Democracy and the Political Unconscious

At a time when the territorial borders between the great civilisations are fading away, mental borders are being reinvented to give a second life to the ghosts of lost civilisations. . . . Ethnicity and religion are being marshaled to draw new borders between groups whose identity relies on a performative definition: we are what we say we are, or what others say we are. These new ethnic and religious borders do not correspond to any geographical territory or area. They work in minds, attitudes and discourses. They are more vocal than territorial, but all the more eagerly endorsed and defended because they have to be invented, and because they remain fragile and transitory.

Look just at the 1990s: 2 million dead in Afghanistan; 1.5 million dead in the Sudan; some 800,000 butchered in ninety days in Rwanda; a half-million dead in Angola; a quarter of a million dead in Bosnia; 200,000 dead in Guatemala; 150,000 dead in Liberia; a quarter of a million dead in Burundi; 75,000 dead in Algeria; and untold tens of thousands lost in the border conflict between Ethiopia and Eritrea, the fighting in Colombia, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Chechnya, Sri Lanka, southeastern Turkey, Sierra Leone, Northern Ireland, Kosovo, and the Persian Gulf War (where perhaps as many as 35,000 Iraqi citizens were killed). In the wars of the twentieth century not less than 62 million civilians have perished, nearly 20 million more than the 43 million military personnel killed. (Hedges 2002:13)

And now, less than a decade into the next century, we are certainly faring no better, with genocide in Darfur, civil war breaking out in Iraq, and conflicts continuing in Afghanistan, Burma, Burundi, the Central African Republic, Chad, Chechnya, Colombia, the border of India and Bangladesh, the Cote d’Ivoire, Nepal, and Uganda. These conflicts are devastatingly traumatic here and now for survivors and loved ones. Their effects will be felt well into the future. But they are also the result of trauma, effects felt now from wounds inflicted earlier.

Examining modernity’s traumas calls for the genealogical work of uncovering what has given rise to them—and it calls for understanding how trauma that occurs today will have its own long-term effects. We notice that in just trying to make sense of the traumas that go on now, sense is hard to come by. We might catalogue the bloodshed, but it seems impossible to explain; there might be patterns, but nothing rational or explainable. The obvious point is that all these deaths, this bloodshed, these upheavals of the social order represent massive breakdowns in relationships between peoples, sometimes in the form of civil war, other times in clashes between nations. Wars occur for all kinds of reasons, but the most intractable wars result from loss of security or threats to identity and order. Wars purely for economic gain (recall the antiwar mantra of the Persian Gulf War: “no blood for oil”) seem amenable to cease fire and intervention: at least we can reason about the bottom line. But there is no reasoning, it seems, about what drives people who live side by side one day to engage the next day in a battle to kill off what suddenly seems to be an ancient and mortal enemy. The end of the twentieth century did not, as Francis Fukuyama once thought (and now, to his credit, no longer believes), bring an end to history and a few ethnic skirmishes; it brought the end of the unifying power of nation-states that could quell such uprisings and the rise of blood enmities, often between brothers. And it brought more genocide and “ethnic cleansing.” And all for what?

What really drives the Janjaweed in Sudan? Prior to 2003, attacks by these Arabs on horseback against largely black African farmers might have been motivated by understandable, if not justifiable, competition over scarce water. But as of this writing, something else drives the bloodshed, and even drives the government to back the Janjaweed. This seems to be a nation internally convulsing, struggling with identity and terror. For what? Wars clearly based on self-interest, as in the mantra of realpolitik, might be understandable, but more and more wars, especially civil wars, seem to have nothing at all to do with self-interest. To the contrary, they are antithetical to self-interest. They are self-immolating. One day people live side by side, in the nice manner of modern liberalism, and the next they find themselves besieged by wielders of other faiths or identities. Why have we not taken more notice of this obvious fact: conflict is inflamed when religious and clanlike sentiments rise up? Religion and thick conceptions of identity, holdovers from medievalism, disrupt modernity’s allegiance to pluralism and tolerance. From Belfast to Beirut, conflict seems to be fueled by religion and identity politics, often oddly in worlds that have been otherwise pluralistic and secular.

I will draw on the tropes of psychoanalysis in an effort to hermeneutically open up what defies explanation. By using psychoanalysis to understand social entities, I do not mean to equate a nation with an individual; the unconscious of the former is of course of a different kind than the latter. Yet there is a connection in how they arise and function, so, as I hope to show, the tools of psychoanalysis can help explain what otherwise seems so inscrutable. The connection is that traumas that beset individuals—and their affective consequences—show up in the public sphere (in thwarted sublimations, repetition compulsions, neuroses, etc.) and circulate there, creating a ripple effect upon others. As Teresa Brennan’s work brilliantly demonstrates, these affects move between and among people, becoming shared phenomena. The psychic phenomena become symptomatic in similar ways in people and in a people, especially in the matter of trauma: how it functions in the development and behavior of an individual is uncannily like how it functions in social entities.

Charles Rycroft’s Dictionary of Psychoanalysis defines “trauma” as follows:

2. In psychiatry and psychoanalysis, any totally unexpected experience which the subject is unable to assimilate. The immediate response to a psychological trauma is shock; the later effects are either spontaneous recovery (which is analogous to spontaneous healing of physical traumata) or the development of a traumatic neurosis. 3. In psychoanalysis, by extension, any experience which is mastered by use of defences. Trauma, in this sense, produces anxiety, which is followed either by spontaneous recovery or the development of a psychoneurosis. (Rycroft 1995:187–188)

According to Rycroft, Freud’s notion of trauma was purely causal. A traumatic event happens to someone without that person willing it, and any effects that result were produced by that event. Freud thought that all neurotic illnesses are the result of traumas that occur in infancy. But Judith Herman, among others, has noted the deleterious effects of traumas that occur in adulthood, from the traumatized soldier to the battered wife. People who weather traumas better—that is, who seem to recover quicker—are those who were more resilient and had stronger social networks in the first place. Those who experience trauma in an already weakened or isolated condition suffer more from post-traumatic stress disorder. Perhaps the latter were already suffering from infantile trauma, which made them less resilient.

What interests me first here are the defenses that arise in order to master traumatization. Defenses work to protect the ego either from unruly aspects of the id (its own desires and drives) or from the outside world. Given that trauma is an unexpected assault from without, defenses help the traumatized subject protect herself from whatever the world might bring again as well as from the memories that still besiege her. Anna Freud listed nine defenses: “regression, repression, reaction-formation, isolation, undoing, projection, introjection, turning against the self, and reversal—plus a tenth, sublimation, ‘which pertains rather to the study of the normal than to that of neurosis.’ Splitting and denial are also listed as defences” (ibid. 32). Regression is the defense by which the ego reverts to an earlier stage of development to avoid anxiety. Repression is the defense mechanism that renders an unacceptable impulse unconscious. Conversely, reaction-formation seeks to master an unacceptable impulse by exaggerating its opposing tendency. Isolation is the defensive mechanism of psychically separating an occurrence from its effects. Undoing goes even further, denying not only the effects but also the occurrence itself. Projection is the defense of imagining a mental phenomenon as an actual phenomenon, often by locating it in some object or person other than oneself. Introjection can be a healthy process of internalizing something, for example, internalizing external authority into one’s own superego; or it may be an unhealthy defense of fantasizing that one has ingested an external object. Turning against oneself is a kind of moral mechanism, such as when a torturer begins to torture himself. Finally, reversal is the process of turning one instinctual vicissitude into its opposite (e.g., sadism into masochism), utilized in reaction-formation.

In the case of trauma, it seems that all of these, save perhaps regression and introjection, would serve as protection. The problem, though, is that relying on these defenses (not including sublimation) for any extended length of time will not help the traumatized subject work through a traumatic experience. It only serves to defer healing and recovery. Moreover, many of these defenses can cause further destruction and damage, either by turning in or against oneself or by projecting one’s ills on others. Psychoanalysis offers the traumatized subject tools, namely the tool of the “talking cure,” to work through troubles and mourn what has been lost.

Psychoanalysis is both a tool for working through and an analysis of how the psyche forms. Could it be a tool for social entities as well? Much of what I noted above could be applied to societies that have experienced trauma. War’s social and political trauma offers strong evidence that the insights of psychoanalysis apply. The defenses at work seem to be variations of reaction-formation, isolation, undoing, projection, and turning against the self. The subject, here the political body (as it is imaginatively constituted in a sociosymbolic sphere), puts up defenses and resists working through, often as if previous trauma shaped it to react as it does. Any war is traumatic, and it is also an acting out of some previous trauma. An act of war or terror is both the result of some trauma and a new instance of it. Both occur simultaneously; they cannot be temporally distinguished.

But they should be distinguished conceptually. In cases of political and social trauma and the accompanying repetition compulsions, there is much to discuss. This chapter considers, with a very broad sweep, originary traumas, the traumas of the modern era that seem to still be doing their destructive work.

Consider the major epochs of human history, at least as we parse time in the West: ancient (roughly until about 333 A.D. with the Roman Empire’s adoption of Christianity), medieval or traditional (until about the fifteenth century), modern (from the early sixteenth century until the present), and perhaps now postmodern (Fredric Jameson marks the break, a bit tongue in cheek, at about 1958 with the television and first computer chips). Each shift from one era to the next has been difficult, but the shift from traditional to modern is unparalleled and still not finished. Modernity has not simply been a time in which massive traumas have occurred, it is also something borne of trauma. Modernity is the renunciation of tradition’s authority, the differentiation of society, the Copernican revolution, meaning both the astronomical and the philosophical shift in our understanding of our own place in the order of things. It is the cataclysmic transformations of the world from agrarian to industrial; from feudal to capitalist; from peoples rooted in place to displaced and dispersed around the globe, most horrifically in the Middle Passage of slavery; from a logic of similitude to a logic of identity and difference (black/white; first world/third world; East/West);¹ from the order of traditions to the bewilderment of a life without foundations; from unity to complexity, differentiation, and compartmentalization.² For all its comforts, modernity has come about brutally. And for the many who have made these comforts possible, it is far from comfortable.

I do not think that we yet fully fathom, nor have we worked through, this transformation into modernity. Much less have we recovered. Perhaps what we call postmodernism is a kind of blinking of the lights, a look underneath the pretenses of modernity, a belated and still highly intelligent resistance to what modernity wreaks. Habermas has made this point, but in a rather reactionary manner, siding with modernity. I don’t mind siding with the postmoderns as well as with traditionalists such as MacIntyre who hesitate and pause before what modernity brings. At the same time, I am a committed modernist, from the aesthetics of architecture and design to the ideals of democracy and self-authorship. Where the traditionalists bemoan the lack of authority that gives meaning to life, I side with the existentialists who say we have to make it up and stand by it ourselves. There is little to appeal to in the way of communicative reason, in what Habermas thinks are the implicit ideals of reason that guide our everyday encounters. These ideals are flimsy and easily abused. Where we are now is life on the edge.

We need to explore several facets of the traumatic birth of the modern and point to the ways we are still acting out rather than working through the changes, from those that are religious and philosophical to those dealing with nation-states, science, and the economy. All of them are deeply interconnected. The economic shift to capitalism requires both modern science and the passing of old traditions and authorities. A new world run according to the logic of profit, expansion, property (including one’s own labor that can be bought and sold) and technological know-how cannot have archaic traditions standing in the way. So out they have gone.

We have not fully grieved the loss of tradition or, rather, the loss of traditions that are given in advance rather than made by our own hand. This inquiry will move from the philosophical to the global. I will begin with what Nietzsche looked into, how the world became a fable, and Heidegger’s continuation of that inquiry and Weber’s sociological analysis of the disenchantment of the world. The philosophical inversion of reality took place against the backdrop of a very real cataclysm that tore apart traditions to make way for colonialism, global capitalism, and an endless war on terror.

At least since Plato, philosophers have divvied up reality between the real and the apparent. In their account, there is what is really real, which can only be grasped through reason, and what is only apparently real, what we gather through our senses. To say that something “seems” to be so is already to doubt it. What seems to us, what comes to be grasped sensuously, is not to be trusted. Plato came on the heels of other ancients, as Heidegger, who had more faith in the senses, reminds us. Or rather, they thought that the world presented itself to human beings and human beings were able to apprehend what opened it:

That which is, is that which arises and opens itself, which, as what presences, comes upon man as the one who presences, i.e., comes upon the one who himself opens himself to what presences in that he apprehends it. That which is does not come into being at all through the fact that man first looks upon it, in the sense of a representing that has the character of subjective perception. Rather, man is the one who is looked upon by that which is; he is the one who is—in company with itself—gathered toward presencing, by that which opens itself. (Heidegger 1977:131)

This ancient worldview got disrupted and began to be inverted with Plato. As Heidegger writes, “Certainly through Plato’s thinking and Aristotle’s questioning a decisive change takes place in the interpretation of what is and of men, but it is a change that always remains on the foundation of the Greek fundamental experience of what is” (ibid. 143). Again, this experience is of having to take in what is presencing itself to oneself. Heidegger understands Protagoras’s famous dictum—that man is the measure of all things—to mean “whatever at a given time anything shows itself to me as, of such aspect is it (also) for me; but whatever it shows itself to you as, such is it in turn for you. You are a man as much as I” (ibid. 144). Reality might have many aspects, and any one of us may see some particular aspect. This does not mean that truth is relative, but that different aspects of the real might be revealed differently to one person or another. The popular sophist notion that truth is whatever I happen to think it is was wrong; the real “sophist,” such as Protagoras, wasn’t a relativist. Truth is not based upon the perceiver’s take or whim; it is what it is, and we are wise to be as open to it as possible. The preplatonic Greek task was to tarry within the horizon of unconcealment, to try to gather truth and save it, trying to keep a footing while being buffeted by “sundering confusions” (ibid. 131).

Plato enters into a world that experiences the world this sensuous way, and he does preserve that way of knowing in his notion of the apparent world. But he is very worried by the sophism that manipulates appearances at the peril of truth. So he juxtaposes a world of seeming and appearance to a world of unchanging truths. As Nietzsche notes in Twilight of the Idols, in the section, “How the ‘Real World’ Finally Became a Fable: History of an Error,” “1. The real world attainable for the wise man, the pious man, the virtuous man—he lives in it, he is it. (Most ancient form of the idea, relatively clever, simple, convincing. Paraphrase of the proposition: ‘I, Plato, am the truth.’)” (Nietzsche 1998:20).

In this move, according to Nietzsche, Plato paves the way for the modern notion that the world can only be fathomed as a representation or a picture, as Heidegger puts it, that is created by a knower. “Precisely as a struggle against sophism and therefore in dependency upon it, this changed interpretation is so decisive that it proves to be the end of Greek thought, an end that at the same time indirectly prepares the possibility of the modern age” (Heidegger 1977:143).

With Plato, as Nietzsche notes at the start of his tale, the real world is available to the select few who are wise, pious, and virtuous. It takes a strong ability to measure for reason to ascertain what is real and true. These things cannot be had by people taken in by their senses. Still, what keeps this Platonic view ancient and not properly modern is that, when truth is gotten, the knower is apprehending truth and truth is presencing itself. The real world is not only attainable, “he lives in it, he is it.” The philosopher who makes his way out of the cave and into the light of the sun is now living in the real, even if this seems to others (such as Aristophanes) to be living in the clouds.

But the real recedes with the advent of Christianity. In the second step of how the real world became a fable, Nietzsche writes: “The real world unattainable for now, but promised to the wise man, the pious man, the virtuous man (‘to the sinner who repents’). (Progress is the idea: it becomes more cunning, more insidious, more incomprehensible—it becomes a woman, it becomes Christian. . . .)” (Nietzsche 1998:20). Again, it is a promise made to the select, but they will have to wait. It is promised, but unattainable for now. In medieval times, the real world is deferred until the afterlife. So the schism begins.

The real world is taken to another level of deferment with modernity, with Descartes and then Kant, who in his epistemological writings argues that things in themselves can never be known with certainty, though from a moral perspective the idea of what is right will steer us categorically. “3. The real world unattainable, unprovable, unpromisable, but the mere thought of it a consolation, an obligation, an imperative. (The old sun in the background, but seen through mist and skepticism; the idea become sublime, pale, Nordic, Königsbergian.)” (ibid.).

At each historical step, within ancient thought, in the move to Christianity, and then to the modern era, the real world moves further away. “4. The real world—unattainable? At any rate unattained. And since unattained also unknown. Hence no consolation, redemption, obligation either: what could something unknown oblige us to do? . . . (Break of day. First yawn of reason. Cock-crow of positivism.)” (ibid.)

By the nineteenth century with positivism, the real became a quaint metaphysical ideal, and only what could be known empirically had any worth. By the fifth step in his tale, Nietzsche is celebrating the demise of the very idea. “5. The ‘real world’—an idea with no further use, no longer even an obligation—an idea become useless, superfluous, therefore a refuted idea: let us do away with it! (Broad daylight; breakfast; return of bons sens and cheerfulness; Plato’s shameful blush; din from all free spirits.)” (ibid.).

Or as David Allison puts it,

What the so-called “true world” entailed or embraced, what it ostensibly signified, was, for Nietzsche, practically a catalogue of Western metaphysics: it included the domain of causality, religion, will, being, science, psychology, morality, and purposiveness. Such a “true world,” which effectively defines the Judeao-Christian universe itself, the lives and habits of individuals and their culture, as well as the very discourse of the West, for some two millennia—this entire apparatus of our intelligibility itself, Nietzsche attacks with his celebrated “critique of pure fiction.” Such a fictional world, he would remark, in The Antichrist, one not even attaining to the status of a dream world, finds its initial motivations in precisely a hatred of the actual, the sensible, world of nature.

But this celebration only really gets under way when the division between the real and the apparent is dashed as well. “6. The real world—we have done away with it: what world was left? the apparent one, perhaps? . . . But no! with the real world we have also done away with the apparent one! (Noon; moment of the shortest shadow; end of the longest error; pinnacle of humanity; INCIPIT ZARATHUSTRA.)” (ibid.). The contrast of real and apparent is founded on a metaphysics that distrusts life and experience.

Heidegger’s concern goes further. He is worried about how we have stripped ourselves of immediate experience. Where the preplatonic Greeks found themselves in a world of presencing, we find ourselves in a situation where nothing is present to us. Instead we are beings who represent the world to ourselves as a picture. This is twofold: on the one side we become the ground of representations; on the other side the representation is never adequate for real experience. As for the first side, in modernity

man becomes subject. We must understand this word subiectum, however, as the translation of the Greek hypokeimenon. The word names that-which-lies-before, which, as ground, gathers everything onto itself. . . . When man becomes the primary and only real subiectum, that means: Man becomes that being upon which all that is, is grounded as regards the manner of its Being and its truth. (Heidegger 1977:128)

As for the other side of this coin, “Man becomes the relational center of that which is as such. But this is possible only when the comprehension of what is as a whole changes” (ibid.). What is is no longer a reality that can be had, certainly not like the reality outside the cave that the true philosopher could enter. In modernity, the best we can do is “get the picture.” We might be able to hold the world as picture up to our eyes for scrutiny, but it no longer is present to us. It is at best a representation, and the modern hopes that the representation is a good one. “Hence world picture, when understood essentially, does not mean a picture of the world but the world conceived and grasped as picture.” It is, like Baudrillard’s simulacrum, a copy without an original.

The real world is now completely deferred, or lost. All we have is a picture we give to ourselves. And we are not in it, except perhaps in some image we have of ourselves that we put in this picture we hold up against ourselves. In modernity, our alienation from the real is complete.

As we tell ourselves in the modern West, the move from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance and then the Enlightenment was a move away from understanding the world as ordered from on high to understanding the world as something that human beings can order and navigate. Though this story gives human beings pride of place in the scheme of things, something that had been vital is lost. In the old order, everything was imbued with meaning and purpose. The new worldview has no room for such enchantments; reason strips away such illusions and lays bare what things are. Describing this loss, Max Weber notes, “The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the ‘disenchantment of the world’” (Weber 1946:155). And a few pages later he describes the subjective loss: “the bearing of man has been disenchanted and denuded of its mystical but inwardly genuine plasticity” (148). Modernity is first and foremost a disenchantment, a casting aside of childish notions such as the traditional ones that everyone has a particular role to fill, a place in the scheme of things. Disenchantment is a kind of trauma, something we, for some reason, visit upon our children with stories of Santa Claus and the tooth fairy. Early in their life, we give them a moment of enchantment, and then on the way to growing up we tear it away. To be grown up in this world is to have been disenchanted.

Were I born into a traditional society, I would be told from the start my place and purpose. I would see myself as a meaningful part of—what Charles Taylor calls embedded within—a larger whole. There is no such narrative structure in the modern era. In fact, the modern chafes at being told what to do. The modern ideal of autonomy is that no one can tell me what I should do with my life. That is for me to decide. But I must also decide what is meaningful and important. Throwing out preordained roles is part of throwing out preordained meaning. In modernity I am free to choose my own purposes and decide what is meaningful. But at the same time I am awash in a world that has no intrinsic meaning or purpose. A world that offers the question “What do you want to be when you grow up?” is a world devoid of intrinsic meaningfulness.

The existentialist response is to choose, to decide by an act of will and performance what is meaningful and right. But there is something unsettling about this state. I could have chosen otherwise. How am I to know whether I am living my life well? What is the standard for deciding what a good life is? If I choose to study and teach philosophy or medicine or art, won’t I be haunted by the other things I might have done?

Today we are thrown into a world devoid of intrinsic purpose or meaning. Our place in it is something we choose for ourselves, as best we can. Limitations are seen as failures. Even if I am born into a family or community of deep tradition and faith, this small world is nestled inside a larger one that thinks that faith is a peculiarity. For most people, the disenchanted life, ameliorated with the fabricated rituals and traditions of our made-up communities, works well enough.

Yet even in the sea of modernity, without ready-made life rafts, most people fashion or adopt some traditions and faith, leftovers from an earlier era fashioned to fit comfortably within a modern, secular world. Faith might take up space a day a week, over prayers at dinner, in the rituals of moving from childhood to adolescence and adulthood. There are the children, though, who will rush off in search of something more authentic. The expatriate is this character, leaving home, rejecting the pseudo-truths of his homeland in search of something else, just as the protagonist in Somerset Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge, having returned home after World War I, leaves again, leaving Europe altogether in search of some meaning. The expatriate does this by choice.

Then there are the children of immigrants, or at least those who have left the developing world for developed societies; they are young people growing up in foreign lands, split between tradition, something lost and gone, and modernity. As Olivier Roy writes of second-generation Muslim immigrants, “Contemporary Muslim minorities have to undergo a process of deculturation that has no precedent in history and is not imposed but is the consequence of voluntary displacement and shifts from pristine cultures to a common, uprooted Muslim identity” (Roy 109). He argues that fundamentalism afflicts uprooted Muslims more than established Muslim societies. To be displaced, to be a stranger in a strange land—the sort of displacement so common in modernity—is to be vulnerable to the lure of fundamentalism. Speaking of the situation of foreigners in France, Julia Kristeva, herself a foreigner in France, describes the difficulty facing les étrangères of finding a safe home in a land where befriendment tends to come from bleeding hearts, paternalist, perverse people, or paranoiacs. One might suggest, in a strange homage to the International Workers of the World, “foreigners of the world unite,” but “things are not so simple,” Kristeva writes at the beginning of her book, Strangers to Ourselves; “one must take into consideration the domination/exclusion fantasy characteristic of everyone” (24). Even the foreigner finds her own foreigner. In France, she notes, “Italians call the Spaniards foreigners, the Spaniards take it out on the Portuguese, the Portuguese on the Arabs or the Jews, the Arabs on the blacks, and so forth and vice versa” (ibid.). Certainly the same has been so in the United States, where one people after another scapegoats another people after another. Even where links are forged between sets of foreigners, the links “unfailingly snap when fanatical bonds fuse together again communities cemented by pure, hard fantasies” (ibid.).

The fantasies Kristeva refers to, those that some estranged foreigners nurture, are the same ones Roy alludes to now, post 9/11: a “common, uprooted Muslim identity.” In my view, this is not a problem peculiar to estranged Islam; it could befall any exile in search of meaning. For the exiled Muslim so seeking, the fantasy can become that of an Ummah or universal brotherhood, a fantasy of unity despite or because of estrangement from material and maternal ties. Those who immigrate to a new land are simultaneously, in the very act, emigrants from another, caught in the new land as other and othered from the land of origin, which with distance and time seems more original, sacred, pure. One imagines that the other who others them, that is, the native, is impure; “the foreigner excludes before being excluded, even more than he is being excluded” (24). For those modern nomads, whether Muslims in France or evangelicals in contemporary America, a logic of exclusion is operating as a means of protection, part of a path toward finding purpose and connection in a world that seems to offer none. The result is that “here, on foreign land,” Kristeva writes, “the religion of the abandoned forebears is set up in its essential purity and one imagines that one preserves it better than do the parents who have stayed ‘back home’” (ibid.). Eerily anticipating the present phenomenon of fundamentalists who have become so as emigrants, she writes, “fundamentalists are more fundamental when they have lost all material ties, inventing for themselves a ‘we’ that is purely symbolic; lacking a soil it becomes rooted in ritual until it reaches its essence, which is sacrifice” (ibid.). Kristeva may be too cavalier in her characterization of foreigners as all being potential fundamentalists, but her description uncannily accounts for what has happened to those who have gone down this path.

The fundamentalists who boarded and then brought down the planes on September 11, 2001, found their Islam in Europe, among other displaced and alienated youth, not in traditional Islamic countries. Apart from Wahabism in Saudi Arabia, most Muslim countries’ brand of Islam is fairly moderate (and even the Saudi extremism can be explained by the huge gap between the wealthy royal family who befriend the West and the poor majority). The point is, fundamentalism is a product of modernity, not traditionalism. Modernity cultivates the alienation that fundamentalism promises to redress.

But as the world goes more global, most traditions are still fabrications, or they are adopted or adhered to in an individualist sense, as a choice that is still somewhat arbitrary. In a truly traditional society these are not matters of choice.

One of the most extended, global, and traumatic events of the modern era, namely the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries, is the trauma of Africans abducted and sold into slavery in the Americas. Upwards of 20 million Africans died in the “Middle Passage,” the route of trade between continents in which African slaves were inhumanely and brutally packed and shipped from Africa to the Americas. The slaves were traded for sugar cane and other goods that went to Europe, where they were traded for money and goods that could be shipped off to Africa to purchase more slaves. Vast wealth and empires were made upon this triangular trade. It was the seed for the rise of a modern, global economy. Slavery made modernity as an economic fact possible.

This trauma was repeatedly reenacted over the course of centuries that also saw the rise of European power, including the power of those who emigrated to the Americas as colonists. The American Revolution portrayed itself as an uprising of colonists against the British colonizers, but in many respects it was simply the maturation of those who came to colonize the Americas. The colonized were the indigenous peoples as well as those who were abducted from Africa and brought over to toil for the benefit of European Americans. As Charles Mills argues, the West has conveniently forgotten the way that white supremacy, slavery, expansion, and exploitation helped found modern nation-states. Instead of recognizing racial oppression as a fundamental source, the West invents a hypothetical story of a social contract in which all willingly agree to forego some of their individual liberty for collective security and freedom. Europeans imagine themselves stepping out of the state of nature into a state of political society; the state of nature is hypothetical for them only in the sense that they do not imagine that they could ever sink into barbarity. They construct nonwhites as barbarians, nonhumans; this construction is a heuristic device (not to mention an economic one) used to found the social contract.

Modernity with its ideas of political philosophy and human dignity could not, it seems, be further from the fact of trading in and brutalizing human beings. Yet in these very same years, political philosophers from Hobbes to Locke developed an idea of a social contract that began with the radical freedom and dignity of human beings. Charles Mills explains the seeming contradiction with his concept of the racial contract, which underlies the social contract by delineating what is “civilized” through a construction of the uncivil as nonwhite. Civil and rational and free and equal all add up to white and European, providing a layer of rationalization to justify expansion and conquest of other lands. In the story of the West, Europeans can lay claim to other lands not just because of their military and economic power but also because of their superiority and uprightness as protectors and agents of civilization.

According to Mills, the racial contract is not just an idea but a historical reality. It is “historically locatable in the series of events marking the creation of the modern world by European colonialism and the voyages of ‘discovery’ now increasingly and more appropriately called expeditions of conquest” (Mills 1997:20).

We live in a world which has been foundationally shaped for the past five hundred years by the realities of European domination and the gradual consolidation of global white supremacy. Thus not only is the Racial Contract “real,” but . . . the Racial Contract is global, involving a tectonic shift of the ethicojuridical basis of the planet as a whole, the division of the world, as Jean-Paul Sartre put it long ago, between “men” and “natives.” (Mills 1997:20)

How can this be? How is it that those of us who are Euro-Americans can so easily forget the magnitude and the enormity of a process that helped found the modern social order, the West’s economic power, the division of the world between the haves who are overwhelmingly light-skinned and the have-nots who are almost always of color? How can the founding trauma of white privilege go unnoticed? Shannon Sullivan gives a brilliant analysis by developing the concept of a “collective raced unconscious” formed via individuals’ psychosomatic habits, which have been handed down from one generation to another (Sullivan 2006:94–96). This collective unconscious is not the Jungian sort, which, Sullivan argues, confuses habit with instinct (97), but one that arises culturally and historically and is passed down from one group to another, a collective unconscious that haunts subsequent generations. Drawing on the work of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, Sullivan calls this collective unconscious a phantom: “an unspeakable secret from previous generations that will not die, that has a murky but very real presence amongst the living” (110).

Via their connections to this phantom collective unconscious, both masters and slaves bequeathed to subsequent generations modes of bodily comportment, ways of interacting with others, that flowed from their position as master or slave. Unconscious, these habits can go undetected. As Sullivan writes,

What I find interesting about collective unconscious habits of white privilege is that, from the perspective of the individual, they both do and do not seem to exist. Often the impact of the collective unconscious on an individual is uneventful. No one has ever sat down and explicitly explained to me, for example, the (alleged) superiority of white people. There is no specific event to point to. Nothing seems to have happened, and no collective knowledge about white superiority seems to exist. Yet it does. A white privileged collective unconscious has slipped, undetected, into my individual habits. Because of this slippage, I unconsciously “know” that white people are superior to all others, and I manifest that knowledge in my psychosomatic engagement with the world. (Sullivan 2006:95)

Drawing on the work of Frantz Fanon and contemporary psychoanalysis, Sullivan describes the collective unconscious as a traumatic inheritance that can “haunt” contemporary individuals (101). These inheritances need not be bequeathed straightforwardly. A black man who had grown up in French Martinique, a predominantly black French colony, Fanon realized later, after traveling to France, that his culture had inherited the white values of France that held that whiteness was good and blackness bad. Fanon, along with the rest of his culture, grew up identifying himself as white and making all the usual French (Western) associations of whiteness with purity. This ethical slippage (glissement éthique) passed into Antillean culture via literary, visual, and aural media. Through “history textbooks, songs, and especially magazines and movies . . . black schoolchildren in the Antilles were explicitly taught to identify with ‘our ancestors, the Gauls’” (98). Hence, “the collective unconscious of ‘homo occidentalis’ became that of the Martiniquean, and the Martiniquean also learned to distrust blackness as symbolizing everything sinful and evil” (97–98).

Earlier I described the public sphere as a discursive or semiotic space through which signifying human beings try to fashion and refashion the meaning of life, the shape of their communities, and political direction, through language, signs, and symbols. I suggested that the matrices and grids of these intersecting and dynamic signifying processes are so prevalent that people often do not notice them for what they are: ways everyday reality is constructed. Now, to make things even more interesting, Fanon’s work and Sullivan’s discussion of it reveal one more level of complexity. The public sphere carries not only today’s attempts at making meaning but also unconscious meanings carried over from the past. In the case of Fanon, Sullivan describes how the entertainment media carried the traumatic past and its distortions into his present world. The public media of Martinique carried the signs and symbols of a racist culture in such a way that racist values became part of the frame of everyday life, the “natural” order of things. Likewise, the media in any public sphere have this power to structure reality in a way that the structures become invisible as such. Sullivan notes that

because the ethical slippage from France to Martinique operated by means of media images, it was difficult to detect and, as a result, especially effective. As Fanon comments, “the black man among his own in the twentieth century does not know at what moment his inferiority comes into being through the other.” Magazines, comic books, movies: these generally are seen as frivolous and pleasurable, as mere entertainment, but their frivolity is what makes them so insidious. The values they convey slip into one’s thinking subtly, smoothly—this is what is conveyed by the particular term un glissement éthique. (98)

The media in Martinique not only carried the message of white superiority, they also carried the trauma of slavery and the inheritance of racism. Growing up, Fanon had never experienced directly the insults of white-on-black racism—he grew up without encountering any whites at all—yet once he was a university student at the Sorbonne, surrounded by white people, he immediately developed the neuroses symptomatic of racist trauma. Though he was not physically or personally traumatized in childhood, the media images of white superiority traumatized him nonetheless.

Kelly Oliver puts it another way: “it is the fact that the colonized are oppressed by the preformed stereotypical image of themselves propagated by the colonizer that makes their alienation unique” (Oliver 2004:26). She notes that the colonized are “thrown into a world of meaning not of their making,” a meaning that includes the meaning of the colonized, beings incapable of making meaning themselves (ibid.). From this perspective, the trauma of colonization is finding oneself foreclosed by semiotic systems over which one has no control, being caught in a realm of being that is semiotically structured but unable to have any part in refashioning it. Colonialism works its evil by foreclosing the possibility for those who are colonized to sublimate their desires and affects, to channel inchoate energy into meaningful semiotic structures. Rendered speechless, deprived of subjectivity, they cannot “find themselves” in the semiotic public sphere.

Despite Marshall McLuhan’s pithy phrase to the contrary, the media in fact do carry a message, but not in the form of transmitting information from sender to receiver. The media are the medium in which political trauma moves from one generation to another. Or to put matters in a different frame, the semiotic, discursive public sphere carries within it the traumas that gave rise to itself in its current form. As with the example above, the trauma of slavery was part of a racial contract, forgotten as such but reformulated in the West’s (false) consciousness with the concept of a social contract. In that modern Western myth, all people freely consent to give up some of their own prerogatives in exchange for the security or freedom that will come with the formation of political society. But in fact political society as we know it is founded on the traumatic subjugation and exploitation of people of color throughout the world. As other writers have noted, the contemporary conservative call for a “color-blind” society masks the fact that the social order is still ridden with color divisions and hierarchies. To be color-blind today is to turn a blind eye to the problems that affect people of color. The political Right calls for consciously forgetting color, but media images and messages still transport, in whatever thinly veiled form, a racist collective unconscious.

Myths are efficient ways of speaking by means of which some situation or other comes about and is maintained. We know how: by carrying out, with the help of their manifest content, the repression of their latent content. Myths, therefore, indicate a gap in introjection, in the communication with the Unconscious. If they provide food for understanding, they do so much less by what they say than by what they do not say, by their blanks, their intonations, their disguises. Instruments of repression, myths also serve as a vehicle for the symbolic return of the repressed. (Abraham and Torok 1994:94)

Premodern truth, as Lyotard has noted, is based on narratives such as religion and myth. If the earliest myths are responses to the fact of being thrown into a world of much danger and uncertainty, stories that manifestly offer explanations of human purpose and place in the world, their latent meaning is that perhaps there is no such purpose or place, that such hopes for certainty are human fabrications and all such values are only contingently true, even if necessary for equilibrium. Myths offer reasons in a world that lacks them; they offer a sense of identity and place to peoples who lack anything certain on which to hang identity or on which to ground themselves. Myths evolve into religions that offer the same comforts. But over time these stories and traditions of purpose, meaning, identity, and place are stories responding to events that shatter illusions of purpose and place, that upturn established boundaries and identities.

The Copernican revolution. The Crusades. The fall of Constantinople. Nine-eleven. From originary myths that gave a people security until today, myths have changed from tales of purpose to tales of trauma. The stories of the Jews are stories of exile; the stories of the Christians are ones of persecution; the stories of Muslims are stories of splintering within and attack from without. And through the interlocking histories, since all three “peoples of the book” have occupied the same lands, their stories and the identities they provide have become ways to account for themselves in relation, often in opposition, to others.

Trauma presents a choice: either work through it or cover it over with denial and fabrications. The traumas of our modern times—from the Middle Passage of slavery that founded contemporary empires to the brutal disenchantment that has exchanged the sacred for the profane and arbitrary—are manifestly still wrenching the public worlds we inhabit. They have produced their own stories, the metanarratives of modernity, which say history is marching forward for the sake of freedom, justice, progress. A modern story “legitimates itself with reference to a metadiscourse,” writes Lyotard, yet these metanarratives have become unraveled in the postmodern unraveling and unveiling of them as myths in their own right. Still wedded to stories such as “we have gone to war for the sake of democracy” or “our aims are beneficent and righteous,” we find ourselves creating debauched situations like Abu Ghraib. The myth of democratic intentions gets frayed and we begin to see that the real aim may simply be power. These untended traumas, covered over, still largely denied, prompt a repetition compulsion. Today’s peoples of the book, Christians, Jews, and Muslims—those who try to maintain sacred spaces and identities in a world that resists them—and agnostics and other apostates all face the task of creating meaning anew, but not on the bloody shards of old traumatic events. Otherwise we are doomed to revisit these traumas without end.