Feeling Liberated: A Meditation on Jodi Dean's Essay "Palestine Speaks For Everyone"
Affective policing is a dominant form of political repression in the United States, so what does it mean to condemn Hamas?
My first impression of Oct 7th was not informed by news reports, not videos, not personal testimony, not punditry, but poetry. On social media, Geo Maher shared the poem “If We Must Die” by Jamaican-American poet Claude McKay, captioned with a Palestinian flag.
If We Must Die
If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursèd lot.
If we must die, O let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
O kinsmen! we must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!
The sentiment is courageous but tragic. It calls upon the reader to stand tall and never admit defeat, never give up our dignity, whatever the odds, and whatever the cost. I did not know what was happening in Gaza, but I understood that Palestinians had once again raised their fists to fight back, and that they would suffer horribly for it.
I passed the message along, and it was not well received. Did I know what Hamas had done? Would I stand for the killing and kidnapping of civilians? I was not prepared for these questions, and I responded in the way that most of the left has responded in the weeks and months since Oct 7, with a knee-jerk condemnation of Hamas, an organization that I knew very little about beyond its Islamist political ideology and its leading role in the attack.
If my first impression of October 7th had been informed by Norman Finkelstein’s analogy to the Nat Turner rebellion, I may have responded differently. Finkelstein argued that Nat Turner had risen up against an unjust and immoral institution and that his rebellion involved the slaughter of women, children, and babies. Should Nat Turner be condemned for this atrocity? Finkelstein turned to Williams Lloyd Garrison for his answer. Garrison’s response to the rebellion was, essentially, I told you so. The abolitionists believed that evil was the necessary result of the unnatural and evil institution of slavery, and if the slaveholders did not heed this warning, they would suffer the consequences. By the same token, Finkelstein admitted that an atrocity had occurred, but he refused to condemn Hamas.
Had my first impression of Oct 7th been formed by reading Jodi Dean’s essay, “Palestine speaks for everyone,” I may have again responded differently. Like Finkelstein, Dean refused to condemn Hamas, and moreover, she has argued that this refusal is a basic condition of comradeship. Dean argues that by condemning Hamas, “the widely acknowledged and accepted leader of the struggle for a free Palestine,” left intellectuals “take a side against the Palestinian revolution, giving a progressive face to the repression of the Palestinian political project, and betraying the anti-imperialist aspirations of a previous generation.”
Those who condemn Hamas, says Dean, have taken a side against Palestinian liberation. Thus, Dean not only offers us her judgment as a means for informing our own, like Finkelstein does; she also asserts a political division between friends and enemies that nobody can ignore. Finkelstein asks us, are you a good person? Dean asks us, are you with me or against me? The questions rhyme, but they are not the same. Finkelstein’s argument interests me as a case of moral reasoning. I can face it abstractly, compare my intuitions, and work through the implications. Dean’s argument confronts me with a challenge, and it strikes me as both political and deeply personal, as a question of belonging to the communist movement.
The differences in approach are reflected in the emotional tone and range provided by Finkelstein’s analogy and Dean’s essay. The affect of Finkelstein’s analogy is at turns cautious and haughty, blending muted scholarly distance at one moment with righteous anger at the next. Finkelstein assumes the point of view of Garrison, which suggests that he sees Garrison as a rough approximation of his own position in relation to Hamas. It is significant, then, that Garrison was not seeking liberation for himself. He stands in the position of the analyst, the judge, or the witness, but not the participant. Now consider again the title of Dean’s essay: “Palestine speaks for everyone.” In a twist on Finkelstein’s analogy, we are not now inhabiting Garrison’s icy rebuke but Turner’s fiery revenge. With Dean, we stand among the oppressed, the slaves marveling at Turner’s bravery, or heeding his call to join the rebellion and turn the world upside down. Dean looks at the rebellion and says, the resistance fighters have done this for us, and we must become worthy of it. Finkelstein offers apologia, Dean offers a call to arms.
The clarity of the question and the stridency of the emotional tone are what set Dean’s essay apart from everything else I’ve read on the war. It just feels different. Dean isn’t ashamed to feel energized by armed resistance. On the contrary, she insists that these are the appropriate feelings for people on our side of the line. Those who don’t feel this way are the enemy, or they have been effectively contained by the policing of appropriate emotion:
“Policing affect is part of the political struggle. Anything that ignites the feeling that the oppressed will break free, that occupations and blockades will end, must be extinguished. Imperialists and Zionists reduce October 7 to a list of horrors not simply to block from view the history and reality of colonialism, occupation, and siege. They do it to prevent the gap of the disruption from producing the subject that caused it.”
Here it is important to be specific about the claim that Dean is making. She clarifies that “Hamas wasn’t the subject of the October 7 action; it was an agent hoping that the subject would emerge as an effect of its action, the latest instantiation of the Palestinian revolution.” The “policing of affect” is not so much about our feelings toward Hamas; rather, it is about containing the feeling of openness, of revolutionary possibility. On this view, the significance of October 7 is its frontal attack on the feeling of despair among the Palestinian people, and all of us by extension. Millions of Gazans who yesterday dreamt only of “food security and open crossings” are confined to refugee camps and scavenging for their next meal today, but they are dreaming of victory. Millions more who had given up on Palestine have returned to the streets, declaring that “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”