VENICE AFTER GAZA

Ricky Varghese

“So much of what happens in psychoanalysis depends on the jaw and its capacity to render speech possible. Without the use of our jaws, we could not speak pleasure and pain – our phantasies and fantasies – into existence in an analytic session.”

A scold is a form of speech act. This, however, is intended to be a meditation, not a scold. Unless, of course, some readers have a fetish for the scold; then, in a certain register, this could indeed be felt as a scold. Then again, for some, perhaps withholding a scold makes it all the more pleasurable. Perhaps, what is pleasurable is what works against pleasure, what ensures the state of some “thing” being withheld from them by another. What feels pleasurable, in this regard, is also what gives an equal measure of pain.

A scold is only a scold if it is intended as such; if, in the speaking of it into existence, the one who pronounced it infuses it with the sheer force of their rebuke. More importantly, a scold could only be considered a scold if the one it is directed at, the one it interpellates into action or hails into being, feels it as such. Simply put, it has to be felt: simultaneously felt as both affective and effective in nature. A scold is a speech that acts somewhere in the nexus between pleasure and pain. Otherwise, it exists simply as a gesture made into a void, null and empty. But, to reiterate, this is not a scold (per se). This intends to be a meditation, a set of observations at best, a series of movements between the violence of pleasure and the existence of its other, pain.

A First Movement: Images and Their Discontents
Was the philosopher Walter Benjamin a soothsayer when he suggested this of the angel of history in Paul Klee’s famous monoprint Angelus Novus (1920)?: “[where] we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.”¹ Writing at the turn of the 20th century, on the very eve of the birth of modern capitalism, was he foretelling our current era of dizzying hypermediation? Is the single catastrophe he refers to the catastrophe of our mediated existence? Is the “piling wreckage” merely the mountain of images we are to negotiate each day to make sense of the world around us and our place in it? Is each image we scroll through a missed opportunity in need of address?

Even in the best of times and at its ostensibly most democratic, the algorithm is, at its heart, a network of uncontained affects. The nature of contemporary life is such that it appears as though it's founded by the cult of an almost unforgiving frenzy of mediation. Being jolted, at breakneck speed, between images from this year’s Venice Biennale shared by the cosmopolitan elite and images from the ground zero of an ongoing genocide, we are no longer entirely sure what we are looking at, or what we are being asked to look at. Theodor Adorno said that it was barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz; he did not, however, say that it was impossible. Perhaps, we have to ask what makes poetry (or art) even possible anymore in the context of so much calamity? What makes images possible (or implausible) in the context of a genocide? What makes both pleasure and pain almost mandated, in a manner of speaking, in this ultra-contemporary age of feverish technological reproduction? All of this feels like it’s enough to produce a most egregious kind of visual whiplash.

In this hypermediated present, as the British psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas has noted, “[it] is as if contemporary selves live several steps removed from engagement in the real – retreating from the unmediated due to anxieties about life outside its gated communities – seeking ironic sanctuary in the technology of mediation…the new role of the self [is] as a transmitter of information, via Twitter or Facebook…iPhones and other such technical devices are transmissive objects, prosthetic parts of the contemporary self.”² If it’s not images of art from Venice, it’s images from the most recent show’n’tell for the mega rich that is the Met Gala in New York, or the n-th set of images of Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce, papped over and over again for “our” pleasure, as they play out their romantic conglomeration for the world to see. Aside from the unfathomable volume, the sheer diversity of the images we are bearing witness to presents us with a grotesque ethical quandary.

What are we supposed to look at? What is it that we are being made to look at, such that we are forced to look away from other things? It is not that we don’t have agency in our “looking away.” Certainly we can mute items, apply filters to what our eyes may be visited with. Still, there are limits. Looking and looking away are choices, for all intents and purposes, even when we feel moments of helplessness in and against this time of image overload. What pleasure is being enforced on us in order to avert both our individual and collective gazes from the obvious signs of pain around us? What does it mean to contend with an overflow of often radically contradictory images? Both pleasure and pain become prosthetically mediated, as though they exist beyond us in some ether that is virtually organized around some notion of the real. These categories are extended beyond us, causing us to further retreat from each other, causing a kind of anti-sociality under the guise of relationality.

Scrolling through such a plethora of unrelated images, bouncing from one app to another, from one news item to another, sharing one item after another on our feeds, this very tendency of sharing appears to stand in for a sense of community or connectedness. In one flick of an opposable thumb or prosthesis, it feels both parasocial and parasitic. Elsewhere I had already suggested that “[what] is being shared, it would appear, feels as though it is being shared for the sake of sharing, as though sharing has become the very measure of a sense of the good as it prevails in the public sphere. Sharing…assumes a democracy of affects bolstered by the presumption that all affects exist and circulate paradigmatically along similar lines or on equal footing.”³ This last point, for reasons that are obvious, is an incorrect assessment. Venice and Gaza are not the same.

What does it signify, then, for an image from Venice to come after an image from Gaza, and still yet another image from Venice and so on and so forth? Can the frame hold these images in tandem? Must they be held in tandem? What does it mean to watch (and share) in horror the tussle of contradictory images, existing in the bi-polar (not in a clinical sense, per se) ether of the technological present? What does it mean for us to have to “hold space” for both the pleasurable and the detestable? The answers to these questions can’t simply be reduced to the immediacy of the pleasure of scolding another for doing or not doing the right thing online. These answers feel as difficult to discern as what we are supposed to feel as we scroll, appearing to be aimlessly lost in thought, as though our very thoughts are themselves lost somewhere else, not here.

A Second Movement: Speech Impossible
“At the risk of sounding vulgar…there’s nothing in this world I enjoy more than sucking cock…,” an erstwhile patient declared, a few years back, as they laid there on my analytic couch. They said this with, what felt like, an equal measure of both excitement and tentativeness, and then paused. “This is a scold-free space…it might not always be a safe space, as in the emotional work we do is challenging and, at times, difficult, but it can be done free of judgment,” I reassured them. The psychoanalyst’s office is indeed supposed to be “scold-free,” perhaps the only place in the world where you could quite literally say anything you wanted, even the most vulgar things that come to your mind, no matter how one defines vulgarity.

It’s true. Adam Phillips famously quipped, “Psychoanalysis is about what two people can say to each other if they agree not to have sex.”⁴ Psychoanalysis lays claim to the notion that it is only in its seemingly sacrosanct realm that any and all things can be said, that speech may be possible on any and all topics both internal and external to the patient’s psychical life. Speech, in its unadulterated, free-wheeling form is the purview of this therapeutic approach and taking heed of this notion, most, if not all (I would hope!), psychoanalysts invite their patients to speak freely and openly about what moves them to speak and to act. In a manner of speaking, psychoanalysis gives form to both pleasure and pain in the act of speaking freely, speaking for the very sake of unburdening oneself through the very act of speaking.

My patient made their apprehensive declaration during a session that took place after a weekend that found them busily engaging in a series of sexual activities. Their penchant for fellatio had been so activated the day before our session that it left them somewhat bruised, as they claimed, and unable to speak easily. The statement that my patient made was the reason they gave for the unusual silence with which they started our session. Unable to speak at first, but unsure as to what could be said at all, they laid there quietly for what felt like a small eternity. After they made their object of enjoyment known to me, I encouraged them to speak more, as best as they could, on why they enjoyed the pleasures of “sucking cock.” This is what they said:

I’m not sure… everything about it feels so satisfying, so satiating… I like how hard I can make someone… I like to think I’m indiscriminate, but perhaps I’m a size queen… the bigger the better, I think… I like how it makes me feel like I am in control… how I determine what happens or doesn’t. It feels risky and yet I know it’s not… it feels so natural to me… the most natural thing for me to do. I like how it feels in my mouth… how big it becomes and fills up my whole mouth. I like how it hits the back of my mouth and the back of my throat. I like the smell, the taste… the feel… I feel filled up when it happens. There’s no feeling quite like it. There’s a porn series that I like to watch every now and then called “Gag the Fag”… where oral bottoms have their mouths used to the point of ad nauseam… to the point that their eyes start to water and their nose starts to run… to the point where it looks like their jaws hurt so much… like their jaws might get locked or even break… I like how it makes my jaw feel after… raw, used, pushed to the absolute limit of what it is capable of… it’s unbelievable, the feeling in my jaw…

For someone who claimed they couldn’t speak easily due to the previous day’s events, my patient had an unusual amount of things to say about what aroused them and an uncanny way of describing this pleasure. After our session ended, I found myself returning to this word “jaw,” thinking almost obsessively about it. I was reminded of this session and my patient’s use of the word “jaw” when, recently, I read a stunning short essay by Rivka Galchen titled “Freud’s Dogs.” Aside from describing in detail Freud’s relationship with his various dogs and their role in his analytic office, the essay also tells the story of how his affection for canines developed much later in life, shortly after he was diagnosed with cancer of the jaw.

So much of what happens in psychoanalysis depends on the jaw and its capacity to render speech possible. Without the use of our jaws, we could not speak pleasure and pain – our phantasies and fantasies – into existence in an analytic session. Without our jaws, we could not speak truth to power, our truths into verbal being. I thought of Freud’s own jaw. Here you have the father of psychoanalysis, the talk-therapeutic modality par excellence, rendered relatively mute toward the end of his life and finding an inexplicable sort of comfort and communion with his various dogs, “nonverbal creatures…who clearly had the most meaningful things not to say.” It was as though in his final days Freud finally realized, through the solace he received from his canine companions, that there is as much power in the unsaid as there is in the said. In a way, this very realization became manifest for me when it took nearly twenty years of my own analysis and seeing the word “jaw” in plain text, in Galchen’s essay, to recognize a connection between Freud and myself.

In describing what Galchen outlined to my analyst, Dr. L, I found myself getting emotional on her couch. I freely associated, “He died, a Jew in exile, suffering from agonizing pain caused by jaw cancer…the father of talk therapy toward the end of his life couldn’t even speak properly…it’s uncanny, isn’t it? Only a vowel distinguishes the words ‘Jew’ and ‘jaw’… seeing that word ‘jaw’ written down…seeing it appear there in that essay three times (I counted!) did something to me…” For the first time in almost two decades of being in analysis, something had become dislodged in me, creating a pain of realization that felt almost wildly pleasurable.

“For the first time in almost two decades of being in analysis, something had become dislodged in me, creating a pain of realization that felt almost wildly pleasurable.”

I was born with a congenital condition known as cystic hygroma which affects my jaw, mouth, and chin areas, and, by extension, my speech somewhat. Imagine being a purveyor of talk therapy with even the slightest appearance of a speech impediment! As Freud spent the last sixteen years or so of his life under the knife to address his cancer of the jaw, I spent the first sixteen of mine under the knife attempting to address something that could never fully be addressed or corrected despite every attempt made by my parents and an army of doctors to do so. Though cystic hygroma is the furthest thing from jaw cancer, an associative line felt as though it could now be drawn between him and I for the first time.

“It feels so hokey to say this…I find this sort of relatability so corny and disingenuous…so parasocial when people speak of how celebrities are ‘just like us…’,” I told Dr. L. She knew I was being dismissive of something more significant here that spoke to my interiority and so responded quickly, “…but hold on… it took you almost twenty years to finally recognize this connection between you and Freud… I would say that this is something more unconscious than conscious...” This is true. For years, I had been familiar with the details of Freud’s painful battle with cancer – of the numerous surgeries he had had to endure, of the prosthesis he had had to use, of how his speech had become so severely impeded by this device, of how unbearably painful and despondent his life had become toward the end, so much so that he chose “to exit the world in peace” through the administration of a lethal dose of morphine. Still, it was only after seeing the word “jaw” inscribed in Galchen’s piece, which reminded me of my patient and the pleasures he claimed he received through the site of the jaw, that I felt something acutely, almost like a figurative punch to the jaw itself, about a line, as unconscious as it was, that drew me to Freud, to psychoanalysis, and to becoming an analyst myself.

“In a sense, psychoanalysis is always about pleasure and its constant undoing, almost like a scold you keep searching for, for yourself, but also finding pleasure in the scold, in the realizations that come to the surface…,” I observed in my session. You follow lines of thought – perhaps, even flights of fancy – and you arrive somewhere you least expected to, where something in you gets moved or when you are ready to be moved. The phrase “subject supposed to know” has substantial currency in analytic parlance. It is a reference to the analyst as the figure in the analytic frame with all the knowledge. This is the fantasy that the patient attributes to the analyst and that the analyst must disabuse the patient of overtime, in turn facilitating the process of having the patient see themselves for what they really are: the holder of knowledge.

Perhaps my erstwhile patient wanted me to scold them for their desire, admonish and judge them for what gave them pleasure. Perhaps anticipating the scold was what they would garner pleasure from. Perhaps withholding it, withholding judgment wasn’t what they expected. This being said, in hindsight, perhaps the session gave me something that I didn’t expect either. Knowledge – about ourselves, about the world we inhabit – is supposed to offer us pleasure. It does do that, to an extent, but it also presents us with its obverse. While analysis is always about the patient arriving at a certain set of truths about themselves, what happens when it provides an undoing for the analyst as well? Sometimes, all it takes is a word, a seemingly throw-away word, to leave us undone and make other words, or speech (and its pleasures) itself, impossible.

A Third Movement: Can Fire Speak?
One would be justified in reading Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s field-defining essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” as one giant unapologetic scold against eurocentric thought. My training as a psychoanalyst has led me to always read the question that forms the title of her essay as a thoroughly psychoanalytic one. For me, this question is as much about who it might be that is the imagined listener as it is about the subaltern’s (or other’s) speech. The pleasures of “speaking truth to power” can only be operationalized if power listens and has the epistemological humility to acknowledge the truth of what has been stated. Another way to ask the famous question would be, who, if anyone, is listening to (or hearing) the other’s speech?

In order to systematically outline her argument, Spivak famously used the case of sati, the ancient Hindu practice of widow immolation, as an example of how women’s subjectivity and voices were unaccounted for in addressing the matter of bride-burning at the turn of the century in colonial India. She positions the figure of the Indian (read: Hindu and upper caste) woman between two patriarchies: one that defended the practice from the nativist theological perspective and the other that challenged its perceived antiquatedness from the stodgy British imperial stance. She reads into the suicide of Bhuvaneshwari Bhaduri, a distant relative of hers, as an alternative “interventionist” act that pushes back against the two competing patriarchal systems.

As Spivak describes it, Bhaduri, a Kolkata-based activist in the Indian independence struggle, was charged with undertaking a political assassination. For reasons that still remain a mystery to this day, Bhaduri refused the task assigned to her. Rather than return to her activist fold having failed to complete her mission, she took her own life. She was thoughtful, in Spivak’s reading of the scene, in how she staged her own death. The order of the day was such that if a young woman, as yet unmarried, took her own life, it was presumed that she did so because of an “illicit” affair which left her pregnant. Bhaduri, instead, ensured that she was menstruating at the time of her death in order to challenge the notion that she took her life as a result of a failed romantic tryst. In doing so, Spivak observes that Bhaduri brushed up against the notion that a woman’s body was the purview of the patriarchal systems that shaped her destiny. Here the body speaks, as a literal image, what could not be rendered into words.

In an era where we find ourselves subjected to interminable speech in the form of near-neurotic mediation, what does any speech, be it literal or figurative, mean anymore? Does speech – speaking truth to power – have any valence in this current atmosphere of conflicting agonisms? Does speech give us any pleasure in the political sense (anymore)? And, what of silence, the other side (not its obverse, though!) of speech? I say, not its obverse, because, as Spivak’s Bhaduri shows us, silence has its own particularly voluminous pitch. Neither speech nor silence are neutral categories, but both exist without guarantees in how they may be read. The death of Aaron Bushnell by self-immolation shows us this.

On February 25th, 2024, nearly five months into Israel’s ongoing assault on the population of Gaza, Aaron Bushnell, an American soldier, set himself on fire in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C. He did so in what he claimed to be an “extreme act of protest” against “what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers.” He livestreamed the act on Twitch and as he burned, his last words were “Free Palestine!” Not having the space to go into a detailed delineation of the long history of self-immolation as a radical act of protest and knowing that there are those better versed in this history than myself, my attention, as I conclude this series of movements, is to think with the silent speech that fire makes possible.

In the immediate aftermath of his speech act, the experts and pundits on both sides of the political spectrum weighed in, not missing a beat, on their interpretation of the event. Some hailed it as “a terrible tragedy,” while others described it as a “horrific act of violence.” Some accused Bushnell, a white American man, of taking attention away from the plight of the Palestinians themselves, while others hailed him as a martyr in the ongoing struggle against colonialism and empire. The commentaries, think-pieces, opinion screeds, hot takes, and criticism piled up like wreckage against the backdrop of a violent humanitarian catastrophe. Unlike Bhaduri’s suicide that remained enigmatic until Spivak attempted to deconstruct it into an act of revolutionary self-annihilation, Bushnell’s death was complemented by the words by which he inaugurated his act before setting himself on fire and, as well, by his final words – “Free Palestine!.” Bushnell did not want his act to be misunderstood or misconstrued, despite every effort that was made to do just that after it happened. Beyond his words, fire, in the act of self-immolation, is its own discursive language. It is a speech act, while certainly neither destitute nor depraved, that is desperate to be heard. It had to be felt, as burning, like a scold. The pleasure of speech, speaking truth to power here, became codified as painful speech, a seeming last resort. It was meant to jolt us out of the pleasure of complacency or complicity. Bushnell, like Freud, knew there is as much power in the unsaid as there is in the said. Here, the scold that took the shape and form of fire, like a seemingly wild dream that another world might be possible, is ultimately a sort of wish awaiting fulfillment.

Footnotes:

Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” in Illuminations (Schocken Books: 1968).
Christopher Bollas, “Psychoanalysis in the age of bewilderment: On the return of the oppressed,” The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 96 (2015): 535-551.
Ricky Varghese and Francisco-Fernando Granados, “Mourning and Mediation: On Erika DeFreitas's A Visual Vocabulary for Hands in Mourning,” in Other Places: Reflections on Media Arts in Canada (Toronto: Public Books, 2019), 244.
Leo Bersani and Adam Phillips, Intimacies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).

Ricky Varghese is a psychoanalyst and writer based in Toronto.

Issue 02:
Against Pleasure

Psychoanalysis
Art criticism

THE VERMIN