Whither Theory in a Time of Surpassing Disaster?

Abstract

Attending to our responsibility to the dead in our present historical moment of danger, this lecture stages three distinct reading experiments in “living together with the dead” with special attention to Palestine and Algeria. The first scene contemplates the times of war and death that constitute what Jalal Toufic refers to as “the withdrawal of tradition past a surpassing disaster.” The second scene explores artistic resurrection in literature by examining antiphonic burial during colonial war while juxtaposing philosophical conceptions of the relationship between death, burial, and history writing. I thus elaborate a concept of death as non-secular and theological, and of history writing as a form of anamnesis that inhabits the isthmus between the Terrestrial realm and the realm of the Unseen. The final scene is a meditation on poetry under conditions of colonial and postcolonial catastrophe. Throughout, theology and poetry serve as provocations to the discipline of history.

For whom do we read and write? With every passing year, every war, every genocide, every massacre, and every suicide in our troubled present, the question becomes ever more pressing. For me the answer has always been deceptively simple—for the dead. As historians and scholars, what is our responsibility to the dead in our present historical moment of danger, what Sigmund Freud termed “the times on war and death”?¹ In cultivating an ethics of listening to, and learning to speak with, the dead, how can we attend to the gravitas of this encounter, in which we are inherently implicated, both consciously and unconsciously?²

Attending to the work of critical theory and practice, this piece stages three distinct scenes of reading, each of which grapples with experiments in what historian Sherene Seikaly terms “living together with the dead.” Throughout I attempt to rethink the relationship between the group and the mediation, or translation, of the experience of war and death—so staggeringly omnipresent in our troubled times. I do so, in part, through a meditation on necromancy and the practice of history writing.

The first scene thinks through the question of ethical semiosis as one inherent to the work of translation from the individual to the group, particularly in the times of “war and death” that constitute what Jalal Toufic refers to as “the withdrawal of tradition past a surpassing disaster.”³ How might we understand what Gayatri Spivak terms the “irreducible work of translation, not from language to language, but from body to ethical semiosis”?⁴ If the question of the group remains one of the persistent aporias within psychoanalytic thought, then Arab studies is well situated to reconceptualize the nature of group life in all of its instantiations. This is so precisely because so many of the experiments of group life—both in their traumatism and their collective resistance—have emerged from that part of the world.

The second scene contemplates the work of artistic resurrection and its limits by examining the exigencies of antiphonic burial under circumstances of colonial war—as evidenced in Assia Djebar’s novel Fantasia. In the process, I juxtapose two distinct philosophical conceptions of the relationship between death, burial, and history writing, while elaborating a concept of death as non-secular and theological, and of history writing as a form of anamnesis that inhabits the barzakh (isthmus) between the Terrestrial realm and the realm of the Unseen.

The third, and final, scene is a meditation on poetry and the calligraphy of invention, or the right to life before death. Here, I delve into artistic forms, such as experimental prose and poetry as a mode of communicative and noncommunicative discourse with the group under conditions of colonial and postcolonial catastrophe. In so doing, I draw upon the concept of the imaginary and poetic invention as elaborated by the psychoanalyst Sami-Ali and as exemplified by the poet and painter Etel Adnan.

Throughout, I ask what it might mean for critical theory to contemplate the destruction of Gaza, and the world, which we are now witnessing, from the perspective of the Arab world. How shall we speak about critical theory both in the midst of genocide in Palestine, and also in the midst of the most sustained forms of resistance that we have witnessed in the modern imperialist West since at least 1968?⁵ Internecine debates regarding “critical theory’s generational predicament” as a “foreclosure of its own future as a tradition” are often predicated on the assumption that the Frankfurt school and Institute for Social Research embody both the means and ends of critical theory tout court.⁶ But if the proliferation of encampments on university campuses is to teach us anything, it is that our students, those vanguards of critical theory in action, rely on an entirely different repertoire of theory (lower-case “t”), one that privileges scholars not on the basis of provenance or institutional capital, but on the basis of their interventions within a complex discursive terrain that is at once theoretical, political, and psychosocial.

As such, our references, and more significantly our conceptual grammar, will entail a sustained engagement with the thought and writings of Jalal Toufic, Sherene Seikaly, David Marriott, Haytham El Wardany, Sami-Ali, Assia Djebar, and Etel Adnan, as well as al-Ghazali and Ibn ʿArabi.⁷ As will become clear, I do not eschew modern European thinkers but place them in conversation with non-European and non-modern thinkers; such a shift will highlight the question of what constitutes theory and in what ways it might actually speak to “history and the present” of the world’s demographic majority.⁸

Scene I: the withdrawal of tradition past a surpassing disaster

If to be a living being entails the acceptance of the eventuality of catastrophic reactions, as Georges Canguilhem suggests, then how does such a being function within the confines of a community that has itself been the subject of a catastrophe, or, as artist and theorist Jalal Toufic outlines, a “surpassing disaster”?⁹ For Toufic “whether a disaster is a surpassing one (for a community defined by its sensibility to the immaterial withdrawal that results from such a disaster) cannot be ascertained by the number of causalities, the intensity of psychic traumas and the extent of material damage, but by whether we encounter in its aftermath symptoms of withdrawal of tradition.”¹⁰ Crucially, Toufic does not define a community as bound together by “a common language and/or racial origin and/or religion”; rather, “being equally affected by the surpassing disaster delimits the community.”¹¹

As he elaborates, peoples that have suffered surpassing disasters—encompassing material losses, such as death tolls, psychic traumas, and the destruction of the built environment—also encounter immaterial losses that he terms the withdrawal of tradition (the “withdrawal of literary, philosophical and thoughtful texts as well as of certain films, videos, and musical works, notwithstanding that copies of these continue to be physically available; of paintings and buildings that were not physically destroyed; of spiritual guides; and of the holiness/specialness of certain spaces”).¹²

In contemplating the cases in which “tradition did at one point or another undergo a surpassing disaster,” Toufic cites the following examples:

for the Jews, the destruction of the temple, the expulsion from Spain, and the Nazi-period extermination; for Twelver Shi‘ites, the slaughter of imām Ḥusayn, his family, relatives and companions at Karbalā’ … for the Armenians, the 1915–17 genocide; and for the Turks, who, in the first decades of the twentieth century, exemplify one of the clearest cases of the withdrawal of tradition, for instance of the Arabic script, Sufi lodges, Sufi music and Ottoman art music, and the fez….¹³

In the case of Palestine, the nakba presents itself as both a structure and a structuring condition, rather than a singular catastrophic event or surpassing disaster; it is, as Nasser Abourahme puts it, an “open present continuous” that functions as the latent logic of Zionism.¹⁴ Such a logic seeks to relentlessly supplant the native population through genocide, ethnic cleansing, expulsion, spatial segregation, and obliterative moments of extreme violence such as we are witnessing today.¹⁵

In Palestine, as Sherene Seikaly notes, “The world has now learned of epistemicide—a policy that mandates the destruction of cultural and historical sites, libraries, bookstores, and the killing of educators.”¹⁶ Subjected to the destruction of archives, cultural institutions, and institutions of knowledge, and to overall epistemological violence—this violence is iterative and emblematic of the ongoing catastrophe that has structured Palestinian existence since well before 1948. In a comment to an article by Dan Sheehan on Literary Hub, titled “These Are the Poets and Writers Who Have Been Killed in Gaza,” the Irish novelist Emer Martin says, “poeticide. Is that a word? To kill the story tellers, the poets.”¹⁷

As the painful litany of counting and naming bodies has demonstrated, Israel’s attempted destruction of Palestine is taking place at the level of the human organism—the body rendered as bare life and subjected to death and dismemberment. Indeed, the earth itself is now bearing witness to this attempted obliteration and the land in Gaza has changed color under the weight and tonnage of bombs. The earth is now an admixture of Palestinian bodies and human remains, as well as the sorrows of a population indefinitely displaced. And yet, as Seikaly suggests, “in this age of catastrophe, Palestine is not an object for sympathy, fear, or even salvation. Palestine is a paradigm. It can teach us about our present condition of the permanent temporary.”¹⁸

Palestine as paradigm thus offers us an angle from which to contemplate the question of the group in the midst of a surpassing disaster. As David Marriott insightfully observes with respect to Frantz Fanon, what was unprecedented about his approach to Algeria (particularly during the war—an example of a “surpassing disaster”), “was the constant interrogation of the group as a veridical dimension of the real, since it sought to make being-there part of a group process wherein an awareness of the patient’s ‘phantasms’ ‘force[d] him to confront reality on a new register.’”¹⁹ Socialthérapie aimed

to force the group to become aware of the difficulties of its existence as a group and then to render it more transparent to itself, to the point where each member is provoked into an awareness of the relation (albeit previously disavowed) between phantasm and the real. It is then at the level of the phantasm that the real unreality of life in the colony could be fully understood …²⁰

This is precisely what is at stake here in our discussions of the attempted eradication of the group itself as object of surpassing disaster, insofar as the confrontation of the real unreality of life in the colony must be addressed if any decolonial transvaluation is to occur.²¹ The group under colonial occupation, then, must be retheorized, and Marriott notes that this is why the distinction between Francesc Tosquelles’s institutional psychotherapy and Fanon’s socio-therapy must not be glossed over; “in Fanon’s clinic the psychodrama was substantially different; the necessity was not just to set up an analogy between the clinic and society, but to deduce the phantasms defining both.”²²

As Stefania Pandolfo elaborates, Fanon’s clinical case studies in Wretched of the Earth invite “us into the fact of madness that bears witness to the real of an unending war, and the temporal indeterminacy of trauma, pondering that vulnerability exposed, and renouncing the mastery of an exit or the resolution of the cure.”²³ David Lloyd, too, has emphasized such a nontherapeutic relation to the past in the context of colonialism, as has Samera Esmeir in reference to the nakba and “the death of human relationships, structured [in] its lived aftermath.”²⁴ And while some have focused on colonial violence as filtered through the clinic as the “undialectizable remainder” within Fanon’s thought, Marriott’s intervention is unparalleled precisely because it introduces a philosophical dimension into our understanding of the psychosocial nature of the group.²⁵

Marriott explores what he terms the n’est pas—a rupture or void in the subject.²⁶ Such a concept, Marriott asserts, emerges in 1958—at a moment of exile, crisis, and exposure to death for Fanon, a moment when the political dimensions of psychotherapy reach their apex and in which the mortified body and petrified speech of the colonized may be grasped in the force de rupture of torture.²⁷ By 1958, “the cure becomes more aporetic,” moving away “from a specular disalienation [as in Black Skin, White Masks] to a more unnameable n’est pas,” culminating in an understanding of the non-sovereignty and “the (non)-signifying place for the one who is black.”²⁸ And here Marriott reminds us that the question of torture (but, of course, not just) illuminates the fact that disalienation was definitively not the objective of institutional or group psychotherapy, certainly in the colony, and that the so-called cure remained ever elusive, ever aporetic.²⁹

As I have intimated, the question of the group remains one of the persistent aporias within psychoanalytic thought, despite the fact that prominent figures ranging from Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Reich to Herbert Marcuse to Wilfred Bion have attempted to think through the question of group dynamics (all in the aftermath of wartime, one might add) and to move beyond the simplistic conceptualizations of Gustave LeBon and William McDougall.³⁰ But it is with Fanon that we begin to truly approach an understanding of the constitution of the group as generated by colonial wretchedness in terms of an abyss or ontological void, or what Marriott terms the n’est pas.³¹

And while the larger literature on institutional psychotherapy’s attempt to address modes of suffering through collective healing by reenvisaging the form and content of the mental hospital has surely been edifying, it is necessary to ponder the difference—what Françoise Vèrges terms “a difference with many consequences”—of colonial sites like Algeria and Palestine.³² Arab studies is well situated to reconceptualize the nature of the group and of group life. This is so precisely because so many of the experiments of group life—both in their traumatism and in their collective resistant sociality, such as the Blida psychiatric hospital in Algeria and refugee camps in Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan, but also Orthodox monastic communities in post-civil war Lebanon, and Tahrir Square during the 2011 uprising in Cairo—not to mention smaller-scale practices of communal storytelling, Qur’anic cures and other embodied practices such as spirit possession and exorcism—model other ways of imagining collectivity as an ethical and social way of living. As Samera Esmeir reminds us, the political project of Zionism itself seeks “to limit Palestinians solely to biological or physiological existence and we cannot use the same vocabulary at the core of the project itself.” She directs us, instead, to the collective and resistant sociality of Palestinians on and enabled by the land, which is itself the target of the obliteration.³³

What might the Arab region have to contribute to our rethinking of the question of the group, of the individual’s relationship to the collectivity under colonial and postcolonial duress? How might ethical conceptions of relations between the self and other, derived from systems outside the purview of Western philosophy, psychiatry, and psychotherapy, shape the question of the group? If war psychiatry—whether the Great War of Bion or the Spanish Civil War and Second World War of Tosquelles—created different ways of theorizing the group, and of reconfiguring or dispensing with notions of “cure,”³⁴ then how can we conceive of ethics and the group as likewise transformed under the hallucinatory conditions of colonial war? Pondering these questions will require a reconceptualization of forms of collective and group life, notions of repair and the irreparable, and styles of narration.

“What,” Jalal Toufic says,

have we as Arab thinkers, writers, filmmakers, video makers, painters, sculptors, musicians, and calligraphers lost after the seventeen years of Lebanese civil war; after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982; after the symptomatic Anfāl operation against the Iraqi Kurds; after the devastation of Iraq; and after [Ḥāfiẓ al-]Assad’s regime’s symptomatic brutal repression of Hama in 1982? We have lost. It is this ascertainment that is to hint to us what we have lost concretely. We have lost tradition. We are not resisting because we are, in a more or less abstract way, mahroumin (disinherited); rather, we know, despite all the lies, the semblance of normalcy, the life goes on, that we have lost—and hence that we are mahroumin in a concrete manner—because we are resisting.³⁵

To be clear, Toufic does not pronounce the loss of all tradition—and clarifies that he is referring to the loss of one kind of tradition, while others may flourish; we may “encounter that other, uncanny tradition, the one secreted by the ruins in a labyrinthine time, often a time-lapsed one,”³⁶ or more dangerously, a counterfeit tradition.³⁷ With respect to a work of art withdrawn, for example, Toufic cannot allow the viewer to hear the soundtrack Maqam Kurdi by Munir Bachir in a video on the Lebanese war, but can only include it in the music credits.³⁸ As Pandolfo notes, “for only that absent-presence, that silence associated with a name, can make visible and heard the fundamental inability to experience, and hence to hear the voice of an artistic tradition that in the aftermath of collective violence remains suspended and cannot be passed on.”³⁹

Here, let us ponder Toufic’s statement that a subjective working through of traumatism “cannot be fully addressed by psychiatrists or psychoanalysts, but demands the resurrecting efforts of writers, artists, and thinkers.” In such sites,

traumatized survivors … seek psychiatric treatment to regain a cathexis of the world, including of tradition and culture in general. But that subjective working through cannot on its own succeed in remedying the withdrawal of tradition, for that withdrawal is not a subjective symptom, whether individual or collective, and therefore cannot be fully addressed by psychiatrists or psychoanalysts, but demands the resurrecting efforts of writers, artists, and thinkers. Without the latter’s contribution, either the psychiatric treatment fails, or else though the patient may leave ostensibly healthy, he or she soon discovers that tradition, including art, is still withdrawn.⁴⁰

But, as Toufic, notes, such “resurrection takes (and gives) time.”⁴¹ Thus, he states, “I have to do my best to physically preserve tradition, while knowing that what I will save physically from the surpassing disaster still needs to be resurrected—one of the limitations of history as a discipline is that the material persistence of the documents blinds it to the exigency of the resurrection.”⁴² Indeed, this is why the discipline of history has become so profoundly inadequate to the Herculean tasks of our present moment.

Scene II: artistic resurrection and its limits

Drawing on Sherene Seikaly’s conception of Palestine as method and abundance, I want us to think through the ongoing surpassing disaster faced in Palestine as a “living together with the dead.”⁴³ How might such a living together, as an “essential possibility of existence,” move beyond enumeration and recitation, beyond even processes of commemoration, to include supplication and poetic invention?⁴⁴ How might we engage with poetic forms as a mode of figuration and communication that allows for the ritual embalming of the dead, and of the unburied dead in particular, through words?

If, as Hans Ruin notes, “the act of burial is not just about laying to rest and storing away but rather the center and starting point for a complex set of practices, rituals, and traditions that continue to care for and to be with the dead, among which writing itself … constitutes an integral part,”⁴⁵ and if we take Palestine to be paradigmatic of the predicament of the unburied dead in the times of war and death⁴⁶—those left behind in the rubble under the debris and detritus of colonial and postcolonial violence—then we might find recourse to literature as a mode of artistic resurrection and ritual embalming. Such a resurrection must be seen through the prism of a region that “believe[s] in the depth of the earth where massacres have taken place, and where so many have been inhumed without proper burial and still await their unearthing, and then proper burial and mourning.”⁴⁷

I came to understand the work of artistic resurrection through Assia Djebar’s magisterial Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade, which I first read sometime in the mid- to late 1990s and which I have taught—in history lectures and seminars, no less—every year since I began teaching in 2003. The novel is structured as a complex contrapuntal musical composition with a tripartite arrangement that alternates between the French conquest of Algeria in 1830 and the so-called pacification of tribes, autobiographical memories from the twentieth century when the author was a child, and the recounting of narratives of women and girls who fought in the Algerian War of Liberation between 1954 and 1962. Within the field of comparative literature, Fantasia has been productively analyzed in terms of Algerian national-language politics (Arabic, Tamazight, and French); gender and sexuality; feminism and autobiography; historical exhumation and the rewriting of colonial history; haunting and cultural memory; silence, oppression, and rebellion; and the politics of subaltern testimony and acoustics.⁴⁸

Here I want to turn our attention to Djebar’s “haunting testimonial poetics,”⁴⁹ as an exemplar of mortuary antiphonic witnessing, or more precisely of antiphonic burial. In the conclusion of a chapter on “Plunder,” Djebar free-associates in an oft-cited passage that her “oral tradition has gradually been overlaid and is in danger of vanishing,” likening the writing of an autobiography using French words alone to lending oneself to the vivisector’s scalpel; an unveiling, a stripping naked, one that recalls the colonial conquest and plunder of Algeria in the preceding century. But she ends with a remarkable observation, one that captures the notion of antiphonic burial: “When the body is not embalmed by ritual lamentations, it is like a scarecrow decked in rags and tatters. The battle-cries of our ancestors, unhorsed in long-forgotten combats, re-echo across the years; accompanied by the dirges of the mourning-women who watched them die.”⁵⁰

The anthropologist Nadia Serematakis has detailed the “ethics of antiphony,” referring to the polyphonic and contrapuntal lament performances of the women of Inner Mani not merely as aesthetic, acoustic, and dramaturgical, but, importantly, as a “social structure of mortuary ritual” and “a prescribed technique for witnessing, for the production/reception of jural discourse, and for the cultural construction of truth.”⁵¹ “The discourse of the mourner,” she states, “is simultaneously a revelation, a disclosure, a witnessing, and an objectification of pain and suffering.”⁵² Intently attuned to the acoustics of death amongst her interlocutors, Serematakis provides us with clues as to how the group might communicate with the dead; we might draw parallels with what Jill Jarvis terms the sonic qualities of Djebar’s text and how they reveal “an imbrication of the aesthetic and deadly.”⁵³

In a harrowing scene, based on an oral history, the young thirteen-year-old shepherd girl Cherifa, whom the villagers had accused of “behaving as if she were the fourth son in the family,” has joined the partisans alongside her brother Ahmed. During a dramatic ambush, they start running away from the French soldiers when he falls in front of her. After hiding out, she returns to retrieve the body of her brother, to wash him, or at least sprinkle water over his face, having dragged the corpse as close as she can to a nearby stream.⁵⁴ A group of partisans, among whom is another one of her brothers, Abdelkader, watch on:

One prolonged, preliminary cry has escaped her. The child rises, her body an even brighter patch in the transparent air; her voice shrills out, stumbling over the first notes, like the shudder of a sail before it is hoisted on the foremast. Then the voice cautiously takes wing, the voice soars, gaining in strength, what voice? That of the mother who bore the soldiers’ torture with never a whimper? That of the little cooped-up sisters, too young to understand, but bearing the message of wild-eyed anguish? The voice of the old women of the douar who face the horror of the approaching death-knell, open-mouthed, with palms of fleshless hands turned upwards? What irrepressible keening, what full-throated clamour, strident tremolo? … Is it the voice of the child whose hands are red with henna and a brother’s blood?

The partisans behind her fall back as one man with the spurting blood. They know what they must live with from now on: the rhythmic wailing of the spirits of unburied dead, the roar of invisible lionesses shot by no hunter … the discordant dirge of inarticulate revolt launches its arabesques into the blue.

The lament swells in an upsurge of sound: glissandos passing into vibrato; a stream of emptiness hollows out the air. Barbed wires taut above invisible torments … Then the thirteen-year-old suddenly starts to her feet, impelled to sway to and fro, keeping time to the rhythm of her grief; the shepherd girl is initiated to the ritual circle. The first circle around the first one to die …

The men stared down at her from the edge of the ravine: standing there throughout that cry that lurches like a pall dripping with blood and flapping in the sun. The dead man swathes himself in it, using it to retrieve his memory: noxious emanations, foetid gases, borboyrgmic rumblings. Suffusing him in the reverberating, stifling heat. The plangent chirring, the rhythm of the cadences swaddle his flesh to protect it from decay. Voice armoring the dead man on the ground, giving him back his eyes on the edge of the grave …

…

Her name is Cherifa. When she tells her story, twenty years later, she mentions no interment nor any other form of burial for the brother lying in the river bed. ⁵⁵

Like the women mourners in Serematakis’s ethnography, Djebar stives to shelter the Algerian unburied dead from a double death, what Serematkis terms a “naked death,” in which one is left alone by death, without clan or “numbers.” Djebar herself refers to Cherifa as a “new Antigone, mourning for the adolescent lying on the grass, stroking the half-naked corpse with henna-stained hands.”⁵⁶ But such ethnographic and mythical parallels often reach their limits in times of colonial war and in the aftermath of colonialism.⁵⁷ By Djebar’s own account, the dead are absent presences who seek to become witnesses,⁵⁸ and critics have found in her work “an ambivalent desire to suture and restore what has been mutilated and dismembered, as if to perform a resurrection or an act of necromancy.”⁵⁹

Necromancy—let us linger on the concept for a while. Michel de Certeau has famously viewed writing, and historical writing in particular, as a mode of appeasing the spirits of the dead. It is an exorcism that aims at “calming the dead” of historical consciousness while erecting a barrier between the living and the dead. If history writing represents an entombment of the dead within the sarcophagus of discourse and practices of writing, it may also be said to embody a dramaturgical view of the dead in which we, the living, are not immanently a part of the psychodrama (“gallery of history” is the term Certeau uses to describe this removed relation).⁶⁰ We might think of this as an extractive relation to both discourse and the dead—mobilized by the living to open up the space of the present to themselves.

In a very lengthy critique of Certeau, Hans Ruin accuses him of an excessive structuralist formalism and a “theoretical-anthropological bias” which posits a “strict separation between supposedly earlier (or contemporary) nonhistorical cultures of death and memory and a modern European Enlightenment-style historicism” as well as “a strict separation between an outside (the dead) and an inside (the living).”⁶¹ Instead, Ruin suggests a “‘spectral’ or ‘hauntological’ approach on the basis of the existential-historical predicament of being with the dead.”⁶² This approach is a self-acknowledged “social ontology of being with the dead” or a “metacritical thanatology.”⁶³ But it is unabashedly premised upon a series of philosophical abstractions, through Hegel, Heidegger, and Derrida, most notably, that purport to universality through the key figures of the Greek classical tradition (Antigone and Odysseus). This, of course, is a standard move within both European philosophy and intellectual history—even if Ruin’s materialist ambition takes him to domains as varied as ancient Egypt and Native American repatriation disputes.⁶⁴

I am deeply sympathetic to Ruin’s philosophical project and the elegance and audacity with which he executes a transhistorical and transcultural account of being with the dead through the exemplary phenomenon of burial, but his driving query betrays a fundamental anxiety. “How,” he states, “can we have a secular and non-superstitious account of the way that the dead are somehow still there, or at least of the way in which they are not simply nothing?” and not “reduce history to a culture of piety, remembrance, or duty toward a particular community and their dead.”⁶⁵ Thus the universal relationship to being with the dead becomes a secular conception of death, which is precisely what Certeau was alerting us to by noting the Enlightenment tendency of dissociating the present from tradition and imposing a break between present and past.⁶⁶ Certeau does so all the while drawing on examples that “bear witness to another relation with time, or what amounts to the same thing, another relation with death.”⁶⁷

Such is the project of his two-volume The Mystic Fable, in which he “described the mystics’ style of dwelling and creating among the ruins of a tradition as an art of connecting to the generative ‘abundance of a source.’”⁶⁸ In Certeau’s words, “We must understand that the origin that was sought [by the mystics] is not a dead past. At issue is the advent of a ‘voice’ that speaks today in its avatars, and that infuses with its force the actual words that are uttered in the present.”⁶⁹ Such a tradition-centered approach, touching as it does on medieval European historical cultures, does not conceive of death or the dead as relegated to a distinct time-space, nor do the mystics “labor against death.” At the same time, this is not an idealized vision of a historical moment in which the past was enchanted, and the living and the dead were simply one. In fact, Certeau’s examples are instructive precisely because his historical protagonists inhabit the time of the ruins.

Attending to the group’s relation to death as non-secular and theological, therefore, might help us theorize the varied modes of being with the dead, including the question of what it means to partake of a hollowed-out tradition, be it historical or religious, in situations of social dereliction and ontological destitution in the aftermath of war and catastrophe. Let us return, then, to Djebar. In a remarkable reflective piece titled “Anamnesis in the Language of Writing” she contemplates what it means “to write, to return to the body, or, at the very least, to the hand in motion.”⁷⁰ Through a reflection on a matrilineal and female genealogy, Djebar contends with “not the past, but pre-memory, before the rising of the first dawn, before the night of nights, before …”;⁷¹ here, as in her semi-autobiographical novel, anamnesis signifies the remembrance of the past as communicated through embodied practices transmitted through women. We might liken it to a pre-originary space, a primal scene that centers not on the murder of the father, but on the bodily encounter with the mother, and a refusal to sacrifice the mother “to the origins of our culture.”⁷²

We might further shift from a neo-Platonic sense of anamnesis toward an understanding of the soul’s memory of death and the dead not in abstract universalist terms, but in terms of the elaborate Islamic and Orthodox Christian discursive traditions of the remembrance of death. Here I am invoking the renowned medieval theologian, jurist, and mystic Abu Hamid al-Ghazali’s Dhikr al-mawt wa ma baʿdahu (Remembrance of Death and the Afterlife), the fortieth book of his magnum opus The Revival of the Religious Sciences, an exposition of and appeal to the recollection of death “and an encouragement to remember it abundantly.”⁷³ Traversing the agonies and violence of death, the conditions of the grave, the true nature of death, and other such topics, its most interesting chapter is “On the States of the Dead which have been known through Unveiling [mukashafa] in Dreams.”⁷⁴ Likewise, the first chapter of Confession and Psychoanalysis by Spiro Jabbour, a deacon of the orthodox Antiochian Church from Latakia, Syria, magnificently translated by Aaron Eldridge, “opens with the remembrance of death and its intimate relationship to birth.”⁷⁵ For Jabbour, the spiritual “atom” that portends life is also a harbinger of death.

Within this conceptualization, there is no question of simply being with the dead; rather life “is always already in the arc of its being-for-death.”⁷⁶ As such, the contemporaneity of the living and the dead is exhibited in a multitude of ways—for instance, in the contemporary Egyptian tradition of writing and sending letters (sometimes via parcel post) written to the deceased Sunni jurist Imam al-Shafiʿi (d. 820 AD) at his mausoleum complex in Cairo.⁷⁷ The dead are not ghosts (s. shabah, pl. ashbah) who haunt us in the present, but souls who coexist with and prefigure us.⁷⁸ “When you recall the departed,” Ghazali exhorts us, “count yourself as one of them.”⁷⁹

If we were to be bold enough to be even more psychoanalytic about this, we might say that the remembrance of death is not just a remembrance of the death of the other, but a remembrance of our own death, a death which has already transpired, if only we could remember it. The British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott suggested as much shortly before his own death. In his brilliant paper “Fear of Breakdown” he analyzed clinical material which intimated that his patients who lived in fear of breakdown (a fear that was destroying their lives) had, in fact, already experienced it as part of the primitive agonies. Analogizing this to the fear of death, he says, “it is the death that happened but was not experienced that is sought. … Death, looked at in this way as something that happened to the patient but which the patient was not mature enough to experience, has the meaning of annihilation.”⁸⁰ The analyst, then, must assist in the anamnesis.

Annihilation (fanaʾ) is extensively theorized within the Sufi tradition, itself counted amongst the traditions with a most elaborated conception of death. But the experience of death need not occur solely in the rarefied experiences of the annihilation of the self in its union with God. Indeed, the quotidian realm of sleep and dreams might provide just such an avenue. Within Sufi cosmology, the passage from the Terrestrial and Visible realm to the realm of the Unseen and the Kingdom takes place principally upon one’s death.⁸¹ However, sleep weakens the attachment to the Terrestrial and Visible realm, allowing a partial passage to the realm of the Unseen, or al-ghayb.⁸² As Ghazali notes, “dreams, and the knowledge of the Unseen through sleep, are among the marvels of God’s works (Exalted is He!) and the wonders of the primordial disposition [fitra] of man,”⁸³ as we see in this Qur’anic passage:

And We have made your sleep [a symbol of] death

and made the night [its] cloak

and made the day [a symbol of] life.(Qurʾan 78:9–11)

In our encounter with the dead across time and space, we could be said to inhabit the space of the barzakh—a liminal zone or an isthmus. Such an isthmus was conceptualized by the medieval mystic Ibn ʿArabi (1165–1240) as a space between the existent and the nonexistent, the known and the unknown, “which is neither the one nor the other but which possesses the power (quwwa) of both.”⁸⁴ Separating the living and the dead, death and resurrection, the corporeal and the spiritual, the barzakh is the domain of the imagination and the imaginal world. Humans partake of this imaginal world, and it is most manifest in the realm of sleep and the dream, an imaginal realm of being known as the lesser death.⁸⁵

Writing history, I humbly contend, may be conceptualized as just such a realm of the lesser death, in which a communication with the beyond of life takes place. Elsewhere I have explored these concepts in terms legible to Western historians through the minor traditions of modern historiography in which the ethico-theological implications of writing history have been emphasized and connected to the critique of historicism. I trace a line of thought from Walter Benjamin through Karl Löwith’s assessment of the eschatological orientation of modern history as resonant with the ethical orientation of psychoanalysis.⁸⁶

But perhaps there is no better example of trying to approach the barzakh in writing history than Assia Djebar’s Fantasia.⁸⁷ The overarching epistolary structure of the novel—the love letters written by her cloistered cousins to the far-flung corners of the Arab world; her father, who “dares write to her mother,” the secret missive from her lover, twice purloined—all find a parallel in the entire novel once it is perceived as a love letter to the Algerian dead. With Djebar, the dead are not spectral apparitions, but inhabit the barzakh, or the liminal space between life and death, a place the living may travel to, if only they would allow themselves the necromantic reverie.

Scene III: poetry, or the calligraphy of invention

I turn now, briefly, to Haytham El Wardany’s book of experimental prose The Book of Sleep, written in Egypt in the spring of 2013 and published in Arabic in 2017.⁸⁸ The interim saw a counterrevolutionary coup and the mass killing of over a thousand protestors in a single day on 14 August 2013.

In The Book of Sleep, El Wardany queries three times, as if in an incantation, “Who is the Sleeper? A limb severed from the whole? A single self? A small group at rest?”⁸⁹ In the third, and final, iteration:

Who is the Sleeper?

A limb severed from the whole? A single self? A small group at rest? At the heart of every group is a wound which will not heal, its pain renewed each time some part of it falls away. Yet always the group will take the side of what remains visible, will privilege the living over the dead and place its hope in the future: the hope that the wound will heal with time. The group sees in itself a history of renewal and development, averting its gaze from a parallel history of loss and disconnection. But sleep does not look away; it turns to face this parallel history head on and, impelled by the catastrophe of loss, is drawn to what is visible no longer. The eye of the sleeper is fixed on the departed; all he sees of the community to which he belongs is the absent part, the crack and breaks which spread and widen day after day. The group to which the sleeper belongs is a lost group, marching towards the open wound. It is not cohesion that holds them together, nor looking forward, but a weakness, a looking backward. Sleep does not seek to bring ease to this wound buried in the heart of every group. It wants only to approach it.⁹⁰

Here we see, most clearly, the way in which the group is constituted as a social body that traverses the living and the dead through sleep and dreams. Earlier El Wardany states that

[w]hat the state of sleep proposes is that there is no individual as distinct from a group, and no group made up of individuals. There are only groups. There are big groups and little groups, human groups regulated by authority, groups which humans share with the dead, and trees. Through the act of sleep, which brings the self out of itself, the sleeper becomes a small, permanently open community, a group without a fixed centre.⁹¹

When we sleep, we are closer to the group and to the dead, and therefore also to the wound which lay at the heart of the constitution of each and every group. Within this framework, the dream is the space in which the sleeper is propelled and in which their body becomes open to others, the group, in particular.⁹²

One of the historical actors in my current book project is a scholar by the name of Sami-Ali (b. 1925), the Arabic translator of Sigmund Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, author of a large body of original psychoanalytic writings, and translator of the poetry of the great Sufi shaykhs. It is significant that Sami-Ali introduced, translated, and personally calligraphed a collection of Sufi poetry by the great Shaykh Husayn ibn Mansur al-Hallaj (d. 922)—Hallaj is especially resonant as the exemplar of a mystical excess that surpasses the unsurpassable in reaching for Truth, but also for bearing the wounds of the martyr and representing the finitude of death alongside resurrection and transfiguration.

Sami-Ali has theorized the space that I have been attempting to describe here through experimental prose, as the imaginary. For Sami-Ali the imaginary was coextensive with subjectivity itself and was more complex than phenomenological theories and more expansive than the restricted category of the imaginary within most psychoanalytic theories.⁹³ Within Sami-Ali’s thought, the imaginary, as the embodiment of psychic life, centers on the dream world—believed to be at the core of human existence—as well as the equivalents of dreaming in waking life—phantasm, reverie, illusion, delirium, hallucination, play, belief, magical thinking, and so forth.⁹⁴ The dream world operates through projection and is itself the template for reality; “reality seems to prolong a dream that is, in turn, a reflection.”⁹⁵

Within this conceptualization, poetry is the quintessential embodiment of the space of the imaginary, representing the meeting point of the visible and the invisible, identity and difference, same and other. Poetry is supremely non-dialectical; it is beyond affirmation and negation. Rather than a totality that synthesizes opposites, it is a totality aimed from the outset at simultaneously grasping contradictory elements, all said in a single breath. It is akin to an instantaneous act that reiterates the semantic oscillation of words with opposite meanings. Everything approaches and recedes, surfaces and sinks, and everything is uttered in the same inspiration.⁹⁶

Metaphorically, there are several ways to imagine this relation between the inside and the outside: as calligraphic letter and sign/signification, reflecting surface and reflected light, and point and circle circumference.⁹⁷ Each poem is a reflecting surface and reflected light: an epiphany of the Unique manifested in verse form:

God makes all the ecstasies of Truth’s ecstatic states,

though great intellects fall short of these.⁹⁸

For Sami-Ali, poetic knowledge represents the mystical intuition of the vision of the heart. Such knowledge operates not through processes of symbolization, but rather through allusions and signs (isharat) that combine the verbal and the visual. That which is said in poetry (le dit poétique) must be surpassed, transcending towards something unsurpassable. Sami-Ali refers to this as a tropism—an allusive sign reaching towards the sun which remains on the horizon that strangely echoes Wittgenstein’s remark: “There is indeed the inexpressible. This shows itself; it is the mystical.”⁹⁹

As such, the allusion is not a symbol but a reality which, having become knowledge, presages Being; it is akin to the martyred Sufi mystic Hallaj’s “out-of-reach sun” toward which mystical knowledge turns (poem: “O my friend! The sun is here! Her light is near, but she is distant to reach”).¹⁰⁰ This heliotropism or tending towards mystical knowledge will entail a transfiguration, simultaneously an annihilation and a union, one that founds mystical knowledge as much as it does poetic inspiration. Poetry is at one with the mystical, states Sami-Ali, insofar as “poetry speaks the unspeakable,” here referencing Octavio Paz.¹⁰¹ It is a tending toward both life and death, creativity and annihilation, an unresolvable spiritual struggle.

In what follows, I draw on Sami-Ali’s theory of Arabic poetics within his theological understanding of the imagination, as one in which poetic utterance is an expression of an ecstatic state (hala), itself a sign and revelation of Being and a mode of witness and testimony (shahada).¹⁰²

Poetry, or the right to life before death

“Is there life before death?” asks a graffiti artist in 1980s Belfast.¹⁰³ Such might be the question on all our minds as we bear witness to the relentless bombardment and siege of Gaza, the evisceration of Palestinian life worlds and the widescale destruction of institutions of learning and creativity, the bombing of places of worship and places of healing, and the catastrophic scale of death and dismemberment.

If, for Sami-Ali, the calligraphy of invention entails a permanent heliotropism towards an out-of-reach sun, then for the supreme poet of our catastrophic times, Etel Adnan, the poetic sublime embodies another kind of heliotropism. Her 1980 magnum opus The Arab Apocalypse is widely heralded as an exemplar of experimental poetry, or alternately, and far more metaphysically in the words of Toufic, as a work of resurrection amidst the withdrawal of tradition past a surpassing disaster.¹⁰⁴ Composed from the time-space of diaspora—a position of extraterritorial vision—it is a text that could not be understood in its time, that had to wait for its time to be invented amidst the seemingly infinite proliferation of the disappeared and the vanquished.¹⁰⁵ The Arab Apocalypse seems to me to best embody El Wardany’s discussion of a form of life that “does not seek to bring ease to this wound buried in the heart of every group. It wants only to approach it.”¹⁰⁶ How better to approach this wound than through hallucinatory poetic reverie?

In her poem, we see that the sun functions as a contranymic cipher or glyph. The sun both appears and disappears; it is scorching and a shroud. It is a tending towards the sun of the apocalypse and a fiery death, and a tending towards the night of resurrection and eternal life.¹⁰⁷ The sun is a paradise towards which the refugee is walking, a paradise that ends in fire, that incarnates in flesh, that liquefies brains.¹⁰⁸ A bloodstained sun that presides over prisons.¹⁰⁹ And so too the sun appears as a camera, recording the massacre of Tal al-Zaʿatar for the archives.¹¹⁰ This sun, born from antimatter in the face of the fidaʿi’s stillborn cause,¹¹¹ has no purpose other than being a shroud to commemorate or to remember Palestinian death.¹¹²

L from The Arab Apocalypse

There have been pounds and pounds of decomposed flesh    tons of suffering

Millions of dollars of pain    tons of crushed flesh

There have been mountains of corpses and rivers of blood

Bags filled with bones    baskets filled with eyes    bowls filled with lymph

There have been meadows covered with human skin under the Arabian moon

Millions of dollars of hatred and tons of sorrow

There have been yellow shells over the mourning of disemboweled houses

Tons of despair and gigantic rivers filled      with our collective tears¹¹³

But then, Etel Adnan writes, through a miraculous transmogrification, the sun, burning itself up in an apocalyptic passionate rage, born of antimatter, becomes the matter-spirit of the night of eternal love.

LIX from The Arab Apocalypse

When the sun will run its ultimate road

fire will devour beasts plants and stones

fire will devour the fire and its perfect circle

when the perfect circle will catch fire no angel will manifest itself STOP

the sun will extinguish the gods the angels and men

and it will extinguish itself in the midst of its daughters

Matter-Spirit will become the NIGHT

in the night in the night we shall find knowledge love and peace¹¹⁴

Adnan’s recourse to nonhuman time—the time of the sun and its extinguishment—as the perspective from which to understand both the catastrophe and the possibility of resurrection might be understood as a disclosure of divine witnessing.¹¹⁵

In another elegy for the dead, and two of her final poems, the Palestinian poet and novelist Heba Abu Nada, killed by an Israeli airstrike in Khan Yunis, Gaza on 20 October, swathes the departed in her poetry, well aware that she will soon be one of them.¹¹⁶ Abu Nada envelops the “spirits of unburied dead” “keeping time to the rhythm of her grief”—a rhythmic lament that can “swaddle … flesh,” “protect[ing] it from decay,”¹¹⁷ expanding and illuminating the grave of the barzakh or isthmus between this world and the next.¹¹⁸ In the fifth and final stanza of her 10 October poem, “I Grant You Refuge,” beautifully translated by Huda Fakhreddine, she writes,

I grant you refuge

from hurt and suffering.

With words of sacred scripture

I shield the oranges from the sting of phosphorous

and the shades of cloud from the smog.

I grant you refuge in knowing

that the dust will clear,

and they who fell in love and died together

will one day laugh.¹¹⁹

With ṣumud she imagines her own death, alongside that of the little ones upon whom she poetically bestows a “a death as beautiful as they are,” in an angle of lucidity that can only come from the contemplation of one’s own disappearance.¹²⁰

And yet such a disappearance is redolent with the knowledge that “amidst the ruins, a new city emerges.”¹²¹ Such an emergence is located, in the words of Palestinian artists Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abourahme, in the fault lines, the trace, the shadows that remain, the buried echo:

To dig in the earth

To dig with your hands

To go under

into earth

to become the land¹²²

The land will testify, bearing witness to resistant sociality in its infinite mutations.¹²³

* * *

If this lecture has turned to theology and poetry, it is not only as provocations to the discipline of history, but also because they embody modes of collective sociality that exceed the violent logics of colonial epistemes and modern state forms.¹²⁴ Here I am reminded of Talal Asad’s prescient distinction between disaster time and the time of learning to face disaster:

But anticipating the probability of disaster is not the same as understanding its moral significance. Disaster time is not the time of learning to face disaster; that is one major reason why ritual time and the time of discursive tradition (both of them times of learning) may be undermined, and why that undermining is itself an aspect of the great disaster.¹²⁵

In these times of infinite war and death, as we struggle to grasp the ethical significance of catastrophe, theology and poetry may offer avenues, among others, from which to learn how to encircle the inherent unknowability of the disaster.