Learning about/from psychoanalysis

“What will we do, before this death? Adjacent to our lives We live and we don’t live”“she sees the martyr operations as attempts at redeploying and resignifying death, in its asphyxiating proximity and in a state of siege, and by that gesture regenerating the possibility of life and of community”“However painful and only thinkable within a space of unending violence, they are attempts at repossession (of both death and life), which, she argues, are mediated by the experiential vocabularies of an Islamic ethical frame of reference, where divine self-sufficiency can come to interrupt an unjust worldly rule, and where the question of the law (as externality) can be upheld to interrupt the instrumentality and atomization of “rights”“Spiritual murder” and “soul choking” speak of the subjugation of the soul, and the oppression of the collectivity, when life shrinks, death is generalized in a proximity that makes it unthinkable, and the divine message is no longer present in the heart.”“what does it mean to tell the truth? To bear witness to the lives and deaths of others, to struggle, to pain, to revolution? To bear witness to the dead, the disappeared, including them in one’s address, in the name of the living? Such was, for Genet, the (impossible) yet real task of the witness.”-what is truth when its power does nothing to change realities? Truth is a privilege, or at least a privilege of tomorrow. Who’s truth is it and who does the truth include?“He describes the raced/colonized subject as constituted by the violent intrusion of the other, the colonizer, in the psychic space of the self, an intrusion that evacuates the self, and replaces it with the poisonous object of the other’s fantasy, an object with which the self will coincide.”“At the center of Fanon’s argument is the “attack” of the Gaze, the look of the Other, the white person, but also the colonial system, the white mythology (with the central role played by the fantasy of the terrifying and sexually powerful African in European culture), and ultimately the white symbolic (“language” and “thought” as power-charged European assets”-who’s creating and has access to these scripts? How does it further subjugate those who are not included“The question becomes: how can one repossess space and being, what Fanon called “ontological resistance”, imagine exits that are not already inscribed in instrumental logics that further and reproduce exclusion and oppression?”““Spiritual murder” is the destruction, or crippling, of this ethical faculty. It describes the subjugation of the soul and the oppression of the collectivity. The question becomes, for Shaykh Yassine, as well as many others, that of shedding light on, disclosing this state of things.” “They prefer to shed their their blood on the streets and the sidewalks of the city, rather than having their blood shed in the torture centers of the regime.”“Sheikh Yassine’s question, in calling the massacre “moral”, is whether such “choked life” is capable of engaging with the thought and the experience of death, the necessary path to vision and regeneration, and to the possibility of emancipation – death understood as a spiritual practice of awakening in Islamic tradition”““Death cannot be understood by those who do not understand life.”-who determines what it means to understand? And what can one relaly understand about life and death?“possibility of life. “Spiritual slaughter”, Sheikh Yassine explains, is caused by the injustice of a tyranny that concentrates all wealth and power in the hands of the few, in a situation in which it becomes both self-evident and justified that only some have access to humanity”“The event of madness, in other words, “shows” the obverse of the subjugation of the subject in the everyday unfolding of social life.”-how you spend your life frames the madness attributed to a person“For the Imam, it is only when the struggle subsides, when the nafs, and the heart, become inert, and are turned into stone, that ethical being ceases to exist, and all “activity” stops. This is what happens in acute melancholy [al-ka’āba: sorrow, grief, depression, gloom, melancholy], the condition the Imam calls “tadyiq al-nafs,” “soul choking.”“The Imam’s psycho-somatic and spiritual-physiological approach stresses at once the desiring soul’s risk of straying (al-dalal: from the path of God, and from ethical existence) in the context of contemporary life, the reality of exclusion [alhirmān], dispossession and grief, the temptation of evil, as a struggle internal to the nafs, and the affective impact of the Imagination, of “images,” on the heart.”-aligning fear of morality and awareness to a lack of faith is interesting and cannot be disproven so to speak“he says; “it is impossible to have faith without work.” Yet fulfilling this obligation under conditions of hardship, such as those that characterize life in his neighborhood, as in many similar locations in Morocco and the Muslim world, cannot be taken for granted.”“The point is that inhabiting pain in this second sense, bearing witness to pain without succumbing to it, can engender an opening of the soul. Pain, in this sense, crosses a limit, beyond the paralysis of being, the impossibility of movement; it transforms.”