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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: Critical South
- Sprache: Englisch
Colonial Trauma is a path-breaking account of the psychosocial effects of colonial domination. Following the work of Frantz Fanon, Lazali draws on historical materials as well as her own clinical experience as a psychoanalyst to shed new light on the ways in which the history of colonization leaves its traces on contemporary postcolonial selves.
Lazali found that many of her patients experienced difficulties that can only be explained as the effects of “colonial trauma” dating from the French colonization of Algeria and the postcolonial period. Many French feel weighed down by a colonial history that they are aware of but which they have not experienced directly. Many Algerians are traumatized by the way that the French colonial state imposed new names on people and the land, thereby severing the links with community, history, and genealogy and contributing to feelings of loss, abandonment, and injustice. Only by reconstructing this history and uncovering its consequences can we understand the impact of colonization and give individuals the tools to come to terms with their past.
By demonstrating the power of psychoanalysis to illuminate the subjective dimension of colonial domination, this book will be of great interest to anyone concerned with the long-term consequences of colonization and its aftermath.
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Table of Contents
Cover
Series Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Foreword – Mariana Wikinski
References
Notes
Introduction: The Difficulty of Acknowledging Colonial Trauma
The history of French colonization in Algeria: a
blank space
in memory and politics
A much-needed interdisciplinary approach
Note
1 Psychoanalysis and Algerian Paradoxes
Disarray of the private and public spheres
God’s reinforcement of failing institutions
The power of religion and the religion of power
The literary text and the invisible staging of power
The power of the “language, religion, and politics” (LRP) bloc as revealed by clinical psychoanalysis
The duplicity of subjects confronting censorship from the LRP
Abandoned citizenship and speech acts
Notes
2 Colonial Rupture
The colony: the rogue child of the Enlightenment
Colonialism’s destruction of social cohesion
A colonial republic divided, or the “duty to civilize [the] barbarians”
1945: a literature of refusal is born
Nedjma
: an esthetic of colonial destruction?
Disrupting genealogical ties: the effect of “renaming” Algerians in the 1880s
Subjective catastrophes and the disappearance of the father as symbolic reference
Writing against anonymous filiation
Jean El Mouhoub Amrouche: a broken voice
Notes
3 Colonialism Consumed by War
1945–1954: the necessity of war
The impossibility of forgetting and madness, a “remedy” for disappearance
Silencing the unforgettable mutilation of bodies
Toulouse, 2012: the return of murder
Constructing the “nation”
The writer’s pressing need: transform disappearance into absence
Notes
4 Colonialism’s Devastating Effects on Post-Independence Algeria
The mutilated body of the colonized and the hunger for reparation
Colonial
hogra
and a frantic quest for legitimacy
The “orphaning” effect of colonialism and its impact
Further distortion of patronyms
Divested of a name: a form of colonial murder
Manufacturing erasure and denial under colonialism
From colonial trauma to social trauma
Notes
5 Fratricide: The Dark Side of the Political Order
The emergence of Algerian nationalist movements in the 1920s
The War of Liberation and an impossible fraternity
From parricide to fratricide
When the murders between brothers are dismissed …
Calling on the father
A gap in memory sets off an endless deadly battle
Notes
6 The Internal War of the 1990s
Reconsidering the LRP bloc
The tyranny and pleasure of power
The shift of 1988 and the experience of political plurality
An internal war of unprecedented violence
The curse of fratricide
The war comes home
A strange reversal in naming
Do freedom and terror go hand in hand?
Notes
7 State of Terror and State Terror
A clinical understanding of terror
The terrified subject’s self-elimination
Psychological terror is always political
Reconciliation: state terror?
When the state tries to make its practice of disappearance disappear
Notes
8 Legitimacy, Fratricide, and Power
Jugurtha: a fratricidal hero
Unpunished crimes within the Republic
The legitimacy the French conquest claimed for itself
The impassioned scene of coloniality
The specter of discord:
el Fitna
Notes
9 Getting Out of the Colonial Pact
After Liberation, the indefatigable re-enactment of coloniality within subjectivities and the political order
Trauma as shelter and alibi
The brutalization of the living: the disappearance of children
The “bone seekers”: from children to fathers
Notes
Conclusion: Ending the Colonial Curse: Lessons from Fanon
The “colonial pact”: erasure of memory, disappearance of bodies, dispossession of existence
The mystical quality of the colonized
For a future liberation
Notes
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Series Title
Critical South
The publication of this series is supported by the International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Series editors: Natalia Brizuela and Leticia Sabsay
Leonor Arfuch,
Memory and Autobiography
Paula Biglieri and Luciana Cadahia,
Seven Essays on Populism
Aimé Césaire,
Resolutely Black
Bolívar Echeverría,
Modernity and “Whiteness”
Celso Furtado,
The Myth of Economic Development
Eduardo Grüner,
The Haitian Revolution
Karima Lazali,
Colonial Trauma
María Pia López,
Not One Less
Pablo Oyarzun,
Doing Justice
Néstor Perlongher,
Plebeian Prose
Nelly Richard,
Eruptions of Memory
Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui,
Ch’ixinakax utxiwa
Tendayi Sithole,
The Black Register
Colonial Trauma
A Study of the Psychic and Political Consequences of Colonial Oppression in Algeria
Karima Lazali
Translated by Matthew B. Smith
polity
Copyright Page
Originally published in French as Le trauma colonial. Une enquête sur les effets psychiques et politiques contemporains de l’oppression coloniale en Algérie © Éditions La Découverte, Paris, 2018
This English edition © 2021 by Polity Press
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All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4102-7 – hardback
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4103-4 – paperback
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Lazali, Karima, author. | Smith, Matthew B., translator.
Title: Colonial trauma : a study of the psychic and political consequences of colonial oppression in Algeria / Karima Lazali ; translated by Matthew B. Smith.
Other titles: Trauma colonial. English | Study of the psychic and political consequences of colonial oppression in Algeria
Description: English edition. | Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA : Polity, 2020. | Series: Critical South | “Originally published in French as Le trauma colonial. Une enquête sur les effets psychiques et politiques contemporains de l’oppression coloniale en Algérie © Editions La Découverte, Paris, 2018.” | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “A powerful account of the subjective dimension of colonial domination”-- Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020026070 (print) | LCCN 2020026071 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509541027 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509541034 (paperback) | ISBN 9781509541041 (epub) | ISBN 9781509545780 (adobe pdf)
Subjects: LCSH: Algeria--Colonization--Psychological aspects. | France--Colonies--Africa--Psychological aspects. | Algerians--Mental health. | Psychoanalysis and colonialism. | Political violence--Algeria--History. | Post-traumatic stress disorder--Algeria.
Classification: LCC DT295 .L32513 2020 (print) | LCC DT295 (ebook) | DDC 965/.03--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020026070
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020026071
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Dedication
To my son, Badri.
Epigraph
Each generation must discover its mission, fulfill it or betray it, in relative opacity.
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth
ForewordMariana Wikinski
In their ways of arresting time and encompassing space, these novels are not only irreplaceable tools of contextualization; they also create meaning out of the opacity of this colonial war and its afterlives. How can historians do their work without having read them?
Benjamin Stora, from his preface to the book Memoria(s) de Argelia. La literatura francófona-argelina y francesa al servicio de la historia
When children hear the voice of the dead, these are most often the voices of those who died without burial, without a rite.
Lionel Bailly, quoted by Françoise Davoine and Jean-Max Gaudillière in History beyond Trauma
Suddenly a phrase interrupts the rhythm of my reading and forces me to pause. Its familiarity surprises me: “to kill death.” “Matar la muerte”: this is the title of a text published in Buenos Aires in 1986 by the Argentine psychoanalyst Gilou García Reinoso and cited by Karima Lazali in its French translation (as “Tuer la mort,” 1988). I begin this foreword in what might be an excessively self-referential way, inevitably, in order to give an account of what it meant for me to feel such a surprisingly strong sense of familiarity in the very place where I was expecting to undergo a certain estrangement.1 My practice as an Argentine psychoanalyst, working with a human rights organization and in a post-dictatorship context since 1984, and Karima Lazali’s practice, working in Paris and Algeria since 2002 and 2006, respectively, converge all of a sudden in this eloquent phrase, which alludes to the wretched phenomenon that is the systematic disappearance of persons. “To kill death” thus functions symbolically as a historical and geographical bridge between two experiences that are politically very different: the Argentine and the Algerian. And it is precisely the differences between these experiences that prompt two acknowledgments. The first of these is that, anywhere on the planet, the setting to work of a psychoanalytic apparatus requires us to think the subject in the context of its moment and its historical and political determinations, to prevent blanks in the subject’s psychic constitution from being replicated in the form of “holes” within the therapeutic process.2 The second acknowledgment is that the effects of the systematic method involving the disappearance of persons, both in Algeria and in Argentina, have been devastating; we are dealing with a biopolitical tool of domination, a tool for the control of subjectivities and bodies in systems of terror. With profound sensitivity, Lazali shows that the disappearance of persons always generates an erasure at the level of memory that cuts across generations and corrosively impedes the work of mourning.
But does this allow us to conclude that Argentina’s history and Algeria’s are somehow homologous? Definitely not. In this, her second book, written after La parole oubliée (2015), Lazali unravels the elements of Algeria’s specificity: the traces of trauma and the psychic transpositions of the destruction that French colonialism left in Algerian society.
French colonialism and its dramatic historical consequences – events that were scandalous in their scale, their cruelty, and their persistence – left an indelible mark on Algerian history. This history is also marked – and this makes it radically different from the history of Argentina – by the absence of investigations into and justice for the innumerable crimes committed under colonialism, during the War of Liberation and the civil wars, and even today: disappearances, genocide, the mutilation of bodies, expropriations, and the disappearance of children. These are deaths, Lazali indicates, that are deprived of bodily integrity, becoming unrecognizable. The disappearance of persons is thus not only a matter of the spectral condition of what cannot be seen; it also results from what is excessively visible but not identifiable: disfigured and mutilated bodies, deprived of any possibility of being granted an identity.
If we could think of reality itself as a laboratory functioning at the planetary scale, then comparing the subjective effects of the systematic disappearance of persons in two countries, Argentina and Algeria, might offer us definitive proof of the place of thirdness that justice creates in the ordering of social bonds. As is well known, in Argentina, the Trial of the Juntas (Juicio a las Juntas Militares) began in 1985, under the new democracy formed after the end of the dictatorship – which lasted from 1976 to 1983, used torture as a systematic method for social control, and disappeared 30,000 people. The trial led to the sentencing of commanding officers. The trials of hundreds of others responsible for state terrorism during the dictatorship continue even today (marked by interruptions and political vicissitudes that are too numerous to discuss in detail in this context), in cases of crimes against humanity that are still pending or that have already concluded in cities throughout the country. This process prompted me to write the following about the statements made during these trials:
“And one day they didn’t come back,” some witnesses say, family members of the disappeared. … But when, on what day, did they not come back? How can we indicate that day, if all days until today are in fact that day? How can we define the absence of absence? Can we understand that those responsible are being tried for “disappearances” and not for “deaths”? What do we need in order to name the unnameable, identify the unidentifiable, specify the unspecifiable, locate the unlocatable? How can we date and provide coordinates for what never took place? How could the witness acknowledge the existence of a crime that was never definitively committed, because it keeps being committed? (Wikinski, 2016, p. 88)
In Algeria, as Lazali explains, the fate of the bodies that were torn apart or disappeared has never been investigated. Nor have there been investigations to determine who was responsible during each of the phases in which these crimes took place.
Lazali lucidly describes terror as a psychic state that, unlike trauma, does not allow for forgetting or repression, that does not lead to the emergence of a new subjective position, but instead blurs the boundaries between the psychic apparatus and the biological body, between the singular and the collective, between the inside and the outside. Terror remains untethered; it cannot be circumscribed. It is perhaps a matter of an encrustation without a subject, of a devastation that can even prevent the recognition of the state of terror by the subject who is undergoing and suffering from it.
The author can distinguish between trauma and terror in this way and can demonstrate that the notion of trauma is insufficient for explaining the effects of colonial violence because she fluently traverses the fields of subjective singularity, collective phenomena, the clinic, literature, and politics, and because she clearly identifies present, historical, and trans-subjective phenomena. In this way, she reveals the traces of colonialism on both the social and subjective levels, considering an event that was by all accounts unlimited in its effects, one that resounds deafeningly in the subjective journeys of many generations throughout Algerian history. We do not find in Lazali’s work any fictitious distinction between the individual and the collective; nor do we find a failure to distinguish between these realms. Instead, we confront a profoundly Freudian way of thinking in which an articulation between these spaces is constantly produced, in a fabric of numerous determinations that are always interwoven with one another.
In this sense, Lazali can be seen to be indebted to the work of Frantz Fanon, who, writing while events were still unfolding, was able to address the implantation of alienation in the psyches of the colonized as well as the improbable work of subjective decolonization that it entailed.
There will always be an expropriation of the self when colonization is imposed. What cannot be spoken of in the space of psychoanalysis, the subjective dimension in history, the unthought that finds expression in literature: it is in these recesses, Lazali tells us, that we can perhaps find the keys for understanding the subjective effects of a history of devastation whose beginning will soon mark its two-hundredth anniversary.
Many figures of the negative – negation, denegation, foreclosure, the “hole,” disavowal, repudiation – can be adduced to give an account of this blank, or what is at times, according to Lazali, a “black silence” that marks what “it is impossible to forget.”
The author refers to Francophone Algerian literature – a corpus that includes several clearly autobiographical works – to glean what cannot be said from the critical deviations (détournements) of this literature’s language and from its use of transliteration. Deviation for its own sake becomes a value, a process that makes “the untranslatable” into an object to be transmitted. Lazali also finds resources in these novels that can be used to oppose the censorship of thought and language that has marked colonial and postcolonial history. “How could psychoanalysts work without having read them?” Lazali might thus wonder, paraphrasing Benjamin Stora.
Lazali reads the works of Kateb Yacine, Nabile Farès, Jean El Mouhoub Amrouche, Malek Haddad, Yamina Mechakra, Chawki Amari, Rachid Mimouni, Mansour Kedidir, Mohammed Dib, Samir Toumi, Amin Zaoui, Kamel Daoud, Mouloud Feraoun, and Albert Camus in order to shed light on the zones rendered invisible by colonialism and by the leveling “mise sous totalité” of postcoloniality.
If, having read this extraordinary book, we had to choose one word with which to express compellingly the effects of colonialism on both sides of the Mediterranean, we would surely choose the French word effacement, meaning erasure. This is an erasure that is political in its origins, of course, begun by French colonialism, with its need to deny the fact that it deposited this abject remainder of the monarchy, which was “exported” to the colony. Identity, language, tradition, genealogy, patronyms: all were demolished as if Algeria had no history. But Lazali suggests that the erasure also includes internal and fratricidal confrontations and postcolonial state terror. This was an erasure or non-inscription, then, of all genealogy, alterity, and difference, for, Lazali suggests, such heterogeneity threatens the work of constructing a “we,” the coerced effort to create a uniform national essence or way of being that begins with the Algerian War of Liberation.
The celebration of the figure of the hero or martyr in the War of Liberation offers nothing more than an alibi, a distraction from the intensification of this erasure. This was a matter of refounding Algeria, erasing the colonial past, not “deconstructing” but rather “reconstructing,” Lazali indicates. This reconstruction presupposes the creation of a heroic gesture of liberation, and it presumes that deaths caused by internal wars should not be surveyed. The postcolonial imposition of one language, Arabic, and of one religion, Islam, in Algeria led to the production of a myth: the myth of the birth of a nation that, again, arbitrary and denialist, erases the past and seeks to establish a point of origin or degree zero for history.
Perhaps this blank in the history of a colonizing (republican?) France, which denies the shameful, monarchic remainder that determined its strategy for occupation, corresponds to a historical blank in Algeria, a denial of the shameful history of responsibility for internal wars. This leads to a paradoxical effect on the way to liberation: the historiography of Algeria at first refers almost exclusively back to colonization, and a pure, urgent, extreme, and totalizing nationalism emerges to heal the damage done. As Lazali explains, an excess of memory also emerges in relation to colonialism, an excess that is in the service of erasure, that safeguards the blank in memory itself, like a spotlight that sheds too much light and so dazzles us. Thus a gradual transformation takes place: colonial trauma becomes social trauma.
Lazali writes:
With a political agenda predicated on eradicating all forms of alterity, coloniality has inflamed hatred by seeking to preserve the One by killing the Other. To what extent does the rise of “nationalism” in Algeria coincide with the barring of alterity? And what impact has colonialism’s negation of the paternal function had on contemporary politics? (p. 101)
These turn out to be central questions for the development of her argument. The advent of colonialism destroyed the paternal function, defined as a symbolic function and a function of thirdness that organizes the social bond, genealogy, the delineation of communities of belonging, and the constitution of identity on the basis of the assignment of a name. This function has been systematically and deliberately obstructed in Algeria since the historical break represented by colonialism. Deaths, disappearances, and the changing of names have made it impossible to determine who is who, whose child is whose, whose sibling is whose.
The advent of this disaffiliation led not only to the fragmentation of the social body by France and the War of Liberation. The internal wars that marked Algeria’s history during the War of Liberation and continued after it, reaching their height in the 1990s, compel us to ask what the model for such incessantly repeated killing among brothers might be, and what might account for this ongoing search for and repeated removal of the figure of the father. Lazali critically revisits Freud’s theory, developed in Totem and Taboo (she mentions James Jasper Atkinson’s competing theory as well), and she wonders why the removal of the father and founder of Algerian nationalism, Messali Hadj, and the killing of Ramdane Abane (a leader in the National Liberation Front [Front de Libération Nationale, or FLN]) in 1957 did not result in the formation of an alliance among brothers, but instead resulted in a bitter and fratricidal internal war that brutally pitted the FLN against Messali Hadj’s followers and FLN combatants against one another, leading to a series of killings and ousters throughout Algeria’s subsequent history.
In Stasis: Civil War as a Political Paradigm (2015), Giorgio Agamben accounts for the development of civil wars by referring to a permanent and unresolvable tension between the oikos (the house, the family) and the polis, in which civil war functions as a threshold between politicized family relations and the polis redefined in familial terms. It would seem that in this case of conflict between “us” and “them,” at this threshold of difference and foreignness, a particular instance of what Agamben calls the irresolvable is at work. This is no longer the irresolvable tension between an “inside” (oikos) and an “outside” (polis), but rather a tension between a precolonial heterogeneity, excessively open to colonial invasion, and a reactive us whose formation required the suppression of even the most minimal divergence from the aim of constructing an illusory, unbreakable One.
As long as heterogeneity, otherness, and the foreign appear as threats, the social and subjective effects will be incalculable. This is not only because the Other will always be defined as an enemy, will always be regarded with suspicion, but also because, Lazali suggests, otherness instills psychic functioning, and thus the Other within is also experienced as a threat and as an obstacle. Lazali cites Albert Memmi, who argues, in perfect agreement with Fanon, that the task of subjective decolonization, the eradication of both the part of the self that is colonizing and the part that is colonized, is the tragic destiny of the colonized subject. Neither the colonizing nor the colonized part of the self belongs entirely to the self. This is a matter of a doubling at the level of identity that never produces mixing or confluence but instead leads to dissociation.
How, then, Lazali wonders, could we be the inheritors of what preceded our existence and what we cannot speak of, for reasons we do not know? Hogra (an insult, the humiliation that resulted from colonialism and crystallized its effects) is thus necessary as a signifier that gives shape to history. But it also fulfills an aiding and abetting function in that it persists, unaltered and unmodifiable, in the psychic life of future generations. Ultimately, Lazali asks, wasn’t this what colonialism sought to achieve? Wasn’t this the mental territory and the language of generational transmission that colonialism sought to occupy?
The customary tools of psychoanalysis are thwarted, since, in this regard, the subject of speech, even in the sense of repression, has not been constituted. What is at stake, then, is precisely the coming into being of the subject, the subject of a history not so much censored as erased, reduced to nothing, and yet inevitably existing. (Davoine and Gaudillière, 2004, p. 47)
Samir Toumi’s novel L’Effacement, which Lazali cites, was published in 2016. In it, Toumi, a young writer born six years after the end of the War of Liberation, gives an account of the impossibility of appropriating and of transforming the voids and erasures that, transmitted from one generation to another, remain inscribed as pure repetition outside the “interpreting apparatus” of the receiving subject.
Analyzing postcolonialism and the role of a particular form of Islamism in the eradication of the traces of the colonial, Lazali enters a symbolic world that is enormously complex, one in which language, religion, and politics mutually determine one another, in a superimposition that Lazali condenses in the name that she gives to this apparatus: the LRP. In this way, she analyzes the power of the apparatus to shape the psyche: Islamism’s religious morality becomes a substitute for politics in its regulation of what is permitted and what is forbidden, what is thinkable and what is unthinkable, such that the figure of the citizen blurs into the figure of the believer.
We know that language does not reflect but rather constitutes thought. As Lazali explains, the apparatus of the LRP operates at an intrapsychic level, such that it is not possible to distinguish, in analysands, between social and internal prohibitions. The analyst must approach the work of analysis mindful that the subject protects its most intimate thoughts from confiscation, in order to prevent them from appearing in free association. Religious morality and psychic censorship overlap such that it is not possible to determine whether subjects ultimately speak for themselves or are spoken by the community to which they belong.
In a lucid assessment, Lazali reveals a psychic alibi or displacement that replaces an “inner revolution” (the uprising that the subject stages against itself) with another, already completed, revolution: the War of Liberation. This subject’s only oppressor is the oppressor from whom it has already been freed.
The Argentine psychoanalyst Silvia Bleichmar3 (2009) distinguishes between two concepts that she also defines: the constitution of the psyche and the production of subjectivity. The former refers to the universals that contribute to psychic constitution (the unconscious, repression), and the latter names the historical processes that determine the constitution of the social subject. These latter processes are articulated with the processes of psychic constitution as well as with social, ideological, historical, and political variables. According to this description, the apparatus of the LRP would operate at the level of the production of subjectivity.
Every subject enters a narcissistic contract (Aulagnier, 2001)4 with the family group into which it is born, but especially with the social body that gives shelter to, and that constitutes by cathecting, its subjects. This contract will become a link in and guarantee of the generational chain as long as the subject bears a sense of filiation, belonging, or social continuity. The psychic constitution of the infans takes place in a socio-cultural space that transcends the space of the family and makes “foundational statements,” which constitute the infrastructure of the social group that shelters him or her. These statements can be mythic, scientific, or sacred. The discourse of the sacred especially locates the origin and end of the social body in one and the same place: the place of eternal truth.
[F]rom his coming into the world, the group cathects the infant as a future voice that will be asked to repeat the statements of a dead voice and thus guarantee the qualitative and quantitative permanence of a body that will continuously regenerate itself. (Aulagnier, 2001, p. 111; translation modified)
As I have already indicated, in Algeria’s history, the guarantee of continuity at the level of filiation is broken by colonialism and its aftermath, by the disappearances, the fragmentation of bodies, the changing of names, the assaults on tribal forms of belonging, and the persistence of disaffiliating practices implemented by the wielders of political power after the War of Liberation. I wonder, then, if the apparatus of the LRP might operate in the place of, might function as a substitute for, the chain of filiation as the apparatus that guarantees the subject’s narcissistic contract with the society to which it belongs, even while this apparatus conditions the rules governing the production of thought and the subject’s psychic life.
It was Piera Aulagnier (1984) who described the state of alienation as the destination and destiny of the ego’s thinking function, of the ego as it seeks to eliminate all conflict and psychic suffering, including conflict between the ego and its ideals and between the ego and its desires. A step short of psychic death, the state of alienation presupposes that the subject has decathected from thought inasmuch as thought is experienced as a risk. The narcissistic contract, the apparatus of the LRP, the state of alienation, and the state of terror might thus converge in establishing the categories of persecutor and persecuted as ways of organizing intra-psychic life and the social bond; they might converge in making suspicion decisive for the subject’s relation to alterity, sustaining an effort to banish from the psyche all forms of conflict that might lead the subject to a confrontation with itself or to a confrontation with the world in which it lives. The forbidden governs both the subject’s knowledge of external reality and its knowledge of psychic reality, Aulagnier suggests.
In these pages, I have tried to locate the specificity of the colonial trauma that Lazali analyzes with such clarity and sensitivity, a trauma that inescapably affects subjectivity, the social bond, and the practice of psychoanalysis in Algeria. And yet for all the specificity of Lazali’s framework, throughout my reading of her extraordinary book I saw how close our experiences are to one another, as if we lived in the same social space and spoke the same language. If in all colonization we see an apparatus for suppression and the domination of difference at work, in this text, by contrast, we find an ethics of hospitality, an openness to the foreign and the other that gives us the sense of being sheltered and of offering shelter to an experience of contact with alterity. If this were to leave a lasting trace in our thought, it would undoubtedly work against the repetition of such a devastating history.
Buenos Aires, February 2020
Translated by Ramsey McGlazer
References
Agamben, Giorgio (2015).
Stasis: Civil War as Political Paradigm
. Trans. Nicholas Heron. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Aulagnier, Piera (1984).
Les destins du plaisir: aliénation, amour, passion
. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Aulagnier, Piera (2001).
The Violence of Interpretation: From Pictogram to Statement
. Trans. Alan Sheridan. Hove: Taylor & Francis.
Bleichmar, Silvia (2009).
El desmantelamiento de la subjetividad. Estallido del Yo
. Buenos Aires: Topía Editorial.
Davoine, Françoise and Gaudillière, Jean-Max (2004)
History beyond Trauma
. Trans. Susan Fairfield. New York: The New Press.
García Reinoso, Gilou (1986). “Matar la muerte.”
Revista Psych
é 1.
Wikinski, Mariana (2016)
El trabajo del testigo
.
Testimonio y experiencia traumática
. Buenos Aires: La Cebra.
Notes
1
In this connection, I quote from my book
El trabajo del testigo. Testimonio y experiencia traumática
(2016): “Jean-François Lyotard wondered whether it was the historian’s task to attend not only to the damage of history, but also to the destruction of its documents. … Here there is a painful analogy with the disappeared in Argentina (where to disappear a person was also ‘to kill death,’ as Gilou García Reinoso wrote in 1986), who leave their traces in testimony as ‘disappeared’ and not only as ‘dead,’ perhaps without the law’s being able to ask after this distinction” (p. 88).
2
Translator’s Note
: I have used the gender-neutral “it” to refer to “the subject” throughout this foreword, both to convey the general nature of this category and to preserve the genderlessness of the possessive pronoun in Spanish.
3
The work of Silvia Bleichmar (an Argentine psychoanalyst who died prematurely in 2007) has been translated into French and Portuguese but is not well known in the English-speaking world. Bleichmar’s prolific work has been foundational in the Southern Cone, both because of its approach to the processes involved in the subject’s constitution and because of its construction of a metapsychology that sheds light on the interconnections between the political and the subjective, without losing sight of an ethical dimension that is constitutive for the subject.
4
Many psychoanalysts in Argentina, myself included, have engaged with the work of the French psychoanalyst Piera Aulagnier, not only in an effort to give an account of the constitutive matrix of the infant, but also as part of the work of thinking through the subjective effects of political phenomena. This means questioning our own practice and our ties to psychoanalytic institutions.
Introduction: The Difficulty of Acknowledging Colonial Trauma
The idea behind this book came from comparing my experiences as a psychoanalyst in Algiers and Paris. The regular tools of this exercise in self-liberation whereby the subject discovers its own forms of alienation weren’t sufficient for my patients in Algeria. They couldn’t turn away from the demands made upon them by the private, social, and political spheres. The notion of “resistance” doesn’t adequately describe their inability to escape censorship’s hold over thinking and to live fully as distinct and singular beings. Clear therapeutic benefits were present during sessions, but, as psychoanalytic treatment always goes hand in hand with a revolution of the private sphere, no matter where that treatment takes place, in Algiers this repeatedly sought-after revolution remains an unachievable goal that is systematically and tirelessly stalled by an Other: family, politics, religion … How to go about analyzing this private sphere deprived of its revolution? And what is this melancholy-filled grievance hiding?
Although subjectivity can never be hemmed in by any identity markers – be they political, linguistic, or historical – it nevertheless uses these to weave the invisible threads of a private self. The site of psychoanalysis must be reinvented on each occasion with each new patient, while taking into consideration the various elements “saturating” the subject. Rather than over-emphasizing cultural specificity, the question raised here concerns the politics underlying a psychoanalyst’s practice. It is also worth considering how treatment may shed light on a central socio-politico-linguistic dynamic at work in the larger society.
The history of French colonization in Algeria: a blank space in memory and politics
My psychoanalytic practice takes place between different languages (French and Arabic) and locations (France and Algeria). This has probably sharpened my awareness of difference, and made me realize what difference reveals about the reach of politics in both places. It has also made me aware of the impact of this political reach on the formation of the subject. In Paris, the fact that a vast number of French patients who, caught in a generational confusion and stagnation, evoke at some point the signifier “Algeria” invites further reflection. These French patients, usually three generations removed from colonialism, express being weighed down by a colonial history experienced more often than not by their grandparents, who were involved in either colonization or the War of Liberation, but about which these patients know very little. It is surprising to see how they are grappling with questions of shame and responsibility due to this legacy. Expressing an acute sense of discomfort, they are caught in a history they never experienced, one that, more often than not, they inherited cloaked in silence. They are beset with a number of questions: how do you inherit a past you never bore witness to and which, for unknown reasons, you can’t even speak about? Where does this leave you? Where did their parents and grandparents really stand politically in relation to “coloniality,” a term that covers a long period (132 years) of domination and violence, whereas now their descendants are forbidden from thinking about it? How do you develop your own story when this parental silence is met with a political blank space?
One might argue that Algeria crops up repeatedly in the discourse of patients because the analyst’s familiarity with the matter invites it. But these patients initially came to her for a variety of symptoms that bore no inherent relation to this episode in History. And at some point over the course of several conversations they express the painful impression of being held hostage and left defenseless by an inaccessible past. Following the patterns traced by the signifier “Algeria” thus leads to a blank space in memory and politics. The work of historians can hardly help these patients come to terms with the ideological blind spots they inherited, for the formation of subjectivity is beyond the reach of the historical record. On the other hand, subjectivity needs and demands acknowledgment from the political order. Otherwise, the part of History refused by the political order continues to be transmitted from generation to generation and creates psychic mechanisms that entrap the subject in existential shame.
In Algeria today, the colonial question is so pervasive that we tend to think of it as a historical template. But its official history is frozen in time, one-dimensional and therefore lacking in nuance. It is a matter for politics, probably its lone and major preoccupation. Since the devastation wrought by colonialism is widely acknowledged, it is treated as though there is no point in exploring the matter any more deeply from an interdisciplinary perspective. There is no room for dispute: the matter of colonialism is, by unanimous decision, a closed affair.
The ideological blind spots shaping the current understanding of coloniality – both inside and outside of Algeria – provided the impetus for this book. The myth-filled grievances expressed by so many patients thus hide the orchestrated effort to ensure that these blind spots persist in Algeria and in France. In this way, each individual’s responsibility in shaping History goes unquestioned. History is seen as a set of facts and the interpretation of those facts. This straitjacketed history prohibits subjects from exploring their own layered, complex, and intricate family histories. As one cannot access the history of colonialism through official channels in either France or Algeria, one must find another way in. This entails ignoring the myths and legends attached to it and seeking what lurks behind the curtain of the historical record.
History doesn’t speak for itself. It speaks through subjects who, ideally, debate with historians and politicians over its interpretation. Psychoanalysis cannot do without History, and yet depending solely on it would neglect the private interpretations tirelessly made of it by individuals. Practicing psychoanalysis in Algiers has in this respect been instrumental in understanding how subjectivity stands both within and outside History. To be clear, every subject is formed within and by History. But the subject also hides behind History in order to elude questions concerning individual responsibility. Everyone is familiar with the common refrain from patients: “My past has made me who I am.” And who hasn’t heard healthcare practitioners claim: “They are like that because of their past”? The subject strives continually to move beyond History and yet, instead of breaking free from it, the subject hides behind it. How, then, can one read and draw on History without letting this reading drown out the subject’s own interpretation of history (both personal and collective)?
To address colonialism’s impact on subjectivities in Algeria today, I have drawn on the work of historians as well as on works of Algerian literature, principally those written in French. My aim is to bring together fictional enunciations [énonciations de fiction] and historical statements of facts [énoncés historiques de faits] as nothing comes closer to the texture of subjectivity than the literary text. The turn to literature is both fruitful and necessary, since the discussions I had with patients which drove me to write this book remain protected by confidentiality – a delicate matter in Algeria, where the act of revelation is negatively perceived in both its religious and secular iterations. Not to mention the fact that psychoanalytic treatment remains restricted to a small minority of people who are already concerned about preserving their ability to speak openly and who remain fearful that the presumed secrecy of this encounter may be betrayed. On top of all this, colonialism finds expression through the blank spaces of thought and speech – in other words, through non-discursive acts.
When I first began my research, I was surprised to note how little clinical work there was in Algeria and France on the psychological effects of colonization, apart from that of Frantz Fanon in the 1950s, which is itself a treasure trove of information and rigorous analyses on the psycho-physical harm caused by colonization.1 His untimely death at 36 years old in 1961, and the dearth of subsequent clinical research in this field, has resulted in an absence of studies on the lasting and wide-ranging psychological effects of colonialism. This is thus a largely unexplored and unknown territory. On the other hand, the clinical effects of colonialism haven’t failed to garner attention from other fields: history, anthropology, sociology, literature. What explains this blind spot in the field of medicine and psychoanalysis? Does the impact of colonialism not merit its own analysis? Do existing notions, such as trauma, go far enough to explain colonial violence?
Probably not, if one considers that the blind spot in the psychological literature signals a larger problem: the longtime silence of leading public officials on colonial violence and its persistence today in a number of disciplines, especially in the clinical and social sciences. The logic of colonialism lives on in the thoughts, speech, and practices of former colonizers and those once deemed “indigènes.” This logic defies treatment, in the medical sense of this term: it doesn’t respond to care or examination. This holds true regardless of the subject’s place within colonialism (colonizer or colonized). The matter is clearly expressed through the blank spaces found in writing from both sides of the Mediterranean. This poses a serious challenge to clinical studies, which would like to establish a set of clear issues and carefully trace them back – following visible signs – to the matter of colonial violence. No such signs exist in this case. This blank space has risen to a deafening pitch in French and Algerian society, where it can be felt by all. For the clinical psychologist, the legacy of colonialism exposes an unusual psychic phenomenon, namely, the existence of a whole field of invisible traces that, in spite of their seeming absence, give shape to subjectivities and political discourse. The clinical psychologist is forced to deal with a history deprived of archives, literally and metaphorically. It is now no longer a question of deconstruction, but one of reconstructing traces that exist outside of memory.
A much-needed interdisciplinary approach
For the time being, uncovering this history is left to historians, whose work, although indispensable, fails to account for actively troubled subjectivities. What’s more, in France, once a historical record is reconstructed, it rarely gets noticed outside of its own disciplinary framework. This is in stark contrast to the multidisciplinary approach of postcolonial studies in the Anglophone world, which have remained largely inaccessible to Francophone readers, in spite of the fact that these works draw on the writing of major French-language theorists: Césaire, Sartre, Fanon, Memmi, Lacan, Derrida, Foucault. Further developed and articulated abroad, this French history is paradoxically hard to translate back home. This paradox seems symptomatic of an impossible reciprocity, which results in so much research, so many carefully crafted arguments remaining in utter obscurity.
In France, there seems to be an assumption that the history of colonization falls strictly within the purview of historians and former “indigènes,” and therefore that they have the exclusive right to treat it. And in Algeria, that colonialism belongs entirely to those who were colonized, making the rest of us apathetic to its debates and complex history. Go along now, nothing to see here! In both places, there are unbridgeable divisions – an effect of coloniality. And this issue cannot be tackled without an interdisciplinary approach, as each discipline offers a distinct vantage point on the matter. Otherwise, by succumbing to a crude partitioning of the past, present, and future, the colonial world will continue to remain sealed and inaccessible.
In Algeria, the effects of colonialism are so embedded in the psyche of individuals that it becomes difficult to distinguish between what results from direct impact and what has formed over time into an “identity” crisis caused by its disruption of the core network of subjectivities and the social bond. Subjectivities are thus entirely suffused with coloniality. This is now accepted as an unequivocal and indisputable historical fact, which undermines the idea that the primary interpreter of History is first and foremost the subject. This is probably why the consequences of colonization appear only in public discourse as cries of pain and resentment, which target the Other of colonialism while staying mute about the impacts of History on one’s personal history. In Algeria, it is as though colonization is the one and only trauma. Whereas in France, the notion of colonial trauma is flipped on its head and exploited by the political order: much talk is made of the “benefits of colonization” for “indigène” subjects. The political order thus strives to make the historical record disappear and to discount the role the subject plays in History. Here again, no clinical work has considered the specificity of these traumas and their impact on the social bond. Instead, we are stuck in the hell of this duality which allows the war to persist by other means.
Bringing together psychoanalysis, history, and literature in an attempt to discern the invisible role played by politics, this book’s approach may be judged problematic from within the specialized fields of each of these disciplines. But I can think of no better way of treating the politico-subjective “matter” of coloniality in Algeria, a totality that cannot be contained by isolated disciplines. Specialists from these fields each see themselves as the best positioned to take on the wide-scale devastation of this affair. But the coalition formed in this book with these three disciplines creates a dynamic approach where each discipline informs and alters the other, the cumulative effect of which, I hope, will not be lost on any reader. This transdisciplinary configuration is also a way of mounting a defense against the blanket-statement generalities and deadly binary logic that affect anyone who has tried to take a closer look at colonialism.
Literature strives to give expression to the blank spaces and the ideological blind spots present in the historical record. Above all, it alerts the reader to how a text is continuously shaped by its invisible margins. The psychoanalyst, for her part, works to read and analyze what can be read without reading. This works only insofar as the psychologization of characters and writers can be carefully avoided. It is a matter of treating the literary text as a literal object. This is clearly at odds with most approaches to literature, in the same way that my subjective approach to history stands in contrast to the historian’s objective approach. The other challenge this approach encounters is its use of psychoanalysis as a tool for understanding the political dimension of history and society. One must strive to avoid psychologizing society and/or “sociologizing” the subject. Although, as Freud says, no boundary separates the individual from the community, it remains a challenge for the psychoanalyst, whose practice is based on individual experience, to understand the community through the individual and vice versa.
Putting psychoanalysis, history, and literature to use in this way brings us the closest to what has been, and continues to be, erased by the political order, whose subjects are kept in the darkness of a sleepless and endless night. History seizes, literature writes, and psychoanalysis reads what resides in the blank space of the text’s margins.
Note
1
Frantz Fanon, “Psychiatric Writings,” in
Alienation and Freedom
, eds. Jean Khalfa and Robert Young, trans. Steven Corcoran (London: Bloombsury, 2018), pp. 167–530.
1Psychoanalysis and Algerian Paradoxes
I’m asking God, who, by the way, no longer believes in me, for forgiveness.
Sarah Haider, 20131
One can get over the disappearance of the past.
But we cannot recover from the disappearance of the future.
Amin Maalouf, 20122
Caught in a continual tension between servitude and freedom, Algerian society is a mix of contradictions. Since 1962, it has seen progress in a variety of areas: schooling for children; treatment of women, who are much more visible now in public spaces; access to free healthcare, and so on. On top of all this remains an unfulfilled desire to regain a sense of belonging after the colonial order has laid waste to one’s ties to the past (destroying languages, traditions, communities). Despite this progress, pain is still constantly felt and expressed by individual subjects, regardless of their sex, language, profession, or cultural belonging. This pain, expressed by numerous patients during the course of my psychoanalytic practice in Algeria, is rarely viewed as part of a larger historical and political context. Individuals feel as though they are gasping for air, suffocating, being crushed under an unbearable weight. A sense of inertia is palpable and conveys the feeling of a “foreclosed” future.
This pain manifests itself – and is recognized – through the body. But rarely is it related to a subjective history. It is hard to ignore this physical torment when so many women and men repeatedly complain about it. It becomes bigger than the individual subject who bears it in his or her personal life and begins to speak on a public stage. The one-on-one session soon gives way to a much larger social stage where the subject feels threatened. Far from inviting participation from subjects, the social order triggers their retreat. The relation between the individual and the community is troubled. On the one hand, they are divided by a radical incompatibility, since one (the community) almost cancels out the other (the individual), and, on the other hand, they are bound by a profound and inextricable solidarity. This solidarity is masked by grievances and other demands such that no one can perceive the role the subject plays in the social bond that overwhelms it and hastens its disappearance. How, then, can one make what is clearly present in psyches legible and translatable when it has left no traces, apart from what remains in public memory?
Disarray of the private and public spheres
In Algeria today, individuals have long been subjected to terrible psychological, social, and political realities. The traces and consequences of this history remain to be discovered. The persistence of these traces in the present is an urgent matter, but it is drowned out by the noise seemingly emanating from elsewhere: an international context whose instability poses many social and economic threats, a political establishment that has been in a volatile state for many years, and, not least, a resurgence of religion that goes beyond national borders and has been behind Algeria’s bloody history, a history that is always ready to re-erupt.
The analyst seeking to find traces of these catastrophes within psyches and connect them to verbal expressions of “malvie,” or the angst of young Algerians, will be met with disappointment. She will encounter only matters of another order – economic, administrative, international – that mask the real inner despair plaguing subjects and the state. Distinguishing between the inside and outside, between private and political responsibilities, between individual and collective history, is no easy task. This gives a dizzying impression of a homogeneous, all-consuming whole. Each individual’s role as individual in the very make-up of society is constantly effaced, while an omnipotent force that lurks in the shadows is seen as fully responsible for all subjective and social disasters.
The outer catastrophes experienced by patients are described, recorded, catalogued, but correlating them with present-day effects on subjects and the larger public has remained a struggle. It is as though a gap both held the individual and the community apart and caused them to merge. The private becomes public, and, conversely, the public is quite simply private, making them an unbroken unit. This makes it exceedingly difficult to find distinct features which could be used beneficially to mediate between them. In this all-consuming whole, catastrophes are identifiable, but their specific and exact effects on the individual and the community remain hidden. Catastrophes are constantly experienced in the present tense. Past, present, and future are almost indistinguishable. In other words, it is hard to make the (catastrophic) event that occurs into a significant event that can be documented in the private and political spheres.
Psychoanalysis in Algeria has slowly ventured out past its regular cultural and linguistic territory and settled into these troubled waters. The 2000s were marked by an urgency to build and repair, not by a need for deconstruction, which is frequently used in analyses of the subject. The last war (1992–2000) had just shown a seemingly unprecedented level of atrocity, robbing countless children, women, and men of their voices if not their lives. The demand for psychoanalytic treatment speaks to the need to understand and move beyond the brutality experienced during what have been called the “bloody years,” the “dark years,” the “red decade,” the “reign of terrorism,” or the “nightmare years.” New questions have emerged as atrocities have spilled over into the private sphere and familiar friends can no longer be distinguished from foreign foes. External catastrophes have laid waste to inner lives, borders, languages, histories. The destruction was so vast that the conventional means of separating inside from outside proved to be no longer operational, failing at times to make any sense at all.
In this indecipherable landscape – to which I’ll return shortly – appeared an element that had been buried until then and which recalled one of Freud’s central insights: namely, the indissociable ties between the psyche and collective experience. Freud developed this idea as early as Project for a Scientific Psychology in 1885, arguing that interiority springs principally from a decisive encounter with the exterior (the environment) – this is the fundamental experience of every infant. He would later refine this idea by widening his notion of environment to include the social environment in 1913 with Totem and Taboo, and continued in this vein all the way up until Moses and Monotheism (1937), where he strove to explain how the unconscious is formed, unforgettably, before boundaries are drawn. In other words, it isn’t just national borders that are artificial: it starts with the border separating interiority and exteriority for the speaking beings we all become. However, we often forget this as we continue to cling to fragile borders for reassurance. Catastrophic events can put these borders at even greater risk.
In Algeria, each individual harbors within the degeneration of the collective body whose central organ is the social order. The discourse of patients from the 2000s sheds light on how this situation directly affects the bodies of subjects, especially in light of the fact that the disaster of the war of the 1990s was compounded by natural catastrophes in the following decade: repeated earthquakes, one of which caused more than 2,000 deaths, and floods no less destructive.3 All of this is not without consequence, as each catastrophe – although different in kind – finds itself tied to the previous one. These catastrophes are linked together by their shared belonging to the tragic sphere. And the psychological associations formed can be explained by the temporal proximity of the catastrophes and the great losses of human life occasioned by each. Tragedy of this sort marks the discourse of patients, who can be heard speaking of “an unrelenting fate,” of “being condemned to catastrophe,” or even of “divine punishment,” which evokes the “wrath of the gods” from Greek mythology. The collision between human atrocities from the war years and the ravages wrought by nature has led to a surge in religion: prayers, women turning to the veil again and a series of other acts to “placate the gods.” In both cases, between heaven and earth, God is at stake: a mysterious God called upon to shield one from natural catastrophes.
Calls for help made amid the murders and massacres during what has been deemed the “Internal War” remain unheard and unanswered. They have been drowned out by the lives lost due to natural disasters. The senselessness of human cruelty has been matched and complemented by nature’s unpredictability. Failing to find explanations for these, everything appears to be ruled by chance. Questions such as “How did we get here?” and “What’s behind this endless bloodshed?” – the countless dead and missing, the massacres, the savagery of it all – are like so many purloined letters.
