Desire to Be Known by a Name

An essay from the Refusing Complicity project.

There’s a line I thought Katja Diefenbach wrote but now I can’t find it: “These left officials of sad passions, aren’t they ashamed to be always the ones standing there with too many words?” But I must have misremembered it because it does not appear on Google. Whether my words are too few or too many, I am equally ashamed. While ranking all the feelings in terms of their political utility, I wonder if shame is any more or less useless than love

There is the sense of the genocide having collapsed language. And resuscitated it on new and unfamiliar terms. A zombie language mortgaged to a narrowing horizon. I'm talking English. I’m talking about English. A kind of stagflation. A hollowing out. A torrent of suffering and images of suffering. The smug syntax of professional havers of opinions. For our part, precarious declarations of inevitable victory. I reconsider the ban on the sacred image. Not mine to reconsider. Not my silence. Not silence, though increasingly the living have nothing to say to the dead

Why doubt the power of the written when the ruling class feels literally murdered by phrases? And Zionism began as literature, says Kanafani. First literature, then with tendrils of the wrong dream, infesting the land with a zombie language, cowering in the face of the name of God. Hatred of perpetrators is more important than love of victims. But both. But both. The universe is a machine powered by the forces of love and hate: Empedocles, downtown, Freud

Right after October 7, it seemed momentarily simple to move the world. As the world was already moving. And everything was clear. It was only or at least partly a matter of denouncing decades of encrusted silence. “At the dawn of decolonization, Palestine was colonized” said Eqbal Ahmad registering his astonishment and dismay at history’s tendency to produce anachronism. Chairos, Chiron. Everything was pulverized and polarized by experimental war. And the fascist imposition of universal psychosis. Modernism is a shroud. We had withdrawn from the world. Now we came back to it, stunned if not not not not surprised

Previously proud of our bylines, we ate the late ashes of our punctual achievements. We had once felt somewhat powerful. We thought the world lived by language. We continue to have entire Ph.D.s and childhoods to unlearn. The desire to be known by a name

In 1943 Suzanne Césaire said that surrealism was hope’s tightrope over the abyss of fascism. The inner space of rebellion that keeps alive the outer. The communists disparaged surrealist indiscipline, but only the latter in all of shattered Europe had fully registered the existence of the colony and the so-called primitive’s accurate assessment of imperial art, its emptiness bodied by a chain mail of interlocking rings

I am no longer an intellectual. My favorite artist is Ms. Rachel. Ms. Rachel taught my daughter to sign the word for “more,” bringing her fingers together in supplication. She could already say the word but she signed it too with her two intact hands when she really really wanted it. More. I want more. This was not long before Ms. Rachel became the only living American to believe in public that Palestinians are babies when they’re born. Ms. Rachel’s YouTube videos have been responsible for a global acceleration in children’s language acquisition. I cannot begin to express all the ways this is not a coincidence. It was an act of love for her son, who could not make the right shapes with his mouth. He had yet to force language through the narrow gate of the word. Not even God knows what coincidences mean

The tightrope of our hopes. Apart from these small exceptions, everyone you previously admired at a distance was paid money to spit on the grave of the world. All politics in English is cosplay. If you say so. That’s the impasse and the scandal. It’s always the 1960s and it never will be again. Writers are not laborers in the plain sense of it. More like mosquitoes or raccoons going through the psychic trash. But it’s necessary to find ways to organize surplus life

Read the next essay in the
Refusing Complicity project here.