This is now accepted as an unequivocal and indisputable historical fact, which undermines the idea that the primary interpreter of History is first and foremost the subject. This is probably why the consequences of colonization appear only in public discourse as cries of pain and resentment, which target the Other of colonialism while staying mute about the impacts of History on one’s personal history. In Algeria, it is as though colonization is the one and only trauma. Whereas in France, the notion of colonial trauma is flipped on its head and exploited by the political order: much talk is made of the “benefits of colonization” for “indigène” subjects. The political order thus strives to make the historical record disappear and to discount the role the subject plays in History. Here again, no clinical work has considered the specificity of these traumas and their impact on the social bond. Instead, we are stuck in the hell of this duality which allows the war to persist by other means.
Bringing together psychoanalysis, history, and literature in an attempt to discern the invisible role played by politics, this book’s approach may be judged problematic from within the specialized fields of each of these disciplines. But I can think of no better way of treating the politico-subjective “matter” of coloniality in Algeria, a totality that cannot be contained by isolated disciplines. Specialists from these fields each see themselves as the best positioned to take on the wide-scale devastation of this affair. But the coalition formed in this book with these three disciplines creates a dynamic approach where each discipline informs and alters the other, the cumulative effect of which, I hope, will not be lost on any reader. This transdisciplinary configuration is also a way of mounting a defense against the blanket-statement generalities and deadly binary logic that affect anyone who has tried to take a closer look at colonialism.
Literature strives to give expression to the blank spaces and the ideological blind spots present in the historical record. Above all, it alerts the reader to how a text is continuously shaped by its invisible margins. The psychoanalyst, for her part, works to read and analyze what can be read without reading. This works only insofar as the psychologization of characters and writers can be carefully avoided. It is a matter of treating the literary text as a literal object. This is clearly at odds with most approaches to literature, in the same way that my subjective approach to history stands in contrast to the historian’s objective approach. The other challenge this approach encounters is its use of psychoanalysis as a tool for understanding the political dimension of history and society. One must strive to avoid psychologizing society and/or “sociologizing” the subject. Although, as Freud says, no boundary separates the individual from the community, it remains a challenge for the psychoanalyst, whose practice is based on individual experience, to understand the community through the individual and vice versa.
Putting psychoanalysis, history, and literature to use in this way brings us the closest to what has been, and continues to be, erased by the political order, whose subjects are kept in the darkness of a sleepless and endless night. History seizes, literature writes, and psychoanalysis reads what resides in the blank space of the text’s margins.
Note
1 1 Frantz Fanon, “Psychiatric Writings,” in Alienation and Freedom, eds. Jean Khalfa and Robert Young, trans. Steven Corcoran (London: Bloombsury, 2018), pp. 167–530.
1 Psychoanalysis and Algerian Paradoxes
I’m asking God, who, by the way, no longer believes in me, for forgiveness.
Sarah Haider, 20131
One can get over the disappearance of the past.
But we cannot recover from the disappearance of the future.
Amin Maalouf, 20122
Caught in a continual tension between servitude and freedom, Algerian society is a mix of contradictions. Since 1962, it has seen progress in a variety of areas: schooling for children; treatment of women, who are much more visible now in public spaces; access to free healthcare, and so on. On top of all this remains an unfulfilled desire to regain a sense of belonging after the colonial order has laid waste to one’s ties to the past (destroying languages, traditions, communities). Despite this progress, pain is still constantly felt and expressed by individual subjects, regardless of their sex, language, profession, or cultural belonging. This pain, expressed by numerous patients during the course of my psychoanalytic practice in Algeria, is rarely viewed as part of a larger historical and political context. Individuals feel as though they are gasping for air, suffocating, being crushed under an unbearable weight. A sense of inertia is palpable and conveys the feeling of a “foreclosed” future.
This pain manifests itself – and is recognized – through the body. But rarely is it related to a subjective history. It is hard to ignore this physical torment when so many women and men repeatedly complain about it. It becomes bigger than the individual subject who bears it in his or her personal life and begins to speak on a public stage. The one-on-one session soon gives way to a much larger social stage where the subject feels threatened. Far from inviting participation from subjects, the social order triggers their retreat. The relation between the individual and the community is troubled. On the one hand, they are divided by a radical incompatibility, since one (the community) almost cancels out the other (the individual), and, on the other hand, they are bound by a profound and inextricable solidarity. This solidarity is masked by grievances and other demands such that no one can perceive the role the subject plays in the social bond that overwhelms it and hastens its disappearance. How, then, can one make what is clearly present in psyches legible and translatable when it has left no traces, apart from what remains in public memory?
Disarray of the private and public spheres
In Algeria today, individuals have long been subjected to terrible psychological, social, and political realities. The traces and consequences of this history remain to be discovered. The persistence of these traces in the present is an urgent matter, but it is drowned out by the noise seemingly emanating from elsewhere: an international context whose instability poses many social and economic threats, a political establishment that has been in a volatile state for many years, and, not least, a resurgence of religion that goes beyond national borders and has been behind Algeria’s bloody history, a history that is always ready to re-erupt.
The analyst seeking to find traces of these catastrophes within psyches and connect them to verbal expressions of “malvie,” or the angst of young Algerians, will be met with disappointment. She will encounter only matters of another order – economic, administrative, international – that mask the real inner despair plaguing subjects and the state. Distinguishing between the inside and outside, between private and political responsibilities, between individual and collective history, is no easy task. This gives a dizzying impression of a homogeneous, all-consuming whole. Each individual’s role as individual in the very make-up of society is constantly effaced, while an omnipotent force that lurks in the shadows is seen as fully responsible for all subjective and social disasters.
The outer catastrophes experienced by patients are described, recorded, catalogued, but correlating them with present-day effects on subjects and the larger public has remained a struggle. It is as though a gap both held the individual and the community apart and caused them to merge. The private becomes public, and, conversely, the public is quite simply private, making them an unbroken unit. This makes it exceedingly difficult to find distinct features which could be used beneficially to mediate between them. In this all-consuming whole, catastrophes are identifiable, but their specific and exact effects on the individual and the community remain hidden. Catastrophes are constantly experienced in the present tense. Past, present, and future are almost indistinguishable. In other words, it is hard to make the (catastrophic) event that occurs into a significant
