War, Disbelief and the Ethics of the Subject
In her contribution to the volume 7 October 2023: Perspectives,1 American poet Merle Feld describes 7 October and its aftermath as the time “when my most terrifying fantasies materialised, when the reality of evil surpassed my ability to fantasise.” Feld wonders about the fate of the Palestinian women she’s known and of a whole generation of children suffering in Gaza. The fate of surviving hostages keeps her awake at night, and she feels unspeakable fears for “what may yet come to harm the Israel I loved.” For now, Feld’s imagination struggles, she says. Yet, two texts seem to put a limit to her distress and disorientation. The first is a poem on closeness and mourning that she wrote fifteen years ago, and the second is her cursing towards “the men who’ve brought us to this place.”
Feld’s essay bears witness to the singularity of everyone’s response when our ability to fantasise is overwhelmed, and to the difficulty to write when numbed by horrors that we are witnessing from a distance. On my part, I live thousands of miles away from today’s war zones. My ideals and imperatives were forged by the stories of occupation, displacement and deportation in my family during the second World War. I wonder about the life and fate of those who suffer horrific torments hidden from sight in today’s war zones. Closer to me, I fear the transformations that Western Europe might undergo while wars and segregationist ideologies spread.
Against this backdrop, I have kept remembering the words of a mother of the West Bank who was interviewed by French television immediately after 7 October 2023. Under the gaze of the camera and the urgent questioning of the reporter, she said that Hamas hadn’t committed the violence that the reporter was describing because Hamas doesn’t target civilians, women, or children. My instant reaction was to be reassured that the law of not harming civilians remained the law despite what had happened. I then wondered what would happen once the reality of 7 October spread, and I candidly pictured Palestinian mothers castigating their children en masse for breaking the law, and imposing peace back onto the land. Besides illustrating how my own fantasy kicked in to mend my defence against the real, my reaction also betrays my naive belief that reality might shake beliefs and ideals that are someone else’s defence.
The words of this mother about Hamas were echoed by several testimonies and documents. In November 2023, ex Minister of Culture Anwar Abou Eisheh testified: “I believe it is untrue, that they rape women, I believe it is untrue, that they destroyed houses, I believe it is untrue.”2 That same month, Ahmed Alnaouq – the 29 year-old director of London based organisation We Are Not Numbers – testified shortly after the death of twenty-one members of his family in Gaza: “On 7 October, I woke up and I was terrified by the scenes of murder of Israeli civilians. It isn’t us. Palestinians do not kill civilians.”3 In January 2024, the Hamas Media Office released the report titled “Our Narrative,” which stated that Hamas has the religious and moral commitment to avoid harm to civilians.4 In September 2024, the Palestinian Centre for Policy and Survey Research released a poll report that stated that 89% of the respondents believed that Hamas men did not commit the atrocities (sic) depicted in videos taken on 7 October.5 I have wondered whether psychoanalytic thought might help me interrogate this repetition, which is at odds with the reality of 7 October6.
In his essay of 1915 titled “War and Sublimation,”7 Ernest Jones contrasted the ideal of good conduct at war – “the popular and romantic view of war” – with the “sundry impulses” that express themselves at war – cruelty, deceit, egotism, looting and savagery. Against the romantic views of Jones’ time, psychoanalysis had uncovered that “the lust for murder [...] slumbers in every man’s heart.” Such lust is replaced in the course of individual development by “tendencies of another nature such as consideration for others, honesty, altruism and horror of cruelty.” However, Jones wrote, “we find in war an instructive example of influence which has the power of releasing repressed impulses, and thus allowing external manifestations of them in a fairly direct form.” Jones posited that it is when an individual “no longer feels himself to be under the eye of the social censor” that one may know whether such repressed impulse still exists in its original form. From this perspective, the atrocities of 7 October could be read as a paradigmatic release of savagery and lust for murder, which slumbers in all our hearts, compounded by the fact that stepping on Israeli soil will likely have been an ineffable and sublime experience to many young Gazan attackers. However, the repetition that Hamas cannot have killed civilians would illustrate that the “romantic view of war” fulfils a subjective or social function.
In his essay of 1930 titled “Civilisation and its discontents,”8 Sigmund Freud reformulated Jones’ dialectic from the lens of civilisation. Freud restated that “men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved.” Men are perpetually tempted to satisfy their aggressiveness on their neighbour, “to use him sexually, [...] to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him. Homo homini lupus.” Consequently, “civilisation has to use its utmost efforts in order to set limits to man‘s aggressive instincts and to hold the manifestations of them in check.” Like Jones, Freud posited the existence of favourable circumstances to aggressiveness, “when the mental counter-forces which ordinarily inhibit it are out of action.” Freud did not explore such circumstances in his essay, and he instead focused on the ways in which civilisation holds aggression in check. The statements made after 7 October open my eyes to the fact that civilisation in Freud’s essay might best be read as an aim or a desire – rather than a clear and objective historical or sociological fact. In this light, statements that “Hamas cannot have killed civilian” could be read as the expression of an enduring desire for civilisation in a Freudian sense – the desire for a society where aggression is held in check – rather than a mere romantic or fantasy view of war in the sense of Jones. And I wonder whether the salient fact of civilisation is in fact the very desire for civilisation.
For we are aware that civilisation in the sense of organised society and social technology is itself the site of production of barbarism. Freud himself recalled the atrocities committed “during the invasions of the Huns, or by the people known as Mongols under Jenghiz Khan and Tamerlane, or at the capture of Jerusalem by the pious Crusaders.” Later on in 1944, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer reflected upon the “new kind of barbarism” perpetrated by civilisation itself, which ensues from the Enlightenment and is underpinned by reason – and which mass culture both obfuscates and reproduces.9 Freud also reflected upon the means that civilisation employs to channel and inhibit aggressiveness, and he warned against the temptation to remove aggressiveness by radical means, which would divert aggression towards other and worse means of expression. Together, these authors attract my attention to the sophistication and breadth of the means used by today’s civilisation to orient violence, such as culture, media, bureaucracy, communications, surveillance, logistics, civil engineering and weaponry – which have all been transformed by digital technologies and machine learning. In time, historians and lawyers will ponder how apparatuses meant to control aggressiveness contributed to the atrocities of 7 October 2023, and to barbarism since.
For now, the work of Jacques Lacan invites me to sidestep the dialectic of civilisation and barbarism and to reflect upon the function of statements that Hamas couldn’t have killed civilians. Alongside other theorists of political discourse who were influenced by Lacan, Ernesto Laclau suggested in his essay of 1996 titled “Why do Empty Signifiers Matter in Politics?” that a word or statement such as “Palestinians don’t kill civilians” may function as an “empty signifier” – a signifier without signified – in the consolidation of a group. Laclau observed that “the meaning (the signified) of all concrete [political] struggles appears, right from the beginning, internally divided.” “Palestinians don’t kill civilians” might therefore be seen as the product of contradictory Palestinian political projects, and would function by “[referring] to the communitarian order as an absence, an unfulfilled reality,” of which each subject may make itself the incarnation, one by one.10 In other words, such statement opens itself to individual libidinal investment by virtue of being an unachievable fullness. Professor Derek Hook and psychoanalyst Stijn Vanheule commended Laclau for formulating a theory of political discourse that is open to singular individual investments.11 For there is a crucial distinction to make between statements that Hamas cannot have killed civilians and the process of their enunciation, which is singular to each individual and is the libidinally invested involvement of their whole body in the act of saying, which transpires in the repetition of Anwar Abou Eisheh’s words. Correlatively, there is myriad individual reasons why someone might say that Hamas cannot have killed civilians, such as the wish expressed by Ahmed Alnaouq more than a year later that “7 October [were] seen in the context of the years leading up to that day.”12
This notwithstanding, Lacan’s seminar of 1959-1960 titled The Ethics of Psychoanalysis invites me to venture beyond the principle of reason, if I dare say, and to reflect upon the relation of the subject to law and its transgression.13 From this perspective, the statement “Hamas cannot have killed civilians” bears witness to two prohibitions. The first is the law to not kill civilians. The second is the interdiction of saying that the first law was broken. Lacan pinpointed this paradoxical moment, “when these things are possible but wrapped in the injunction ‘Thinking about them is prohibited.’” Lacan observed that “morbid experience” elicits “strange, paradoxical and cruel commands.” In this light, the prohibition to say that Hamas killed civilian could be conceived as a paradoxical command elicited by the morbid experience of 7 October. Jacques-Alain Miller helped frame such prohibition in his course of 2002-2003 titled Un Effort de Poésie: “Prohibition is only a semblance, [...] only a projection. [...] The datum is not an enjoyment that would be prohibited; the datum is the sexual non-rapport. And prohibition is only the rationalisation of this initial datum.”14 Said otherwise, prohibition is a semblance that masks the impossibility to entirely subsume the real of human relations to images, language and desire. Correlatively, Lacan suggested, what is at stake behind prohibition is the very status of the subject, “the ‘I’ which asks itself what it wants.” In other words, prohibition would be a semblance that masks the question: who is “I” after 7 October? In this light, paradoxical certainties such as “Hamas cannot have killed civilians” could bear witness to some subjects facing a singular and seemingly impossible ethical choice as to their position qua “I” after the morbid experience of 7 October.
Lacan’s “I” is a grammatical representation of the subject, which subverts the Western idea of a self-evident self and lends itself to a dialogue with Arabic and Islamic subjectivity – for example in Nivedita Menon’s book of 2024 titled Secularism as Misdirection, in which Menon pointed out “Arabic influences on Freud and Lacan and the affinity that twentieth-century Arabic scholars felt for psychoanalysis.”15
For now, many of us will experience disbelief and face the question “who is ‘I’?” when confronted with atrocities and barbarism. This question may remain beyond answering for victims of war who endure continued suffering and abuse. Many others will shun the “I” and will follow the highway of “inhibited verbal radicalism, which dehumanises an enemy presented as an all within which everyone is guilty” – to borrow the words of journalists Benoît Christal and Gallagher Fenwick.16 Others might wager on the “I” and find their own paths, alleys and lanes17 – whether it is towards peace, war, or another singular destination.
1 Merle Feld, "Tisha B’Av,” in 7 October 2023 Book II: Perspectives, ed. Marla Brettschneider (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 2024), 263-267.
2 Benoît Christal and Gallagher Fenwick, 7 Octobre 2023 Israël Gaza: L’affrontement des tragédies (Monaco: Éditions du Rocher, 2024), 61. Translated from French.
3 Christal and Fenwick, 139. Translated from French.
4 Hamas Media Office, “Our Narrative... Operation Al-Aqsa Flood,” The Palestine Chronicle, 21 January 2024, https://www.palestinechronicle.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/PDF.pdf.
5 “Press Release: Public Opinion Poll No (93)”, Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, 17 September 2024, https://www.pcpsr.org/en/node/991.
6 ”Report of the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, Including East Jerusalem, and Israel”, Human Rights Council, 14 June 2024, https://docs.un.org/en/A/HRC/56/26.
7 Ernest Jones, “War and Sublimation,” in Essays in Applied Psycho-Analysis (London: International psycho-analytical press, 1923), 381-82, 384, 389.
8 Sigmund Freud, “Civilization and its Discontents,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XXI, 1927-1931 (London: Vintage, 2001), 111-14.
9 Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University, 2002), xiv.
10 Ernesto Laclau, “Why do Empty Signifiers Matter in Politics?” in Deconstruction: a Reader, ed. Martin McQuillan (New York: Routledge, 2001), 406, 409, 412.
11 Derek Hook and Stijn Vanheule, “Revisiting the Master-Signifier, or, Mandela and Repression,” Frontiers in Psychology 6, article 2028 (2016), https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.02028.
12 Ahmed Alnaouq and Pam Bailey, We are not Numbers: The Voices of Gaza’s Youth (London: Penguin, 2025), Epilogue, Kobo EPUB.
13 Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII (1959-1960), ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter (New York: Norton, 1992), 7, 232.
14 Jacques-Alain Miller, “Un effort de poésie,” L’orientation lacanienne (University of Paris 8, Department of Psychoanalysis, lesson of 19 May 2003, unpublished), https://jonathanleroy.be/2020/12/orientation-lacanienne-jacques-alain-miller/. Translated from French.
15 Nivedita Menon, “The Self and Psychoanalysis from the Global South,” in Secularism and Misdirection (Durham: Duke University Press, 2024), 223. Also: Omnia El Shakry, The Arabic Freud (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017). Stefania Pandolfo, Knot of the Soul: Madness, Psychoanalysis, Islam (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2018).
16 Christal and Fenwick, 21. Translated from French.
17 Mario Focci, “The Highway and the Heretical Road,” Contemporary Heretic, 2 December 2024, https://www.contemporaryheretic.org/articles/heresy/the-highway-and-the-heretical-road.