The Invisible Armada

2024/11/19

8- What makes today's world particularly dangerous is that the dividing line between war and peace has become blurred. We have entered the age of hybrid wars, the antipodes of that where sovereignties, states declared war on each other, agreed to declare themselves in a state of war and waited until they had done so before triggering hostilities. From now on, the major conflicts shaking the planet are placed under the sign of hybrid warfare. The case of Ukraine is exemplary here: for Russian leaders, the non-respect by the United States and the Europeans of the red lines that they had set concerning the integration of Ukraine into the Western system established, has ratified a de facto war situation, not only with the Ukrainian proxy , but with its masters and sponsors as well. The US leaders, like those of NATO and the main European powers, are sunk in the most constant and massive denial of this real state of war – if they arm, support, advise, help furtively but systematically Ukraine on the ground, it is purely defensive – they are not waging war against Russia, they are defending the borders of global democracy.

Open war even if undeclared for some, defense of peace and protection of the borders of freedom for others... On the ground, this does not mean a drôle de guerre, "phoney war" (the long suspense of hostilities between Germany and France between September 1939 and June 1940), no more "neither peace nor war". It means a war which does not speak its name, a war without a name (like the one which was conducted in Algeria for many years, before the colony gains its independence – all things being equal), a war which, the less it has a name, the more it gets bogged down, becomes ever more dangerous – the proof being that on its occasion, nuclear war once again becomes an option, openly discussed by hawks and other strategists more or less close to the powers concerned, in both camps.

In the same way, the specter of hybrid war hovers more than ever today over East Asia, the China Sea, it prowls around Taiwan, where the parties in conflict observe each other, test each other, " search" tirelessly, waiting for the first "incident" likely to lead to a confrontation with unpredictable consequences. In truth, this continuity which is now established between war and peace looks increasingly less and less like an imperfect peace, punctuated by local conflicts, and more and more like a global, perpetual war of varying intensity. The horizon of this confrontation is distinct: that of a total war, like "war of the worlds". This is shown by the obvious fact that each local confrontation (Ukraine today, Syria yesterday, Taiwan tomorrow) is distinctly the microcosm of the global confrontation pitting the same forces, the same powers, the same “systemic” adversaries against each other. Never will the presumptions of immunity in which the populations of the Global North are established have been so illusory, never will what, for them, passes for peace-despite-all (confused with their own state of relative security) will have been so false, global non-war will never have so little or poorly deserved its name of peace.

What we must learn to think about is the indissoluble relationship that is established between the evidence of internal non-peace, at the time of uprisings, and that of war, sometimes furtive, quiet, sometimes noisy , hybrid in any case, which rages on theaters apparently distant - but capable at any moment, of coming closer to us – we Europeans have had the experience without cost but convincing, for those who know how to see and hear, during the war in former Yugoslavia.

9- There does exist, specifically and rigorously, that is to say in the very terms of the Freudian clinic, something like a colonial hysteria whose endurance defies time and any purely chronological approach of modern and contemporary history. Le Monde recently noted its effectiveness on two full pages, about the anti-woke delirium in France, but also in the United States and Great Britain21.

The perseverance of colonial hysteria, in a present which perceives itself as ever more distant (and untied) from the age of colonization, is what attests to the persistence of a colonial unconscious. This maintained efficiency of the colonial beyond the time of manifest colonization is what makes tangible the existence of forces inseparable from colonization and which persist in the present in the form of a "something" that is unknown. which this present is not aware of, or, more precisely, that it represses, that it resists, that it does not want to know – and it is precisely in this sense that this present is sick of colonization , again and always, inhabited and haunted by it ; it is in this sense that the specter and prolonged (uninterrupted) effects of colonization profoundly affect (disturb) its relationship both to the present and to the past. The antiwoke delirium, in this sense, is conversion hysteria, nothing more and nothing less, a collective psycho-neurosis, affecting the (white) societies of the Global North in their entirety, and, in these societies, certain subjects more than others - but here, it is more to the aid of sociology that it would be appropriate to resort, more than to those of Freudian theory which, for the rest, finds its use here perfectly. Colonial hysteria today, it is not a simple agitation, an ideological pruritus arising in reaction to the shaking effects produced by the rise of decolonial discourse, it is a real collective neurosis which profoundly affects the relationships with the reality of the living who fall under their influence and whose symptoms tend to worsen and multiply as the operation of redressing the discourses in which the colonial past and its extensions are at stake and put into question today deepens, gains in extension and legitimacy.

The antiwoke delirium , a term which has become the fetish and the gimmick of obsession and the affects (anxiety, resentment...) which are associated with it, is par excellence the return of the repressed. What resurfaces with its vindictive proliferation is the memory of that whose reality is denied – the “work” of colonization, its disasters and its crimes. Memories that Freud would say have been “forgotten”, but without being “lost”. They therefore return on the occasion of the rise of decolonial discourse, their rise to the surface is sparked by the decolonial turn . The chaotic virulence with which they backlash, the gestures and actions of subjects affected by colonial hysteria clearly show that they are under the influence of forces arising from a domain or a fund on which they they have no grip, which manifests itself against their will, emerges from unexplored depths and which we call, for this very reason, unconscious .

If this return manifests itself in such a noisy, agitated, strident and vehement (hysterical) mode it is because what is at stake and the images associated with it are totally incompatible with the representation that contemporary subjects of the white world so-called post-colonial have of themselves –  their honorability, their morality, their present and past position in the world. It is from this incompatibility that they are sick and that their illusory post-colonial condition is morbid: the present respectability of the white world, particularly in the ex-colonial powers, is conditioned by the repression as complete as possible of memory or traces of what colonization actually was, both in its duration and in its extension – colonization as an epoch or age and, for white people, a modern epic. It is, to use Freud's language, for "ethical" reasons linked to a good self-image, that the repression of these images and the contents associated with them must be the subject of such complete repression as possible.

In the Freudian perspective, what must be thus repressed and isb the object of the most categorical denial are, of course, "intolerable desires", that is to say unavowable, irreconcilable with the good image that the subject (the ego, according to Freudian nomenclature) has him. What, in the topography of the colonial unconscious takes the place of these repressed desires, is, precisely, the entire desiring part of colonialism and colonization: the white man's drive for conquest and expansion, founded on the dogma of its racial superiority; white supremacism as an irrepressible and blind engine of the colonization of the world by the white species. The traces and the memory of this desire must of course be repressed and erased as completely as possible today, for they enter into open conflict with white normality, which is now marked out by the discourse of Human Rights, the rhetoric of universal tolerance and the rejection of the right of conquest. It is a vital fight for today's white democracies to make people forget where they come from, anthropologically and historically , to blur the tracks of their historical provenance, tracks which, infallibly, lead back to the primitive scene of colonization, with all the figures of frenzied desire that accompany it. Colonial hysteria, that of the discursive neo-colonialism in contemporary total democracy, is the insurrection against everything that conspires to make visible the traces of these hastily erased traces 22.

The antiwoke delirium, in this respect, is a bit like thr dream in the Freudian acceptation: it is what Freud calls the via regia leading to the unconscious, and therefore, for the decolonial observer attached to asserting the rights of the real, to the knowledge of it. The antiwoke delirium is the distorted version of repressed desire which remains inseparable from the nostalgia for colonial grandeur and the sensations associated with it. It is also the displaced expression of the hatred inspired to the dreamer by the untimely action of the decolonial subject who wakes him from his sleep, from his post-neo-colonial narcosis.

“Generally speaking,” asserts Freud, “human beings are not sincere in sexual matters.” We can easily parody this statement by saying: “Generally speaking, white people are not sincere in colonial (post-colonial) matters”. Freud continues thus: "They do not freely show their sexuality, but wear a thick overcoat made... of a fabric of lies intended to hide it as if it were bad weather in the world of sexuality 23. "

The same is true for colonization as an integral as well as inconvenient component of what the identity of the white subject (global North, total democratic) is made of today. The antiwoke discourse, the sarcasm about the “sobs of the white man” are parts and elements of the “thick overcoat” intended to protect this subject from attacks on memory and the remanence of the colonial past or, more precisely, of the colonial past/present. 

In matters of colonial memory, of discourse on colonization, as in matters of sexuality according to Freud, this protective layer is "a tissue of lies intended to hide it as if it were bad weather in the world of sexuality" 24. The substitution of the word “colonization” for the term “sexuality” is easily made here.

The perpetual "bad weather" of colonization is precisely everything that is woven into the unspeakable of the colony: the desires, the impulses, the gestures, the crimes which inspired it and accompanied its exercise throughout. throughout its course. It is precisely because this inexhaustible fund of colonization has become unpresentable in the present under the normative conditions of this present itself that it is the subject not only of censorship but of a distortion, of a perpetual fantasy reinvention – it becomes a retrospective “dream” of the present. But it is also what the present is sick with – what means that it cannot be, in white metropolises, at peace with the past. The colonial past is its perpetually re-inflamed wound, its neurosis. Which makes him so stupid and so mean, prone to resentment, denial, and aberrant behavior as soon as this past resurfaces. The past which does not pass, associated with shame, with the repressed feeling of guilt, resurfaces in the form of the spirit of vindictiveness, of hatred, of the vomiting of everything which associates ("freely") with this indigestible matter – populations of colonial origin, racialized people, migrants and, today, “wokism”.

In this very sense, everything that is organized around the decolonial motif has much in common with the cure, even if those who are incriminated by the anti-woke discourse do not share, as far as they are concerned, the optimism of Freud in the face of neurosis: “It is only by uncovering and becoming conscious of these almost always forgotten memory traces that we acquire the power to eliminate the symptoms” 25.

We do not believe, here, in the virtues of "awareness" supported by appropriate means, the "cure", here, it is not the couch, it is the struggle, the antiwoke, it is not  the patient, he.she is the enemy. The colonial question, as a question of the past in the present, is a front of struggle, a raging war. In the analytical treatment, the “analysant” and the analyst contribute to the same cause – the healing of the patient, the reduction of a psychological affection which poisons his existence. The resistance we are dealing with here must not be overcome, but broken – it is a completely different configuration of the confrontation of forces than in the analytical treatment.

What is at stake is not so much a historical turning point as an anthropological mutation. What is in question, in the ongoing confrontation around the colonial issue, are only superficially assessments, it is the very foundation of white societies, of white civilization and the way in which they have invested the entire planet and have determined its destiny. However, since it set out to conquer the planet, this white world has had a problem with reality which has constantly grown. Like the Freudian neurotic, it has “withdrew into his world of fantasy, more satisfying [than the real world] whose content he transposes into symptoms when he falls ill” 26. It has fallen under the influence of an ever more demanding unconscious, of an ever more tyrannical desire and of which Freud tells us that he "is not susceptible to being influenced, independent of all the tendencies which oppose to him 27. ”

The whole question is therefore to know under what conditions, by what means and at what price the others and the “elsewhere” of this (white) world can free themselves from the grip of its devouring desire – if there is still time to do so. . One thing is certain: it is not “awareness” or the moral surge which are the models or figures which draw the line of flight out of this configuration marked out by all the pathologies of the white species. We are here on a front of struggle where questions that affect the future of the human species are at stake. Regaining a foothold in reality requires learning to situate oneself in the present, identifying its singularity, which can also be said: what is happening to us and how did we get here?

However, what is happening to us and how we got here is not just what is commonly said about the alarming state of the planet, the "it's five minutes to midnight" in Greta Thunberg mode, humanity as a whole being sick of all the evils that it would have inflicted on itself, all aggravated by the madness of the powerful playing with the fire of the new Cold War... It is not the carelessness or the blindness of  humanity in general that has led us (as  humanity in general, precisely) to where we have arrived today. The driving force, the matrix of the disaster indeed has a name and an address which remain the unthought and the inarticulable of the vague discourse of the ongoing catastrophe as it prevails today. It is not even enough to replace Anthropocene with Capitalocene to regain a foothold in reality and begin a true genealogy of the disaster which inhabits the present and marks the singularity of our “today” (Jetztzeit, Benjamin) . It is in the forms of a particular culture and its own dynamics that we must look for what has influenced the history of the world in the direction which has led to its growing inhabitability 28. Incriminating “capitalism” in general may be a new ruse of discourse rather than of Reason, intended to avoid the cultural dimension of what is at issue here: it is not just any human civilization that  has been the blind and conquering force which led all of humanity onto the path of savage and violent expansion of which we are today the dismayed heirs. Latin American decolonial theorists are therefore right to name the crime by its color, European civilization, the white world in opposition to the indigenous cultures that it subjugated and destroyed. It is not the Andean civilizations, it is not the Chinese empire, it is not the African civilizations that have led all of humanity to the edge of the abyss – to “what is happening to us”, to what imposes its texture to an exhausted and disoriented present. Time has come for the Great Decentering.