Freud and Said: Contrapuntal Psychoanalysis As Liberation Praxis

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN THE THEORY AND
HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY
Freud and Said
Contrapuntal Psychoanalysis
as Liberation Praxis
Robert K. Beshara
Palgrave Studies in the Theory and History
of Psychology
Series Editor
Thomas Teo
Department of Psychology
York University
Toronto, ON, Canada
Palgrave Studies in the Theory and History of Psychology publishes
scholarly books that use historical and theoretical methods to critically
examine the historical development and contemporary status of psycholog-
ical concepts, methods, research, theories, and interventions. Books in this
series are characterised by one, or a combination of, the following: (a) an
emphasis on the concrete particulars of psychologists’ scientific and profes-
sional practices, together with a critical examination of the assumptions that
attend their use; (b) expanding the horizon of the discipline to include more
interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary work performed by researchers and
practitioners inside and outside of the discipline, increasing the knowledge
created by the psychological humanities; (c) “doing justice” to the persons,
communities, marginalized and oppressed people, or to academic ideas such
as science or objectivity, or to critical concepts such social justice, resistance,
agency, power, and democratic research. These examinations are anchored
in clear, accessible descriptions of what psychologists do and believe about
their activities. All the books in the series share the aim of advancing the
scientific and professional practices of psychology and psychologists, even
as they offer probing and detailed questioning and critical reconstructions
of these practices. The series welcomes proposals for edited and authored
works, in the form of full-length monographs or Palgrave Pivots; contact
beth.farrow@palgrave.com for further information.
Series Editor
Thomas Teo is Professor of Psychology at York University, Canada.
Series Editorial Board

Alex Gillespie, London School of Economics and Political Science, UK
Suzanne R. Kirschner, College of the Holy Cross, USA
Annette Mülberger, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, Spain
Lisa M. Osbeck, University of West Georgia, USA
Peter Raggatt, James Cook University, Australia
Alexandra Rutherford, York University, Canada
More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14576
Robert K. Beshara
Freud and Said

Contrapuntal Psychoanalysis
as Liberation Praxis
Robert K. Beshara
Northern New Mexico College
Española, NM, USA
Palgrave Studies in the Theory and History of Psychology

ISBN 978-3-030-56742-2 ISBN 978-3-030-56743-9 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56743-9
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature
Switzerland AG 2021
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher,
whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting,
reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical
way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software,
or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt
from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this
book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the
authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained
herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with
regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
In memory of my grandmother Teta Aida Youssef (1927 –2018)
Preface
On May 20th, 2020, my wife and I received a direct death threat that
was addressed to me personally by a David P. on Zoom chat during my
moderation of Theodore Richards’s Q & A after his keynote speech.
The context was a ten-day virtual conference titled The Psychology of
Global Crises, of which I was one of the co-organizers. I reported the
death threat to the Santa Fe Police Department and to the FBI. David P.
hacked into the Zoom meeting without leaving a digital trace; he or she
is clearly a professional Zoombomber. Some of my relatives and friends
tried to comfort me by saying that it is probably a troll, but do trolls send
direct death threats to particular individuals or do they engage in general
trolling? Others told me that I must have been doing something right
with my antiracist research if I am upsetting right-wingers, but that does
not comfort me as a measure of my work’s success. I cannot deny the
traumatic effect of this threat on my psyche; it has changed my horizon.
I currently live with this implicit awareness that someone out there in the
world knows where I live and wants to kill my wife and me.
On May 25th, 2020, in Minneapolis, George Floyd was killed
by police officer Derek Chauvin, a Trump-supporter who was once
vii
viii Preface
photographed wearing a “Make America White Again” red cap. Chauvin

murdered Floyd by taking a knee on his neck and choking him to
death. Many activists on social media juxtaposed the NFL’s, and the
wider (white) public’s, ostracization of Colin Kaepernick for taking a
knee during the national anthem as a gesture of solidarity against police
violence with the police’s lethal form of taking a knee, which seems to be
more ideologically acceptable. One of Floyd’s final words were, “I can’t
breathe!” These words echo the words of Eric Garner, who, in 2014, was
also chocked to death by the police in New York. They are the words of
countless other Black victims of police violence.
The killing of George Floyd was not only a manifestation of personal
violence, but also of structural violence. Without the eradication of
the structural violence of racism, there can never be positive peace or
social justice. For this reason, the murder of George Floyd, as a tipping
point, instigated nationwide protests, on the next day, against police
violence. Reading about, and seeing videos of, these protests on social
media are on my mind as I write this preface. One of the central topics
of my book is racialized capitalism, which is also the context for this
current moment of revolt: “Colonial domination via police power inau-
gurated an explicitly racial capitalism in which Black, Brown and Indige-
nous suffering and death [serves] ruling class interests” (Correia & Wall,
2018, Location No. 177).
The spectralization of anti-Black police violence is problematic on
many fronts. Amateur videos of Black men being murdered by the
police engage their viewers through a perverse enjoyment, which ideolog-
ically position the viewers as peeping toms and Black men as disposable.
The positioning of Black men as disposable erases Black men ontologi-
cally, for living Black men are only comprehended in relation to these
hyper-mediated images of dead and dying Black men. These videos,
which Killer Mike characterized as “murder porn,” provide enjoyment
for conservative racists (i.e., segregationists) and are also a show of force
for everyone else, that is, liberals who think they are non-racists (i.e.,
assimilationists).
It is worth mentioning here that the ongoing militarization of the
police in the United States is a direct function of the training that
they receive from the Israeli Defense Forces. In other words, US
Preface ix
police officers are receiving a specific form of tactical training, that

is, apartheid policing, which can be understood through the lens of
Paul Virilio’s (1983/2008) concept of “endo-colonization.” For example,
Ajamu Baraka (2020) reads the deployment of the National Guard as
endo-colonization: “The U.S. government is deploying the army (that
is what the national guard is) against its own citizens. Isn’t that now
when someone calls for regime change if that was happening in another
nation?” Apartheid policing affords a framing of police violence as
structural violence:
these exchanges with the Israeli military, police, and intelligence agencies
reinforce American law enforcement practices of: Expanding surveillance:
Including comprehensive visual monitoring in public places and online,
and the heightened infiltration of social movements and entire commu-
nities; Justifying racial profiling: Marking Black and Brown people as
suspect, particularly Arabs and Muslims, and refining the policies, tactics,
and technologies that target communities and social movements that
seek racial justice; Suppressing public protests through use of force: Treating
protestors as enemy combatants and controlling media coverage of state
violence. (RAIA & JVP, 2018, p. 2, emphasis in original)
Slavoj Žižek’s (2008) term for structural violence is objective violence,

which for him has two dimensions: symbolic violence and systemic
violence. These two dimensions can help us make sense of the widespread
phenomenon of police violence, which also has two dimensions. We
all experience the symbolic violence of policing through these horrific
videos that are virally shared on social media, so we can also think of
symbolic violence as virtual violence. However, those who are rendered
sub-human, within the apparatus of racialized capitalism, are the only
ones who directly experience the systemic violence of policing, which for
them is actual violence.
More than fifty years ago, Martin Luther King Jr. (1968) uttered the
following words, which resonate today and testify to the importance of
our continuing struggle for social justice:
a riot is the language of the unheard . And what is it that America has
failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the Negro poor has
x Preface
worsened over the last few years. It has failed to hear that the promises
of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that
large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and
the status quo than about justice, equality, and humanity. And so in a real
sense our nation’s summers of riots are caused by our nation’s winters of
delay. And as long as America postpones justice, we stand in the position
of having these recurrences of violence and riots over and over again.
Social justice and progress are the absolute guarantors of riot prevention.
(emphasis added)
Seventeen years ago, this is what one of the chief architects of the Iraq
War, Donald Rumsfeld (2003), said about looting during the first year of
the war; it is interesting to juxtapose his words about Iraqis to the current
US opposition to endo-colonization:
while no one condones looting, on the other hand, one can understand the
pent-up feelings that may result from decades of repression and people who
have had members of their family killed by that regime, for them to be taking
their feelings out on that regime …Think what’s happened in our cities
when we’ve had riots, and problems, and looting. Stuff happens! But in
terms of what’s going on in that country [Iraq], it is a fundamental misun-
derstanding to see those images over, and over, and over again of some
boy walking out with a vase and say, “Oh, my goodness, you didn’t have a
plan.” That’s nonsense. They know what they’re doing, and they’re doing
a terrific job. Andm [sic] it’s untidy, and freedom’s untidy, and free people
are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things. They’re also
free to live their lives and do wonderful things, and that’s what’s going to
happen here. (emphasis added)
On May 29th 2020, this is what US president, Donald Trump,

tweeted about the Black Lives Matter (BLM) protestors: “These THUGS
are dishonoring the memory of George Floyd, and I won’t let that
happen. Just spoke to Governor Tim Walz and told him that the Military
is with him all the way. Any difficulty and we will assume control but,
when the looting starts, the shooting starts. Thank you!” (emphasis added)
Trump (2020) characterized BLM protestors as “THUGS,” which
according to John McWhorter “is a polite way of using the ‘N-word’” (as
Preface xi
cited in Eubanks, 2020). Also, with the phrase “when the looking states,
the shooting starts,” Trump (2020) was indexing Walter Headley’s (police
chief of Miami) 1967 very same words, who further added during a press
conference that he did not mind “being accused of police brutality” (as
cited in Eubanks, 2020).
BLM—the largest movement in US history (Buchanan, Bui, & Patel,
2020)—is a movement with a pluriversal dimension, particularly when
we see international solidarity among Indigenous, Black, and Brown
subjects. The clearest example of this is the 2015 Black Statement on
Solidarity with Palestine, which is echoed by Nick Estes (2019) who
writes, on behalf of the Red Nation: “Palestine is the moral barometer
of Indigenous North America.” In this book, I explore the pluriversality
of BLM in contrast to the provincial logic of All Lives Matter.
Another context informing the writing of my book is being under
lockdown because of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has dispropor-
tionally impacted Indigenous, Black, and Brown folks in the US as a
function of structural racism (Sequist, 2020). What is crystal clear in this
political moment of revolt is the difference between freedom and liber-
ation. For instance, many (if not most) conservatives are against phys-
ical distancing guidelines and lockdown measures claiming that they are
authoritarian in nature and that perhaps COVID-19 is exaggerated (if
not a hoax), but these same people who feel oppressed by guidelines that
are there to keep them safe are ambivalent about the freedom of non-
whites in the face of police violence. All of this is, of course, unfolding
amid the 2020 US presidential non-election, wherein the nationalist Law
and Order discourse is on full display to unify Trump’s base. I say non-
election because Joe Biden does not offer a real (read: antiracist) alterna-
tive to Trump from the Democratic side when he tells his followers: “if
you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then
you ain’t black” (as cited in Bradner, Mucha, & Saenz, 2020). Other
relevant contextual moments include: the US leaving the World Health
Organization and Trump designating ANTIFA as a terrorist organiza-
tion. What is the logical implication of the US State designating an
anti-fascist, anarchist movement as a terrorist organization?
xii Preface
Another significant aspect of this difficult period is the racialization

and politicization of COVID-19 as a way of smearing China’s reputa-
tion, which, of course, results in anti-Asian racism here in the US: “1500
reports of incidents of racism, hate speech, discrimination, and physical
attacks against Asians and Asian-Americans” have been documented by
Human Rights Watch (2020). Calling COVID-19 the “Chinese virus”
is similar to characterizing the 1918 flu pandemic as the “Spanish flu,”
which was a function of how “wartime censors minimized reports of the
illness while the Spanish press did not” (Brown, 2020). Here is how the
racializing and politicizing rhetoric of COVID-19 works:
The expressions “Chinese virus” and “Wuhan virus” personify the threat.
Personification is metaphorical: its purpose is to help understand some-
thing unfamiliar and abstract (i.e., the virus) by using terms that are
familiar and embodied (i.e., a location, a nationality or a person). But
as cognitive linguists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson have long shown,
metaphors are not just poetic tools, they are used constantly and shape
our world view. The adjective “Chinese” is particularly problematic as
it associates the infection with an ethnicity. Talking about group iden-
tities withan [sic] explicitly medical language is a recognized process of
Othering (here and here), historically used in anti-immigrant rhetoric and
policy, including toward Chinese immigrants in North America. This type
of language stokes anxiety, resentment, fear, and disgust toward people
associated with that group. (Viala-Gaudefroy & Lindaman, 2020)
In addition to anti-Asian racism, we are witnessing a new class config-

uration, wherein essential workers are the new proletariat and those
working from home are the new bourgeoisie. We are additionally seeing
a rise in the targeting of reporters in the US, which is yet another sign
for anti-democratic forces being on the rise:
Across the country journalists have been targeted by police, facing arrest,
detention, and violence, including being pepper sprayed and shot by
rubber bullets. Journalists were targeted by police in the Ferguson protests
in 2015 and during the civil rights era, and that pattern of violence and
arrests continued into this weekend’s protests”. (Burns, 2020)
Preface xiii
Property rights over human rights (Kovel, 1970/1984, p. 16) is the

logic driving mythic violence under racialized capitalism. Divine violence
follows the obverse logic: human rights over property rights. This is the
struggle, which is unfolding before our very eyes. I write this book, as a
form of scholar-activism, in this context and on the basis of these experi-
ences, as a small contribution to the slow but inevitable actualization of
social justice.
Española, USA Robert K. Beshara
Acknowledgments This project would not have been possible if it were

not for the support of: Thomas Teo, Ian Parker, Hatem Bazian, María-
Constanza Garrido Sierralta (Cony), Grace Jackson, Beth Farrow, Jo O’Neill,
Zobariya Jidda, Alberto Hernandez-Lemus, Michael Kim, Tommy J. Curry,
and Northern New Mexico College.
References
Baraka, A. [@ajamubaraka]. (2020, May 30). Twitter [Tweet]. Retrieved from
https://twitter.com/ajamubaraka/status/1266945898384416770.
Black for Palestine. (2015). Black statement of solidarity with Palestine. Retrieved
from https://www.blackforpalestine.com/read-the-statement.html.
Bradner, E., Mucha, S., & Saenz, A. (2020, May 22). Biden: ‘If you have a
problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black’.
CNN [Atlanta]. Retrieved from https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/22/politics/
biden-charlamagne-tha-god-you-aint-black/index.html.
Brown, M. (2020, March 23). Fact check: Why is the 1918 influenza virus
called ‘Spanish flu’? USA Today. Retrieved from https://www.usatoday.com/
story/news/factcheck/2020/03/23/fact-check-how-did-1918-pandemic-get-
name-spanish-flu/2895617001/.
Buchanan, L., Bui, Q., & Patel, J. K. (2020, July 3). Black Lives Matter may
be the largest movement in US history. The New York Times. Retrieved
from https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/07/03/us/george-floyd-pro
tests-crowd-size.html.
xiv Preface
Burns, K. (2020, May 31). Police targeted journalists covering the George
Floyd protests. Vox [New York]. Retrieved from https://www.vox.com/identi
ties/2020/5/31/21276013/police-targeted-journalists-covering-george-floyd-
protests.
Correia, D., & Wall, T. (2018). Police: A field guide. New York, NY: Verso.
Estes, N. (2019, September 7). The liberation of Palestine represents an alterna-
tive path for native nations. Retrieved from https://therednation.org/2019/
09/07/the-liberation-of-palestine-represents-an-alternative-path-for-native-
nations/.
Eubanks, O. (2020, May 29). The history of the phrase ‘when the looting
starts, the shooting starts’ used by Trump. ABC News [New York].
Retrieved from https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/history-phrase-looting-sta
rts-shooting-starts-trump/story?id=70950935.
Human Rights Watch. (2020, May 12). COVID-19 fueling anti-Asian racism
and xenophobia worldwide. Retrieved from https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/
05/13/covid-19-fueling-anti-asian-racism-and-xenophobia-worldwide#.
King, M. L. (1968, March 14). The other America. Retrieved from https://www.
gphistorical.org/mlk/mlkspeech/.
Kovel, J. (1970/1984). White racism: A psychohistory. New York, NY: Columbia
University Press.
RAIA, & JVP. (2018). Deadly exchange: The dangerous consequences of American
law enforcement trainings in Israel . Retrieved from https://deadlyexchange.
org/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Deadly-Exchange-Report.pdf.
Rumsfeld, D. (2003, April 11). DoD news briefing—Secretary Rumsfeld and
Gen. Myers. Retrieved June 29, 2020, from https://archive.defense.gov/Tra
nscripts/Transcript.aspx?TranscriptID=2367.
Sequist, T. D. (2020). The disproportionate impact of Covid-19 on communi-
ties of color. NEJM Catalyst Innovations in Care Delivery, 1(4).
Trump, D. J. [@realDonaldTrump]. (2020, May 28). Twitter [Tweet]. Retrieved
from https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1266231100780744704.
Viala-Gaudefroy, J., & Lindaman, D. (2020, April 21). Donald Trump’s ‘Chinese
virus’: The politics of naming. Retrieved from https://theconversation.com/
donald-trumps-chinese-virus-the-politics-of-naming-136796.
Virilio, P. (1983/2008). Pure war (M. Polizzotti, Trans.). S. Lotringer (Ed.).
Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e).
Žižek, S. (2008). Violence: Six sideways reflections. New York, NY: Picador.
Contents
1 Post-/De-colonial Psychoanalysis: Critical Border

Psychology 1
2 Beginnings 89
3 Orientalism 113
4 Freud and the Non-European 131
5 Contrapuntal Psychoanalysis as Liberation Praxis 149
Index 203
xv
List of Figures
Fig. 1.1 The semiotic square 19

Fig. 1.2 The four discourses 73
Fig. 5.1 Horizontal semiosis 191
xvii
1
Post-/De-colonial Psychoanalysis: Critical
Border Psychology
Critical psychologists draw on a number of theoretical resources (e.g.,

feminism, poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, Marxism, etc.) in their
critiques of mainstream (Euro-American) psychology. The central debate
in critical psychology is whether critical psychology is providing a vision
of a more ethical way of doing psychology, one that is grounded in
history, philosophy, theory, qualitative methodology, etc.; or is critical
psychology the negation of psychology proper? I live on both sides of the
debate, but my preference on most days is for the latter position because
I am a transdisciplinarian at heart—being not only a scholar-activist,
but also a fine artist. In my approach, which I am calling critical border
psychology (cf. Mignolo, 2007), I draw on postcolonialism/decoloniality
along with Freudo-Lacanian psychoanalysis in an effort to imagine a
pluriversal psychology grounded in liberation praxis (Beshara, 2019a);
contrapuntal psychoanalysis is one such an attempt. Some of the crit-
ical psychologists who have paved the way for this kind of work include:
Ian Parker (Parker & Siddiqui, 2019), Thomas Teo (2005), Tod Sloan
(1996), Sunil Bhatia (2018), Erica Burman (2019), and Derek Hook
(2008).
© The Author(s) 2021 1

R. Beshara, Freud and Said, Palgrave Studies
in the Theory and History of Psychology,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56743-9_1
2 R. K. Beshara
From Decolonial Psychoanalysis

to Contrapuntal Psychoanalysis
This book is a sequel to Decolonial Psychoanalysis: Towards Critical Islam-
ophobia Studies (Beshara, 2019b). In Decolonial Psychoanalysis, I analyzed
the ideology of (counter)terrorism-Islamophobia/Islamophilia through
the lens of critical psychology, while drawing in particular on psycho-
analysis and decoloniality (Mignolo, 2007) as theoretico-methodological
tools. I ended Decolonial Psychoanalysis with the question of liberation
praxis, which I aspire to explore further in this book through what
I will be describing as contrapuntal psychoanalysis, which is a kind of
psychoanalysis as liberation praxis that accounts for both (post)colonial
psychoanalysis and decolonial psychoanalysis in an effort to theorize
oppressor/oppressed subjectivities in order to practice liberatory subjec-
tivities. The challenge of liberation praxis is whether it is possible to
theorize and practice psychoanalysis exterior to ideology? Or, even,
whether it is possible to imagine a world without psychoanalysis (Spivak,
1994)?
In this book, while I will not be revisiting my analysis of
the specific ideology of (counter)terrorism-Islamophobia/Islamophilia
per se, I continue to be concerned, however, with the overall
ideology of (post)modernity-(post)coloniality; or how the violent logic
of (post)coloniality (e.g., Islamophobia/Islamophilia) fantasmatically
sustains the oppressive rhetoric of (post)modern discourses (e.g., the War
on Terror). Another name for this ideology is racialized capitalism, which
as a modern world-system explains everything, in the case of the US,
from the genocide of Indigenous peoples and the transatlantic slave trade
to Jim Crow and New Jim Crow. Liberation praxis is the attempt to think
and act exterior to racialized capitalism; contrapuntal psychoanalysis is
one such attempt.
Racialized Capitalism
Racialized capitalism (Cole, 2016), however, is more than a modern
ideology; it is equally a colonial materiality. For this reason, I conceive
1 Post-/De-colonial Psychoanalysis … 3
of racialized capitalism as a dispositif , or an apparatus, in Michel

Foucault’s (1980) sense of the term: “a thoroughly heterogeneous
ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regu-
latory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements,
philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions–in short, the said
as much as the unsaid” (p. 194). This apparatus goes by other names,
such as “racial capitalism” (Burden-Stelly, 2020; Gilmore, 2020; Kelley,
2017; Robinson, 1983) and “racist capitalism” (Desmond, 2019). For
Cedric J. Robinson (1983):
Racism, I maintain, was not simply a convention for ordering the rela-
tions of European to non-European peoples but has its genesis in the
“internal” relations of European peoples. As part of the inventory of
Western civilization it would reverberate within and without, transfer-
ring its toll from the past to the present. In contradistinction to Marx’s
and Engels’s expectations that bourgeois society would rationalize social
relations and demystify social consciousness, the obverse occurred. The
development, organization, and expansion of capitalist society pursued
essentially racial directions, so too did social ideology. As a material force,
then, it could be expected that racialism would inevitably permeate the
social structures emergent from capitalism. I have used the term “racial
capitalism” to refer to this development and to the subsequent structure
as a historical agency. (p. 2)
The racial axis is the central feature of racialized capitalism, which is

a European modern/colonial project that can be traced back to 1492
(Dussel, 1995, p. 12). Here’s Aníbal Quijano’s (2000) explication of the
racial axis in the coloniality of power:
What is termed globalization is the culmination of a process that began

with the constitution of America and colonial/modern Eurocentered capi-
talism as a new global power. One of the fundamental axes of this model
of power is the social classification of the world’s population around the
idea of race, a mental construction that expresses the basic experience
of colonial domination and pervades the more important dimensions of
global power, including its specific rationality: Eurocentrism. (p. 533)
4 R. K. Beshara
In racialized capitalism, racism is certainly the most oppressive struc-

tural element of the apparatus, but it often intersects with two other
axes: labor and sex. Quijano (2000) argues that the “idea of race,
in its modern meaning, does not have a known history before the
colonization of America” (p. 533). However, Geraldine Heng (2018)
asserts that England is the first racial state in premodernity with its
1290 Edict of Expulsion, which was a royal decree expelling all Jews
from the Kingdom of England. Colonialism and racism did undoubt-
edly exist in the premodern world (Heng, 2018), but the novelty of
racialized capitalism, as a modern world-system, was and continues to
be its accelerated global systematization of imperialism, colonialism,
racism/classism/sexism, and capitalism in the name of civilization. Civi-
lization is savage, but it projects its savagery onto the Other as a defense
mechanism:
The civilized white man retains an irrational nostalgia for the extraor-
dinary times of sexual licentiousness, orgies, unpunished rapes, and
unrepressed incest. In a sense, these fantasies correspond to Freud’s life
instinct. Projecting his desires onto the black man, the white man behaves
as if the black man actually had them. (Fanon, 1952/2008, pp. 142–143)
The signifier ‘race’ can be traced back to the Arabic word ra’s (‫)رأس‬,
which means head, beginning, or origin. James Sweet (1997) even makes
the following argument: “The racist ideologies of fifteenth-century Iberia
grew out of the development of African slavery in the Islamic world as
far back as the eighth century” (p. 145). This is a fair critique, which will
necessitate an analysis of the Aristotelian notion of natural slavery:
For the slave the result was a state of social death in which all rights
and sense of personhood were denied. The appearance of this form of
slavery [i.e., chattel slavery] in the ancient Mediterranean has led to the
dominant modern view that Greece and Rome offer the first examples in
world history of what can be called genuine slave societies. (Bradley &
Cartledge, 2011, p. 1)
However, my focus is not on the premodern world, for the politico-

economic configuration of the world today (e.g., US hegemony) is a
function of the longue-durée of (Spanish, Portuguese, British, French,
and/or Dutch) Euro-colonialism, which began in 1492 and came to a
mild halt between 1945 and 1960 with the decolonization of Asia and
Africa. I cautiously use the expression “mild halt” for three reasons: (1)
As Jacques Derrida argues, the Cold War has not ended (as cited in
Borradori, 2003, p. 92); in fact, the War on Terror is a continuation
of the Cold War by another name. (2) While classical colonialism is
less frequent or visible today, neocolonialism (Nkrumah, 1965), human-
itarian imperialism (Bricmont, 2006), coloniality (Quijano, 2000),
auto-colonialism (Bulhan, 1985, p. 44), and endo-colonization (Virilio,
1983/2008) are all highly frequent and visible phenomena. (3) The
majority of former franchise colonies have not truly decolonized them-
selves but instead are now postcolonies (cf. Mbembe, 2001) because the
oppressive colonizers have been replaced by colonized sub-oppressors,
which is akin to a sado-masochistic game of musical chairs.
To be evenhanded, we must consider the contributions of the Islamic
world (i.e., modernity’s alterity), particularly the Golden Age (800–
1258), while holding the colonial history of the Islamic Caliphates
(632–1924) accountable:
Popular accounts of the history of science typically show a timeline in

which no major scientific advances seem to have taken place during the
period between the ancient Greeks and the European Renaissance. In
between, so we are told, Western Europe and, by extrapolation, the rest
of the world, languished in the Dark Ages for a thousand years.
In fact, for a period stretching over seven hundred years, the interna-
tional language of science was Arabic. For this was the language of the
Qur’an, the holy book of Islam, and thus the official language of the vast
Islamic Empire that, by the early eighth century CE, stretched from India
to Spain. (Al-Khalili, 2011, pp. 29–30)
Therefore, even though the Kingdom of Spain was not the first racial
state, “Spain initiated modernity” (Dussel, 1995, p. 90). Quijano (2000)
shows us the link between modernity and coloniality since 1492 through
an analysis of the two main axes of power (race and labor):
6 R. K. Beshara
America was constituted as the first space/time of a new model of power

of global vocation, and both in this way and by it became the first identity
of modernity. Two historical processes associated in the production of that
space/time converged and established the two fundamental axes of the
new model of power. One was the codification of the differences between
conquerors and conquered in the idea of “race,” a supposedly different
biological structure that placed some in a natural situation of inferiority
to the others. The conquistadors assumed this idea as the constitu-
tive, founding element of the relations of domination that the conquest
imposed. On this basis, the population of America, and later the world,
was classified within the new model of power. The other process was the
constitution of a new structure of control of labor and its resources and
products. This new structure was an articulation of all historically known
previous structures of control of labor, slavery, serfdom, small indepen-
dent commodity production and reciprocity, together around and upon
the basis of capital and the world market. (pp. 533–534)
Sex is the third axis of power in the apparatus of racialized capi-

talism (cf. Lugones, 2010). The subaltern are not only racialized and
over-exploited, they are also violently sexualized (Curry, 2017). The most
oppressed in any given society tends to be the racialized, or politicized,
male. There is ample empirical evidence for this paradoxical position
(that the racialized male is the most oppressed subject under patriarchy)
as supported by the subordinate-male target hypothesis in social domi-
nance theory, which “argues that group-based social hierarchy is driven
by three proximal processes: aggregated individual discrimination, aggre-
gated institutional discrimination, and behavioral asymmetry” (Sidanius &
Pratto, 1999, p. 39, emphasis in original). For instance, in the US, Black
men suffer from the highest unemployment rate (9.1) according to the
Department of Labor (2016), the highest risk (1 in 1,000) of being killed
by police use of force (Edwards, Lee, & Esposito, 2019), and the highest
incarceration rate (1 in 9) for those between the ages of 20 and 34 (PEW,
2008).
According to Tommy J. Curry (personal communication, May 14,
2020), the oppression of racialized males “has to do with how patriarchy
establishes kinship bonds to build racial hierarchy. Because it elimi-
nates other groups of [racialized/politicized] men for sexual access to all
women.” This suggests that racial-sexual violence against racialized, or

politicized, males may have an evolutionary basis, as Jim Sidanius claims,
which gets ideologically reinforced or is “simply the most historically effi-
cacious political strategy of racial management throughout the centuries”
(Curry, personal communication, May 14, 2020).
Racist violence is sexualized violence, and this is a key psychoanalytic
insight. As Enrique Dussel (1995) shows:
The modern ego of the conquistador reveals itself as also a phallic ego.
No amount of idyllic fantasizing about erotic relationships between the
conqueror and the conquered can ever justify injustices such as occurred
in Tlaxcala. Such erotic violence simply illustrates the colonization of the
indigenous life-world. (p. 46, emphasis in original)
Curry (2017) also draws attention to the perverse sexual nature of

anti-Black racist violence, which is the unconscious of racist jouissance
or enjoyment (cf. Fanon, 1952/2008, pp. 134–135):
“racial hatred is carnal hatred … sexualized hatred”—a phallicism or

process that criminalizes Black males as sexual threats like the rapist,
while simultaneously constituting them as the carnal excesses and fetishes
of the white libido. Racism is a complex nexus, a cognitive architec-
ture used to invent, reimagine, and evolve the presumed political, social,
economic, sexual, and psychological superiority of the white races in
society, while materializing the imagined inferiority and hastening the
death of inferior races. Said differently, racism is the manifestation of the
social processes and concurrent logics that facilitate the death and dying
of racially subjugated peoples. (p. 4, emphasis added)
This is in line with Frantz Fanon’s (1952/2008) thesis: “If we want to

understand the racial situation psychoanalytically, not from a universal
viewpoint, but as it is experienced by individual consciousnesses, consid-
erable importance must be given to sexual phenomena” (p. 138,
emphasis added). Before I highlight some historico-empirical examples
of racialized capitalism in the US, I would like to include another defi-
nition of racism, which complements the previous one and the ones yet
8 R. K. Beshara
to come: “Racism is a global hierarchy of human superiority and inferi-

ority, politically, culturally and economically produced and reproduced
for centuries by the institutions of the ‘capitalist/patriarchal western-
centric/Christian-centric modern/colonial world-system’” (Grosfoguel,
Oso, & Christou, 2015, p. 636).
In other words, racialized capitalism is structured upon not only a
hierarchy of labor (bourgeois v. proletariat) and sex (male v. female), but
also, and more importantly, a hierarchy of race (being v. nonbeing). The
reason I explain the coloniality power in detail is because (post)modern
psychoanalysis operates within the (post)colonial logic of racialized capi-
talism, wherein the analyst is the oppressor and the analysand is the
oppressed, but that can change if psychoanalysis is decolonized and
becomes a liberation praxis; in other words, decolonial psychoanalysis
must be explicitly both antiracist and anti-capitalist (and certainly, anti-
sexist). Fanon (1952/2008), too, was aware of, wrote about, racialized
capitalism: “The black problem is not just about Blacks living among
Whites, but about the black man exploited, enslaved, and despised by a
colonialist and capitalist society that happens to be white” (p. 178).
Matthew Desmond (2019) calls racialized capitalism, in the context
of the US, “racist capitalism” (p. 40) because “historians have pointed
to the gnatty fields of Georgia and Alabama, to the cotton houses and
slave auction blocks, as the birthplace of America’s low-road approach to
capitalism” (p. 32). Desmond (2019) then cites Sven Beckert and Seth
Rockman who wrote, “American slavery is necessarily imprinted on the
DNA of American capitalism” (p. 33). Those who do not accept the
reality of white privilege today are consciously or unconsciously denying
how the US became the world’s largest economy since 1871 on the basis
of slavery. In Desmond’s (2019) words, “Cotton was to the 19th century
what oil was to the 20th: among the world’s most traded commodities”
(p. 33). He adds:
As slave labor camps spread throughout the South, production surged.

By 1831, the country was delivering nearly half the world’s raw cotton
crop, with 350 million pounds picked that year. Just four years later, it
harvested 500 million pounds. Southern white elites grew rich, as did
their counterparts in the North. (p. 34)
Desmond (2019) states further, “The United States solved its land
shortage by expropriating millions of acres from Native Americans, often
with military force, acquiring Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee and Florida.
It then sold that land on the cheap — just $1.25 an acre in the early
1830s ($38 in today’s dollars) — to white settlers” (p. 33). Desmond
is deconstructing the American dream and other related myths, such as
social mobility or the idea that the US is a level playing field, wherein any
person can succeed if they work hard enough. While some theorists may
object to the phrase racialized capitalism as not specific enough, I would
argue that this Black Marxist phrase accurately describes the theoretico-
practical continuity from mercantile capitalism to industrial capitalism
and beyond (e.g., neoliberalism), and situates all iterations of capitalism
within the project of modernity/coloniality and its civilizational (i.e.,
dehumanizing) violence:
The large-scale cultivation of cotton hastened the invention of the factory,

an institution that propelled the Industrial Revolution and changed the
course of history. In 1810, there were 87,000 cotton spindles in America.
Fifty years later, there were five million. (Desmond, 2019, p. 34)
The other example of racialized capitalism that Desmond (2019)

points to is the mortgage. He writes, “Enslaved people were used as
collateral for mortgages centuries before the home mortgage became the
defining characteristic of middle America. In colonial times, when land
was not worth much and banks didn’t exist, most lending was based
on human property” (p. 37). This cruel fact is worth thinking about
in relation to the 2008 financial crisis, wherein many racialized home-
owners lost their homes while the banks were being bailed out by the
US government:
African-American and Latino borrowers have been particularly hard-hit

by the foreclosure crisis. Among owner-occupants, our estimates suggest
that 7.9% of African Americans and 7.7% of Latinos who received loans
to purchase or refinance their primary residence between 2005 and 2008
have lost their homes to foreclosure between 2007 and 2009, compared to
an estimated 4.5% of non-Hispanic whites. (Bocian, Li, & Ernst, 2010,
p. 8)
10 R. K. Beshara
Dehumanization
To ground capitalism exclusively in the Industrial Revolution is to deny
the colonial history of property (cf. Kovel, 1970/1984, p. 16): the theft
of Indigenous lands and the enslavement of Black bodies. Emphasizing
both capitalism as industrialism and the industrial worker as the site
of struggle is a Eurocentric critique of modernity, which does not take
into account the dehumanization experienced by non-Europeans, many
of whom would not even qualify as the proletariat. For this reason,
I invite us to think of oppression and violence under racialized capi-
talism not only in terms of exploitation or alienation, but also, and
more importantly, in terms of dehumanization (of the non-European
lumpenproletariat):
For a population to be dehumanized they have to be perceived as a race

(a natural human kind) with a unique racial essence. The racial essence
is then equated with a subhuman essence, leading to the belief that they
are subhuman animals. The function of dehumanization is to override
inhibitions against committing acts of violence. (Smith, 2011, pp. 447–
448)
Elsewhere in the book, David Livingstone Smith (2011) writes about

dehumanization as a way of thinking (cf. Teo, 2020 on subhumanism);
Joel Kovel (1970/1984, p. 91) argues that the process of dehumanization
(or thingification) is based upon the repulsive fantasy of dirt. Coloniality
is also a way of thinking, or a fantasy, powered by “the dehumanizing
impulse” (p. 15):
Dehumanization isn’t a way of talking. It’s a way of thinking—a way

of thinking that, sadly, comes all too easily to us. Dehumanization is a
scourge, and has been so for millennia. It acts as a psychological lubricant,
dissolving our inhibitions and inflaming our destructive passions. As such,
it empowers us to perform acts that would, under other circumstances,
be unthinkable. (p. 30)
Therefore, our liberation praxis entails thinking critically in Paulo

Freire’s (1970/2018) sense of conscientização (conscientization), but the
task is complicated in psychoanalysis because it becomes a question of
not only critical consciousness, but also critical unconsciousness. However,
given that the unconscious is the discourse of the Other, this Other
must be liberated in order for the subject to also be liberated. This
is the radical humanist task of contrapuntal psychoanalysis. We must
also wrestle with the possibility that the unconscious is ipso facto racist
since it premised on the fantasy of dirt (Kovel, 1970/1984), or the
metaphoric condensation of black = evil or sin: “Deep down in the
European unconscious has been hollowed out an excessively black pit
where the most immoral instincts and unmentionable desires slumber”
(Fanon, 1952/2008, pp. 166–167). Fanon is certainly inspired by Carl
Jung’s notion of the collective unconscious, but he has an even better take
on it than Jung: “the collective unconscious is quite simply the reposi-
tory of prejudices, myths, and collective attitudes of a particular group”
(p. 165); “it is the consequence of…an impulsive cultural imposition”
(p. 167). Perhaps the end of racism is also the end of the unconscious,
or at least the end of racist cultures.
From Modernity/Coloniality
to Transmodernity/Decoloniality
My distinction between postcoloniality and decoloniality is not temporal
but spatial. Postcoloniality was the moment after decolonization but it
was not necessarily a decolonial moment. For this reason, I conceive of
postcoloniality as still housed within the neocolonial project of racialized
capitalism (cf. Bhabha, 1994, p. 9). Decoloniality, on the other hand,
is exterior to coloniality, which does not automatically mean that it is
outside of it. For example, even though Indigenous communities are
structurally exterior to the rhetoric/logic of modernity/coloniality, they
still exist within settler colonial nation-states in the Global North (e.g.,
the US, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Israel, etc.).
What of postcolonialism as opposed to postcoloniality? Walter
Mignolo’s (2007) distinction between postcolonialism and decoloniality
12 R. K. Beshara
is an arbitrary one premised on ethnic difference (cf. Bhambra, 2014):

Afro-Asian theorists (e.g., Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, and Homi
Bhabha) v. Latin American theorists (e.g., Aníbal Quijano, Enrique
Dussel, and Walter Mignolo). Here is Mignolo’s (2007) statement on
the key distinction between postcolonial and decolonial theorists: “The
de-colonial shift, in other words, is a project of de-linking while post-
colonial criticism and theory is a project of scholarly transformation
within the academy” (p. 452). According to Mignolo’s (2007) reasoning,
Edward Said is merely a postcolonial critic albeit being a scholar-activist
in every sense of the word. Said was both a Professor of English and
Comparative Literature at Columbia University and a member of the
Palestinian National Council.
Unlike Mignolo, I am concerned with the technical or theoret-
ical difference between postcolonialism and decoloniality, which also
acknowledges the difference between postcoloniality (the neocolonial
period after decolonization) and postcolonialism (the critical theoriza-
tion of this period in relation to colonialism). Consequently, even though
Said is typically credited for being the founder of postcolonialism, I
regard him as a decolonial scholar-activist on the basis of his transmodern
(Dussel, 1995) praxis of cultural resistance, or of counter-ideologically
delinking colonial discourses (e.g., Orientalism) from modern fantasies
of exceptionalism.
Egypt, for example, as a former franchise colony is the postcolo-
nial state par excellence because the kingdom of colonial oppres-
sors (i.e., the Muhammad Ali dynasty and the British Empire) was
replaced with a republic of postcolonial sub-oppressors (i.e., the Egyp-
tian Armed Forces). In other words, in the case of (post)modern
Egypt, decolonization took place but neither decoloniality nor libera-
tion, and as such, Egypt continues to operate within the framework of
neomodern/neocolonial racialized capitalism. In this case, contrapuntal
psychoanalysis as liberation praxis is the theorizing and practicing of a
decolonial (Egyptian) subjectivity vis-à-vis (or in spite of ) the apparatus
of racialized capitalism.
This book then is a reflexive application of contrapuntal psychoanal-
ysis given my positionality as an Egyptian scholar-activist situated in
the Global North on Turtle Island in proximity to twenty-three Indige-

nous tribes: nineteen Pueblos (Acoma, Cochiti, Isleta, Jemez, Laguna,
Nambe, Ohkay Owingeh, Picuris, Pojoaque, Sandia, San Felipe, San
Ildefonso, Santa Ana, Santa Clara, Santo Domingo, Taos, Tesuque, Zuni,
and Zia); three Apache tribes (the Fort Sill Apache Tribe, the Jicar-
illa Apache Nation, and the Mescalero Apache Tribe), and the Navajo
Nation. Contrapuntal psychoanalysis not only informs my subjectivity
(as a psychosocial site of political resistance and liberation ethics), but
also informs the aesthesis of my critical pedagogy given that I work
at a college dedicated to underserved (Hispanic and Native American)
students.
Freud and Said

So far I have been addressing the subtitle of the book (Contrapuntal
Psychoanalysis as Liberation Praxis) and not the actual title (Freud and
Said). This book is not a dual biography of Sigmund Freud (1856–1939)
and Edward Said (1935–2003), for that I recommend Adam Phillips’s
(2014) or Elisabeth Roudinesco’s (2016) biographies of Freud and Said’s
(1999) own memoir, Out of Place. Rather, this book is about the theo-
retical linkages between Freud and Said, who are undoubtedly two of the
most important theorists in the twentieth century, which is not merely
an opinion. Their importance as theorists is corroborated by the fact that
they both were on the Times Higher Education (2009) list of most cited
authors of books in the humanities. In 2007 alone, Freud was cited 903
times and Said was cited 694 times. These results speak of not only their
importance as theorists but also the continued practical relevance of their
ideas in the twenty-first century as public intellectuals.
Both Freud and Said were founders of original fields of study, the
former being the inventor of psychoanalysis and the latter being the
originator of postcolonialism. Both critical theorists wrote from the
perspective of exilic marginality with the (explicit or implicit) awareness
of being out of place: Freud being a non-European (atheist Jew) and
Said being an non-American (secular Palestinian). Toward the end of his
life, Freud had to flee from Austria to the UK after Vienna was annexed
14 R. K. Beshara
by Nazi Germany in 1938. From the beginning of his life, Said had to
contend with living in exile in Egypt after the nakba (catastrophe), or
the 1948 Palestinian exodus.
Freud produced a powerful theory of subjectivity being divided
between ego and unconscious, and Said produced an equally influential
theory of the (Oriental) Other being in a dialectical relationship with the
(Occidental) subject. Put together, these two theories help us explain the
psychosocial distress, which manifests itself through the subject-Other
dialectic in the form of clinical structures (i.e., neurosis, perversion, and
psychosis) and their symptoms. In other words, Said links the repres-
sion that Freud encountered in the clinic with the oppression existing
outside the clinic in society (cf. Levy, 1996), particularly in the context
of imperialism and colonialism, or the apparatus of racialized capitalism.
Here is Said’s (1993) distinction between imperialism and colonialism:
“‘imperialism’ means the practice, the theory, and the attitudes of a
dominating metropolitan center ruling a distant territory; ‘colonialism,’
which is almost always a consequence of imperialism, is the implanting
of settlements on distant territory” (p. 9).
Freud was born and grew up in Freiberg in Mähren, the Austrian
Empire (now: Příbor, Czech Republic); regarding Said’s formative years,
in both Palestine and Egypt as franchise colonies, there were two over-
lapping contexts: the Ottoman and British Empires. This emphasis on
psychosocial distress and the link between repression (inside the clinic)
and oppression (outside the clinic), or the personal and the political,
is what contrapuntal psychoanalysis as liberation praxis is principally
concerned with.
Said had great admiration for Freud as both a theorist and a writer,
and while some scholars (e.g., Barghouti, 2010; Esonwanne, 2005; Field,
2016) have addressed this connection in their essays, the topic has
never been addressed in book-length form. Therefore, in highlighting
the influence of Freud (and subsequently, psychoanalysis) on Said, I
hope to achieve two things: (1) to decolonize Freud in order to theorize
decolonial subjectivity—the kind of subjectivity at the heart of libera-
tion praxis—and (2) to psychoanalyze Said as a means to articulate the
transmodern Other—as a counterpoint to the (post)modern Other.
It is worth adding, in this context, two more things: (1) Freud iden-
tified with the conquistadors, as is evident in this letter he wrote to
Wilhelm Fliess on February 1, 1900: “I am by temperament nothing
but a conquistador –an adventurer, if you want it translated–with all the
curiosity, daring, and tenacity characteristic of a man of this sort” (as
cited in Masson, 1985, p. 398, emphasis added); (2) Said (1999) was
not just inspired by psychoanalysis, he was actually in analysis (p. 261);
hence, what Jacqueline Rose (2017) terms his “psychoanalytic passion”
(p. 10).
Overview
In the remainder of this chapter, I will review the non-Saidian theoretical
links between psychoanalysis and postcolonialism/decoloniality begin-
ning with the contributions of Freudo-Marxists, particularly Wilhelm
Reich’s (1933/1970) publication of The Mass Psychology of Fascism, all
the way to my publication: Decolonial Psychoanalysis (Beshara, 2019b).
Along the way, I will survey some of classic literatures: Octave Mannoni’s
(1950/1990) Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonization,
Frantz Fanon’s (1952/2008) Black Skin, White Masks, Albert Memmi’s
(1957/1965) The Colonizer and the Colonized , and Ashis Nandy’s (1983)
The Intimate Enemy among others.
In Chapter 2, I will closely read Said’s (1975/1985) second
book, Beginnings: Intention and Method , wherein he discusses Freud’s
(1899/2010) magnum opus The Interpretation of Dreams among other
texts to investigate Freud’s intentions and methods not as a psychoana-
lyst but as a writer. For Said (1975/1985), The Interpretations of Dreams
is a “text whose intention is to begin a discourse one of whose principal
purposes is to the conscious avoidance of certain specific textual conven-
tions” (p. 162). Is that Said’s way of downplaying the scientific status of
psychoanalysis and elevating Freud’s contributions to the humanities?
In Chapter 3, I will engage with Said’s (1978/2003) third and
most influential book, Orientalism, which inaugurated postcolonialism
as a field of study. In Orientalism, Said (1978/2003) distinguishes
between latent (unconscious) Orientalism and manifest (conscious)
16 R. K. Beshara
Orientalism—an important distinction, which he would not have been

able to make without Freud’s categories for dream interpretation.
Strangely, Freud’s name is cited three times in Orientalism, but these cita-
tions are in passing, and they are never in relation to the latent/manifest
distinction. In other words, Freud is repressed in the text. Why is that?
In Chapter 4, I will concentrate on Freud and the Non-European,
which is Said’s (2003) final book before losing his life to leukemia.
The book is a transcription of a talk Said gave at the Freud Museum
London in 2001. The talk was incidentally banned (disavowed?) by the
Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna. In the book, Said (2003) pays close
attention to Freud’s (1939/1967) final book, Moses and Monotheism.
The crux of the book is that identity, something which most of us
strongly cling to, is based upon non-identity. This is the point that
Freud makes when he argues that Moses was an Egyptian; in other
words, the first Jew was a non-Jew. By extension, Said argues that Freud
is a non-European—and Said a non-American? In the spirit of praxis,
Said elaborates this powerful theoretical reflection in an effort to apply
it to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. For Said, Freud’s insight has the
potential for helping us envision a world not divided along the lines of
identity politics—something that Freud theorized but could not himself
avoid. Finally, it is worth noting the obvious: that Said’s final book deals
with Freud’s final book—not mentioning that both men battled cancer.
What is the significance of their late styles for both psychoanalysis and
postcolonialism/decoloniality?
In Chapter 5, I will unpack contrapuntal psychoanalysis as liberation
praxis. I will do this by way of the following concepts: the two Others,
double-unconsciousness, and colonial difference. As liberation praxis, I
will elaborate on contrapuntal psychoanalysis qua border methodology.
Furthermore, contrapuntal psychoanalysis can be read along the lines of
not only power/knowledge/being but also politics/aesthetics/ethics. In
the concluding chapter, I will be demonstrating these features through
concrete examples. Finally, I aspire to contribute to a general theory of
oppression (and violence) in the context of racialized capitalism. In the
next section, I will discuss the difference between ‘race,’ racialization, and
racism because racism is the most salient form of oppression.
I will argue that while ‘race’ is a social construction, racism is a mate-

rial reality mediated through racialization, which is the perception of
race. The perception of race is a function of our schemas, which are
unconscious, because we internalize them from the culture in which
we are situated. Therefore, antiracism can only be the product of an
antiracist culture. Ultimately, we need a new language for talking about
human difference without resorting to the problematic category of race.
We are not there yet because such a long-term project entails undoing the
history of modern colonialism, which may take us around five hundred
years.
‘Race,’ Racialization, and Racism

Throughout this book, I will heuristically use signifiers like ‘white,’
‘Brown,’ and ‘Black’ to refer to different human groups with the aware-
ness that ‘race’ is not only a social construction (cf. Spivak, 1987,
p. 205 on strategic essentialism), but also a master category or “a funda-
mental concept that has profoundly shaped, and continues to shape, the
history, polity, economic structure, and culture of the United States”
(Omi & Winant, 2015, p. 106). Henceforth, I will drop the use of
inverted commas. Race is also a transcendent category: “something that
stands above or apart from class, gender, or other axes of inequality and
difference” (p. 106). Michael Omi and Howard Winant (2015) add:
Race is a fundamental organizing principle of social stratification. It has

influenced the definition of rights and privileges, the distribution of
resources, and the ideologies and practices of subordination and oppres-
sion. The concept of race as a marker of difference has permeated all
forms of social relations. It is a template for the processes of marginal-
ization that continue to shape social structures as well as collective and
individual psyches. (p. 107)
Because race is “a concept that signifies and symbolizes social conflicts

and interests by referring to different types of human bodies” (Omi &
Winant, p. 110, emphasis in original), racism is Real, and it is for this
18 R. K. Beshara
reason that the concept of race, while a social construction, is still of

great value in antiracist struggle. Also: “While race is a template for the
subordination and oppression of different social groups, we emphasize
that it is also a template for resistance to many forms of marginal-
ization and domination” (Omi & Winant, 2015, p. 108). Omi and
Winant’s (2015) racial formation theory comprises a constellation of
concepts, which are worth unpacking: race making, racialization, racial
projects, racism, and antiracism. They define race making “as a process
of ‘othering’” (p. 105), which is based on any perceived distinction. They
add: “Gender, class, sexuality, religion, culture, language, nationality, and
age, among other perceived distinctions, are frequently evoked to justify
structures of inequality, differential treatment, subordinate status, and in
some cases violent conflict and war” (p. 105).
I appreciate the conception of othering because it explains not only
racism, but also other forms of oppression. Othering, as Omi and
Winant (2015) point out, is “a global and world-historical process of
‘making up people’” (p. 106), a form of categorization premised on not
only difference (us v. them), but also hierarchy (superior v. inferior).
Now, we can map the coordinates of subject-positions in the apparatus
of racialized capitalism (see Fig. 1.1) using the semiotic square (Greimas,
1968; cf. Kovel, 1970/1984, p. 75) and Curry’s (2017) Man-Not theory.
Here is Curry’s (personal communication, June 28, 2020) response
to my formalization of his theory, “the Man-Not however creates the
stratification because he is outside civility. The woman-not (savage) is
civilized in contact and through rape (she can produce babies for rule
over the native)…he is only eliminated.” Curry (personal communica-
tion, August 7, 2020) clarifies, “even when he [the Man-Not] is raped,
it serves no function besides accelerating his dehumanization and ulti-
mate death.” Curry (personal communication, June 28, 2020) adds,
“class stratification and group distinctions in civil society emerge from
the distance they have from the savage. This nuances Wynter’s point in
No Humans Involved.”
Racial formation is “the sociohistorical process by which racial identi-
ties are created, lived out, transformed, and destroyed ” (Omi & Winant,
2015, p. 109, emphasis in original). Racialization is “the extension of
Fig. 1.1 The semiotic square

20 R. K. Beshara
racial meaning to a previously racially unclassified relationship, social prac-

tice, or group” (p. 111, emphasis in original). Here is the definition of
the next element (i.e., racial project) in Omi and Winant’s (2015) racial
formation theory:
A racial project is simultaneously an interpretation, representation, or expla-

nation of racial identities and meanings, and an effort to organize and
distribute resources (economic, political, cultural) along particular racial lines.
(p. 125, emphasis in original)
So what is racism according to Omi and Winant (2015)? “A racial

project can be defined as racist if it creates or reproduces structures of
domination based on racial significations and identities” (p. 128, emphasis
in original). Conversely, antiracist projects are “those that undo or
resist structures of domination based on racial significations and identities”
(p. 129, emphasis in original).
In Stamped from the Beginning, Ibram Kendi (2016) names three
subject-positions vis-à-vis the question of race: segregationists, assimi-
lationists, and antiracists. I find that these positions map perfectly onto
the “trinity of ideologies that emerged in the wake of the French Revolu-
tion–conservatism, liberalism, and radicalism” (Wallerstein, 2004, p. 52).
Whereas segregationists are conservatives who are consciously racist,
assimilationists are liberals who are unconsciously racist, which is epit-
omized by the phrase: “I’m not racist, but…” Non-racism, or racial
moderation, is still a form of liberal (or centrist) racism. Kendi (2016)
defines radical antiracism as follows: “there is nothing wrong with Black
people as a group, or with any other racial group. That is what it truly
means to think as an antiracist: to think there is nothing wrong with
Black people, to think that racial groups are equal” (p. 11, emphasis in
original).
Not only is race a social construction, racism is a dangerous racial
project that is founded upon myths:
Curse theorists were the first known segregationists. They believed that
Black people were naturally and permanently inferior, and totally inca-
pable of becoming White. Climate theorists were the first known assimi-
lationists, believing Black people had been nurtured by the hot sun into a
temporary inferiority, but were capable of becoming White if they moved
to a cooler climate. (Kendi, 2016, p. 32, emphasis added)
However, undoing racist myths entails racial justice, not color blind-
ness; in other words, radical antiracism entails both “oppositional race
consciousness and racial resistance” (Omi & Winant, 2015, p. 131,
emphasis in original). It is unfortunate that we must define a project of
social justice and positive peace using a negative term (antiracism); never-
theless, antiracism is the negation of the negation, for during 468 years
of Euro-colonialism racism has negated the being of the non-European,
non-white, non-Christian, etc. It will perhaps take another 468 years to
undo this legacy of modern colonialism.
Color blindness is not tenable in the foreseeable future because it
is impossible not to racialize (i.e., not to perceive race); however, it is
possible to racialize and also be antiracist. Racialization will cease to exist
with the collapse of racialized capitalism. As Marxist theorist Mike Cole
(2016) puts it, racialization is “a process that serves ruling-class interests
by dividing the working class, promoting conflict among that class – the
class with least access to power and wealth – and forcing down labour
costs” (pp. 1–2). Cole is on the right track; however, while Marxism
provides us with the most powerful critical analysis of capitalism, the
Eurocentric category of class (i.e., the white industrial worker) fails to
account for those below the proletarian threshold: the non-European
lumpenproletariat or underclass.
The most obvious historical example is the slave; today’s equivalent, at
least in the US, is the incarcerated. The Thirteenth Amendment to the
US Constitution states: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except
as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted ,
shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their juris-
diction” (emphasis added). The highlighted exception means that the
incarcerated are the new slaves, and this colonial logic confirms Giorgio
Agamben’s (1998) thesis about the state of exception being a structurally
22 R. K. Beshara
inherent feature of European politics, whether democracy or totalitari-

anism. The incarcerated, or the new slave, is the homo sacer (sacred man)
“who may be killed and yet not sacrificed ” (p. 8, emphasis in original).
Agamben (1998) does not address the racialization of the homo sacer,
which is the limit of his analysis, but extending Curry (2017) one can
characterize him as the sacred man-not. The incarcerated (e.g., the enemy
combatant in Guantánamo Bay) is outside the law, an exception, and
hence, he is also outside politics; therefore, he neither has the right to
vote nor can he enjoy the Aristotelian bios (good life) that most of us
take for granted. As a sacred man-not, the incarcerated is reduced to zoē
(bare life).
The end of racism (or any other form of oppression) depends not only
on the end of racialized capitalism, but also on the end of any politics
based on the state of exception. The gendering is intentional for the
most oppressed in any given society tends to be the homo sacer. It is
also true that man is the oppressor par excellence. Whereas in the Global
North, the primary oppressor tends to be a bourgeois white man, in the
Global South, the primary sub-oppressor tends to be a bourgeois Brown
or Black man. Within the apparatus of racialized capitalism, patriarchy
explains the sexist oppression of women, but it fails to explain the oppres-
sion of the homo sacer, who tends to be oppressed on the basis of race
in the Global North and on the basis of politics in the Global South.
Signifiers that have been used by the state to characterize the homo sacer
include: superpredator, terrorist, enemy combatant, criminal, n-word,
thug, extremist, radical, fundamentalist, etc.
The homo sacer functions as a scapegoat for the state, this scapegoating
ideologically interpellates civilians to support, or at least to not critically
think about, the violence of the state itself, which Asaf Jalata (2013), in
the case of Europe, characterizes as “colonial terrorism.” Jalata (2013)
argues that European colonial terrorism against Africa occurred in two
waves over a period of five hundred years:
The first wave started in the late fifteenth century with merchandising
some young and able-bodied Africans at gunpoint and colonizing some
limited coastal islands or territories (about 10 percent of Africa). The
second wave emerged in the first half of the nineteenth century and
consolidated with the partition and colonization of the remaining 90

percent of the continent in the late nineteenth century. (p. 3)
Jalata (2013) then defines terrorism as follows, which challenges the

facile understanding of modern terrorism as political violence perpe-
trated exclusively by non-state actors:
a systematic governmental or organizational policy through which lethal

violence is practiced openly or covertly to impose terror on a given popula-
tion group and their institutions or symbols or their representative members to
change their behavior of political resistance to domination or their behavior of
domination for political and economic gains or other reasons. (p. 3, emphasis
in original)
What Is Psychoanalysis?
According to the co-founder, and first major theorist, of psychoanalysis:
Psycho-analysis is seeking to bring to conscious recognition the things in

mental life which are repressed ; and everyone who forms a judgement on
it is himself a human being, who possesses similar repressions and may
perhaps be maintaining them with difficulty. They are therefore bound
to call up the same resistance in him as in our patients; and that resistance
finds it easy to disguise itself is an intellectual rejection and to bring up
arguments like those which we ward off in our patients by means of
the fundamental rule of psycho-analysis. We often become aware in our
opponents, just as we do in our patients, that their power of judgement
is very noticeably influenced affectively in the sense of being diminished.
The arrogance of consciousness (in rejecting dreams with such contempt,
for instance) is one of the most powerful of the devices with which we
are provided as a universal protection against the incursion of unconscious
complexes. That is why it is so hard to convince people of the reality of
the unconscious and to teach them to recognize something new which is
in contradiction to their conscious knowledge. (Freud, 1909/1961, p. 41,
emphasis added)
24 R. K. Beshara
I emphasized through italicization some of the key technical terms

used by Freud in these closing remarks to his third lecture at Clark
University, such as repression, resistance, consciousness, dreams, protec-
tion (i.e., defense mechanism), and the unconscious. Elsewhere he
describes psychoanalysis as “the science of the unconscious” (Freud,
1923/1955, p. 251, emphasis in original) and as “a method of research”
(Freud, 1927/1961, p. 36). However, Freud (1909/1961) gives the credit
to Bertha Pappenheim (pseudonym: Anna O.), Joseph Breuer’s hysteric
analysand, for characterizing psychoanalysis as the “talking cure” or, more
jokingly, as “chimney-sweeping” (p. 8). For a succinct definition, see this
encyclopedia entry from Freud (1923/1955):
Psycho-analysis is the name (1) of a procedure for the investigation of

mental processes which are almost inaccessible in any other way, (2) of
a method (based upon that investigation) for the treatment of neurotic
disorders and (3) of a collection of psychological information obtained
along those lines, which is gradually being accumulated into a new
scientific discipline. (p. 234)
In other words, psychoanalysis, as a science of the unconscious, is a

research method that is concerned with what is repressed. As subjects
of the signifier, we are divided between our egotistical wishes (what
Freud terms “conscious knowledge”) and our unconscious desires (e.g.,
dreams), which we defensively repress in an effort to avoid the trauma
of anxiety. Because we unconsciously repress our (the Other’s) desires,
we develop neurotic symptoms. This brief account excludes the psychic
structures of psychosis and perversion not only because they are less
common in most societies when compared with neurosis, but also
because my interest in psychoanalysis is more theoretico-political and
less clinical.
In contrast to the extremes of biological essentialism and cultural
constructionism, the divided subject, or speaking being (parlêtre), is
psychosocially structured, from the perspective of Freudo-Lacanian
psychoanalysis, by the singular and irreducible materiality of the signi-
fier. This question of materiality is worth emphasizing if we are serious
about using psychoanalysis not only as a form of contrapuntal critique
but also, and more importantly, as one of many tools for changing the
world.
Another way of restating how the divided subject is neither a human
animal nor a cultured person is through the Lacanian formula: demand
- need = desire. The formula is based on this statement from Écrits:
“desire is neither the appetite for satisfaction nor the demand for
love, but the difference that results from the subtraction of the first
from the second, the very phenomenon of their splitting (Spaltung )”
(Lacan, 1966/2006, p. 580, emphasis in original). Generally, govern-
ments address the biological needs and/or the cultural demands of their
citizens, but a psychoanalytically-informed politics is attuned to our
unconscious desires as subjects: What do we want? What is our collective
fantasy? And is it enjoyable for us to be on this journey together as we
traverse this fantasy? Therefore, desiring is an ethico-political question
that has to do with jouissance (enjoyment); we enjoy desiring more than
realizing our desires through acquiring objects. Desire is our fantasmatic
relation to the objet petit a, a lost or impossible object-cause of desire
that we presume is in the Other, which is “the dimension required by the
fact that speech affirms itself as truth” (Lacan, 1966/2006, p. 712). The
Other, of course, does not exist or is barred, and this is why radical polit-
ical projects are important: Together we create the Other, which informs
how we speak and act.
What Is Postcolonialism?
In The Empire Writes Back, Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen
Tiffin (1989/2000) use the signifier ‘post-colonial’ to refer to “all the
culture affected by the imperial process from the moment of coloniza-
tion to the present day” (p. 2) and “all that cultural production which
engages, in one way or another, with the enduring reality of colonial
power (including its newer manifestations)” (p. 195). Elsewhere, they
have written that postcolonialism “deals with the effects of colonization
on cultures and societies” (Ashcroft, Griffiths, & Tiffin, 2002, p. 186).
They also acknowledge “the implications involved in the signifying
hyphen [i.e., post-colonial] or its absence [i.e., postcolonial]” (p. 187).
26 R. K. Beshara
According to them, the high theorists (Said, Bhabha, and Spivak) “insist
on the hyphen to distinguish post-colonial studies as a field from colo-
nial discourse theory per se” (p. 187, emphasis in original). Leela Gandhi
(1998), on the other hand, asserts that “the unbroken term ‘postcolo-
nialism’ is more sensitive to the long history of colonial consequences”
(p. 3).
For me, whereas postcolonialism “as the contestation of colonial domi-
nation and the legacies of colonialism” (Loomba, 1998, p. 12) is the field,
(post)colonional/ity, or (post)colonization, is the object of study to be
acted upon and transformed in the spirit of praxis. I include the prefix
‘post’ in parentheses to recognize that many societies today are not post-
colonial, but are rather settler colonial or franchise neocolonies. Also, as
Ania Loomba (1998) shows: “A country [e.g., Egypt] may be both post-
colonial (in the sense of being formally independent) and neo-colonial
(in the sense of remaining economically and/or culturally dependent) at
the same time” (p. 7).
In terms of postcolonial studies as “a term for a body of diverse and
often contesting formulations of the cultural production of colonized
people rather than a discipline or methodology per se” (p. 199, emphasis
in original), Ashcroft et al. (1989/2000) acknowledge the critical debates
surrounding the field (p. 194); they respond to these debates by making
an analytic distinction between postcolonial societies or countries, post-
colonial literature or writing, and postcolonial theory or criticism (cf.
Moore-Gilbert, 1997).
As Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (1994) argue in their excel-
lent reader: “It is perhaps no exaggeration to say that Edward Said’s
Orientalism, published in 1978, single-handedly inaugurates a new
area of academic inquiry: colonial discourse, also referred to as colo-
nial discourse theory or colonial discourse analysis” (p. 5, emphasis in
original). They then situate postcolonialism within a specific intellec-
tual tradition (to which we can add the names of Giambattista Vico,
Antonio Gramsci, Michel Foucault, and Anouar Abdel-Malek to signal
other intellectual traditions that have influenced Said’s development of
postcolonialism):
it must be pointed out that it [Orientalism] was preceded by a number

of academic texts from a German intellectual tradition [e.g., Theodor
Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, and Hannah Arendt]
which shared Said’s concerns with the historical and theoretical relations
between Western economic/political global domination and Western
intellectual production. (pp. 6–7)
Further, Williams and Chrisman (1994) contend that while “the era
of formal colonial control is over…we have not fully transcended the
colonial [which is a way of maintaining an unequal international relation
of economic and political power]” (pp. 3–4). Nevertheless, the closest
they come to a definition of postcolonialism is this: “Colonial discourse
analysis and post-colonial critique are thus critiques of the process of
production of knowledge about the Other. As such, they produce forms
of knowledge themselves, but other knowledge, better knowledge” (p. 8).
In his historical introduction to postcolonialism, Robert Young (2001)
writes:
If colonial history, particularly in the nineteenth century, was the history

of the imperial appropriation of the world, the history of the twen-
tieth century has witnessed the peoples of the world taking power and
control back for themselves: Postcolonial theory is itself a product of that
dialectical process. (p. 4)
For Young (2001), postcolonial theory is “a political discourse, the

position from which it is enunciated (wherever literally spoken, or
published) is located on the three continents of the South [i.e., Latin
America, Africa, and Asia]” (p. 4). To the tricontinental, I add decolonial
communities, and comrades (Dean, 2019), in the Global North, such
as Indigenous peoples, the descendants of slaves, immigrants, forcibly
dispersed people, political radicals, and persecuted (sexual, religious,
ethnic, etc.) minorities of all kinds.
28 R. K. Beshara
The (Proto)Theorists of Post-/De-colonial

Psychoanalysis
Wilhelm Reich
Wilhelm Reich (1897–1957) was an Austrian psychoanalyst, who was

one of the pioneers of Freudo-Marxism (cf. Balibar, 1994, pp. 177–189)
and somatic psychology, but unfortunately today he is often overlooked
or dismissed. Perhaps the following dramatic, and perhaps even tragic,
events shed light on his dismissal: Reich was excommunicated from both
the International Psychoanalytical Association (founded by Freud) and
the Communist Party of Germany (co-founded by Rosa Luxemburg),
and he died in prison after a crackdown on his Orgone Institute by the
federal government of the US.
I begin my literature review with his important book, The Mass
Psychology of Fascism, which was originally published in German in
1933—the year Adolf Hitler became the Chancellor of Germany—
because it is the first psychoanalytic reading of the imperial/colonial
dimensions of fascism. The third edition of the book was translated to
English in 1942 and published in the US by Orgone Institute Press
in 1946. The version I had access to was published in 1970 by Farrar,
Strauss, and Giroux, and it is based on a new translation from the revised
German manuscript, which was co-edited by Marry Higgins and Chester
Raphael.
As an exemplar of the first wave of Freudo-Marxism, The Mass
Psychology Fascism really stands out because in contrast to the more
popular second wave (i.e., the Frankfurt School), Reich (1933/1970)
underlined the interconnection between fascism and race ideology—an
analysis that is clearly missing from the works of Frankfurt School critical
theorists (Baum, 2015). Bruce Baum (2015) makes the case for decolo-
nizing critical theory because in his view: “Horkheimer and Adorno [two
of the Frankfurt School’s leading figures] offered no sustained analysis
of anti-Black racism, colonialism, and other forms of racism” (p. 423).
Decolonizing critical theory means grounding the analyses conducted
by Frankfurt School researchers in a critique of racialized capitalism:
“modern racism can be comprehended adequately only through a critical
examination of modern capitalist society, and modern society itself can be

adequately understood only through a critical analysis of modern racism”
(Baum, 2015, p. 427, emphasis added).
In contrast to the Frankfurt School’s shortcomings, Reich
(1933/1970) clearly makes the following argument in the preface
to the third edition of The Mass Psychology of Fascism: “The racial
theory is not a product of fascism. On the contrary: it is fascism that
is a product of racial hatred and is its politically organized expression”
(p. 16). In fact, Reich (1933/1970) dedicates the third chapter of his
book to debunking “race theory.” This is not to say that every aspect of
Reich’s analysis is correct, for he places too much emphasis on sex(uality)
when explaining how a fascistic tendency manifests itself in the structure
of one’s character. However, I shall highlight the passages, which support
my thesis that Reich was ahead of his time in terms of his psychoanalytic
reading of the imperialist/colonialist and racist dimensions of fascism.
For example, in the following passage, Reich (1933/1970) under-
scores not only the politico-economic but also, and more importantly,
the psychopolitical driver of German imperialism:
To be sure, the economic interests of German imperialism were the imme-

diate decisive factors, but we also have to put into proper perspective the
mass psychological basis of world wars; we have to ask how the psychological
structure of the masses was capable of absorbing the imperialistic ideology,
to translate the imperialistic slogans into deeds that were diametrically
opposed to the peaceful, politically disinterested attitude of the German
population. (p. 75, emphasis in original)
He then concludes that “imperialistic ideology concretely changed the

structures of the working masses to suit imperialism” (Reich, 1933/1970,
p. 76, emphasis in original).
In addition to writing about Nazi Germany’s nationalistic and patri-
archal imperialism, Reich (1933/1970) juxtaposes, in his analysis, two
forms of imperialism through ideology critique to highlight their dialec-
tical relationship:
30 R. K. Beshara
The essential connection between familial and nationalistic ideology can

be pursued further. Families are just as cut off from and opposed to one
another as nations are. In both cases the ultimate basis for this separation
and opposition is an economic one…It is for this reason that the lower
middle-class man is especially accessible to imperialistic ideology. He is
capable of fully identifying with the personified conception of the nation.
It is in this way that familial imperialism is ideologically reproduced in
national imperialism. (pp. 131–132, emphasis added)
Reich (1933/1970) develops his thesis of fascism as a product of racial

hatred in the third chapter, which is titled “The Race Theory.” Reich
(1933/1970) writes: “According to Hitler, humanity is to be divided
into three races: the founders of civilization, the upholders of civiliza-
tion, and the destroyers of civilization. Only the Aryan race is considered
as the founder of civilization” (p. 158). A couple of pages later, he adds:
“this idea [Hitler’s race theory] conceals the imperialist function of fascist
ideology. For if the Aryans are the sole founders of civilization, then,
by virtue of their divine destiny, they can lay claim to world domin-
ion…Thus, we can see that the glorification of an imperialist war lay
wholly within the compass of this ideology” (p. 160).
In other words, Reich establishes that fascist ideology is comprised
of an imperialist/colonialist discourse sustained by a racist fantasy, or to
put it in his words: “the fascist race theory and nationalistic ideology in
general have a concrete relation to the imperialistic aims of a ruling class
that is attempting to solve difficulties of an economic nature” (Reich,
1933/1970, p. 163). Reich’s analysis sheds light on the authoritarian
nature of racialized capitalism, which can manifest itself ideologically in
more than one form, as either fascism or totalitarianism.
Reich’s (1933/1970) notion of fascist ideology as patriarchal imperi-
alism can be read as a psychosocial critique of the family’s complicity
with the state against the subject:
nationalistic sentiments are a direct continuation of the sentiments of the

authoritarian family. But mystical feelings are also a source of national-
istic ideology. Hence, patriarchal family attitudes and a mystical frame
of mind are the basic psychological elements of fascism and imperialistic
nationalism in the masses. (p. 241, emphasis in original)
Culture, in the context of capitalism, is inherently ideological because

the “ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas”
(Marx & Engels, 1845/1978, p. 172). Reich (1933/1970) adds a twist
to this classical Marxian reading by framing (fascist) culture, in the
context of (racialized) capitalism, as not only ideological (i.e., nation-
alistic, authoritarian, patriarchal, etc.), but also “imperialistic mysticism”
(p. 253).
Reich (1933/1970) demonstrates the inevitability of imperialism as a
function of the contradictory nature of capitalism, wherein the prole-
tariat (the 99%) continues to be in a historical class struggle with the
bourgeoisie (the 1%). In capitalist societies, the proletariat constitutes
the material base (i.e., the means and relations of production), whereas
the bourgeoisie produces the ideological superstructure (e.g., culture,
religion, family, etc.).
Reich (1933/1970) shows that fascist ideology ‘resolves’ capitalism’s
contradictions, in a reactionary way, through imperialism. His analysis
sheds light on the humanitarian imperialist wars taking place today
(e.g., the War on Terror) in the name of mystical values (e.g., freedom)
promoted by neoliberal democracies in the Global North. For Reich
(1933/1970), “Since fascism promised the masses of people a revolu-
tion against private capitalism and at the same time promised private
capitalism salvation from the revolution, its moves could be nothing but
contradictory, incomprehensible, and sterile. This also accounts to a large
extent for the compulsion that drove the German state apparatus into an
imperialistic war” (p. 474).
The above-mentioned passages support my thesis regarding the impor-
tance of Reich’s theorization of fascism from a Freudo-Marxist perspec-
tive for contrapuntal psychoanalysis. Although I value many of the
contributions of second-wave critical theorists, particularly their critique
of modernity, I agree with Baum’s (2015) criticisms of the Frankfurt
School regarding their silence on the question of coloniality. Perhaps the
only exception is Herbert Marcuse, who concluded the following in his
1967 speech at the Congress on the Dialectics of Liberation, which took
place in London and included speakers as diverse as Stokely Carmichael,
David Cooper, and R. D. Laing:
32 R. K. Beshara
without putting the affluent society in the framework of the Third World
it [liberation from the affluent society] is not understandable. I also
believe that here and now our emphasis must be on the advanced indus-
trial societies – not forgetting to do whatever we can and in whatever way
we can to support, theoretically and practically, the struggle for liberation
in the neo-colonial countries which, if again they are not the final force
of liberation, at least contribute their share – and it is a considerable share
– to the potential weakening and disintegration of the imperialist world
system. (as cited in Cooper, 1968/2015, p. 405)
While some may object to the phrase ‘the Third World’ as deroga-
tory, I am personally in favor of it for a simple theoretical reason. The
Third World for me still carries the meaning it used to carry during
the Cold War era as the third term beyond the dialectic comprising
the First World’s laissez-faire capitalism (represented by the US) and the
Second World’s state capitalism (represented by the Soviet Union). The
People’s Republic of China currently represents the Second World. In
other words, the Third World signifies the non-aligned movement in the
Global South, particularly in Africa, Latin America, and parts of Eurasia.
Samir Amin’s (1990) concept of delinking here names the possibility
of an anti-capitalist mundialización, or South-South solidarity. Further-
more, I prefer the post-developmental designation Third World over
‘developing’ or ‘underdeveloped’ countries because the latter signifies
not only economic development (as measured by a nation’s GDP per
capita), but also implies psychological (i.e., cognitive, moral, psychoso-
cial) development. To put it differently, the seemingly non-racist psycho-
economic developmental model, which follows a modern logic of
progress according to standards set in the Global North, ultimately infan-
tilizes former colonies in the Global South through a neocolonial, and
inherently racist, rhetoric.
What of the third wave of Freudo-Marxism then vis-à-vis contrapuntal
psychoanalysis? The third wave can be accurately rendered as Lacano-
Marxism and certainly includes the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan
and some of the critical theorists who are influenced by his reading of, or
return to, Freud like Louis Althusser and Slavoj Žižek to name but two
of the most prominent examples.
In Decolonial Psychoanalysis (Beshara, 2019b, p. 12), I acknowledge

Lacan’s (1991/2007) reference to the “real of decolonization” (p. 34)
in his Seminar XVII, which is titled The Other Side of Psychoanalysis.
Lacan gave the seminar between 1969 and 1970 at the Paris Law Faculty
in the aftermath of the anti-capitalist/anti-imperialist/antiracist global
protests of 1968, but the seminar was published much later in 1991 in
French and then in 2007 in English. Lacan’s remark was in relation to
the Algerian War of Independence (1954–1962), which Fanon militantly
supported as a member of the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN).
The most impressive aspect of Lacan’s psychoanalytic discourse theory
in this seminar pertains to his contempt for philosophy qua the univer-
sity as an extractive enterprise, which produces knowledge for the master.
On the other hand, the analyst causes the desire of the hysteric, who in
turn speaks truth to power and consequently is more scientific than the
university. Lacan’s critique of philosophy, which I extend to psychology,
echoes Marx’s (1845/1978) 11th thesis on Feuerbach: “Philosophers [and
psychologists] have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point,
however, is to change it” (p. 145, emphasis in original). Marx’s 11th thesis
pertains to the question of praxis, or the marriage between theory and
practice.
Psychoanalysis, as the science of the unconscious, is a praxis because
it entails a theory of the unconscious as articulated by Freud and Lacan,
and how that theory comes to inform clinical practice. However, the
question of praxis, at least for Marx, is not only a question of psycholog-
ical change, but also, and more importantly, a question of socio-political
revolutionary transformation. Therefore, the clinic, as far as psycho-
analysis is concerned, is not a neutral space, but a psychopolitical
one.
Ample evidence of the psychoanalytic clinic as a psychopolitical space,
in the early history of the psychoanalytic movement, is well documented
by Elizabeth Ann Danto in her 2005 book Freud’s Free Clinics: Psycho-
analysis & Social Justice, 1918–1938. She writes: “Even among analysts
who outwardly avoided politics, a practice at a free clinic implicitly
reflected a civic commitment to human welfare…From 1920 until 1938,
in ten cities and seven countries, the activist generation of psychoanalysts
built free treatment centers” (p. 24). Danto (2005, p. 20) also shows
34 R. K. Beshara
that Freud was essentially a political radical since, in 1933, he donated

200 Austrian shillings (the equivalent of approximately $1407 today) to
the free clinic in Vienna. I will revisit the question of praxis later on in
the book in my discussion of Paulo Freire’s (1970/2018) Pedagogy of the
Oppressed and its relevance for contrapuntal psychoanalysis.
While Althusser’s (1970/2014) analysis of ideology in terms of inter-
pellation or hailing is pertinent, particularly for a contrapuntal reading
of racialized capitalism, his antihumanism and structural Marxism have
little to offer liberation praxis. In contrast, I will argue for resurrecting
Said’s critical humanism as an antidote to the moral relativism of
postmodern theory. Also, Marxism and postcolonialism are not incom-
patible. Said, for example, was heavily influenced by Antonio Gramsci’s
Marxist humanism, which in turn greatly informed his dialectical take
on, and argument for, critical humanism—an unpopular stance in the
postmodern academic milieu.
Žižek’s misreadings of postcolonialism aside (cf. Almond, 2012),
his invigorating arguments, in the Sublime Object of Ideology (Žižek,
1989), against post-ideology and for the continued relevance of ideology
critique qua fantasy have a lot to offer contrapuntal psychoanalysis.
Not mentioning the applicability of his Lacano-Marxist analysis of anti-
Semitism in The Plague of Fantasies (Žižek, 1997) to Islamophobia and
other forms of oppression today.
Octave Mannoni
If Edward Said (1935–2003), Gayatri Spivak (1942–), and Homi

Bhabha (1949–) are the patron saints of postcolonialism, then Octave
Mannoni (1899–1989), Frantz Fanon (1925–1961), and Albert Memmi
(1920–2020) are the patron saints of postcolonial psychoanalysis.
Although I began my literature review with Reich, a Freudo-Marxist crit-
ical of coloniality, Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonization
(Mannoni, 1950/1990) is the first publication exemplary of postcolonial
psychoanalysis.
Prospero and Caliban is a problematic book, to say the least; Fanon
(1952/2008) considers the book “dangerous” (p. xvii). While at times,
Mannoni (1950/1990) comes across as critical of colonialism (e.g., the

second chapter is on the colonial situation and racialism), frequently his
arguments function as apologetics (Bloch, p. vii). According to Mannoni
(1950/1990), the “colonial situation” is:
the very instant a white man, even if he is alone, appears in the midst of
a tribe, even if it is independent, so long as he is thought to be rich or
powerful or merely immune to the local forces of magic, and so long as
he derives from his position, even though only in his most secret self, a
feeling of his own superiority. (p. 18)
Mannoni (1950/1990) interprets the colonial situation through the

lens of (Adlerian/Jungian/Kleinian) psychoanalysis, which is nothing
short of psychologizing colonialism (i.e., reducing colonialism to the
psyches of the colonizer/colonized), for he is exclusively interested in
analyzing the personalities of the European colonizer and the colonized
Malagasy. His analysis leads him to a sweeping generalization that the
former suffers from an “inferiority complex” while the latter is ailed by
a “dependency complex.” In addition to diagnosing these pathological
personality structures that supposedly lead to adult neurosis in the case of
the European or infantile primitivism in the case of the non-European,
Mannoni (1950/1990) is recommending a treatment: a way of doing
colonialism, which is better, or more ethical, for all parties involved, but
the idea of a nonviolent colonialism is, of course, paradoxical.
Maurice Bloch’s new forward to Prospero and Caliban emphasizes
Mannoni’s (1950/1990) ignorance regarding “the Malagasy in general”
and “the causes of the [1947] revolt in particular” (p. vi), or as he puts
harshly: “Mannoni disguises his ignorance of Malagasy motives only by
substituting other motives deduced from [psychoanalytic] theories origi-
nating in the highly specific intellectual tradition of his own culture” (p.
xix). In other words, in Prospero and Caliban, we encounter Mannoni’s
unconscious projections onto the Malagasy people as opposed to a
convincing empirical, or even theoretically erudite, psychoanalytically-
informed study of colonialism in Madagascar. Bloch does not believe
that Mannoni is racist; instead, he argues that his arrogance (or igno-
rance) “is the arrogance of the psychoanalyst…who unthinkingly comes
36 R. K. Beshara
to indulge in the different but no less objectionable claim to superiority

that his professional knowledge apparently gives him [or her]” (p. xviii).
For me, the book is a primer on how not to use psychoanalysis when it
comes to interpreting colonialism.
The book’s strength is its reflexivity, if we approach it as an auto-
ethnography or “reflexive ethnography” (Bloch, p. vi, as cited in
Mannoni, 1950/1990). Nonetheless, the book’s weakness is that it does
not go as far as it could have gone. Mannoni (1950/1990) himself admits
this much in his 1956 note: “what I regret is not so much these weak-
nesses in my book as the fact that I have not produced a much more openly
personal study” (p. 6, emphasis added). This lack of critical reflexivity on
the part of the author is characterized by Bloch as an ambiguous attitude,
for Mannoni was “a Frenchman who became the head of the information
services of the colony” (p. v). Not only that, Bloch suggests that Prospero
and Caliban may have even informed the French administration’s colo-
nial policy in Madagascar: “Mannoni’s ‘solution’ [a gradual and firmly
guided move toward partial self-determination and a revival of the tradi-
tional Malagasy communal organic village councils, the Fokon’olona]…is
exactly the one attempted by the French administration after the revolt”
(p. xi, emphasis in original).
Given Mannoni’s (1950/1990) own admission regarding the weak-
nesses of his theoretical arguments in the book (pp. 4–6), I would like
to suggest that we read Prospero and Caliban as an auto-ethnographic
reflection on the Malagasy Uprising of 1947 from the perspective of
a European analyst-in-formation. In other words, the book says more
about Mannoni himself, particularly his unconscious qua the Other’s
(the French administration’s) colonial discourse.
The ‘primitive,’ the ‘savage,’ the ‘backward,’ and their obverse (i.e.,
the ‘developed,’ the ‘civilized,’ the ‘advanced’) are signifiers in the
Other’s colonial discourse, which point to the European colonizers’
unconscious fantasies vis-à-vis the non-European world. These racialist
fantasies were, and continue to be, informed by Social Darwinism and
psycho-economic developmental logics that spatiotemporally divide up
the world in a binary and linear fashion: Europeans are here (civilized)
and now (advanced), while non-Europeans are there (barbarian) and
then (primitive).
Mannoni (1950/1990) uses some of these terms in inverted commas

to signal his critique or ironic distance from them, yet as Bloch remarks:
“although unhappy with the term primitive Mannoni cannot do without
it and merely isolates it in inverted commas” (p. ix, emphasis in orig-
inal). Put differently, Mannoni (1950/1990) is still operating within a
binary, Orientalist framework, wherein the Malagasy people are posi-
tioned as not only colonized subjects but also inherently inferior beings,
who ontologically lack, according to him, “the democratic spirit” and
“the experimental spirit” (p. 187). This Orientalist logic informs his
misguided belief in a humanitarian colonialism: “There was a time when
Europe was easily able to provide the sort of colonial who was capable of
guiding native peoples” (p. 170).
In other words, his purpose for psychologizing colonialism is to inspire
prospective European colonizers to be reflexive about their indepen-
dent personality and potential inferiority complex, so they can be more
efficient colonizers and achieve “inter-racial harmony” (p. 171) with
colonized subjects (i.e., non-Europeans). Because Mannoni (1950/1990)
does not question colonialism to begin with, after all he personally bene-
fited from it and operated within its logic, he cannot understand the
revolt except as illogical or irrational, which for him means uncon-
scious. This wild psychoanalytic misreading on his part is a result
of what Philip Mason characterizes as “Mannoni’s extreme individual-
ism” (p. 15), which blinded him from seeing the revolt as a politically
motivated anticolonial event.
Additionally, Mannoni’s false dichotomy between dependence and
independence when it comes to personality structure could have been
resolved by a notion like interdependence, which speaks to the complex
positionings that we as divided subjects may occupy at any given
moment in time. Also, the psychoanalytic concept of divided subjec-
tivity, as opposed to personality, refutes Mannoni’s either/or approach to
realms of the personal and the political without undermining the tense
but fantasmatic relationship between the subject and the Other.
Having said that, it is curious to note that Mannoni was not only
closely associated with Lacan, being his analysand; Lacan was also influ-
enced by Mannoni as Bloch writes (p. v). To be fair, Mannoni wrote
Prospero and Caliban in 1948, one year before Lacan delivered his first
38 R. K. Beshara
major essay to the Sixteenth International Congress of Psychoanalysis

in Zurich, Switzerland: The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Func-
tion as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience. Coincidentally, this essay
on Imaginary identification signals the least sophisticated, and most
accessible, theoretical contribution in Lacan’s oeuvre, which spanned a
period of three decades wherein each decade roughly indexed his gradual
but inverse elaboration of his tripartite register theory: Real-Symbolic-
Imaginary.
When asked by the editors of the journal Race to reevaluate Pros-
pero and Caliban, Mannoni (1966) admits that, in the aftermath of
the decolonization of Asia and Africa between 1945 and 1960, a sequel
to his flawed book ought to be written with the appropriate title: “the
psychology of decolonisation” (p. 327, emphasis in original). Mannoni
never had the chance to write this proposed sequel. Later in the article,
Mannoni (1966) argues that racism, as a neurotic or pathological
symptom, must “be of interest to every psycho-analyst” (p. 330).
After approximately two decades since the writing of Prospero and
Caliban, Mannoni (1966) is now exhibiting critical reflexivity, which
is embodied in the article’s title The Decolonisation of Myself . He is
even skeptical about the merits of psychologization when it comes to
studying colonialism or racism; for example, he writes about “the limi-
tations of the ‘psychological’ interpretation” vis-à-vis “the true terms of
the problem” (p. 331). Further, Mannoni (1966) problematizes what
he labels as the universalist solution to racism: “all men [and women]
are essentially alike” (p. 331). Instead of this Imaginary solution, which
is promoted ideologically by white liberals, he makes the case for an
antiracist acknowledgment of Real-Symbolic differences: “the fact of the
black man’s [sic] existence has come to play a conjurer’s role, revealing
in the world what might otherwise never have been so clearly visible”
(p. 333, emphasis in original). For Mannoni (1966), the universalist
solution, which is a secularization of Christian charity, is a form of
resistance to non-European ontologies and epistemologies. In this sense,
Mannoni’s (1966) critical reflexivity enacts a radical humanism. For
antiracism is not merely the opposite of racism, it “forms an opposition
to the moral and political theories and practices of whites” (p. 334).
Therefore, following Mannoni (1966), one can conceive of two

humanist responses to colonial racism: While the liberal non-racist calls
for the coexistence of races through the universalist solution, the radical
antiracist rallies for the coexistence of humankind through pluriversalist
solutions. The liberal humanist psychologizes, and the radical humanist
psychosocializes. Universalist philosophy, Mannoni (1966) reminds us, is
“nothing but a sleight-of-hand designed to ensure a quiet conscience for
the white man [sic]” (p. 334). Mannoni’s (1966) argument against iden-
tity politics resonates with Mari Ruti’s (2018) case for jumping “directly
from the singular to the universal by bypassing the particular [e.g., race,
gender, sexuality, religion, or nationality]” (p. 45). Psychoanalytic theo-
rists, myself included, will continue to make pluriversal claims for the
foreseeable future, but perhaps the key is grounding such claims in the
singularity of being; radical difference is the antidote to identity politics.
Whereas Mannoni (1950/1990) analyzed colonialism from the perspec-
tive of psychoanalysis, my goal is to analyze psychoanalysis from the
perspective of coloniality.
Aimé Césaire (1950/2000) is not only critical of Mannoni’s
(1950/1990) psychologization of colonialism, when he sardonically
writes: “Away with racism! Away with colonialism! They smack too
much of barbarism. M. Mannoni has something better: psychoanal-
ysis” (p. 59). He is also reminding his readers of the materiality of
colonialism by characterizing Mannoni’s (1950/1990) “disinterested” or
apolitical psychologization as ideological, that is, as a “bourgeois attempt
to reduce the most human problems to comfortable, hollow notions: the
idea of the dependency complex” (p. 62, emphasis in original). Césaire
(1950/2000) then emphatically asks:
What has become of…the Banque de Madagascar? And the bullwhip?

And the taxes? And the handful of rice to the Madagascan…And the
martyrs? And the innocent people murdered? And the bloodstained
money piling up in your coffers, gentlemen? (p. 62)
40 R. K. Beshara
Frantz Fanon
Frantz Fanon’s masterpiece Black Skin, White Masks was published in

1952 in French, two years after the publication of Prospero and Caliban.
These links are important to highlight in an effort to reconstruct the
context out of which the dialogue between psychoanalysis and post-
colonialism germinated. Fanon dedicates the fourth chapter in his book
(The So-Called Dependency Complex of the Colonized) to critiquing
Mannoni, but the book is much more than a critique or a commentary.
It is so rich and certainly ahead of its time that theorists continue to
return to Black Skin, White Masks in the twenty-first century without any
sense that interpretations of the text have been exhausted: Brown Skin,
White Masks (Dabashi, 2011); Brown Skin, White Minds (David, 2013);
Red Skin, White Masks (Coulthard, 2014); and Radical Skin, Moderate
Masks (Morsi, 2017). It is worth adding that Black Skin, White Masks
was Fanon’s doctoral dissertation, which was rejected by his supervisor,
so Fanon quickly wrote another dissertation on a neuropsychological
disorder in order to complete his medical degree (Gordon, 2015, p. 15).
Black Skin, White Masks is psychosocial in its methodological scope,
for throughout the text Fanon links the personal with the polit-
ical, analyzing his experiences through the lens of multiple theoretical
resources, such as psychoanalysis (Freud, Adler, Jung, Lacan), négritude
(Césaire, Senghor), and phenomenology (Hegel, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty)
among others. Whereas I would classify Prospero and Caliban as the foray
into (post)colonial psychoanalysis, Black Skin, White Masks is the first
theoretico-methodological articulation of decolonial psychoanalysis. And
who else could have come up with such an innovation but “Freud’s most
disputatious heir” (Said, 2003, p. 18)?
Modern psychoanalysis is colonial psychoanalysis because it does not
interrogate the question of colonial difference, that is, how it is located in
the zone of being. In other words, colonial psychoanalysis is intimately
connected to historical and/or ongoing oppressive structures; therefore,
it tends to be white, Eurocentric, (secular) Christian, bourgeois, civilized,
etc. Psychoanalysis is a critical innovation from within the center of the
modern world-system (i.e., the belly of the beast). It is also an interna-

tional movement, with many schisms, that has been and continues to be
influential in the periphery, particularly in Latin America.
Jacques Derrida (1991) characterized this “worldification” (p. 201),
this move from the center to the periphery, as “geopsychoanaly-
sis” (p. 200). Derrida (1991) deconstructs the following phrase from
the International Psychoanalytic Association’s proposed Constitution of
1977: “and the rest of the world” (p. 199). This modern rhetoric of “the
West and the rest” (Hall, 1992) is undergirded by a colonial logic that is
not only othering (i.e., us v. them), but also oppressive (i.e., superior v.
inferior).
The distinction between the zones of being and nonbeing is premised
on two forms of colonial difference: spatial and temporal (Mignolo,
2007). Whereas spatial colonial difference is established based on the
notion of ‘barbarians’ or those who are outside the center of Euro-
modernity, temporal colonial difference is premised on the concept of
‘primitives’ or those who still live in a premodern past (p. 472). I will
elaborate in more detail on the question of colonial difference in the
final chapter, but suffice to say for now that it seems that colonial differ-
ence (i.e., being v. nonbeing) is rooted in the binary logic of European
politics itself dating back all the way to Aristotle: “The fundamental
categorial pair of Western politics is not that of friend/enemy but that
of bare life/political existence, zoē/bios, exclusion/inclusion” (Agamben,
1998, p. 8, emphasis in original).
On the other hand, postcolonial psychoanalysis is an attempt to use
psychoanalysis critically vis-à-vis the question of coloniality but I locate
such an analysis on the threshold between being and nonbeing because
those who engage in such an analysis (e.g., Mannoni) tend to be privi-
leged, such as the descendants of a historically oppressive group and/or
actual oppressors. Oppressors who want to be in solidarity with the
oppressed must follow their leadership: “Only power that springs from
the weakness of the oppressed will be sufficiently strong to free both”
(Freire, 1970/2018, p. 44).
Decolonial psychoanalysis, however, is a critical praxis “from the
perspective of coloniality and not only from the critique of post-
modernity” (Mignolo, 2007, p. 451). Because decolonial psychoanalysts
42 R. K. Beshara
(cf. Seshadri-Crooks, 1994) are conducting their analyses from the zone
of nonbeing, they are able to delink the rhetoric of modernity from the
logic of coloniality as far as psychoanalysis is concerned. Put differently,
decolonial psychoanalysts decolonize psychoanalysis as they psychoana-
lyze coloniality, which is exactly what Fanon (1952/2008) does in Black
Skin, White Masks. It is true that decolonization is not a metaphor (Tuck
& Yang, 2012), it is a praxis: a theory and a practice. Fanon elaborated
his decolonial psychoanalytic theory in his writings and speeches, and
he practiced decolonial psychoanalysis both as the chef de service at the
Blida–Joinville Psychiatric Hospital in Algeria and as a member of the
Front de Libération Nationale (FLN).
Fanon (1952/2008) defines the zone of nonbeing as “an extraordi-
narily sterile and arid region, an incline stripped bare of every essential
from which a genuine departure can emerge” (p. xii). Another name for
the zone of nonbeing is the unconscious logic of coloniality, or “the
darker side of Western modernity” (Mignolo, 2011). In the apparatus
of racialized capitalism, the zone of nonbeing (which is essentially non-
European) is the product of five centuries of Euro-colonialism. The forms
of oppression that exist today (e.g., racism, classism, and sexism) are
a function of this historical and ongoing legacy of colonial difference
between being and nonbeing, or the West and the rest (Hall, 1992).
In the zone of nonbeing, we can locate the Man-Not (Curry, 2017)
and the Woman-Not, who look darker than those in the zone of being,
speak a language other than English, and/or practice a religion other
than Christianity. Consequently, the question of colonial difference is
not only premised on skin color or race, for historically racism began
as religious racism in the fifteenth century (i.e., Christian supremacy)
and then mutated into scientific, or biological, racism in the nineteenth
century (i.e., European, or white, supremacy). The dominant form of
racism since the second half of the twentieth century has been, and
continues to be, cultural racism, which is a subtle form of racism that
is unconsciously informed by both religious and biological racisms.
The zone of nonbeing overlaps to some extent with the Global South,
or the dark nations in Vijay Prashad’s (2007) words, but the zone of
nonbeing extends beyond former franchise colonies in the Global South
to current settler colonies in the Global North. Given that I am based in
Turtle Island, particularly on ceded Tewa land, namely Oghá P’o’oge,

in what is now the State of New Mexico, the zone of nonbeing is
the product of two specific events: the American (Stannard, 1992), or
Indigenous (Smith, 2017), Holocaust and the transatlantic slave trade.
“Today about 70 million Indigenous people live in the Western Hemi-
sphere” (Smith, 2017, p. 7), 5.2 million of which live in the US
according to the 2010 Census. Compare today’s Indigenous popula-
tion figures to the population estimates in 1492: 75–145 million and
8–15 million, respectively (Smith, 2017). According to David Stannard
(1992), “population loss among native societies routinely reached and
exceeded 95 percent–a rate of decline more than sufficient to account
for a pre-Columbian hemispheric population in the neighborhood of
100,000,000 and more” (p. 268). David Smith (2017) clarifies that
“Stannard reached this conclusion by estimating the original Native
population at approximately 100 million and by noting that this number
had fallen about 95% [to 5,000,000] by the beginning of the twentieth
century” (p. 12).
Based on his own calculation, Smith (2017) argues, “the total number
of Indigenous deaths throughout the Western Hemisphere between 1492
and 1900 appears to be about 175 million” (p. 13). However, “for the
entire present-day United States from 1492 to the present…the Indige-
nous Holocaust in this country appears to have taken around 13 million
lives” (Smith, 2017, p. 13). It is worth noting that the timeline of these
population and death estimates pre-date, and overlap with, both British
America (1607–1783) and the US since the Declaration of Independence
(1776). Also worth considering are the leading causes of death in the
Indigenous Holocaust: “microbial pestilence and purposeful genocide”
(Stannard, 1992, p. xii, emphasis in original). Furthermore, it is vital to
stress that the Indigenous Holocaust is not some distant historical event,
but an ongoing violent reality:
For the genocide in the Americas, and in other places where the world’s
indigenous peoples survive, has never really ceased. As recently as 1986,
the Commission on Human Rights of the Organization of Amer-
ican States observed that 40,000 people had simply “disappeared” in
Guatemala during the preceding fifteen years. Another 100,000 had been
44 R. K. Beshara
openly murdered. That is the equivalent, in the United States, of more

than 4,000,000 people slaughtered or removed under official government
decree—a figure that is almost six times the number of American battle
deaths in the Civil War, World War One, World War Two, the Korean
War, and the Vietnam War combined. (Stannard, 1992, p. xiii)
The historical and ongoing violence against Indigenous people in

the Americas and elsewhere is crucial to highlight here in the context
of the refugee crisis discourse. According to the United Nations High
Commissioner for Refugees, there are 70.8 million forcibly displaced
people worldwide, which is approximately the equivalent of the entire
population of Thailand.
The second event in the gruesome architecture of the zone of
nonbeing is the transatlantic slave trade. Here I quote at length the editor
of the 1619 Project, which is not without its critics (see Harris, 2020):
In August 1619, just 12 years after the English settled Jamestown, Va.,
one year before the Puritans landed at Plymouth Rock and some 157
years before the English colonists even decided they wanted to form their
own country, the Jamestown colonists bought 20 to 30 enslaved Africans
from English pirates. The pirates had stolen them from a Portuguese
slave ship that had forcibly taken them from what is now the country
of Angola. Those men and women who came ashore on that August
day were the beginning of American slavery. They were among the
12.5 million Africans who would be kidnapped from their homes and
brought in chains across the Atlantic Ocean in the largest forced migra-
tion in human history until the Second World War. Almost two million
did not survive the grueling journey, known as the Middle Passage.
(Hannah-Jones, 2019, p. 16)
The central argument of the 1619 Project is that the US was not,
as common sense would have us believe, born in 1776, but actually in
1619 because enslaved Black men are the true founding fathers of the
US (Hannah-Jones, 2019, p. 17), but historian Gerald Horne (2020)
argues that the 1619 date is “notional” because “Africans enslaved and
otherwise were present in northern Florida as early as 1565 or the area
due north as early as 1526” (p. 19). In his widely-read essay, Louis
Althusser (1970/2014) makes a distinction between ISAs or Ideolog-

ical State Apparatuses (e.g., religion, education, the family, etc.) and
RSAs or Repressive State Apparatuses (e.g., police violence). This is
how Althusser (1970/2014) describes the function of ISAs: “all ideology
hails or interpellates concrete individuals as concrete subjects” (p. 264,
emphasis in original). When it comes to racialized capitalism, ISAs seem
to target those in the zone of being and RSAs appear to single out
those in the zone of nonbeing, which is particularly visible in the violent
police response to the George Floyd protests. Therefore, “racial terror-
ism” (Hannah-Jones, 2019, p. 22) is the material base of the ideological
superstructure of racialized capitalism.
As mentioned earlier, the clearest example of the zone of nonbeing
today is what Michelle Alexander (2010) calls the “New Jim Crow,” that
is, mass incarceration. According to Alexander (2010):
The impact of the drug war has been astounding. In less than thirty
years, the U.S penal population exploded from around 300,000 to more
than 2 million, with drug convictions accounting for the majority of the
increase. The United States now has the highest rate of incarceration in
the world, dwarfing the rates of nearly every developed country, even
surpassing those in highly repressive regimes like Russia, China, and Iran.
In Germany, 93 people are in prison for every 100,000 adults and chil-
dren. In the United States, the rate is roughly eight times that, or 750
per 100,000. (p. 6)
Bryan Stevenson (2019), in his article for the 1619 Project, puts it this
way: “We [the US] represent 4 percent of the planet’s population but 22
percent of its imprisoned” (p. 81). Stevenson (2019) continues: “Because
of mandatory sentencing and ‘three strikes’ laws, I’ve found myself repre-
senting clients sentenced to life without parole for stealing a bicycle or
for simple possession of marijuana. And central to understanding this
practice of mass incarceration and excessive punishment is the legacy of
slavery” (p. 81).
Alexander (2010) underscores the racial dimension of mass incarcer-
ation through a stark analogy, “The United States imprisons a larger
percentage of its black population than South Africa did at the height of
apartheid” (p. 6). But why? In addition to the logic of exception, which
46 R. K. Beshara
I have explicated earlier, the prison population in the US is literally slave

labor. Here is how Stevenson (2019) vividly describes the Louisiana State
Penitentiary, which is “one of America’s most violent and abusive”:
Angola is immense, larger than Manhattan, covering land once occupied

by slave plantations. Our clients there worked in fields under the super-
vision of horse-riding, shotgun-toting guards who forced them to pick crops,
including cotton. Their disciplinary records show that if they refused to
pick cotton — or failed to pick it fast enough — they could be punished
with time in “the hole,” where food was restricted and inmates were
sometimes tear-gassed . (p. 81, emphasis added)
In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon chronicles his experience with

not only racism, but, more importantly, internalized racism (cf. Davids,
2011; Duran & Duran, 1995). As a Martinican, Fanon grew up identi-
fying as a Frenchman. This identification morphed into patriotism when
Fanon joined, and fought with, the French army in World War II. He
was even awarded the Croix de Guerre for his heroism (Gordon, 2015,
p. 82).
This identification with Frenchness is the white mask in the title of
his book, which covered his Black skin. Fanon shows how this identi-
fication with Frenchness eventually leads to internalized racism, for he
was not even fully aware that he was Black until he moved to France and
experienced not only being racialized but also being the object of racism.
Fanon also points to the fact that Martinicans (mis)perceive, through the
lens of the French white mask, the Senegalese—but not themselves—as
Black because they are French, or European, and not African. For this
reason, any decolonial psychoanalysis is essentially critically reflexive. In
his analysis of racism, Fanon has to also decolonize his own internalized
racism in order to be liberated. But it is not easy, and may even be impos-
sible, because racism is premised on racialization (i.e., perceiving others
through the lens of race), which is intimately linked to one’s cultural
upbringing, that is, ideology.
In the introduction, Fanon (1952/2008) states, “only a psychoana-
lytic interpretation of the black problem can reveal the affective disorders
responsible for this network of complexes” (p. xiv). Disorder, or distress,
under colonialism brings up the question of (ab)normality that Foucault

(1961/2006) so aptly problematized in his History of Madness. From
a crude psychoanalytic perspective, normality is aligned with neurosis
and abnormality with psychosis or perversion. In Das Unbehagen in der
Kultur, Freud (1930/1961) writes, “what we call our civilization is largely
responsible for our misery, and that we should be much happier if we
gave it up and returned to primitive conditions” (p. 38, emphasis added).
Freud is correct in asserting that our uneasiness (das unbehagen)—our
diagnostic categories or psychical structures (i.e., neurosis, psychosis, and
perversion), at least as far as psychoanalysis is concerned—is a function of
European culture or ‘civilization,’ which can also be called the project of
modernity/coloniality. Unfortunately, this assertion is coupled with the
Eurocentric notion of the ‘primitive’ (cf. Nandy, 1983, p. 13). Perhaps,
this speaks to Freud’s inferiority complex in antisemitic Vienna, for he
was not critically reflexive regarding his identification with Europeanness
or whiteness (cf. Bulhan, 1985, p. 55).
In the conclusion to Das Unbehagen in der Kultur, Freud (1930/1961)
links civilization (i.e., European imperialist culture) with neurosis: “If
the development of civilization has such a far-reaching similarity to the
development of the individual…may we not be justified in reaching
the diagnosis that…the whole of mankind [sic]–have become ‘neurotic’ ?”
(pp. 109–110, emphasis added). That is Freud when he is critical of
modernity, and this is Freud (1913/1946) when he is uncritical of colo-
niality, and is frankly racist, in Totem and Taboo: Resemblances Between
The Psychic Lives of Savages and Neurotics: “Although laws of avoidance no
longer exist in the society of the white races of Europe and America…Many
a European will see an act of high wisdom in the laws of avoidance which
savage races have established” (pp. 20–21, emphasis added). Decolo-
nizing Freud entails retaining his timeless criticality while forgoing his
uncritical moments.
According to Fanon (1952/2008), the inferiority complex is a double
process: “First, economic. Then, internalization or rather epidermaliza-
tion of this inferiority” (p. xv). In other words, instead of being in
solidarity with the non-European Other, Freud viewed him or her from
the perspective of the European, white, Christian, and bourgeois (i.e.,
civilized) subject. This is the oppression that Freud internalized, which
48 R. K. Beshara
made him feel inferior, hence, his overcompensation or his “whitening”

(Fanon, 1952/2008, p. 27).
This is not a dismissal of Freud, for he is clearly critical of modernity,
but an extension of his critique to coloniality, which we have all internal-
ized. It is for this reason that Fanon (1952/2008) writes, “an individual
who loves Blacks is as ‘sick’ as someone who abhors them” (p. xii). He is
pointing to the oppressive dialectic of negrophobia/negrophilia, that is,
the two sides of anti-Black racism: conscious (or manifest) anti-Black
racism and unconscious (or latent) anti-Black racism. I have written
about this in relation to Islamophobia/Islamophilia (Beshara, 2019b),
and my solution to this problem is the notion of learned ignorance. This
is a kind of ignorance, which is paradoxically epistemic, and it is exem-
plified by the Socratic attitude of “I know that I do not know.” Put
differently, I (the subject) know that I do not know the Other; there-
fore, I will not make dehumanizing claims, to myself or to others, that
they are barbaric and/or primitive.
Fanon’s (1952/2008) decolonial methodology in Black Skin, White
Masks is psychosocial, or sociogenic (p. xv), but not psychological; the
purpose of this sociogeny is “the disalienation of the black [or racial-
ized/politicized] man” (p. xiv). Fanon is aware that psychologization is a
reductive form of analysis, which is why he writes of the necessity of “a
brutal awareness of the social and economic realities” (p. xiv).
The telos of “New Humanism” (p. xi) that Fanon (1952/2008) begins
the book with can also be characterized as radical, or critical, humanism
(cf. Bulhan, 1985, p. 12) to be echoed later by both Freire and Said.
While antihumanism, posthumanism, and transhumanism are popular
notions in European critical theory today, the question of the human
is not an outdated theoretico-practical one as far as the subaltern is
concerned. Surely, the European humanism, which was undergirded by
genocide and slavery, must be critiqued and ultimately rejected, but a
new radical humanist vision is ethically and politically integral to contra-
puntal psychoanalysis as liberation praxis. In an effort to be actional, we
pose Fanon’s (1952/2008, p. 197) question: What are the fundamental
values that make the world human?
Fanon’s (1952/2008) chapter on “The Black Man and Language” is

decisive for my psychoanalytic theorization of oppression qua language.
Fanon (1952/2008) writes:
All colonized people–in other words, people in whom an inferiority

complex has taken root, whose local [i.e., Egyptian/Arab] cultural origi-
nality has been committed to the grave–position themselves in relation to
the civilizing language [i.e., English]: i.e., the metropolitan culture. The
more the colonized has assimilated the cultural values of the metropolis
[the US], the more he will have escaped the bush [or the Sahara]. The
more he rejects his blackness [or brownness, in my case] and the bush [or
Sahara], the whiter he will become. (pp. 2–3)
I have reflexively applied the above quote to myself because I am an

Egyptian living in the US, and I am writing this book not in my native
tongue (Arabic), but in English to an English-speaking audience (Other)
in the US and elsewhere. Egypt, of course, was a franchise colony,
between 1882 and 1956, of the British Empire, and so the English
language has a specific meaning for me in the context of Egypt’s modern
history. Having said that, and given my research on Islamophobia, I
am always hyper-aware of the unconscious criminalization of the Arabic
language in the US in the context of the War on Terror, which results in
self-censorship—a function of the superego. This is undoubtedly restric-
tive for my being because I enjoy speaking in Arabic with my family
and friends, but I would certainly get into trouble if I spoke, or if I read
a book, in Arabic on an airplane; this is the racialized phenomenon of
flying while Arab, Muslim, or Brown.
Fanon (1952/2008) is inviting us to think about the role of language
in cultural racism before that term came into existence. Cultural racism
is certainly the dominant form of racism today, and it is very much
informed by colonial difference. Being Egyptian and speaking in Arabic
publicly in the US localizes me in the zone of nonbeing, wherein Arab
culture and the Arabic language are assigned inferior status since in the
Orientalist Symbolic-Imaginary matrix they are associated with Islam,
Islamism, fundamentalism, extremism, terrorism, radicalism, backward-
ness, primitivism, barbarism, etc.
50 R. K. Beshara
This cultural, or linguistic, dimension of racism is very important in

psychoanalysis (the talking cure), wherein speech in the form of free
association is central. For this reason, we need more decolonial psychoan-
alysts who are from Other cultures and who speak Other languages. Later
on, in the book’s conclusion, I will make the argument that writing is a
form of killing, and perhaps speaking and listening are forms of living?
This is not an argument against literacy, which is absolutely crucial,
but one about the arbitrary nature of lawmaking, in the history of
Euro-colonialism, as a form of mythic violence (Benjamin, 1921/1996).
Fanon (1952/2008) also writes about one’s accent as a marker for
racialization: “Yes I must watch my diction because that’s how they’ll
judge me” (p. 4). This is a common experience for me in the US: “Oh,
you have an accent. Where are you from?” First of all, everyone has an
accent, but from the perspective of whiteness, which is invisible like god’s
all-seeing eye, only certain people have accents. Notice that the question
about origin brings the etymology of the signifier ‘race’ full circle since
that is what it actually means.
I reject this comment/question, for it interpellates me as a racialized
subject, who is assumed to be an outsider: “Beneath the body schema
[human subject living in the US] I had created a historical-racial schema
[Egyptian → Arab → Brown → Oriental Other]” (Fanon, 1952/2008,
p. 91). In Decolonial Psychoanalysis, I have written about my experience
with someone telling me that I “look like a terrorist” (Beshara, 2019b,
p. 2), which had the same effect on me as “Look! A Negro!” did on Fanon
(1952/2008, p. 91). How does one look (or sound) like a terrorist? In the
US, having an accent makes me look like an outsider, for racialization is
a (mis)perception. The racializer is (mis)hearing and (mis)perceiving in
order to (mis)categorize the Other in terms of race, which is inherently
dehumanizing: “The eye is not only a mirror, but a correcting mirror.
The eye must enable us to correct cultural mistakes” (Fanon, 1952/2008,
p. 178, emphasis in original).
Nevermind if Fanon was a psychiatrist or if I am a critical psycholo-
gist, what matters to the racializing subject is how we look and speak to
them, or how we are translated into the zone of being’s grammar, hence,
rendered intelligible. The alternative to this Imaginary misrecognition,
which results from lack of identification, should be Symbolic alignment
of desire, wherein we may want something similar (e.g., liberation) even

if we are not the same. However, in an ideological world founded upon
fantasies of identification, we must completely assimilate to the hege-
monic culture and language (i.e., whiten), if we are to be recognized and
accepted as, more or less, equal. But what is whiteness?
According to Carl Anthony (1995):
About the time that slavery was introduced, the first English settlers
called themselves “Christians,” and they called the populations that they
encountered “pagan,” or sometimes “savage.” As more Europeans arrived,
they called themselves “English” or “Dutch” or “French.” But then came
Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676. A group of indentured servants and African
slaves organized a rebellion in order to kick the aristocratic elements out;
this was a precursor of the American Revolution. And the colonists real-
ized that if the indentured servants ever got together with the black people
and the native people, they wouldn’t have a future. That’s when the word
“white” was invented as we use it. What “whiteness” did was unify all the
Europeans who were coming here, people who, in Europe, would not at
all be unified. Many of them spoke different languages, and many had
been at war with each other for centuries. “Whiteness” was very effective
in creating a sense of solidarity, especially among those who had suffered
hardship. (pp. 268–269)
When Fanon (1952/2008) writes toward the end of Black Skin, White
Masks, “I am a man, and in this sense the Peloponnesian War is as
much mine as the invention of the compass” (p. 200), I am reminded
of Mourad Wahba’s (1995) thesis that there are one human civilization
and many cultures. Although I am critical of the concept of freedom,
since it is typically a privilege for those in the zone of being, there is a
universality, or pluriversality, at work here in both Fanon’s and Wahba’s
thinking, which Mari Ruti (2018) captures well with these words:
freedom is not a matter of seamless sovereignty or self-mastery; and it is

emphatically not linked to any attempt to dominate the world. Instead, it
is an opening to self-creation, to the kind of liberation from the dictates of
the big Other that facilitates the emergence of the subject’s singularity of
being. This singularity, in turn, becomes the foundation for a universalist
52 R. K. Beshara
ethics where each singularity, ideally at least, relates to other singularities

from a platform of equality and solidarity. (pp. 157–158, emphasis)
This jump from singularity to pluriversality bypasses particularity (i.e.,

identity politics) and allows for an identity based on politics and not
vice versa (Mignolo, 2007, p. 492). In this non-identity politics of soli-
darity, together we struggle against racialized capitalism and we work
toward a new human civilization, a “transmodern worldhood ” (Dussel,
1995, p. 26, emphasis in original), wherein modernity is delinked from
coloniality and instead linked to its alterity (i.e., non-European cultures).
Wahba (2006) argues that Ibn Rushd (Averroes) can function as
a theoretical bridge between modernity and its alterity, particularly
Islam. In an increasingly authoritarian and socially/environmentally
unjust world, perhaps transmodernity (cf. “contramodernity” in Bhabha,
1994) is our only choice if we wish to survive; we desperately need a
world “characterized by ecological civilization, popular democracy, and
economic justice” (Dussel, 1995, p. 117). We demand, in our liberation
praxis, to freely associate within and without the psychoanalytic clinic,
and to seriously think about our “ecological unconscious” (Roszak, 1995,
p. 14) as the more-than-human discourse of the environmental Other.
In this sense, contrapuntal psychoanalysis is also ecopsychoanalysis (cf.
Dodds, 2011).
Fanon (1952/2008) cites passages from Germaine Guex’s (1950) The
Abandonment Neurosis, which read like attachment theory. The most
interesting quote includes a reference to the concept of the Other:
Being “the Other” is a term I have encountered on several occasions in

the language of the abandonment neurotic. To be “the Other” is to always
feel in an uncomfortable position, to be on one’s guard, to be prepared
to be rejected and…unconsciously do everything that’s needed to bring
about the anticipated catastrophe. (Guex, as cited in Fanon, 1952/2008,
p. 57)
The concept of the Other is of utmost relevance to this study, but

it is not one that is easily grasped because it can mean different things
depending on the area of study and theorist one pays attention to. For
example, the concept of the Other is used in phenomenology (Hegel,

Husserl, Sartre, Levinas, de Beauvoir), psychoanalysis (Lacan), and post-
colonialism (Said); and it can mean another human, one’s m(O)ther,
an abstract big Other (i.e., language and law), or even someone who
is othered. I am particularly interested in the Lacanian and Saidian
conceptions of the Other, which I will address later in my discussion
of Orientalism.
In perhaps the most read chapter in the book “The Lived Experience
of the Black Man,” Fanon (1952/2008) writes:
Locked in this suffocating reification, I appealed to the Other so that his

liberating gaze, gliding over my body suddenly smoothed of rough edges,
would give me back the lightness of being I thought I had lost, and taking
me out of the world put me back in the world. But just as I get to the
other slope I stumble, and the Other fixes me with his gaze. (p. 89)
In this Lacanian passage, Fanon is describing his lived experience with

being objectified by the “white gaze” (p. 90), which reifies him and
reduces him to his “body schema” and his “historical-racial schema”
(p. 91). For this reason, Fanon thinks that ontology is impossible for
racialized subjects (p. 89)—hence, his zone of nonbeing and Curry’s
(2017) Man-Not. Fanon’s analysis throughout the book is far from sexist,
for he hones in on the racial axis of power, wherein the white oppressor
(man) is at the top of the hierarchy and the Black oppressed (Man-
Not) is at the bottom. Later, Fanon (1952/2008) writes, “the white
man is not only ‘the Other,’ but also the master, whether real or imagi-
nary” (p. 117). This implicitly Lacanian footnote is not surprising given
Fanon’s (1952/2008) explicit references to Lacan throughout Black Skin,
White Masks, such as:
Once we have understood the process described by Lacan, there is no

longer any doubt that the true “Other” for the white man is and remains
the black man, and vice versa. For the white man, however, “the Other”
is perceived as a bodily image, absolutely as the non ego, i.e., the uniden-
tifiable, the unassimilable. For the black man we have demonstrated that
the historical and economic realities must be taken into account. (p. 139)
54 R. K. Beshara
Fanon’s use of the Other to primarily signify whiteness is akin to

Lacan’s notion of the Symbolic Other, which in the context of coloniality
happens to be racist. The colonial unconscious is the discourse of the
modern Other: “the white man, who had woven me out of a thousand
details, anecdotes, and stories” (Fanon, 1952/2008, p. 91). One thing
that is clear in the chapter is Jean-Paul Sartre’s (1946/1976) influence on
Fanon, for the latter makes use of Anti-Semite and Jew to draw paral-
lels between anti-Semitism and anti-Black racism as a form of solidarity:
“The Jew and I: not satisfied with racializing myself, by a happy stroke
of fate, I was turning more human. I was drawing closer to the Jew, my
brother in misfortune” (Fanon, 1952/2008, p. 101). The clearest concep-
tual link from Sartre to Fanon is the notion of Manichaeism as a function
of othering and oppression: “Anti-Semitism is thus seen to be at bottom
a form of Manichaeism” (Sartre, 1946/1976, p. 28). Sartre (1946/1976)
shows that, for the anti-Semite, the Jew is not only an Other, he or she
is also Evil.
Fanon highlights a key feature of colonial difference: Whereas the
white man wants the world, the Black Man-Not is the world (p. 107). The
white man thinks he is separate from the world, and so he desires every-
thing (Gordon, 2018). Is this not the libidinal drive behind racialized
capitalism with its violence against the subaltern and its destruction of
the environment? This desire for everything also supports Homi Bhabha’s
(1994) thesis about the ambivalence of colonial desire (cf. Young, 1995).
The most touching part of the chapter is Fanon’s (1952/2008) affec-
tive response—“Not responsible for my acts, at the crossroads between
Nothingness and Infinity, I began to weep” (p. 119, emphasis added)—
to Sartre’s (1948/1976) dialectical reading of Negritude, which comes
across as harsh to say the least:
Negritude appears as the weak stage of a dialectical progression: the theo-

retical and practical affirmation of white supremacy is the thesis; the
position of Negritude as antithetical value is the moment of negativity.
But this negative moment “is not sufficient in itself and the Blacks who
employ it well know it; they know that it serves to pave the way for
the synthesis or the realization of the human society without race. Thus
Negritude is dedicated to its own destruction, it is transition and not
result, a means and not the ultimate goal. (as cited in Fanon, 1952/2008,
p. 112)
Fanon’s (1952/2008) response:
The dialectic that introduces necessity as a support for my freedom

expels me from myself. It shatters my impulsive position. Still regarding
consciousness, black consciousness is immanent in itself. I am not a
potentiality of something; I am fully what I am. I do not have to look
for the universal. There’s no room for probability inside me. My black
consciousness does not claim to be a loss. It is. It merges with itself.
Sartre’s dialectic is premised on a false logic: that Negritude (antithesis)

is merely a negation of white supremacy (thesis), when in fact Negritude
is an assertion of a new humanism. Not only that, Sartre—“who remains
‘the Other’” (Fanon, 1952/2008, p. 116)—belittles and doubly erases
a decolonial movement, which is exemplary of liberation praxis, in the
name of a utopian society without race. The former is a living material
culture, while the latter is a fantasy.
The only resolution of the contradiction brought forth by the dialec-
tics of racism (i.e., segregation v. assimilation) is antiracism: “Without
a black past, without a black future, it was impossible for me to live
my blackness” (Fanon, 1952/2008, p. 117). Fanon’s phenomenological
account in this chapter is heartfelt, for it embodies the rhythmic attitude
and poetic sensitivity of Negritude, which was co-founded by his teacher
Aimé Césaire. There is so much more I can write about Black Skin,
White Masks, but there are also other texts that deserve my attention.
I will return to Fanon’s (1961/2004) another masterpiece, The Damned
of the Earth, which is less psychoanalytic and more political, toward
the end of the book to consider the question of decolonization vis-à-vis
contrapuntal psychoanalysis.
56 R. K. Beshara
Albert Memmi
Fanon is a hard act to follow, which is unfair to Albert Memmi (1920–

2020), who was a Tunisian essayist. Memmi recently passed away on
May 22, 2020, in France, where he has been living in exile for forty-
four years; he was ninety-nine years old at the time of his passing. The
Colonized and the Colonized is Memmi’s (1957/1965) most recognized
contribution to the emerging field of post-/de-colonial psychoanalysis. In
the preface to the book, Memmi (1957/1965) asks questions that shed
light on his psychosocial, and to some extent phenomenological, method
of studying colonialism:
Does psychoanalysis win out over Marxism? Does all depend on the indi-
vidual or on society? In any case, before attacking this final analysis I
wanted to show all the real complexities in the lives of the colonizer and
the colonized. Psychoanalysis or Marxism must not, under the pretext
of having discovered the source or one of the main sources of human
conduct, pre-empt all experience, all feeling, all suffering, all the byways
of human behavior, and call them profit motive or Oedipus complex. (p.
xiii, emphasis in original)
He then includes a critically reflexive statement about his positionality,

and his privilege, as a researcher, given that he is a non-Muslim Tunisian
who has internalized oppression and identified with the oppressor to a
degree:
My portrait of the colonized, which is very much my own, is preceded by

a portrait of the colonizer. How could I have permitted myself, with all
my concern about personal experience, to draw a portrait of the adver-
sary? Here is a confession I have never made before: I know the colonizer
from the inside almost as well as I know the colonized. But I must
explain: I said that I was a Tunisian national. Like all other Tunisians
I was treated as a second-class citizen, deprived of political rights, refused
admission to most civil service departments, etc. But I was not a Moslem.
In a country where so many groups, each jealous of its own physiog-
nomy, lived side by side, this was of considerable importance. The Jewish
population identified as much with the colonizers as with the colonized.
They were undeniably “natives,” as they were then called, as near as

possible to the Moslems in poverty, language, sensibilities, customs, taste
in music, odors and cooking. However, unlike the Moslems, they passion-
ately endeavored to identify themselves with the French. To them the
West was the paragon of all civilization, all culture. The Jew turned his
back happily on the East. He chose the French language, dressed in the
Italian style and joyfully adopted every idiosyncrasy of the Europeans.
(pp. xiii–xiv)
Sartre introduced both The Colonizer and the Colonized (1957) and
The Damned of the Earth (1961), which speaks to Sartre’s solidarity
with non-European theorists and his commitment to decolonization in
the Third World (Tunisia and Algeria, respectively), particularly when
it is against the colonial interests of his country: France. For some
reason, Sartre is seen as passé among continental philosophers today
(with Lewis Gordon being the most visible exception), which is unfortu-
nate given the above-mentioned record and his decolonial publications
like Anti-Semite and Jew (1946/1976) or Colonialism and Neocolonialism
(1964/2001)—not mentioning his critical contributions to psychoanal-
ysis and psychology from the perspective of existential-phenomenology
and Marxism.
In the introduction to The Colonizer and the Colonized , Sartre is lucid
in his description of racialized capitalism, which he calls “the colonialist
apparatus” (p. xxiv), wherein the colonized is dehumanized into not only
a “subproletariat” (p. xxiii) but also a “subhuman” (p. xxiv):
Colonialism denies human rights to human beings whom it has subdued

by violence, and keeps them by force in a state of misery and ignorance
that Marx would rightly call a subhuman condition. Racism is ingrained
in actions, institutions, and in the nature of the colonialist methods
of production and exchange. Political and social regulations reinforce
one another. Since the native is subhuman, the Declaration of Human
Rights does not apply to him; inversely, since he has no rights, he is
abandoned without protection to inhuman forces–brought in with the
colonialist praxis, engendered every moment by the colonialist apparatus,
and sustained by relations of production that define two sorts of indi-
viduals–one for whom privilege and humanity are one, who becomes
58 R. K. Beshara
a human being through exercising his rights; and the other, for whom
a denial of rights sanctions misery, chronic hunger, ignorance, or, in
general, “subhumanity”. (as cited in Memmi, 1957/1965, pp. xxiv–xxv)
I would like to end this section by highlighting Memmi’s (1957/1965)

notion of “colonial bilingualism” since it supports my thesis on linguistic
oppression, wherein the oppressed is doubly split and, therefore, answers
to two Others (i.e., the Other of the signifiers and the Other of the Law):
The difference between native language [Arabic] and cultural language

[English or French] is not peculiar to the colonized, but colonial bilin-
gualism cannot be compared to just any linguistic dualism. Possession of
two languages is not merely a matter of having two tools, but actually
means participation in two psychical and cultural realms. Here, the two
worlds symbolized and conveyed by the two tongues are in conflict; they
are those of the colonizer and the colonized. (p. 107, emphasis added)
Paulo Freire
Paulo Freire’s (1970/2018) Pedagogy of the Oppressed is one of the most

influential books ever published. On the cover of the fiftieth anniver-
sary edition, one reads that over one million copies of the book have
been sold. Although Freire’s goal with the book is elaborating a dialog-
ical pedagogy of/with (and not for) the oppressed, his analysis of the
dialectics of oppression is applicable beyond the classroom and, there-
fore, he presents us with a liberation praxis that is applicable in all facets
of society, particularly the psychoanalytic clinic (cf. Gaztambide, 2019).
The Brazilian educator and philosopher is clearly influenced by Marx’s
critique of capitalism, his analysis of class struggle, and above all his
notion of praxis from Theses on Feuerbach, but he opts for ‘oppres-
sion’ as a signifier, instead of exploitation or alienation, as way of
transcending class reductionism and acknowledging phenomena such
as racism and sexism that particularly affect the racialized/politicized
lumpenproletariat, especially in the Global South. Freire is also influ-
enced by liberation theology, which was a major source of inspiration
to many psychologists and philosophers in Latin America (e.g., Ignacio

Martín-Baró and Enrique Dussel).
Most significantly, Freire (1970/2018) chooses to write about the
praxis of liberation, as opposed to the “fear of freedom” (p. 36), since
the former involves a collectivity—“the action and reflection of men and
women upon their world in order to transform it” (p. 79)—while the
latter tends to be individualistic. Put differently, liberation is how the
oppressed reflect on, and practice, their own freedom in spite of the
oppressors’ selective application of political freedom; think, for example,
of Thomas Jefferson’s self-evident truths in the US Declaration of Inde-
pendence, which were in contradiction with the reality of him owning
nearly two hundred slaves (Kendi, 2016, p. 105).
Freire (1970/2018) also provides us with a radical humanist project
grounded in “an act of love” (p. 45), wherein the oppressed lead the way
toward collective liberation, for oppressors must be liberated, too, since
their dehumanization of the oppressed dehumanizes them in the process
as well. Revolution can sometimes imply that the oppressed, in a reversal
of fortune, take the place of the oppressors, but replacing one form of
oppression with another form of oppression is not liberation. Oppression
results from a socially unjust hierarchical form of organization; there-
fore, liberation has to essentially be non-hierarchical and socially just.
This is why Freire (1970/2018) writes of the teacher as a student and
students as teachers as a way of resolving the teacher-student contradic-
tion, which is inherently oppressive, for him, since it presupposes that
the teacher knows but the student does not. However, students bring
their life experiences to the classroom, which is subjective knowledge.
It is fitting to juxtapose this above-mentioned contradiction that we
find in the classroom with another one that we find in the clinic: the
analyst-analysand contradiction (cf. Fromm, 1960/2013, pp. 84–85). Is
it possible to theorize/practice the analyst (a) as analysand ($) and the
analysand ($) as analyst (a)? Perhaps we need to reevaluate the fantasy
($ ♦ a) at the heart of the psychoanalytic clinic between the subject and
the Other, particularly if it is an oppressive one. And for this we need
conscientização (conscientization) of the unconscious, that is, not only
critical consciousness but also critical unconsciousness.
60 R. K. Beshara
Freire (1970/2018) relies on psychoanalytic concepts such as internal-

ization (p. 47) and identification (p. 46) to explain how the oppressed
internalize oppression through their identification with the oppressors,
which can result in them becoming “sub-oppressors” (p. 45). Freire’s
thesis on the transferential relationship from the oppressed to the
oppressor is certainly a development of Sándor Ferenczi’s (1933/1988)
theory on the identification with the aggressor. Daniel José Gaztambide
(2019), a Puerto Rican psychoanalyst, develops these theoretical link-
ages further; I highly recommend in particular his intellectual genealogy
of the links between psychoanalysis and liberation psychology (p. 180).
As far as the theoretical trajectory of post-/de-colonial psychoanalysis is
concerned, Freire (1970/2018) cites Fanon and Memmi on the same
page (p. 62).
Joel Kovel
Joel Kovel (1936–2018) was a US psychoanalyst, who is known for

founding eco-socialism. I turn now to his book, White Racism: A
Psychohistory (Kovel, 1970/1984), which seems to have been forgotten.
Kovel (1970/1984) defines his methodology of psychohistory “as the
study of the historical function of the changing meanings of things, a theory
of cultural change” (p. 6, emphasis in original). In a footnote to his
definition, he clarifies the emphasis he places “on the unconscious mean-
ingfulness of culture as a synthetic organism” (p. 6). Kovel (1970/1984)
situates his study of racism in relation to culture, which for him, “is both
organic –in that is presents a coherent and self-evident view of human
reality–and synthetic –in that it works upon and ties together elements
of experience created by human activity” (p. 4, emphasis in original).
For Kovel (1970/1984), racism is “a symbolic product, a set of fantasies,
but only insofar as the symbols and fantasies of racism have been them-
selves generated by the history of race relations and sustained by the rest of an
organically related culture” (p. 5, emphasis in original).
Kovel’s (1970/1984) most significant contribution, in his historiciza-
tion of racism in the US, is his reduction of the apparatus of racialized
capitalism to its essence: the link between race and property, as in the
body/thing of the Black slave (p. 18). In the fourth chapter, “Fantasies of
Race,” Kovel (1970/1984) begins with a substantial epigraph from Black
Skin, White Masks and later on he engages with “the most powerful voice
to have articulated the emerging consciousness of black peoples across
the world” (i.e., Fanon), particularly regarding the “Fantasy of Black-
ness” (pp. 64–65). Fantasy, for Kovel (1970/1984), is “a form of knowing
based upon wish and desire” (p. 47, emphasis in original).
In the same chapter, Kovel (1970/1984, pp. 54–55) presents his
readers with a useful typology, or three types, of racists: (1) the domi-
native racist “who acts out bigoted beliefs”; (2) the aversive racist “who
believes in white race superiority and is more or less aware of it, but does
nothing overt about it”; and (3) a less defined racist “who does not reveal
racist tendencies at all–except as the unconscious persistence of what may
be considered mass fantasies.” According to Kendi’s (2016) classification,
the first type would be the segregationist, the third type would be the
assimilationist, and the second type could go either way.
In the eighth chapter, “The Psychohistory of Racism in the United
States,” Kovel (1970/1984) develops the novel concept of metaracism
(p. 211). Metaracists, according to Kovel (1970/1984), are “not racists–
that is, they are not racially prejudiced…they acquiesce in the larger
cultural order which continues the work of racism” (pp. 211–212). In
other words, a metaracist is someone who claims, “I’m not racist, but…”
The solution to (meta)racism is antiracism as Kendi (2016) reminds us.
Ashis Nandy
Ashis Nandy (1937–present) is an Indian political psychologist. His most

significant contribution to post-/de-colonial psychoanalysis is his book,
The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism (Nandy,
1983), which is partly based on his 1982 journal article The Psychology of
Colonialism: Sex, Age, and Ideology in British India. In the book, Nandy
(1983) is concerned with the political psychology, as opposed to the
political economy, of colonization: “the first differentia of colonialism is
a state of mind in the colonizers and the colonized, a colonial conscious-
ness which includes the sometimes unrealizable wish to make economic
62 R. K. Beshara
and political profits from the colonies” (p. 1, emphasis added). In other
words, he finds colonization to be structurally similar to a dream, or a
nightmare (cf. Kovel, 1970/1984; Manonni, 1950/1990).
Drawing on Mannoni, Fanon, and Memmi among others, Nandy
(1983) explicates the sexual axis of power in racialized capitalism in an
effort to pinpoint how sexual difference is mapped as colonial difference
onto the colonized:
The homology between sexual and political dominance which Western

colonialism invariably used–in Asia, Africa and Latin America–was not
an accidental by-product of colonial history. It had its correlates in other
situations of oppression with which the West was involved, the American
experience with slavery being the best documented of them…It produced
a cultural consensus in which political and socio-economic dominance
symbolized the dominance of men and masculinity over women and
femininity. (p. 4)
According to Nandy (1983), “femininity-in-masculinity [cf. Curry’s

(2017) Man-Not] was now perceived as the final negation of a man’s
political identity, a pathology more dangerous than femininity itself ”
(p. 8), but it also led to white men in India establishing “an unconscious
homo-eroticized bonding” (p. 10) with Indian men. Nandy (1983)
shows how this sexual axis in the colonial situation was a crucial political
factor in “cultural co-optation” (p. 7), which he explains in terms of the
Ferenczian notion, cited earlier: “identification with the aggressor” (p. 7).
Next, Nandy (1983) problematizes the colonial logic of psycho-
economic development, which is still used today when we speak of
developed versus developing countries; Nandy (1983) describes the
infantilization of the colonized Indian in terms of the “homology
between childhood and the state of being colonized” (p. 11). In this
section, Nandy (1983) takes a stab at Karl Marx, particularly his 1853
article The British Rule in India, which reads as an excuse for colonialism.
According to Marx, India is “a small semi-barbarian, semi-civilized”
community; therefore, “whatever may have been the crime of England
she was the unconscious tool of history” (as cited in Nandy, 1983,
p. 13). For Nandy (1983), “Such a view was bound to contribute hand-
somely–even if inadvertently–the racist world view and ethnocentrism
that underlay colonialism” (p. 13).
This moment in the text crystallizes the historical and ongoing theo-
retical clash between Marxism and postcolonialism, such as the historical
clash between Aijaz Ahmad and Edward Said or the recent clash between
Slavoj Žižek and Hamid Dabashi. Another dimension of Nandy’s (1983)
text that is worth highlighting is his use of Sanskrit, which is a decolonial
way of writing back in an Other language.
I have been attempting to build a bridge between both camps
(Marxism and postcolonialism) with my emphasis on racialized capi-
talism, which Nandy (1983) acknowledges when he writes that colo-
nialism is “a political economy which ensures a one-way flow of benefits,
the subjects being the perpetual losers in a zero-sum game and the
rulers the beneficiaries” (p. 30). In a sense, the clash is false because
some (if not many or most) post-/de-colonial theorists are actually also
Marxists, particularly Samir Amin and Enrique Dussel—not mentioning
the Marxism of Frantz Fanon and Edward Said, the latter being espe-
cially influenced by Antonio Gramsci. To the Marxists, postcolonial
theorists are culturalists who are duped by ideology and are, there-
fore, not thinking universally through the dialectic. To the postcolonial
theorists, Marxists universalize their provincialism but obscure that
dimension with their emphasis on the industrial workers of the world.
Sara Salem (2020), echoing Said, argues that the debate is somewhat
artificial, perhaps a purely academic one, because of the lived histor-
ical reality of post-/de-colonial Marxists, particularly in the Global
South. Salem shows, for instance, that the majority of proto-postcolonial
theorists/practitioners (e.g., Anouar Abdel-Malek, Samir Amin, C.L.R.
James, etc.) were committed Marxists, too. Similarly, Biko Agozino
(2014) argues against the claim that Marxism is a Eurocentric ideology as
evidenced, for example, by Marx’s hundreds of references, in his writings,
to the struggles of people of African descent (p. 175).
64 R. K. Beshara
Hussein A. Bulhan
Hussein Bulhan (1946–present) is a Somali psychologist who wrote

the 1985 influential book, Frantz Fanon and the Psychology of Oppres-
sion. This book is an erudite contribution to not only post-/de-
colonial psychoanalysis, but also critical psychology, particularly liber-
ation psychology. Bulhan (1985) begins with an intellectual biography
of Fanon before unpacking the psychologies of oppression and liber-
ation. Fanonian scholars are aware of this book, but it is surprising
that critical and liberation psychologists do not really cite this work
when it includes an extensive critique of “the amnesia of Euro-American
psychology” (Bulhan, 1985, pp. 37–59). Not mentioning the fact that
the book, which includes an entire chapter on the “psychology of liber-
ation” (Bulhan, 1985, pp. 251–278), was published nine years before
Martín-Baró’s (1994) collection of English-translated essays, Writings for
a Liberation Psychology.
Bulhan (1985) references the usual suspects (i.e., Mannoni, Fanon,
and Memmi), but of particular interest to us is his section on Fanon and
Freud, wherein one can see why Fanon is not a colonial psychoanalyst:
it would be misleading to conclude from the preceding that Fanon

embraced psychoanalytic theory which of course had very formative influ-
ences on his thinking. But even more misleading would be the suggestion
that Freud’s and Fanon’s interests in aggression and sexuality derived from
identical social and personal sources. Freud’s theorizing emerged out of a
nuclear, patriarchal, and bourgeois family context and within a sexually
repressive Victorian Europe. Although he challenged the Victorian mores
of his day, Freud was essentially an apologist for the status quo within
the bourgeois family and the larger capitalist society. (p. 71, emphasis in
original)
What makes Fanon a decolonial psychoanalyst, according to Bulhan

(1985), is his radical sociogenic perspective, which is akin to what today
we call psychosocial studies:
For him, sociogeny took a definite precedence over both ontogeny and
phylogeny. The fragmenting effect of [Freud’s] ontogenetic perspective
and the ossifying consequences of [Jung’s] phylogenetic explanations

obscured a fundamental dimension of the human psyche….it was Fanon’s
unwavering conviction that the fundamental cause of alienation is first
socioeconomic and second the internalization of societal inequity as well
as violence. To be effective and meaningful, according to Fanon, all efforts
toward disalienation must therefore intervene both at the socioeconomic
and the psychological level. (p. 80)
Central to Fanon’s radical sociogeny is the Marxist notion of praxis:
According to this sociogenetic perspective, man’s [or woman’s] biological

constitution defines a given set of advantages and limitations that is more
or less constant among nationalities and races. Conscious, organized,
and collective praxis defines man’s [or woman’s] ontological vocation as
the subject of history. Through this praxis and because of it, he [or
she] transforms nature, harnesses his [or her] environmental and biolog-
ical resources, dominates others, or liberates himself [or herself ] from
repressive social structures. (p. 77)
Bulhan’s (1985) is more than a commentary on Fanon, for he

contributes a number of original concepts, such as “auto-colonialism”
(p. 44, emphasis in original) and “psycho-praxis” (p. 275, emphasis in
original). Bulhan (1985) draws a link in Fanon’s work between oppres-
sion and violence, which is something that I (Beshara, 2019b) have also
addressed:
according to Fanon, oppression is above all else the practice and institu-
tionalization of violence–both crude and subtle. This pervasive violence
imposes a Manichean world, corrodes basic human values, and dehu-
manizes all involved. The exploitation that motivates and perpetuates
this violence is not only economic, but also psychological and cultural.
(p. 117)
Also worth mentioning is Bulhan’s (1985) unpacking of Fanon’s five

aspects of alienation (p. 188) because ultimately psychoanalysis “with the
oppressed that is not about disalienation of praxis and regaining of power
66 R. K. Beshara
tends to produce morally entrapped and compromised objects, not liber-

ated and creative subjects” (Bulhan, 1985, p. 276, emphasis in original).
Psychopathology, from the perspective of decolonial psychoanalysis, is
“the denial of liberty” (Bulhan, 1985, p. 12, emphasis in original).
Bulhan (1985) argues that Fanon’s account of oppression and
violence—“If freedom requires the risk of life, oppression too requires
the fear of physical death” (p. 121, emphasis in original)—is grounded, to
a large extent, in Hegel’s master-slave dialectic and, to a lesser extent,
in Mannoni’s colonizer-colonized dialectic. Also, Bulhan (1985) adds
that Fanon’s reading of Hegel is influenced by Sartre’s understanding of
Alexandre Kojève’s interpretation of Hegel; nonetheless, Fanon had an
original take on the dialectic:
When Fanon focused his discussion on oppressed blacks, he directed

attention not so much to the whys of oppression (as Hegel and Mannoni
did) but to how the violence of oppression dehumanizes all involved. This
shift from the why to the how of oppression reflected Fanon’s sense of
urgency and search for the practical solution neither Hegel nor Mannoni
sought. Moreover, Fanon analyzed the dynamics of oppression with the
passion of a man deeply scarred by the harsh realities of the enslaved and
the colonized. (Bulhan, 1985, p. 120, emphasis in original)
Homi K. Bhabha
Homi Bhabha (1949–present) is one of the triumvirates of postcolo-

nialism. Although he started writing on Fanon in the eighties, my focus
here will be on his 1994 book, The Location of Culture, which is consid-
ered a major contribution to the informal field of post-/de-colonial
psychoanalysis and, of course, it is also his opaque magnum opus, which
is a collection of highly theoretical (read: poststructural) essays.
Bhabha’s brand of postcolonial critique is equally informed by post-
structuralism (Barthes, Derrida, and Foucault) as it is by psychoanalysis
(Freud, Lacan, and Fanon). Therefore, his innovative textual method-
ology hones in on the discursive and unconscious dimensions of colonial
discourse. For this reason, there is a theoretical affinity, in terms of style,
between his work and mine, but I question the universality of the notion
of hybridity, for example, since it is premised on the specificity of British

colonialism in India. For Bhabha (1994), the (post)colonial subject is
hybrid because of the linguistic ambivalence afforded to him or her by
the Indo-European family of languages (p. 83). I also do not see any
theorization of decolonial subjectivity in his work beyond the “colo-
nial discourse” (p. 118), or the “apparatus of colonial power” (p. 119).
For example, my own theoretical formulation is based on the three
substitutional metaphors in psychoanalysis (cf. Fink, 1997, p. 194): the
alienation of the colonial subject as demand , the separation of the postcolo-
nial subject as desire, and the traversing of fantasy by the decolonial subject
as drive. Having said that, Bhabha’s (1994) psycho-discursive analysis of
(post)colonial subjectivity is original and, as such, inaugurates its own
methodology.
Bhabha (1994) is wary of the progressive telos of dialectics, as a
methodology, because of its developmental implications, which are typi-
cally racist. However, his opting for an “anti-dialectical ” (p. 79, emphasis
in original) or a “non-dialectical” (p. 88) approach seems to flatten out
the colonial experience with concepts, such as mimicry, ambivalence, in-
between, and cultural hybridity. The end result of his analysis is that it is
difficult to distinguish between the colonizer and colonized—hence, his
notion of the colonial subject (Bhabha, 1994, p. 108), who subsumes
both. The colonial subject is a cultural hybrid that exists in the “inter-
stitial passage between fixed identification” (p. 5). He or she is “neither
the One (unitary working class) nor the Other (the politics of gender)
but something else besides” (p. 41, emphasis in original). One can hear an
echo of intersectionality in this articulation of cultural hybridity, which
we are told can be “a strategy of political subversion” (p. 89).
Bhabha’s (1994) Foucaultian analysis of colonial discourse and its
apparatus of power/knowledge are undergirded by a Lacanian reading
of colonial fantasy and its “economy of desire” (p. 98). Bhabha’s (1994)
emphasis on the racial and sexual axes of power, “as modes of differenti-
ation, realized as multiple, cross-cutting determinations, polymorphous
and perverse, always demanding a specific and strategic calculation of
their effects” (p. 96), in colonial discourse, as “a form of discourse
crucial to the binding of a range of differences and discriminations
that inform the discursive and political practices of racial and cultural
68 R. K. Beshara
hierarchization” (p. 96), is resonant with my conception of racialized

capitalism:
The construction of the colonial subject in discourse, and the exercise of

colonial power through discourse, demands an articulation of forms of
difference – racial and sexual. Such an articulation becomes crucial if it is
held that the body is always simultaneously (if conflictually) inscribed in
both the economy of pleasure and desire and the economy of discourse,
domination and power. (p. 96)
Bhabha’s (1994) writing is at its sharpest when he is distinguishing

between cultural difference and cultural diversity: “Cultural diversity is
an epistemological object–culture as an object of empirical knowledge–
whereas cultural difference is the process of the enunciation of culture as
‘knowledgeable’, authoritative, adequate to the construction of systems
of cultural identification” (pp. 49–50, emphasis in original). Bhabha’s
(1994) notion of cultural difference is crucial for my articulation of
colonial difference (being v. nonbeing), which cannot be dialectically
transcended except with a new (read: radical or critical) ontology, such
as “interbeing” (Hanh, 1987/2005, p. 88).
In Buddhism, the category of being includes all sentient beings, that
is, human and nonhuman animals endowed with consciousness and a
nervous system meaning sentient beings that can experience pain and
suffering. While this relational ontology certainly raises the ethical bar
and has consequences for what we eat on a daily basis, it also raises
an ecological question that is central to liberation praxis: What kind
of beings are oppressed? Having said that, as a critical humanist, I
firmly believe in the primacy of human suffering, which is a justifi-
able bias within my biocentric worldview—with the awareness that the
human-nonhuman dialectic reflects the logic of colonial difference.
For Bhabha (1994), “The ‘language’ metaphor raises the question of
cultural difference and incommensurability, not the consensual, ethno-
centric notion of the pluralistic existence of cultural diversity” (p. 253).
Cultural difference “unsettles the liberal ethic of tolerance and the pluralist
framework of multiculturalism” (p. 254). Any culture (like any Other) is
split into the objet a and the barred Other. In other words, all cultures
include their specific partial objects, which are desired and enjoyed by
subjects of that culture, and no one culture can say it all. Also, because
il n’y a pas de rapport culturel (there’s no such thing as a cultural rela-
tionship), Bhabha’s (1994) point is to maintain cultural difference as a
contradiction without resolving it dialectically in any way, for the “time
of liberation is…a time of cultural uncertainty, and, most crucially, of
significatory or representational undecidability” (p. 51). However, the
question of translation, or untranslatability (cf. Homayounpour, 2019),
is a relevant one, for how does one acknowledge cultural difference in an
antiracist way?
The migrant culture of the ‘in-between’, the minority position, drama-

tizes the activity of culture’s untranslatability; and in so doing, it moves
the question of culture’s appropriation beyond the assimilationist’s dream,
or the racist’s nightmare, of a ‘full transmissal of subject-matter’; and
towards an encounter with the ambivalent process of splitting and hybridity
that marks the identification with culture’s difference. (p. 321, emphasis
added)
The translation of cultural and linguistic difference:
requires these two places [i.e., the subject of enunciation and the subject
of the statement] be mobilized in the passage through a Third Space,
which represents both the general conditions of language and the specific
implication of the utterance in a performative and institutional strategy
of which it cannot ‘in itself ’ be conscious. What this unconscious relation
introduces is an ambivalence in the act of interpretation. (Bhabha, 1994,
p. 53)
In this passage, Bhabha (1994) writes about the aim, and the subject,
of cultural difference:
The aim of cultural difference is to rearticulate the sum of knowledge

from the perspective of the signifying position of the minority that resists
totalization – the repetition that will not return as the same, the minus-
in-origin that results in political and discursive strategies where adding
to does not add up but serves to disturb the calculation of power and
70 R. K. Beshara
knowledge, producing other spaces of subaltern signification. The subject

of the discourse of cultural difference is dialogical or transferential in
the style of psychoanalysis. It is constituted through the locus of the
Other which suggests both that the object of identification is ambivalent,
and, more significantly, that the agency of identification is never pure or
holistic but always constituted in a process of substitution, displacement
or projection. (pp. 232–233, emphasis in original)
Finally, Bhabha (1994) provides us with the coordinates for an inter-

national culture that can emerge from the Third Space of cultural
difference:
the theoretical recognition of the split-space of enunciation may open

the way to conceptualizing an inter national culture, based not on the
exoticism of multiculturalism or the diversity of cultures, but on the
inscription and articulation of culture’s hybridity. To that end we should
remember that it is the ‘inter’ – the cutting edge of translation and nego-
tiation, the inbetween space – that carries the burden of the meaning of
culture. It makes it possible to begin envisaging national, anti-nationalist
histories of the ‘people’. And by exploring this Third Space, we may elude
the politics of polarity and emerge as the others of our selves. (p. 56,
emphasis in original)
Other Important Contributions

to Post-/De-colonial Psychoanalysis
In this section, I will overview, in sketch form, a number of key publi-
cations on post-/de-colonial psychoanalysis in an effort to quickly get
to the main body chapters of my book. The first issue of the first
volume of the Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture & Society
(now: Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society) was published in the spring
of 1996. The journal’s founding editor was Mark Bracher, author of
the 1993 book: Lacan, Discourse, and Social Change. The first two
issues of the journal’s first volume, which are now hard to get, had a
number of articles dealing with psychoanalysis and postcolonialism, such
as The Post-colonial Unconscious (MacCannell, 1996), Post-colonialism
and Psychoanalysis (Apollon, 1996), From Oppression to Repression, from

Subjection to Subject (Levy, 1996), and The Limits of Postcolonial Theory
After Said/Bhabha (Levinson, 1996).
In 2009, the Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Culture
published an edited book on psychoanalysis and Islam titled, Umbr(a):
Islam. In 2013, the Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology
(volume 33, issue 3) published a special issue on Post/Coloniality and
Subjectivity. In 2016, the American Psychoanalyst published a three-
part Conversations on Psychoanalysis and Race. In 2018, Psychology and
History (volume 20, issue 3) published a special issue on Psychoanalysis
and the Middle East: Discourses and Encounters.
A major publication (or point de capiton), in my genealogy of this
emerging field, is Christopher Lane’s (1998) edited book, The Psycho-
analysis of Race, whose first part is dedicated to psychoanalysis and
postcolonialism and includes chapters from Derrida and Žižek among
others. Other significant publications (i.e., books, chapters, articles) that
deal with colonialism and/or racism from a psychoanalytic perspec-
tive include (and this list is by no means comprehensive): “All the
Things You Could Be by Now If Sigmund Freud’s Wife Was Your Mother ”
(Spillers, 1996), Love in a Time of Hate (Hollander, 1997), The Other
and Other Others (Van Zyl, 1998), Desiring Whiteness (Seshadri-Crooks,
2000), Psychoanalysis in Colonial India (Hartnack, 2001), The Melancholy
of Race (Cheng, 2001), Lying on the Postcolonial Couch (Nair, 2002),
Between Prospero and Caliban (De Sousa Santos, 2002), Dark Continents
(Khanna, 2003), Colonial Identity and Ethnic Hatred (Clarke, 2003), The
Colonization of Psychic Space (Oliver, 2004), Fanon and the Psychoanal-
ysis of Racism (Hook, 2004), Postcolonial Melancholia (Gilroy, 2005),
Psychohistoriography (Hickling, 2007), Postcolonial Theory and Psycho-
analysis (Greedharry, 2008), Postcolonialism, Psychoanalysis and Burton
(Grant, 2008), The Postcolonial Unconscious (Lazarus, 2011), Unconscious
Dominions (Anderson, Jenson, & Keller, 2011), Psychoanalysis, Colo-
nialism, and Racism (Frosh, 2013), Psychoanalysis, “Islam,” and the Other
of Liberalism (Massad, 2015), Trauma and Race (George, 2016), The
Arabic Freud (El Shakry, 2017), Lacan and Race (Khan, 2018), A People’s
History of Psychoanalysis (Gaztambide, 2019), Žižek on Race (Zalloua,
2020), and Postcolonial Lack (Basu Thakur, 2020).
72 R. K. Beshara
Decolonial Psychoanalysis
I developed my notion of decolonial psychoanalysis in a paper I presented
in 2017 at the Islamic Psychoanalysis/Psychoanalytic Islam conference,
which was organized by the College of Psychoanalysts-UK and was held
at the University of Manchester on June 26–27. I published my paper as
a chapter titled, “Decolonizing Psychoanalysis / Psychoanalyzing Islam-
ophobia” (Beshara, 2019c), which is included in Parker and Siddiqui’s
(2019) edited book, Islamic Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Islam.
In the chapter, I write that “decolonial psychoanalysis improves upon
Lacanian social theory with its emphasis on liberation” (p. 102). I also
position decolonial psychoanalysis vis-à-vis radicalism: “a leftist alter-
native to the center-right paradigm plaguing most politico-economic
systems in the world today” (p. 105). But, following the moder-
nity/coloniality research project (Mignolo, 2007, p. 451), I make a
distinction between freedom/emancipation and liberation. In short, the
former is an individual aspiration, while the latter is a collective one. I
also associate Lacan’s (1991/2007) Discourse of the Analyst (S2 → a →
$ → S1 ) with decolonial psychoanalysis by qualifying it as “a decolo-
nized Lacanian social theory” (p. 106). Theoretically, and also in terms
of political praxis, the Discourse of the Analyst is not reducible, for me,
to the psychoanalytic clinic. In Fig. 1.2, I apply Lacan’s (1991/2007)
four discourses from the perspective of contrapuntal psychoanalysis. The
reader should note that the Master’s Discourse overlaps with the semiotic
square from Fig. 1.1.
Taking my cue from Bracher’s (1993) statement that the Discourse
of the Analyst “offers the most effective means of achieving social
change by countering the psychological and social tyranny exercised
through language” (p. 68), I see the decolonial psychoanalyst as a
racialized/politicized objet a who causes the desire of other racial-
ized/politicized subjects by enacting “a de-colonial epistemic shift”
(Mignolo, 2007, p. 453). The product of such a decolonial analysis
would be the subjectification of the cause of liberation through “de-linking”
(p. 453) from the apparatus of racialized capitalism. Liberation names the
delinking process and so must eventually materialize as political power,
which Dussel (1995) calls transmodernity.
Fig. 1.2 The four discourses
In my chapter on “Decolonizing Psychoanalysis” (Beshara, 2019c), I

acknowledge Derek Hook’s (2008) influence, since he wrote that “the
principal factor of a postcolonial psychoanalysis [is] a commitment to
the political scrutiny of colonial desire, and the multiple roles it plays the
psychic life of colonial power” (p. 278, emphasis in original). However,
I prefer the signifier ‘decolonial’ over ‘postcolonial’ for three reasons:
(1) It is an outcome of my engagement over the last number of years
with works by decolonial theorists/practitioners from Latin America,
namely Enrique Dussel, Walter Mignolo, Aníbal Quijano, Ramón Gros-
foguel, and Nelson Maldonado-Torres; (2) I regard postcoloniality to
be theoretically linked with coloniality and this is particularly obvious
in many, if not most, postcolonial states—hence, my use of the hybrid
term (post)coloniality; and (3) decoloniality is a liberation praxis, and
not a mode of criticism restricted to the academy (cf. Bhambra, 2014).
Having said that, many postcolonial theorists are also decolonial prac-
titioners, so I see an overlap. Another important distinction is that the
former term (postcoloniality) implies a temporality after coloniality, but
74 R. K. Beshara
the latter term (decoloniality) signifies an active project of decolonization

and liberation, especially in the postcolonies.
Stephen Sheehi’s (2018) definition of decolonial psychoanalysis is very
much in alignment with my project, and so is worth quoting in full:
Decolonial psychoanalysis adopts psychoanalytic tools to understand how

two-ness (or what really should be understood as binary identity struc-
tures) and its concomitant productive alienation and identifications are
naturalized and produces subjects of coloniality. It allows us to reach
beyond a Manichean condition of twoness, beyond a two-state condition
to a one-state condition without exonerating ourselves from the material
realities that implicate our own class and race privilege vis-à-vis White and
Black America or our relation to Zionism and American global power.
In fact, psychoanalytic theory and practice should make us aware of the
social and psychic structures that hail us to ameliorate the tensions that
arise from these compulsions and identifications, from the ways we, too,
participate in histories and contemporary realities of violence, whether
they are colonial-settler, racial gendered, class, or sexual. (p. 319)
After the publication of my chapter (Beshara, 2019c), I further devel-

oped the notion in my book, Decolonial Psychoanalysis (Beshara, 2019b),
by situating it in relation to a variety of critical methodologies: Crit-
ical Border Thinking (Mignolo, 2007), Lacanian Discourse Analysis
(Parker, 2005, 2010), and Žižekian Ideology Critique (1989). My goal
was to name a new field (Critical Islamophobia Studies) and illustrate
it through a radical qualitative research project; my argument was and
is that decolonial psychoanalysis is “one theoretical resource in critical
Islamophobia studies” (Beshara, 2019b, p. 4, emphasis in original).
For my study, I interviewed 19 US Muslims in order to not only
analyze their accounts of Islamophobia, but also, and more signifi-
cantly, get a sense of how they resist Islamophobia. I concluded that US
Muslims resist Islamophobia both epistemically (through critical knowl-
edge) and ontically (by virtue of being Muslim). My textual approach was
equally informed by psychoanalysis and decoloniality—hence, decolonial
psychoanalysis. Decoloniality kept psychoanalytic theory in check.
Before I move on to the next chapter, I would like to critically revisit
some of my arguments in the book from the perspective of Black Male
Studies (Curry, 2017, p. 225), which can easily be stretched since I am

a racialized (Brown) worker, who is wholeheartedly committed to inter-
national solidarity among the damned, that is, racialized workers of the
world.
I consider Curry’s (2017) The Man-Not: Race, Class, Genre, and the
Dilemmas of Black Manhood the rosetta stone of this project the way
that Orientalism (Said, 1978/2003) was the rosetta stone for Decolonial
Psychoanalysis (Beshara, 2019b, p. 45). I say that because Curry woke
me up from my dogmatic slumber, which was David Hume’s effect on
Immanuel Kant. I want to critically revisit two arguments in particular,
which are premised on a white feminist theorization of patriarchy that
equates maleness with power regardless of context. Here is Curry’s (2017)
rebuttal of white feminist ideology:
Black maleness is, in fact, a de-gendered negation of white maleness that

is feminine because of its subordinate position to white masculinity, but
not female, because Black maleness lacks a specific gender coordinate that
corresponds to either white maleness or white femaleness. (p. 6, emphasis
in original)
Blacks, in particular, and, racialized/politicized subjects in general,

exist in the zone of nonbeing; therefore, they are not gendered—this is
not only a logical argument, but a historical and empirical one. For this
reason, Curry (2017) theorizes the Black male as a Man-Not; by exten-
sion, the Black female can be theorized as a Woman-Not. Curry (2017)
then distinguishes between gender and genre in relation to Black males:
Man-Not(ness) is a term used to express the specific genre category of the

Black male. Genre differs from gender by this distance Black males share
with Western man a priori, and, by consequence, patriarchy. Whereas
gender asserts that historical and social orders, defined by the biologic
marker of sex, are in fact synonymous with the historical and sociolog-
ical location of Black males, genre expresses how the register of nonbeing
distorts the categories founded upon white anthropology or that of the
human. Popular categories of analysis such as class, gender, and even
race suppose a universal human template upon which they imprint. But
76 R. K. Beshara
what is the applicability of human categories on the nonhuman? (p. 6,

Because Blacks, and Black males in particular, are not gendered,

given the history of slavery and the commodification of the Black body,
they end up becoming generic, which explains the sexual/racist violence
against, or the disposability/fungibility of, Black (especially male) bodies
that we continue to witness today. Curry (2017) writes:
Because Black male death is made generic, non-gendered, it is thought

to be ontologically irrelevant. Because it is encapsulated within the cate-
gory of race and understood as the violence to which all raced bodies
are subjected, Black male death fails to designate a specificity within
our present theoretical/disciplinary order. The violence Black male bodies
experience is thought to be summarized within the intersectional modes
of the Black and the female, the Black and the transgendered, the Black
and the queer/quare subject. (p. 164)
Curry (2017) is problematizing intersectionality because it occludes

Black male vulnerability since the feminist assumption is that male-
ness qua patriarchy is inherently equated with power. This assumption,
of course, erases the historical specificity of racialized males under
Euro-colonialism, particularly in the Americas, as well as their current
vulnerability in the face of sexual-racist violence. Therefore, context
matters. For example, patriarchy in the US is linked with white and
secular Christian supremacy, but in Egypt it is linked with military and
secular Islamic supremacy.
In Decolonial Psychoanalysis (Beshara, 2019b), I made the assumption
(without considering the empirical evidence) that Islamophobia must
be worse for Muslim women, or even worse for Black Muslim women,
because, according to intersectionality theory, oppression multiplies with
every addition of othered identity categories (e.g., religion, sex, race,
etc.). However, following Curry (2017), our theoretico-methodological
analysis must be grounded in historical and empirical examples of how
hierarchy works in any given society.
Curry’s (2017) focus is the US; mine is the US in relation to the
Global South. Historically, feminism was white women’s critical response
to the oppression they experienced from white men, but Curry (2017)
reminds us that white patriarchy (or what I have been calling racialized
capitalism), as a violently oppressive apparatus, is a project created and
operated by both white bourgeois men and women to over-exploit the
material bodies of racialized subjects to the point of death.
I am comfortable with using Angela Davis’s (2016) critical notion of
“intersectionality of struggles” (p. 19), and I have used it throughout
Decolonial Psychoanalysis (Beshara, 2019b), for it implies a critique of
mainstream intersectionality theory since her emphasis is on shared
struggles and not shared identities; shared struggle is what Mignolo
(2007) calls “identity based on politics” (p. 492, emphasis in original).
Davis’s critique is perhaps a function of her commitment to Marxism.
Another argument I want to challenge is my linking of terrorism
with toxic masculinity (Beshara, 2019b, p. 34), which presumes that
something is inherently wrong with the masculinity of those who are
labeled ‘terrorists’ today, who according to the politico-media complex
tend to be in many cases Muslim, or Brown, males. While the use of
political violence against any civilian population is unethical beyond
all doubt, terrorism is a politically-motivated tactic that has been used
by state and non-state actors alike since the birth of modernity, and
so terrorism is not inherently linked with Muslim, Arab, or Brown
masculinity. Curry (2017) writes: “Black [or Brown] males are thought
to be the exemplifications of white (bourgeois) masculinity’s patholog-
ical excess [surplus-jouissance?]. In other words, the toxic abnormality of
a hegemonic white masculinity becomes the conceptual norm for Black
[or Brown] men and boys” (p. 3). I have only made one reference to
toxic, or “hegemonic” (Curry, 2017), masculinity; in the remainder of
the book (Beshara, 2019b), I deconstruct the mythology of the Muslim
terrorist, who is often a Brown male.
Curry (2017) invented Black Male Studies because he wanted to study
Black masculinity, or the experiences of Black males, on its own terms
without having to resort to modern/colonial theories from the zone of
being, such as feminism or psychoanalysis for that matter. The response
to Curry’s (2017) critiques should not be defensive, but rather construc-
tive: Black Female Studies. Ultimately, those in the zone of being want us
divided so they can conquer us, but we (the racialized/politicized subjects
78 R. K. Beshara
of the world) must be in solidarity if we commonly desire liberation

and decolonization. In sum, my vision of contrapuntal psychoanalysis
as liberation praxis is an inclusive one, but I do believe, following Freire
(1970/2018), that for radical humanism to work (post)colonial psycho-
analysts must follow the leadership of decolonial psychoanalysts; this is
how we dismantle the oppression and violence of racialized capitalism
together. In the concluding chapter, I will show how the Discourse of
the Analyst can be horizontalized.
References
Agamben, G. (1998). Homo Sacer: Sovereign power and bare life (D. Heller-
Roazen, Trans.). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Agozino, B. (2014). The Africana paradigm in Capital: The debts of Karl Marx
to people of African descent. Review of African Political Economy, 41(140),
172–184.
Alexander, M. (2010). The new Jim Crow: Mass incarceration in the age of
colorblindness. New York, NY: The New Press.
Al-Khalili, J. (2011). The house of wisdom: How Arabic science saved ancient
knowledge and gave us the Renaissance. London, UK: Penguin.
Almond, I. (2012). Anti-capitalist objections to the postcolonial: Some concil-
iatory remarks on Žižek and context. Ariel: a Review of International English
Literature, 43(1), 1–21.
Althusser, L. (1970/2014). On the reproduction of capitalism: Ideology and
ideological state apparatuses (G. M. Goshgarian, Trans.). New York, NY:
Verso.
Amin, S. (1990). Delinking: Towards a polycentric world . London: Zed Books.
Anderson, W., Jenson, D., & Keller, R. C. (2011). Unconscious dominions:
Psychoanalysis, colonial trauma, and global sovereignties. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press.
Anthony, C. (1995). Ecopsychology and the deconstruction of whiteness. In T.
Roszak, M. E. Gomes, & A. D. Kanner (Eds.), Ecopsychology: Restoring the
earth, healing the mind . New York, NY: Sierra Club Books.
Apollon, W. (1996). Post-colonialism and psychoanalysis: The example of
Haiti. Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture & Society, 1(1), 43–51.
Ashcroft, B., Griffiths, G., & Tiffin, H. (1989/2000). Post-colonial studies: The
key concepts. Abingdon, UK: Routledge.
Ashcroft, B., Griffiths, G., & Tiffin, H. (2002). The empire writes back: Theory
and practice in post-colonial literatures (2nd ed.). Abingdon, UK: Routledge.
Balibar, E. (1994). Fascism, psychoanalysis, Freudo-Marxism. In J. Swenson
(Trans.), Masses, classes, ideas: Studies on politics and philosophy before and
after Marx. Abingdon, UK: Routledge.
Barghouti, A. (2010, August 12). Edward Said and Freud: The question of
identity and sub-consciousness.
Basu Thakur, G. (2020). Postcolonial lack: Identity, culture, surplus. New York,
NY: SUNY Press.
Baum, B. (2015). Decolonizing critical theory. Constellations, 22(3), 420–434.
https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8675.12169.
Benjamin, W. (1921/1996). Critique of violence. In M. Bullock & M. W.
Jennings (Eds.), Walter Benjamin: Selected writings volume 1, 1913–1926 .
Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.
Beshara, R. K. (2019a). A critical introduction to psychology. Hauppauge, NY:
Nova Science Publishers.
Beshara, R. K. (2019b). Decolonial psychoanalysis: Towards critical Islamophobia
studies. Abingdon, UK: Routledge.
Beshara, R. K. (2019c). Decolonizing psychoanalysis/Psychoanalyzing Islamo-
phobia. In I. Parker & S. Siddiqui (Eds.), Islamic psychoanalysis and psycho-
analytic Islam: Cultural and clinical dialogues (pp. 102–117). Abingdon, UK:
Routledge.
Bhabha, H. K. (1994). The location of culture. Abingdon, UK: Routledge.
Bhambra, G. K. (2014). Postcolonial and decolonial dialogues. Postcolonial
Studies, 17 (2), 115–121. https://doi.org/10.1080/13688790.2014.966414.
Bhatia, S. (2018). Decolonizing psychology: Globalization, social justice, and
Indian youth identities. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Bocian, D. G., Li, W., & Ernst, K. S. (2010). Foreclosures by race and ethnicity:
The demographics of a crisis. Retrieved from Center for Responsible Lending
website: https://www.responsiblelending.org/mortgage-lending/research-ana
lysis/foreclosures-by-race-and-ethnicity.pdf.
Borradori, G. (2003). Philosophy in a time of terror: Dialogues with Jürgen
Habermas and Jacques Derrida. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Bracher, M. (1993). Lacan, discourse, and social change: A psychoanalytic cultural
criticism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
80 R. K. Beshara
Bradley, K., & Cartledge, P. (Eds.). (2011). The Cambridge world history
of slavery: Volume 1, the ancient Mediterranean world . Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press.
Bricmont, J. (2006). Humanitarian imperialism: Using human rights to sell war
(D. Johnstone, Trans.). New York, NY: Monthly Review Press.
Bulhan, H. A. (1985). Frantz Fanon and the psychology of oppression. New York,
NY: Plenum Press.
Burden-Stelly, C. B. (2020, July 1). Modern U.S. racial capitalism: Some theoret-
ical insights. Monthly Review Press. Retrieved from https://monthlyreview.
org/2020/07/01/modern-u-s-racial-capitalism/.
Burman, E. (2019). Fanon, education, action: Child as method . Abingdon, UK:
Routledge.
Césaire, A. (1950/2000). Discourse on colonialism (J. Pinkham, Trans.). New
York, NY: Monthly Review Press.
Cheng, A. A. (2001). The melancholy of race: Psychoanalysis, assimilation, and
hidden grief . Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Clarke, S. (2003). Colonial identity and ethnic hatred: Fanon, Lacan, and
Zizek. In S. Clarke (Ed.), Social theory, psychoanalysis and racism (pp. 99–
122). Palgrave: London, UK.
Cole, M. (2016). Racism: A critical analysis. London, UK: Pluto Press.
Cooper, D. (1968/2015). The dialectics of liberation. New York, NY: Verso.
Coulthard, G. S. (2014). Red skin, white masks: Rejecting the colonial politics of
recognition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Curry, T. J. (2017). The man-not: Race, class, genre, and the dilemmas of Black
manhood . Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.
Dabashi, H. (2011). Brown skin, white masks. London, UK: Pluto Press.
Danto, E. A. (2005). Freud’s free clinics: Psychoanalysis & social justice, 1918–
1938. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.
David, E. J. (2013). Brown skin, white minds: Filipino-/American postcolonial
psychology. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing.
Davids, M. F. (2011). Internal racism: A psychoanalytic approach to race and
difference. New York, NY: Springer.
Davis, A. Y. (2016). Freedom is a constant struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the
foundations of a movement. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books.
De Sousa Santos, B. (2002). Between Prospero and Caliban: Colonialism, post-
colonialism, and inter-identity. Luso-Brazilian Review, 39 (2), 9–43. https://
doi.org/10.3368/lbr.39.2.9.
Dean, J. (2019). Comrade: An essay on political belonging. New York, NY: Verso.
Derrida, J. (1991). Geopsychoanalysis: “… and the rest of the world”. American

Imago, 48(2), 199–231.
Desmond, M. (2019, August 18). Capitalism. The New York Times Magazine,
30–40.
Dodds, J. (2011). Psychoanalysis and ecology at the edge of chaos: Complexity
theory, Deleuze|Guattari and psychoanalysis for a climate in crisis. Abingdon,
UK: Routledge.
Duran, E., & Duran, B. (1995). Native American postcolonial psychology. New
York, NY: SUNY Press.
Dussel, E. (1995). The invention of the Americas: Eclipse of “the other” and the
myth of modernity (M. D. Barber, Trans.). New York, NY: Continuum.
Edwards, F., Lee, H., & Esposito, M. H. (2019). Risk of being killed by police
use of force in the United States by age, race–ethnicity, and sex. Proceedings
of the National Academy of Sciences, 116 (34). https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.
io/kw9cu.
Esonwanne, U. (2005). Critique and extension: Said and Freud. Research in
African Literatures, 36 (3), 98–111. https://doi.org/10.1353/ral.2005.0146.
Fanon, F. (1952/2008). Black skin, white masks (R. Philcox, Trans.). New York,
New York: Grove Press.
Fanon, F. (1961/2004). The wretched of the earth (R. Philcox, Trans.). New
York, NY: Grove Press.
Ferenczi, S. (1933/1988). Confusion of tongues between adults and the child.
Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 24 (2), 196–206. https://doi.org/10.1080/001
07530.1988.10746234.
Field, R. M. (2016). Freud, Said, and the ancient and classical worlds/Freud,
Said en die antieke en klassieke wêreld. Literator, 37 (1), 1.
Fink, B. (1997). A clinical introduction to Lacanian psychoanalysis: Theory and
technique. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Foucault, M. (1961/2006). History of madness. Abingdon, UK: Routledge.
Foucault, M. (1980). Power/knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings,
1972–1977 (C. Gordon, Ed.). New York, NY: Vintage.
Freire, P. (1970/2018). Pedagogy of the oppressed . New York, New York:
Bloomsbury.
Freud, S. (1899/2010). The interpretation of dreams (J. Strachey, Trans.). New
York, NY: Basic Books.
Freud, S. (1913/1946). Totem and taboo: Resemblances between the psychic lives
of savages and neurotics (A. A. Brill, Trans.). New York, NY: Vintage.
Freud, S. (1909/1961). Five lectures on psycho-analysis (J. Strachey, Trans.). New
York, NY: W. W. Norton.
82 R. K. Beshara
Freud, S. (1923/1955). Two encyclopaedia articles. In J. Strachey (Trans.), The

standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud, Volume
XVIII (1920–1922): Beyond the pleasure principle, group psychology and other
works (pp. 233–260). London, UK: Hogarth Press.
Freud, S. (1927/1961). The future of an illusion (J. Strachey, Trans.). New York,
NY: W. W. Norton.
Freud, S. (1930/1961). Civilization and its discontents (J. Strachey, Trans.). New
Freud, S. (1939/1967). Moses and monotheism (K. Jones, Trans.). New York,
NY: Vintage.
Fromm, E. (1960/2013). Psychoanalysis and Zen Buddhism. New York, NY:
Open Road Media.
Frosh, S. (2013). Psychoanalysis, colonialism, racism. Journal of Theoretical
and Philosophical Psychology, 33(3), 141–154. https://doi.org/10.1037/a00
33398.
Gandhi, L. (1998). Postcolonial theory: A critical introduction. Sydney, NSW:
Allen & Unwin.
Gaztambide, D. J. (2019). A people’s history of psychoanalysis: From Freud to
liberation psychology. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.
George, S. (2016). Trauma and race: A Lacanian study of African American racial
identity. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press.
Gilmore, R. W. (2020, June 1). Geographies of Racial Capitalism with Ruth
Wilson Gilmore – An Antipode Foundation film [YouTube]. Retrieved from
https://youtu.be/2CS627aKrJ.
Gilroy, P. (2005). Postcolonial melancholia. New York, NY: Columbia University
Press.
Gordon, L. R. (2015). What Fanon said: A philosophical introduction to his life
and thought. New York, NY: Fordham University Press.
Gordon, L. R. (2018, September 25). Philosophy and decoloniality in Africana
philosophy [Video]. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/_T-dwgqTEmg.
Grant, B. (2008). Postcolonialism, psychoanalysis and Burton: Power play of
empire. Abingdon, UK: Routledge.
Greedharry, M. (2008). Postcolonial theory and psychoanalysis: From uneasy
engagements to effective critique. London, UK: Palgrave.
Greimas, A. J. (1968). The interaction of semiotic constraints. Yale French
Studies, 41, 86–105. https://doi.org/10.2307/2929667.
Grosfoguel, R., Oso, L., & Christou, A. (2015). ‘Racism’, intersectionality and
migration studies: Framing some theoretical reflections. Identities: Global
Studies in Culture and Power, 22(6), 635–652. https://doi.org/10.1080/107

0289X.2014.950974.
Hall, S. (1992). The West and the rest: Discourse and power. In B. Gieben &
S. Hall (Eds.), The formations of modernity: Understanding modern societies
an introduction. Cambridge, UK: Polity.
Hanh, T. N. (1987/2005). Being peace. Berkeley, CA: Parallax Press.
Hannah-Jones, N. (2019, August 18). The idea of America. The New York
Times Magazine, 14–26.
Harris, L. M. (2020, March 6). I helped fact-check the 1619 Project. The
Times Ignored Me. Politico. Retrieved from https://www.politico.com/news/
magazine/2020/03/06/1619-project-new-york-times-mistake-122248.
Hartnack, C. (2001). Psychoanalysis in colonial India. Oxford, UK: Oxford
University Press.
Heng, G. (2018). The invention of race in the European Middle Ages. Cambridge,
UK: Cambridge University Press.
Hickling, F. W. (2007). Psychohistoriography: A post-colonial psychoanalytical and
psychotherapeutic model . Kingston, Jamaica: Carimensa.
Hollander, N. C. (1997). Love in a time of hate: Liberation psychology in Latin
America. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Homayounpour, G. (2019). Islam, the new modern erotic. In I. Parker & S.
Siddiqui (Eds.), Islamic psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic Islam: Cultural and
clinical dialogues. Abingdon, UK: Routledge.
Hook, D. (2004). Fanon and the psychoanalysis of racism. In D. Hook
(Ed.), Critical psychology (pp. 115–138). Claremont, South Africa: Juta and
Company.
Hook, D. (2008). Postcolonial psychoanalysis. Theory & Psychology, 18(2),
269–283. https://doi.org/10.1177/0959354307087886.
Horne, G. (2020). The dawning of the Apocalypse: The roots of slavery, white
supremacy, settler colonialism, and capitalism in the long sixteenth century. New
York, NY: Monthly Review Press.
Jalata, A. (2013). Colonial terrorism, global capitalism and African underde-
velopment: 500 years of crimes against African peoples. The Journal of Pan
African Studies, 5 (9), 1–42.
Kelley, R. D. G. (2017, January 12). What did Cedric Robinson mean by
racial capitalism? Boston Review. Retrieved from http://bostonreview.net/
race/robin-d-g-kelley-what-did-cedric-robinson-mean-racial-capitalism.
Kendi, I. X. (2016). Stamped from the beginning: The definitive history of racist
ideas in America. New York, NY: Nation Books.
84 R. K. Beshara
Khan, A. (2018). Lacan and race. In A. Mukherjee (Ed.), After Lacan:

Literature, theory and psychoanalysis in the 21st century. Cambridge, UK:
Khanna, R. (2003). Dark continents: Psychoanalysis and colonialism. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press.
University Press.
Lacan, J. (1966/2006). Écrits: The first complete edition in English (B. Fink,
Trans.). New York, NY: W. W. Norton.
Lacan, J. (1991/2007). The other side of psychoanalysis (R. Grigg, Trans.). New
Lane, C. (Ed.). (1998). The psychoanalysis of race. New York, NY: Columbia
University Press.
Lazarus, N. (2011). The postcolonial unconscious. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press.
Levinson, B. (1996). The limits of postcolonial theory after Said/Bhabha.
Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture & Society, 1(2), 145–157.
Levy, J. (1996). From oppression to repression, from subjection to subject.
Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture & Society, 1(2), 113–116.
Loomba, A. (1998). Colonialism/Postcolonialism. Abingdon, UK: Routledge.
Lugones, M. (2010). Toward a decolonial feminism. Hypatia, 25 (4), 742–759.
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1527-2001.2010.01137.x.
MacCannell, J. F. (1996). The post-colonial unconscious, or the white man’s
thing. Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture & Society, 1(1), 27–41.
Mannoni, O. (1950/1990). Prospero and Caliban: The psychology of colonization.
Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Mannoni, O. (1966). The decolonisation of myself. Race, 7 (4), 327–335.
https://doi.org/10.1177/030639686600700401.
Martín-Baró, I. (1994). Writings for a liberation psychology (A. Aron & S.
Corne, Eds.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Marx, K., & Engels, F. (1845/1978). The German ideology. In R. C. Tucker
(Ed.), The Marx-Engels reader (2nd ed.). New York, NY: W. W. Norton.
Massad, J. A. (2015). Psychoanalysis, “Islam,” and the Other of liberalism. In
J. A. Massad (Ed.), Islam in liberalism. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago
Press.
Masson, J. M. (Ed.). (1985). The complete letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm
Fliess, 1887–1904 (J. M. Masson, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.
Mbembe, A. (2001). On the postcolony. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Memmi, A. (1957/1967). The colonizer and the colonized . Boston, MA: Beacon
Press.
Mignolo, W. D. (2007). Delinking: The rhetoric of modernity, the logic of
coloniality and the grammar of de-coloniality. Cultural Studies, 21(2–3),
449–514. https://doi.org/10.1080/09502380601162647.
Mignolo, W. D. (2011). The darker side of Western modernity: Global futures,
decolonial options. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Moore-Gilbert, B. (1997). Postcolonial theory: Contexts, practices, politics. New
York, NY: Verso.
Morsi, Y. (2017). Radical skin, moderate masks: De-radicalising the Muslim and
racism in post-racial societies. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Nair, R. B. (2002). Lying on the postcolonial couch: The idea of indifference.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Nandy, A. (1983). The intimate enemy: Loss and recovery of self under colonialism.
New Delhi, India: Oxford University Press.
Nkrumah, K. (1965). Neo-colonialism: The last stage of imperialism. New York,
IL: International Publishers.
Oliver, K. (2004). The colonization of psychic space: A psychoanalytic social theory
of oppression. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Omi, M., & Winant, H. (2015). Racial formation in the United States (3rd
ed.). Abingdon, UK: Routledge.
Parker, I. (2005). Lacanian discourse analysis in psychology. Theory &
Psychology, 15 (2), 163–182. https://doi.org/10.1177/0959354305051361.
Parker, I. (2010). Psychosocial studies: Lacanian discourse analysis negotiating
interview text. Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society, 15 (2), 156–172. https://
doi.org/10.1057/pcs.2009.21.
Parker, I., & Siddiqui, S. (Eds.). (2019). Islamic psychoanalysis and psychoana-
lytic Islam: Cultural and clinical dialogues. Abingdon, UK: Routledge.
PEW. (2008, February 28). One in 100: Behind bards in America in 2008.
Retrieved from https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/reports/
2008/02/28/one-in-100-behind-bars-in-america-2008.
Phillips, A. (2014). Becoming Freud: The making of a psychoanalyst. New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press.
Prashad, V. (2007). The darker nations: A people’s history of the third world . New
York, NY: The New Press.
Quijano, A. (2000). Coloniality of power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America.
Nepantla: Views from South, 1(3), 533–580.
Reich, W. (1933/1970). The mass psychology of fascism (3rd ed., M. Higgins &
C. M. Raphael, Eds.). New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
86 R. K. Beshara
Robinson, C. J. (1983). Black Marxism: The making of the Black radical

tradition. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Rose, J. (2017). The psychoanalytic passion of Edward Said. Raritan, 36 (3),
1–23.
Roszak, T. (1995). Where psyche meets Gaia. In T. Roszak, M. E. Gomes, &
A. D. Kanner (Eds.), Ecopsychology: Restoring the earth, healing the mind .
New York, NY: Sierra Club Books.
Roudinesco, É. (2016). Freud: In his time and ours (C. Porter, Trans.).
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Ruti, M. (2018). Distillations: Theory, ethics, affect. New York, NY: Bloomsbury.
Said, E. W. (1975/1985). Beginnings: Intention and method . London, UK:
Granta.
Said, E. W. (1978/2003). Orientalism. London, UK: Penguin.
Said, E. W. (1993). Culture and imperialism. New York, NY: Vintage.
Said, E. W. (1999). Out of place: A memoir. New York, NY: Vintage.
Said, E. W. (2003). Freud and the non-European. New York, NY: Verso.
Salem, S. (2020). Anticolonial afterlives in Egypt: The politics of hegemony.
Sartre, J. (1946/1976). Anti-semite and Jew: An exploration of the etiology of hate
(G. J. Becker, Trans.). New York, NY: Schocken Books.
Sartre, J. (1964/2001). Colonialism and neocolonialism (A. Haddour, S. Brewer,
& T. McWilliams, Trans.). Abingdon, UK: Routledge.
Seshadri-Crooks, K. (1994). The primitive as analyst: Postcolonial feminism’s
access to psychoanalysis. Cultural Critique, 28, 175–218. https://doi.org/10.
2307/1354515.
Seshadri-Crooks, K. (2000). Desiring whiteness: A Lacanian analysis of race.
Abingdon, UK: Routledge.
Shakry, O. E. (2017). The Arabic Freud: Psychoanalysis and Islam in modern
Egypt. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Sheehi, S. (2018). The transnational Palestinian self: Toward decolonizing
psychoanalytic thought. Psychoanalytic Perspectives, 15 (3), 307–322. https://
doi.org/10.1080/1551806x.2018.1492816.
Sidanius, J., & Pratto, F. (1999). Social dominance: An intergroup theory of social
hierarchy and oppression. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Sloan, T. S. (1996). Damaged life: The crisis of the modern Psyche. Abingdon,
UK: Routledge.
Smith, D. L. (2011). Less than human: Why we demean, enslave, and exterminate
others. New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press.
Smith, D. M. (2017, November). Counting the dead: Estimating the loss of

life in the Indigenous Holocaust, 1492-Present. Paper presented at 2017
Native American Symposium: Representations and Realities, Southeastern
Oklahoma State University.
Spillers, H. J. (1996). “All the things you could be by now if Sigmund Freud’s
wife was your mother”: Psychoanalysis and race. Critical Inquiry, 22(4),
710–734. https://doi.org/10.1086/448814.
Spivak, G. C. (1987). In other worlds: Essays in cultural politics. North Yorkshire,
UK: Methuen.
Spivak, G. C. (1994). Psychoanalysis in left field and fieldworking: Examples
to fit the title. In S. Shamdasani & M. Münchow (Eds.), Speculations after
Freud: Psychoanalysis, philosophy and culture. Abingdon, UK: Routledge.
Stannard, D. E. (1992). American Holocaust: The conquest of the New World .
Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Stevenson, B. (2019, August 18). Mass incarceration. The New York Times
Magazine, 80–83.
Sweet, J. H. (1997). The Iberian roots of American racist thought. The William
and Mary Quarterly, 54 (1), 143–166. https://doi.org/10.2307/2953315.
Teo, T. (2005). The critique of psychology: From Kant to postcolonial theory. New
York, NY: Springer.
Times Higher Education. (2009, March 26). Most cited authors of books in the
humanities, 2007 . Retrieved from https://www.timeshighereducation.com/
news/most-cited-authors-of-books-in-the-humanities-2007/405956.article#.
Tuck, E., & Yang, K. W. (2012). Decolonization is not a metaphor. Decoloniza-
tion: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 1(1), 1–40. Retrieved from https://jps.
library.utoronto.ca/index.php/des/article/view/18630/15554.
U.S. Department of Labor. (2016). Unemployment rates. Retrieved from
https://www.dol.gov/agencies/wb/data/latest-annual-data/employment-
rates.
Van Zyl, S. (1998). The other and other others: Post-colonialism, psycho-
analysis and the South African question. American Imago, 55 (1), 77–100.
https://doi.org/10.1353/aim.1998.0009.
Virilio, P. (1983/2008). Pure war (M. Polizzotti, Trans., S. Lotringer, Ed.). Los
Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e).
Wahba, M. (2006). Averroes as a bridge. Think, 4 (12), 13–16. https://doi.org/
10.1017/s1477175600001652.
Wahba, M. (1995). Fundamentalism and secularization (R. K. Beshara, Trans.).
Wallerstein, I. (2004). World-systems analysis: An introduction. Durham, NC:
Duke University Press.
88 R. K. Beshara
Williams, P., & Chrisman, L. (Eds.). (1994). Colonial discourse and post-colonial
theory: A reader. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.
Young, R. J. (1995). Colonial desire: Hybridity in theory, culture and race.
Young, R. J. (2001). Postcolonialism: An historical introduction. Oxford, UK:
Blackwell.
Zalloua, Z. (2020). Žižek on race: Toward an anti-racist future. New York, NY:
Bloomsbury.
Žižek, S. (1989). The sublime object of ideology. New York, NY: Verso.
Žižek, S. (1997). The plague of fantasies. New York, NY: Verso.
2
Beginnings
I begin this chapter with Beginnings: Intention & Method , Edward Said’s
(1975/1985) second book, which was overshadowed by his third and
most popular book, Orientalism, published three years later in 1978.
My aim with this chapter is to highlight the prevalence of Sigmund
Freud throughout the text and the influence of his “disputatious radi-
calism” (Said 1975/1985, p. 51) on Said’s theorization of beginning as
an intention and as a method. Of particular interest to Said (1975/1985)
is “The Interpretation of Dreams as an inaugural text” (p. 179, emphasis
in original), whose method of dream interpretation, I argue, can also
be used as a method of contrapuntal interpretation as Said (1978/2003)
did in Orientalism. For Said (1975/1985), “the text as a whole retains a
particular beginning function” because it is “the physical location where
dream-thoughts are verbally created for the purposes of analysis” (p. 179,
emphasis in original).
In the preface to the 1975 edition of Beginnings, Said begins by asking,
“What is a beginning?” He responds, “Beginning is not only a kind of
action; it is also a frame of mind, a kind of work, an attitude, a conscious-
ness. It is pragmatic…And it is theoretic” (p. xxi). For Said (1975/1985),
beginnings are “something one does” and “something one thinks about.
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56743-9_2
90 R. K. Beshara
The two…are always necessarily connected when language is being used”

(p. xxi, emphasis added); in other words, beginning is a praxis. In the first
chapter, Said (1975/1985) defines the beginning as “the first step in the
intentional production of meaning ” (p. 5, emphasis in original).
Said (1975/1985) adds:
In language, therefore, writing or thinking about beginning is tied to

writing or thinking a beginning. A verbal beginning is consequently both
a creative and critical activity, just as at the moment one begins to use
language in a disciplined way, the orthodox distinction between critical
and creative thought begins to break down. (p. xxi, emphasis in original)
The centrality of language vis-à-vis creativity, criticality, and devel-

opment in Said’s theorization of beginning resonates with a number of
key psychoanalytic principles on language qua Symbolic order: (1) “the
unconscious…is structured like a language” (Lacan 1966/2006, p. 737);
(2) “the unconscious is the Other’s discourse” (Lacan 1966/2006, p. 10,
emphasis in original); (3) “the Other is that foreign language we must
learn to speak…it is the discourse and desires of others around us insofar
as the former are internalized” (Fink 1995, p. 11); (4) “there is no meta-
language that can be spoken” (Lacan 1966/2006, p. 688); (5) “the subject
is the subject of the signifier” (Lacan 1966/2006, p. 530); (6) to be a
subject is to be split (between ego and unconscious), which is a function
of being alienated within language; and (7) “a signifier [S1 ] represents a
subject [$] to another signifier [S2 ]” (p. 713).
Lacan was certainly influenced by structuralism, and so was Said
(1975/1985) who wrote about its “radical spirit” (p. xviii), but the link
between language and desire in psychoanalysis is Freud’s legacy: “sexual
needs have played the biggest part in the origin and development of
speech” (Freud 1920/1966, p. 206). Also, the primary technique in
psychoanalysis is free association, which is a form of speech that reveals
unconscious desire in the subject’s signifying chain: “Starting with Freud,
the unconscious becomes a chain of signifiers that repeats and insists
somewhere…interfering in the cuts offered it by actual discourse and
the cogitation it informs” (Lacan 1966/2006, p. 676). The other ways
2 Beginnings 91
through which a subject can encounter the unconscious are also housed
in language: dreams, jokes, slips of the tongue, symptoms, etc.
Here are some other examples from the 1975 preface that illus-
trate Said’s engagement with psychoanalysis: “Even when it is repressed ,
the beginning is always a first from which (except on rare occa-
sions) something follows” (p. xxii, emphasis added). According to Freud
(1909/1961), we unconsciously repress ideas that are incompatible with
our egos as a form of defense (p. 22); we unconsciously do this in
order to reduce or eliminate the “unpleasure” (p. 22) that arises from
“opposing mental forces” (p. 24). However, in the process we substi-
tute the repressed idea with “the symptom” (p. 26). Beginnings are
symptomatic.
Back to Said (1975/1985): “If we assume the presence of beginnings
here and there for the reflective artist, reflective critic, philosopher, polit-
ical, historian, and psychoanalytic investigator, a study of beginnings can
all too easily become a catalog of infinite cases” (p. xxii, emphasis added).
After all, psychoanalysis would not exist as a praxis if it were not for the
analysand beginning analysis.
As Said (1975/1985) is distinguishing between beginning and origin,
he implicitly frames beginning as jouissance (enjoyment):
Beginning is basically an activity which ultimately implies return and

repetition rather than simple linear accomplishment, that beginning and
beginning-again are historical whereas origins are divine, that a beginning
not only creates but is its own method because it has intention. In short,
beginning is making or producing difference, but…difference which is the
result of combining the already-familiar with the fertile novelty of human
work in language. (p. xxiii, emphasis in original)
Does beginning imply a return (of the repressed), hence, a failure

of the ego’s defenses? Does not beginning-as-repetition (or beginning-
again) signal a masochistic jouissance vis-à-vis the death drive (cf. Lacan
1966/2006, p. 53)? Is the ‘intention’ of beginning an unconscious one
akin to (the Other’s) desire? What is this ‘combining’ except the “combi-
natory of the signifier” (Lacan 1966/2006, p. 544)? Is the ‘difference’
made or produced by beginning sexual difference? Does not saying
92 R. K. Beshara
beginning is ‘historical’ indicate “the future anterior [subject] as what

I will have been, given what I am in the process of becoming” (Lacan
1966/2006, p. 247)?
In the 1985 preface to the book, Said agreeingly quotes a reviewer’s
(J. Hillis Miller) characterization of Beginnings as “uncanny criticism” (p.
xvii). For Freud (1919/2003), “the uncanny [unheimlich or unhomely]
is that species of the frightening that goes back to what was once well
known and had long been familiar” (p. 318). Uncanny criticism is
criticism that is “frightening precisely because it is unknown and unfa-
miliar” (p. 318). The book’s uncanniness is a “symptom” of its mode of
“uncertainty” and its “hybrid” style (Said 1975/1985, p. xx).
For Said (1975/1985), beginning is “secular, humanly produced, and
ceaselessly re-examined” which enables “the critique of domination, the
re-examination of suppressed history (feminine, non-white, non Euro-
pean, etc.), the cross-disciplinary interest in textuality, the notion of
counter-memory and archive, the analysis of traditions…, professions,
disciplines, and corporations” (p. xix). Said (1975/1985) adds that “the
form and representations of narrative fictions are based upon desire–
authorized as well as ‘molested’ by the novelistic consciousness [and
unconscious]” (p. xix, emphasis added), which is line with the fact that
we live in a “a world where the Other’s desire lays down the law” (Lacan
1966/2006, p. 488). Most significantly, Said (1975/1985) continues:
Out of this [free?] association developed a theory of authority linking

authorship, paternal property and power to each other, and this conse-
quently has been extendable to the social history of intellectual practices,
from the manipulation and control of discourse to the representation of truth
and ‘the Other.’ (p. xix, emphasis added)
Beginnings marks the shift from modernism to postmodernism, which

roughly parallels the shift from colonialism to postcolonialism. To clarify
the difference between modernism and modernity, the former is a “cul-
tural sphere” while the latter is a “geopolitical scheme” (cf. Hassan 2001,
p. 3 on postmodernism v. postmodernity). Said (1975/1985) writes:
2 Beginnings 93
One of the central points made by Beginnings is that modernism was an

aesthetic and ideological phenomenon that was a response to the crisis
of what could be called liation–linear, biologically grounded process,
that which ties children to their parents–which produced the counter-
crisis within modernism of affiliation, that is, those creeds, philosophies,
and visions re-assembling the world in new non-familial ways…ideolog-
ically and socially, the rise of the syndicate, political party, guild, and
State, as quasi-paternal but affiliatively organized authorities, is a parallel
phenomenon, even if its consequences and dimensions are a great deal
more far-reaching and varied than aesthetic versions of affiliation. (p. xix,
What is psychoanalysis if not the product of these modernist aesthetic

and ideological phenomena of (af )filiation? What is the Other, in
the Symbolic order, if not these “quasi-paternal but affiliatively orga-
nized authorities” wherein “authorship, paternal property and power” are
linked? And what are we to make of this other ‘Other’ who is misrepre-
sented in intellectual practices? The (novelistic) unconscious desire that
Said (1975/1985) hinted at is a specific one, for it is the desire “to mime
the life processes of generation, flourishing, and death” (p. xix, emphasis
added).
This is what Lacan (1973/2004) wrote about mimicry, which is
certainly grounded in the Imaginary narcissism and aggressivity one
experiences in/on the mirror stage: “The effect of mimicry is camouflage,
in the strictly technical sense. It is not a question of harmonizing with the
background but, against a mottled background, of becoming mottled—
exactly like the technique of camouflage practised in human warfare”
(p. 99). Bhabha (1994) would later revisit the concept of mimicry in
his account of (post)colonial subjectivity. Therefore, this other ‘Other’
is certainly an Imaginary other (another ego), but, more radically, Said
(1975/1985) is also alluding to Symbolic and Real Otherness (i.e., Other,
non-European, cultures and languages) as will become more explicit in
both Orientalism as well as Culture and Imperialism.
Contrapuntal psychoanalysis as liberation praxis is a “constant re-
experiencing of beginning and beginning-again whose force is…to stim-
ulate self-conscious and situated activity, activity with aims non-coercive
and communal” (Said 1975/1985, p. xx). It is also concerned with
94 R. K. Beshara
the democratization of discourse and the politicization of representa-

tion vis-à-vis unconscious truths that link the singularity of being with
the pluriversality of knowledge. Liberation praxis as beginning is the
opposite of totalitarianism, colonialism, or any mythical apparatus of
oppression as origin.
With Beginnings, Said (1975/1985) is not only concerned with how
other writers begin their texts, he is also beginning a new form of writing:
uncanny criticism. The shift from the classical novel to modernist forms
of writing is also mirrored in Said’s style of literary criticism. According
to Said (1975/1985), before World War II literary scholars had to be
trained in classical philology (p. 6), which meant that they read texts in
their original languages. As for today’s critic, who is an “autodidact” or a
“wanderer” (p. 8), Said (1975/1985) writes:
There is not much use in speculating why most people no longer regard
education as adding links to a historical dynasty. We expect the student
trained in literature to have a smattering of ‘humanities’–in translation–
but an urgent sense of other knowledge, paraknowledge, that assumes lies
naturally alongside literature and in some way bears upon it. He will
know a lot about Freudian psychology. (p. 7, emphasis added)
Said (1975/1985) is noting the modernist rupture that allowed for the
possibility of subjective interpretation, which is contrary to the histor-
ical dynasty established by classical philologists. Today, we do not read
texts directly (if ever that was possible), we always need a theoretical
lens, or paraknowledge (e.g., psychoanalysis or postcolonialism), through
which we can interpret texts. In other words, “the study and the produc-
tion of literature today is the study and the production of de-formation”
(Said 1975/1985, p. 8). What are free associations, dreams, jokes, slips of
the tongue, and symptoms, but unconscious (de-)formations (cf. Lacan
1966/2006, p. 713) or Entstellung (distortions)? This de-formation is “a
disguised fulfilment of repressed wishes” (1909/1961, p. 36, emphasis in
original). Entstellung can also be translated as displacement or transpo-
sition, that is, “the sliding of the signified under the signifier” (Lacan
1966/2006, p. 425).
2 Beginnings 95
Said (1975/1985) introduces the notions of “exteriority” and “in-

betweenness” to describe how:
today’s writer is less comfortable with the unadorned fact of prece-

dence…and perhaps he [or she] can no longer know what it means to
stand in a direct line of descent. History and tradition seem less commu-
nicable in sequential narrative…Knowledge, therefore, is less formally
embodied…Furthermore, exteriority and in-betweenness in the modern
writer are the inevitable results of lacking either faith in or capacity
for limited (discrete) but wholly integrated work. The modern writer
often feels the urge instead to create new totalities, to cultivate random
appetites, to deny forward movement altogether. (p. 9)
For Said (1975/1985), Freud is the exemplar modern writer because

of how he exercised the hermeneutics of suspicion in his writings just like
Marx and Nietzsche did before him; all three were critical of modernity
but not of coloniality. The non-sequential, fragmented, and disintegrated
narratives of modernist texts that Said (1975/1985) writes about are none
other than the structure of split subjectivity itself. In psychoanalysis, the
unconscious follows a different temporal logic that goes by the name
Nachträglichkeit (Freud) or après-coup (Lacan).
According to Lacan (1966/2006), the last word of a sentence seals
the meaning of that sentence following what he labels “the retroac-
tive effect” (p. 711). The Freudo-Lacanian notion of retroactivity or
deferred action—cf. Foucault’s (1975/1977) “history of the present”
(p. 31)—sheds light on the way that time and history are subjectively
lived and interpreted: “What concerns psychoanalysis is not the real
past sequence of events in themselves, but the way that these events
exist now in memory and the way that the patient reports them” (Evans
1996, p. 209). In other words, modernist history or temporality is the
languaging of the past as an unconscious commentary on the present,
which is a history or a temporality exterior to tradition but in-between
other contemporaneous texts.
Exteriority and in-betweenness are two ways of signifying complexity
or intertextuality, which are ways for describing the unconscious and its
subject, who is caught in a network of signifiers. Said (1975/1985) makes
a distinction between modernists writing adjacently and traditionalists
96 R. K. Beshara
writing in a line of descent. He argues that a chief characteristic, for

Freud, has been a necessity at the beginning to see his work “as making
reference, first, to other works, but also to reality and to the reader, by
adjacency, not sequentially or dynastically” (p. 10). He adds:
Freud’s unconscious: banned from consciousness at the outset, it exerts an

influence upon dreams and everyday life by means of distortions, exag-
gerations, mistakes, which do not even deliver the unconscious whole;
indeed, the whole of our conscious life is discontinuous with our uncon-
scious principles of order, which in turn repeat and vary that initial
rupture ad infinitum. (p. 10)
Said (1975/1985) maintains the primacy of the Symbolic, over the

Imaginary, register in modern writing: “Nearly every consciously inno-
vative major writer since Oscar Wilde has repeatedly denied (or even
denounced) the mimetic ambition of writing. A text [is] a text [and
not] a representation of anything else” (p. 11). He continues, “the
order proceeding from beginnings…cannot be grasped adequately by any
image at all” (p. 11, emphasis in original), for it is a Symbolic order that
has to do with language and law. With the image falling from grace, “a
work enters a realm of gentile [or secular] history” (p. 11).
Said (1975/1985) calls the Symbolic order of writing: “an eccentric
order of repetition” (p. 12). It is not an Imaginary (i.e., narcissistic and
aggressive) order of sameness based on ego-driven images and imagina-
tions; rather it is an unconscious order that emphasizes “the possibilities
for difference within repetition” and that signifies “irregularities [or
uncanniness] of varying degrees and qualities within writing as a whole”
(p. 12). This eccentric order of repetition is also a source of Real jouis-
sance (enjoyment): “the pleasure of writing” (p. 24), which is the material
dimension of the letter or the signifierness of the signifier (Fink 1995, p.
xiv).
Beginnings, for Said (1975/1985), are intimately linked with inten-
tion (this is what I want to do) and method (this is how I am going to
do it). By intention, Said (1975/1985) means:
2 Beginnings 97
an appetite at the beginning intellectually to do something in a character-

istic way–either consciously or unconsciously, but at any rate in a language
that always (or nearly always) shows signs of the beginning intention
in some form and is always engaged purposefully in the production of
meaning. (p. 12, emphasis added)
Because the modern writer is a split subject, “conscious intention–

when is it ever exclusively conscious?–is frequently at odds with method”
(Said 1975/1985, p. 13). The modern writer is not concerned with
originality, he or she acknowledges the influence of others adjacently
through repetition or refutation (p. 15). Said (1975/1985) cleverly shows
that: “Prophecy is a type of language around which this issue of origi-
nality perpetually lurks in many forms” (p. 22). He then concludes that
the prophet, as someone obsessed with originality, is structurally alien-
ated, which is amusing to think about in light of Freud (1920/1966)
remarking that Jung used to be “merely a psycho-analyst” but now aspires
to become “a prophet” (p. 334). In alienation, “the Other [as god]
dominates or takes the place of the subject” (Fink 1995, p. 65).
Here is what Said (1975/1985) has to say about writing vis-à-vis the
Symbolic order:
Every sort of writing establishes explicit [or conscious] and implicit [or
unconscious] rules of pertinence for itself: certain things are admissible,
certain others are not. I call these rules of pertinence authority–both in
the sense of explicit law and guiding force…and in the sense of that
implicit power to generate another word that will belong to the writing as
a whole. (p. 16, emphasis in original)
Said (1975/1985) cites Vico’s etymology of authority: “auctor: autos:

suis ipsius: propsius: property” (p. 16, emphasis in original), and we
should also bear in mind related words that perhaps illuminate the
different faces of the Symbolic order: author (which is homophonous
with Other), authoritarian, authoritative, authorization, etc. For Said
(1975/1985), “authorization is provisional,” it is “what the subject of
‘beginnings’ authorizes,” it is “what is rationally apprehensible…what is
allowable” (p. 17, emphasis in original). Later, Said (1975/1985) clari-
fies: “authority–or the specific power of a specific act of writing–can be
98 R. K. Beshara
thought of as something whole and as something invented–as something

inclusive and made up, if you like, for the occasion” (p. 23). In other
words, nomadic authority (as opposed to anterior, or pure, authority) is
secular, democratic, and critical (pp. 23–24).
Beginnings are essentially unconscious: They follow “a principle of
[free] association that works, in a sense, against simple consecution and
chance” and they are “more a structure [that intends] than a history,
but this structure cannot be immediately seen, named, or grasped” (Said
1975/1985, p. 16, emphasis in original). In view of Lacan’s (1966/2006)
indexing of Freud that “a dream has the structure of a sentence or, rather,
to keep to the letter of the work, of a rebus—that is, of a form of writ-
ing” (p. 221), let us consider Said’s (1975/1985) structuralist account of
beginning qua writing,
since a study of beginnings is…mainly about the language used by anyone

who begins (or talks of beginning), the intimate yet apprehensible circum-
stances of a beginning are verbal…the history and coherence of beginnings
[is] a fact of written language…beginning is doing–intending–a whole set
of particular things primarily in writing or because of writing. (p. 19,
Said’s (1975/1985) section on the writerly addiction to quotation

and its “unsettling effect” (p. 22) is absolutely brilliant, particularly
since upon self-diagnosis I can attest that I clearly suffer from this
symptom, but how does Said explain its etiology? He writes, “quota-
tion is a constant reminder that writing is a form of displacement”
(p. 22). Here we are again in psychoanalytic territory. According to
Freud (1920/1966), “The first achievement of the dream-work is conden-
sation. By that we understand the fact that the manifest dream has a
smaller content than the latent one, and is thus an abbreviated trans-
lation of it” (p. 210, emphasis in original). For Lacan (1966/2006),
condensation, following Roman Jakobson, “is the superimposed struc-
ture of signifiers in which metaphor finds its field” (p. 425, emphasis
added). Back to Freud (1920/1966), “The second achievement of the
dream-work is displacement …Replacing something by an allusion to it”
(p. 214, emphasis in original). For Lacan (1966/2006), displacement is
2 Beginnings 99
“this transfer of signification that metonymy displays” (p. 425, emphasis

added).
Said (1975/1985) adds that quotation is “always, even when in the
form of a passing allusion…a reminder that other writing serves to
displace present writing, to a greater or lesser extent, from its absolute,
central, proper place” (p. 22, emphasis added). In other words, quoting
is a form of self-censorship that disguises, or distorts, the latent thoughts
of the writer, that is, his or her unconscious desire. Furthermore, “other
writing” gives “a neurotic cast to the problems of originality and sincer-
ity” (p. 22), so perhaps quoting can also be read as a form of disalienation
or separation, that is, a confrontation with the Other’s (writing) desire?
Early in the book, Said (1975/1985) cautions that originality is
premised on the myth of origin as “divine, mythical and privileged”
(p. xix). Near the end of the first chapter, Said (1975/1985) quotes
Roland Barthes: “Writing is precisely that which exceeds speech; it is
a supplementary space where what is inscribed is not another uncon-
scious…but another relationship between the speaker (or hearer) and
the Unconscious” (p. 25). I feel conflicted about this argument because
modernity/coloniality marks the world historical cut from speech (e.g.,
oral tradition) to writing, from listening to reading/seeing, and from the
community to the individual. Here I am drawn to the ethic of psycho-
analysis as an ethic of speaking truthfully and listening intentionally, but
I am more interested in cultural therapeutics, that is, transcending the
dyadic relationship toward the communal, which is one of the aims of
contrapuntal psychoanalysis as liberation praxis.
Said (1975/1985) considers Freud a revolutionary alongside Coper-
nicus and Lenin (p. 32) because beginning is a discontinuous act. Erik
Erikson called Freud “the first psychoanalyst” and he argued that even
though Freud changed his field (from neurology to psychoanalysis), “the
idea of search is preserved” (Said 1975/1985, p. 33, emphasis added).
Therefore, a beginning is not only a discontinuity, but also a transfer:
“Psychoanalysis redeploys old elements, arranging them discontinuously
with, yet parallel to, the traditional manner” (p. 33, emphasis in original).
Said (1975/1985) adds:
100 R. K. Beshara
Freud’s lonely discoveries originate…a discursivity–that is, the possibility

of, as well as the rule of formation for, subsequent texts…such a begin-
ning authorizes; it constitutes an authorization for what follows from
it…yet we cannot forget that authority limits as much as it enables.
Certain concepts are inexpressible “according to Freud”…for instance,
just as the discursivity we call Freudian…is not simply the repetition of a
few ideas but the construction of thoughts, continuities, and words in a
manner authorized (discursively) by Freud. (p. 34, emphasis in original)
Said (1975/1985) argues that Freud’s Moses is characterized by a

construction of both creative energy as “the synthetic power presumed
to bring together creative work and give it form” and “an individu-
alized type which has some of the attributes of a person but not an
existential identity” (p. 58). This is because “individuality per se fails
to include transindividual experiences like economic or social develop-
ment” (p. 58). For Said (1975/1985), a text is “a [discontinuous] series
of subtexts or pre-texts or paratexts or surtexts…a transindividual field of
dispersion” (p. 58); therefore, Freud’s authority comes from his reading
of “psychological history” as a textual field of dispersion (p. 58).
In reading Freud’s last book Moses and Monotheism, which is the
subject of both Said’s last book and my fourth chapter, Said (1975/1985)
extracts the notion of Entstellung (or distortion), which had a double
meaning for Freud: “to change the appearance of something” and “to
put something in another place, to displace” (p. 59). Freud compares
textual distortion to murder (p. 59), which parallels an argument I
will be making later in the book about writing as a form of killing .
Said (1975/1985), following Freud, also makes the case that “writing
is not coterminous with nature, and therefore it deforms its subjects
(life, liberty, happiness) more than it forms them. Reading and writ-
ing…are particular distortions of general realties. There is violence in
texts” (p. 59, emphasis added). To become a Lacanian analyst, one
must go through analytical formation (as distinct from training), but
contrapuntal psychoanalysis entails analytical deformation.
In other words, writing is not an abstract vocation that concerns only
the author or the literary critic; writing is a concrete inscription of the
Symbolic order and, as such, it is always accompanied by the specter
2 Beginnings 101
of law. Additionally, there is the Real jouissance of writing, for the letter
kills the body. The body, alienated in language, becomes symptomatically
overwritten by the signifierness of the signifier. Writing turns the enun-
ciating subject into the subject of the statement (cf. Lacan 1966/2006,
p. 650), which points to the ideology of writing: writing-as-interpellation.
Writing hails, positions, and fixes subjects (and objects) in discourse.
An Imaginary fantasy of immortality sustains the ideology of writing:
Authors narcissistically write texts in the hope that these texts will outlive
them. Does not writing as an abstract mode, which distorts reality, fit
perfectly within the logic of racialized capitalism? For example, we are
generally more impressed with the written representations of ‘ancient’
or ‘premodern’ cultures that we find in museums than we are with the
ongoing material realities of some of these transmodern cultures, many of
which are still among us. Earlier in the book, I wrote about my location,
or positionality, vis-à-vis Indigenous tribes in New Mexico, for example.
This ideological dimension of writing (for not all writing is ideological)
is why when I mention to anyone in the US that I hail from Egypt,
they immediately (i.e., unconsciously) think of the Pyramids of Giza or
the Sphinx, but never of modern Egypt. Said’s explanation? Orientalism.
More on that in the next chapter.
In this excerpt, Said (1975/1985) explores Freud’s analogy between
psychoanalysis and archeology and his radical method of construction
(as opposed to interpretation):
For Freud the material of mental life is analyzable through language,

since only words can engage the unconscious skillfully enough for
them to bear its stresses. Dreams are not simply images that tell, for
rather it is the interpretation of dreams by words–the dreamer’s words,
the analysts’ interpreting words–that tells about dreams. Among many
other negative characteristics of the unconscious, the absence of pictures
fairly describes it, according to Freud. Despite his frequent comparisons
between psychoanalysis and archeology, Freud carefully distinguished
material phenomena…from psychological energy. He said that mental
life is apprehended by psychoanalysis from three standpoints–dynamic,
economic, and topographical–each of which deliberately resists visual
102 R. K. Beshara
analogy. When, very late in life, Freud assessed the role of construc-
tion made by the analyst during analysis, there, too, he steered clear of
pictures. (p. 64)
Freud’s distinction between material phenomena and psychological

energy is nothing short of Kant’s (1781/1998, p. 347) distinction
between phenomena (a world of the senses) and noumena (a world of
the understanding) in philosophy, wherein there is a Real material world
out there, which we do not have direct access to, and, therefore, what we
call reality is our Symbolic-Imaginary representations of this inaccessible
(or unconscious) Real material world. For this reason, Freud moves from
interpretation to construction since the former presumes that the analyst
can directly access the Real when in fact it can only be reconstructed
in analysis using words. Ferdinand de Saussure (1916/2011) revisited
the Kantian problem using structural linguistics, and for him, the inac-
cessibility of the noumenal world (and consequently, the impossibility
of objectivity) was not the central issue; de Saussure (1916/2011) was
more concerned with the relationship between signifiers and signifieds,
or representations and concepts: “The bond between the signifier and
the signified is arbitrary” (p. 232, emphasis added).
Said (1975/1985) writes that Freud was not bothered by accuracy in
analysis because “there can be no direct correspondence between a mental
construction…and actual events” (p. 65). Condensation and displace-
ment are effects of this lack of correspondence, and for Freud, the result
of displacement was not only distortion, but also delusion (as cited in
Said 1975/1985, p. 65). This problem of accuracy does not mean that
anything goes because delusions:
build up around a kernel of historical truth that by definition appears

exclusively in verbal substitutions for the truth, or as an already repudiated
experience. Words, therefore, stand at the beginning, are the beginning,
of a series of substitutions. Words signify a movement away from and
around the fragment. This is another way of characterizing the human
capacity for language. (p. 65, emphasis in original)
To put it differently, what kind of worlds/words do we (the oppressed)

want to (re)construct, which we will also enjoy? I have been intentionally
2 Beginnings 103
constructing a world of words, which displaces racialized capitalism using

the method of contrapuntal psychoanalysis as liberation praxis. This
world is not a utopia, or something completely new; rather, it is a linking
of the best (read: socially just) ideas and practices of already existing
worlds. Contrapuntal psychoanalysis then is an indexing of what works
from the perspective of social ecology, which is the “subversive opposite”
(Said 1975/1985, p. 75) of racialized capitalism—to use Freud’s notion
of “the primal word” (p. 78) or that “signs or words in a dream [or in
waking life] can mean their opposite” (p. 75). After all, “In any of the
reconstructive techniques, whether history, philosophy, or personal narra-
tive, the objective, according to Freud, is both to create alternatives to a
confusing reality and to minimize the pain of experience. In other words,
the project is an economic one” (Said 1975/1985, p. 94, emphasis added).
PoliticalCompass.org shows us that the left-right paradigm is a one-
dimensional economic spectrum, which does not take into account
the social axis. Using a Cartesian coordinate system, wherein x is the
economic axis and y is the social axis, we can easily map four quadrants
(and many nodal worlds). The two quadrants on the left are socialist, and
the two quadrants on the right are capitalist, but the social axis pertains
to the question of political liberty, wherein authoritarianism is at the top
and libertarianism is at the bottom. I situate this project in the lower-left
quadrant of the Political Compass; therefore, contrapuntal psychoanal-
ysis as liberation praxis is a movement toward, and an actualization of,
anarcho-socialism, which is the obverse of racialized capitalism.
According to Said (1975/1985), Freud’s (like Nietzsche’s) work is
“radically anthropological” because he:
regarded the task of accurately describing man [or woman] as fundamen-

tally connected with three problems. One is the problem of biography
as embodied in genealogical sequence…The second problem is that of
language in relation to human reality…The third problem is that of
dealing with man’s [or woman’s] fiction-making capabilitie s. (p. 158,
emphasis added)
Said (1975/1985) shows how Nietszche prefigures Freud in his

indexing of Oedipus as the one to begin “the insane [i.e., historically,
104 R. K. Beshara
fearfully, and perennially demanding] task of gaining knowledge” which

“requires finding, first, a form of understanding that recognizes this truth
[about humanity’s environmental alienation], and second, a language and
a text in which to contain, express, realize, fulfill, or incarnate this knowl-
edge” (p. 159). Nietzsche also writes about the unteachable, which, for
Freud, is the unconscious.
Psychoanalysis reveals that the human subject is neither natural nor
cultural; rather, he or she is the desire, and failure, to transcend the
antagonism between need and demand. Ironically, or masochistically,
it is desiring itself (and not realizing objects of desire), which we find
enjoyable. As a result of this complexity, “nature [the Other?] has to
be interpreted, or read, just as man [or woman] must be read and
interpreted” (Said 1975/1985, p. 160). Said (1975/1985) continues:
This is a fundamental point which, in The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud

was to make many times and in many different ways. Dreams, he says at
some point, do not come into being with the intention of being under-
stood: they simply are (and they are problematical), they unscrupulously
yield to any method of granting visual representation to dream-thoughts,
and their unity is simply an illusion. Therefore, like nature under the gaze
of the scientist, dreams are hieroglyphics which can only be understood
by schooling oneself in their peculiar mechanisms. Yet the most problem-
atical thing about dreams is that everyone, even their interpreter, dreams
them. How, then, does one separate the object of study from the object
of experience–or from the experience tout court ? The relatively simple
answer to this question is appealing indeed, and Freud seems not to have
evaded it: first one experiences the object, then one analyzes it. (p. 160,
Lacan names this object, with its “subjective distortion of reality”

(Said 1975/1985, pp. 160–161): objet a. The objet a is an object-cause
of desire, a part of the Other that we desire and fantasize about as
something that we once had but somehow lost and/or as something
that, once realized, will make us satisfied beyond imagination, which,
of course, is impossible. This is the central object of study in psycho-
analysis and it also the central object of experience for any human (i.e.,
desiring) subject. In fact, the praxis of psychoanalysis is premised on the
2 Beginnings 105
analyst playing the part of the objet a for the analysand to cause their
desire to speak, to free associate, to unravel how their unconscious is
knotted together by a particular network of signifiers, which constitutes
the subject’s symptomatic enjoyment.
When it comes to dream interpretation, “Freud [too systematic a
writer to deliver a slapdash text] does not choose between illusion and
reality until the very end” because he “wishes his text to be the stage, the
locale, where dream interpretation takes place” (Said 1975/1985, p. 161).
Further, Freud’s
text is ordered according to a planned dissociation, a dismemberment of

image clusters (dreams) into fragments of thought…he deliberately avoids
the instruments socially, culturally, and institutionally linked in the West
to the practice of fiction, even as his material is…connected to that same
practice. (p. 161)
Said (1975/1985) is less interested in Freud the scientist and more

absorbed by Freud the writer, particularly how the latter authorizes
psychoanalysis through his writing style: “Freud’s general theory of
dreams and of the unconscious seems undeniably to have influenced
the vocabulary of modern writing” (p. 163). This is not simply an argu-
ment about psychologization, or how psychoanalytic discourse qua the
psy-complex has colonized our popular imagination even if most people
confuse the unconscious with the subconscious. Rather, it is an argument
about Freud’s influence as a modern writer.
Said (1975/1985) argues that writing before Freud (i.e., the classical
novel) was conventional; therefore, Freud begins a new, or modern,
style of writing—“an amalgam of scientific and ‘traditional’ wisdom”
(p. 163)— which displaces numerous conventions that were taken for
granted:
The Interpretation is not only an encyclopedia of dream interpretation, a

theater for staging Freud’s scientific investigations: it is also a text whose
intention is to begin discourse one of whose principal purposes is the
conscious avoidance of certain specific textual conventions. The first of
these conventions is supplementarity…A second convention is the adop-
tion of a logic of structure and argument based on temporal and spatial
106 R. K. Beshara
forward movement…Third is the convention of adequacy…Fourth is the

convention of finality…The fifth and final convention is that the unity, or
integrity, of the text is maintained by a series of genealogical connections.
Next, Said (1975/1985) highlights the function of the paternal

metaphor—what Lacan (1966/2006) calls the “Name-of-the-Father”—
in Freud’s writing: “Not only does [the role of the father] play a key role
in Freud’s discussion of the Oedipus complex, but it also returns later
in Freud’s historical essays, such as Moses and Monotheism and Totem
and Taboo” (p. 163, emphasis in original). It is worth noting that two
roots for the signifier ‘author’ are father and creator. Said (1975/1985)
adds, “There are strong echoes of paternity as well in his analyses of the
superego, of culture and of religion” (p. 163). Further, Said (1975/1985)
asserts that there is a structural equivalency between “Freud’s displace-
ment and qualification in his psychology of the father’s role” and the
“displacements and qualifications made in those genealogical, hierar-
chical, and consecutive conventions to be found in the idea of a text”
(p. 163). Another name for this structural equivalency is “the killing of
the father” (Lacan 1966/2006, p. 393), which is the ending of old (clas-
sical) conventions and the beginning of new (modern) conventions. In
other words, by killing the father (i.e., tradition), Freud becomes the
father (of psychoanalysis).
The structure of a dream, of analysis, and of the Freudian text is
that of the palimpsest: “sections of which remain vivid while others
are almost invisible or partial” (Said 1975/1985, p. 165). There are
eight German editions of The Interpretation of Dreams, for example. Said
(1975/1985) points to the following sentence, Freud’s formula for the
nature of dreams, to say something about the (unconscious) form of
his text: “a dream is a (disguised) fulfillment of a (suppressed or repressed)
wish” (p. 166, emphasis in original). Here is Said’s (1975/1985) analysis
of the Freudian text (or Freud’s unconscious) as being structured like a
palimpsest:
2 Beginnings 107
The typographical devices–the italics and the parentheses–used here to

indicate Freud’s later changes, emphasize the proleptic as well as the reca-
pitulatory aspects of the observation. In addition, the parentheses on the
printed page represent the mechanisms of disguise and repression, not
only by virtue of their presence, but also, paradoxically, by their delayed
appearance. (p. 166)
In other words, The Interpretation of Dreams is a reflexive text, wherein

Freud’s unconscious is hidden in plain sight, in the very form of the text
itself. Across eight German editions, Freud edits, cuts, revises, rephrases,
adds/removes, and censors his text on behalf of, and for, the Other. As
Said (1975/1985) puts it, Freud rambles on the royal road to the uncon-
scious (p. 164), and in this sense, the text reveals the desire of the analyst
(writer/dreamer).
Said (1975/1985) then shows a second textual consequence, that is,
how Freud’s interpretation, in the realm of language, disrupts the dream-
plot by transforming “the dream from images into words” (p. 167).
Freud’s “antivisual” (p. 167) and non-sequential analytic method vis-à-
vis a dream’s “images and sequences, or plots” comes across as aniconic.
Verbal interpretation reverse engineers the dream-work in order to get
at the dream-thoughts. Furthermore, Freud’s “verbal interpretation of
dreams operates at the sentence (or even phrase) level rather than at the
paragraph level, even though the latter more closely parallels the overall
organizational pattern of the dream” (p. 166).
Echoing Lacan’s point about the logic of not-all—“a non-universal
which admits of no exception” (Evans 1996, p. 222)—in Other jouis-
sance, here is Said’s (1975/1985) definition of interpretation: “Interpre-
tation is a field of understanding in which statements are dispersed but
whose positions can be determined with regard only to certain (but not
all ) other statements” (p. 169, emphasis added). And here is what he also
says about how to break through tangles as “barriers to an additive sort
of knowledge” (p. 169): “That which resists interpretation–the tangle of
thoughts [i.e., knowledge of incest]–can be unraveled by the poet, but
not without sacrificing Oedipus and, indeed, our pride and ignorance”
(p. 170).
108 R. K. Beshara
Oedipus is “a break in the [family] sequence” just like a text is neither

“the sum of its words added together” nor an author is “free of the
unseemly implications of his [or her] writing” (Said 1975/1985, p. 171).
The unconscious is an encounter with complexity, whose nonlinearity
and multiplicity is disruptive for consciousness: “The collapse of the one
into the many, of the genealogical line into a plurality of ‘unnatural’ rela-
tionship, of systematic linear analysis into a tangled skein of problems–all
these leave sustained effects in consciousness” (p. 170). Freud does not
merely theorize the unconscious, he embodies its complexity with his
writing style. This is precisely why Said finds Freud, the modern writer,
fascinating. By killing the father, or “paternal originality [or authority],”
Freud (like Oedipus) is authorizing complexity as “a structure of theo-
retical understanding” (p. 173). Incest should not be read literally in this
context, but metonymically as the intertextual, or adjacent, enjoyment of
desiring, which has to do with the text being a polysexual tangle (p. 265).
Or to put in Said’s (1975/1985) own words:
In a material and legal way, the role of the father for a text is taken by the
author, whose ideas, arguments, and conclusions are viewed as emerging
sequentially in the writing, as being his offspring…Thus the text of the
Interpretation can be traced back step by step to Freud’s own self-analysis
and the discovery of his own Oedipus complex…Interpretation does away
with, or kills, its author-father, Freud. (p. 172, emphasis in original)
What makes the praxis of psychoanalysis radical is its potential for

democratic polyvocity: “Underlying the Interpretation is the analytic rela-
tionship between the dreamer and interpreter…that replaces the author’s
univocity [with polyvocity]…Insofar as interpretation is concerned,
then, Freud sees analysis as a joint venture that makes possible a
mutual discourse” (Said 1975/1985, p. 174, emphasis in original). Said
(1975/1985) adds:
In the evolving discursive relationship between patient and analyst…the

analyst becomes brother, interlocutor, discursive partner…Freud’s work
accomplishes the institutionalization of its beginning intention, the effort
to understand psychological reality as something essentially available only
to interpretation, and yet available to neither direct representability (one
2 Beginnings 109
cannot draw pictures of it, nor mimetically portray it in language) nor

univocal statement. A beginning intention, therefore, is in constant need
of reworking: it is not, like the “author” an origin to which, by virtue
of precedence and unchanging being, everything can be referred for
explanation. Above all, an intention in the psychoanalytic discourse is
the immediate practical application of the mutuality between [humans]
which ensues when a repressive central authority [e.g., the patriarchal
primal horde or racialized capitalism] is removed. (p. 174)
Even though Freud was unhappy with The Interpretation of Dreams

“as a written textual object” (p. 176), Said (1975/1985) argues that the
text’s “lack of form” or its “indeterminacy…is necessarily congruent with
a reality largely unknown (the unconscious) and always incompletely
grasped by language” (p. 176); or as Lacan would put it: The Other,
like the subject, is also “barred” or “incomplete” (Fink 1995, p. 195).
Is psychoanalysis a Weltanschauung ? Many (if not most) psychoana-
lysts will answer with a resounding no even though “Freud could not but
recognize that the psychoanalytic viewpoint was in fact just such an alter-
native available to the culture” (Said 1975/1985, p. 176). Furthermore,
Freud’s “texts established not only a precedent but also a sustaining struc-
ture of language; and it was this language that determined the bounds of
what was psychoanalytically possible to say” (p. 176, emphasis in original).
Freud’s method of interpretation is premised on the following: “the
materiality of language…further objectifies dreams, draws them out from
the recesses of subjectivity, where they guard sleep, and admits them into
discourse” (Said 1975/1985, p. 178). For Said (1975/1985):
the images of a dream, the interpretive verbal transcription of the dream,

and the attendant analysis belong to different orders of substitution.
While taking different forms, each bears a trace of the unconscious
[but does not so much make clear what the unconscious is as begin and
continue the traces of the unconscious in language ]: the image as distortion,
the transcription as pseudocontinuity or plot, the analysis as thoughts leading
to a (supposed) wish. (pp. 178–179, emphasis added)
In conclusion, Freud invented a system of thought (i.e., psychoanal-

ysis) “which no image in words could adequately represent” (p. 229),
110 R. K. Beshara
wherein the human is “the possibility of an alternative, or a second time”

(p. 262). In the next chapter, I will show how Freud’s method of dream
interpretation unconsciously influenced Said’s (1978/2003) method of
contrapuntal interpretation in Orientalism. Here is Said (1975/1985)
reminding us of Freud’s method:
Freud’s text is a redistribution of language according to a dynamic of

dissociation and association. In less abstract terms, this means that Freud
takes the images of a dream and dissolves them by putting them into
words, then allows these words to make associations with other words
and ideas, and so on until a new form of understanding is achieved.
(p. 264)
References
Bhabha, H. K. (1994). The location of culture. Abingdon, UK: Routledge.
De Saussure, F. (1916/2011). Course in general linguistics (W. Baskin, Trans.).
New York, NY: Columbia University Press.
Evans, D. (1996). An introductory dictionary of Lacanian psychoanalysis.
Fink, B. (1995). The Lacanian subject: Between language and Jouissance.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Foucault, M. (1975/1977). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison (A.
Sheridan, Trans.). New York, NY: Vintage.
Freud, S. (1909/1961). Five lectures on psycho-analysis (J. Strachey, Trans.). New
Freud, S. (1919/2003). The uncanny (D. McLintock, Trans.). London, UK:
Penguin.
Freud, S. (1920/1966). Introductory lectures on psycho-analysis (J. Strachey,
Hassan, I. (2001). From postmodernism to postmodernity: The local/global
context. Philosophy and Literature, 25 (1), 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1353/
phl.2001.0011.
2 Beginnings 111
Kant, I. (1781/1998). Critique of pure reason (P. Guyer & A. W. Wood, Trans.).
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Lacan, J. (1973/2004). The four fundamental concepts of psycho-analysis (A.
Sheridan, Trans.). London, UK: Karnac.
Granta.
3
Orientalism
Orientalism is Edward Said’s (1978/2003) magnum opus; despite being

his third book, it is certainly his most widely read and cited text, and,
as established earlier, it is also considered the text that begins postcolo-
nialism as a field of study. What interests me in this chapter is the fact
that Sigmund Freud (who undoubtedly influenced Said) is, more or less,
repressed in the text; Said makes significant use of key psychoanalytic
concepts, such as latent dream-thoughts and manifest dream-content
without any direct engagement with Freud (1899/2010). This is strange
because three years earlier, in Beginnings, Said (1975/1985) dedicated a
whole section (pp. 158–182) to analyzing not only Freud’s The Inter-
pretation of Dreams but also some of his other texts: Totem and Taboo,
Moses and Monotheism, and so on. Furthermore, Said (1975/1985)
directly engages with the notions of latent dream-thoughts and mani-
fest dream-content in Beginnings (pp. 179–180), so indisputably he is
both interested in Freud and knowledgeable about psychoanalysis.
Therefore, why is Freud repressed in Orientalism? I will argue that it is
a function of a theoretical antagonism within the text between Foucault
and Freud, wherein Said ends up siding with Foucault over Freud,

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56743-9_3
114 R. K. Beshara
which is paradoxical because Foucault (1976/1978) rejected the “repres-

sive hypothesis” and yet Said repressed Freud—therefore, disproving
Foucault by unconsciously aligning his method with Freud’s through
his use of contrapuntal interpretation. Perhaps this is why Said aban-
dons Foucault after Orientalism, and returns to Freud toward the end of
his life? Beginning-again as it were. Before getting into the nitty-gritty
of my central argument, I want to unpack what Said means by Orien-
talism and how he goes about studying it through colonial discourse
analysis, or what should, more accurately, be described as contrapuntal
interpretation. I define contrapuntal interpretation as a critique of both
the ideology and materiality of modernity/coloniality, or what I have
been calling the apparatus of racialized capitalism, of which Orientalism
is a part. Said (1978/2003) is critical of the apparatus (i.e., ideology
and materiality) of Orientalism. As an ideology, Orientalism is both a
discourse and a fantasy.
I use the term ideology, following Žižek (1989), even though Said
(1978/2003) prefers the Gramscian notion of “cultural hegemony” (p
7), wherein ruling ideas are a function of consent, and not of a domi-
nating ruling class. My use of the term ideology is more psychoanalytic
than Marxist: “In ideology, fantasy is the screen that supports discourse”
(Beshara, 2019, p. 10). Said (1978/2003) writes that Orientalism “is not
an airy European fantasy about the Orient” (p. 6), and this is not my
argument. I am using fantasy, as a technical term from psychoanalysis
(cf. Beshara, 2019, pp. 40–50), to denote two contradictory functions
of fantasy-as-screen: (1) the fantasy-screen that conceals and (2) the
fantasy-screen onto which one projects his or her desires. The Orient,
in Orientalist fantasy, both conceals the Real Orient, which can never be
represented, and is a screen onto which the following is projected from
the European imagination: “a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting
memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences” (Said, 1978/2003,
p. 1). This psychoanalytic notion of fantasy, particularly “sexual fantasy”
(p. 190), is implicit in Said’s method of contrapuntal interpretation as
this quote shows:
3 Orientalism 115
the imaginative examination of things Oriental was based more or less

exclusively upon a sovereign Western consciousness out of whose unchal-
lenged centrality an Oriental world emerged, first according to general
ideas about who or what was an Oriental, then according to a detailed
logic governed not simply by empirical reality but by a battery of desires,
repressions, investments, and projections. (p. 8, emphasis added)
What is Orientalism? Said (1978/2003) conceptualizes Orientalism

using signifiers from Foucault—“to whose work [he is] greatly indebted”
(p. 23)—such as: “discourse” (p. 3), “discursive formation” (p. 23),
“archive” (p. 41), and “apparatus” (p. 204). But, most significantly, Said
(1978/2003) is careful to point out that Orientalism is not “just another
idea” because of its “material effectiveness” (p. 23). Whereas Foucault
conceived of the subject as an effect of discourse, Said has a different
notion of subjectivity (cf. Pannian, 2016), a psychoanalytic one:
I do believe in the determining imprint of individual writers upon the

otherwise anonymous collective body of texts constituting a discursive
formation like Orientalism…Foucault believes that in general the indi-
vidual text or author counts for very little; empirically, in the case of
Orientalism (and perhaps nowhere else) I find this not to be so. (p. 23)
By Orientalism, Said (1978/2003) means three different but interre-

lated things (academic, imaginative, and historical/material):
Anyone who teaches, writes about, or researches the Orient—and this

applies whether the person is an anthropologist, sociologist, historian, or
philologist—either in its specific or its general aspects, is an Orientalist,
and what he or she does is Orientalism…Orientalism is a style of thought
based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between
“the Orient” and (most of the time) “the Occident”…Orientalism [is] a
Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over
the Orient. (pp. 2–3)
Said’s (1978/2003) principal argument in the book (with my Laca-

nian twist) is that the apparatus of Orientalism says very little about
the Orient and Orientals as objets a, but it certainly reveals so much
116 R. K. Beshara
about the projective identifications of Orientalist subjects. Accordingly,

Orientalism is:
a distribution of geopolitical awareness into aesthetic, scholarly, economic,

sociological, historical, and philological texts; it is an elaboration not only
of a basic geographical distinction (the world is made up of two unequal
halves, Orient and Occident) but also of a whole series of “interests”
which, by such means as scholarly discovery, philological reconstruc-
tion, psychological analysis, landscape and sociological description, it not
only creates but also maintains; it is, rather than expresses, a certain
will or intention to understand, in some cases to control, manipulate,
even to incorporate, what is a manifestly different (or alternative and
novel) world; it is, above all, a discourse that is by no means in direct,
corresponding relationship with political power in the raw, but rather is
produced and exists in an uneven exchange with various kinds of power,
shaped to a degree by the exchange with power political (as with a colonial
or imperial establishment), power intellectual (as with reigning sciences
like comparative linguistics or anatomy, or any of the modern policy
sciences), power cultural (as with orthodoxies and canons of taste, texts,
values), power moral (as with ideas about what “we” do and what “they”
cannot do or understand as “we” do). Indeed, my real argument is that
Orientalism is—and does not simply represent—a considerable dimen-
sion of modern political-intellectual culture, and as such has less to do
with the Orient than it does with “our” world. (Said, 1978/2003, p. 12,
Further, Said (1978/2003) makes a distinction between classical

Orientalism, or “representations of the Orient before the last third of the
eighteenth century” (p. 22), and modern Orientalism (p. 122), which
coincides with Napoleon’s Egyptian expedition (1798–1801). Classical
Orientalism can be traced back to the imaginative geography established
in Ancient Greece exemplified in texts like Homer’s The Iliad , Aeschylus’s
The Persians, and Euripides’s The Bacchae (Said, 1978/2003, p. 56). Here
is Said’s (1978/2003) definition of imaginative geography (cf. spatial
colonial difference):
this universal practice of designating in one’s mind a familiar space which

is “ours” and an unfamiliar space beyond “ours” which is “theirs” is a way
3 Orientalism 117
of making geographical distinctions that can be entirely arbitrary. I use

the word “arbitrary” here because imaginative geography of the “our land-
barbarian land” variety does not require that the barbarians acknowledge
the distinction. It is enough for “us” to set up these boundaries in our
own minds; “they” become “they” accordingly, and both their territory
and their mentality are designated as different from “ours.” (p. 54)
Said (1978/2003) shows that both imaginative geography along with

“historical knowledge” (p. 55; cf. temporal colonial difference) Orien-
talize the Orient, that is, they are not only forms of discursive othering
(us v. them), they are also materially oppressive and violent since they
are sustained by a dehumanizing fantasy (superior being v. inferior
nonbeing):
Orientalism is never far from…the idea of Europe, a collective notion

identifying “us” Europeans as against all “those” non-Europeans, and
indeed it can be argued that the major component in European culture is
precisely what made that culture hegemonic both in and outside Europe:
the idea of European identity as a superior one in comparison with all the
non-European peoples and cultures [who are presumed to be barbarian
and/or primitive]. (p. 7, emphasis added)
We see this Orientalizing of the Orient in Ancient Greek imagina-

tive geography: “Europe is powerful and articulate; Asia is defeated and
distant” (Said, 1978/2003, p. 57), but Orientalism as an academic field
can be traced back to the Church Council of Vienne in 1312 (pp. 49–
50). For this reason, I argued in Decolonial Psychoanalysis (Beshara, 2019)
that while the discourse of modern Orientalism began in 1798, colonial
fantasies are much older as a result of the workings of imaginative geog-
raphy (spatial colonial difference) and historical knowledge (temporal
colonial difference) in European culture. I traced the fantasy of Islam-
ophobia to 1492, for example, because of the “transference from the
Muslim Other to the Amerindian Other” (Beshara, 2019, p. 42).
On this note, I want to add that while the pre-colonial ‘Americas’
are technically West of Europe, they are actually part of the Orient
within the logic of Orientalism for two reasons: (1) After sailing across
the Atlantic Ocean in search of a new, presumably faster, sea route to
118 R. K. Beshara
India, Christopher Columbus et al. reached the shore of Haití (Española)

on December 5, 1942. Indigenous people in the Americas are still
called Indians as a result of this colonial legacy. For this reason, some
Indigenous people today prefer the term ‘Indian’ over ‘Native American’
because it signifies the ignorance of the colonizers. Not mentioning the
racist connotation of the term ‘native’ (or natural) as the opposite of
‘cultural.’ (2) The colonial imaginative geography works in the inverse
direction, too.
As Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz (2014) shows, the phrase “Indian country”
in US history and present reality is used to refer to “enemy territory”
(p. 56), whether in Vietnam (p. 148) or Iraq (p. 193). Not mentioning
the Navy SEAL’s use of the code name “Geronimo” for their target:
Osama bin Laden (p. 56). The metonymic displacement exposes the
following signifying chain, which is operating unconsciously as the logic
of coloniality: ‘Indian’ (Oriental) → ‘enemy’ (outside) ∴ ‘Indigenous’
(Geronimo) → ‘terrorist’ (bin Laden). Consequently, since there is no
Real Orient, the signifier ‘Orient’ does not simply refer to cultures East
of Europe. The Orient signifies ‘barbarism’, according to the discourse
of Orientalism; that is, ‘inferior’ non-European cultures in toto that are
outside the ‘civilized’ center of Europe. Orientals then are ‘primitives’
or ‘subhumans’ who are supposedly lagging behind the temporality of
European modernity (i.e., the ‘present’). Said (1978/2003) implicitly
acknowledges these links, which is why he uses the signifiers ‘Oriental’
and ‘Other’ interchangeably throughout the text; the Imaginary Orient
in particular is a substitute for Symbolic-Real Otherness in general:
Orient(al) → Other.
One of the most radical concepts introduced by Said (1978/2003)
in his contrapuntal interpretation of Orientalism is that of exteriority,
which is the equivalent of extimacy (extimité ) in psychoanalysis: “Exti-
macy is not the contrary of intimacy. Extimacy says that the intimate is
Other–like a foreign body, a parasite” (Miller, 1988, p. 123). I say radical
because exteriority is not outside in Agamben’s (1998) sense of politics
as the division between outside (bare life) and inside (good life). Rather,
it names the psychosocial reality of subjectivity, or the exteriority of the
unconscious as the Other’s discourse. Put differently, the conscious inte-
rior (ego) is monological or self-referential while the exterior unconscious
3 Orientalism 119
($) is dialogical or relational (cf. Pavón Cuéllar, 2010). Fantasy ($ ♦ a),

as the link between the subject and the Other, is what makes exteriority
possible.
Orientalism, as a fantasy, can be located in the “surface” of Orientalist
texts (p. 20), or their form, because the unconscious is not a function
of some depth in the psyche, it is hidden in plain sight in the “fab-
ric” of discourse (Said, 1978/2003, p. 24; cf. point de capiton in Lacan,
1966/2006, p. 681). The pop psychological notion of the subconscious
is often confused with psychoanalytic concept of the unconscious, a
distinction that even Freud (1899/2010, p. 610) addressed; the former
signifier (subconscious) implies a region below consciousness, while the
latter (unconscious) literally signifies not-consciousness, a negativity.
Here is Said’s (1978/2003) thick description of exteriority and its relation
to the problem of representing the Real Orient:
my concern with authority does not entail analysis of what lies hidden in
the Orientalist text, but analysis rather of the text’s surface, its exteriority
to what it describes….Orientalism is premised upon exteriority, that is,
on the fact that the Orientalist, poet or scholar, makes the Orient speak,
describes the Orient, renders its mysteries plain for and to the West. He is
never concerned with the Orient except as the first cause of what he says.
What he says and writes, by virtue of the fact that it is said or written,
is meant to indicate that the Orientalist is outside the Orient, both as
an existential and as a moral fact. The principal product of this exteri-
ority is of course representation: as early as Aeschylus’s play The Persians
the Orient is transformed from a very far distant and often threatening
Otherness into figures that are relatively familiar (in Aeschylus’s case,
grieving Asiatic women). The dramatic immediacy of representation in
The Persians obscures the fact that the audience is watching a highly
artificial enactment of what a non-Oriental has made into a symbol for
the whole Orient. My analysis of the Orientalist text therefore places
emphasis on the evidence, which is by no means invisible, for such repre-
sentations as representations, not as “natural” depictions of the Orient.
This evidence is found just as prominently in the so-called truthful text
(histories, philological analyses, political treatises) as in the avowedly
artistic (i.e., openly imaginative) text. The things to look at are style,
120 R. K. Beshara
figures of speech, setting, narrative devices, historical and social circum-

stances, not the correctness of the representation nor its fidelity to some
great original. The exteriority of the representation is always governed
by some version of the truism that if the Orient could represent itself,
it would; since it cannot, the representation does the job, for the West,
and faute de mieux [for lack of something more desirable], for the poor
Orient. “Sie können sich nicht vertreten, sie müssen vertreten werden,”
[They cannot represent themselves, they have to be represented] as Marx
wrote in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.
Another reason for insisting upon exteriority is that I believe it needs
to be made clear about cultural discourse and exchange within a culture
that what is commonly circulated by it is not “truth” but representations.
It hardly needs to be demonstrated again that language itself is a highly
organized and encoded system, which employs many devices to express,
indicate, exchange messages and information, represent, and so forth. In
any instance of at least written language, there is no such thing as a deliv-
ered presence, but a re-presence, or a representation. (pp. 20–21, emphasis
in original)
In Decolonial Psychoanalysis, I have written about how “the link…-

between transmodern exteriority and the decolonial unconscious is
extremely important as the foundation for what I have been calling
decolonial psychoanalysis” (p. 62, emphasis in original). In addition to
Said’s (1978/2003) notion of exteriority and Lacan’s concept of extimacy
(as cited in Miller, 1988), Dussel (2002) has some important insights to
contribute here regarding the exteriority of the transmodern Other:
“trans”-modernity affirms “from without ” the essential components of

modernity’s own excluded cultures in order to develop a new civiliza-
tion for the twenty-first century. Accepting this massive exteriority to
European modernity allows one to comprehend that there are cultural
moments situated “outside” of modernity. (p. 224, emphasis in original)
I see a theoretical connection between psychoanalysis and postcolo-

nialism vis-à-vis the Other. The Oriental Other is both an Imaginary
other (identified in images) and a Symbolic Other (signified in words).
Said’s (1978/2003) focus in his book is on the latter: textual repre-
sentations of the Oriental Other. If the unconscious is the Other’s
3 Orientalism 121
discourse, then the (post)colonial unconscious is the (post)modern

Other’s discourse: Orientalism (Beshara, 2019, p. 64). The counterpoint
to this axiom is: the decolonial unconscious is the transmodern Other’s
discourse.
We can then conclude that the Real Orient, or what Said (1978/2003)
calls the “real thing as ‘the Orient’” (p. 21, emphasis in original), cannot
be represented because the Real, or the Orient as das Ding (the Thing),
“is essentially that which resists symbolization and thus resists the dialec-
tization characteristic of the symbolic order, in which one thing can
be substituted for another” (Fink, 1995, p. 92). This applies to the
Real Occident, too, of course. Said’s (1978/2003) point is that the
‘Orient’ and the ‘Occident’ are both charged (or cathected) but asym-
metrical signifiers (i.e., the Orient is inferior) within the apparatus of
Orientalism because Orientalist representation is premised on a signifier
(Orient) representing the (Oriental) subject for another signifier (exotic,
mysterious, dangerous, etc.).
Representation will always fail, we know that much from Kant
(1781/1998), because of that Real (unbridgeable) gap between noumena
and phenomena; however, if liberation is our praxis then Orientals must
represent themselves as subjects without falling into the Orientalist trap of
being representatives for the Orient. This form of “cultural resistance”
is precisely what Said (1993) explores in Culture and Imperialism, his
sequel to Orientalism, which responds to Orientalist misrepresentations
with Oriental self-representations, thereby, answering his earlier ques-
tion: “how one can study other cultures and peoples from a libertarian,
or a nonrepressive and nonmanipulative, perspective” (Said, 1978/2003,
p. 24)?. Furthermore, Said’s own writings precisely enact this style of
cultural resistance through critical self-representation, which can also be
qualified as reflexivity or positionality: where one is coming from and
where one is located.
One of Said’s (1994) books, Representations of the Intellectual , deals
directly with the problem of representation (i.e., what to repre-
sent and how to represent it) for the dissenting secular intellectual.
Sixteen years earlier, in Orientalism, Said (1978/2003) wrote about the
personal/political dimension as an aspect of his contemporary reality,
particularly his attempt with the book, following Gramsci, to “inventory
122 R. K. Beshara
the traces” of Euro-colonial culture upon him as an “Oriental subject”

(p. 25), who grew up in two British colonies (Palestine and Egypt). Simi-
larly, I hope with this book, which is an affiliative praxis, to represent
myself (as a secular critic) and my dissenting ideas without being seen
as a representative for where I come from (Cairo, Egypt, North Africa),
where I am currently located (New Mexico, USA, North America), or
anything else for that matter (critical psychology, psychoanalysis, post-
colonialism). For Freud (1899/2010), the problem of representation was
how the dream-work process represents latent dream-thoughts to the
dreamer in the form of manifest dream-content: unconscious words →
conscious images.
Moving on to my thesis that Freud is repressed in Said’s (1978/2003)
text Orientalism, I will illustrate my evidence for this repression and
my reasoning as to why he is repressed. Said (1978/2003) cites Freud
exactly three times in his book: “a Freudian Orient” (p. 22), “Freudian-
ism” (p. 43), and “the anthropocentrism dismantled by Freud” (Abdel
Malek, 1963, as cited in Said, 1978, p. 97). And yet the first unit in the
third chapter is titled, “Latent and Manifest Orientalism” (pp. 201–225).
I have touched on this issue in Decolonial Psychoanalysis (Beshara, 2019,
pp. 44–45), but I will say more here.
First, let us establish Said’s (1978/2003) distinction between latent
Orientalism and manifest Orientalism, which is central for an elabora-
tion of contrapuntal interpretation:
The distinction I am making is really between an almost unconscious

(and certainly an untouchable) positivity, which I shall call latent Orien-
talism, and the various stated views about Oriental society, languages,
literatures, history, sociology, and so forth, which I shall call manifest
Orientalism. Whatever change occurs in knowledge of the Orient is
found almost exclusively in manifest Orientalism; the unanimity, stability,
and durability of latent Orientalism are more or less constant. (p. 206,
3 Orientalism 123
Said’s (1978/2003) distinction is undoubtedly based on Freud’s

(1899/2010) differentiation between “latent dream-thoughts” and “man-
ifest dream-content” in a dream. Latent dream-thoughts are the uncon-
scious thoughts behind the images, or manifest dream-content, that
we remember from a dream. For Freud (1899/2010), “a dream is a
(disguised) fulfilment of a (suppressed or repressed) wish” (p. 183, emphasis
in original). Freud (1899/2010) calls the process of latent dream-
thoughts becoming manifest dream-content: the “dream-work” (p. 201).
The reverse of the dream-work is “interpretation” (Freud, 1899/2010),
which is the analysis of manifest dream-content, or the translation of
images into words through free association, in order to expose the latent
dream-thoughts, or the unconscious wish, that is disguised in the dream.
Therefore, the method of contrapuntal interpretation, used by
Said (1978/2003), analyzes manifest Orientalist-content in order to
encounter latent Orientalist-thoughts. In other words, contrapuntal
interpretation reveals the unconscious wish of Orientalism, which is
disguised by the Orientalist-work. It should come as no surprise that
Said (1978/2003) described colonial empires as “great systems of system-
atic repression” (p. 251). Orientalism, as an apparatus, represses the
Orient and Orientals both psychoanalytically and politically, and this is
precisely what Said’s (1978/2003) book shows in detail. If my thesis is
not convincing enough, here is another unconscious Freudian trace in
Said’s (1978/2003) text:
in discussions of the Orient, the Orient is all absence, whereas one feels
the Orientalist and what he says as presence; yet we must not forget that
the Orientalist’s presence is enabled by the Orient’s effective absence. This
fact of substitution and displacement, as we must call it, clearly places on
the Orientalist himself a certain pressure to reduce the Orient in his work,
even after he has devoted a good deal of time to elucidating and exposing
it. (pp. 208–209, emphasis added)
Said’s (1978/2003) gendering of the Orientalist as a male is neither

accidental nor sexist, but actually describes the colonial (patriarchal,
racist, sexist) logic of modern Orientalism, which stereotypically femi-
nizes the Orient and Orientals:
124 R. K. Beshara
But there were other uses for latent Orientalism. If that group of ideas
allowed one to separate Orientals from advanced, civilizing powers, and
if the “classical” Orient served to justify both the Orientalist and his disre-
gard of modern Orientals, latent Orientalism also encouraged a peculiarly
(not to say invidiously) male conception of the world …The Oriental male
was considered in isolation from the total community in which he lived
and which many Orientalists…have viewed with something resembling
contempt and fear. Orientalism itself, furthermore, was an exclusively
male province; like so many professional guilds during the modern period,
it viewed itself and its subject matter with sexist blinders. This is especially
evident in the writing of travelers and novelists: women are usually the
creatures of a male power-fantasy. They express unlimited sensuality, they
are more or less stupid, and above all they are willing. (p. 207, emphasis
added)
Therefore, we can conclude our contrapuntal interpretation with the

following formula: Orientalism is a (disguised) fulfilment of a (suppressed
or repressed) wish to dominate the Orient and Orientals sexually and polit-
ically. This is the unity of academic, imaginative, and historical/material
Orientalisms as an apparatus. A final question: why is Freud repressed in
Orientalism (the text)?
In Orientalism, Said (1978/2003) represses Freud because of his
strategic alliance with Foucault, who provides Said with many concep-
tuals tools for analyzing Orientalism as a discursive formation and, more
importantly, as power/knowledge. At stake, here are two conceptions of
subjectivity: the Nietzschean-Foucaultian subject of power (who is an
effect of discourse) and the Freudo-Lacanian subject of desire (who is
divided by language). Alongside these two conceptions of subjectivity
are two formulations of law: law as productive and law as repressive,
respectively. While Said (1978/2003) is clearly indebted to some of
Foucault’s conceptual tools, he is unconsciously aligned with Freudo-
Lacanian notions of subjectivity and law. I have already established
Said’s (1978/2003) disagreement with Foucault regarding subjectivity,
but what about law?
In part two of the first volume of The History of Sexuality, Foucault
(1976/1978) illustrates why he rejects the “repressive hypothesis”
(pp. 16–49) in his “archeology of psychoanalysis” (p. 130). For Foucault
3 Orientalism 125
(1976/1978), psychoanalysis is a secularized ritual of confession (p. 113),

wherein sex is strategically repressed to maintain a certain power rela-
tion. In other words, for Foucault (1976/1978), the concept of sexual
repression is, in fact, a form of political oppression: “If sex is repressed,
that is, condemned to prohibition, nonexistence, and silence, then the
mere fact that one is speaking about it has the appearance of a deliberate
transgression” (p. 6).
To be fair, Freud (1920/1966) is ahead of his time when he writes
about: children being “polymorphously perverse” (p. 259), the distinc-
tion between “sexuality and reproduction” (p. 386), and the difference
between “pleasure” and “satisfaction” (p. 388). However, he is very much
a product of his time when he describes homosexuals as “perverse”
(Freud, 1920/1966, p. 258).
In psychoanalysis, the Name-of-the-Father, barring the mOther’s
desire, lays down the law for the child, which is how he or she is subjecti-
fied—by entering into language and becoming alienated in it. In French,
the Lacanian expression le nom du père implies both the ‘name’ and
the ‘no’ of the father. The Name-of-the-Father signifies the prohibitive
‘no’ that establishes the “incest taboo” (Freud, 1913/1946) as a universal
(superegoic) law of human subjectivity. The parameters of what we can
and cannot do as children, vis-à-vis the Other, is the formation of the
unconscious through repression.
So while Said (1978/2003) agrees with Foucault that Orientalism, as
a discursive formation, can be productive, he also shows how it can be
inhibiting or repressive. It is true that Said (1978/2003) conceptualizes
Orientalism, following Foucault, as a discourse or an apparatus, but he
also points to its unconscious fantasmatic dimensions (e.g., latent Orien-
talism) vis-à-vis the Orient and Orientals. Further, for Said, Orientals
are not mere effects of the discourse of Orientalism, they are subjects
(like Said) who can and must represent themselves. In other words, they
are subjects of desire or dislocated subjects (Said, 1993, p. 28), and not
merely subjects of power. Therefore, Said’s (1978/2003) repression of
Freud paradoxically affirms his affiliation with psychoanalysis.
In sum, contrapuntal psychoanalysis as liberation praxis acknowledges
the importance of theorizing (and decolonizing) power/knowledge in
the apparatus of racialized capitalism as a step toward practicing (and
126 R. K. Beshara
prefiguring) a transmodern form of desiring/enjoyment: what I call

“divine-jouissance” (Beshara, 2019, p. 61, emphasis in original).
In comparing Fanon with Foucault, this is what Said (2001) had to
say in 1985, seven years after the publication of Orientalism:
what is present in Fanon’s work and absent in the early Foucault is the
sense of active commitment. Ten years after Madness and Civilization in
1972, Foucault was involved in a television debate with Noam Chomsky.
While Chomsky spoke about his own liberation ideals, notions about
justice, and so forth, Foucault backed away and essentially admitted that
he believed in no positive truths, ideas, or ideals. And this was not true
of Fanon, whose commitments to revolutionary change, solidarity, and
liberation were very powerful and appealing to such as myself. Foucault’s
work was rather a matter of a quite remarkable ingenuity and acuity of
philosophical perception. (p. 40, emphasis in original)
Culture and Imperialism is Said’s (1993) sequel to his Orientalism

trilogy: Orientalism (1978), The Question of Palestine (1979), and
Covering Islam (1981). Culture and Imperialism was already prefigured
in Orientalism: “There is still a general essay to be written on imperi-
alism and culture” (Said, 1978/2003, p. 24). The main criticism that Said
received for Orientalism is that while he diligently deconstructed Orien-
talist representations of the Orient and Orientals, the self-representations
of Orientals were absent from the text. Said (1993) wrote Culture and
Imperialism to address this criticism:
What I left out of Orientalism was that response to Western domi-

nance which culminated in the great movement of decolonization all
across the Third World. Along with armed resistance in places as diverse
as nineteenth-century Algeria, Ireland, and Indonesia, there also went
considerable efforts in cultural resistance almost everywhere, the asser-
tions of nationalist identifications, and, in the political realm, the creation
of associations and parties whose common goal was self-determination
and national independence. (p. xii, emphasis in original)
By culture, Said (1993) means two things:

3 Orientalism 127
First of all it means all those practices, like the arts of description,
communication, and representation, that have relative autonomy from
the economic, social, and political realms and that often exist in aesthetic
forms, one of whose principal aims is pleasure…Second, and almost
imperceptibly, culture is a concept that includes a refining and elevating
element, each society’s reservoir of the best that has been known and
thought. (pp. xii–xiii)
Said’s (1993) twofold definition of culture is a nuanced development

of his earlier definition in Orientalism, which is based on the Gramscian
distinction between civil society and political society: “Culture, of course,
is to be found operating within civil society, where the influence of ideas,
of institutions, and of other persons works not through domination but
by what Gramsci calls consent” (Said, 1978/2003, p. 7).
Cultural resistance can be counter-hegemonic or decolonial, according
to Said (1993) in three ways:
One, of course, is the insistence on the right to see the community’s

history whole, coherently, integrally. Restore the imprisoned nation to
itself…The concept of the national language is central, but without the
practice of a national culture–from slogans to pamphlets and newspapers,
from folktales and heroes to epic poetry, novels, and drama–the language
is inert; national culture organizes and sustains communal memory…it
reinhabits the landscape using restored ways of life, heroes, heroines,
and exploits; it formulates expressions and emotions of pride as well as
defiance, which in turn form the backbone of the principal national inde-
pendence parties. Local slave narratives, spiritual autobiographies, prison
memoirs form a counterpoint to the Western powers’ monumental histo-
ries, official discourses, and panoptic quasi-scientific viewpoint…Second
is the idea that resistance, far from being merely a reaction to imperialism,
is an alternative way of conceiving human history. It is particularly impor-
tant to see how much this alternative reconception is based on breaking
down the barriers between cultures. Certainly, as the title of a fascinating
book has it, writing back to the metropolitan cultures, disrupting the
European narratives of the Orient and Africa, replacing them with either a
more playful or a more powerful new narrative style is a major component
128 R. K. Beshara
in the process…Third is a noticeable pull away from separatist nation-

alism toward a more integrative view of human community and human
liberation. (pp. 215–216, emphasis in original)
Cultural resistance is essential in contrapuntal psychoanalysis. Contra-

puntal, incidentally, is another name for transmodernity (i.e., modernity
and its exterior counterpoint). According to Said (1993):
By looking at the different experiences [of metropolitan and formerly

colonized societies] contrapuntally, as making up a set of what I call inter-
twined and overlapping histories, I shall try to formulate an alternative
both to a politics of blame and to the even more destructive politics of
confrontation and hostility. (p. 18)
In my own words, contrapuntal psychoanalysis accounts for both

the colonial psychoanalysis of Freud (cf. psychoanalysis as decolonial
Judaism in Frosh, 2020) and the decolonial psychoanalysis of Fanon.
It is transmodern in that it includes the best of modernity from the
perspective of its exteriority (i.e., non-European cultures). Liberation
does not mean the oppressed replacing the oppressors, it means the
oppressed leading the way toward the actualization of a socially just
world for everyone. Therefore, liberation implies decolonial psychoan-
alysts showing (post)colonial psychoanalysts an Other way of theorizing
and practicing psychoanalysis.
In the following excerpt, Said (1993) compares Fanon (the decolonial
psychoanalyst) with Freud (the colonial psychoanalyst):
As Freud excavated the subterranean foundations of the edifice of Western

reason…so Fanon reads Western humanism by transporting the large
hectoring bolus of “the Greco-Latin pedestal” bodily to the colonial
wasteland, where “this artificial sentinel is turned into dust.” It cannot
survive juxtaposition with its quotidian debasement by European settlers.
In the subversive gestures of Fanon’s writing is a highly conscious man
deliberately as well as ironically repeating the tactics of the culture he
believes has oppressed him. The difference between Freud…on the one
hand and Fanon’s “native intellectual” on the other is that the belated
colonial thinker fixes his predecessors geographically–they are of the
3 Orientalism 129
West–the better to liberate their energies from the oppressing cultural

matrix that produced them. By seeing them antithetically as intrinsic
to the colonial system and at the same time potentially at war with it,
Fanon performs an act of closure on the empire and announces a new
era. National consciousness, he says, “must now be enriched and deep-
ened by a very rapid transformation into a consciousness of social and
political needs, in other words, into [real] humanism.” (pp. 268–269,
References
Beshara, R. K. (2019). Decolonial psychoanalysis: Towards critical Islamophobia
Dunbar-Ortiz, R. (2014). An Indigenous peoples’ history of the United States for
young people. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
Dussel, E. (2002). World-system and “trans”-modernity. Nepantla: Views from
South, 3(2), 221–244.
Foucault, M. (1976/1978). The history of sexuality: Volume 1, an introduction
(R. Hurley, Trans.). New York, NY: Pantheon.
Frosh, S. (2020). Psychoanalysis as decolonial Judaism. Psychoanalysis, Culture
& Society, 25 (2), 174–193. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41282-020-00163-8.
Kant, I. (1781/1998). Critique of pure reason (P. Guyer & A. W. Wood, Trans.).
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
130 R. K. Beshara
Miller, J. (1988). Extimité. Prose Studies, 11(3), 121–131. https://doi.org/10.

1080/01440358808586354.
Pannian, P. (2016). Edward Said and the question of subjectivity. London, UK:
Palgrave.
Pavón Cuéllar, D. (2010). From the conscious interior to an exterior unconscious:
Lacan, discourse analysis and social psychology. Abingdon, UK: Routledge.
Granta.
Said, E. W. (1979). The question of Palestine. New York, NY: Vintage.
Said, E. W. (1981). Covering Islam: How the media and the experts determine
how we see the rest of the world . New York, NY: Vintage.
Said, E. W. (1994). Representations of the intellectual: The 1993 Reith lectures.
New York, NY: Vintage.
Said, E. W. (2001). Power, politics, and culture: Interviews with Edward W. Said
(G. Viswanathan, Ed.). New York, NY: Pantheon.
Žižek, S. (1989). The sublime object of ideology. New York, NY: Verso.
4
Freud and the Non-European
Moses and Monotheism is Freud’s (1939/1967) last book, published in

the year he opted for assisted dying after losing a battle with oral cancer.
Freud and the Non-European is Said’s (2003) last book, which is on Moses
and Monotheism, and published in the year Said lost his life to leukemia
after an eleven-year struggle. Both books exemplify “late style” (Said,
2006) and are considered controversial for different reasons, but they
are worthy of our attention as the final words of two great theorists and
practitioners who were critical of modernity and coloniality, respectively.
It is significant that Said began with Freud in 1975, repressed him in
1978, but then Freud gloriously returned in 2001.
Freud and the Non-European is a transcription of Said’s 2001 talk at the
Freud Museum London after he was disinvited from the Sigmund Freud
Museum Vienna earlier that year. Here is the reason given by Johann
August Schülein, President of the Freud Society of Vienna, for canceling
Said’s talk: “A lot of members of our society told us they can’t accept that
we have invited an engaged Palestinian who also throws stones against
Israeli soldiers” (as cited in Smith, 2001). Said’s response: “It was a
pebble…There was nobody there. The guardhouse was at least half a mile

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56743-9_4
132 R. K. Beshara
away…Freud was hounded out of Vienna because he was a Jew…Now I

am hounded out because I’m a Palestinian” (as cited in Smith, 2001).
Moses and Monotheism comprises three parts: the first two essays were
previously published in the journal Imago, but Freud began writing the
third, and final, essay under extreme circumstances, which had “some-
times contradictory and even disorganizing, destabilizing effects” (p. 28):
his battle with cancer, his ambivalent relationship with the Catholic
Church in Vienna as far as the practice of psychoanalysis is concerned,
and the annexation of Austria into Nazi Germany on March 12, 1938.
Consequently, the third part of the book begins with two different pref-
aces: one written before March 1938 in Vienna and another written in
June 1938 from London. Reading Freud’s reflexive account reminded
me of my 2014 visit to the Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna, which is
the location of his Berggasse apartment house from 1891 to 1938. The
visitor is struck by how hauntingly empty the Museum is; I particu-
larly remember Freud’s correspondence with US Ambassador William
C. Bullitt and Princess Marie Bonaparte asking them for help with
securing an exit from Nazi-occupied Vienna for himself, his family, his
belongings, etc. Here is Freud’s (1939/1967) account in his own words:
Formerly I lived under the protection of the Catholic Church and feared
that by publishing the essay I should lose that protection and that
the practitioners and students of psychoanalysis in Austria would be
forbidden their work. Then, suddenly, the German invasion broke in on
us and Catholicism proved to be, as the Bible has it, but a “broken reed.”
In the certainty of persecution–now not only because of my work, but
also because of my “race”–I left, with many friends, the city which from
early childhood, through seventy-eight years, had been a home to me.
(pp. 69–70)
Moses and Monotheism should be considered Freud’s sequel to Totem

and Taboo, for it certainly builds theoretically upon the latter:
That conviction I acquired a quarter of a century ago, when I wrote

my book on Totem and Taboo (in 1912), and it has only become stronger
since. From then on I have never doubted that religious phenomena are to
be understood only on the model of the neurotic symptoms of the indi-

vidual, which are so familiar to us, as a return of long forgotten important
happenings in the primaeval history of the human family, that they owe
their obsessive character to that very origin and therefore derive their
effect on [hu]mankind from the historical truth they contain. (Freud,
1939/1967, p. 71, emphasis in original)
I will try to summarize the book’s main arguments before reflecting

on Said’s talk:
To the well-known duality of that history–two peoples [the Neo-Egyptians

and the other Jews] who fuse together to form one nation [the people of
Israel], two kingdoms [Kingdom of Israel and Kingdom of Judah] into
which this nation divides, two names [Aton and Jahve] for the Deity in
the source of the Bible–we add two new ones: the founding of two new
religions [an Egyptian one and a Jewish one], the first one ousted by the
second and yet reappearing victorious, two founders of religions [Egyp-
tian Moses and Midianite Moses], who are both called by the same name
Moses and whose personalities [masterful, hot-tempered, even violent and
the most patient and “meek” of all men] we have to separate from each
other. And all these dualities are necessary consequences of the first: one
section of the people [the Neo-Egyptians] passed through what may prop-
erly be termed a traumatic experience which the other was spared. (Freud,
1939/1967, pp. 64–65, emphasis in original)
This duality, or two-ness, which Freud repeats regarding his recon-

struction of Jewish history mirrors the subject’s division between uncon-
scious and ego. The link in Freud’s psychosocial analysis between indi-
vidual psychology and mass psychology is, in his view, to be found in
the connection between neurosis and religion. For Freud (1939/1967),
monotheistic religions in general and Judaism in particular, can be
understood through the lens of “traumatic neurosis” (p. 84), which
he explains phylogenetically as an “archaic heritage” or “archaic inher-
itance” (p. 125). Archaic inheritance is the inheritance of “not only
[thought] dispositions, but also ideational contents, memory traces of
the experiences of former generations” (p. 127). Freud (1939/1967) adds
that:
134 R. K. Beshara
there exists an inheritance of memory–traces of what our forefathers

experienced, quite independently of direct communication and of the
influence of education…an old tradition still alive in a people, of the
formation of a national character, it is such an inherited tradition, and
not one carried on by word of mouth, that I have in mind. (p. 127)
Freud (1939/1967) is careful to distinguish between his notion of

archaic inheritance and Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious: “I
do not think that much is to be gained by introducing the concept of
the ‘collective’ unconscious–the content of the unconscious is collective
anyhow, a general possession of mankind” (p. 170).
Before I reconstruct Freud’s account of Moses—a figure that Freud
(albeit an atheist) seems to be identified with because of his “audacity,
persistence and courage” (Said, 2003, p. 15)—and his influence on not
only Judaism in particular but also monotheism in general, I would like
to say something about Freud’s method of (re)construction as opposed
to his earlier one of interpretation. According to Freud’s (1937/1964)
paper, Constructions in Analysis, the task of the analyst “is to make out
what has been forgotten from the traces which it has left behind or,
more correctly, to construct it” (pp. 258–259, emphasis in original). He
continues, “His [or her] work of construction, or, if it is preferred, of
reconstruction, resembles to a great extent an archaeologist’s excavation
of some dwelling-place that has been destroyed and buried or of some
ancient edifice” (Freud, 1937/1964, p. 259). However, there is a limit to
the analogy: “for the archaeologist the reconstruction is the aim and end
of his [or her] endeavours while for analysis the construction is only a
preliminary labour” (Freud, 1937/1964, p. 260).
What of the difference between interpretation and (re)construction?
“‘Interpretation’ applies to something that one does to some single
element of the material, such as an association or a parapraxis. But it
is a ‘construction’ when one lays before the subject of the analysis a
piece of his [or her] early history that he [or she] has forgotten” (Freud,
1937/1964, p. 261). Much more can be said about (re)construction, but
for the sake of brevity, in Moses and Monotheism, Freud (1939/1967)
utilizes this psychoanalytic method of reconstruction in his selective
reading of history to get at what he calls “the kernel of historical truth”
(p. 14), which leads me to a second methodological distinction between

“material truth” and “historical truth” (cf. Freud, 1937/1964).
In Moses and Monotheism, Freud (1939/1967) writes, “I too should
credit the believer’s solution with containing the truth; it is not, however,
the material truth, but an historical truth” (p. 166, emphasis added). The
believer’s solution that Freud is referring to is this: “the idea of an Only
God has had this overwhelming effect on mankind because it is part
of eternal truth, which, hidden for so long, has at last come to light
and has swept all before it” (pp. 165–166). For Freud (1939/1967), the
believer’s solution is not materially true from an atheistic viewpoint, but
it is historically true in the sense that “in primeval times there was one
person who must needs appear gigantic and who, raised to the status
of a deity, returned to the memory of men” (p. 166). This person is
the primeval father of the horde, he is the Mosaic God (i.e., Aton) and
Moses himself, and he is also Freud (the father of psychoanalysis). In
other words, “the father-identification” (p. 101) is historically true even
if God’s existence is not materially true.
Despite Freud’s (1939/1967) atheism, he chose to write his last book
on the Egyptian Moses, who demanded “only belief and a life of truth
and justice (Maat)” (p. 63). According to Freud (1939/1967), the Egyp-
tian Moses was murdered and repressed by his people, who forgot that he
was the original founder of “a true monotheism” (p. 61), which repeats
Akhenaten’s Atenism. Freud is clearly attracted to the character of Moses
and what he represents to the Jewish people. At the same time, Freud is
repulsed by the Midianite Moses and Jahve (the volcano god).
For Freud (1939/1967), the abstract Mosaic God, who must not be
visually represented, is a “more spiritual conception of God, a single God
who embraces the whole world, one as all-loving as he was all-powerful,
who, averse to all ceremonial and magic, set humanity as its highest aim a
life of truth and justice [maat]” (p. 61). First, Judaism’s aniconism clearly
resonates with the emphasis on language (over images) in psychoanalysis.
Second, Freud (1939/1967) makes a compelling argument for aniconism
as a sign of spiritual progress:
Among the precepts of Mosaic religion is one that has more significance
than is at first obvious. It is the prohibition against making an image
136 R. K. Beshara
of God, which means the compulsion to worship an invisible God. I

surmise that in this point Moses had surpassed the Aton religion in strict-
ness. Perhaps he meant to be consistent; his God was to have neither a
name nor a countenance. The prohibition was perhaps a fresh precaution
against magic malpractices. If this prohibition was accepted, however, it
was bound to exercise a profound influence. For it signified subordinating
sense perception to an abstract idea; it was a triumph of spirituality over
the senses; more precisely an instinctual renunciation [or renunciation of
the drives]. (p. 144, emphasis added)
I would add that this renunciation of the drives is essential for what
I have termed divine-jouissance in Decolonial Psychoanalysis (Beshara,
2019), an Other jouissance founded in Maat as historical truth and social
justice. Further, I find Freud’s model of archaic inheritance qua trau-
matic neurosis of great import for thinking about the memory of colonial
trauma, particularly genocide and slavery—and every related form of
oppression and violence that these two signifiers entail. I am thinking
of how “what is sacred was originally nothing but the perpetuated will
of the [modern/colonial father-sons]” (Freud, 1939/1967, p. 156). Freud
clarifies, and in a way seems to be echoed years later by Agamben, that
“‘Sacer ’ does not only mean ‘sacred,’ blessed,’ but also something that we
can only translate by ‘accursed,’ ‘worthy of disgust’” (p. 156, emphasis in
original).
Freud (1939/1967) is referring to “sacred prohibition” (p. 154); in
other words, the contemporary question of: what is prohibited under
racialized capitalism today as a function of the will of the historical and
ongoing modern/colonial father-sons (i.e., the rich 1%)? The answer
becomes clear when we bear in mind the movement that is sweeping
across not only the US but also the world after the murder of George
Floyd (a tipping point in the colonial unconscious), namely: Black
Lives Matter. This movement is a response, a counter-cathexis, to the
unconscious will of the modern/colonial father-sons: “Black lives do not
matter.” This is the fantasy of dirt (Kovel, 1970/1984), or the violent
logic of coloniality, sustaining the oppressive rhetoric of modernity: “All
lives matter!” ‘All’ is, of course, a reference to those in the zone of being,
that is, “the whole edifice of European humanism” (Said, 2003, p. 21).
But what about the sub-proletariat who are disavowed from the political
discourse of recognition and who are “reduced and dehumanized…to
both the scientific gaze and the will of the superiors” (Said, 2003, p. 21)?
In the US, we speak of Founding Fathers, they are rather a horde
of brothers who symbolically murdered their primeval father (George
III) through the American War of Independence. But what did they
establish exactly in their capacity as founding brothers? A settler-colonial
society, which is formally a democracy for the rest of their brothers
(i.e., the white male bourgeoisie). Capital, particularly private property,
becomes the totem, which replaces the primeval father, and on which
the capitalists cannibalistically feast to this day (cf. Freud, 1913/1946).
In the context of US history, private property is the equivalent of stolen
land and abducted bodies. Memory traces of this colonial trauma are
all over present-day society, they are most visible in statues and monu-
ments across the US commemorating colonial settlers, conquistadors, or
Confederate soldiers. With the cathexis of mass-mediated videos showing
he police murdering innocent Black men and women, we witness the
return of the repressed (colonial trauma) in the form of repetition (police
violence), which signifies mythical-jouissance.
Above all, the officer of this nation used to be an overseer of the plan-
tation, his or her function (back then and now) was/is the protection of
private property (Correia & Wall, 2018), so do Black lives matter? From
the perspective of racialized capitalism, Black lives are not as valuable as
commodities. When Black people emancipated themselves, they ceased
being commodities (i.e., no more surplus-value), but their fetishiza-
tion in the form of racialization, sexualization, and over-exploitation
has not ended, hence, the surplus-jouissance of anti-Black racial-sexual
violence (Curry, 2017), which I call mythical-jouissance since it is the
excess of mythic violence (Benjamin, 1921/1996). Are Black people
being punished for liberating themselves then? That seems to be the
unconscious logic of racialized capitalism in the US. Liberation entails
liberating not only the oppressed from the zone of nonbeing but also the
oppressors from their dehumanizing ways, which dehumanize both the
oppressed and themselves (Freire, 1970/2018).
Here is an example of an unconscious memory trace, or a screen-
memory as Freud (1939/1967) calls it: “impressions of a sexual and
138 R. K. Beshara
aggressive nature and also early injuries to the self (injuries to narcis-
sism)” (p. 93). In the center of the Santa Fe Plaza lies a controver-
sial phallic symbol, an obelisk, commemorating colonial trauma. This
concrete example is vivid in my memory because I attended a polit-
ical rally on June 18, 2020 organized by The Red Nation (a coalition
of Native and non-Native activists, educators, students, and community
organizers advocating Native liberation), which called for the removal of
the dehumanizing obelisk. The Mayor of Santa Fe (Alan Webber) agreed
to remove the obelisk and two other monuments in response to political
pressure from Native activists and their non-Native comrades. However,
Mr. Webber never ordered the removal of the obelisk, so activists took it
upon themselves to tear it down on Indigenous Peoples’ Day (October
12, 2020).
Here is the text chiseled on the obelisk: “To the heroes who have
fallen in the various battles with savage Indians in the Territory of New
Mexico.” According to Daniel J. Chacón (2020), a reporter for the Santa
Fe New Mexican: “In the 1970s, an unidentified man wearing overalls
climbed into the Plaza obelisk and chiseled the word ‘savage’ away.”
In other words, the obelisk, as a memorial to colonial victory, erases
in its presence colonial trauma, which is absent or repressed. However,
what is repressed, according to Freud (1939/1967), is never completely
forgotten, only distorted over time; a memory trace of the trauma
remains latent within the unconscious: “the facts which the so-called offi-
cial written history [i.e., the one written by the victors] purposely tried
to suppress were in reality never lost. The knowledge of them [i.e., the
facts of colonialism] survived in [Indigenous] traditions which were kept
alive among the people” (p. 86).
The obelisk, as a phallus of colonial victory, is dedicated to ‘heroes.’
For Freud (1939/1967), “the origin of the hero [is] him who rebels
against the father [Popé, the leader of the Pueblo Revolt of 1680] and
kills him in some guise or other. Here we also find the real source of
the ‘tragic guilt’” (p. 111). This tragic guilt that the colonizer feels is,
according to Freud (1939/1967), a form of ambivalence (p. 172) that
covers up the colonizer’s hostility toward the Other [i.e., the ‘savage’
Indian]: “It [guilt] bears the characteristic of being never concluded and
never able to be concluded with which we are familiar in the reaction-

formations of obsessional neurosis” (p. 173). This formulation of white
guilt also explains police violence against the racialized sub-proletariat,
particularly Black men.
The solidarity driving the oppressed to revolt against the apparatus
of racialized capitalism is a function of what Freud (1939/1967) terms
over-determination, which signifies complex causality as opposed to the
linear causality exemplified by the psychological experiment. For Freud
(1939/1967), over-determination is a function of “a significant discrep-
ancy between the nature of our thinking apparatus and the organization of
the world which we are trying to apprehend” (p. 137, emphasis added).
In other words, the nature of our thinking apparatus is linear causality
(or A causes B), but the world is organized in a complex fashion. There-
fore, we have to think and act in nonlinear ways in order to grasp the
complexity of the world, especially if we want to change it for the better
using the Maatian compass of truth and justice, which is yet another
definition of contrapuntal psychoanalysis as liberation praxis.
Another term for this nonlinear praxis of solidarity among the
oppressed is transversality, which is the “movement from the periphery
to the periphery. From the feminist movement to the antiracist and anti-
colonial struggles” (Dussel, 2012, p. 54). In sum, Black Lives Matter is
a transversal movement, whereas All Lives Matter is a regressive non-
movement. Regression is “reversion to an earlier [i.e., colonial] kind of
mental life” (Freud, 1939/1967, p. 178).
Now, I turn to Said’s (2003) talk Freud and the Non-European, which is
essentially a commentary on Moses and Monotheism. Said (2003) begins
by distinguishing between two uses of the term “non-European”: (1)
“One, of course, is a simple designation of the world beyond Freud’s
own as a Viennese-Jewish scientist, philosopher and intellectual who
lived and worked his entire life in either Austria or England” (p. 13) and
(2) “the culture that emerged historically in the post-World-War-Two
period–that is, after the fall of the classical empires and the emergence of
many newly liberated peoples and states in Africa, Asia and the Americas”
(p. 17). Having made that distinction, Said is not intent on minimizing
Freud’s contributions; in fact, Said (2003) emphatically says that Freud’s
work “is about the Other…an Other recognizable mainly to readers
140 R. K. Beshara
who are well acquainted with the classics of Graeco-Roman and Hebrew
Antiquity and what was later to derive from them” (p. 14).
Nevertheless, Said (2003) reproaches Freud for his representation
of “‘primitive’ non-European cultures” as “pretty much left behind
or forgotten, like the primal horde, in the march of civilization”
(pp. 14–15). The only non-European cultures that Freud took seriously,
according to Said (2003), were Egypt, India, and China (pp. 13–14);
also, in terms of non-European outsiders, Freud identified with Moses
and Hannibal as Semitic heroes (p. 15).
Said (2003) then concludes that Freud’s “Eurocentric view of culture”
can be explained by the fact that his “world had not yet been touched by
the globalization, or rapid travel, or decolonization, that were to make
many formerly unknown or repressed cultures available to metropolitan
Europe” (p. 16). In other words, while Freud challenged some of the
Orientalist and “dominant race theories of the time” (p. 15), he was also
a product of his time. This challenge is characterized by Said (2003) as
“the radicality of Freud’s work on human identity” (p. 17).
Freud’s radicality, according to Said (2003), is a function of his
“implicit refusal, in the end, to erect an insurmountable barrier between
non-European primitives and European civilization” (p. 19). The differ-
ence between the primitive and the civilized, according to Freud
(1939/1967), is a question of psycho-sexual development, which is
extrapolated to cultures. This developmental logic is still with us
today in the language of developed versus developing countries, which
suggests a linear path of psycho-economic development from prim-
itivism/childhood/neurosis to civilization/adulthood/normalcy (Freud,
1939/1967, p. 144). Another term for this psycho-economic develop-
mental logic is spatiotemporal colonial difference; contrapuntal psycho-
analysis must account for cultural difference without reverting to this
colonial developmental logic. And here we must remember Mourad
Wahba’s axiom that there is one civilization and many cultures. This
axiom is implicit in Freud’s work, according to Said (2003), when he
is writing about “universal behaviors as the prohibition against incest,
or…the return of the repressed” (p. 20).
In short, Das unbehagen is the universal effect of civilization, an

effect experienced in all cultures, but we must delink Euro-colonialism
from human civilization if we are to realize the liberatory project of
transmodernity: the synthesis of the best of modernity and its alterity.
How we determine our valuations of European and non-European
cultural ideas and practices should be informed by the Maatian compass
of truth and justice, which comprises the commons (e.g., education,
healthcare, transportation, etc.), liberation (especially for those in the
zone of nonbeing), and social ecology (Kadalie, 2019). Let us heed
Fanon’s demand “that all human beings collaborate together in the inven-
tion of new ways to create” a new, radical or critical, humanism (Said,
2003, p. 21).
With Freud and the Non-European, Said (2003) attempts to see Freud
contrapuntally as a figure “whose writing travels across temporal, cultural
and ideological boundaries in unforeseen ways to emerge as part of a new
ensemble along with later history and subsequent art” (p. 24, emphasis in
original). This methodological approach is the opposite of what is today
known as cancel culture, which I regard as the cancelation of critical
(border) thinking. Said never cancels the likes of Marx or Freud, for he
is “always trying to understand figures from the past whom [he admires],
even [he points] out how bound they were by the perspectives of their
own cultural moment as far as their views of other cultures and peoples
were concerned” (p. 23). In this sense, contrapuntal psychoanalysis as
liberation praxis is the antithesis of cancel culture, which dismisses great
figures on the grounds of political incorrectness (p. 23).
From the perspective of contrapuntal psychoanalysis, “later history
reopens and challenges what seems to have been the finality of an
earlier figure of thought [e.g., Freud], bringing it into contact with
cultural, political and epistemological formations [e.g., postcolonialism
or decoloniality] undreamed by–albeit affiliated by historical circum-
stances with–its author” (Said, 2003, p. 25). In other words, “the
latencies in a prior figure [e.g., Freud] or form [e.g., psychoanalysis]” can
“suddenly illuminate the present” (p. 25). For instance, Stephen Frosh
(2020) links psychoanalysis, which he situates within the radical Jewish
tradition, with decoloniality: “psychoanalysis needs and can never escape
its Jewish provocations; and in these can be found some of the energy
142 R. K. Beshara
with which it is possible for psychoanalysis to contribute to the ongoing

struggle for a decolonized world.” Freud’s alterity, his non-Europeanness
or his Jewishness, opens up the possibility for him to align his desire
with that of the Egyptian Moses: a desire for Maat (truth and justice), a
divine-jouissance through the renunciation of the drives.
Said (2003) is in agreement with Frosh when he glowingly writes the
following about Freud:
Freud is a remarkable instance of a thinker for whom scientific work

was, as he often said, a kind of archaeological excavation of the buried,
forgotten, repressed and denied past…Freud was an explorer of the mind,
of course, but also, in the philosophical sense, an overturner and a re-
mapper of accepted or settled geographies and genealogies. He thus lends
himself especially to rereading in different contexts, since his work is all
about how life history offers itself by recollection, research and reflec-
tion to endless structuring and restructuring, in both the individual and
the collective sense. That we, different readers from different periods of
history, with different cultural backgrounds, should continue to do this in
our readings of Freud strikes me as nothing less than a vindication of his
work’s power to instigate new thought, as well as to illuminate situations
that he himself might never have dreamed of. (p. 27)
Said (2003) characterized Moses and Monotheism as a “classic example”

(p. 28) of late style, but the same can be said about Freud and the Non-
European, for both books exemplify:
the intellectual trajectory conveyed by [these] late work[s] is intransigence

and a sort of irascible transgressiveness, as if the author was expected to
settle down into a harmonious composure, as befits a person at the end
of his life, but preferred instead to be difficult, and to bristle with all sorts
of new ideas and provocations. (p. 29)
While Said’s talk was canceled by the Sigmund Freud Museum

Vienna, late style with its “alienating” effect (Said, 2003, p. 30)—in
Freud and Said—was not canceled. In Moses and Monotheism, Freud
returns “to the very elements of identity itself ” which are “so crucial
to psychoanalysis, the very heart of the science” (Said, 2003, p. 29).
Similarly, the question of decolonial subjectivity, for Said, is central

to postcolonialism (cf. Pannian, 2016). In other words, his analysis of
Freud’s last text is also a self-analysis: “I too wish to be arbitrary” (Said,
2003, p. 32).
Freud, like Said, was a secular critic, who had “his own complicated
and…hopelessly unresolved connection to his own Jewishness, which he
seemed always to hold on to with a combination of pride and defiance”
(Said, 2003, p. 31). The same can be said about Said’s Christianity, which
he works through in his 1999 memoir, Out of Place. But the most inter-
esting parallel I would like to draw here between Freud and Said was
uttered by the latter in a 2000 interview with Ari Shavit of Ha’aretz
Magazine: “I’m the last Jewish intellectual…The only true follower of
Adorno. Let me put it this way: I’m a Jewish-Palestinian” (Said, 2001,
p. 458; cf. Hochberg, 2006).
Said’s statement, which is spoken in jest, embodies a kernel of histor-
ical truth to use Freud’s phrase: “the actual Jewishness that derives from
Moses is a far from open-and-shut matter, and is in fact extremely prob-
lematic” for it constitutes “the removal of a religion’s source from its place
inside the community and history of like-minded believers” (Said, 2003,
p. 32). This is an argument about the instability of identity or subjec-
tivity, which elsewhere Said (1993) terms: “exilic marginality” (p. 24)
and “dislocated subjectivity” (p. 28).
This instability is, of course, the splitting of subjectivity into ego and
unconscious, or as Said (1999) puts it in his memoir: “She seemed to
speak directly to that underground part of my identity I had long held
for myself, not the ‘Ed’ or ‘Edward’ I had been assigned, but the other
self I was always aware of but was unable easily or immediately to reach”
(p. 284). What Said (1999) calls “that other non-Edward self ” (p. 165)
is the unconscious, which is alienating: our own Otherness. Said’s (1999)
phrase for this alienation is “being out of place” (p. 3). Edward (or Ed)
ends up representing his ego, or the subject of the statement, but Said
is the enunciating subject. Coming to terms with his alterity, as a Pales-
tinian Arab, who always felt out of place, whether in Egypt, Lebanon,
or the US, this is Said’s (1999) conclusion: “With so many dissonances
in my life I have learned actually to prefer being not quite right and
out of place” (p. 295). In psychoanalysis, Said’s conclusion embodies the
144 R. K. Beshara
traversing of fantasy, or what I call the decolonial subject as drive. The

decolonial subject is driven by these dissonances that render him or her
out of place. Instead of running away from them, he or she learns to
enjoy these dissonances. This is the divine-jouissance inherent in Said’s
(1999) ontology of exteriority, wherein the subaltern’s suffering is subli-
mated vis-à-vis not the Other but the objet a. For Said, these objets a
include Palestine, Arab cultures, the Arabic language, modern literature,
classical music, decolonization, liberation, etc.
In Orientalism, Said (1978/2003) famously wrote: “I have found
myself writing the history of a strange, secret sharer of Western anti-
Semitism” (p. 27). While different forms of oppression are qualitatively
different, they are linked by virtue of their over-determination vis-à-vis
the history of Euro-colonialism. For example, in Decolonial Psychoanal-
ysis (2019, pp. 46–48), I show the connection between Islamophobia
and anti-Semitism through the Nazi figure of the Muselmann, who is a
fantasmatic composite of the conceptual Muslim and Jew.
Consequently, Freud’s analysis of anti-Semitism in Moses and
Monotheism is a radical feature of the text, for it provides the reader
with an early, and perhaps the first, psychoanalytic reading of racist
oppression (cf. Fenichel, 1940). Freud’s reading, as Said (2003) shows,
is paradoxical, for he defensively makes the claim that Jews are Euro-
pean, or are not outsiders to Europe (i.e., Asiatics), but are rather “the
remnants of Mediterranean civilization” (p. 40). At the same time, Freud
(1939/1967) argues throughout the text that Moses, “who created the
Jews” (p. 136), is an Egyptian. In other words, there is a tension here
between Freud’s assmilianist ego (that identifies as European) and his
antiracist unconscious (as the discourse of the Egyptian Moses).
Said (2003) contrasts Freud’s ambivalence (i.e., Jews as European
v. Jews as non-European) in Moses and Monotheism with the political
tension between present-day Israel as “a quasi-European state” which
holds “non-European indigenous peoples at bay” and historical Palestine
as “a diverse, multiracial population of many different peoples–European
and non-European” (pp. 41–42). Said (2003) adds:
out of the travails of specifically European anti-Semitism, the establish-

ment of Israel in a non-European territory consolidated Jewish identity
politically in a state that took very specific legal and political positions
effectively to seal off that identity from anything that was non-Jewish.
(p. 43)
Said (2003) finds in Freud’s theorization of non-identity the possi-

bility for a binational one-state solution: “in excavating the archeology
of Jewish identity, Freud insisted that it did not begin with itself but,
rather, with other identities (Egyptian and Arabian)” (p. 44). This
is what Mignolo (2007) calls an “identity based on politics” (p. 492,
emphasis in original) and not the other way around. Delinking from the
modern/colonial project entails moving away from the family metaphors
of the primeval father and the horde of brothers; instead of an identity
politics, we need a non-identity politics.
As Jodi Dean (2019) shows, the comrade is “a generic figure for the
political relation between those on the same side of a political strug-
gle” (p. 3). There is a stronger historical argument, between 610 and
1948, for Judeo-Islamic comradeship (not denying conflicts) in the face
of Christian supremacy, but unfortunately it is not what we see today
as evidenced by the geopolitics of sectarianism, which is a politics based
on identity—an identity politics. Today’s geopolitics of sectarianism in
West Asia and North Africa is, of course, not accidental but the result
of the British colonial policy of divide and rule, which is most evident
in the 1916 Sykes–Picot Agreement. I have written extensively about the
phenomenon of modern terrorism in this context, and there is no need
to repeat my arguments here, but its politicization today is purposely
ahistorical.
There is an interesting parallel between Said’s (2003) point about
“Palestininan archaeology as a practice in the liberation struggle” (p. 49)
and Freud’s (1939/1967) argument regarding oral tradition in its relation
to “the coercion of logical thinking” (p. 130). In other words, contra-
puntal archeology pays attention “to the enormously rich sedimentations
of village history and oral traditions” which “changes the status of objects
from dead monuments and artifacts…to remainders of an ongoing native
life and living Palestinian practices of a sustainable human ecology”
(p. 49).
146 R. K. Beshara
Conceivably, non-identity politics is inherently non-political in

Agamben’s (1998) sense of the word, that is, allowing for no state of
exception (i.e., no apartheid), or no distinction between good life (inside)
and bare life (outside). In Israel, this distinction is literally consolidated
by the Israeli West Bank barrier, which, for Arabs, is known as the
Apartheid Wall. The Apartheid Wall literalizes the difference between
the zone of being and the zone of nonbeing. Said’s vision of a bina-
tional one-state acknowledges national, or cultural, difference; “national
culture” (Fanon, 1961/2004) is not the same as regressive nationalism
with its authoritarian, particularly fascistic, tendencies.
In conclusion, Moses and Monotheism is Freud’s (1939/1967)
genealogy of “the non-Jewish Jew” (p. 52). We can also speak of the non-
Arab Arab and so on and so forth; therefore, both Freud and Said exem-
plify “the diasporic, wandering, unresolved, cosmopolitan consciousness
of someone who is both inside and outside his or her community”
(p. 53). Mignolo (2007) calls this epistemology “critical border thinking ”
(p. 485, emphasis in original), which is “grounded not in Greek thinkers
but in the colonial wounds and imperial subordination and, as such, it
should become the connector between the diversity of subaltern histo-
ries…and corresponding subjectivities” (p. 493). Cosmopolitan (i.e.,
contrapuntal) subjectivity, for Said (2003), then is grounded in the
Freudian notion of identity as non-identity:
identity cannot be thought or worked through itself alone; it cannot

constitute or even imagine itself without that radical originary break or
flaw which will not be repressed…and therefore always outside the iden-
tity inside which so many have stood, and suffered–and later, perhaps,
even triumphed. The strength of this thought is, I believe, that it can be
articulated in and speak to other besieged identities as well–not through
dispensing palliatives such as tolerance and compassion but, rather, by
attending to it as a troubling, disabling, destabilizing secular wound–the
essence of the cosmopolitan, from which there can be no recovery, no
state of resolved or Stoic calm, and no utopian reconciliation even within
itself. (p. 54)
References
Chacón, D. J. (2020, June 17). Santa Fe mayor calls for removal of controver-
sial monuments, statue of Spanish conquistador. Santa Fe New Mexican.
Correia, D., & Wall, T. (2018). Police: A field guide. New York, NY: Verso.
Dussel, E. (2012). Transmodernity and interculturality: An interpretation
from the perspective of philosophy of liberation. Transmodernity: Journal of
Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World , 1(3), 28–59.
Fenichel, O. (1940). Psychoanalysis of antisemitism. American imago, 1(2), 24–
39.
Freire, P. (1970/2018). Pedagogy of the oppressed . New York, NY: Bloomsbury.
Freud, S. (1937/1964). Constructions in analysis. In The standard edition of
the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XXIII (1937–
1939): Moses and monotheism, an outline of psycho-analysis and other works
(J. Strachey, Trans.). London, UK: Hogarth Press.
IN: Vintage.
Frosh, S. (2020). Psychoanalysis as decolonial Judaism. Psychoanalysis, Culture
& Society, 25 (2), 174–193. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41282-020-00163-8.
Hochberg, G. Z. (2006). Edward said: “The last Jewish intellectual”. Social
Text, 24 (2), 47–65. https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-24-2_87-47.
Kadalie, M. (2019). Pan-African social ecology: Speeches, conversations, and essays.
Atlanta, GA: On Our Own Authority! Publishing.
148 R. K. Beshara

University Press.
449–514. https://doi.org/10.1080/09502380601162647.
Pannian, P. (2016). Edward said and the question of subjectivity. London, UK:
Palgrave.
Said, E. W. (1999). Out of place: A memoir. New York, NY: Vintage.
Said, E. W. (2001). Power, politics, and culture: Interviews with Edward W. Said .
G. Viswanathan (Ed.). New York, NY: Pantheon.
Said, E. W. (2003). Freud and the non-European. New York, NY: Verso.
Said, E. W. (2006). On late style: Music and literature against the grain. New
York, NY: Vintage.
Smith, D. (2001, March 10). Freud museum speaking ban sparks Said fury.
The Guardian, London.
5
Contrapuntal Psychoanalysis as Liberation
Praxis
In the first chapter, I mainly reviewed the literature on psychoanalysis

and postcolonialism, and contextualized this survey within the apparatus
of racialized capitalism. In the second, third, and fourth chapters, I inves-
tigated the theoretical linkages between Sigmund Freud and Edward Said
as an attempt to decolonize the former and psychoanalyze the latter.
Decolonizing Freud does not mean canceling him; on the contrary, it
signifies using Freud’s most brilliant insights for our time by extending
his critique of modernity to coloniality. Psychoanalyzing Said does not
mean psychologizing him; in fact, my aim was to show the influence
of psychoanalysis on Said’s work. My argument throughout the three
body chapters has been that Said began with Freud, repressed him, and
then Freud returned. Reading Freud and Said side by side has allowed
me to theorize what I have been calling contrapuntal psychoanalysis
as liberation praxis, which I will say more about in this fifth and final
chapter.

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56743-9_5
150 R. K. Beshara
Decolonization
In the first chapter, in the section on Black Skin, White Masks, I
promised I would return to Fanon (1961/2004) in the conclusion to
consider his thoughts on decolonization in The Damned of the Earth.
Fanon (1961/2004) writes, “decolonization is always a violent even-
t…decolonization is quite simply the substitution of one ‘species’ of
[hu]mankind by another” (p. 1). The ‘species’ being substituted is not a
race, but oppressors who dehumanize the oppressed and themselves. The
violence that Fanon speaks of is not “subjective violence” or the “violence
performed by a clearly identifiable agent” (Žižek, 2008, p. 1); rather, it is
a “divine violence” (Benjamin, 1921/1996) against “objective violence”
(Žižek, 2008).
Objective violence, for Žižek (2008), includes two kinds: the
“‘symbolic’ violence embodied in language and its forms” (p. 1) and
“‘systemic’ violence, or the often catastrophic consequences of the
smooth functioning of our economic and political systems” (p. 2). Johan
Galtung’s (1969) terms for subjective and systemic violence are personal
and structural violence, respectively. For Galtung (1969), personal
violence is direct and its absence leads to negative peace, while structural
violence (or social injustice) is indirect and its absence leads to positive
peace (or social justice). Now, here is Walter Benjamin’s (1921/1996)
distinction between “mythic violence” and “divine violence”:
If mythic violence is lawmaking, divine violence is law-destroying; if the

former sets boundaries, the latter boundlessly destroys them; if mythic
violence brings at once guilt and retribution, divine power only expiates; if
the former threatens, the latter strikes; if the former is bloody, the latter is
lethal without spilling blood . (pp. 249–250)
In other words, divine violence is a paradoxical form of nonvi-

olent violence against systemic or structural violence, or in Fanon’s
(1961/2004) words: “The violence of the colonial regime” (p. 46). A
concrete example of divine violence provided by Benjamin (1921/1996)
is the “revolutionary [or proletarian] general strike” (p. 239), which
strikes at the systemic/structural violence of racialized capitalism in
an effort to “found and modify legal conditions” (p. 240). Benjamin

(1921/1996) contrasts the revolutionary, or proletarian, general strike
with “the political strike” (p. 245):
Whereas the first form of interruption of work is violent, since it causes

only an external modification of labor conditions, the second, as a pure
means, is nonviolent. For it takes place not in readiness to resume work
following external concessions and this or that modification to working
conditions, but in the determination to resume only a wholly transformed
work, no longer enforced by the state, an upheaval that this kind of strike
not so much causes as consummates. For this reason, the first of these
undertakings is lawmaking but the second anarchistic. (p. 246, emphasis
added)
Consequently, while divine violence may be nonviolent, it can actually

destroy “state power” (Benjamin, 1921/1996, p. 246), but it has to do so
through pure means. For Hannah Arendt (1969), the question of violence
is one of justification and not of legitimacy. Violence, for her, can never
be legitimate, for it is always an instrumental means to an end. What
needs legitimacy is power:
Power springs up whenever people get together and act in concert, but
it derives its legitimacy from the initial getting together rather than from
any action that then may follow. Violence needs justification and it can
be justifiable, but its justification loses in plausibility the farther away its
intended end recedes into the future. (Arendt, 1969)
Therefore, we return to Benjamin’s question of pure means, which

is essential vis-à-vis decolonization. Decolonization as a divinely violent
event, or as pure means, needs justification and it can be justifiable, as
Arendt (1969) shows, but the end of this divine violence is anarchist
power, which rests on legitimacy. For Freire (1970/2018), decoloniza-
tion, or rebellion, is an act of love because its goal is humanization, or
liberation, for all (i.e., the oppressed and the oppressors):
Consciously or unconsciously, the act of rebellion by the oppressed (an

act which is always, or nearly always, as violent as the initial violence of
152 R. K. Beshara
the oppressors) can initiate love. Whereas the violence of the oppressors
prevents the oppressed from being fully human, the response of the latter
to this violence is grounded in the desire to pursue the right to be human.
(p. 56, emphasis added)
Decolonization “starts from the very first day with the basic claims
of the colonized” (Fanon, 1961/2004, p. 1). Successful decolonization
“lies in a social fabric that has been changed inside out…The need for
this change exists in a raw, repressed, and reckless state in the lives and
consciousness of colonized men and women” (p. 1). The social fabric
that Fanon speaks of is Freud’s (1939/1967) archaic heritage, wherein
one can find memory traces of repressed material many generations back
and which is reconstructed après-coup as tradition, but unlike Freud,
it is sociogenic and not phylogenic. For Fanon (1961/2004): “Decolo-
nization, which sets out to change the order of the world, is clearly an
agenda for total disorder.” This echoes Benjamin’s (1921/1996) point
about divine violence being anarchistic.
What Fanon (1961/2004) calls “the colonial situation” is an index of
the hierarchical, oppressive, and violent relationship between the colo-
nizer and the colonized (i.e., the apparatus of racialized capitalism).
Therefore, decolonization:
is an historical process…it can only find its significance and become self
coherent insofar as we can discern the history-making movement which
gives it form and substance. Decolonization is the encounter between
two congenitally antagonistic forces that in fact owe their singularity to
the kind of reification secreted and nurtured by the colonial situation.
(p. 2)
Fanon’s (1961/2004) analysis of colonial difference should move every

single reader to see why “the ontology that dehumanizes” the damned
and “the epistemology that strips him [or her] down to an unregenerate
essence” must be violently decolonized (Said, 1993, p. 268). For Fanon
(1961/2004):
Decolonization never goes unnoticed, for it focuses on and fundamentally

alters being, and transforms the spectator crushed to a nonessential state
into a privileged actor, captured in a virtually grandiose fashion by the

spotlight of History. It infuses a new rhythm…a new language and a new
humanity…The ‘thing’ colonized becomes a man [or woman] through
the very process of liberation. (p. 2)
Decolonization “implies the urgent need to thoroughly challenge the

colonial situation” (Fanon, 1961/2004, p. 2), and the most succinct
definition of decolonization is: “The last shall be first” (p. 2). I take
this to mean that the oppressed must lead the way to liberation, since
they know oppression firsthand and the oppressors cannot be relied
on since they typically engage in “false generosity” (Freire, 1970/2018,
p. 44). For this reason, Jodi Dean (2019) distinguishes between ally
and comrade: “Where the ally is hierarchical, specific, and acquiescent,
the comrade is egalitarian, generic, and utopian” (p. 22). According to
Freire (1970/2018), it is possible for an oppressor to become a comrade;
however, it necessitates not only a conversion but also “a profound
rebirth” (p. 61). Freire (1970/2018) adds: “Only through comradeship
with the oppressed can the converts understand their characteristic ways
of living and behaving, which in diverse moments reflect the structure of
domination” (p. 61).
Therefore, an ex-oppressor, or a descendent of oppressors, who wants
to be in solidarity with the oppressed must follow their leadership. On
the other hand, the oppressed must not become “sub-oppressors” (Freire,
1970/2018, p. 45) or “mimic men [or women]” (Said, 1993, p. 272).
Anarchic leadership means leadership by example, that is, one informed
by “the great humanistic and historical task of the oppressed: to liberate
themselves, and their oppressors as well” (Freire, 1970/2018, p. 44).
Decolonization “can only succeed by resorting to every means,
including, of course, violence” (Fanon, 1961/2004, p. 3). This quote
is the origin of the phrase popularized by Malcolm X (al-H . ājj Mālik
ash-Shabāzz): “By any means necessary.” Fanon (1961/2004) adds: “The
colonial context…is characterized by the dichotomy it inflicts on the
world. Decolonization unifies this world by a radical decision to remove
its heterogeneity, by unifying it on the grounds of nation and sometimes
race” (p. 10). The dichotomy that Fanon wants removed is, of course,
that of colonial difference: the zones of being and nonbeing. Once that
154 R. K. Beshara
dichotomy is removed (which implies a new ontology), the Wahbian

axiom reveals itself to us once more: one civilization, many cultures.
In other words, in our mundialización (Mignolo, 2000), we must still
work through the question of cultural difference without regressing to
hierarchical Manichaeanism.
For Fanon (1961/2004), “The immobility to which the colonized
subject is condemned can be challenged only if he decides to put an
end to the history of colonization and the history of despoliation in
order to bring to life the history of the nation, the history of decoloniza-
tion” (p. 15). The nation, in the cultural and not the nationalist sense, is
an essential drive in decolonization, because the modern/colonial culture
has to be replaced with transmodernity, which is the best of modernity
and its alterity. When it comes to decolonization, “urgent decisions are
needed on means and tactics, i.e., direction and organization” (Fanon,
1961/2004, p. 21) with the knowledge that revolutionary violence is a
means to an end (anarchist power), which necessitates justification if it
is to be considered pure means.
As to the question of the legitimacy of this anarchist power, “Coloniza-
tion or decolonization: it is simply a power struggle” (Fanon, 1961/2004,
p. 23). Arendt (1969) does not believe that the path from revolutionary
violence to anarchist power to be a straightforward one, and, to be
fair, the decolonization of Asia and Africa (1945–1960) attests to her
argument:
Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the
other is absent. Violence appears where power is in jeopardy, but left to
its own course its end is the disappearance of power. This implies that it
is not correct to say that the opposite of violence is nonviolence: to speak
of nonviolent power is actually redundant. Violence can destroy power;
it is utterly incapable of creating it.
Liberationist Anti-imperialist Resistance

and Opposition
In Culture and Imperialism, or “culture as imperialism” (p. 264,
emphasis in original), Said (1993) distinguishes between “nationalist
anti-imperialism” and “liberationist anti-imperialist resistance” (p. 264),
which are a function of the cultural difference between nationalist inde-
pendence and international liberation (p. 277). Another related division
that Said (1993) underlines is the one between resistance and opposition:
The ideological and cultural war against imperialism occurs in the form
of resistance in the colonies, and later, as resistance spills over into
Europe and the United States, in the form of opposition or dissent in
the metropolis. The first phase of this dynamic produces nationalist inde-
pendence movements. The second, later, and more acute phase produces
liberation struggles. The basic premise of this analysis is that although
the imperial divide in fact separates metropolis from peripheries, and
although each cultural discourse unfolds according to different agendas,
rhetorics, and images, they are in fact connected, if not always in perfect
correspondence…The connection is made on the cultural level since, I
have been saying, like all cultural practices the imperialist experience is an
intertwined and overlapping one. Not only did the colonizers emulate as
well as compete with one another, but so also did the colonized. (p. 276,
emphasis added)
For Said (1993): “All nationalist cultures depend heavily on the

concept of national identity, and nationalist politics is a politics of iden-
tity: Egypt for the Egyptians” (p. 267). This is the exclusive particularity
of identity politics, which stands as an obstacle between the singu-
larity of being and the pluriversality of the world. Non-identity politics,
on the other hand, acknowledges the national, or cultural, but tran-
scends both toward the socio-political: “Nationalism is not a political
doctrine, it is not a program. If we really want to safeguard our coun-
tries from regression, paralysis, or collapse, we must rapidly switch from
a national consciousness to a social and political consciousness” (Fanon,
1961/2004, p. 142).
156 R. K. Beshara
What I call non-identity politics, Said (1993) names “anti-identitarian

force” (p. 274). Said’s analysis is inspired by Fanon’s emphasis on the
importance of the shift from national consciousness to socio-political
consciousness in The Damned of the Earth:
needs based on identitarian (i.e., nationalist) consciousness must be

overridden. New and general collectivities–African, Arab, Islamic–should
have precedence over particularist ones, thus setting up lateral, non-
narrative connections among people whom imperialism separated into
autonomous tribes, narratives, cultures…the center (capital city, official
culture, appointed leader) must be deconsecrated and demystified. A new
system of mobile relationships must replace the hierarchies inherited from
imperialism…Liberation is consciousness of self…leading to true national
self-liberation and to universalism. (Said, 1993, pp. 273–274)
Contrapuntal psychoanalysts acknowledge the contributions of “the

decentring doctrines of Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche” (Said, 1993, p. 266)
to the culture of liberationist anti-imperialist resistance/opposition, while
also being critically aware that:
if European theory and Western Marxism as cultural co-efficients of liber-

ation haven’t in the main proved themselves to be reliable allies in the
resistance to imperialism–on the contrary, one may suspect that they are
part of the same invidious “universalism” that connected culture with
imperialism for centuries–how has the liberationist anti-imperialism tried
to break this shackling unity? First, by a new integrative or contrapuntal
orientation in history that sees Western and non-Western experiences as
belonging together because they are connected by imperialism. Second,
by an imaginative, even utopian vision which reconceives emancipatory (as
opposed to confining) theory and performance. Third, by an investment
neither in new authorities, doctrines, and encoded orthodoxies, nor in
established institutions and causes, but in a particular sort of nomadic,
migratory, and anti-narrative energy. (pp. 278–279, emphasis added)
New Humanism
Many contemporary critical theorists, following Althusser, consider
themselves antihumanists and find humanism to be passé; however,
this theoretical privilege seems absurd for those of us who were never
considered human to begin with. Therefore, while we reject “liberal
humanism” (Said, 1978/2003, p. 254) or “European bourgeois human-
ism” (Said, 1993, p. 316), we absolutely affirm Fanon’s (1961/2004) call
for “a new humanism” (p. 178), which is a radical, critical, and revolu-
tionary humanism that is not premised on colonial difference. For Fanon
(1961/2004):
This new humanity, for itself and for others, inevitably defines a new
humanism. This new humanism is written into the objectives and
methods of the struggle. A struggle, which mobilizes every level of society,
which expresses the intentions and expectations of the people, and which
is not afraid to rely on their support almost entirely, will invariably
triumph. The merit of this type of struggle is that it achieves the optimal
conditions for cultural development and innovation. (p. 178, emphasis
added)
Fanon’s new humanism “is free from the narcissistic individualism,

divisiveness, and colonialist egoism of the imperialism that justified the
white man’s rule” (Said, 1993, p. 269). This new humanism necessitates
“an entirely new post-nationalist theoretical culture” (p. 268), for it is
“in effect a trans-personal and trans-national force” (p. 269). It is a new
humanism that springs from decolonization as a violent event, or as an
act of love; it is “a force intended to bridge the gap between white and
non-white…it is the synthesis that overcomes the reification of white
man as subject, Black man as object” (p. 270). This is why decoloniza-
tion entails “an epistemological revolution” (p. 271) like critical border
thinking or “epistemologies of the South” (de Soussa Santos, 2016) that
can counter “epistemicide, the murder of knowledge” (p. 92, emphasis in
original).
158 R. K. Beshara
Said (1993) reminds us that liberation is a process and not a goal

(p. 274); however, Fanon’s transmodern vision affords “a new non-
adversarial community of awareness and anti-imperialism” (p. 274). The
revolutionary humanist ethos of liberation praxis is that we must struggle
to liberate humankind from modernity/coloniality, “we must all write
our histories and cultures respectively in a new way; we share the same
history, even though for some of us that history has enslaved” (p. 274).
Said (1993) adds that “the culture of opposition and resistance
suggests a theoretical alternative and a practical method for reconceiving
human experience in non-imperialist terms” (p. 276). However, “How
can a non- or post-imperial history be written that is not naively utopian
or hopelessly pessimistic, given the continuing embroiled actuality of
domination in the Third World?” (p. 280). Said (1993) locates the
answer to this “methodological and meta-historical aporia” (p. 280) in
the register of the poetic.
For Said (1993), C.L.R. James’s The Black Jacobins, as an example of
the poetic (as opposed to the economic or the political), accomplishes a
“contrapuntal, non-narrative turn” by embodying “the energies of anti-
imperialist liberation” (p. 281). The book, according to Said (1993),
crosses “over from the provincialism of one strand of history [i.e., the
French Revolution] into an apprehension of other histories [e.g., the
Haitian Revolution]…it is part of what in human history can move
us from the history of domination toward the actuality of liberation”
(p. 281). Therefore, new humanism is contrapuntal humanism.
Similarly, Freire (1970/2018) distinguishes between (radical)
humanism and (liberal) humanitarianism. For Freire (1970/2018),
in other words, radical humanism is the actualization of “the great
humanistic and historical task of the oppressed: to liberate themselves
and their oppressors as well” (p. 44); liberal humanitarianism (e.g.,
humanitarian imperialism), however, is false generosity:
The pedagogy of the oppressed, animated by authentic, humanist (not

humanitarian) generosity, presents itself as a pedagogy of humankind.
Pedagogy which begins with the egoistic interests of the oppressors (an
egoism cloaked in the false generosity of paternalism) and makes of
the oppressed the objects of its humanitarianism, itself maintains and
embodies oppression. It is an instrument of dehumanization. This is why,

as we affirmed earlier, the pedagogy of the oppressed cannot be developed
or practiced by the oppressors. It would be a contradiction in terms if
the oppressors not only defended but actually implemented a liberating
education. (p. 54)
Said’s (1983) critical humanism, on the other hand, is grounded in

his method of “secular criticism” which “deals with local and worldly
situations” and which “is constitutively opposed to the production of
massive, hermetic systems” (p. 26). For this reason, Said (1983) cham-
pions the essay form as “the principal way in which to write criticism”
(p. 26). Criticism, for Said (1983), is equal to having “critical conscious-
ness” which means that “the intellectual’s situation is a worldy one and
yet, by virtue of that worldliness itself, the intellectual’s social identity
should involve something more than strengthening those aspects of the
culture that require mere affirmation and orthodox compliancy from its
members” (p. 24). In other words, the secular critic resists vertical filia-
tion (i.e., identity politics) in favor of non-identity politics or “horizontal
affiliation” (p. 18, emphasis in original).
Said’s (1983) notion of horizontal affiliation bears resemblance to the
psychoanalytic method of free association, which is also lateral in its
orientation. Said (1983) writes, “The filiative scheme belongs to the
realms of nature and of ‘life,’ whereas affiliation belongs exclusively to
culture and society” (p. 20). Comradeship is a form of horizontal affil-
iation, which is not based on Imaginary identification, but Symbolic
alignment of desire and Real enjoyment. Put differently, we are not
comrades because we are the same, but because, despite our differences,
we may share common interests. The paradox is that under racialized
capitalism, not only is violence normalized, everything is individualized.
In contrast, the subject of psychoanalysis, with its singularity of being,
provides a necessary departure from both individualism and collectivism.
The subject of the unconscious is a psychosocial subject who transcends
the particularities of filiative identifications into a pluriversal affiliative
realm. As such, solidarity is not reducible to identity politics or “the
feeling that everything you do has to be either legitimated by, or has to
160 R. K. Beshara
pass through the filter of, your national identity, which in most instances
is a complete fiction” (Said, 2001, p. 391).
In his 2003 preface to Orientalism, which was written four months
before his death, Said (1978/2003) defends his critical, or “genuine”
(p. xxi), humanism, which, in Culture and Imperialism, he calls “con-
trapuntal reading” (Said, 1993, p. 66):
My idea in Orientalism is to use humanistic critique to open up the

fields of struggle, to introduce a longer sequence of thought and analysis
to replace the short bursts of polemical, thought-stopping fury that so
imprison us in labels and antagonistic debate whose goal is a belligerent
collective identity rather than understanding and intellectual exchange.
I have called what I try to do “humanism,” a word I continue to use
stubbornly despite the scornful dismissal of the term by sophisticated
post-modern critics. By humanism I mean first of all attempting to
dissolve Blake’s mind-forg’d manacles so as to be able to use one’s mind
historically and rationally for the purposes of reflective understanding
and genuine disclosure. Moreover, humanism is sustained by a sense
of community with other interpreters and other societies and periods:
strictly speaking, therefore, there is no such thing as an isolated humanist.
(p. xvii, emphasis in original)
Said (1978/2003) continues his defense of critical humanism in his

conclusion to the preface, while contextualizing his magnum opus vis-à-
vis the recently launched Iraq War:
Humanism is centered upon the agency of human individuality and

subjective intuition, rather than on received ideas and approved authority.
Texts have to be read as texts that were produced and live on in the histor-
ical realm in all sorts of what I have called worldly ways. But this by no
means excludes power, since on the contrary what I have tried to show
in my book have been the insinuations, the imbrications of power into
even the most recondite of studies.
And lastly, most important, humanism is the only, and, I would go as
far as saying, the final, resistance we have against the inhuman practices
and injustices that disfigure human history. We are today abetted by the
enormously encouraging democratic field of cyberspace, open to all users
in ways undreamed of by earlier generations either of tyrants or of ortho-

doxies. The worldwide protests before the war began in Iraq would not
have been possible were it not for the existence of alternative commu-
nities across the globe, informed by alternative news sources and keenly
aware of the environmental, human rights, and libertarian impulses that
bind us together in this tiny planet. The human, and humanistic, desire
for enlightenment and emancipation is not easily deferred, despite the
incredible strength of the opposition to it that comes from the Rums-
felds, Bin Ladens, Sharons and Bushes of this world. I would like to
believe that Orientalism has had a place in the long and often interrupted
road to human freedom. (pp. xxii–xxiii, emphasis in original)
Humanism and Democratic Criticism (Said, 2004) is a posthumously

published book, which is based on a series of lectures given by Said in
2000 at Columbia University. As is clear from the title, the book deals
directly with the question of humanism “as a useable praxis for intel-
lectuals and academics who want to know what they are doing, what
they are committed to as scholars, and who want also to connect these
principles to the world in which they live as citizens” (p. 6). Here is
Said’s (2004) clearest, dare I say contrapuntal, statement on his critical
humanism, which certainly resonates with the project of transmodernity:
it is possible to be critical of humanism in the name of humanism and that,

schooled in its abuses by the experience of Eurocentrism and empire,
one could fashion a different kind of humanism that was cosmopolitan and
text-and -language bound in ways that absorbed the great lessons from the
past…and still remain attuned to the emergent voices and currents of the
present, many of them exilic, extraterritorial, and unhoused …the core of
humanism is the secular notion that the historical world is made by men
and women, and not by God, and that it can be understood rationally.
(pp. 10–11, emphasis added)
In other words, for Said (2004), there is no contradiction in using

a structuralist, or antihumanist, methodology (e.g., psychoanalysis or
discourse analysis) in tandem with a humanistic ontology and epis-
temology. In fact, contrapuntal psychoanalysis, as a “methodology of
the oppressed” (Sandoval, 2000), enacts this very dialectic of critical
162 R. K. Beshara
humanism. For Said (2004), humanism “is the achievement of form by

human will and agency” (p. 15), which has the potential to become “a
democratic process producing a critical and progressively freer mind”
(p. 16), but “it is neither system nor impersonal force like the market
or the unconscious” (p. 15).
Here is what Said (2004) says about the dialectic of critical humanism,
which the reader as “a central feature of all humanism” (p. 43) should
contrast with contemporary identity politics and cancel culture, which
affects (pro-)Palestinians more than any other group:
Humanism is, to some extent, a resistance to idées reçues, and it offers

opposition to every kind of cliché and unthinking language…far from
humanistic effort being determined (or for that matter predetermined)
by socioeconomic circumstances, is is the dialectic of opposites, of antag-
onism between those circumstances and the individual humanist that is
of the deepest interest, and not conformity or identity. (p. 43, emphasis
in original)
Critical humanism situates “critique at the very heart of humanism,

critique as a form of democratic freedom and as a continuous practice
of questioning and of accumulating knowledge that is open to, rather
than in denial of, the constituent historical realities of [our world]”
(Said, 2004, p. 47). For Said (2004), critical humanism is worldly,
which denotes “the real historical world from whose circumstances
none of us can in fact ever be separated, not even in theory” (p. 48).
The grounding of critical humanism in worldliness is what enables its
reflexive critical consciousness, the kind of conscientização needed in
liberation praxis, which reflects on, and acts upon, the world. In essence,
Said is arguing: don’t throw the baby (humanism) out with the bathwater
(Eurocentrism).
Writing as a Form of Killing

Writing qua law (e.g., Leyes y ordenanzas nuevamente hechas por su
Majestad para la gobernación de las Indias y buen tratamiento y conser-
vación de los Indios and Encomienda) is a form of killing because it
legitimizes colonization, genocide, slavery, mass incarceration, etc. For

example, given where I live I am particularly thinking of Juan de Oñate’s
1598 expedition to what we now call New Mexico and his declaration
that this land is part of Spain effective immediately. His was an act
of arbitrary lawmaking (i.e., mythic violence) through writing, which
disrupted the course of Indigenous history. A good example of this
authorization of laws through arbitrary Royal decrees in the context of
South America is captured in Werner Herzog’s (1972) Aguirre, the Wrath
of God . In the film, the viewer sees how delusional decrees are arbitrarily
issued and enacted.
If the delusional issuing/enacting of arbitrary decrees, reminiscent of
the will of the primeval father, is the foundation of law, what makes our
current legal system any more legitimate? In this sense, I am in agree-
ment with Benjamin’s (1921/1996) argument for divine violence in his
Critique of Violence. The authorizing logic for these arbitrary laws was the
Monarch (a sovereign representation of God on Earth), hence, why they
were called Royal Decree-Laws. Paradoxically, even though we live in a
Republic, which waged a Revolution against the British Monarchy, we
have not transcended the formal logic of Royal Decree-Laws used in the
context of the Spanish colonization of the Americas. Hence, how mass
incarceration in the US legally writes Blacks and other racialized bodies
outside the law placing them in an oppressive/violent state of exception:
the bare life of the new slave.
Another example of writing as a form of killing is the Requerimiento.
Dussel (1995) writes:
Before battling the Indians, the conquistadores read them the require-
ment (requerimiento), which promised to exempt the Indians from the
pains of defeat if they would merely convert to the Christian-European
religion…Of course, the Indian would have been unable to grasp this
proposal, since it had been read in Spanish. (p. 51, emphasis in original)
What if law is a pure formality whose function is literally to

alienate and castrate the colonized subject through an incomprehen-
sible language? The reader needs only to consider my thesis vis-à-vis this
excerpt from the Spanish Requirement of 1513 (Requerimiento):
164 R. K. Beshara
I require that you understand carefully this proclamation, take it utterly

seriously, and deliberate about it for an appropriate amount of time. I
require you to recognize the church as queen and superior of the world,
to acknowledge the pope in the church’s name, and to obey his majesty,
the pope’s vicar, who is superior, lord, and king of these lands…. If you
refuse or try to protract this process by malicious delay, I certify that with
the aid of God I will wage mighty war upon you in every place and in
every way…. I will seize your women and sons and sell them into slavery.
I will rob you of all your goods and do to you every evil and injury in
my power. (as cited in Dussel, 1995, p. 51, emphasis in original)
My thesis that writing as a form of killing is reminiscent of Lacan’s

(1973/2004) “vel of alienation” (p. 211, emphasis in original), except
that the colonial situation is much worse. The colonized subject is forced
to choose between Being and the colonial Other’s meaning (i.e., recog-
nizing the church as queen and superior of the world), which, of course,
the colonized subject does not understand. Consequently, the result is
that the colonized subject is interpellated into the zone of non-meaning,
which is also a zone of nonbeing, between his or her Being and the
colonial Other’s meaning.
The discourse of recognition (i.e., the Other’s meaning) in racialized
capitalism is sustained by the fantasy of disavowal (i.e., non-meaning
qua nonbeing). The Symbolic violence of writing then is a function of
its arbitrary lawmaking and law-preserving capacity. Therefore, one must
pay attention to “the materiality of the signifier” (Lacan, 1966/2006,
p. 16) vis-à-vis oppression and violence, for “the letter kills” (p. 423).
In other words, I am shedding light on the Real violence of writing,
the literality of its lethal/legal inscriptions. It is no surprise then that
Lacan refers to his écrits (writings) as poubellications (litter-publications),
and why he prefers speaking at seminars. Psychoanalysis itself is a praxis
of speaking and listening (an oral tradition), which deals with the violent
effects of language on the subject. If the Requerimiento is the Other’s
discourse, then the unconscious is violence.
Freud (1913/1946) explored the historical truth of mythic violence
(i.e., its lawmaking and law-preserving functions) in his reconstruction
of what a taboo is and what it does in Totem and Taboo:
Taboo is a very primitive prohibition imposed from without (by an

authority) and directed against the strongest desires of man. The desire
to violate it continues in the unconscious; persons who obey the taboo
have an ambivalent feeling toward what is affected by the taboo. (p. 48)
If we go back to the Requerimento, the taboo is premised on under-

standing, recognition, and acknowledgment of the colonial Other, that
is, the taboo forbids misunderstanding, misrecognition, and denial. But,
as I showed above, the taboo is based on the failure of communication,
or of language itself. In other words, the taboo, as the legal inscrip-
tion of Symbolic failure, sets up the colonized subject to fail in the face
of the impossible: Real violence. This is why the colonized subject has
an unconscious desire to violate the taboo and to be liberated from its
oppressive violence. This structure is still in place today as Curry (2017)
shows with his theory of the Man-Not; it is also evident in the US with
the mass incarceration of Blacks (Alexander, 2010) as a new form of
slavery and the endo-colonization of racialized communities as a function
of the militarization of the police.
Freedom v. Liberation
In Arbitrary Rule, Mary Nyquist (2013) argues that the Aristotelian
distinction between natural slavery and political slavery is a central
feature of European politics since time immemorial. The idea of a natural
slave, who is outside of the political equation, is also a function of
another Aristotelian differentiation (Agamben, 1998) between those who
are barely living outside the polis (e.g., in ghettos or concentration
camps) and those who are enjoying the good life inside the polis.
Political slavery is a figurative form of slavery, which is concerned with
antityrannicism. A great example of this mythical discourse is the Amer-
ican Revolution, which frames the political freedom realized through
Republicanism as the antithesis of the tyranny of British Monarchy:
“Taxation without representation is tyranny.” Natural slavery, on the
other hand, is a literal form of chattel slavery, which is repressed in Euro-
pean political discourses about freedom as Nyquist (2013) shows. This
166 R. K. Beshara
is the paradox at the heart of European democracies since ancient times;

for this reason, I conceptually prefer the term liberation over freedom:
“Freedom” (and its Roman stepdaughter “Liberty”) so saturates hege-

monic Euro-American ideologies that it is difficult to grasp that its
emergence as a political ideal is contingent on numerous historical
particulars, including the institution of chattel slavery. (Nyquist, 2013,
p. 3)
Similarly, Mignolo (2007) distinguishes between the signifiers eman-

cipation and liberation:
While ‘emancipation’ was the concept used to argue for the freedom of
a new social class, the bourgeoisie (translated into the universal term
of ‘humanity’ and setting the stage to export emancipation all over the
world, although Haiti presented the initial difficulties to emancipating
universal claims) and was recovered in the twentieth century in Marxist
discourse to argue for the ‘emancipation of the working class’ or still more
recently, for the emancipating forces of the multitude, ‘liberation’ provides
a larger frame that includes the racialized class that the European bour-
geoisie (directly or indirectly) colonized beyond Europe (or beyond the
heart of Europe, as it was the colonization of Ireland) and, thus, subsumes
‘emancipation’.). (p. 455, emphasis in original)
Following Benjamin (1921/1996), can writing be decolonized?

Perhaps, it is difficult but not impossible. Maybe this is why many
Indigenous cultures around the world transmitted their knowledge and
wisdom both orally and ritualistically, but seldom through writing? Also,
the question of writing, which is linked to developmental arguments
regarding literacy, is often raised to support arguments for markers
of civilizational progress, such as: whereas Europeans have philosophy,
non-Europeans have religion or thought. In other words, markers of
civilization are complicit in the project of modernity/coloniality given
that they not only justify mythic violence legally but also theoretically—
this is known as “Eurocentrism” (Amin, 1988/2009), which is “epistemic
violence” (Spivak, 1988).
So how do we decolonize writing, or delink it from its lawmaking and

law-preserving functions? In other words, can writing be a form of living?
Writing as a form of living , or as divine violence, would be law-destroying
(Benjamin, 1921/1996), since it would be anti-developmental, contra-
puntal, poetic, anarchistic, and non-narrative in both rhetoric and logic
(Said, 1993). Perhaps embracing divine violence entails writing in the
poetic style of oral transmissions and sacred rituals. Maybe we, as secular
critics, should not shy away from spirituality as embodied, or living,
thought.
From Repression to Oppression

Arabic is an example of a transmodern language (langue), but it is not
in any sense the transmodern language (langage). I am merely trying to
provoke you to think about the repression of transmodern signifiers in
the context of the War on Terror discourse vis-à-vis the phenomenon
known as flying while Arab, Muslim, or Brown. Furthermore, I theo-
rize oppression as the repression of an Other language (langue) because
the repression of an Other language entails the wholesale erasure of
Other speaking beings. This is my contrapuntal psychoanalytic reading
of oppression.
Modern language (langage) is never neutral, for it is inherently colo-
nial as a result of the dominance of certain languages (langues) and
cultures throughout history, particularly since 1492, which marks the
establishment of the modern world-system of racialized capitalism.
Therefore, a transmodern signifier (like sharı̄ ah) is either repressed in
the (post)modern unconscious, or if it is not repressed, it is appro-
priated meaninglessly or hysterically. Think of the following signifiers,
for example: h.ijāb, h.ummus., or .tah.ı̄na. They demonstrate appropriation
through transliteration (or Romanization), wherein the (post)modern
unconscious, like a whale, swallows whole these transmodern signifiers
and other ones, particularly those of the exotic variety that can be
commodified in service to capital. In sum, I have been critiquing the
(post)modern world of words because it excludes the transmodern world
of things.
168 R. K. Beshara
The question of colonial difference (as opposed to sexual difference)

entails a reconceptualization of the two modes of jouissance expli-
cated by Lacan (1975/1998): masculine jouissance and feminine jouis-
sance. These two modes of jouissance are operative within the zone of
being. Colonial difference constitutes two different modes of jouissance:
mythical-jouissance and divine-jouissance (Beshara, 2019). Oppression
is dehumanizing for both oppressors and the oppressed; therefore, if
we think of freedom as the phallus, psychoanalytically-speaking, then
under oppression all subjects lack this phallus of freedom, which is essen-
tially individualistic à la political slavery. Liberation, on the other hand,
implies a social praxis; hence, it does not function as the phallus but
as a mode of jouissance beyond the pleasure principle of oppression.
Ironically, when liberation (as a process) turns into power (as an end),
oppression will become a repressed signifier and will function as the
reverse phallus, that is, if the unconscious continues to be relevant.
Race is a misrecognition premised on the racist disavowal of the racial-
ized. The subject of psychoanalysis was assumed to be European, male,
and heterosexual—although Freud (1920/1966) did grant that children
are “polymorphously perverse” (p. 259). Freud’s (1930/1961) writings
on European culture as civilization (i.e., as imperialism) attest to his
Eurocentrism and the Oedipus complex, which supposedly affects only
male children, speaks to the inherent sexism of psychoanalysis. Lacan
(1973/2004) revised penis envy through the lens of structuralism and
produced the phallus as “a symbol of the lack” (p. 103); in other words,
a symbol that both males and females lack, which turns castration into
an effect of entering into language.
Freud’s (1920/1966) homophobia is clear from his psychosexual devel-
opmental model, wherein ‘healthy’ (read: heterosexual male) subjects
resolve the Oedipus complex through identification with the father.
Feminist theorists (e.g., Grosz, 1990; Mitchell, 1974/2000) have done,
and continue to do, excellent work in critiquing psychoanalysis along
these lines. However, my own interest lies in the postcolonial critique of
psychoanalysis, which concerns the non-European subject, particularly
the colonized. By “the colonized,” I mean those non-European indi-
viduals and groups who either have been historically colonized and/or
are currently experiencing colonialism. Two forms of colonialism are
salient in my mind: settler colonialism and franchise colonialism (Wolfe,

1999). Neocolonialism (Nkrumah, 1965) is certainly a third type, but,
as we shall shortly see, colonialism (or coloniality) today is not only
politico-economic but also psychosocial (for an overview of European
imperialism see Gwynne, Klak, & Shaw, 2003).
Endo-Colonization
Consequently, a fourth type of colonialism that is worth thinking about
at present, particularly with the global militarization of the police,
is “endo-colonization” as the colonization of “one’s own population”
and the underdevelopment of “one’s own civilian economy” (Virilio,
1983/2008, p. 107). Virilio (1983/2008) sees endo-colonization as an
effect of decolonization, but it is not clear whether he is for or against
decolonization; perhaps, his analysis is more descriptive than evaluative:
Endo-colonization: the colony has always been the model of the political
State, which began in the city, spread to the nation, across the communes,
and reached the stage of the French and English colonial empires. And
now it backfires, which we knew the moment there was decolonization.
Decolonization is not a positive sign, it’s an endo-colonial sign. If you
decolonize without, you’ll colonize all the more intensely within. Colonial
extensiveness is replaced by endo-colonial intensiveness. (pp. 166–167)
Virilio (1983/2008) also explains endo-decolonization as a func-

tion of “minimal politics” or the “minimum-State” (p. 110), wherein
“societies have lost their capacity for self-regulation” to multinational
corporations (p. 111). In other words, neoliberal capitalism leads to
endo-colonization. Elsewhere, Virilio also qualifies endo-colonization in
terms of totalitarianism; he writes: “Totalitarian societies [e.g., Nazi
Germany] colonize their own people” (as cited in Armitacge, 1999,
p. 50). The merging of globalization (under neoliberal capitalism) in
tandem with totalitarianism is what Virilio terms “Globalitarianism!” (as
cited in Armitacge, 1999, p. 38), which is exemplified by the Global
170 R. K. Beshara
War on Terror. Finally, Virilio sheds light on another dimension of endo-

colonization qua “endo-technological eugenicism” (as cited in Armitacge,
1999, p. 51), in the context of technological acceleration (e.g., the
transplant revolution):
Every time a country is being colonized, bodies are colonized. The body
of the Negro, of the slave, of the deportee, of the inmate of the labour
camp, is a colonized body. Thus technology colonizes the world, through
globalitarianism, as we have seen earlier, but it also colonizes bodies, their
attitudes and behaviours. (pp. 50–51, emphasis in original)
Decolonial Subjectification
Contrapuntal psychoanalysis is a liberation praxis, which begins with
a critique of Freudo-Lacanian psychoanalysis “from the perspective of
coloniality” (Mignolo, 2007, p. 451). This praxis entails looking at
psychoanalysis as both an “imperialist discourse” and a “colonialist prac-
tice” (Said, 1993, p. 6) “from the point of view of the colonies (in
the historical sense)” (Mignolo, 2007, p. 507). Elsewhere in his article
Delinking: The Rhetoric of Modernity, the Logic of Coloniality and the
Grammar of De-coloniality, Mignolo (2007) qualifies this perspective
using other terms: first from Frantz Fanon like “the damnés” (p. 458)
then from Enrique Dussel like “liberation and decolonization” (p. 459).
Therefore, the aim of contrapuntal psychoanalysis, as a praxis inspired by
Marx’s (1845/1978) 11th thesis on Feuerbach and Freire’s (1970/2018)
Pedagogy of the Oppressed , is theorizing decolonial subjectification in an
effort to change the world.
In Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said (1993) describes the polit-
ical subject of contrapuntal psychoanalysis using phrases like “exilic
marginality” (p. 24) and “dislocated subjectivity” (p. 28). Decolonial
subjects are actively engaged in what Mignolo (2007), along with Aníbal
Quijano and Samir Amin, call “delinking” or “a de-colonial epistemic
shift” (p. 453). Decolonial subjects are also involved in what he, and
Gloria Anzaldúa, conceptualize as “border thinking or border epistemol-
ogy” (p. 455). Mignolo (2007) writes:
Border thinking is grounded not in Greek thinkers but in the colo-

nial wounds and imperial subordination and, as such, it should become
the connector between the diversity of subaltern histories…and corre-
sponding subjectivities. (p. 493)
In other words, the decolonial subject is neither a (post)colonial

subject nor a pre-colonial subject; for the logic of decolonial subjectivity
is governed by the rhetoric of transmodern Otherness. Conversely, the
(post)colonial subject is logically governed by a (post)modern rhetoric,
which is still situated within the project of modernity/coloniality. As for
the pre-colonial subject, she is a fantasy figure that ideologically sustains
Orientalism and similar discourses.
The Two Others

The concept of the big Other, or the Other with a capital O, is central
to both psychoanalysis and postcolonialism, but it certainly predates
both fields. Lajos Brons (2015) argues that Simone De Beauvoir can
be credited for introducing this concept of the Other in 1949 with
the publication of her book, The Second Sex. In her conceptualization
of woman as Other, De Beauvoir (1949/2009) was indexing G. W. F.
Hegel’s (1807/2018) master-slave dialectic from The Phenomenology of
Spirit.
For Hegel (1807/2018), the struggle between the master and the
slave is not simply a struggle between two individuals or subjects, but a
struggle between two historical ideas. Hegel believed that the better idea
(freedom or emancipation, in this case) would eventually win because
there is a dialectical (i.e., developmental or progressive) logic to history.
Marx, of course, had a similar belief to that of Hegel’s but the struggle
for him was not an idealist one, but a material struggle between two
historical classes: the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.
In psychoanalysis, the dialectic becomes one involving the subject
and the Other. In decoloniality, it encompasses the colonizer and the
colonized, or, in the language of liberation philosophy, it is the oppressor-
oppressed dialectic. The goal of psychoanalysis, if there is one, is the
172 R. K. Beshara
traversing of the fantasy, wherein “the subject subjectifies the cause of

his or her existence (the Other’s desire: object a), and is characterized
by desirousness” (Fink, 1997, p. 195, emphasis in original). The aim of
decoloniality is liberation, which for Freire (1970/2018) is our historical
vocation: to become “more fully human” (p. 44).
Although the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, was a dislo-
cated subject, a Jewish atheist, a non-European, living in an anti-Semitic
Viennese milieu, in a country (Austria) that ended up being annexed,
without resistance, by Nazi Germany; psychoanalysis is a modern project,
which means it is inherently governed by a colonial logic. My aim is not
to throw the baby (psychoanalysis) out with the bathwater (Eurocen-
trism), for I am committed to many of the insights of psychoanalysis.
However, the question for me is how to decolonize psychoanalysis so
that it becomes a liberation praxis for everyone in the world? There-
fore, contrapuntal psychoanalysis must be relevant, and applicable, for
those living in both the Global South and the Global North. The Global
South is a geopolitical designation that refers to transmodern cultures
in the continents of South America, Africa, and Asia. But the Global
South also signifies ‘outsiders within’—that is, decolonial subcultures in
the Global North. In the context of the US, for example, these decolonial
subcultures include Indigenous, Black, and Brown subjects.
Having said that, I circle back to the notion of the Other because
I am curious to find out if there is any conceptual link between the
psychoanalytic Other and the decolonial Other. Lacan (1966/2006),
in his return to Freud, distinguishes between the little, or Imaginary,
other, that is, other egos; and the big, or Symbolic, Other as the field
of speech and language. Lacan (1966/2006) writes, “The Other is,
therefore, the locus in which is constituted the I who speaks along
with he [or she] who hears” (p. 358). This conceptualization of the
Symbolic Other as the field, or locus, of speech and language compels
Lacan (1966/2006) to formulate that “the unconscious is the Other’s
discourse” (p. 10, emphasis in original). Meaning that the unconscious
is neither personal nor collective, but psychosocial: a “transindividual
reality” (Lacan, 1966/2006, p. 214).
Now, let us turn to the decolonial Other, who is either ignored by

psychoanalysts or dismissed as Imaginary. In his magnum opus, Orien-
talism, Said (1978/2003) conceptualizes the Other, as an ideological
fantasy figure, denoting both the Orient and the Oriental in the Euro-
American subject’s imagination. In other words, Orientalism is not only
a Symbolic discourse, but an ideology sustained by an Imaginary fantasy
about the binary and hierarchical relationship between ‘us’ and ‘them.’
To put it differently, the colonial subject’s unconscious is the modern
Other’s discourse, which is Orientalism. Therefore, Said was not writing
about Orientals as other egos in the imagination of colonial subjects. He
was writing about Orientals and the Orient as discursive and material
objects, or objets a, in the unconscious of colonial subjects. To further
support my point, I will cite to you a passage from Orientalism, wherein
Said (1978/2003) discusses the notion of exteriority, a central notion for
my analysis of decolonial subjectivity:
[M]y concern with authority does not entail analysis of what lies hidden
in the Orientalist text, but analysis rather of the text’s surface, its exteriority
to what it describes. I do not think that this idea can be overemphasized.
Orientalism is premised upon exteriority, that is, on the fact that the
Orientalist, poet or scholar, makes the Orient speak, describes the Orient,
renders its mysteries plain for and to the West…The principal product of
this exteriority is of course representation. (pp. 20–21, emphasis added)
In Orientalism, Said (1978/2003) also writes about Orientalism as

paranoiac knowledge, which is consistent with Lacan’s (1966/2006)
interpretation of paranoia as Imaginary knowledge (or méconnaissance).
The unconscious truth of Orientalism, its Symbolic or unknown knowl-
edge, is concerning the Oriental Other as the repressed of the Orientalist
unconscious. For example, ‘Islam’ and ‘Arab’ are repressed signifiers that
constitute the non-identity of Europe, particularly vis-à-vis Al-Andalus
(711–1492). It takes a lot of effort to repress close to eight centuries of
non-European rule in Europe, wherein Muslims and Arabs functioned
as a bridge between the ancient world and the Renaissance not only
as translators of, and commentators on, ancient Greek texts but also as
original contributors in the fields of philosophy and science.
174 R. K. Beshara
The Oriental as Other is a locus of speech, which has been systemati-

cally misrecognized in, and fantasmatically disavowed from, the discourse
of Orientalism; a discourse that imaginarizes and signifierizes the Orient
and Orientals. One’s desire is the desire of the Other, but which
Other? The (post)modern Other or the transmodern Other? Hence,
my theory of double-unconsciousness: the (post)colonial unconscious
and the decolonial unconscious. Ultimately, this dialectic of oppres-
sion can be superseded by liberation as a process, but the oppressed
must lead the way as Freire (1970/2018) shows. Hence, there are two
general desires at work here: a desire to maintain dominance (couched
in the grammar of freedom) and a desire for liberation. In Decolonial
Psychoanalysis (Beshara, 2019), I focused on Arabic as an example of a
transmodern language (langue), but it is not in any way the transmodern
language (language).
Said’s (1978/2003) notion of exteriority resembles Lacan’s
(1986/1992) idea of “extimacy” from his Seminar VII: The Ethics of
Psychoanalysis. Lacan (1986/1992) defines extimacy as “intimate exteri-
ority” (p. 139). Extimacy, in other words, is a psychosocial concept that
names the topological structure of human subjectivity. As an effect of
language, the subject is divided between a conscious interior (or ego)
and an exterior unconscious. This split led Lacan to visualize the subject
as a Möbius strip. However, the topological structure of decolonial
subjects is further complexified by the question of cultural difference,
which in the longue durée of Euro-colonialism amounts essentially to
colonial difference.
To further solidify what I am trying to construct here, I have linked
Said’s (1978/2003) notion of exteriority and Lacan’s (1986/1992) idea
of extimacy to Dussel’s (2002) concept of transmodernity. For Dussel
(2002):
The metacategory ‘exteriority’ can illuminate an analysis of the cultural

‘positivity’ not included by modernity, an analysis based not on post-
modernity’s suppositions but rather on those of what I have called
‘trans’-modernity. That is to say, exteriority is a process that takes off,
originates, and mobilizes itself from an ‘other’ place…From this ‘exteri-
ority,’ negated and excluded by hegemonic Europe’s modern expansion,
there are present-day cultures that predate European modernity, that have
developed together with it, and that have survived until the present
with enough human potential to give birth to a cultural plurality that
will emerge after modernity and capitalism. These living and productive
cultures, creative and in otherness [di-ferentes], are not just postmodern,
since ‘postmodern’ only labels a final stage of modernity. Rather, they
are cultures that have developed on a ‘trans’-modern horizon, some-
thing beyond the internal possibility of simple modernity. This ‘beyond’
(‘trans-’) indicates the take-off point from modernity’s exteriority. (p. 234,
My effort so far in this section has been to build a theoretical bridge

between psychoanalysis and decoloniality through the notion of exteri-
ority. However, while the psychoanalytic Other and the decolonial Other
are both Symbolic entities that are formal in essence given their discursive
ontology, we are still dealing with two different Others: not a Symbolic
Other versus an Imaginary other, but two different Symbolic Others, and
that difference has to do with cultural, or colonial, difference, which we
can conceptualize as the traumatic Real of colonialism.
In his Seminar V, The Formations of the Unconscious, Lacan
(1998/2017) writes about “the Other of the Other” (p. 176), a formu-
lation that he ends up rejecting in his Seminar VI, Desire and Its
Interpretation, by writing that “[t]here is no Other of the Other” (Lacan,
2013/2019, p. 324). The second formulation is meant to make the
case that like the subject, the Other is also barred because, as Lacan
(1966/2006) argues in Écrits, “there is no metalanguage that can be
spoken” (p. 688). However, for the purposes of my analysis, I think it
is worth resurrecting Lacan’s (1998/2017) earlier formulation regarding
“the Other of the Other” because while it is true that there is no
metalanguage, there are Other languages and Other cultures.
Resurrecting this earlier formulation will allow me to distinguish
between the psychoanalytic Other, or “the Other of the law” (Lacan,
1998/2017, p. 438), and the decolonial Other, or “the Other of the signi-
fier” (Miller, 2013, p. 4). I also designate the former as the (post)modern
Other, and the latter as the transmodern Other. I have explored this
notion of the two Others in my book, Decolonial Psychoanalysis, wherein
176 R. K. Beshara
I realized that US Muslims, as decolonial citizen-subjects, desire as US

citizens according to Other of the Law, which in the context of the
Islamophobia/Islamophilia fantasy is informed by the (counter)terrorism
discourse (Beshara, 2019). But then, here is the interesting part, as
Muslim subjects they enjoy according to the Other of the signifier,
primarily Islam as a religion, or culture, and Arabic as a language. And,
of course, this Other form of jouissance, or enjoyment, is essentially a
counter-hegemonic form of ethico-political resistance, too.
To get a better sense of Lacan’s (1998/2017) earlier formulation, here
is what he writes about the Other of the Other in Formations of the
Unconscious:
We have defined the Other as the locus of speech. This Other is instituted
and takes shape through the sole fact that the subject speaks. By virtue
of this sole fact, the big Other is born as the locus of speech. That does
not mean, though, that it is realized as a subject in its alterity. The Other
is invoked whenever there is speech…this beyond that is articulated in
the upper line of our schema is the Other of the Other …The Other of
the Other is the locus in which the Other’s speech takes shape as such.
(p. 450, emphasis added)
Decolonial subjects are border thinkers because they live in the inter-
section, or at the border, of these two Others: the Global Northern
Other and the Global Southern Other. My formulation affords us a
new theorization of oppression as the repression of the Other of the Other.
This helps us explain the unconscious criminalization of Arabic in the
US, which concerns me greatly since it is my mOther tongue. Think
about the phenomenon of flying while Arab, Muslim, or Brown, which
I mentioned earlier. Am I able to read or write in Arabic on a plane while
flying in the US? What is racism but the rejection of an Other language,
an Other culture, and consequently Other bodies? And what is the logic
behind this racism? Colonial difference.
Now, of course, coloniality, as a style of thought beyond the extrac-
tive material system of colonialism, is not only about physical geography
(i.e., Global North v. Global South), but also about human geog-
raphy because the damnés are not only from the Global South. So as
someone that lives in New Mexico on colonized Tewa land, American

Indian boarding schools, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,
come to my mind immediately as instances of the systematic erasure
of an Other language and culture. I am speaking of epistemicide (de
Sousa Santos, 2016) here, as a form of oppression, because how can
these Indigenous cultures be orally transmitted to future generations if
their languages were historically erased through both psychoanalytic and
political repression?
I am also thinking of the timeline of white supremacy from the
transatlantic slave trade to the New Jim Crow. Again, consider the
ongoing criminalization of African-American culture not only through
the killing and mass incarceration of Black bodies, but also through
the repression of African-American Vernacular English (AAVE), which
happens to fare better than some of my other examples as a function of
the capitalist co-option, and commodification, of hip-hop by the hege-
monic music industry. So while some may argue that the appropriation
of the n-word from the colonial masters is empowering to Blacks, one
has to critically question, however, the context within which the n-word
is being used, which, of course, is racialized capitalism. To be clear, racial-
ized capitalism as a modern world-system is inherently linked with the
coloniality of power (Quijano, 2000).
Contrapuntal psychoanalysis as an antiracist and anti-capitalist liber-
ation praxis is concerned with alter-globalization, or mundialización,
because although psychoanalysis is a product of a local history (Vienna
in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries), it tends to operate
through a global design like a civilizing mission, wherein the subject is
conceived to be universal in theory although in reality this universality
is never applied to so-called primitive or barbarian subjects (i.e., those
developmentally stuck in the past from the perspective of modernity or
those living outside the Euro-American centers of power, respectively).
On the contrary, contrapuntal psychoanalysis explicitly honors “the di-
versity and pluri-versity of the many local histories that in the past 500
hundred years (some in the past 250 or perhaps only 50 years) couldn’t
avoid the contact, conflict, and complicity with the West” (Mignolo,
2007, p. 449).
178 R. K. Beshara
We are currently witnessing the criminalization of Latin@ cultures and

the Spanish language in the context of the MAGA ideology, particularly
the Build That Wall discourse. I am sure the reader has seen numerous
examples in the media of white-identifying people calling the police
upon seeing/hearing Brown people speaking in Spanish. This racist act,
of course, negates the colonial history of the US, wherein many of these
Spanish-speaking subjects are descendants of people who were living here
before parts of this country were parts of this country, and were instead
colonies of the Viceroyalty of New Spain before becoming territories of
Mexico. The concept of the two Others affords us a contrapuntal psycho-
analytic reading of oppression, or racism, as the repression of the Other
of the Other.
Double-Unconsciousness
Given that there are two Others, and that decolonial subjects are
oppressed because they embody this double-Otherness, what then is
the status of the unconscious from the perspective of contrapuntal
psychoanalysis? In this section, I build upon and extend W. E. B. Du
Bois’s (1903/2007) notion of “double-consciousness” which is one of the
features of the decolonial subject’s “two-ness” (p. 8). The other missing
feature from Du Bois’s account is, of course, double-unconsciousness.
Given that there are two Others, the decolonial subject’s double-
unconsciousness is a function of the discourses generated by these two
Others, namely: the discourse of (post)modernity and the discourse of
transmodernity.
Du Bois (1903/2007) wrote about double-consciousness not as a
curse, but as a gift of “second-sight” (p. 8). Meaning that the decolo-
nial subject is able to perceive both the colonial subject and how they
are being perceived, and racialized, by this colonial subject. Fanon
(1952/2008) characterized his experience with not only two-ness but
three-ness: “I existed in triple. I was taking up room. I approached the
Other…and the Other, evasive, hostile, but not opaque, transparent and
absent, vanished. Nausea” (p. 92).
In the context of my notion of double-unconsciousness, second-sight

is both a conscious and an unconscious gift when it comes to percep-
tion. Colonial subjects, on the other hand, lack this gift of second-sight,
which is why many bourgeois whites continue to deny their privilege and
to overlook the disadvantaged subject-positionings of oppressed groups
as a function of colonialism. Furthermore, psychoanalysis, like colonial
subjects, also lacks the gift of second-sight, a gift that allows decolonial
subjects to be acutely aware of, for example, microaggressions or everyday
racism. Naturally, the gift of second-sight is at the heart of contrapuntal
psychoanalysis as a border methodology.
The Paradox of the Racism-‘Race’ Dialectic

Reading Fanon’s (1952/2008) “The Lived Experience of the Black Man”
made me think of the paradox of the racism-‘race’ dialectic. On the one
hand, the concept of ‘race’ would not exist without the reality of racism.
Racism is a product of racialization and racialization is a function of
the concept of ‘race’. On the other hand, while the concept of ‘race’ is
inherently problematic (i.e., racist), we cannot do without it and pretend
to be colorblind.
The fact of the matter is we live in a racist world, therefore, we all
racialize. However, we are not all racists. So while we cannot help, but
(mis)perceive other human beings through the lens of ‘race,’ which does
not mean that we all think, feel, and/or act as if this other human (who
is presumably different from us) is somehow inferior than us. The real
question, raised by the racism-‘race’ dialectic, is how do we account for
human differences without being racist?
In other words, it is normal to perceive human differences, the
problem is how do we make sense of these differences? That is, what
schemas do we rely on for interpreting perceived human differences?
This issue is complex because our schemas are largely products of our
culture(s). Then the next logical question becomes: How do we change
cultures of racism? This is a difficult task because it entails changing how
we read, and consequently reconstruct, world history. Put differently, it is
a pedagogical task at the levels of the family, the school, and the society.
180 R. K. Beshara
Colonial Difference
Decolonial theorists write about colonial difference, which is the histor-
ical and ongoing asymmetry between the colonizer and the colonized.
In Decolonial Psychoanalysis (Beshara, 2019), I tried to theorize the link
between colonial difference and sexual difference. The latter is grounded
in Lacan’s (1975/1998) formulas of sexuation in Seminar XX, which are
premised on “the impossibility of the sexual relationship as such. Jouis-
sance, qua sexual, is phallic–in other words, it is not related to the Other
as such” (p. 9). This impossibility is typically rendered in this form: il
n’y a pas de rapport sexuel (there’s no such thing as a sexual relation-
ship). But why this impossibility? Lacan (1975/1998) argues that writing
(representing the unrepresentable) itself attests to the truth of his axiom:
the sexual relationship cannot be written (ne peut pas s’écrire). Everything
that is written stems from the fact that it will forever be impossible to
write, as such, the sexual relationship. It is on that basis that there is a
certain effect of discourse, which is called writing. (p. 35, emphasis in
original)
For Lacan (1975/1998), sexual difference, or the difference between

masculine and feminine, is neither a biological nor a cultural difference,
but a logical difference in jouissance. Consequently, masculine jouissance
is a phallic jouissance, while feminine jouissance is an Other jouissance.
Love signifies the impossibility of the sexual relationship, and the fact
that it cannot be written: “What makes up for the sexual relationship is,
quite precisely, love” (p. 45).
Another reason why the sexual relationship is impossible is because
phallic jouissance is premised on the masculine subject’s fantasy vis-à-vis
a partial object of the feminine Other: “Phallic jouissance is the obstacle
owing to which man does not come (n’arrive pas), I would say, to enjoy
woman’s body, precisely because what he enjoys is the jouissance of the
organ [i.e., objet a]” (p. 7, emphasis in original). This is why Lacan
(1975/1998) later qualifies phallic jouissance as “the jouissance of the
idiot” (p. 81) since it is essentially masturbatory.
Conversely, Lacan (1975/1998) links feminine jouissance not to the

phallus (), as a symbol of lack or as a “signifier that has no signified”
(p. 81), but to the barred Other (A): “why not interpret one face of the
Other, the God face, as based on feminine jouissance?” (p. 77). Conse-
quently, Lacan (1975/1998) writes Woman or claims “La femme n’existe
pas” (Lacan, 1987, p. 41, emphasis in original):
Woman has a relation to the signifier of that Other, insofar as, qua Other,
it can but remain forever Other. I can only assume here that you will
recall my statement that there is no Other of the Other. The Other, that
is, the locus in which everything that can be articulated on the basis of
the signifier comes to be inscribed, is, in its foundation, the Other in the
most radical sense. That is why the signifier, with this open parenthesis,
marks the Other as barred: S(A). (Lacan, 1975/1998, p. 81)
My thesis is that Lacan’s (1975/1998) sexual difference applies to

the zone of being, but not to those in the zone of nonbeing, that is,
the damned who have been historically ungendered (Curry, 2017) or
“robbed of gender” and “confined within the binary of conquest” (Curry,
personal communication, August 7, 2020). Also, in Decolonial Psycho-
analysis (2019), I have resuscitated the Other of the Other to distinguish
between the Other of the Law and the Other of the signifiers. When Lacan
(1966/2006) writes “that there is no Other of the Other” or “that there is
no metalanguage that can be spoken” (p. 688), he is signifying the death
of the Name-of-the-Father. However, from the perspective of coloniality,
the Other of the Law is very much alive. According to Lorenzo Chiesa
(2007), “the Real of the object a” (p. 122, emphasis in original) fills in
the gap left by the death of the Name-of-the-Father.
In my view, colonial difference is premised on what Du Bois
(1903/2007) has termed “two-ness” (p. 8), the two-ness of decolonial
subjects. While (post)colonial subjects are divided, decolonial subjects
are doubly divided. For this reason, I conceive of two modes of jouissance
(Beshara, 2019) that correspond with colonial difference: mythical-
jouissance and divine-jouissance. Mythical-jouissance (which is essentially
phallic) is the jouissance experienced by those in the zone of being,
which perpetuates the apparatus of racialized capitalism. It is a jouissance
derived from oppression and mythic violence (Benjamin, 1921/1996),
182 R. K. Beshara
particularly “racialized death and sexual violence against Black men”

(Curry, 2017, p. 142). On the other hand, divine-jouissance charac-
terizes the jouissance of the damned, whose source is liberation and
divine violence (Benjamin, 1921/1996). Earlier, I have linked this Other
jouissance with the (spiritual) renunciation of the drives to hint at the
relationship between sublimation and the sublime. Mignolo frames that
relationship in terms of “decolonial aesthesis” (as cited in Gaztambide-
Fernández, 2014). Spirituals, of which blues and gospel are derivatives,
are the most concrete example I can think of.
Curry (2017) has been crucial in my articulation of colonial differ-
ence in relation to sexual difference with his distinction between gender
and genre and his conceptualization of the Man-Not, who can also
be represented as Man. Therefore, we can say: il n’y a de rapport colo-
niale (there’s no such thing as a colonial relationship), and we can also
declare: l’homme noir n’existe pas (the Black man doesn’t ex-sist). Fanon
(1952/2008) acknowledges the fact of colonial difference when he writes,
“Between the white man and me there is irremediably a relationship
of transcendence” (p. 117). The Man-Not extends to other colonized
(i.e., racialized or politicized) men; we can, naturally, also speak of the
Human-Not, which includes both the Man-Not and the Woman-Not.
The colonial relationship cannot be written because writing is a form
of killing, and what makes up for the colonial relationship is, quite
precisely, carnal hatred (Curry, 2017, p. 4). It is for this reason that I
conceptualize solidarity with the oppressed, in the context of cultural
difference, not in terms of love but “learned ignorance” (Beshara, 2019).
My point about the primacy of colonial difference over sexual difference
is echoed by Curry’s (2017) account of the distinction between gender
and genre (p. 6), which was developed by Sylvia Wynter.
Curry (2017) argues, from a post-feminist perspective, that Black
males are actually more vulnerable to racial-sexual violence because of
their Man-Notness. Curry (2017) supports his arguments with examples
from history and with empirical data from the present; he writes:
Because the Black male is often defined by a categorical redundancy of

“him as male,” his sexual difference, his genre, is usually obscured from
sight. He is thought to be like the white male because he is biologically
male. The notion of a different historical consciousness, or develop-

ment of manliness, is thought to be conceptually impossible and without
historical substantiation, not because there is no actual evidence, but
because the proof is imperceptible under the present categorical assort-
ment of knowledge. This historicization of the Black male does not
solidify another race/gender standpoint. In actual point of fact, there is
no oppression that is “unique,” in the sense that oppression happens to
only one group of people within history. The study of the Black male
shows that certain kinds of violence accumulate around certain bodies,
and these are the discoveries of his specificity revealed by study. Closer
attention to Black males throughout history shows that patriarchy is
not an insular and gender-opposing system that protects all men while
subjugating all women. Patriarchy stands appositionally to femininity as
a self-regenerative system (both ideologically and biologically). It depends
on white womanhood to enact its domestic terrorism and global impe-
rialism. Patriarchy depends on white femininity for its propagation. Just
as “man” and his expression of masculinity have meaning within Western
patriarchal logics, so, too, are the female and her feminism the represen-
tation of the wombs that birth the masculinity of this order. Patriarchy
evolved to protect white womanhood because white womanhood is not
only the foundation on which empire is built but also the nascence of
the expendable white male surplus needed for imperial conquest. She
births MAN, so the white woman is given a peculiar power under white
supremacy. This reality is excluded from theory in an effort to main-
tain the essential category of the woman as morally good and subjectively
vulnerable and in need of recognition and preference in discourse. (Curry,
2017, pp. 41–42)
In Chapter 1, I applied Algirdas Greimas’s (1968) semiotic square to

distinguish between the zone of being (S) and the zone of nonbeing (~S),
wherein S1 is the (white bourgois) Man and S2 is the (white bourgois)
Woman. Both are, of course, raceless from the perspective of racial-
ized capitalism. This semiotic configuration also overlaps with Lacan’s
(1991/2007) Master’s Discourse, wherein S1 is a master-signifier (patri-
archy) and S2 is knowledge (feminism). Curry (2017) is making the case
that feminism, as a critique of patriarchy, was specifically a historical
response to white supremacist patriarchy that, of course, excluded and
continues to disavow racialized folks. Therefore, Curry (2017) comes to
184 R. K. Beshara
the conclusion that the feminist argument that Black males today are
more privileged in the US because of their maleness constitutes either a
denial of history or historical revisionism.
Curry (2017) is a staunch critic of intersectionality theory because it
assumes that Black women are more oppressed than Black men because
they are both racialized and gendered; however, Curry (2017) goes to
show that Black males, despite the claims of intersectionality theory,
are in fact equally, if not more, oppressed than women because they
are racialized, but were never gendered , hence, why they are Man-Nots
(cf. Curry, 2021). National data on intimate partner and sexual violence
that date back to 2010 provide empirical support for Curry’s thesis. For
example, Stemple and Meyer (2014) conclude, on the basis of five federal
surveys, that “a high prevalence of sexual victimization [was detected]
among men—in many circumstances similar to the prevalence found
among women” (p. 19). Going back to the semiotic square, the ~S at
the bottom of the square signifies the zone of nonbeing, which includes
the racialized, the politicized, the oppressed, the damnés, the subaltern,
the lumpenproletariat, the colonized, etc. But in the context of Curry’s
(2017) analysis, ~S specifically signifies Blackness as a zone of nonbeing.
Therefore, ~S2 is the (Black lumpenproletarian) Woman-Not and ~S1 is
the (Black lumpenproletarian) Man-Not. In the schema of the Master’s
Discourse (Lacan, 1991/2007), ~S2 is the doubly divided subject ($)
and ~S1 is the objet a (phobogenic object). Curry’s (2017) invention of
Black Male Studies is a methodological attempt to think about Black
masculinity from the zone of nonbeing.
Sexual difference is concerned with the difference between white
bourgeois masculinity and femininity in terms of enjoyment, but colo-
nial difference sheds light on the racial-sexual violence perpetrated by
subjects in the zone of being onto those in the zone of nonbeing. Both
forms of analysis are important, but they are not morally equivalent
if we care about liberation. I am worried about how racialized femi-
nists (~S2 ), for example, are aligning themselves with white feminists
(S2 ) when they have a more pressing common struggle with Indigenous,
Black, and Brown males (~S1 ) against over-exploitation and dispos-
ability/fungibility. I read this situation highlighted by Curry (2017) as
an example of a divide and rule tactic employed from the zone of being,
which, of course, weakens our subaltern communities. The ideological

campaign from the zone of being to discursively frame the zone of
nonbeing as an inherently violent zone fantasmatically sutures the trau-
matic Real of colonial violence, which is the material basis of oppression
and violence in the apparatus of racialized capitalism.
Colonial Difference as a Product

of the Coloniality of Power
Now, I will turn to how colonial difference is conceptualized among
decolonial theorists. I begin with Quijano (2000) because his essay on
the coloniality of power was the basis for later conceptions like the
coloniality of knowledge and being:
What is termed globalization is the culmination of a process that began

with the constitution of America and colonial/modern Eurocentered capi-
talism as a new global power. One of the fundamental axes of this model
of power is the social classification of the world’s population around the
idea of race, a mental construction that expresses the basic experience
of colonial domination and pervades the more important dimensions
of global power, including its specific rationality: Eurocentrism. The
racial axis has a colonial origin and character, but it has proven to be
more durable and stable than the colonialism in whose matrix it was
established. (p. 533)
Epistemic Colonial Difference as a Product

of the Coloniality of Knowledge
The main theorist of epistemic colonial difference as a product of the
coloniality of knowledge is Mignolo (2000), who writes:
By “colonial differences” I mean, through my argument (and I should

perhaps say “the colonial difference”), the classification of the planet
in the modern/colonial imaginary, by enacting coloniality of power,
186 R. K. Beshara
an energy and a machinery to transform differences into values. If

racism is the matrix that permeates every domain of the imaginary
of the modern/colonial world system, “Occidentalism” is the overar-
ching metaphor around which colonial differences have been articulated
and rearticulated through the changing hands in the history of capi-
talism…and the changing ideologies motivated by imperial conflicts.
(p. 13)
Elsewhere, Mignolo (2002) adds:
the starting point of knowledge and thinking must be the colonial differ-
ence, not the narrative of Western civilization or the narrative of the
modern world-system. Thus transmodernity and coloniality of power
highlight the epistemic colonial difference, essentially the fact that it is
urgently necessary to think and produce knowledge from the colonial
difference. Paradoxically, the erasure of the colonial difference implies that
one recognize it and think from such an epistemic location—to think,
that is, from the borders of the two macronarratives, philosophy (Western
civilization) and the social sciences (modern world-system). The epistemic
colonial difference cannot be erased by its recognition from the perspec-
tive of modern epistemology. On the contrary, it requires, as Bernasconi
clearly saw in the case of African philosophy, that epistemic horizons open
beyond Bacon’s authoritarian assertion that “there can be no others.” The
consequences of this are gigantic not only for epistemology but also for
ethics and politics. (p. 85)
A key distinction within epistemic colonial difference is between

temporal colonial difference and spatial colonial difference: “If the
temporal difference was expressed through the notion of ‘primitives’, the
spatial colonial difference worked through the concept of barbarians, an
idea taken from the Greek language and historical experience, but modi-
fied in the sixteenth century to refer to those who were located in an
inferior space” (Mignolo, 2007, pp. 470–471, emphasis in original).
Ontological Colonial Difference as a Product

of the Coloniality of Being
Nelson Maldonado-Torres is the chief theorist of ontological colonial
difference as a product of the coloniality of being. His work draws on
the Fanonian distinction between zones of being and nonbeing as well
as Mignolo’s epistemic colonial difference. The difference between onto-
logical and sub-ontological colonial difference, for Maldonado-Torres
(2007) is the “difference between Being and what lies below Being or
that which is negatively marked as dispensable as well as a target of rape
and murder…In short, sub-ontological or ontological colonial difference
relates to the coloniality of Being” (p. 254).
Maldonado-Torres (2007) continues:
For Fanon, in the colonial context, ontological colonial difference or sub-

ontological difference profoundly marks the day to day reality. If the most
basic ontological question is ‘why are things rather than nothing’, the
question that emerges in this context and that opens up reflection on
the coloniality of Being is ‘Why go on?’ As Lewis Gordon has put it,
‘why go on?’ is a fundamental question in the existential philosophy of
the African diaspora and it illuminates the plight of the wretched of the
earth. Why go on? is preceded only by one expression, which becomes
the first instance that [reveals] the coloniality of Being, that is, the cry.
The cry, not a word but an interjection, is a call of attention to one’s
own existence. The cry is the pre-theoretical expression of the question–
Why go on?–which for the most part drives theoretical reflection in the
peoples of the African diaspora. It is the cry that animates the birth
of theory and critical thought. And the cry points to a peculiar exis-
tential condition: that of the condemned. The damné or condemned is
not a ‘being there’ but a non-being…Invisibility and dehumanization are
the primary expressions of the coloniality of Being. The coloniality of
Being indicates those aspects that produce exception from the order of
Being; it is as it were, the product of the excess of Being that in order
to maintain its integrity and inhibit the interruption by what lies beyond
Being produces its contrary, not nothing, but a non-human or rather an
inhuman world [cf. Curry’s (2017) Man-Not]. The coloniality of Being
refers not merely to the reduction of the particular to the generality of
188 R. K. Beshara
the concept or any given horizon of meaning, but to the violation of

the meaning of human alterity to the point where the alter-ego becomes
a sub-alter. Such a reality, typically approximated very closely in situa-
tions of war, is transformed into an ordinary affair through the idea of
race, which serves a crucial role in the naturalization of the non-ethics
of war [i.e., damnation] through the practices of colonialism and (racial)
slavery. The coloniality of Being is not therefore an inevitable moment or
natural outcome of the dynamics of creation of meaning. Although it is
always present as a possibility, it shows itself forth when the preservation
of Being (in any of its determinations: national ontologies, identitarian
ontologies, etc.) takes primacy over listening to the cries of those whose
humanity is being denied. The coloniality of Being appears in histor-
ical projects and ideas of civilization which advance colonial projects of
various kinds inspired or legitimized by the idea of race. The coloniality
of Being is therefore coextensive with the production of the color-line
in its different expressions and dimensions. It becomes concrete in the
appearance of liminal subjects, which mark, as it were, the limit of Being,
that is, the point at which Being distorts meaning and evidence to the
point of dehumanization. The coloniality of Being produces the onto-
logical colonial difference, deploying a series of fundamental existential
characteristics and symbolic realities. (pp. 256–257, emphasis in original)
Colonial, Postcolonial, Decolonial

Subjectivities
In this section, I would like to distinguish between three subjectiv-
ities that result from colonial difference: colonial subjectivity, post-
colonial subjectivity, and decoloniality subjectivity. The first two, or
(post)coloniality subjectivity, are racist; one is segregationist while the
other is assimilationist. Decolonial subjectivity, on the other hand, is
antiracist. Before I say more, it is crucial to demonstrate that the
(post)modern ego cogito is an outcome of, first, the ego conquiro, and,
second, the ego extermino. In other words, unconscious thinking is a
function of unconscious conquering/exterminating. It is no surprise
then that the zone of being is founded upon the conquering and
exterminating of unthinking-nonbeings (cf. Maldonado-Torres, 2007,

p. 245):
The ego cogito, as we have seen, has a direct relationship with a protohis-
tory of the seventeenth century, which is reflected in Descartes’s ontology,
but which does not emerge from a void. The ego conquiro (I conquer) is
its predecessor, as a “practical ego.” Hernán Cortés’s conquest of Mexico
in 1521 precedes The Discourse on Method (published in 1637) by more
than a hundred years. (Dussel, 2013, p. 43, emphasis in original)
Ramón Grosfoguel’s (2013) innovation was elaborating a third histor-

ical ego (ego extermino) between the ego conquiro and the ego cogito as
way of explaining the four genocides/epistemicides of the long sixteenth
century:
What links the “I conquer, therefore I am” (ego conquiro) with the idol-
atric, God-like “I think, [therefore] I am” (ego cogito) is the epistemic
racism/sexism produced from the “I exterminate, therefore I am” (ego
extermino). It is the logic of genocide/epistemicide together that medi-
ates the “I conquer” with the epistemic racism/sexism of the “I think” as
the new foundation of knowledge in the modern/colonial world. The ego
extermino is the socio-historical structural condition that makes possible
the link of the ego conquiro with the ego cogito. In what follows, it will
be argued that the four genocides/epistemicides of the long 16th century
are the socio-historical condition of possibility for the transformation of
the “I conquer, therefore I am” into the epistemic racism/sexism of the
“I think, therefore I am.” These four genocides/epistemicides in the long
16th century are: 1) against Muslims and Jews in the conquest of Al-
Andalus in the name of “purity of blood”; 2) against indigenous peoples
first in the Americas and then in Asia; 3) against African people with the
captive trade and their enslavement in the Americas; 4) against women
who practiced and transmitted Indo-European knowledge in Europe
burned alive accused of being witches” (Grosfoguel, 2013, p. 77, emphasis
in original).
The ego cogito is, of course, one of the pillars of psychoanalytic theory.
Freud’s innovation was to decenter this ego by introducing the uncon-
scious as a destabilizing force in subjectivity, but unfortunately that does
190 R. K. Beshara
not deny the historical evolution of the unconscious itself vis-à-vis the
modern Other. Therefore, we must speak of the longue durée of the
conquering/exterminating unconscious (i.e., the colonial unconscious)
before we get to the postcolonial, or even decolonial, unconscious, which
is partly what contrapuntal psychoanalysis does.
Whereas the colonial subject is the segregationist subject as demand,
who is dominated by the modern Other’s demand, the postcolonial
subject is the assimilationist subject as desire, who is subjugated by
the postmodern Other’s desire. The decolonial subject, however, is the
antiracist subject as drive, who “subjectifies the cause of his or her exis-
tence (the [transmodern] Other’s desire: object a), and is characterized
by desirousness” (Fink, 1997, p. 195, emphasis in original). Colonial,
postcolonial, and decolonial subjectivities correspond to Lacan’s three
substitutional metaphors: alienation, separation, and the traversing of
fantasy (Fink, 1995, p. 69). After dismantling the apparatus of racial-
ized capitalism, we can even speak of a contrapuntal (or cosmopolitan)
subject beyond neurosis. While the modern Other demands the over-
exploitation of the planet by any means necessary and the postmodern
Other desires recognition in the zone of being, the transmodern Other
enjoys the praxis of liberation, which is a source of divine-jouissance.
The Decoloniality
of Power/Knowledge/Being Through Border
Methodology
Having elaborated the different dimensions of colonial difference, how
can we (the damned of the Earth) decolonize power/knowledge/being—
for the coloniality of gender (see Lugones, 2010)? Mignolo (2007)
suggests border methodology as a way of delinking the rhetoric of
(post)modernity from the logic of (post)coloniality (p. 499), or as a
machine for intellectual decolonization (Mignolo, 2000, p. 45). Mignolo
(2000) writes:
Engaging in border thinking is tantamount to engaging in decoloniality;

that is, in thinking and doing decolonially. Why? Because the main thrust
of border thinking is not directed toward “improving” the disciplines, but

toward “using” the disciplines beyond the disciplines themselves, aiming
and building a world without modernity/coloniality. Border thinking is
actional. What kind of knowledge do decolonial thinkers want? We want
knowledge that contributes to eliminating coloniality and improves living
conditions on the planet. (pp. xvii–xviii)
According to Mignolo (2000), border methodology results in the

“subalternization” of power/knowledge/being. As a method, it is part of
the project of transmodernity and has political, ethical, and aesthetic
dimensions. Mignolo (2007) explains that border methodology is “the
necessary critical method for the political and ethical project of filling in
the gaps” (Mignolo, 2007, p. 499, emphasis in original). These gaps that
need filling signify the two-ness of the decolonial subject, which is repre-
sented by the slash in modernity/coloniality, the dash in Man-Not, the
strikethrough in Woman, and the line dividing being from nonbeing.
I have written about two-ness in terms of double-unconsciousness and
the two Others that are functions of colonial difference. Now, you
have a context for a term like Eurocentrism. Conversely, contrapuntal
psychoanalysis is pluriversal, or world-centric; it is a manifestation of
mundialización and an example of critical border psychology. Whereas
in Chapter 1, I applied the semiotic square and the Master’s Discourse
to Curry’s (2017) theory of the Man-Not. With Fig. 5.1, I am demon-
strating how liberation praxis can function as a horizontal semiosis.
Fig. 5.1 Horizontal semiosis

192 R. K. Beshara
Principles of Contrapuntal Psychoanalysis

In this section, I will reflect on some of the principles of contrapuntal
psychoanalysis, but I first I must acknowledge the source of inspiration:
Said’s (1993) decolonial methodology of “contrapuntal reading” from
Culture and Imperialism, which was meant to address the critiques of
its prequel: Orientalism. Said (1993) writes that a contrapuntal reading:
means reading a text with an understanding of what is involved when

an author shows, for instance, that a colonial sugar plantation is seen
as important to the process of maintaining a particular style of life in
England. Moreover, like all literary texts, these are not bounded by their
formal historic beginnings and endings…The point is that contrapuntal
reading must take account of both processes, that of imperialism and that
of resistance to it, which can be done by extending our reading of the
texts to include what was once forcibly excluded. (pp. 66–67, emphasis
added)
To slightly rephrase Said (1993), “this global, contrapuntal

[psycho]analysis should be modelled not…on a symphony but rather
on an atonal ensemble; we must take into account all sorts of spatial
or geographical and rhetorical practices—inflections, limits, constraints,
intrusions, inclusions, prohibitions—all of them tending to elucidate a
complex and uneven topography” (p. 318).
The first principle of contrapuntal psychoanalysis is accounting
for two-ness: two subjects, two Others, double-consciousness, and
double-unconsciousness. A contrapuntal psychoanalyst accounts for the
(post)colonial subject and the (post)modern Other on the one hand, and
the decolonial subject and the transmodern Other on the other hand.
The second principle of contrapuntal psychoanalysis is accounting
for not only temporality, but also spatiality. Psychoanalysis is inher-
ently developmental (e.g., Freud’s theory of psychosexual development),
and contrapuntal psychoanalysis is conversely anti-developmental. The
temporal unconscious of (post)modernity/(post)coloniality is a histor-
ical unconscious, while its spatial unconscious is essentially a geopo-
litical unconscious. Derrida’s (1991) essay on “geopsychoanalysis” is
a great example of a contrapuntal psychoanalytic account of the

spatial/geopolitical unconscious of the International Psychoanalytic
Association. The geopolitical unconscious dimension was also crucial for
Said’s (1993) methodology of contrapuntal reading:
Imperialism and the culture associated with it affirm both the primacy of
geography and an ideology about control of territory. The geographical
sense makes projections—imaginative, cartographic, military, economic,
historical, or in a general sense cultural. It also makes possible the
construction of various kinds of knowledge, all of them in one way
or another dependent upon the perceived character and destiny of a
particular geography. (p. 78)
The third principle of contrapuntal psychoanalysis is accounting for

not only sexual difference, but also colonial difference, which entails
shifting our analysis of the libidinal economy of enjoyment from
phallic/Other jouissance to mythical/divine jouissance. The emphasis
on colonial difference prioritizes the historical primacy of racial-sexual
violence against the ungendered (Curry, 2017).
To conclude, contrapuntal psychoanalysis as liberation praxis ought to
reveal structures of reference and attitude, webs of affiliations, connec-
tions, decisions, and collaborations (Said, 1993, p. 125). Contrapuntal
psychoanalysis as a border methodology entails reading “texts from the
metropolitan center and from the peripheries contrapuntally” (Said,
1993, p. 259). Contrapuntal psychoanalysis necessitates seeing “Western
and non-Western experiences as belonging together because they are
connected by imperialism” (Said, 1993, p. 279). In sum, contrapuntal
psychoanalysis is “a global analysis, in which texts and worldly institu-
tions are seen working together” (Said, 1993, p. 318).
Contrapuntal psychoanalysis as liberation praxis disrupts the global
apparatus of racialized capitalism. The working class is a fantasy that
covers up ‘classless’ (i.e., underclass) racialized labor: the sub-proletariat.
Racialized labor is not only over-exploited, it is disposable (Evans &
Giroux, 2015) and fungible (Curry, 2017). Is psychoanalysis able to
come to terms with that fact or must it remain repressed in the clinic?
I am not singling out psychoanalysis here, the majority of European
194 R. K. Beshara
critical theorists in the twentieth century and beyond are critical of

modernity—for example, Zygmunt Bauman (1989) situates the Holo-
caust within the rhetoric of modernity with its instrumental rationality,
bureaucracy, technology, etc.—but they are mute on the unconscious
colonial logic which underpins modernity.
The pre-modern was certainly not pre-colonial, or pre-racist for
that matter, but it was certainly pre-capitalist. The distinction between
mercantile capitalism and later forms of capitalism is not as important
as the fact that the European colonization of the Americas inaugurated
racialized capitalism as an accelerationist world-system premised on not
only the exploitation of the white proletariat, but also, and more signif-
icantly, the disposability of the non-white lumpenproletariat through
genocide, slavery, and other forms of oppression and violence.
A term like neoliberalism names a new chapter in the history of racial-
ized capitalism, wherein transnational corporations, as opposed to the
State, are the ruling class, but the term can be distracting and confusing
because it is often used instead of capitalism and is frequently mistaken
with liberalism as a centrist political project.
Because “the concept of the human is an ideological structure” (Smith,
2020, p. 201), humanness is determined on the basis of where one
is located in the global racial-sexual hierarchy. Patriarchy names the
historical phenomenon of dominant men in the zone of being (be they
oppressors or sub-oppressors), but patriarchy fails to account for the “dis-
posability and fungibility” (Curry, 2017, p. 34) of racialized males in the
zone of nonbeing. Similarly, white supremacy names the phenomenon
of hegemonic whites in settler-colonial societies, but not the reality
of hegemonic non-whites in former franchise colonial societies (Cole,
2016).
Racialization in the Global South does not function on the axis of race
per se but, in the majority of cases, functions on a political axis. Politi-
cization, which is the foundation of racialization, in a sense becomes
the process of determining who is inside the polis and who is outside
(Agamben, 1998); surely, anything (e.g., one’s religious affiliation or
sexual orientation) can be politicized in the context of racialized capi-
talism. Consequently, the oppressed in the Global South tend to be either
political dissidents or religious/sexual/ethnic minorities. In the majority
of cases, the political dissident or the member of a minority group is a

Man-Not (Curry, 2017), a phobogenic objet a, who causes the oppressor’s
hateful desire to kill, hence, the lethality of racial-sexual oppression
as mythical-jouissance. Consequently, l’homme noir (racialisé ou politisé)
n’existe pas, for the colonized position cannot be fully symbolized.
The paradox is that, in the apparatus of racialized capitalism, the most
oppressive are likely to be men and the most oppressed are also likely to
be men. This is not an argument in support of “Oppression Olympics”
(Hancock, 2011), rather I am pointing to an aporia, a Real deadlock,
which is a function of what Du Bois (1903/2007) called “the problem
of the color-line” (p. 3) and what Grosfoguel (2013) characterizes as “the
line of the human” (p. 83); in other words, it is the deadlock of ontolog-
ical colonial difference. Patriarchy is not the most accurate concept for
describing this paradox, but racialized capitalism is because the politico-
economic and racial-sexual logic of contradiction (i.e., inequality) is
inherent in the very hierarchical and dehumanizing structure of capi-
talism; and racialization (or racism), as an axis of power, is a fundamental
structuring antagonism within that contradiction constituting the colo-
niality of power/knowledge/being. Therefore, I conceive of horizontal
semiosis (see Fig. 5.1) not as the end of contradictions, but as the horizon-
talization of contradictions, wherein negativity (in the form of difference)
is not removed but it is not there at the expense of the damned. Hori-
zontal, or lateral, violence among the racialized class will remain a
challenge that we must attend to in our liberation praxis as a result of
internalized oppression and sub-oppression.
Furthermore, racialized capitalism signifies how oppression works on a
global scale through both over-exploitation and disposability/fungibility.
For this reason, solidarity among the racialized and the politicized (or
the oppressed, damned, colonized, etc.) is crucial for dismantling the
apparatus. Unfortunately, radicals today are divided by liberal identity
politics. For example, racialized feminists (as Women-Not) must focus on
not only dismantling patriarchy and white supremacy, but also, and more
importantly, racialized capitalism–the primary targets of which tend to
be racialized/politicized males, for they are the most disposable/fungible
group in the global racial-sexual hierarchy (Curry, 2017; Sidanius &
Pratto, 1999).
196 R. K. Beshara
Patriarchy is not only sexist, it is ultimately racist misandrist (Curry,

2017). Why are racialized and/or politicized males the most dehuman-
ized? Because they represent a politico-sexual challenge to the global
ruling-class patriarchs. There is certainly an evolutionary logic to this
antagonism, but it is more a function of being historically efficacious
in the coloniality of power (Curry, personal communication, May 14,
2020). Consequently, liberation consists of not only a new conception of
the human that is not ideological (Smith, 2020, p. 201), but also another
way for societies to self-organize beyond the Aristotelian notion of poli-
tics as the distinction between bare life and the good life (Agamben,
1998), or between natural slavery and political slavery (Nyquist, 2013).
The Aristotelian foundation of Euro-American politics names the
underlying colonial logic of all modern societies, be they democratic
or authoritarian: the state of exception (Agamben, 1998). The state
of exception produced the homo sacer with his various incarnations:
from the slave to the enemy combatant. The alter-global societies-to-
come may be described as impossible, or anarchist, republics, wherein
the fundamental law (or taboo) is no state of exception, that is, no
outside/inside distinction, or no politics. It is hard to imagine such a
world because it will be radically different from ours. Having said that,
it is virtually unthinkable for humans not to categorize, and reduce the
complexity of, the world by making distinctions between people, events,
and ideas—or to perceive differences, in other words. It seems that
humans have evolved, and have been enculturated, to think dualistically
as a function of the nature of language itself (Nietzsche, 1887/1998).
Thinking dialectically and being divided may be our inescapable
destiny as human subjects, but how we account for cultural difference
determines everything, particularly if we accept the Wahbian axiom of
one civilization, many cultures. Accounting for cultural difference neces-
sitates both a conscious and an unconscious reconstruction of our world
history with its potentiality and actuality of oppression and its impo-
tentiality and virtuality of liberation. So while we may never fully get
there, because liberation is a process, we should move in the direction
of an anarchist power informed by social and environmental justice not
only for our sake but also for the sake of the planet. Radical, or critical,
humanism is the kind of humanism that accounts for structures (e.g.,
the unconscious) without reducing the subject to an effect of discourse.

It is a new humanism because it transcends European humanism, which
excluded a whole group of people based on the notion of race. In sum,
transmodernity, as the outcome of liberation praxis and the embodiment
of anarchist power, is the best (i.e., most socially and environmentally
just) of modernity and its alterity, it is the actualization of pluriver-
sality: one civilization with many cultures. In this book, I have tried to
articulate contrapuntal psychoanalysis as one approach to critical border
psychology.
References
Alexander, M. (2010). The new Jim Crow: Mass incarceration in the age of
colorblindness. New York, NY: The New Press.
Amin, S. (1988/2009). Eurocentrism (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Monthly
Review Press.
Arendt, H. (1969, February 27). Refections on violence. The New York Review
of Books.
Armitacge, J. (1999). From modernism to hypermodernism and beyond: An
interview with Paul Virilio. Theory, Culture & Society, 16 (5–6), 25–55.
https://doi.org/10.1177/02632769922050854.
Bauman, Z. (1989). Modernity and the holocaust. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univer-
sity Press.
Brons, L. (2015). Othering, an analysis. Transcience: A Journal of Global Studies,
6 (1), 69–90.
Chiesa, L. (2007). Subjectivity and otherness: A philosophical reading of Lacan.
Cambridge: MIT Press.
Cole, M. (2016). Racism: A critical analysis. London, UK: Pluto Press.
198 R. K. Beshara
Curry, T. J. (2021). Decolonizing the intersection: Black Male Studies as a
critique of intersectionality’s indebtedness to subculture of violence theory.
In R. K. Beshara (Ed.), Critical psychology praxis: Psychosocial non-alignment
to modernity/coloniality. Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Routledge.
De Beauvoir, S. (1949/2009). The second sex (C. Borde & C. Malovany-
Chevallier, Trans.). New York, NY: Vintage.
de Sousa Santos, B. (2016). Epistemologies of the south: Justice against Epistemi-
cide. Abingdon, UK: Routledge.
Derrida, J. (1991). Geopsychoanalysis: “… and the rest of the world”. American
Imago, 48(2), 199–231.
Du Bois, W. E. (1903/2007). The souls of Black folk. Oxford, UK: Oxford
University Press.
Dussel, E. (1995). The invention of the Americas: Eclipse of “the other” and the
myth of modernity (M. D. Barber, Trans.). New York, NY: Continuum.
Dussel, E. (2002). World-system and “trans”-modernity. Nepantla: Views from
South, 3(2), 221–244.
Dussel, E. (2013). Ethics of liberation: In the age of globalization and exclusion
(E. Mendieta, Trans.). Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Evans, B., & Giroux, H. A. (2015). Disposable futures: The seduction of violence
in the age of spectacle. San Francisco, CA: City Lights Publishers.
Fanon, F. (1952/2008). Black skin, white masks (R. Philcox, Trans.). New York,
NY: Grove Press.
Fink, B. (1997). A clinical introduction to Lacanian psychoanalysis: Theory and
technique. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Freire, P. (1970/2018). Pedagogy of the oppressed . New York, NY: Bloomsbury.
Freud, S. (1930/1961). Civilization and its discontents (J. Strachey, Trans.). New
NY: Vintage.
Galtung, J. (1969). Violence, peace, and peace research. Journal of Peace
Research, 6 (3), 167–191. https://doi.org/10.1177/002234336900600301.
Gaztambide-Fernández, R. (2014). Decolonial options and artistic/aestheSic
entanglements: An interview with Walter Mignolo. Decolonization: Indi-
geneity, Education & Society, 3(1), 196–212.
Greimas, A. J. (1968). The interaction of semiotic constraints. Yale French
Studies, 41, 86–105. https://doi.org/10.2307/2929667.
Grosfoguel, R. (2013). The structure of knowledge in westernised universi-
ties: Epistemic racism/sexism and the four genocides/epistemicides. Human
Architecture: Journal of the sociology of self-knowledge, 11(1), 73–90. Retrieved
from https://scholarworks.umb.edu/humanarchitecture/vol11/iss1/8/.
Grosz, E. (1990). Jacques Lacan: A feminist introduction. Abingdon, UK:
Routledge.
Gwynne, R. N., Klak, T., & Shaw, D. B. (2003). Alternative capitalisms: Geogra-
phies of emerging regions: Geographies of emerging regions. Abingdon, UK:
Routledge.
Hancock, A. (2011). Solidarity politics for millennials: A guide to ending the
oppression Olympics. New York, NY: Palgrave.
Hegel, G. (1807/2018). The phenomenology of spirit (M. Inwood, Trans.).
Herzog, W. (Director). (1972). Aguirre, the Wrath of God [Motion picture].
Germany: Hessischer Rundfunk.
Lacan, J. (1973/2004). The four fundamental concepts of psycho-analysis (A.
Sheridan, Trans.). London, UK: Karnac.
Lacan, J. (1975/1998). On feminine sexuality: The limits of love and knowledge
(B. Fink, Trans.). New York, NY: W. W. Norton.
Lacan, J. (1986/1992). The ethics of psychoanalysis (D. Porter, Trans.). New
Lacan, J. (1987). Television. October, 40, 7–50. https://doi.org/10.2307/
778337.
Lacan, J. (1991/2007). The other side of psychoanalysis (R. Grigg, Trans.). New
Lacan, J. (1998/2017). Formations of the unconscious (R. Grigg, Trans.).
Cambridge, UK: Polity.
200 R. K. Beshara
Lacan, J. (2013/2019). Desire and its interpretation (J. Miller, Ed.). Cambridge,
UK: Polity.
Lugones, M. (2010). Toward a decolonial feminism. Hypatia, 25 (4), 742–759.
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1527-2001.2010.01137.x.
Maldonado-Torres, N. (2007). On the coloniality of being. Cultural Studies,
21(2–3), 240–270. https://doi.org/10.1080/09502380601162548.
Marx, K., & Engels, F. (1845/1978). The German ideology. In R. C. Tucker
(Ed.), The Marx-Engels reader (2nd ed.). New York, NY: W. W. Norton.
Mignolo, W. D. (2000). Local histories/Global designs: Coloniality, subaltern
knowledges, and border thinking. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Mignolo, W. D. (2002). The geopolitics of knowledge and the colonial differ-
ence. South Atlantic Quarterly, 101(1), 57–96. https://doi.org/10.1215/003
82876-101-1-57.
449–514. https://doi.org/10.1080/09502380601162647.
Miller, J. (2013, May). The other without other. Paper presented at Congress of
the NLS, Athens, Greece.
Mitchell, J. (1974/2000). Psychoanalysis and feminism: A radical reassessment of
Freudian psychoanalysis. New York, NY: Basic Books.
Nietzsche, F. (1887/1998). On the genealogy of morals (M. Clark & A. J.
Swensen, Trans.). Indianapolis, IN: Hackett.
Nkrumah, K. (1965). Neo-colonialism: The last stage of imperialism. New York,
IL: International Publishers.
Nyquist, M. (2013). Arbitrary rule: Slavery, tyranny, and the power of life and
death. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Quijano, A. (2000). Coloniality of power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America.
Nepantla: Views from South, 1(3), 533–580.
Said, E. W. (1983). The world, the text, and the critic. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Said, E. W. (2001). Power, politics, and culture: Interviews with Edward W. Said .
(G. Viswanathan, Ed.). New York, NY: Pantheon.
Said, E. W. (2004). Humanism and democratic criticism. New York, NY:
Columbia University Press.
Sandoval, C. (2000). Methodology of the oppressed . Minneapolis, MN: Univer-
sity of Minnesota Press.
Sidanius, J., & Pratto, F. (1999). Social dominance: An intergroup theory of social
hierarchy and oppression. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Smith, D. L. (2020). On inhumanity: Dehumanization and how to resist it.
Spivak, G. C. (1988). Can the subaltern speak? In C. Nelson & L. Grossberg
(Eds.), Marxism and the interpretation of culture. Champaign, IL: University
of Illinois Press.
Stemple, L., & Meyer, I. H. (2014). The sexual victimization of men in
America: New data challenge old assumptions. American Journal of Public
Health, 104 (6), 19–26.
Virilio, P. (1983/2008). Pure war (M. Polizzotti, Trans., S. Lotringer, Ed.). Los
Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e).
Wolfe, P. (1999). Settler colonialism and the transformation of anthropology: The
politics and poetics of an ethnographic event. London, UK: Cassell.
Žižek, S. (2008). Violence: Six sideways reflections. New York, NY: Picador.
Index
A B
accelerationist 194 barbarism 118
Agamben, G. 165 bare life 163
alienation 10 barred Other 181
alignment of desire 159 Beginnings 15
ambivalence 144 Bhabha, Homi 12, 34
analysand 8 Black Lives Matter 136
analyst 8 Black Marxist 9
anarcho-socialism 103 border methodology 16
anti-capitalist 8 bourgeoisie 171
antihumanism 34 Bulhan, Hussein 64
antiracist 8
apparatus 3
archaic inheritance 136 C
archeology 101 cancel culture 141
Aristotelian 4 capitalism 4
assimilation 55 Césaire, Aimé 55
axes of power 5 Christian 76
civilization 4
civilized 118
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive 203
license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56743-9
204 Index
classism 4 Derrida, Jacques 5

colonial difference 16 desire 78
Colonialism 4 dialectic 55
coloniality of power 3 disavowal 164
colonial psychoanalysis 40 discourse 11
colonization 163 Discourse of the Analyst 72
commodification 177 displacement 118
conceptual Muslim 144 disposability 195
condensation 11 divine-jouissance 142
conscientization 11 divine violence 163
construction 101 double-unconsciousness 16
contrapuntal 78 dream-content 113
contrapuntal interpretation 110 dream-thoughts 113
contrapuntal psychoanalysis 1 dream-work 122
cosmopolitan 190 Dussel, Enrique 12
(counter)terrorism 2
critical border psychology 1
Critical Border Thinking 74 E
critical consciousness 11 ego 14
critical humanism 159 Egypt 14
critical psychology 1 emancipation 171
cultural difference 68 Empire 14
cultural resistance 12 endo-colonization 5
culture 51 enjoyment 7
Culture and Imperialism 93 Entstellung 100
Curry, Tommy J. 6 epistemic violence 166
Eurocentrism 3
Euro-colonialism 5
D Europe 118
damned 181 exteriority 95
decoloniality 1 extimacy 118
Decolonial Psychoanalysis
Towards Critical Islamophobia
Studies 2 F
decolonial subjectivity 14 Fanon, Frantz 7, 11, 15
decolonization 5 fantasy 59
deformation 100 fantasy of dirt 11
dehumanizing 9 feminine jouissance 181
delinking 12 feminism 1
Index 205
2008 financial crisis 9 Indigenous 2

Floyd, George 136 inferior 118
Foucault, Michel 3 interbeing 68
four discourses 72 internalization 60
franchise colonies 5 internalize 17
free association 90 interpretation 101
freedom 168 The Interpretation of Dreams 15
Freire, Paulo 11 intersectionality 76
Freud and the Non-European 16 Islamophobia 2
Freudo-Marxism 28 Israel 144
Freud, Sigmund 13
J
G jouissance 7
genocide 2 Judaism 134
genre 182 justice 136
good life 165
K
H Kovel, Joel 10
hegemony 5
hierarchy 8
historical knowledge 117 L
homo sacer 196 labor 5
horizontal affiliation 159 Lacan, Jacques 32
horizontal semiosis 195 language 90
humanism 34 latent 113
humanitarian 5 late style 131
humanitarianism 158 law 163
liberation praxis 1
logic 118
I lumpenproletariat 10
identification 60
identity politics 159
ideology 2 M
Imaginary 93 Maat 136
imaginative geography 116 manifest 113
imperialism 4 Mannoni, Octave 15
Indian country 118 Man-Not 182
206 Index
masculine jouissance 168 oppression 10, 14

masculinity 77 oppressor 8
mass incarceration 165 Orient 117
Master’s Discourse 72 Oriental 118
materiality 2 Orientalism 12
material reality 17 Orientalize 117
Memmi, Albert 15 origin 91
memory trace 137 the Other 4
method 114 Other language 167
Mignolo, W. 1 Otherness 93
militarization of the police 165 Other of the Law 181
mirror stage 93 Other of the signifiers 181
modern/colonial project 3 over-exploited 6
modern world-system 4
monotheism 134
mortgage 9 P
Moses 16 Palestine 14, 144
Moses and Monotheism 16 particularity 155
mundialización 154 patriarchy 77
mythical-jouissance 137 perverse 7
phallus 168
pluriversality 155
N police violence 137
Nandy, Ashis 15 political slavery 165
natural slavery 4 politicized 6
Nazi 144 postcolonialism 1
Negritude 55 (post)coloniality 2
neocolonialism 5 postcolonial psychoanalysis 2, 41
neurosis 14 postcolonies 5
new humanism 197 (post)modernity 2
New Mexico 101 (post)modern Other 14
non-European 10 power 72
non-identity politics 145 praxis 2
non-meaning 164 premodern 4
primeval father 163
primitives 118
O proletariat 171
objet a 184 property 10
oppressed 8 psychoanalysis 1
Index 207
psychosocial 14 segregation 55
semiotic square 72
separation 190
Q settler colonial 194
Quijano, Aníbal 3 Sex 6
sexism 4
sexual difference 168
R sexualized 6
race 4 signifiers 102
racial axis 3 signifying chain 118
racial capitalism 3 singularity 155
racialization 16 slavery 4, 8
racialized 6 social construction 17
racialized capitalism 2 social mobility 9
racial state 4 solidarity 78
racism 4 speaking beings 167
radical 108 the state of exception 196
radical humanism 158 structuralism 90
Real 93 subaltern 6
recognition 190 subhumans 118
reconstruction 133, 134 subjectivity 14
reflexive 12 sublimation 182
Reich, Wilhelm 15 sub-oppressors 5
religion 133 surplus-jouissance 137
renunciation of the drives 142 Symbolic 93
representations 102, 120
repression 122
Republic 163 T
Requerimiento 163 Totem and Taboo 113
Revolution 163 transatlantic slave trade 2
Robinson, Cedric J. 3 transmodern 12
transmodern Other 14
trauma 136
S traversing of fantasy 190
Said, Edward 12 truth 136
Sartre, J. 55 two-ness 133
savage 4 two Others 16
secular 13
secular criticism 159
208 Index
U white supremacy 55
unconscious 7 worldliness 159
ungendered 193 writing as a form of killing 100
Writing as a form of living 167
writing is a form of killing 182
V
violence 7
Z
W Žižek, Slavoj 32
Wahbian axiom 196 zone of being 40
War on Terror 2 zone of nonbeing 42

Freud and Said: Contrapuntal Psychoanalysis As Liberation Praxis

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Freud and Said: Contrapuntal Psychoanalysis As Liberation Praxis

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN THE THEORY AND

Freud and Said

Series Editorial Board

More information about this series at

Freud and Said

Palgrave Studies in the Theory and History of Psychology

photographed wearing a “Make America White Again” red cap. Chauvin

police officers are receiving a specific form of tactical training, that

Slavoj Žižek’s (2008) term for structural violence is objective violence,

On May 29th 2020, this is what US president, Donald Trump,

Another significant aspect of this difficult period is the racialization

In addition to anti-Asian racism, we are witnessing a new class config-

Property rights over human rights (Kovel, 1970/1984, p. 16) is the

Española, USA Robert K. Beshara

Acknowledgments This project would not have been possible if it were

1 Post-/De-colonial Psychoanalysis: Critical Border

4 Freud and the Non-European 131

5 Contrapuntal Psychoanalysis as Liberation Praxis 149

Fig. 1.1 The semiotic square 19

Critical psychologists draw on a number of theoretical resources (e.g.,

© The Author(s) 2021 1

From Decolonial Psychoanalysis

of racialized capitalism as a dispositif , or an apparatus, in Michel

The racial axis is the central feature of racialized capitalism, which is

What is termed globalization is the culmination of a process that began

In racialized capitalism, racism is certainly the most oppressive struc-

However, my focus is not on the premodern world, for the politico-

Popular accounts of the history of science typically show a timeline in

America was constituted as the first space/time of a new model of power

Sex is the third axis of power in the apparatus of racialized capi-

women.” This suggests that racial-sexual violence against racialized, or

Curry (2017) also draws attention to the perverse sexual nature of

“racial hatred is carnal hatred … sexualized hatred”—a phallicism or

This is in line with Frantz Fanon’s (1952/2008) thesis: “If we want to

to come: “Racism is a global hierarchy of human superiority and inferi-

As slave labor camps spread throughout the South, production surged.

The large-scale cultivation of cotton hastened the invention of the factory,

The other example of racialized capitalism that Desmond (2019)

African-American and Latino borrowers have been particularly hard-hit

For a population to be dehumanized they have to be perceived as a race

Elsewhere in the book, David Livingstone Smith (2011) writes about

Dehumanization isn’t a way of talking. It’s a way of thinking—a way

Therefore, our liberation praxis entails thinking critically in Paulo

is an arbitrary one premised on ethnic difference (cf. Bhambra, 2014):

the Global North on Turtle Island in proximity to twenty-three Indige-

Freud and Said

Orientalism—an important distinction, which he would not have been

I will argue that while ‘race’ is a social construction, racism is a mate-

‘Race,’ Racialization, and Racism

Race is a fundamental organizing principle of social stratification. It has

Because race is “a concept that signifies and symbolizes social conflicts

reason that the concept of race, while a social construction, is still of

Fig. 1.1 The semiotic square

racial meaning to a previously racially unclassified relationship, social prac-

A racial project is simultaneously an interpretation, representation, or expla-

So what is racism according to Omi and Winant (2015)? “A racial

inherent feature of European politics, whether democracy or totalitari-

consolidated with the partition and colonization of the remaining 90

Jalata (2013) then defines terrorism as follows, which challenges the

a systematic governmental or organizational policy through which lethal

Psycho-analysis is seeking to bring to conscious recognition the things in

I emphasized through italicization some of the key technical terms

Psycho-analysis is the name (1) of a procedure for the investigation of