Marco and Perla’s request to participate in this table occurred during the terrible days we all experienced last May, days in which cannons roared and words lost of their value due to those terrible sights that we all witnessed, an outbreak of war and violent conflicts between Jews and Arabs in the country, events of unrestrained violence by groups from both sides that imposed their mastery over the public domain. With the distress that I felt, and a sense of threat due to the abyss toward which our lives here might plunge, I replied yes. Yes to my colleagues’ request, colleagues with which I share an interest that crosses, from my perspective, all divisions relying on our origins and the background that the contingent destined to each and every one of us to be born into. An interest in the field of psychoanalysis, a field of exile from the mass and the universal, a field of alienation to ourselves, which is at the core of the most intimate experience of each and every one of us in meeting with the stranger within, with the unconscious. At first, the title that Marco offered for this evening seemed to me enigmatic and strange. It posited a question for me regarding how to approach it. How can you discuss the unconscious and relate it to democracy, a model of social political organization regarding civil life, whereas discussing the unconscious is usually about the experience and life of a single person. I found a direction that made this title accessible by reading Miller courageous act in his presentation of the Turin theory, during the establishment of the Italian school of psychoanalysis. In this presentation, and not without some worries that “stones were going to be thrown” at him, he proposed a theory of a subject of the school. He proposed an existence of the unconscious regarding the school. An unconscious that is instilled in this collective form called school, an unconscious that is composed of individuals or the subjective loneliness of subjects who partake in the school and are members of it. Miller designed this development starting with Lacan’s reading of Freud’s “Group Psychology”, which teaches us that “the collective is nothing but the subject of the individual”. In Miller’s concise reading of “Group Psychology”, he provided a logic to the collective form of the school that is different from the logic at the base of the psychology of the group that Freud analyzes in his book, in which the collective is composed of a multiplicity of individuals that take as their ego-ideal the same object, an ideal that is posited as the common denominator of the ego for a number of individuals. As we learn from Freud, the group is made of emotional ties through identification on two axes: the vertical, that relates to the ideal that connects the members through the ties of individuals to the ideal, and the horizontal, that relates to the connection of group members through the belief that “we are all equal”, that we are all brothers. Psychoanalysis is the field of strangeness and alienation in relation to the ideal, it is a field of a cause that aims at the absolute difference of the individual from the others, the field of the loneliness of those who do not have a group. This is where Miller proposes the paradoxical logic of the school as a field of a group of those who do not have a group, of different ‘subjective lonelinesses’ with the alienation of each and every one of them from the ideal. In a group based on a logic such as this, the connection between the members is the difference between them, it is a connection that is based on multiplicity and not on the similarity between members, their attachment to the One or their identification with it. National groups are constructed according to the model of the “Group Psychology” due to identification with a mutual ideal, and so is the case with Israel. According to the Zionist ideal, the state that was supposed to be was intended to populate the diaspora of the Jewish people along with its multiplicity of cultures, languages and differences, as all fall under the national ideal of a Jewish state. This ideal of a Jewish state, who embraced a democratic order to organize its civil life, has many issues with great tension that are not easy to untangle. Symptomatic in a special way and on the dimension of the impossible to untangle, that of the attempt to include under the same ideal the Palestinian Arab population in Israel. I shall focus on this specific point, on the impossible of Israeli democracy. since it relates to me personally, and since my life is interweaved with the Israeli domain, as long as it continues to be so, and thus it is affected by the consequences of this political situation. It is possible to see the outbreak of latest events as an expression of this impossibility of tension that exists between the state, as a Jewish state, and its democracy. The national Palestinian group in Israel, which historically belongs to the Palestinian people, obviously cannot and will not be included under the Jewish signifier of the state, and due to the definition of the state as Jewish, obviously the democratic signifier cannot be valid for it. The very definition of the state as Jewish excludes it from the collective, and naturally discriminate it as a civil group by providing superiority and priority to he who is defined as Jewish in comparison with he who is not Jewish, a priority to everyone who falls under this name in comparison to everyone who does not or cannot be subjected to this group and its ideal. The Nation-State Law provides a legal validity to this aspect of discrimination and superiority by providing privileges to the Jewish national group over the Arab citizens in the country. The fact of the continuous existence of the conflict between the Palestinian and the Jewish people over land does not eases, and obviously intensifies the symptoms of this tension and the problematic of its untangling and/or dealing with it for what is called Israeli democracy. To me it seems that dealing with this tension of Israeli democracy cannot reach a solution, as long as the conflict between the two populaces will not find a turn in direction. A turn that will destine the two populaces with a different fate in life regarding their presence in this place, which is different from the horrible repetition of a continuous war for existence between them, with aspects of religious zeal, as Freud predict in his letter to Chaim Koffler, the head of the Keren HaYesod in Vienna. Koffler asked Freud for a letter of support in the Jewish settlement in the country, due to the terrible events that occurred in 1929, which were similar in nature to the events in the latest period. Freud, who never denied his Jewish heritage, and might have even showed some understanding in relation to the Zionist wish to establish a place in which all Jews could come together, politely refused the request, with the appropriate distancing he maintained from national ideals and myths, and noted that it doesn’t seem that the wish to establish a state for Jews is possible in a location that is so loaded with historical and religious significance. Ever since that letter, the real of life imposed the existence of Israel here, and the terrible aim of the organized annihilation of the Jews by the Nazis accelerated the impossible process and turned Israel into an established fact. This situation imposed over the Palestinians to bear the results of this well-organized crime that was carried out in Europe. Therefore, since we have to bear the results of this history, a question arises: can psychoanalysis provide us with a better advice or contribution, to provide a direction to for untangling the tension between these two populaces who fight over the ownership of a land, and for dealing with the complex situation created in Israel due to this? A direction other than the fate of a repetition in the form of wars that aim at winning the game or imposing one side’s mastery and ideals over the other. Unlike other therapeutic practices, when it comes to the symptom psychoanalysis offers a different relation with a unique ethical position, one that does not strive to making the symptom disappear, or annihilate it under the effort of fixing it. Psychoanalysis offers another route for the subject, the direction of reconciliation with the impossible jouissance anchored in the symptom, and finally to know how to do with it. This is an ethic that goes in the opposing way of defeating it. This ethic relies on the logic of the unconscious, in which contradiction can co-exist and the question of the subject regarding this fact is – how to do with this. In my point of view, the path of reconciliation, at which the analítica.

My work is directed, is the only possible path in order to deal with the complex political situation with which we live. My opinion is that without such a reconciliation with the presence of the other populace, with its difference, there will not be an unfolding of the path toward knowing how to do with the symptoms derived from the fact of a mutual life under the same sky. Can such a path exist for us, in this country? A path that will be paved by the drives of eros, and not by the death drives? My hope is that it will be possible, but only the coming days will tell.

 

Khalil Sbeit is psychologist and psychoanalist, he lives in Haifa.

Member of the New Lacanian School, founder and director of “Pequeño Hans”, Arab – Hebreo treatment Center in Haifa.

 

*Text presented in the panel «Democracy and ( its) unconscious». Activity organized as part of the annual “Night of philosophy», in Tel Aviv by the French Consulate.