Social Cohesion, Gaza, Bondi, Adelaide

The Royal Commission established by the government in the wake of the Bondi massacre has been asked to explore the key drivers of antisemitism in Australian society. So it should: the micro environments of murderous hate that allowed for this event to happen cannot be investigated enough. But the Royal Commission has also been requested to examine ways of strengthening social cohesion, defined as a national consensus in support of democracy, freedom and the rule of law. The relation this has with the Bondi attack is less clear than it might first appear. In fact, as I want to argue here, there is no relation whatsoever between the two.

For many Indigenous and immigrant groups in Australia with a history of racialisation and marginalisation, calls for social cohesion, like calls for assimilation and integration, do not bode well.  They often signal that somebody is about to try and hurt them. The creation of social solidarity at the expense of a scapegoat is a phenomenon well-known to anthropologists. In Australia, the history of the symbolic and sometimes physical violence that such calls have helped unleash is well documented by researchers. That mainstream politicians act as if they are not aware of this history is, in itself, not reassuring as far as social cohesion goes. A certain political literacy in that domain would not go amiss. And even though I am not sure if we are dealing with politicians who don’t remember or who don’t want to remember, I will begin with a very short refresher of how calls for social cohesion have worked in the past.

Every time discourses of social cohesion, integration or assimilation start circulating, some groups who posit themselves as quintessentially and unproblematically ‘Australian’ claim, as if it went without saying, that they are the ones assigned with the role of policing the process of cohesion. In the process, other groups, portrayed as not Australian or not Australian enough, are invited to accept, also as if it went without saying, that they are the problem. These claims could be easily dismissed and shown to be incorrect if it wasn’t for the fact that dominant state and media institutions work on legitimising and institutionalising them. Importantly, the relation between the self-proclaimed ‘cohesion police’ and those classified as a ‘cohesion problem’ is always dressed in a racial garb that is part of the very fabric of Australian society. Thus we end up having endless variations on a common structure: White Australians versus First Nations people who, amazingly, are posited to not fit well atop the lands stolen from them, or, White Australians versus immigrants (usually of colour, or as I pointed out in White Nation, perceived as ‘Third-World-Looking’) who are assumed to not be attached enough to the nation. 

It is only superficially paradoxical that, historically, calls for social cohesion, rather than bringing society together, have played the opposite role of cementing the division of society between groups of assimilators and groups that are forever waiting in a purgatory of assimilation, never good enough to actually transition to the status of unproblematic and unproblematised Australians. Hardly ever do we hear the self-proclaimed cohesion police declaring that the problem group they have targeted has now successfully integrated into the nation and has ceased to be a problem. In fact, hardly ever do we hear that any call for social cohesion has been successful, full stop. If there ever is a hint of proclaimed success, it is when social cohesion is achieved as a result of the social and symbolic elimination (ie, disempowerment, effacing and silencing), and even sometimes the physical elimination, of the group posited as causing the problem (the Holocaust and the genocide of First Nations people in the process of colonisation being prime examples of such an exterminatory campaign for a social cohesion imagined in the form of racial purity).

Of course, not all imaginaries of social cohesion are imaginaries of racial purity. Social cohesion has been imagined in many ways. It is imagined as an easygoing ‘let’s all get on’ way, or as a strict adherence to common values. It is imagined as enforced from above or as the product of adherence from below. It is imagined as the obeying of laws and it is imagined as the fostering of a sense of belonging. It is nonetheless the case that most discourses of social cohesion, even when proposed in the kindest ways, have a dark side, a threat of exterminatory violence lurking between the legally and softly spoken words. Some well-meaning believers in social cohesion continue to find this hard to accept. As I have put it some time ago, in Australian history most of the people who have called on First Nations people, or on Asian or Muslim others, to ‘integrate,’ have wished them, secretly or not so secretly, to ‘disintegrate’. 

The Royal Commission’s proposed investigation of ways of strengthening social cohesion defined as commitment to democracy, freedom of speech and the rule of law does not explicitly invite an imaginary of racial purity, but it will not escape circulating in social space in the way described above. It has a dark side written all over it. It will encourage, indeed it has already encouraged, some White people to see their commitment to democracy, freedom of speech and the rule of law as going without saying, and using the Bondi massacre to construct Arab/Muslim others as a cohesion problem since they can’t keep their hatred towards Jewish Australians in check. This is a false and unsubstantiated claim, but it is the kind of racist generalisation that the government’s problematisation of social cohesion in relation to Bondi will necessarily invite.

Multicultural societies such as Australia inevitably include communities whose home countries are at war with each other. There is little doubt that Australians of immigrant backgrounds who are politically, emotionally and existentially implicated in international conflicts that pit them against other Australians, have a duty of care towards Australian space. They should valorise the social peace that Australia offers and not endanger it. No one can be asked to treat their enemies as friends, but at the same time it is the duty of Australians to curb their animosity and chill out a bit when inhabiting Australian space, no matter what is at stake. Likewise, Australians of immigrant background cannot expect the Australian state to take their side in a conflict involving the place they have migrated from. At the same time, such communities are free to disagree with the government’s foreign policy without this disagreement being considered a threat to social cohesion. This should not be the cause of lack of commitment to Australia. 

It may be necessary to point out that the right to oppose a foreign policy does not mean the right of each community to pursue its own foreign policy. It means that communities can organise protests and work democratically so that, come election day, they have tried their best to ensure the political party with the foreign policy they agree with most wins. But once a government is elected, it is important to recognise that it alone can conduct foreign policy. Perhaps I am highlighting this because, born and raised in Lebanon, I am particularly sensitive to the destructiveness of a national space where various groups pursue different foreign policy at the expense of the state. I wish this on no one, and I certainly want to work hard on protecting Australia, my children and my grandchildren, from such a potential destructiveness. But having written the above using a normative language, I would nonetheless say that the overwhelming majority of people are like me in this regard. They don’t need people to give them lectures about it.

There is no doubt that a form of antisemitic radical Islamicist politics has manifested itself in an extremely ugly and murderous way in Bondi. There is also little doubt that everyone should welcome the state’s desire to investigate and work towards eradicating any such tendencies towards inter-communal violence. But why does this extremist and violent act require a royal commission into social cohesion as if the latter represents a widespread social phenomenon? Is the government not aware that by doing so it is inviting an unwarranted link between the generalised Arab/Muslim anti-colonial opposition to Israel and an isolated extremist event? That this Royal Commission will encourage such an unwarranted leap is so obvious that people have the right to ask the question: is the government really unaware of this, or is this precisely what it is aiming for? Australian governments always celebrate multiculturalism by portraying it as the product of exceptional statecraft. Where is the statecraft in starting an investigation with so many pitfalls without worrying about it taking us into yet another White festival of generalised Arab/Muslim bashing? Isn’t the government causing the very lack of social cohesion it professes to want to address by doing so?

This last question is not rhetorical. A magical trick performed by calls for social cohesion is that they never target those who are calling for them, even though, as I argued earlier, calls for social cohesion have often played a key role in causing social fragmentation. Thus, questions such as ‘in what way does the racism engrained in Australia’s mainstream culture foster social fragmentation’ are never asked? Nor is that question asked in relation to dominant political institutions though politicians often conduct politics in ways that create social fragmentation. Raising this issue is especially important in this era of belligerent right wing politics that treats social space as a war zone and would literally do anything, including tearing apart society, for the sake of winning. We are seeing this unfolding before our eyes in Trump’s America. Trumpism perceives those who oppose it, not as adversaries who share a commitment to the same society, but as enemies with whom one shares nothing. They must be destroyed no matter how this affects the social fabric. How can state institutions be trusted with asking the right questions about the causes of social fragmentation today when they can be invested in the generation of so much social fragmentation?

This is also true when it comes to foreign policy. I noted above that multicultural societies inevitably bring together communities whose home countries might be at war against each other. I argued that such communities cannot expect the Australian government to have a foreign policy that is in line with the foreign policy of their home countries. Nonetheless, and while a government cannot conceive of its international interests according to the desires of this or that community, it has to care about the effect of its partisanship on the communities that it governs. This is certainly part of multicultural statecraft. If a state cannot have a foreign policy that pleases all communities it should at least try and temper and curb the way it expresses it’s partisanship so as to minimise a sense of alienation among the community against whose home country they have positioned themselves. This is where, it seems to me, if anyone is failing to perform what should be expected of them to foster social cohesion with regards to the conflict between Israel and Palestinians, it is the Australian state itself.

As I have argued again and again, it is not a question of being pro-Palestinian. If the Australian state sees its interests to be in line with the interest of Israel its unfortunate for many of us. We’ll democratically oppose it, but so be it.  However, does this pro-Zionism have to be done in such an extreme partisan way? Well before October 2023 the Australian state, like most western states, has dismissed the Palestinian narrative that Zionists are European colonists no different from the French who settled Algeria or the English who settled Australia. Instead they have accepted the Zionist fantasy of a people returning to their ancestral land. Since October 2023, however, this bias has become so complete it has taken tragicomic tones in its denial of anything that challenges Zionism. We have the empirical evidence and we know all too well about the continuous oppression, imprisonment, humiliation and killing of Palestinians over the last eighty years, but we’re asked to believe that the history of violence began on October 7 2023. We see the mass killing and the destruction of everything in Gaza on our screens but this is not genocide, it is a country defending itself. We see the teenage American Zionist settlers treating elderly Palestinian people like shit and kicking them out of their ancestral houses but this is not colonialism, its Jewish people returning to their biblical lands. We see the racist arrogance of the supremacist Jewish ethno-nationalists strutting the streets of Tel Aviv and abusing Arabs but there is no fascism here, it is our ally, the only western democracy in the region. Then, on top of all this, we have the obsession with Zionist ‘feelings’ and ‘sensitivities’ over Palestinian, and indeed over any other, sensitivity. The unspeakable violence Zionists are perpetrating in Gaza has to be looked at through a large telescope with blurry lenses: it is far away from us and it is not really clear what is going on there. But how we speak about this genocidal violence here in Australia has to be looked at with a sharp semiotic microscope that captures every nuance and every tone of every word uttered lest what is being said offends Zionist sensitivities.

There was a consensus in Australia that the Bondi attack should be condemned as antisemitic because it targeted Jews as Jews. Everyone including Palestinian and Arab/Muslim Australians were mourning the victims as Jews. But suddenly, everyone realised that the government was asking of everyone is to mourn them as Zionists before all else. This took all the Arab/Muslims who wanted to mourn them as Jewish Australians out of the picture. The treatment of Randa Abdel-Fattah by the Premier of South Australia and the board of the Adelaide Festival is a symptom of this unspeakably outrageous affective bias. What strikes one most about the statements of the Premier and of the board is how gauche and confused they sound. They come across as if written by amateurs out of their depth: We are not suggesting but we are suggesting. We are so sensitive, sorry to be so insensitive. What we are saying is not what we really mean though we don’t really know what we are saying or what we really mean. And so on. The fact is that this is not the case of gaucheness at all. The confusion is the product of the unwillingness to explicitly lay out the Zionist-biased premises from which these utterances are made. If this is the kind of Zionist social cohesion that the Royal Commission is supposed to help consolidate, Palestinian and Arab/Muslim and indeed all non-Zionist Australians have every reason of being weary of what kind of consolidation is being imagined here.

Luckily, we have an alternative imaginary of collective social cohesion we can embrace. One that is not built on hyper Zionism and Islamophobic exclusion. It is an imaginary that forefronts the togetherness built around an opposition to the degradation of human life that was paraded on the Harbour Bridge on the 3rd of August 2025. I am willing to bet that most Australians would be happy to call that date Social Cohesion Day and to parade every year in support of the Australia that it embodies.

Christmas and the adoration of children in the Shadow of Gaza

At our beach house south of Sydney, two days after Christmas, I was walking to fetch myself a coffee from the café near me. I thought I’ll take with me my 8 month-old grandson,Taka, in his pram. A minute or so into our stroll we encountered a local woman I vaguely know. After a lot of oohing and aahing she looks at me and says, ‘he’s adorable.’

The fact that it was Christmas and her usage of the word ‘adorable’ sent me remembering another Christmas period many years ago, like some 35 years ago, when people’s usage of the word ‘adorable’ when meeting my baby daughters, and the fact that Christmas is structured around the adoration of Christ as a child, made me curious as to what kind of imaginary lies behind the concept of adoration. I started reading and taking notes about what philosophers and theologians had to say about ‘adoration.’

I couldn’t stop thinking about those notes trying to remember what was in them. I recalled that it was where I started reading the work of the Catholic philosopher, and Derrida’s student, Jean Luc Marion, who left a lasting impression on me. I wanted to re-read what I had written about him. Remembering the notes also took me to a time when I became more open to the idea that religious thought in general had important things to say about the world, and can help me think through certain issues I wanted to explore. I no longer saw it, as I did in my radical student days, as that which needs to be opposed before all else.

No sooner did I get back home to Sydney than I immediately went looking for my notes. Miraculously (a Christmas miracle?), I found them very quickly, in a box where I kept a number of summaries of texts and notes that I have taken while working at the University of Western Sydney between 1988 and 1994. They were only about ten pages and I read them the next day, on the plane, on my way from Sydney to Hobart where I was heading to spend the rest of the Christmas/New Year holiday period with my other, equally ‘adorable,’ 2 year-old grandson, Luca. 

The notes related to the specificity of Christian adoration as a relation to the divine and how it is manifested in the adoration of children. I am keeping them below in their unconnected dot point state and will only feature the bits of writing that I have managed to make coherent enough to share with others. I have therefore added words and changed sentences here and there that give further clarity to the text

• The philosophical and theological issues raised around the adoration of Christ take us straight to the heart of the Christian belief in the dual, human and divine, physical and metaphysical, finite and infinite, nature of Christ. But it also raises the question of how the divine, the metaphysical and infinite can be adored via the worship of the physical and the finite.
• Unlike, admiration or respect, adoration, as far as Christians are concerned, is a form of worship that can only be offered to God as a divine being. Thus the adoration of Christ is an affirmation of the belief that Christ despite being wholly human is also, and at the same time, wholly divine. I need to go back to those texts that debate the way adoration is similar and different from devotion as it figures in Greek philosophy (…)
• There are special forms of worship that can be directed at saintly people, like Mary the mother of Christ. I can’t believe myself remembering the teachings of father Chahine (the priest who taught me Maronite religious studies in my early teens)! He’d be very proud given that he thought I was a lost cause, or perhaps not. If I recall (!), there is a difference between ’ibadat and tabjeel, adoration and veneration. Mary can be and is an extremely loved and venerated figure for us Maronites. One can paradoxically express love towards her more than to Jesus himself. Nonetheless, it would be blasphemous to adore her. For though she is indeed greatly loved, and immensely loving, such love and such immensity were within our human capacity to imagine and understand even as we classify them as ‘immense’. What is beyond our capacity to understand was God himself, because not only was he immensely loving, he was the very source of love. That is what constitutes, to use an anthropological term for what is beyond our comprehension, the radical otherness of God. And it was that divine radical otherness that made Him worthy of absolute reverence: adorable.
• Unsurprisingly, the above links very neatly with Jean-Luc Marion’s differentiation between Idole and Icône (Finally, since coming across his work in Derrida’s Donner la Mort, I have now read more carefully some select passages from L’Idole et la distance (1977) and Dieu sans l’être (1982).)
• For Marion the idol embodies the divine in so far as the divine remains within the intellectual grasp of the believer. Idolatry is not so much a blasphemous worship as a limited one. The idol captivates us and ‘saturates’ our field of vision and comprehension such as it does not leave room for anything beyond it and beyond ourselves. Conversely, there is something that is always mysterious, in excess of our field of vision and comprehension, in the icon. This is why it invites adoration. It mediates the existence of that which cannot be grasped about the divine: the fact that it cannot be fully comprehended, and the fact that its existence cannot be cognitively demonstrated. If I understood this correctly, this makes Jesus Christ the most absolute iconic figure.
•  Another important dimension of Marion’s treatment of adoration, and that takes us closer to understanding the relation between the adoration of Christ and the adoration of children, is his association of adoration with giftedness. This makes him particularly interesting from an anthropological perspective. Against the traditional critiques of religion that see in adoration a relation of domination, where the adoring subject submits to the adored God, Marion sees adoration as residing primarily in the appreciation of the divine as a gift. Rather than the order of domination and submission, adoration belongs to the order of receptivity to the divinity of what is being offered. To adore is not to say I obey and submit but to say: wow I can’t believe I am receiving such a wonder-full, in the literal sense of the word, gift. And nothing exemplifies that wonder-full gift as God’s ultimate gift to humans: baby Jesus. 
• There’s a lot of Christian philosophical and theological gymnastics that goes into explaining this divine gift, that is also a gifting of the divine. I don’t know if it is the same for all Christians now but this ‘dual nature of Christ’ used to cause wars between Christians in the past. The Maronites escaped the Syrian interior to Lebanon because of this. Their Catholicism entailed an insistence that Jesus is born as fully human and fully divine. Not sometimes this and sometimes that. Not as half-half. Not human in form but essentially divine. He is both human in form and essence and divine in form and essence. In this sense, the divine gift that is Jesus, is a divine-human converter: through his existence he makes the human divine and the divine human. This is most exemplified in the experience of vulnerability.
• In gifting the divine to become subjected to the human condition, God is agreeing to something paradoxical: making the divine experience vulnerability. But, and this is what I find interesting, this gift also entails making vulnerability divine. Hence lies the iconic adorability of baby Jesus: he, like all babies, is ‘passively sitting there’ innocent, helpless and vulnerable. We adore the fact that God, the all powerful divine, is presenting himself to us in such a human way. But in the process we also adore the fact that this human mode of existence of the divine transforms this vulnerability into something divine. 
• Associated with the above, though I am not sure I fully understand the nature of the association, is the idea that, more generally, children’s state of innocence and vulnerability is the condition of openness to those dimensions of the divine that cannot be captured cognitively, what Marion (noted above) sees as the radical otherness of the divine. Most importantly, this innocence and vulnerability is also seen as the condition of receptivity to ‘grace.’ It seems that it is here that resides the original Christmas experience of every child as ‘deserving’ a gift. There also seem to be a Christian argument that the above makes every child, not just Christian children, receptive to and partaking in the divine?
• Note: This idea that the child’s innocence and vulnerability makes them inhabit a pre-symbolic and pre-cognitive reality is also echoed in Levi-Strauss’s argument concerning children’s ability to exist in a mythical reality rather than ‘interpret’ myths. It is also echoed in Benjamin’s argument concerning children’s access to a form of meaning that is outside functional language. 
• Some possible concluding points: 
• In adoring the beauty, helplessness and vulnerability of any child we are adoring it as a portal to something which religious people refer to as the divine and that those of us who are not religious still experience as something sublime beyond rationality and cognition.
• The Christian experience of vulnerability as divine gift subverts the opposition between strength and vulnerability. It turns vulnerability into strength. It defines, scholastically rather than practically though, a radically other horizon for politics and ethics where innocence is knowledge, helplessness is power, vulnerability is strength.

This covers the core and most coherent part of my notes. There was nothing particularly political behind my interest in adoration when I wrote them. I was only driven by intellectual curiosity. And I remember experiencing a certain pleasure writing them. I was at a relatively early stage in my academic career, and I had just began to realise that there were convergences and possibilities of dialogue between theological thought and certain secular moral and ethical issues such that I can develop arguments grounded in both. This was liberating because, as a student, when thinking radical philosophical and ethical questions, I imagined religious thought as what I needed to escape at all cost. Part of the pleasure came from a certain form of reconnection and reconciliation with some of the religious sentiments that have shaped me as a kid. Though I did so without becoming religious again or at least not in the sense of a born-again Christian.

Reading the notes was an ambivalent experience. Rereading what certain philosophical and theological texts say about ‘adoration’ and the kind of thinking it generated in me about the relation between Christmas, children and adoration. This was as enlightening and pleasurable as it was thirty five years ago. And I like reading the way the question of ‘adoration’ brought out to me some of the more politically and ethically radical dimensions of Christian thought. I could see my interest in ‘alter-politics’ even though I did not begin thinking and writing about this until twenty years later.

What was unpleasant was the gap between these thoughts and the reality we are living in today. How can one read about Christmas and the adoration of children without thinking of the more than twenty thousand children massacred by Zionists in Gaza? Furthermore, particularly for those of us living in the Western world: how can we stomach the West’s extraordinary hypocritical ability to celebrate the birth of Christ, and the adoration of children seen as an extension of Christ himself, while being complicit in the mass murdering of Palestinian children, and the banalisation of their death. By the time I finished reading the notes, the plane was landing in Hobart and I was genuinely depressed.

Let me be clear that I am not so naive as to believe that, before Gaza, the West or any other place for that matter, allowed its national and international politics to be guided by Christian or any other moral values. At the same time though, I have never thought of the nations’ upholding of their ‘moral values’ as an empirical descriptive statement. Even when the colonial West continuously proclaimed ‘Western Values’ while doing the exact opposite of what it proclaimed, I always believed that there was something positive to the proclamation in that it worked as a ‘causal horizon’: an aspiration whose mere statement, even when everything happening was contrary to what it states, still had the effect of limiting the damage, no matter how minimal that effect was. But this is no longer the case.

Along with the disgusting governmental acquiescence to the killing of children, I could not help thinking about how far we are from that wonderful Christian idea I described above as ‘innocence is knowledge, helplessness is power, vulnerability is strength.’ In Israel and the United States we have two states where governments, supported by large sections of the population, are busy instituting themselves as cults of hyper-militarised power and strength that celebrate the unhinged enactment of killing, destruction and domination in a way we have not seen before. Vulnerability, if anything, is the enemy. ‘Weak’ seems to be one of Netanyahu’s favourite insults, directed among others at our Prime Minister.

What was depressing about those notes was that they highlighted to me how far we have gone from a mere disparity between ‘moral values’ and politics. We are now witnessing the way those values, even as aspirations, have been, along with all the dead and everything that has been destroyed, massacred before our very eyes. Gaza has been the abattoir of ‘Western Values.’ In this sense, my notes on adoration made me confront the way the Gaza genocide has obliterated the idea that the world we live in had any moral foundations left at all. 

Remembering a Pope whose writing on the ecological crisis was worth engaging with Intellectually. (The last section from the concluding chapter of Is Racism an Environmental Threat? Polity Press, 2017)

Generalized domestication: from symbolic violence to orthodoxy

Examining both the possibilities of other modes of existence and, as importantly, the possibility of negotiating an entanglement of a multiplicity of modes of existence, serves to highlight the poverty of our mono-relational present. Generalized domestication, instrumental logic and dualism are hardly the creation of Western modernity. Nor is “exploitation” invented by capitalism. I am in agreement with Nietzsche (2002: 153) when he says that the idea of removing exploitation is like a promise “to invent a way of life that would dispense with all organic functions.” Exploitation, as he argued, does not belong to a corrupt system, “it belongs to the essence of being alive…” Where I have parted company with him is when he concludes that exploitation “is a result of the genuine will to power, which just the will of life.” What we are trying to argue instead is that there are many other ways of “willing life” that are not the expression of an exploitative will to power. And it is towards this multiplicity that we need to orient ourselves to temper the exploitative will to power. 

Nietzsche naturalizes western modernity’s eclipsing and marginalization of other “wills to life,” such as the modes of being we referred to as mutualism and reciprocity. During modernity’s reign, such modes were tolerated and legitimized as pertaining to the worlds of artists, poets and other fantasists but not to the serious world of political and economic life. This is what we need to aspire to today. Our impasse is not the product of the dualist mode of thinking, nor is it only the problem of capitalist exploitation or the domesticating mode of existence, rather it is the problem of the mono-realism that capitalist modernity has locked us in: the fact that we are not able to think of solutions, or worse, we are unable to ask questions, other than through and within the categories of generalized domestication. The recurring questions that our societies keep asking bear the mark of this mono-realist impasse well before they are answered: How are we to manage nature? How are we to manage the ungovernable Muslim? It is within this restricted frame that we keep generating destructive solutions driven by a domesticating desire to “recover” an omnipotence we never had, whether they are of the order of geo-engineering or of the order of the fantasies of extermination that are generated in the encounter with the Muslim wolf. The question, “is it possible not to consider nature or the Muslim as a managerial problem?” does not come to mind in the dominant governmental milieus. And yet this is perhaps one of the most urgent questions we are facing: is it possible to forefront other modes of inhabitance and relationality so as to relate with nature and the Muslim other in a non-exclusively managerial way? Are exterminatory fantasies a necessary by-product of the way we relate to our metonymic and metaphoric wolves?

To a certain extent it can be said that the very fact that many today are asking these very questions I am asking here is itself the product of the erosion of the hold that generalized domestication has had on us all. In Pierre Bourdieu’s theorization of cultural domination he usefully differentiates between “symbolic violence” and “orthodoxy.” A state of symbolic violence is a state where a cultural form dominates others opposing it to the extent that it is forgotten that there even was a struggle between them. The opposition becomes so minimal that people consider the existing state of affairs as “natural,” as “something that goes without saying.” A state of “orthodoxy” is still a state where a cultural form overwhelmingly dominates but its domination is visible since its very existence as an orthodoxy signifies the existence of an equally visible or pronounced heterodoxy.

It can be said that today generalized domestication has moved under the effect of the ecological crisis from being a mode of symbolic violence to being an orthodoxy. Everywhere, counter-hegemonic voices and counter-hegemonic practices to its dominance are emerging and growing stronger. Technologies that work through negotiation rather than solely through extraction are becoming increasing important, from the resurrected bicycle to wind farms to more negotiated modes of milking cows. Even in farming, cooking and eating as well as modes of hiking – such as minimum impact bushwalking which invites a heightened consciousness of what one is disturbing in the process of walking in the bush – a logic of negotiated being infused with reciprocity and mutualism is emerging everywhere, creating wider and wider networks of alternative modes of existence.

Perhaps one of the most remarkable voices of opposition to have emerged in recent times has been Pope Francis and his Encyclical on the Climate Change and Inequality (2015). In it the pope begins precisely by recognizing the end of domestication’s symbolic violence. As he put it:

Following a period of irrational confidence in progress and human abilities, some sectors of society are now adopting a more critical approach. We see increasing sensitivity to the environment and the need to protect nature, along with a growing concern, both genuine and distressing, for what is happening to our planet. (Pope Francis 2015: 14)

Like an anthropologist highlighting the possibility of a multiplicity of modes of enmeshment he argues that the problem is the mono-realism associated with generalized domestication:

Men and women have constantly intervened in nature, but for a long time this meant being in tune with and respecting the possibilities offered by the things themselves. It was a matter of receiving what nature itself allowed, as if from its own hand. Now, by contrast, we are the ones to lay our hands on things, attempting to extract everything possible from them while frequently ignoring or forgetting the reality in front of us. (Pope Francis: 67)

Furthermore, as if writing specifically to help me finish this book on a good religious note, the pope emphasizes the interconnection between the ecological and the social, pointing out that: “the human environment and the natural environment deteriorate together; we cannot adequately combat environmental degradation unless we attend to causes related to human and social degradation” (Pope Francis: 29)

The pope also emphasizes the order of the gift, which is not surprising given the emphasis on the giftedness of the earth in Christian theology: “The destruction of the human environment is extremely serious, not only because God has entrusted the world to us men and women, but because human life is itself a gift which must be defended from various forms of debasement” (Pope Francis: 5). And for good measure, he also mobilizes St. Francis who in the language we have developed earlier is a quintessential “mutualist”

Saint Francis helps us to see that an integral ecology calls for openness to categories which transcend the language of mathematics and biology… His response to the world around him was so much more than intellectual appreciation or economic calculus, for to him each and every creature was a sister united to him by bonds of affection. (Pope Francis: 19-20)

From the ethical to the political

We can see from the above that, at the very least, there are practices and voices growing in number and importance involved in a critical engagement with the over-dominance of generalized domestication. These voices are increasingly offering at least a marginal moral challenge to what is really a straightjacketing by generalized domestication of the imagination necessary to handle the crises produced by this very straightjacketing. But is it the case that “morality” and “ethical discourse” have to always be marginal? Teresia Teaiwa describes listening to Kiribati’s President Anote Tong at a conference on climate change at Victoria University of Wellington, and being surprised to hear him equating climate change with the Trans-Atlantic slave trade:

Slavery, he said, was a system that was justified solely by its profitability. Morality was all that opponents of slavery had to argue against slave plantation economics.

This is the same with climate change, Tong argued. Climate change is the consequence of a system justified solely by its profitability. The fossil fuel and coal industries, for example, are profitable. But they’re also immoral. They’re reaping profits for the few, while spreading the costs around the world. And some of these costs include the loss of whole homelands and livelihoods. (Teaiwa 2016)

This is also true of colonial racism as I presented it here. The colonial instrumental economistic logic that justifies Australia’s inhumane detention centers, for example, cannot be opposed on its own pragmatic grounds. The detention centers fed by Islamophobia do their job of stopping the arrival of asylum seekers by boat very well. The opposition to them in Australia as elsewhere is largely moral. Critics often say: “it is working but what is it doing to us?” This raises the question of the power of “the moral and the ethical” in opposing “the profitable” and the “instrumental”? To what extent can morality be transformed into a potent political force? As we have argued, one of the key characteristics of capitalism, but also more generally of generalized domestication, is the continual oscillation between aggressive profiteering and domination and the production of “civilized homeliness.” The pope’s ethical discourse can be seen as a moment of homeliness in this oscillation, providing the usual corrective to the increased social, political and economic nastiness and aggression we find ourselves in today. So is the function of the religious to be as in Marx’s old dictum “the soul of a soulless world” which leaves the world fundamentally soulless? or is it a soul that actually challenges the soullessness? That is, is the ethical today the new political space for those seeking change given how corrupt other political spaces have become? 

In this book, by showing the way racism reproduces the attitudes and dispositions that are behind the ecological crisis, I have argued that no political force aiming for social change can ignore the unity of the principle of generation of both the racial and the ecological crisis. I have also argued that it is possible to formulate an alternative ethico-political direction to the dominance of generalized domestication that is not based merely on a “good idea” but on an already existing “practical ground” made out of the multiplicity of surviving forms of inhabitance and relationality. Whatever this direction might be, however, it cannot ignore the fundamental unity of the struggle for ecological change and against colonial racism.

 

WITH THE FIG, THE OLIVE AND THE POMEGRANATE TREES: THOUGHTS ON ANOTHER AUSTRALIAN BELONGING

(originally published in the Australian's education supplement and later in Robert Manne and Chris Feik, The Words that Made Australia, Black Inc. 2014)

I was heading to a birthday party in western NSW with my wife and daughters when we drove past Bathurst. My grandparents had arrived there in the late 1930s and opened a clothing factory. My mother went to school, then began helping her parents run the factory. She has good memories of many years spent zigzagging NSW in the family Studebaker as she delivered clothes to shops across Bathurst and as far afield as Lithgow and Young.

But in the mid ’50s, when she was 30, she left Australia for Lebanon. I’m not sure if she did so specifically to find herself a husband but she says she was introduced to my father – an influential gendarmerie officer at the time – fell in love and stayed.

Although I never visited Australia as a youth, Bathurst was a familiar name to me. It was often on my mother’s lips.

It was the sender’s address of the many large boxes that came by ship to Beirut’s port; inside, among many other things, were those furry koala and kangaroo toys that were everywhere in our house. These clearly marked our household’s Australian connections. So did the distinctness of my mother’s accent when speaking English. I remember Carla, the blonde German-Lebanese neighbour, and the secret object of my passions in my early teens, asking me: “Why does your mother always say ‘aahy’ instead of ‘eehy’?”

But far more important to me than the stuffed toys or the accent were the pictures of my grandparents in Bathurst that my mother kept in her drawer and that I took out and examined carefully every now and then. It was primarily these photos that constituted the portal through which I stared to imagine what life in Australia was like.

The adventures of Sandy and his friend Hoppy the kangaroo in my favourite French comic journal, Spirou, helped extend my imagining. Courtesy of the excellent drawings of Willy Lambil, the series’ Belgian creator, Sandy and Hoppy were my first introduction to images of the Australian outback and its culture, albeit in a European, cliched way.

Sandy and Hoppy’s adventures happened in various places, although mostly somewhere on the border between Victoria and NSW; Poursuite sur la Murray was the title of one suspenseful adventure. Yet, somehow, these drawings fused with the family photos to create my own particular idea of Bathurst.

When I finally came to Australia during the Lebanese civil war, I lived in Sydney but visited my grandparents in Bathurst.

By then, they were old. The clothing factory was no more and all that remained was a frock shop that my grandmother kept going to make a few dollars that she spent during short telephone conversations with what was referred to, quite obscurely to me, as the bookmaker. Soon after I arrived, my grandparents sold the Bathurst house and the shop and moved to Sydney where their children could look after them.

Despite having visited the Bathurst house several times, I had no memory of it 25 years later when we stopped on our way to that birthday party in Cowra.

This is not surprising as I spent much of my first couple of years in Australia in a state of almost total detachment from reality.

My most distinct feeling was of living in a state of suspension produced by an acute sense not only of displacement but also of directionlessness. As a kid I dreamed of what it was like to be in Australia, but never with a desire to live there. Australia was simply not in a zone where I envisaged my life would unfold. In the back of my mind was a pre-Galilean image: the Earth was flat and soon after people got to Australia they would start falling off a gigantic cliff.

So, when my parents insisted I go to Australia to escape the civil war and continue my university education, I felt I was positioned at the edge of the universe with no task other than to wait … for whatever.

This made Australia, for me, a transitional space unsuitable for purpose of settlement or long-term planning: what French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu calls a space of “zero social gravity’. For Bourdieu, if one has no interest in the social reality in which one exists, then reality in turn fails to impose itself on one’s senses and fails to pull one in. Reality loses its importance and, because of this, it loses its consistency, and even the materiality of the physical environment diminishes. This was certainly the way I experienced Australia to begin with, and more so Bathurst. It did not really leave much of an imprint in my mind. I did not particularly miss anything about Bathurst when I stopped visiting. But on that day, on our way to Cowra, my wife Caroline and the kids were eager to see where Teita (Granny) grew up.

So I tried to locate the house, remembering that it was towards the Mt Panorama side of a long shopping street.

Indeed, with Mt Panorama in sight, it was not hard to locate what to me clearly looked like the house. Next to it, I was almost certain, stood my grandmother’s old frock shop. Nonetheless, I still had some doubts, and when we all got out of the car I was still trying to convince myself that I was not mistaken about it all. That’s when a woman came out of the shop, locking the door behind her. She was about to go down the street but she noticed us all standing there.

“Are you looking for something, love,” she said.

“Is that the Debs’ house?” I replied. (Debs is my mother’s maiden name.)

“Well, yes,” she said, “but it hasn’t been the Debs’ house for a very long time.”

She inquired a bit more and I told her my mother had grown up there. She said she remembered her, then asked: “Would you like to go in and have a look?’

“Yes, thank you,” said Caroline, before I had the time to say anything.

And so we all went in and looked around. I could not remember a thing, not the house’s layout, not the shop’s interior – although we were told that nothing had changed – not the furniture, nothing. I was a bit disappointed. The woman even showed us some garments that were still there from “Mrs Debs’ time”, but I was unaffected.

Then I went to the back yard, and there something quite spectacular happened to me. The back yard was unkempt. There was no lawn but a chaotic entanglement of high and low vegetation. Nonetheless, there, amid the chaos, I could discern three unmistakable forms: a fig tree, an olive tree and a pomegranate tree, the holy Mediterranean trinity, or one of them at least.

At the very sight of them a complex web of emotions as wild as the vegetation that was before my eyes welled in me.

I glimpsed a moment in my past when my mother, sitting on a long chair in front of our beach house to the north of Beirut, was telling someone the story of how my grandmother had an argument with my grandfather because she felt that he was wasting his time insisting on planting these trees.

I am not sure why the sight of the trees affected me so much, especially since, even though I had no memory of it, I must have seen them before in my early visits.

Perhaps because I am pulled by the social gravity of Australia, now that I am as seriously immersed and interested in Australia as can be. Or perhaps simply because I am older, more existential and more appreciative of whatever memory and feeling comes my way.

But the thought of me on my way from Sydney to Cowra, standing in the middle of this back yard in Bathurst, next to a couple of trees that my grandfather has planted more than 50 years ago, was awesome, as my teenage daughter would say.

Roots, routes, Lebanon, family, the cosmos, Heidegger and much more, all came racing into my mind.

But among all of the above there was one feeling that was particularly discernible and that I want to highlight here: next to these very Lebanese trees, planted by my very Lebanese grandfather, I stood there feeling rooted here, feeling more Australian than ever. What was surprising about this feeling was not its paradoxical nature. Rather, it was how non-paradoxical – or to use the equivalent of paradox in the emotional realm, it was how non-ambivalent – this feeling of rootedness in Australia was.

The Lebanese trees did not make me feel Australian and Lebanese, although I do feel both at many moments of life. Nor did they make me feel torn between my Lebaneseness and my Australianness. They simply made me feel, as I said, more Australian.

Reflecting on this, I came to understand that this was because it was not the trees themselves or the presence of my grandfather in Bathurst that made me feel rooted there. If I had seen those trees simply as Lebanese trees on Australian soil, I probably would have felt nostalgic to Lebanon. But this was not the case. Nor did the trees represent a memory of my grandfather that would have carried me to the time when he lived there. What seemed to me to have been crucial to my experience was the memory of my grandfather planting the trees. It was the practice that symbolised a specific relation to the land that made me feel rooted. And the trees stood there as a metonymic extension of that practice and that relation.

Now, despite the elevating feeling that overwhelmed me, I knew Australia’s history too well to forget that I was in a town that was at the heart of the white settlement of Australia. I was also in a back yard: as quintessentially Anglo a mode of marking and shaping and rooting oneself in the land as can be. So I was well aware that others have come at different times and through their practices, rooted themselves in this space. And, of course, I am too politically correct, and proudly so, to have missed the fact that my Lebanese trees and the Anglo back yard in which they were planted were both on Aboriginal land.

So I was fully conscious at the time – indeed at the moment I was experiencing a high, admiring my grandfather’s trees – of the colonial histories of violence, domination and appropriation, of heroism and overcoming, of resistance, defeat and perseverance that marks the land on which these trees have grown.

But, again, this awareness did not diminish the sense of rootedness they infused in me, for this was not – nor could it afford to be – a possessive rootedness that claimed monopoly over the space of its emergence.

It is this open, non-exclusivist, rootedness that allows for a superposed multiplicity of roots that I want to highlight.

Roots have a bad name in certain intellectual circles. They are associated with stasis, conservatism and narrow mindedness. There is no doubt that roots can be experienced this way. Some people end up burying themselves in their roots and their rootedness becomes a territorial and a claustrophobic one.

So there is certainly a good reason to capture the negativity that is part of such a conception of roots.

But there is no reason to universalise this. For many people, a greater sense of rootedness does not mean a sense of being locked in the ground, unable to move. On the contrary, roots often are paradoxically experienced like an extra pair of wings. And this was exactly how I experienced my trees. I felt them propelling me.

It is important to stop and fully comprehend what propelling means here. When we are pushed by a force, it can make us go forward. The same goes with a force that is propelling us. Yet there is one important difference: when we are propelled, the force that pushes us stays with us.

There, it seems to me, lies the importance and the power of the roots that I am referring to: they are not roots that keep you grounded, they are roots that stay with you as you move. They are of the same order as the “with” we offer someone when we wish them: “May God” or “May the Force be with you”. It is a Heideggerian withness that gives strength to our being.

I want to emphasise this mode of rootedness and its positive character because in it I glimpsed not just a way of being rooted but a mode of belonging that can stand in opposition to the narrow territorial way of being rooted I have referred to earlier, and that has often generated sadness and paranoia.

The latter inherits colonialism’s exclusivist mentality, which operates with an either-or logic: either my roots or yours, either this land is mine or yours, either you belong here or there, either you are sovereign or I am.

The experience of rootedness that I found so uplifting seems to offer a path to a different mode of belonging.

But this is not an anti-colonial belonging, which pits the belonging of the colonised against that of the coloniser while conserving colonialism’s either-or logic.

Nor is it a post-colonialism, which prematurely sees colonial culture as something superseded. If anything, it is a supra-counter-colonialism: it counters colonial culture from a space outside of and beyond it. This is what some theorists today refer to as the event: that which comes from an outer plane and carries with it multiple possibilities of transforming the existing.

Given the many dead-ends that various forms of multiculturalism have led to, it is important to look for, and from, such a novel space to rethink the interaction of cultures within Australia. It is an important challenge that was elided by the “Help! Our core values are in danger” brigade that the Howard government represented. And it would be a mistake if the Rudd Government is to continue to shy away from it. For let there be no mistake: Australia’s future culture will be plural. And there is no other way forward but to think about how all of us can learn to embrace it in its plurality.

still here: On Anti-Racist Joy

Racism is a phenomenon responsible for much hate, death and destruction throughout history.  As such it is easy to associate something like virtue or strength of character with the struggle against it. But to associate the anti-racist struggle with joy might strike one as insensitive. Why should one experience anything remotely joyful in the face of the kind of hate, violence, death, viciousness, pain and misery that racism produces? I think there are good reasons why anti-racism should generate joy despite all this.

Let me stress that when I think of joy, I do not equate it so much with ‘enjoyment’ in the sense of ‘having a good time,’ though I don’t discount the possibility of having a good time while engaging in anti-racist work: there is a good time to be had in the collective struggles and forms of solidarity that anti-racist work entails. When I speak of joy I mainly think of the idea of ‘augmentation of being’ advanced by Spinoza: joy as an experience of feeling morally and physically uplifted, of feeling that our capacity to inhabit the world has been enhanced. Let me explain in what way anti-racist practices can be associated with such a heightening of the viability of our lives. To be clear, I am only concerned here with the non-violent, ideological, political and institutional anti-racist practices of the type that activists engage in within the legal spaces offered by democratic states.

In one of the many objectionable statements made by Israelis amid the destruction of Gaza and the mass murdering of its inhabitants, I was struck by a woman who, talking about Palestinians, explained to the person interviewing her: ‘we kill them, we kill them. They just don’t know how to die.’

I think this classification of Palestinians as people who ‘don’t know how to die’ tells us something very important about the nature of colonial racism today and about the ground on which anti-racist practices operate. It is particularly important for us here in Australia because I have often noted a similar form of racist classification directed at Australia’s First Nation people.

Perhaps the most important aspect of this classification lies in the feelings of irritation and exasperation that are behind it. They highlight the way the colonially racialized today are seen as people who are refusing to disappear despite all the attempts made by the colonists to disappear them. They are post-genocidal remnants and debris that are not only just not dissipating but that are reconstituting themselves as a social and political force. 

If you want to understand what the colonists’ experience in the face of such remnants is like, think of someone who has just deployed the best that pest-control can offer to get rid of cockroaches in their house. They think that they have done an as thorough as a job can be and they want to have what they think is a well earnt rest. They open a can of beer and are ready to slump in front of the TV, and suddenly a cockroach makes its appearance between them and the TV. 

In the eyes of the settler-colonialists, the colonised today embodies the figure of this surviving cockroach. Perhaps the racialized themselves don’t see themselves as cockroaches, but in the name of inter-species solidarity, I have no problem of becoming such a cockroach myself. I have found a word to describe such genocide-resistant beings: obstinants. Obstinant ChatGPT informed me is an obsolete form of the word obstinate. But I was surprised to know that it is etymologically a fusion of Obstinate (stubborn) and Thanatos(death) and ‘it conveys the refusal to die in a stubborn, defiant way.’

To see all the native survivors of colonial racist genocide as obstinants is to see them as being at the same time the proof of the genocide that has or is unfolding, and the proof that the genocidal drive is never as conclusive as it is fantasised to be by the colonists. 

As I argued in my book Is Racism an Environmental Threat? white settler colonialism shares with the human domestication of nature a modernist fantasy of omnipotence over the space it yearns to control. The obstinant, like those parts of nature that prove themselves to be undomestic-able, punctures that fantasy of omnipotence. It does not challenge the dominance of the coloniser, but it instils in them a sense of insecurity that disturbs their sense of power. White racists today always think of themselves as lacking strength and power when comparing themselves to their racist predecessors whether those are imagined as slave owners, as Nazis or as members of the Ku Klux Klan. Whether their predecessors were ever as powerful as they think is another matter, but what is clear is that this sense of lack makes white racists today frustrated, anxious and self-doubting. Unfortunately, this also makes their racism more vicious, cruel and vindictive. And there is nothing like the obstinant dimension of racialized people to unleash these negative affects.

I want to highlight the figure of the obstinant because it’s double sidedness as both a figure of extinction and a counter-figure of survival, a space where a genocidal tragedy has unfolded and a space of resistance and possibilities, points to the above mentioned double dwelling that marks or at least ought to mark anti-racist practices as purveyors of joy. Think of how depressing it is to have anti-racists who simply dwell on tragedy, whose discourse is a continuous uninterrupted form of wailing. Such anti-racists never manage to uplift the racialised. Quite the contrary, they uplift the racists who watch them and see in them a confirmation of their fantasised unlimited capacity to inflict misery. One the other hand, there is something tragicomic and unethical when someone engages in unlimited celebrations of survival and victory unmoored and detached from the genocidal tragedy that is surrounding them. It is only in so far as anti-racist practices can occupy both the domain of tragedy and the domain of possibility that they can aspire for being joy-instilling. 

As I am writing this text, I became conscious that the night before I presented it as a conference paper at the Carumba Institute in Brisbane, I was taken by the well-known Indigenous artist, my friend Vernon Ah Kee, to see an installation of one of his artworks at The Queensland University of Technology. The artwork is a textual aestheticization, for which Vernon is known for, of the words: still here. 

It dawned on me that this anti-racist artwork is actually an excellent representation of the state of ‘obstinance’ I am talking about. While an indigenous person will see it as a celebration of survival, racists will see in it the cockroach that survived genocide speaking to them. It is also an excellent example of the anti-racist double dwelling I am referring to. Indeed, the words 'still here' dwell in both tragedy and possibility. They allude to tragedy in that 'still' by itself points to something of the order of ‘Despite what has happened,’ while in combination with 'here' it points more to survival and possibility. I am suggesting that such double dwelling is a characteristic of good (joyful) anti-racist practices in all domains of struggle. I’ll give two quick examples of other domains. 

Anti-racism involves protecting the racialized from the effect of racist cultures, structures and practices. This is especially so in a world where the racists are still overwhelmingly powerful, and even aiming for what they see as the restoration of lost power. Finding ways of shielding and protecting the racialised from the effect of this domination is crucial. However, if all one does is ‘duck for cover’ one can end up digging oneself in a hole. Anti-racism has to also involve attacking the racists such as to stop them from doing what they feel empowered to do. Recently, I felt this very strongly when I was attacked by German Zionists. I had many people come and offer to support and protect me. But after some time, I start feeling that too much protection can be suffocating. I needed more than protection, I needed people who helped me ideologically and institutionally attack my attacker. I felt that strategizing to attack my attackers was essential for my well-being. In much the same way, an efficient and empowering anti-racism has to know how to dwell in both the politics of protection and the politics of counter-attack.

Another domain I can briefly mention has to do with the politics of anti-racist narcissism. Racism always involves a continual attempt at the de-valorisation and humiliation of the racialised. Thus, it makes total sense that the countering of such racism involves, indeed necessitates, a strategic narcissistic valorisation of the self. Such a politics is strategic in the sense that it has to involve a capacity to know, control and limit itself. If one lets such a narcissistic politics take over and develop unchecked without equally developing a politics of solidarity and affinity with, and care for, others, one ends up with a pathological valorisation of the self at the expense of others. This can easily become a form of racism in itself. Thus, dwelling in both narcissism and a capacity to care for others than oneself is essential. Zionism is a good example of where one ends if one lets the politics of narcissism dominate over all others.

There are many other seemingly discordant political spaces where anti-racist politics has to learn to dwell in order to be a politics of joy: the politics of love and hate is one. The politics of negative opposition to a given reality and the politics of creating new realities, what I call alter-politics, is another. To learn to dwell in those and similarly antagonistic or opposing universes is not a mere matter of merely occupying two spaces. Joyful anti-racism is an artful practice that requires a continual strategic play on where, when, and with what intensity to dwell in one space more so than in another, and sometimes to even learn how to oscillate between them and with what frequency.

This is not so written with the sense of giving advice on how to do anti-racims as much as with the sense of clarifying and spelling out certain processes. For I genuinely feel that the great majority of anti-racist work that is being done is on the side of joy in the way I have described.