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.

Translation of Samuli Schielke's 'Censorship through intimation: Preliminary report from the Ghassan Hage case against the Max Planck Society'

Anyone who expected that a German labor court would not be a place for courtroom dramas was proven wrong last Tuesday. The Halle Labor Court met for almost five hours on December 10, 2024 to discuss the lawsuit brought by Ghassan Hage against the Max Planck Society because of his immediate, alternative, ordinary dismissal in February 2024. The decision was not in his favour. The court only agreed with him formally, but not in substance. The following are my notes from the verdict, which are not identical in wording to the verdict. The exact wording of the reasons for the judgment will be announced later in writing.

“- The employment relationship was not terminated by an extraordinary termination, but by an ordinary termination, issued on February 7, 2024 and with effect from March 31, 2024.

- The plaintiff and the defendant share the costs 50:50.

- The plaintiff (i.e. Ghassan Hage) has through his October 7 posts, published on November 7th and 16th, 2023, seriously violated his duties, so significantly that a warning would have been of no use: this was due to the lack of compassion (towards the Israeli victims of Hamas’ murders– GH) in his post on October 7th, and because in his post from November 16, Israel is referred to as a 'project,' which denies Israel's existence under international law. The Chamber is not convinced that the defendant (i.e. the Max Planck Society) made this decision out of the blue. Therefore, for formal reasons, the termination without notice was ineffective. We (i.e. the court) deliberately are not talking about anti-Semitism. The (challenging of the) constitutional statehood of Israel is sufficient ground (for dismissal) and the plaintiff should be aware of this.”

The press office of the labor court published the following statement on the day after the verdict:

“The director of the Halle Labor Court and his chamber came to the conclusion that the extraordinary termination was ineffective for formal reasons due to non-compliance with the exclusion period of § 626 BGB, but that the alternative, ordinary, termination ended the employment relationship at the end of March 31, 2024.

In the verdict that followed the chamber hearing, the director of the Halle Labor Court emphasized that the plaintiff, in particular with his posts from October 7, 2023 and November 16, 2023 and by questioning the established statehood of Israel, had violated his existing employment contractual obligations so severely that the ordinary termination did not require a prior warning.”

An amicable agreement that had almost been reached had previously failed. After long negotiations, the parties had agreed on a text in which Hage declared that he accepts that his publicly expressed views were incompatible with the interests of the Max Planck Society, and the MPG made it clear that the last paragraph of its press release of February 7th (that mentions anti-semitism – GH) does not refer to Ghassan Hage, but represents a general statement. In addition, Hage's inaugural lecture should be put online again. MPG's lawyer presented this draft to the MPG board, which rejected this clarification. The judge nevertheless repeatedly and repeatedly pushed for an agreement in which both parties declare that they have no differences of opinion, but Hage did not accept this because it did not resolve the reputational damage caused by the termination and the associated allegations.

After the hearing, I asked Hage for a statement. He commented as follows: “I am disappointed, but a part of me is not disappointed.”

I asked him what part of him isn't disappointed. He replied:
“There was a strange comfort in hitting a brick wall at the court. It’s a bit like you realise that what you are facing is a natural disaster, not a social disaster. It has at least some element of a natural disaster. Like, the unthinkingness of what I heard was, wow!”

In a Facebook post that same evening I announced a report with more details. Here it is. A longer report looking at the background and consequences of the affair will hopefully appear in Zenith Magazine next year.

 

What has happened so far

 

On February 4, 2024, with cleverly compiled passages from various posts on social media, Welt am Sonntag accused Ghassan Hage of “inhumane cynicism” and spoke of an “anti-Semitism scandal.” The text aimed to provoke a negative emotional reaction from readers towards Hage and made it clear that he was an incorrigible anti-Semite. But nowhere in the text did it explicitly say that Hage was anti-Semitic or that his statements were anti-Semitic. This omission is important, as we will soon see.

The accusation was picked up by many German media outlets, while Hage received more international support, including from colleagues in Israel. After examining the contributions, I came to the conclusion that the accusation of anti-Semitism against Hage is demonstrably false. Hage is a staunch opponent of Israel and angry about its extreme methods of warfare in the ongoing war in Gaza. He has also mourned the Israeli victims of October 7, 2023, but his sympathies are firmly on the Palestinian side. He finds resistance to Israel fundamentally legitimate, but has not advocated extreme violence against civilians. He certainly supports a one-state solution in which Jews, Muslims, Christians, Druze and others live in a democratic state with equal rights. You can accuse him of idealism, but not anti-Semitism. But his positions on the question of opposition or support towards Israel are certainly incompatible with those of the Max Planck Society. The MPG has resolutely shown solidarity for Israel and mourning for the Israelis who were killed. It has shown no solidarity for Palestine and Palestinians. In a statement on October 11, 2023, the MPG spoke of “unspeakable suffering among the Palestinian civilian population,” but attributed this suffering exclusively to Hamas’s murderous initiative; as if the government of Israel had had no choice in the use of the extremely murderous means it has used in its war of retaliation ever since. Most recently, the MPG expanded its institutional presence in Israel. In early December 2024 it opened an office in West Jerusalem. It is not expected that Hage and the Max Planck Society will agree on this.

 

On leave from his professorship in Sydney, Hage came to the Max Planck Institute for Ethnology in Halle as a full-time visiting professor in 2023. The position was extended to a half-time position for 2024 with a rating of 15/6 according to the public service collective agreement, with a gross monthly salary of 3,572 euros - a bargain price for a world-famous researcher. On February 7, 2024, he received a notice of dismissal without notice, or alternatively, ordinary notice. (“As an alternative, ordinary” means that if the termination without notice is revoked, an ordinary termination will instead take place on the next legally permitted date, in this case March 31, 2024.) He went to court against this.

 

Accusation by intimation

The Max Planck Society published the following statement on Hage's termination on February 7, 2024:

“The Lebanese-Australian scientist Ghassan Hage, who is well-known and respected in the specialist community, has been working at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology since April 2023. Among the views he has recently shared on social media, many are incompatible with the core values of the Max Planck Society. The Max Planck Society therefore separated from him in agreement with the Institute.

The freedom rights guaranteed by the Basic Law of the Federal Republic of Germany for 75 years are an inestimably valuable asset for the Max Planck Society. They come with great responsibility. Researchers abuse their civil rights when they undermine the credibility of science with publicly disseminated statements and thereby damage the reputation and trust in the institutions that support them. The fundamental right to freedom of expression finds its limit in the mutual obligations of consideration and loyalty in the employment relationship.

 

Racism, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, discrimination, hatred and agitation have no place in the Max Planck Society.”

The first paragraph is in bold, followed by a green bar, and the remaining two paragraphs are formatted in a smaller font size. This creates visual and semantic ambiguity. Is the last paragraph an accusation that Hage is guilty of racism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, discrimination, hatred and incitement? Which of his views are incompatible with which basic values of the Max Planck Society? Thanks to the ambiguous wording and the separation of the paragraphs, the MPG's lawyer was able to deny during the hearing that his client had harmed Hage through a false accusation of anti-Semitism. However, the general public clearly understood this as an accusation of anti-Semitism. Hage also referred to this during the trial. He argued that his main concern was to repair the damage to his reputation:

That's exactly how it happened. The MPG had Hage in its press release dated February 7th. not directly accused of anti-Semitism. But the company's board of directors refused to reach an amicable settlement negotiated by its own lawyer, in which the MPG would make it clear that it did not accuse him of anti-Semitism. An explicit accusation can be proven false. Due to the enormous damage to reputation, an injunction or defamation lawsuit would have a chance of success. That's probably why both Welt am Sonntag and the Max Planck Society were careful not to make the accusation explicit. But because the MPG refused to provide clarification, the accusation remained – albeit unassailable because it was implicit. The Halle news portal interpreted the implicit suggestion clearly. It reported the day after the verdict was announced: “Halle Labor Court: Expulsion of a scientist from the Max Planck Institute because of anti-Semitic statements and HAMAS sympathies confirmed.”

In a statement on the day of the verdict, the MPG refrained from claiming one thing or the other, only stating:

“In February 2024, the Max Planck Institute for Anthropological Research in Halle separated from the Lebanese-Australian guest scientist Ghassan Hage in agreement with the management of the Max Planck Society. The background was Hage's views on the Hamas terrorist attack on October 7, 2023, which were widespread on social media and were incompatible with the basic values of the Max Planck Society. Ghassan Hage had sued the labor court in Halle against his dismissal. At its meeting today, the labor court dismissed the lawsuit and thereby confirmed the position of the Max Planck Society.”

https://www.mpg.de/21510533/stellungnahme-ghassan-hage

The head of the communications department at MPG refused to provide further explanations when I spoke on December 12th. asked for an interview in an email: “We see the verdict as confirming the position we published on February 7th. From our point of view, there is nothing more to say about it.” I wanted to ask the following question:

“In the press release and on Tuesday in court, the MPG carefully avoided explicitly accusing Hage of anti-Semitism. The verdict also reflected that. Nevertheless, the MPG has rejected an agreement in which it would state that it did not accuse him of anti-Semitism. Why?"

In the absence of a response from the MPG, I'll try to explain.

 

Tendency Bearers, Project, Moral Feeling

It is nothing new for scientists to hold views that their institutions are unwilling to support. The same Max Planck Institute for Anthropological Research in Halle from which Hage was fired also has Chris Hann, a prominent supporter of Vladimir Putin's policies and critic of Ukraine's Western orientation, in its ranks. Some of his arguments in his publications read as a veiled denial of Ukraine's legitimacy as a nation state - Hann doesn't say it himself, but allows others to say it. His views are well-known and controversial among experts. Nevertheless, the homepage of the MPI in Halle lists him as active director emeritus - and that's how it should be. Science thrives on dissent and criticism, including questionable and problematic views. Without confronting them, our analyzes and decisions are blind, a mere reflection of our own tendencies.

And that was essentially what was at issue before the Halle Labor Court: what kind of dissent and difference are scientists allowed, and to what extent are they, as “tendency bearers,” obliged to support the official line of their institution? For example, priests of a church tend to be believers and should not make public anti-religious statements. The word tendency bearer was not mentioned by the presiding judge in the oral verdict. But during the hearing he pointed out that in April 2024 (file number 5 Sa 894/23) the Berlin State Labor Court had confirmed the immediate termination of a Deutsche Welle employee because of his anti-Semitic and anti-Israel statements on social media and did not allow an appeal. That employee had written, among other things, that a supposed Jewish lobby had German politics under its control. So, he really made anti-Semitic comments. Hage did not do this. What was decisive here was not the facts of the case, but rather the reasons given by the Berlin State Labor Court, according to which “the plaintiff, as a tendency bearer, was obliged not to violate the tendency, i.e. the fundamental objectives, of Deutsche Welle, both in his work performance and in areas outside of the company.”

https://www.berlin.de/gerichte/arbeitsgericht/presse/pressemitteilungen/2024/pressemitteilung.1455787.php

From the extensive evidence, the presiding judge focused his judgment on two posts that the MPG had submitted to the works council (consultation with the works council is a legal condition for termination without notice). The first post is a poem published on the afternoon of October 7th, 2023 - at a time when it was not yet known how brutal the attack was and how many people were killed. At that point, many observers were still under the impression that it was a military rather than a terrorist operation. In the poem, Hage is impressed by the Palestinians' ability to resist. The text is a romanticization of armed struggle versus Israel's warfare, but there is no glorification or justification of the extreme violence perpetrated by Hamas and its allies. Secondly, the presiding judge referred to an essay from November 16, 2023, where the expression “Zionist ethno-nationalist project” occurs. The judge pointed out that in his statements Hage described the entire territory of Palestine as occupied. However, the word “project” was central to his justification. Describing Israel as a project is a negation of Israel's existence under international law because a project means something unstable and temporary.

The word “project” only appears in one sentence in that essay, this one:

“There are, of course, those among us who, despite our opposition to the Zionist ethno-nationalist project and from the comfort of our social and geographical locations, and because of our diverse ties, have been able to mourn the victims of Hamas' murders.”

In this passage, Hage in no way denies Israel's state existence, but does identify himself as an opponent of the political project of Zionism. He also expresses explicit sadness for the Israeli victims of October 7th. The presiding judge had found Hage lacking in compassion. But here compassion is written in black and white. This was not taken into account in the judgment.

In his ruling, the presiding judge expressly refrained from discussing the question of whether these statements were anti-Semitic or not. There was a lot of talk about anti-Semitism during the trial. With reference to a ruling by the Federal Constitutional Court, the MPG's lawyer insisted that statements on social media could be anti-Semitic due to their effect on the audience even if Hage, who is married to a Jew, is not himself an anti-Semite. Hage's lawyer had in turn insisted on checking whether there was any anti-Semitic content at all, taking into account the surrounding circumstances, as provided for in the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism and that of the Jerusalem Declaration.

If the MPG had explicitly fired Hage because of anti-Semitism, his lawyer would have been able to prove that the accusation was untrue. But by neither explicitly making nor withdrawing the allegation, the MPG gave the court the opportunity to find other reasons for the verdict.

My impression was that the presiding judge based his judgment on his own moral and political sensibilities. During the trial he said that he did not want to hear Dresden and Nazi comparisons (he was referring to a mention of Dresden in the quotes from Hage collected by the WaS), and that when one says about a recognized state that it is an occupation and a project is that the defendant (i.e. the MPG) cannot accept this. The tone and choice of words made it clear that the judge was not concerned that the views of Hage and MPG were incompatible - that was not up for debate. Rather, he seemed convinced that Hage was morally and politically wrong.

 

What the verdict means for science in Germany

The fact that the word “project” was made the decisive reason for the judgment is remarkable. After all, the word project does not have a generally negative connotation, and staunch supporters of Israel have also described Israel as a project. A political project is not characterized by the fact that it is temporary, but rather that it is unfinished, in motion. The word project applies well to Israel's statehood, because the State of Israel was first expressed as an idea and only later conquered as a territory; and its area is characterized by unfinished borders that constantly change due to wars and settlement policies, expansions and retreats. In the end, however, the judge's choice to address this word is not decisive. He could also have found another justification, and the MPG's statement on the day of the judgment only cites the poem dated October 7, 2023 as justification for its position. Three points are crucial for the impact of the judgment on science in Germany.

- The ambiguity of the accusation enabled the MPG to accuse Hage of anti-Semitism, but not to have to prove the allegation as an allegation.

- The presiding judge relied on his moral and political sensibilities and viewed Hage's position as substantively incorrect, even if the termination itself was formally incorrect.

- Due to the ambiguity of the accusation and the role of moral feeling in the verdict, the crucial question remained unclear as to which principles and guidelines of the MPG Hage's breach of duty was directed against. Accordingly, it remains vague and unclear to what extent scientific institutions are allowed to prohibit and dictate political positions to their employees.

If this interpretation becomes common practice, those working in science in Germany will in future have to expect that their institutions will prescribe and prohibit them from taking political positions. But this is the less serious part of the judgment. Many of my colleagues in Germany already have this expectation of forced political loyalty. What is more serious is the way in which the accusation of anti-Semitism repeatedly came to the fore over the course of the affair, was not openly expressed - but was not withdrawn either.

In general, a lot of things were not expressed openly, and this was also reflected in the unwillingness of employees at the Max Planck Institute in Halle to speak to the public. My first attempts to find interviewees there were unsuccessful. People found it problematic to express themselves even anonymously because their choice of words and arguments would still make them recognizable. But what exactly were they afraid of? That was also unclear. A colleague from the institute finally shared his experience with me in an informal conversation.

He said that the WaS report and Hage's dismissal were followed by great uncertainty among MPI employees in Halle. The fragments of his posts quoted in the WaS were perceived differently. International employees often found them less problematic. German colleagues expressed different views. He said that it was easier for the latter to understand why the statements met rejection from the General public than for their international colleagues. Nevertheless, almost the entire staff at the institute was against Hage's dismissal and was dismayed by the sudden and non-transparent decision. Since then, there has been concern and uncertainty among colleagues. Are employees’ social media checked now? What is allowed and what is not? The management of the institute tried to calm the employees. However, they were unable to eliminate the feeling of insecurity. In a town hall meeting with employees where the previously published statement of February 7, 2024 was discussed, MPG President Patrick Cramer avoided accusing Hage of anti-Semitism. Referring to the statement, he said that the last paragraph was a general position of the MPG. A clarification was requested, but the President saw no reason for it.

The picture I got in conversation with him corresponds to the general impression from informal conversations with colleagues: strong but unclear and non-transparent decisions create a depressed, uncomfortable silence. An extraordinary termination is controversial and risky and often creates more conflicts than solutions. It is much easier not to extend contracts and to withdraw support for funding applications. Such censorship by innuendo is much more powerful than official red lines that can either be aligned or acted upon if one is willing to accept the consequences.

 

Afterword, with comments from the author

 

For a while I too felt like I was part of an oppressive silence. When the war began, I kept a low profile for a long time because I rejected both the mass murderous warmongering in Germany on the part of Israel and the justification of a massacre in the name of resistance and decolonization. Here and there I felt the impossibility of a conversation that would go beyond an annoyed exchange of incompatible assertions. Hage must have felt something similar when, after the verdict, he spoke of the “strange comfort” of “coming up against a brick wall in court.” He described it as the “unthinkingness” of the other side, which could perhaps be translated as “determination not to think.” lets. The presiding judge had clearly given this some thought. But his thoughts and Hage's thoughts could not meet. A solid wall of incomprehension separated them from each other, both in and of themselves coherent and complete.

Science offers humanity a critical polyphony that enables better thinking and better actions. During this war, this critical polyphony has been replaced to a dangerous extent by a brick wall of loudly expressed incomprehension and by a depressing silence of censorship through suggestion. I have left my cover and am following the case of Ghassan Hage against the Max Planck Society for two reasons: firstly, because this depressed silence threatens me and my colleagues more than the open lack of understanding; and secondly, because Hage and I share the conviction that there should be other options in this war that has been going on for decades than the subjugation or destruction of one side by the other. (At present, Israel has the means and increasingly the will not only to subjugate the Palestinian side but also to destroy it in parts or in whole. On the Palestinian side there is also no lack of will to destroy the other side, but there is certainly a lack of means. In one In other world political constellations in the future, the resources may be distributed differently. With the nuclear arsenal that Israel has as a weapon of last resort, the destruction can then extend far beyond the Palestine-Israel region I have less faith than Ghassan Hage in idealistic goals and revolutions. Where he thinks a democratic one-state solution is realistic, I think that a possible negotiated peace can only be bad and unfair, but at least it would be better than more war. Such differences of views are important. They deserve to be encouraged and promoted, not crushed and dismissed.

A summary of Professor Ghassan Hage’s arguments about Israel and Palestine in his academic work

(this text was produced by and with my German lawyers to help them with their pleading on my behalf  in my case against Max Planck on December 10. I am pleased with it as a summary/history of my arguments and think it is worthwhile to share)

Professor Hage has researched and published on various dimensions of Israeli and Palestinian society, including on anti-Arab racism and Antisemitism, for the last forty years. In his PhD submitted, in 1987, he examined the similarities, at the time of his research, between Lebanese Christians (his own community), White South Africans, and Zionists. He showed how, in the 1960s and 70s, they shared a similar conception of themselves as bastions of western civilisation surrounded by barbarian others (Muslims/Arabs/Blacks), and in need of defending themselves against those others. He explored the way these communities present themselves as western, but having to engage in violence that other westerners don’t have to engage in, and as such blame westerners for not understanding that they have to engage in horrific actions because of the special circumstances they find themselves in, that they are doing it because they have to, and that they are doing it for all westerners, despite the latter not showing enough gratitude. Hage also showed how in such situations forms of domination and expansion present themselves as ‘modes of defending oneself’.

The work he did in his PhD offered him a fresh take on ideologies of White supremacy in Australia that he explored in his book White Nation. While researching for this book, he also explored White supremacists in France and the United States. In comparing these diverse forms of white supremacy Hage developed a key analysis of the differences between racism towards immigrants (numerological racism) and antisemitism (essentialist racism). He argued, as the name indicates, that numerological racism was dependent on numbers. In being racist towards immigrants, people can say: ‘there are too many Chinese in my street.’ Hage showed that it was important to stress the difference between a racism where ‘a few’ others as opposed to ‘too many’ are acceptable. Antisemites, Hage he stressed, never say such a thing. That is what makes them essentialist: one Jew in the street is already too many.

In another book, Against Paranoid Nationalism, Hage explores the resurgence of White ethnonationalism that followed the attack on and decline of multiculturalism as an alternative form of nationalism in the West. He argues that ethno-nationalism is a form of fundamentalism whether it is Muslim or Western. It is characterised by a belief in a mono-ethnic/cultural self that thinks that it needs a mono- ethnic/cultural environment specific to it in order to thrive and ‘realise’ itself. Hage argues that both the Israeli government and Islamic fundamentalists espouse similar forms form of ethno-nationalism. He also examines how in the case of Israel and Hamas during the wave of suicide bombing that the latter initiated, archaic political affects around archaic political entities such as mono-cultural nations are coupled with ultra-modern technologies of war. As he put it: “To my mind, both the Israeli invasion and the suicide bombings constitute a kind of warped postmodern pastiche of medievally violent political affects, early modern veneration of political entities such as ‘the nation’, and late modern military technology.”

In a series of articles and talks presented between 2005 and 2013 and published in his book Alter-Politics (2015) Hage develops his concept of Narcissistic victimhood. He argues that there is a way of experiencing victimhood that fosters narcissism: because you have been victimised you don’t feel like you owe anyone anything and you feel entitled to be selfish and look after yourself without caring what happens to or how you relate to others. Hage shows that this creates a psycho-social affinity between a sense of victimhood and ethno-nationalism as an embodiment of this narcissism. He also demonstrates how the same narcissistic victimhood is exhibited by Islamic fundamentalists. Hage argues that this narcissistic victimhood contributes to a politics of resistance that is only concerned with what it is against (anti-politics) as opposed to what it wants to build as an alternative (alter-politics). This leads him to develop a critique of the way, particularly in the case of Hezbollah and in Syria, the notion of ‘resistance’ becomes an ideology of power consolidation and authoritarianism that loses sight of what it is resisting. 

Hage argues that Israeli and Palestinian narcissistic victimhood as they are present in the Israeli extreme-right and in Hamas makes them unable to face and come to terms with what he calls ‘the relational imperative’: that the very nature of the post-colonial world entails the inevitability of co-existence and living together. Hage argues that there are two forms of resistance: eliminationist resistance and reparative resistance. Slaves’ resistance against slave owners is a case of eliminationist resistance: the idea of slaves and slave owners co-existing is inconceivable, slave owners as a category has to be eliminated. Feminist resistance on the other hand is largely a reparative resistance: it does not aim to eliminate males but to transform them to create better relations with them. Hage argues that anti-colonial resistance in the twentieth century was primarily imagined as an eliminationist resistance: the colonisers had to be eliminated. But with the transformation and success of South African anti-colonialism a reparative anti-colonialism that highlights ‘the relational imperative’ has become a necessity.

 

In 2017 Hage publishes ‘Is Racism an Environmental Threat?’ in which he argues that the anthropocentric desire to subjugate nature and make it serve human needs, and the ethno-nationalist desire to subjugate a national space and make it serve the needs of a single ethnic/cultural group are part of the same mode of inhabiting the world. What Hage refers to as ‘generalised domestication’. Both are animated by fantasies of omnipotence over their surroundings. Hage argues that fantasies of omnipotence are often considered as unrealistic and mainly work as an aspirational guiding horizon. But in some cases, people believe in the actual imminent possibility of omnipotence. In such cases the fantasy becomes particularly destructive. It was the case until recently with the human domination of nature. Hage argues that Zionist ethno-nationalism is also propelled by a destructive fantasy of omnipotence believed to be imminent and possible. This destructive fantasy took shape in the aftermath of the 1967 war where Israel showed itself overwhelmingly superior to all the countries around it as far as military might and capacity of destruction is concerned. Ever since, Israeli governments take this overwhelming superiority as the norm below which Israeli power should never fall. The close and many-faceted relation between the western ‘military-industrial complex’, that is, weapon manufacturers, and Israel has worked to keep this fantasy of omnipotence alive. It is the single most important factor that makes Israel’s willingness to think of an alternative to subjugating its surroundings non-existent. This is why, Hage argues that while the political/military forces grounded in Palestinian narcissistic victimhood remain in need of being critiqued, any politics that wants to create the conditions of co-existence between Israelis and the Palestinians has to be a politics that restricts Israel’s capacity and desire to use overwhelming military power as a way of solving unsolvable problems.

There has been no other work on Israel/Palestine since 2017, as Prof. Hage concentrated on finishing his ethnography of the Lebanese Diaspora (The Diasporic Condition, 2021) and his theoretical work on the social phenomenology of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (Pierre Bourdieu’s Political Economy of Being, forthcoming 2025).

 

 

Surprised, Outraged and Can’t Understand What is Going On

 I used to have a ritualistic argument with my partner concerning her affective politics. Whether she is talking about coal mining, abortion, Zionist colonialism, or opposition to bike lanes in the city, she always expresses her principled positions against right wing politics doused with a strong sense of outrage. ‘I can’t believe they still believe x or y!’, ‘how outrageous is it that they have voted for z!’, ‘how can they act against their own interest like this?!’ I, on the other hand, having inherited from Bourdieu Spinoza’s ‘do not be outraged… just try and understand’ mode of dealing with things would always critique her outrage and try and provide a social explanation as to why this or that happened and why it made sense.

Slowly, I have been dissatisfied with myself doing this. I felt that by replacing her ‘outrage’ and ‘surprise’ with my ‘understanding’ I was banalizing what was genuinely outrageous about what we were talking about. I also felt that by continuously claiming to be ‘unsurprised by this’ and ‘unsurprised by that’ I was engaging in those immature fantasies of omnipotence of knowledge that marked my hyper-Marxist student days. The idea that ‘I understand it all’ meant that I had some power over the events I was understanding rather than letting them surprise me and outrage me. I could feel that it was a particularly male fantasy of power/knowledge.

When I had my visiting professorship terminated by Max Planck over my opposition to Zionist politics. I used to say to many people ‘what has happened to me has happened to so many others in Germany so it is not surprising really’. But then I started feeling a little bit irritated by the number of friends, even very close friends, who would say to me: ‘Sorry this happened to you but it is not surprising’. The irritation was strange given that I was saying it to myself really. But somehow, when people started directing it at me, I felt my experience was being banalised. My feeling was: “I don’t really want to know about how amazingly knowledgeable you are such that you are not surprised.” I really wanted to hear people say to me that this was totally surprising, outrageous and unacceptable, rather, than ‘ah well, this is how it is.’ I wanted to hear it even though I knew that it was indeed ‘unsurprising.’

I reflected on the fact that maybe I needed to hear that it was surprising just for my own psychological well-being. But I wondered to what extent we often use ‘this is not surprising’ also for our own psychological well-being, to protect ourselves from what is precisely surprising and unexpected in an event.

As an anthropologist, I know very well that things do not have to be either surprising or not surprising, just as an encounter with a foreign culture does not have to be either familiar or not-familiar. But I also know that just as an excessive highlighting of what is unfamiliar about such an encounter can dissimulate certain similarities, an excessive highlighting of what is familiar and unsurprising can dissimulate certain genuinely unfamiliar and impenetrable things that we need to explore. This is where I felt that an excessive usage of ‘this is not surprising' does.

I am writing this today as we have spent many hours with friends watching the American election results unfold on TV and having many discussions. Sure enough, just as we inundated ourselves with outrage and indignation, we were also copiously offering each other a good deal of ‘there is nothing surprising here because x, y and z.’ The elephant in the room was the rise and rise of anti-cosmopolitan right wing culture everywhere.

This is where something quite definite dawned on me: I have been studying this right-wing culture since its emergence in Australia in the mid-1990s. I have also researched it but to a lesser extent in France and in the US since that time. But I have to say, I am genuinely over ‘not being surprised by it’ because it is continuously surprising me. I am over not being outraged by it because this de-civilisational process is bloody outrageous. And, despite my own research and having read the research of many other, I definitely can’t say that I understand what is going on here in any way that I consider satisfactory. I feel that we've been scratching surfaces and all the work is ahead of us.

Symbolic Violence, Trump and Biden/Harris (Excerpts from the Concluding Chapter of Pierre Bourdieu's Political Economy of Being (Duke University Press, forthcoming)

...

As the above highlights, in conceiving politics as the politics of making and un-making reality, Bourdieu argues that every domination involves both a struggle to dominate and an attempt to institute and better still institutionalize one’s domination. And this is where an important transformation occurs: the more the dominant institutionalize their dominance, enshrine it by law and by habit, among other things, the more their struggle moves from merely winning against someone to ensuring that the game and its rules are their game and their rules. Here, their gaze turns into a top-down gaze rather than just a horizontal gaze. From an imaginary of war, where the horizontal “I’m fighting you in this game” gaze prevails, we move to an imaginary of policing, where the top-down “I am protecting the whole game” gaze is dominant. Symbolic violence occurs at the most intense point of the process whereby the dominant, rather than being seen as fighting for their interests, become seen as—and indeed in practice become—the protectors of “the order of things.” This is where the group that the dominants are struggling to subdue becomes a policing problem rather than a competitor/adversary. 

A shift between warring and policing is very crucial in the fluctuation between states of orthodoxy and states of symbolic violence. We can briefly take the difference in the international politics of Donald Trump’s Republican Party and Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s Democrats. The period following World War II was the apex of a belief in the United States—not as a state pursuing its own interest alone, but—as a protector of an international order marked by democracy and the rule of law. It can be said that during that time, the dominance of US interest approximated a state of symbolic violence. But this international legitimacy has been in decline ever since. Today, US dominance in world politics has been more and more recognized for what it is: the US fighting to realize its own interests under the guise of protecting a world “order of things.” 

What is interesting about Trumpian international politics is that it involves accepting this state of affairs and dropping any pretense of being responsible for policing the world order. It involves abandoning the American commitment to international bodies that provide a semblance of world governmentality and the US unequivocally presenting itself as fighting for US interests before anything else. The Trumpian Republican gaze on international politics can be said to be more horizontal than top-down. It looks at international competitors eye-to-eye and says, “I am going to win against you.” In this, it can be seen as far more of a realist about the state of US domination and legitimacy than the Biden/Harris Democratic Party gaze. The latter is still grounded in a fantasy of symbolic violence. It still struggles to portray US international politics in terms of an international order that it is caring for and policing. But reality is not on its side and it finds itself increasingly unable to do so and reluctantly doing what Trumpian politics does wholeheartedly: abandoning a commitment to international bodies and presenting US interest as above international law.