Workshop
How to Build a Grass Hut; 5-Session Workshop with Latif Askia Ba
In the last 19 months we witnessed innumerable scenes of Israeli soldiers enjoying themselves on invaded land; dancing, cheering, desecrating homes and places of worship, parading in found underwear, playing back drone footage of live mass detonations, setting up seating areas to watch the bombing of Gaza from the hills of the settlements and towns of the Gaza envelope. What are the psychoanalytic concepts that can help us read these acts and images? How can blocking the enjoyment of the other take the form of killing, maiming, lynching? What is the (racist, nationalist) fantasy that makes me see the other as an obstacle to my enjoyment? The more rational and moral the (AI production) of a “target factory” of proportional and legitimate targets wants to appear, the more we see its underside horror as an irrational killing machine, even as a champs contre champs. To think about these repetitions, we illuminate why the injunction to enjoy pertains to Law in its various ways as liberal organiser of libido and interests; as maintainer of peace in market economy; as primary psychic marker of civilization; as core to subjectivity via the encounter with the signifier, etc. We wonder about the ways in which enjoyment serves the superego injunctions to obey and to force the enjoyment of that obedience to the point of obscenity in eliminating the other. If every “wherever there is society, there is law” includes going over and above the call of law and duty thanks to phenomena such as repressive desublimation, then enjoyment of obedience and transgression can become depraved. Soldiers embody and reproduce the violence that emerges from Law, and helps us think the potential for sadism at the heart of enjoying your moral duty. At multiple registers of Law, we probe these points in relation to the acts of systemic destruction and celebration by the IOF in Gaza and south Lebanon.
Some readings will be assigned and the session will be a combination of lecture, reading and seminar discussion. Capped at 30.
