as it seeks to eliminate all conflict and psychic suffering, including conflict between the ego and its ideals and between the ego and its desires. A step short of psychic death, the state of alienation presupposes that the subject has decathected from thought inasmuch as thought is experienced as a risk. The narcissistic contract, the apparatus of the LRP, the state of alienation, and the state of terror might thus converge in establishing the categories of persecutor and persecuted as ways of organizing intra-psychic life and the social bond; they might converge in making suspicion decisive for the subject’s relation to alterity, sustaining an effort to banish from the psyche all forms of conflict that might lead the subject to a confrontation with itself or to a confrontation with the world in which it lives. The forbidden governs both the subject’s knowledge of external reality and its knowledge of psychic reality, Aulagnier suggests.
In these pages, I have tried to locate the specificity of the colonial trauma that Lazali analyzes with such clarity and sensitivity, a trauma that inescapably affects subjectivity, the social bond, and the practice of psychoanalysis in Algeria. And yet for all the specificity of Lazali’s framework, throughout my reading of her extraordinary book I saw how close our experiences are to one another, as if we lived in the same social space and spoke the same language. If in all colonization we see an apparatus for suppression and the domination of difference at work, in this text, by contrast, we find an ethics of hospitality, an openness to the foreign and the other that gives us the sense of being sheltered and of offering shelter to an experience of contact with alterity. If this were to leave a lasting trace in our thought, it would undoubtedly work against the repetition of such a devastating history.
Buenos Aires, February 2020
Translated by Ramsey McGlazer
References
1 Agamben, Giorgio (2015). Stasis: Civil War as Political Paradigm. Trans. Nicholas Heron. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
2 Aulagnier, Piera (1984). Les destins du plaisir: aliénation, amour, passion. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
3 Aulagnier, Piera (2001). The Violence of Interpretation: From Pictogram to Statement. Trans. Alan Sheridan. Hove: Taylor & Francis.
4 Bleichmar, Silvia (2009). El desmantelamiento de la subjetividad. Estallido del Yo. Buenos Aires: Topía Editorial.
5 Davoine, Françoise and Gaudillière, Jean-Max (2004) History beyond Trauma. Trans. Susan Fairfield. New York: The New Press.
6 García Reinoso, Gilou (1986). “Matar la muerte.” Revista Psyché 1.
7 Wikinski, Mariana (2016) El trabajo del testigo. Testimonio y experiencia traumática. Buenos Aires: La Cebra.
Notes
1 1 In this connection, I quote from my book El trabajo del testigo. Testimonio y experiencia traumática (2016): “Jean-François Lyotard wondered whether it was the historian’s task to attend not only to the damage of history, but also to the destruction of its documents. … Here there is a painful analogy with the disappeared in Argentina (where to disappear a person was also ‘to kill death,’ as Gilou García Reinoso wrote in 1986), who leave their traces in testimony as ‘disappeared’ and not only as ‘dead,’ perhaps without the law’s being able to ask after this distinction” (p. 88).
2 2 Translator’s Note: I have used the gender-neutral “it” to refer to “the subject” throughout this foreword, both to convey the general nature of this category and to preserve the genderlessness of the possessive pronoun in Spanish.
3 3 The work of Silvia Bleichmar (an Argentine psychoanalyst who died prematurely in 2007) has been translated into French and Portuguese but is not well known in the English-speaking world. Bleichmar’s prolific work has been foundational in the Southern Cone, both because of its approach to the processes involved in the subject’s constitution and because of its construction of a metapsychology that sheds light on the interconnections between the political and the subjective, without losing sight of an ethical dimension that is constitutive for the subject.
4 4 Many psychoanalysts in Argentina, myself included, have engaged with the work of the French psychoanalyst Piera Aulagnier, not only in an effort to give an account of the constitutive matrix of the infant, but also as part of the work of thinking through the subjective effects of political phenomena. This means questioning our own practice and our ties to psychoanalytic institutions.
Introduction: The Difficulty of Acknowledging Colonial Trauma
The idea behind this book came from comparing my experiences as a psychoanalyst in Algiers and Paris. The regular tools of this exercise in self-liberation whereby the subject discovers its own forms of alienation weren’t sufficient for my patients in Algeria. They couldn’t turn away from the demands made upon them by the private, social, and political spheres. The notion of “resistance” doesn’t adequately describe their inability to escape censorship’s hold over thinking and to live fully as distinct and singular beings. Clear therapeutic benefits were present during sessions, but, as psychoanalytic treatment always goes hand in hand with a revolution of the private sphere, no matter where that treatment takes place, in Algiers this repeatedly sought-after revolution remains an unachievable goal that is systematically and tirelessly stalled by an Other: family, politics, religion … How to go about analyzing this private sphere deprived of its revolution? And what is this melancholy-filled grievance hiding?
Although subjectivity can never be hemmed in by any identity markers – be they political, linguistic, or historical – it nevertheless uses these to weave the invisible threads of a private self. The site of psychoanalysis must be reinvented on each occasion with each new patient, while taking into consideration the various elements “saturating” the subject. Rather than over-emphasizing cultural specificity, the question raised here concerns the politics underlying a psychoanalyst’s practice. It is also worth considering how treatment may shed light on a central socio-politico-linguistic dynamic at work in the larger society.
The history of French colonization in Algeria: a blank space in memory and politics
My psychoanalytic practice takes place between different languages (French and Arabic) and locations (France and Algeria). This has probably sharpened my awareness of difference, and made me realize what difference reveals about the reach of politics in both places. It has also made me aware of the impact of this political reach on the formation of the subject. In Paris, the fact that a vast number of French patients who, caught in a generational confusion and stagnation, evoke at some point the signifier “Algeria” invites further reflection. These French patients, usually three generations removed from colonialism, express being weighed down by a colonial history experienced more often than not by their grandparents, who were involved in either colonization or the War of Liberation, but about which these patients know very little. It is surprising to see how they are grappling with questions of shame and responsibility due to this legacy. Expressing an acute sense of discomfort, they are caught in a history they never experienced, one that, more often than not, they inherited cloaked in silence. They are beset with a number of questions: how do you inherit a past you never bore witness to and which, for unknown reasons, you can’t even speak about? Where does this leave you? Where did their parents and grandparents really stand politically in relation to “coloniality,” a term that covers a long period (132 years) of domination and violence, whereas now their descendants are forbidden from thinking about it? How do you develop your own story when this parental silence is met with a political blank space?
One
