Fomenting Political Violence: Fantasy, Language, Media, Action [1st ed.] 978-3-319-97504-7, 978-3-319-97505-4

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-xiii
Fomenting Political Violence: An Introduction (Steffen Krüger, Karl Figlio, Barry Richards)....Pages 1-16
‘Fighting for Something Great …’: Intergenerational Constellations and Functions of Self-culturalisation for Adolescents in Migrant Families (Vera King)....Pages 17-36
A Most Brutal and Implacable Superego: Understanding the Pseudo-political Violence of the Islamic State (Barry Richards)....Pages 37-56
Pussy Riot, or the Return of the Repressed in Discourse (Maria Brock)....Pages 57-74
Violence and the Virtual: Right-wing, Anti-asylum Facebook Pages and the Fomenting of Political Violence (Steffen Krüger)....Pages 75-102
Shaping Prejudice? Holocaust Remembrance and the Narrative of German Suffering (Roger Frie)....Pages 103-124
The Rhetorical Satisfactions of Hate Speech (James Martin)....Pages 125-148
Fundamentalism and the Delusional Creation of an Enemy (Karl Figlio)....Pages 149-166
Spatialisation and the Fomenting of Political Violence (Deborah L. S. Wright)....Pages 167-187
Four Monuments and a Funeral: Pathological Mourning and Collective Memory in Contemporary Hungary (Jeffrey Stevenson Murer)....Pages 189-218
Darwin, Freud, and Group Conflict (Jim Hopkins)....Pages 219-252
Back Matter ....Pages 253-260

Citation preview

FOMENTING POLITICAL VIOLENCE FANTASY, LANGUAGE, MEDIA, ACTION STUDIES IN THE PSYCHOSOCIAL

EDITED BY STEFFEN KRÜGER, KARL FIGLIO AND BARRY RICHARDS

Studies in the Psychosocial

Series Editors Stephen Frosh Department of Psychosocial Studies Birkbeck, University of London London, UK Peter Redman Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences The Open University Milton Keynes, UK Wendy Hollway Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences The Open University Milton Keynes, UK

Studies in the Psychosocial seeks to investigate the ways in which psychic and social processes demand to be understood as always implicated in each other, as mutually constitutive, co-produced, or abstracted levels of a single dialectical process. As such it can be understood as an interdisciplinary field in search of transdisciplinary objects of knowledge. Studies in the Psychosocial is also distinguished by its emphasis on affect, the irrational and unconscious processes, often, but not necessarily, understood psychoanalytically. Studies in the Psychosocial aims to foster the development of this field by publishing high quality and innovative monographs and edited collections. The series welcomes submissions from a range of theoretical perspectives and disciplinary orientations, including sociology, social and critical psychology, political science, postcolonial studies, feminist studies, queer studies, management and organization studies, cultural and media studies and psychoanalysis. However, in keeping with the inter- or transdisciplinary character of psychosocial analysis, books in the series will generally pass beyond their points of origin to generate concepts, understandings and forms of investigation that are distinctively psychosocial in character. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14464

Steffen Krüger  •  Karl Figlio Barry Richards Editors

Fomenting Political Violence Fantasy, Language, Media, Action

Editors Steffen Krüger Department of Media and Communication University of Oslo Oslo, Norway Barry Richards Bournemouth University Poole, UK

Karl Figlio Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies University of Essex Colchester, UK

Studies in the Psychosocial ISBN 978-3-319-97504-7    ISBN 978-3-319-97505-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97505-4 Library of Congress Control Number: 2018956326 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2018 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Anette Selmer-Andresen / Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

This book grew from a conference by the same name in 2016 and has been a group effort throughout. We thank our authors whose inspired work and engaged participation made this a smooth and pleasant process. But as usual, when it comes to team play, there are those dexterous, untiring people in the background whose excellent work would not find appreciation if their names weren’t mentioned here. Thus, our thanks go to Deborah C. Stewart and Tom Kugler at the Department for Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies (DPPS), University of Essex, for their fantastic (not in the psychoanalytic sense) help with the 2016 conference. We also thank all conference presenters and other participants who engaged in discussion with us, sharpened our ideas, or changed them entirely. The conference was also enriched by a chamber music trio comprising Katherine Darton, Stina Lyon, and Chris Scobie. The University of Essex graciously hosted the conference. The Faculty of Media and Communication at Bournemouth University, the Department of Media and Communication (IMK) at the University of Oslo and the DPPS at Essex supported us financially. IMK also helped with the book publication. Thanks a lot! Further thanks go to Grace Jackson and Joanna O’Neill at Palgrave Macmillan for guiding us elegantly and surefootedly through the publication process, as well as to the series editors of Studies in the Psychosocial, Stephen Frosh, Wendy Hollway, and Peter Redman, who supported this v

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project from the first. We are also extremely grateful to Jessica Yarin Robinson, who copy-edited the book in a manner that sets new standards of professionalism. And finally, we thank Joanne Brown, Stina Lyon, and Marianne Heggenhougen for putting up with their respective parts of this book’s editorial team on a daily basis.

Contents

 Fomenting Political Violence: An Introduction  1 Steffen Krüger, Karl Figlio, and Barry Richards  ‘Fighting for Something Great …’: Intergenerational Constellations and Functions of Self-culturalisation for Adolescents in Migrant Families 17 Vera King  Most Brutal and Implacable Superego: Understanding the A Pseudo-political Violence of the Islamic State 37 Barry Richards  Pussy Riot, or the Return of the Repressed in Discourse 57 Maria Brock  Violence and the Virtual: Right-wing, Anti-asylum Facebook Pages and the Fomenting of Political Violence 75 Steffen Krüger

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 Shaping Prejudice? Holocaust Remembrance and the Narrative of German Suffering103 Roger Frie  The Rhetorical Satisfactions of Hate Speech125 James Martin  Fundamentalism and the Delusional Creation of an Enemy149 Karl Figlio  Spatialisation and the Fomenting of Political Violence167 Deborah L. S. Wright  Four Monuments and a Funeral: Pathological Mourning and Collective Memory in Contemporary Hungary189 Jeffrey Stevenson Murer  Darwin, Freud, and Group Conflict219 Jim Hopkins Index253

Notes on Contributors

Maria Brock  is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Centre for Baltic and East European Studies (CBEES), Södertörn University, Stockholm. With a BA in Russian Studies (Bristol), an MSc in Social and Cultural Psychology (LSE), and a PhD in Psychosocial studies, she does research into nostalgia and memory culture in ex-socialist/ex-communist states. Karl  Figlio is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Essex, UK. He is a senior member of the Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Association of the British Psychotherapy Foundation and a Clinical Associate of the British Psychoanalytical Society, in private practice. He has published widely on psychoanalysis as a discipline and in relation to other disciplines, most recently on bearing unbearable memory. His book, Remembering as Reparation: Psychoanalysis and Historical Memory (Palgrave 2017), develops themes relevant to his chapter in this book. Roger Frie  is a clinical psychologist and a professor at the Faculty of Education, at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver. His academic work examines the intersection of cultural and personal dimensions in psychological development. He focuses on how human beings develop within social, cultural, historical, and political contexts, and in turn, how they respond to these contexts through situated acts of psychological and political agency. Jim Hopkins  is a Visiting Professor at UCL and Reader Emeritus in Philosophy at King’s College London. He was Kohut Visiting Professor of Social Thought at ix

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the University of Chicago for 2008. His main work has been on psychoanalysis, consciousness, interpretation, and the philosophy of Wittgenstein. Vera King  is head of the Sigmund Freud Institute Frankfurt for psychoanalysis and its cultural applications, as well as professor of sociology and psychoanalytic social psychology at the Goethe University, Frankfurt. She has conducted research into strategies of self-perfection, on migrant identities and disadvantaged families. Steffen Krüger  is a postdoctoral research fellow and lecturer at the Department of Media and Communication, University of Oslo, Norway. He develops critical, psychosocial approaches to media texts and discourses. In his current research project, “Online Interaction Forms,” financed by the Norwegian Research Council (NFR), he analyses forms of online interaction on a variety of platforms – discussion forums and social networking sites. James  Martin  is a professor of politics at the Department of Politics and International Relations at Goldsmiths College, University of London. He is a political theorist with interests in public speech, argument, ideology and discourse and their effects on subjectivity. He is currently working on the topic of ‘hate speech’ and preparing a book on the ‘psychopolitics of speech.’ Jeffrey  Stevenson Murer  is lecturer on collective violence at the School of International Relations, University of St. Andrews. His research explores the psychosocial processes associated with collective and individual identity formation in the context of conflict and through violence. It explores how anxiety can motivate social action, and how perceptions of material change can prompt not only violence but also a profound realignment of the boundaries of identity in the contexts of postcommunist Central and Eastern Europe. Barry Richards  is Professor of Political Psychology at Bournemouth University in the U.K. He has long-standing interests in terrorism and political violence, in social cohesion, and in national identity and nationalisms. His approach to these topics is psychosocial, combining psychoanalytic insights with sociological and political analyses. His current work continues to explore the emotional dynamics of democracy and governance, with security and the sense of safety as key topics. Deborah L. S. Wright  has a degree in Visual Communication from Edinburgh College of Art. Her artistic and academic work have centered on humans’ relationships with their environment. She worked as a supervisor, staff trainer, and

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manager in residential care with people with learning difficulties and mental health issues. She has worked as a Psychotherapist in private practice for eleven years and is currently doing the professional doctorate at the Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Essex.

List of Figures

Spatialisation and the Fomenting of Political Violence Fig. 1 The spatial array of a building as an auxiliary mind introjected as an auxiliary mind, by Wright, D Fig. 2 Marking out spaces and people, by Wright, D Fig. 3 The nave of Westminster Abbey, by Wright, D Fig. 4 The shrine of Edward the Confessor, by Wright, D Fig. 5 Speer’s ‘Cathedral of Light’ (‘Lichtdom’) at Nuremberg, by Wright, D

173 173 177 178 181

Four Monuments and a Funeral: Pathological Mourning and Collective Memory in Contemporary Hungary Fig. 1 Soviet War Memorial, designed and built by Károly Antal in 1946, is dedicated to the fallen soldiers of the Red Army during the Battle of Budapest, by Jeffrey S. Murer 195 Fig. 2 Bust of Admiral Miklós Horthy dedicated in 2013, by Jeffrey S. Murer196 Fig. 3 Monument to the Victims of the German Occupation, designed and built by Péter Párkány Raab, was unveiled in the Spring of 2014, by Jeffrey S. Murer 198 Fig. 4 Shoes on the Danube Bank, conceived and executed by Can Toguay and Gyula Pauer, was installed in 2005, by Jeffrey S. Murer199 Fig. 5 Dialogue instead of double-talk, a protest placard in Szabadság Tér in 2015, by Jeffrey S. Murer 211 xiii

Fomenting Political Violence: An Introduction Steffen Krüger, Karl Figlio, and Barry Richards

Abstract  In this introduction we use a speech by Rodrigo Duterte, the president of the Philippines, as an example with which to explain the psychosocial outlook of the volume. ‘If you had raped three, I will admit it, that’s on me,’ Duterte told soldiers tasked with battling Muslim rebels. We follow the reception of this and others of Duterte’s statements in order to map the theoretical frame laid out by the concepts of fantasy, language, media, and action and offer various interpretations and analyses of the unfolding scenes. Subsequently, we introduce the volume’s chapters with reference to the theoretical frame thus set up. S. Krüger (*) Department of Media and Communication, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway e-mail: [email protected] K. Figlio Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Essex, Colchester, UK e-mail: [email protected] B. Richards Bournemouth University, Poole, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2018 S. Krüger et al. (eds.), Fomenting Political Violence, Studies in the Psychosocial, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97505-4_1

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‘If you had raped three, I will admit it, that’s on me.’ This is what Rodrigo Duterte, president of the Philippines, told soldiers tasked with battling Muslim rebels on the southern Mindanao island, after having declared military rule there in order to fight armed rebel groups (Reuters 2017). Duterte made the remark as a joke in which he contradicted – and practically disavowed – both the pleading and threatening rhetoric that went before it: ‘If you go down, I go down,’ he appealed to the soldiers in his speech, ‘But for this martial law and the consequences of martial law and the ramifications of martial law, I and I alone would be responsible, just do your job I will take care of the rest.’ Subsequently turning to threats, he warned his soldiers: ‘I’ll imprison you myself,’ referring to any soldiers committing violations. It was at this point that he made the joking promise that soldiers would go unpunished for three rapes. Now, this is probably one of the most direct, least euphemistically vested ways of inciting political violence of recent times  – performed publicly, not only in front of soldiers but, via the media coverage of the speech, national and international audiences. In its flabbergasting frankness, it exaggerates and caricatures the tendencies towards impulsiveness and looseness, aggression and transgression, populism and nationalism that combine to weigh in heavily on the structure of feeling (Williams) of the current historical moment. As that, it can serve here as an exemplary case with which to unfold the practices, processes, and dynamics that the chapters in this book seek to shed light upon. In keeping with existing definitions (Bosi and Malthaner 2015; Della Porta 2013), we define political violence as the infliction of physical, psychological, and/or symbolic harm on people and/or things through a variety of means so as to influence wider parts of a given public in order to achieve political goals. However, the word ‘fomenting’ is a decisive qualification here. In its sense of to rouse, stir up, excite, effect, and spread (OED 2018), the term directs our interest in political violence to the seismic contractions, historical movements, and shifts in social, political, and cultural constellations that lay the ground for such violence to emerge. Furthermore, the developmental aspect contained in the term points towards the psychoanalytic/psychodynamic viewpoint that the present volume takes. Such a perspective is oriented towards micro-­ interactions, relational styles, and dynamics between people, and pays

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particular attention to the inter- and intra-subjective dimensions of such dynamics. This can be demonstrated by returning to the example of Duterte’s aside. The jocular, self-contradicting way in which he made this statement opens an ambiguous realm of meaning and non-meaning that activates all the concepts contained in the subtitle of this volume: fantasy, language, media, and action. Into this realm of ambiguity, fantasies can flow from various positions and perspectives. Not only will it have triggered the imaginations of the Philippine soldiers as to who they are, what their task is, and their duties and privileges, but also the wider Philippine population will have been set alight with impressions and ideas concerning their leader and themselves  – let alone the female population on Mindanao thus surrendered to the wills of an army let loose – and finally, also the ‘world stage.’ All who witnessed Duterte’s statement could find dark, brooding meaning here – to be embraced or rejected, rejoiced or feared. Staying with Duterte’s speech, in the kind of martial law to be established on Mindanao, soldiers were to become unbound, relieved, and freed from the constraints of doubt and empathy: ‘My order to the troops is all people who are not authorised by government to carry arms and they resist, kill them, wipe them out,’ Duterte ordered. In other words, the force by which resistance was to be met was to be immeasurably, unchallengeably stronger than the resistance it was to meet. Resistance is not merely to be met and overcome here; rather, it is to be totally ‘wiped out’ so that no trace of it will be found after the soldiers’ work is done. In light of this fantasy of total annihilation, the joke about going free for up to three rapes can no longer be seen as remaining enclosed in the sphere of the ‘as-if.’ Rather, in a situation thus defined, the joke hints at the very plausible circumstance that sexual violence becomes tolerated as a degree of collateral damage to be expected and absorbed (see Wood 2014 for a comprehensive overview of conflict-related sexual violence). Furthermore, the execution of military force and political violence on this imagined scale becomes charged with a sexual dimension itself. Total annihilation presupposes total domination and, accordingly, total subjugation. In this respect, Duterte’s joke is a way of admitting to a grotesque proportionality in the monstruous fantasy of martial law that he imposed.

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Extending this line of thought, it is enlightening to assess the family relations that Duterte constructs between his soldiers and himself, how he as president and military leader binds himself to the soldiers and, in turn, makes the soldiers dependent on him personally. He takes responsibility for and ties his fate to the soldiers’ actions; he threatens to personally punish them for war crimes, but at the same time offers them personal protection from such punishment – he upholds the law but informally suspends it. From the viewpoint of Freudian theory, this creates a precarious situation in which subjects are offered to let their drives (cultivated in military training) run freely by assuring them that this will not only be within the limits of what is approved of by the (externalised) superego but, moreover, welcomed by it as being for its sake (see Kris 1941 for an assessment of Nazi-German home propaganda along those lines). Soldiers are directly bound to the president by ties of love and are made to depend on the president’s quasi-parental authority. After all, should they, by juridical standards, overshoot the mark in the way Duterte suggests and jokingly invites them to, their fate will be in his hands only. In such a paternal context, having the father’s goodwill, blessing, and protection can be expected to have very concrete effects on the soldiers’ actions. Do as I please – which I know will please you too – and I have you covered. This has been the way in which the ground for conflict-related sexual violence was laid in the Philippines in 2017. The circumstance that Mindanao is Duterte’s home island adds a further troublesome familial dimension to the concessions to his soldiers. It is as though Duterte, speaking from the position of connoisseur, makes a perversely cruel, underhand compliment to the women on the island  – as though he gives his soldiers to understand that he himself knows from experience that the women of Mindanao are ‘impossible to resist.’1 Even though Duterte made his career in local politics, having held the office of mayor of Davao City for long stretches of consecutive election periods (1988–1998 and 2001–2009; Batalla 2016), his joke is anything but a product of provinciality or naivety in national, or international politics. To the contrary, with the incident being one in a chain of similar and similarly gruesome ones, he will have been fully aware of the media attention, and even if his remarks should have come to him spontaneously and were made off-script, he will have intuitively anticipated what

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impact they would have. After all, in the case of the rape joke he could already draw from extensive experience with public responses. In 2016, for example, during a string of provocative anti-American statements – one in which he called US President Barack Obama a ‘son of a bitch’ – his approval ratings kept at an unambiguously positive 86 percent (Batalla 2016, p. 180). Against the insight that it apparently pays nationally to show an aggressive disregard to the sentiments of international onlookers, especially as concerns the US as the Philippines’ former colonial power, Duterte could expect that the shocked responses from international news outlets would only strengthen his standing with substantial parts of the Philippine population, who – similar to the relationship his soldiers were offered in the speech – embrace him as a strong, uncompromising, and charismatic leader. Indeed, his rape joke could be expected to resound positively and impress as a token of radical independence from and disregard for an intellectual, globally oriented, liberal elite. Carried by international media coverage, Duterte’s enactment of authoritarian populism will have further resounded with audiences with likewise authoritarian, transgressive inklings around the world. In Western societies, his joke could tap into strong anti-Political Correctness currents that, in turn, are part and parcel of contemporary internet culture. As Angela Nagle (2017) rightly claims, this online culture must be seen as the reactionary reinterpretation of a culture of transgression that, throughout the second part of the twentieth century, had been owned by artists and intellectuals with leftist political orientations. Directly related to this intersection of Duterte’s populist play with violence and transgressive internet culture, BBC News reported in November 2017 on several video games available on various app stores in which players could either play Duterte himself or his police chief, Ronald ‘Bato’ dela Rosa, and shoot drug addicts. Duterte’s links to urban death squads are an open secret and reach back to his time as mayor of Davao. These connections he apparently took with him into the president’s office in 2016, so that already by September 2017, there had been over 8000 extrajudicial killings by vigilante groups, in addition to the 3900 deaths at the hand of police forces (Human Rights Watch 2018). The above-mentioned video games, boasting titles such as Pinoy Crime Fighter and Fighting Crime 2 (BBC 2017), turned

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the killings into fun and play and, in view of their crude, two-­dimensional aesthetics, into a joke once more. Indeed, one can understand the games symptomatically as confessing to and disavowing the ongoing violence in the Philippines at the same time. As with Duterte’s jokes, which play ‘hide and seek’ with reality, making suggestions only to laugh them off, the games invite players to restage the literally thousands of killings and experience them as absurd and inconsequential and the victims as two-­ dimensional cutouts receiving their natural fate.

 Psychosocial Approach to Studying Political A Violence As cursory as the above assessment of aspects of political violence in the contemporary Philippines is, what we hope becomes apparent from it is how the realms of fantasy, language, media, and action inform and interact with one another in a process towards fomenting violence – violence that, in addition to its often horrendous effects, is politically motivated and has political gains and losses. As shown, Duterte’s statement and its ambiguous relation to reality has a place between humour and seriousness, legality and illegality; it draws on and, in turn, triggers fantasies that are based on shared cultural imaginations, creating and recreating relations and dynamic interplays of investments, attitudes, and meanings. In turn, the media coverage of the statement, circulating in the hybrid spaces (Chadwick et al. 2016) in which various media forms (mainstream news media, social networking sites, anonymous online discussion boards, etc.) overlap and contend with one another, further shapes and adds to the imaginaries and fantasies of audiences in vastly different contexts, strengthening positions, modifying and transforming them, or breaking them down. And finally, all the above will interact with existing cultures of conflict that shape dispositions and the pathways of action and, in the case of an eruption of violence, the modes and quantities of discharge. Such an approach to the preconditions and developmental aspects of political violence shares central viewpoints with a social scientific paradigm in the study of political violence that has formed throughout the last 15 years. This paradigm took shape when social movement scholars

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started to research political violence in a way different from mainstream terrorism studies (Bosi and Malthaner 2015, p. 3). The latter field had shown tendencies to render essential the notion of the terrorist and failed to take into consideration the specific ways in which people were becoming radicalised and drawn into insurgent groups (see Della Porta 2013). Social movement scholars, by contrast, sought to develop critical perspectives to address and counter terrorism studies’ somewhat rigid and universalistic conceptions by shedding light on the specific contexts, relations, processes, and dynamics in which radicalisation and acts of violence emerge. In Political Violence in Context (2015), for example, Lorenzo Bosi, Niall Ó Dochartaigh, and Daniela Pisoiu use the dimensions of time, space, and milieu ‘as variables that are an intrinsic and central part of the analysis of contention’ (Bosi et al. 2015, p. 3). In Dynamics of Political Violence (2014), Bosi, Chares Demetriou, and Stefan Malthaner seek to develop an understanding of the buildup and development of cases of political violence by focusing on four dimensions of such dynamics: ‘state-­ movement interactions, intra-movement competition, meaning formation, and (transnational) diffusion’ (2014, p. 5). As a last example, Eitan Y.  Alimi, Bosi, and Demetriou (2012) offer an approach to studying political violence that looks at its relational and processual dynamics. In the article they write: A relational approach, ‘depicts social reality in dynamic, continuous and processual terms, and sees relations between social terms and units as preeminently dynamic in nature, as unfolding, ongoing processes rather than as static ties among inert substances’ (Emirbayer 1997, p. 289). From this perspective, strategy, rationality, and even values and norms are always relationally embedded in space and time and gain salience in the context of social relations. (Alimi et al. 2012, pp. 7–8)

Paying attention to dynamic and relational aspects becomes particularly important in view of the strong rationalistic orientation that dominated a substantial part of terrorism and insurgency studies. In Why Terrorism Works, for example, Alan Dershowitz (2002) argued that terrorism is ‘an entirely rational choice to achieve a political objective’ (Dershowitz 2002, p. 89). This argumentative line has been a mainstay in

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terrorism studies of the 2000s and has been extended even to suicide bombers. For example, Robert Pape (2005) contends that ‘over the past two decades, suicide terrorism has been rising largely because terrorists have learned that it pays’ (Pape 2005, p. 343, quoted in Abrahms 2006, p. 45). Now, whereas we by no means want to rule out that a strong belief in the effectiveness of one’s actions on the part of the (surviving) insurgents plays an important role in spawning further such acts, we do not think that conceiving of the rationale of terrorist acts as outcomes of sober decision-making processes, in which pros and cons are meticulously weighed against one another, is a fertile path to understanding insurgencies. Thus, we strongly agree with Alimi et al.’s (2012) above point that political violence cannot sufficiently be captured in and understood merely through notions of strategies, tactics, aims, and calculations of gains and benefits (see also Bosi et  al. 2015, p.  6). As Barry Richards argues in the present volume about a case of Islamic State propaganda, even though this propaganda might appear to offer the recruit a rational choice between in-group and out-group, or right or wrong, ‘There is no real choice of any kind here, since the terms of the dichotomy have pre-­ empted that: would you choose the only right path, which leads to paradise, or (the only alternative) sin and eternal hellfire?’ (Richards, this volume). Far from considerations of rational choice, Richards understands the act of joining IS along the lines of Sandor Ferenczi’s (1949) concept of ‘identification with the aggressor’ – that is, ‘a way of seeking safety through merger with the boundless power and will of god’ (Richards, this volume). In our opinion, this interpretation of the motives and circumstances of joining IS  – a step offering a makeshift solution to painful insecurities about one’s place and identity – is significantly more orienting and socially enabling than that of a rational weighing of options. What a psychoanalytic perspective can thus bring to existing approaches to political violence is its theoretical richness and sophistication in analysing and interpreting the inter- and intra-subjective dimensions of social relations and cultural constellations. This sophistication is oriented towards finding the irrational in the supposedly rational and, vice versa, the rational in the supposedly irrational. Referring back to the above reading of

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Duterte’s speech, a psychoanalytic orientation can unfold the affective, ‘sticky’ qualities in the relation between the president and his soldiers that are mixed into the more explicit relations in the scene. As shown, the formal relationship between soldiers and their leader can be understood along these lines as permeated by a radically informal, libidinous dimension in which Duterte enacts a paternal authority who is known to be brutal and violent, but who shows himself to be benign towards and understanding of his (soldier) sons’ needs.2 In this way, the context of his official speech is coextensive with another context of male bonding, specifically: subjection under and initiation into a paternal structure which needs female victims to counter its homoerotic implications. This initiation will thus have unfolded a catastrophic dynamic on Mindanao, inflicting gruesome violence on the island’s female population. While as of today, independently verified figures are missing, the Philippine government has stated that the counterinsurgency cost 1112 lives, all but destroyed the Muslim city of Marawi, and displaced more than 400,000 residents (Human Rights Watch 2018). Against these numbers, one can only surmise what the women of Mindanao had to suffer – silently and off the record.

The Chapters in This Volume In the approaches to fomenting political violence we have gathered in this volume, psychoanalytic considerations of inter and/or intra-subjective dynamics, such as the above, are combined with and checked against the social, cultural, and political dimensions (and to a lesser degree economic ones) in various ways and to differing degrees. Rather than attempting to bring all contributions in line with one central conception of the psychosocial, we have embraced a range of positions and methodologies, represented by our international roster of researchers, with some chapters engaging more intensely with psychoanalytic theory while others are more empirically oriented. Vera King’s chapter (“‘Fighting for Something Great …’: Intergenerational Constellations and Functions of Self-culturalisation for Adolescents in Migrant Families”), which opens the main part of the volume, represents a qualitative and intergenerational approach to the psychosocial dimensions of adolescent development. This approach conceives of the psychic and the

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social as dialectically interrelated. Her synopsis of findings from research projects on adolescents with immigrant backgrounds in Germany shows how the socioeconomic and sociopolitical realities of migrant families in their host country, as well as the ways in which these realities come in conflict with the families’ hopes and expectations, prepare the ground for relational dynamics between family members that can (but by no means must) lead to rigid identity formations on the part of the adolescents which might then foment acts of violence. Barry Richards (“A Most Brutal and Implacable Superego: Understanding the Pseudo-political Violence of the Islamic State”) offers an understanding of IS and its appeal to (particularly Western) recruits through his reading of Dabiq, IS’s official, glossy magazine that was published monthly for over two years, until the ‘caliphate’s’ demise. Drawing on Ferenczi’s concept of the ‘identification with the aggressor’ (1949), Richards suggests that surrendering to the absolutist and persecutory superego of IS’s vision of Allah has a liberating effect in that the recruit is freed from all ambivalence and ambiguity, all doubts and insecurities as to her/his existence and role in life. This escape from ambivalence and insecurity thus continues on from what King observes as rigid modes of self-fashioning caused by a state of comprehensive disorientation. In the chapters following Richards’s, we will turn to discursive phenomena and their violent dynamics. Maria Brock (“Pussy Riot, or the Return of the Repressed in Discourse”) analyses the widespread public calls, circulating in Russian mainstream and social media, for harsh physical punishment of the female members of the band Pussy Riot, following their satirical performance in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow in 2012 and their subsequent imprisonment. What she finds in the language and rhetoric used in these calls are residues of a linguistic repertoire of Stalinism. Using Freud’s concept of the ‘return of the repressed’ as a means with which to understand the significance of this discursive afterlife of Stalinism in contemporary Russia, Brock suggests that language which is ‘uprooted and retrieved from a previous historical context … can retain a violent charge that comes back to haunt the speaking subject.’ What this charge entails, as well as the fruits it has borne, can be witnessed today, six years after Pussy Riot’s notoriety, in the Russian government’s repressive treatment of journalists, activists, and

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the political opposition. While these repressions are widely known, the Putin government nevertheless has the support of the majority of Russians and especially young adults (Troianovski 2018). Continuing on Brock’s path, Steffen Krüger’s analysis of anti-asylum, anti-migration Facebook pages in Germany (“Violence and the Virtual: Right-wing, Anti-asylum Facebook Pages and the Fomenting of Political Violence”) offers a similar connection between language and violence. Applying Alfred Lorenzer’s (1986) interactionist paradigm to the posts on those pages, Krüger identifies two main forms of interaction becoming established there. Firstly, news reports about crimes committed by foreigners throughout Germany and Austria are condensed into a coherent, agonistic reality. Secondly, the intolerableness of this reality is emphasised time and again. In this way, a disposition towards violence is gradually built up and, by implicitly making the users and audiences of the Facebook pages responsible for the ongoing injustice, ways of violent discharge are tacitly suggested. The disposition created on the pages can be paraphrased: How can you be a witness to such injustice without doing something? The repeated plaints of an ongoing injustice done to the German people, which Krüger finds in the posts of right-wing German Facebook pages, are traced back to their historical roots in Roger Frie’s chapter on the present state of Holocaust remembrance in Germany (“Shaping Prejudice? Holocaust Remembrance and the Narrative of German Suffering”). What Frie finds in the memory discourses advanced in German families and closely knit communities is people’s tendency to perceive of themselves as victims of World War II. In a development of Krüger’s observation of the rhetoric of ‘endless suffering,’ Frie finds that such suffering is put on a par with that of the Nazi regime’s victims. Right-wing extremism, Frie warns, is able to profit from such perceived victimhood and from Germans’ aggressive rejection of their role as perpetrators. While Brock, Krüger, and Frie thus point to the ways in which a violent charge can seep into and be built up in everyday exchanges, James Martin (“The Rhetorical Satisfactions of Hate Speech”) puts forth the question of what can be done with such charges and the language which bears them. Approaching the 2015 controversy over antisemitism in the

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British Labour Party, Martin argues for a view of political speech (including hate speech) as a means to sublimate, rather than overcome violence. Whereas rhetorics of hate tend to distract from the satisfactions that the haters draw from them, it is important that we identify and analyse the desires that drive them. Our task cannot be to eliminate hate altogether, writes Martin, but, rather, to find ‘better ways to let our hate speak.’ Martin’s identification of a particularly harmful form of hateful speech – one that acts as ‘a refusal to accept any symbolic mediation with one’s opponent’  – prepares the ground for Karl Figlio’s argument (“Fundamentalism and the Delusional Creation of an Enemy”). In his contribution the author offers an understanding of fundamentalism by way of acts upon objects that have lost – again in Martin’s words – ‘any symbolic mediation.’ Reconstructing an incident in which an agitated mob attacked the house of a paediatrician, smearing ‘paedo’ on the windows of the doctor’s house, Figlio interprets this expletive, ‘paedo,’ as the object of/for the attack itself. Staking out the wider bearings of this claim, Figlio takes a theoretical detour to Freud’s concept of primary narcissism (1914). From the first, Figlio states, narcissism creates a tension and, ultimately, a rift in the ego due to the ego’s desire to take itself as object and, at the same time, its fear of being replaced by such an object. The higher the perceived degree of sameness between ego and object, the higher the fear of replacement by that object and, consequently, of extinction. Subsequently, Figlio claims, there exists within us a drive towards making a difference which can then help us create the object upon which our worst fears can be projected. He uses historical analyses of the establishment of antisemitism at state level in Nazi Germany to illustrate this claim of the difference that begs to be made. Figlio’s observation that, under extreme stress and in near psychotic states, people’s use of words can begin to act as objects builds a bridge to Deborah Wright’s concept of spatialisation (“Spatialisation and the Fomenting of Political Violence”). Spatialisation, Wright argues, is a psychic mechanism by which intolerable, anxiety-provoking feelings and thoughts, which cannot be contained in the self, are projected onto, and placed inside, objects in the physical world, such as buildings, parts of landscapes, furniture, but also people and animals. These objects are manipulated and modified, moulded and marked, so as to inscribe into

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them the charge that the subject is unable to bear. This concept represents a fertile extension of Melanie Klein’s notion of projective identification (1946). Like the latter, spatialisation projects intolerable feelings into an Other that then becomes identified with these feelings. In spatialisation, however, this Other is also physically modified so as to fit the projection. This modification in turn facilitates the transmission of unconscious feelings in that the object is made to bear the stigma that the self is unwilling to accept. Wright’s concept of spatialisation, in turn, offers a fertile tool with which to approach the conflicted and embattled politics of remembrance in contemporary Hungary, analysed by Jeffrey Murer (“Four Monuments and a Funeral: Pathological Mourning and Collective Memory in Contemporary Hungary”). The four memorials and a funeral site, which Murer refers to in his chapter’s title, are all positioned in walking distance from one another in Budapest’s city centre. They all can be understood as the material renderings of the Hungarians’ struggle with their unfinished, conflicted past. Contending interpretations of this past are thus inscribed into the urban space, where they disseminate undigested affective states amongst Budapest’s inhabitants. In this way ­memorials can be seen to play an active role in Hungary’s ongoing authoritarian turn. Finally, in the volume’s last chapter, we take an evolutionary perspective to the theme of fomenting political violence. While such universalising, ‘big’ narratives of the root causes of political violence have fallen out of favour – and rightly so (see Bosi et al. 2015, pp. 1–2) – our psychoanalytic viewpoint justifies the present attempt in that it helps us uncover an invariable aspect inherent in the manifold manifestations of political violence analysed in this volume. Thus, in “Darwin, Freud, and Group Conflict,” Jim Hopkins integrates psychoanalytic theories of identification and projection with recent advances in computational and affective neuroscience and Darwin’s (1871) concept of in-group cooperation for out-group competition and conflict (‘the competition of tribe with tribe’). The problem of political violence, writes Hopkins, can be seen as arising from this evolutionary arrangement: For insofar as we cooperate in groups only to compete in groups, we cannot cooperate as a single group, however important the shared interests

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that might impel us to do so. … Attempts at species-wide cooperation thus constantly regress to forms of all of us against the foreigner. (Hopkins, this volume)

Confronted with the recent turn to authoritarianism in various parts of the world, Hopkin’s claim rings painfully true  – and so does Karl Figlio’s argument of the ‘difference that begs to be made.’ With James Martin, then, we must conclude that it cannot be our aim to overcome hatred, but rather to find ways to ‘hate better’ so that aggression becomes sublimated into symbolic contention and not fomented into violence.

Notes 1. This reading is supported by Peter Kreutzer’s (2009) analysis of Duterte’s political rhetoric: ‘Duterte makes abundantly clear that there can be security, but only he himself can provide it. Security is provided according to his personal ideas of justice and adequateness. In his political symbolism, Duterte clearly is above the law. It is him, who indicts, passes judgement and orders the executioners to do their job. It is a personalized fight between those who do not follow the rules and the rightful vigilante whose rules reign supreme. It is boss-rule in pure form’ (p. 59). 2. Indeed, in an earlier incident from 2016, Duterte joked about the rape and murder of an Australian woman, Jacqueline Hamill, during a prison riot in the Philippines in 1989, that ‘I was mad she was raped but she was so beautiful. I thought, the mayor [i.e. Duterte himself ] should have been first’ (The Guardian 2016).

References Abrahms, M. (2006). Why terrorism does not work. International Security, 31(2), 42–78. Alimi, E. Y., Bosi, L., & Demetriou, C. (2012). Relational dynamics and processes of radicalisation: a comparative framework. Mobilization: An International Journal, 17(1), 7–26. Batalla, E. V. C. (2016). The early Duterte presidency in the Philippines. Journal of Current Southeast Asia Affairs, 35(3), 161–186.

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BBC. (2017, November 29). Apple removes Philippines leader Duterte execution games. Retrieved 15 August 2018 from https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/ world-asia-42165328 Bosi, L., & Malthaner, S. (2015). Political violence. In D.  Della Porta & M.  Diani (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of social movements (pp.  439–451). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bosi, L., Demetriou, C., & Malthaner, S. (Eds.). (2014). Dynamics of political violence: A process-oriented perspective on radicalization and the escalation of political conflict. Surrey, UK: Ashgate Publishing. Bosi, L., Ó Dochartaigh, N., & Pisoiu, D. (2015). Political violence in context: Time, space and milieu. Colchester: ECPR Press. Chadwick, A., Dennis, J., & Smith, A. P. (2016). Politics in the age of hybrid media: Power, systems, and media logics. In A. Bruns, G. Enli, E. Skogerbø, A. O. Larsson, & C. Christensen (Eds.), The Routledge companion to social media and politics, (pp. 7–22). London & New York: Routledge. Darwin, C. (1871). The descent of man, and selection in relation to sex. London: John Murray. Della Porta, D. (2013). Clandestine political violence. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Dershowitz, A. (2002). Why terrorism works: Understanding the threat, responding to the challenge. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Emirbayer, M. (1997). Manifesto for a relational sociology. American Journal of Sociology, 103, 281–317. Ferenczi, S. (1949). Confusion of tongues between adults and the child. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 30, 225–230. Freud, S. (1914). On narcissism: An introduction. In J. Strachey (Ed. & Trans.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 14, pp. 68–102). London: Hogarth Press. Human Rights Watch. (2018). Human Rights Watch World Report 2018. Retrieved 2 May 2018 from https://www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/world_ report_download/201801world_report_web.pdf. Kreutzer, P. (2009). Private political violence and boss-rule in the Philippines. Behemoth: A Journal on Civilisation, 2(1), 47–63. https://ojs.ub.uni-freiburg. de/behemoth/article/view/721/647. Kris, E. (1941). The ‘danger’ of propaganda. American Imago, 2(1), 3–42. Lorenzer, A. (1986). Tiefenhermeneutische Kulturanalyse. In A. Lorenzer (Ed.), Kulturanalysen (pp. 7–96). Frankfurt: Fischer. Nagle, A. (2017). Kill all normies: Online culture wars. Winchester & Washington: Zero Books.

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Oxford English Dictionary online. (2018). Foment (v). Retrieved 2 May 2018 from http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/72587?rskey=BCUrnY&result=2# eid. Pape, R. A. (2005). Dying to win: The strategic logic of suicide terrorism. New York: Random House. Reuters. (2017, May 27). Rodrigo Duterte jokes to soldiers that they can rape women with impunity. Retrieved 2 May 2018 from https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/may/27/rodrigo-duterte-jokes-to-soldiers-that-theycan-women-with-impunity. The Guardian. (2016, April 19). Philippines presidential candidate apologises for comments on Australian rape victim. Retrieved 4 May 2018 from https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/apr/19/philippines-apologisesrape-comments-rodrigo-duterte-jacqueline-hamill. Troianovski, A. (2018, March 9). The Putin generation: Young Russians are Vladimir Putin’s biggest fans. The Washington Post. Retrieved 2 May 2018 from https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/world/wp/2018/03/09/feature/russias-young-people-are-putins-biggest-fans/?noredirect=on&utm_ term=.4b1770865afb. Wood, E. J. (2014). Conflict-related sexual violence and the policy implications of recent research. International Review of the Red Cross, 96(894), 457–478.

‘Fighting for Something Great …’: Intergenerational Constellations and Functions of Self-culturalisation for Adolescents in Migrant Families Vera King

Abstract  This article spells out the mechanisms of intergenerational transmission of relational styles in the contexts of migration and adolescence, exploring both their productive and restrictive dimensions. Parts of the parental biography that remain unprocessed can be interpolated by the children into their own histories. Such constellations can lead to life stories full of detours and ruptures. Attempts to overcome these issues can result in the recourse to self-ethnicisation or self-culturalisation, a process with various possible forms. In a productive variation, we can see the creation of something new from facets of the culture of origin. In a defensive and concretising variation, however, such attempts have the function of reinforcing one’s own fragile identity through a rigid understanding of tradition and religion.

V. King (*) Sigmund Freud Institute & Goethe University, Frankfurt, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2018 S. Krüger et al. (eds.), Fomenting Political Violence, Studies in the Psychosocial, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97505-4_2

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Introduction Research on the consequences of migration, in a number of aspects, appears to be shaped by two opposing perspectives: one focuses on ‘culturally specific’ conflict potential in migrant biographies, the other on the critical deconstruction of the ‘cultural’ and respective stereotypes. The debate among scholars has experienced renewed fervour in the wake of animated discussions in the public and media about the potential for radicalisation and the significance of fundamentalist leanings among the younger generations (see Gilles 2016; Roy 2016). The polarisation of viewpoints is particularly keen between explanations tending to simplify and exaggerate the meaning of the ‘cultural’ and those tending to deconstruct culture in such a way that it becomes difficult to discern the contemporary ‘boom’ of cultural and religious relations in certain contexts of youth and/or migrant culture at all. By contrast, the focus of this discussion will be on the consequences of the psychosocial dynamics typical to migration. While these consequences, on the one hand, run across the dimension of culture, that is, play a significant role irrespective of the country of origin, the attempt to overcome them employs patterns of culturalisation (by both self and other) – a dynamic wherein old patterns take on increased significance or new ones are generated. It is imperative that we understand the background, as well as the social and psychological dynamics, of the profound increase in extremism and violence. It is also essential to question, ever anew, the degree to which the various kinds of acts of violence declared to be ‘political’ are genuinely political in nature. We need to illuminate, to deconstruct the social and biographical motives connected to acts of violence that ultimately appear ‘political.’ Recent suicide attacks in Europe offer a particularly useful example of this phenomenon. Here, social actors, both domestic and foreign, attempt to attribute political, cultural, and politico-­ religious meaning to apparently desolate biographical constellations that have culminated in mass shootings, murders, attacks, and murder-­ suicides. It is, in any case, politically relevant to analyse the processes of radicalisation, to which also belong certain interpretive and discursive patterns that set their own dynamic of violence into motion.

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(Self)Culturalisation and the Instrumentalisation of Islam Particularly potent at the moment are variations of instrumentalisation of Islam by different parties. We can currently observe a very unsettling form of intensifying polarisation and, with that, the potential for an increase in extremism and violence in connection with the contemporary discourse about Islam and migration. Islam, Muslim culture, and the ethnicity of immigrants and their children are being loaded with particular, affective meaning simultaneously by two different sides, who then put that meaning into discursive practice: On the one side, Islamic fundamentalists charge the meaning of religion in a variety of ways, stylising it as a kind of pure counterculture to a West that is figured as ‘amoral’ or ‘enemy.’ Correspondingly, the other side  – not only in the context of right-wing extremism but in everyday discourses of European society – propagates a vision of Islam and what is considered to be the Muslim culture of immigrants and their children as a threat and as something to be defended against. Islam and the Muslim culture of immigrants, a culture globally perceived as ‘backwards,’ primitive, and unenlightened, are then made, both entirely and diffusely, responsible for violence and extremism, although factually the majority of immigrants and their children (even those who are, in fact, Muslim) are neither radical nor violent. These complementary and affectively very powerful interpretive patterns do, indeed, have genuinely political dimensions. They are ideologically effective, because they create new realities, as it were, independent from their social substance and their validity. They evoke ever-new forms of culturalisation and self-culturalisation associated with the intensification, disambiguation, and simplification of concepts of culture that have unhinged themselves from everyday practice. But, why are they so effective? To begin with, let us consider that these forms of culturalisation create an apparently unambiguous sense of belonging through opposition. They generate interpretive patterns for experiences of frustration and destructiveness and provide these experiences with an apparent cultural ­meaning,

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thus increasing the potential for political violence and becoming, in turn, a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. These dynamics of intensification are further exacerbated by the media. Not a day goes by in which such interpretive and discursive patterns in their different complementary forms are not repeatedly emphasised and reiterated here. With every piece of Islamic propaganda and statements in all possible forms of media, we see an equal intensification of anti-Islamism, pulling the rug from under strategies for the integration of Muslims and all of those considered Muslim. Marginalisation, discrimination, and the refusal of a sense of belonging create fertile ground for new dynamics of extremism and what Peter Neumann (2015) refers to as “homegrown” radicalisation in Western countries. What is more, our opportunities for a genuine, differentiated understanding of the complexity of the cause and effect relationships, as well as their consequences across generations of immigrant families, fade from view. In an attempt to contribute to such an understanding, this article will lay the groundwork for a differentiated analysis. In contrast to the discourses of culturalisation associated with migration – even in migration research – I want to identify the issues typical to migration with which migrants and their adolescent children are confronted  – issues that go beyond what is frequently perceived as typical for the religion and cultures of origin. A psychoanalytic perspective is particularly helpful for identifying these issues in order to define the psychological mechanisms of intergenerational transmission. In the course of this analysis, we will identify specific vulnerabilities that may lead to defensive forms of self-­ culturalisation, which may, in turn, serve as defensive mechanisms. Such defensive mechanisms, in very specific constellations and under the permanent fire of the discursive circle of marginalisation and culturalising stereotypisation, may ultimately be instrumentalised for fundamentalist seduction. Perhaps more to the point, this article will focus on the significance of adolescence in the context of migration, not only because there are relationships between adolescence and extremism or because many recent acts of violence were committed by young men; and not only because there are relationships between adolescent crises of manhood and the attraction of extremist images, acts, and language. Rather, adolescence

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also represents a phase of development in which what, in a general culture, can be named (symbol formation, practices, interpretive patterns), can harbour the potential to be newly generated, can be filled with different meanings or can simply be adapted. Adolescent processes in the context of migration are, thus, of particular interest, especially, as will be explained in more detail, with respect to the intergenerational dynamics of adolescence.

 hat Is Typical to Migration Is Not Typical W to Culture This article draws on insights and examples from various projects, among them: a project on individuals with and without a migration background, who have achieved social advancement through higher education1; a project on the adolescent life concepts of youth with migration backgrounds in Germany and France2; a collaborative project on adolescent generational dynamics in Turkish migrant families3; and, finally, another project, similar in design to the first, on intergenerational transmission in Italian immigrant families in Germany,4 which also allowed us to compare the predominantly Catholic Italian migrant community and the more commonly Islamic migrant community from Turkey.5 This latter project was particularly interesting given that migrants from Italy, meanwhile, count among the most accepted, ‘favourite’ migrant groups in Germany after having been the target of intense discrimination and marginalisation in the 1950s and 1960s (Janz and Sala 2011). In these various projects, focused on groups with different migration histories, there emerged certain commonalities, that is, challenges that remained consistent across all cultural and national differences in the various groups, or what we might refer to as typical challenges of migration. Often, what is typical to migration is mistakenly taken to be typical to the respective culture – but this is by no means the same thing. Phenomena typical to migration include the loss of experience that is self-evident or natural, of trusted relationships, and environments (Akthar 1999; Grinberg and Grinberg 2004). Erdheim (2003) speaks emphatically of

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the rupture that follows from the loss of the familiar, self-explanatory experience of one’s native country (Karatza-Meents 2014). Even if life there was by no means harmonious, even if rage and fear were the motivation to flee, the fact of separation, as we know from psychoanalysis, can even be all the more destructive in this case. The pain of separation is intensified, moreover, by experiences of rejection in the country of immigration and by the individual’s perception of failure, while cultural differences, in turn, can make the pain of rupture still more severe. Essentially, however, what we are talking about is the experience of loss. Overcoming this loss is made more difficult by experiences of discrimination and exclusion, which are a matter of everyday life for many immigrants and their children. Still, another phenomenon typical to migration is the hope of a better life. In best-case scenarios, the process of ‘arrival’ (in the sense of ‘having arrived,’ finding one’s place, upward social mobility, and acceptance) is mastered in the first generation and migration is seen as a predominantly positive, enriching experience. Often, however, the hope of attaining this level of success in the migration project is deferred to subsequent generations – the idea being that the effort, uncertainty, and risk undertaken with the decision to migrate must at least ‘pay off’ for the children, whose ‘arrival’ in the new country will make it all worthwhile for the parents. One might speak, then, of an ‘intergenerational hope project’ (King 2016) – though, here, it bears noting that the German term Erwartung, used in the original version of this article, perhaps more effectively conveys the double edge of this situation, as it contains the meanings of both hope and expectation. For such hopes, particularly under extremely difficult external conditions, are fed by the illusion, we might even call it ‘wishful thinking,’ that their fulfilment will heal the rupture, heal the wounds of the parents resulting from migration, if only the children lead the better life their parents had strived to achieve. On the other hand, the situation of young men and women who are born in the country of parental immigration is highly unique in many respects (Alba and Waters 2011; Dustmann 2008; Apitzsch 2003; Pott 2002; Zhou 1997). Though they themselves have never emigrated and despite the fact that they have been educated, in the case of the projects referred to here, in Germany and even if they speak only German, these young people are

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treated as foreigners. Even if they adopt and adapt to the culture to the greatest possible extent, they are perceived and discriminated against as other (Sayad 1992; Straub 2014). This phenomenon was confirmed in our German–French research project (King and Müller 2013), where we observed not only differences between young migrants in France and Germany resulting from their respective life circumstances but, more tellingly, we observed similarities between the two groups. Specifically, we learned of the tremendous pressure experienced by young women and men to justify their way of life, no matter what it was, to natives of the country of immigration. One young woman explained, ‘It’s not just when I wear the hijab but even when I’m not wearing one.’ We also learned that the sense that one’s heritage and lifestyle are somehow devalued and less legitimate makes separation from the family much more difficult. The studies clearly revealed an overall and peculiar constellation in which the parents, who have crossed great geographical distances in order to improve their life circumstances, are frequently stuck in the conditions available to them in the country of immigration. One Turkish-born mother described her quarter of the city as a prison she will never get out of. In this sense, the parental generation appears to their children as at once extremely mobile and immobile. Parental hopes that at least the children will be able to overcome social barriers are objectively difficult to realise and often subjectively evoke ambivalent feelings associated with a potentially great sense of disappointment, guilt, and shame (King et al. 2013). This contradictory situation creates, in several respects, typical intergenerational conflicts and dynamics specific to migrant families that reach their pinnacle in adolescence – the decisive period when children choose either to maintain a close interconnection and identification with the parental generation or to explore their own opportunities for productive, new life concepts.

Migration and Adolescence There are marked parallels between embarking on the journey of adolescence and the commencement of the journey to a foreign country in migration. Akhtar (1999) even speaks of migration as a ‘third individuation,’

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while Machleidt (2007) refers to the ‘process of appropriating the foreign aspects of another culture after migration’ as ‘cultural adolescence’ (p. 13). Analogies of adolescence and migration all share the common understanding, seen even in myths and fairy tales, of becoming adult as an awakening, a journey to a new life, a move into foreign territory. What becomes perceivable especially in the case of young people migrating, is that there are not merely parallels between the processes of adolescence and migration, but a psychological entwinement of the two processes. Adolescents, like migrants, undergo separation and relinquish trusted relationships. The degree of success of these necessary transformations is dependent upon the available psychological resources and external circumstances. Yet, even under favourable conditions, crises may arise. For, there is no turning back – not for the adolescent to childhood, nor for the migrant to the world left behind, which itself cannot go unchanged. The image of the place of origin, now lost but safeguarded and preserved from afar, is founded on memories and projections. A break, once made, cannot simply be undone. In cases of regressive behaviour, an illusion can be maintained with great effort and at the high price of the forfeiture or obstruction of vital psychological development. By contrast, a productive process of migration takes place through psychological reconfiguration and creation of the new. In a sense, then, we can speak of adolescence and migration as a ‘redoubled transformational requirement’ (King 2005; King and Koller 2015), wherein the developmental challenges of adolescence are interwoven with those of migration. The result can be creative visions of the future or the experience of excessive demand. It can lead not only to individual but to intergenerational developmental crises. Increased psychological demands can overburden the parent–child relationship. Or, these crises can be overcome and generate creative life visions. It should be emphasised, as relates to this point, that there are important differences between the processes of adolescence and ­migration, as well. While both deal with separation, reconfiguration, and creation of the new, the conditions of migration are unique. Particularly those migrants originating from less wealthy, developing countries have to deal with marginalisation, stigmatisation, and discrimination, all of which obstruct the process of psychological transformation or push it in certain directions. These migrants must often overcome not

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only painful separation but deal, as well, with the situation of probably never really ‘arriving’ – that is, fitting in. In any case, not in the way they had imagined. The price of migration may later appear too high for themselves and their families. Loss experienced by parents in the course of migration, if left unexamined, can lead to a more intensified experience of loss in the course of the children’s transition to adulthood, making this separation ‘too much’ to deal with. In turn, the intergenerational ambivalence associated with adolescence (King 2002, 2010) can be intensified to the point of becoming overwhelming. Children’s adolescent awakening, their transformation to emerging adults, can, for instance, re-traumatise parents  – alternatively, adolescent children may intuitively or unconsciously seek to protect their parents from further trauma. Generally speaking, parental migration history – the degree to which parents have dealt with the psychological effects of migration – is decisive for their ability to cope with their children’s adolescence.

Generational Patterns Typical to Migration Migration can be characterised as an intergenerational project, which can have a variety of ramifications for the parent–child relationship, including pressure on the younger generation to succeed. The explicit or implicit mandate for success by the parents to the children – ‘We didn’t manage it. Now, show and prove to us that the effort to immigrate was worth it through your life and your success’ – can be extremely burdensome, as we see in this example from an interview with the son of Moroccan immigrants (King 2005): K: (My father) told me about how he arrived … (in Germany) and what a great impression it made on him (choked with emotion), how much he was impressed by it, the wealth, how extreme it is and how he thought, hey, we are nothing, we in Africa are nothing and we will never make it, we will never make it … and that’s what my father told me and how he said it, at that moment he realised perfectly looking at all that wealth, we are nothing, we are nothing and we will never make it here. ….

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That was the reason, why he wanted: “well, my son should be integrated here.” He should make his way to the top, here. That had to do with my education, like, he definitely has to make it to the top. And it was that way … throughout my entire childhood … and that’s a lot of pressure and that pressure is always there – (voice steadily fades).

This young man’s story makes palpable not only the painful identification between father and son and the pressure the latter feels to adopt the father’s project, to accept his mandate, but it also shows the risk of self-­ alienation for the son  – that is, a kind of external control that occurs when the son lives his own life in the service of the father’s wishes, namely, the rather paradoxical mandate to make something out of the nothing of his father’s experience, to make it to the top. The mandate is paradoxical insofar as the son, in order to do so, must distance himself from the father at the same moment he is to internalise the father’s project. The results, if the son doesn’t make it, are inevitably shame and guilt. Burdensome constellations can also occur when fathers, as is often the case, experience a loss of status within the family as a consequence of migration and are perceived by their children as emasculated. This was the case in one Italian immigrant family where the father’s business failed. He was unemployed as a consequence, and marital crises developed in the wake (Tressat et al. 2015): L: My dad, there (3 sec pause) my dad, I’m proud of him, of what he, you know – actually did. He just had a bit of bad luck sometimes (3 sec pause). He’s my father, that’s why he, well, didn’t deserve, I think, but  – you know? – I’m actually, you know, of him too (3 sec pause) yeah – our – yeah (3  sec pause) I hope  – just unfortunately not so much. I dunno what I wanna say (16 sec pause).

We see, here, how the son’s attempt to express pride in his father performatively disintegrates as he speaks. At other times in the interview, the son tells of his futile attempts to make his father proud of him: We might say, rather, his futile attempt to compensate for his father’s failure with his own success. L: The football league, I was actually pretty high up there and such – anyway I, you know, and somehow, to make my father proud I stayed in, kept

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going actually. Well, actually, if I really think about it, I didn’t actually want to play … I think, when I, when I – quit the team, I think, I let my father (falters) down a bit, because he was always there, he always watched (3 sec pause) hm … I somehow disappointed, that I – didn’t keep – playing there (10 sec pause).

Father and son remain bound together in this constellation in that the one needs the other to be proud, but neither manages it. They form a tragic pair shaped by a peculiar kind of inseparability, which points to a further aspect of intergenerational entwinement in the context of adolescence and migration. One central, inescapable experience of migration, as we have already seen, is separation and loss, experiences that can be dealt with to varying degrees of success. When children grow up and become adolescent, when new forms of separation are introduced into the family as children grow up, the experiences of separation and loss in the parents’ migration history are reawakened, renewed, if you will, with a certain degree of inevitability. If the parental generation has not overcome the pain of separation resulting from migration, it is harder for them to let go of their children. This can even develop to pathogenic attempts to hold everyone and everything together at any price. Take, for example, family M, originally from southern Italy and in which migration has existed in both directions since the grandparents’ time (Tressat et al. 2015). Looking back on his own family of origin, the father reflects, ‘In the end, the whole family is scattered … all because of work. … Because people like my parents, they only came up here because of work and that’s what destroys, well, well a whole … yeah, a whole family’ (Tressat et al. 2015, p. 255). The image of destruction and the permanent pain of separation are essential for Mr. M and continue to operate uninterrupted in relation to his own children. The adolescent children, who to some extent already became parentified in childhood, sense, in turn, quite keenly the boundaries of their parents’ ability to cope in this situation. In connection with the mandate for success, such constellations turn into stark contradictions. The implicit message can be something like, ‘Be successful, show that our migration project was worthwhile, but stay with us, do it for us’ – and this under social conditions that make success

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more difficult, such as disadvantage in the educational system and on the job market. This often multigenerational pattern of transmission, associated with significant paradoxes and tensions, we referred to as separation avoidance in our research. In such familial constellations, we identified the dynamic of limitation of adolescent transformation and distancing – in the sense of a ‘glass boundary’ to protect the father and/or mother from re-traumatisation. Overall, the continual psychological need of the father or mother in various forms can infiltrate the psychological development of their children to such an extent that the unmastered, unexperienced, and blocked out are adopted by the children. These mechanisms are reminiscent of Faimberg’s (1988) concept of generational ‘telescoping’ or interpolation – the psychological unconscious transmission of the unresolved. In the context of migration, these mechanisms also typically include helpless rage, arising in the wake of a kind of over-adaptation on the part of the first generation. Typical, here, is the vicarious, even destructive, boundless rebellion with which adolescents may respond to the parents’ forced adaptation and repressed aggression. In such constellations, parents either block out or minimise their experiences of discrimination. The costs of adaptation, any negative feelings, are pushed away; aggression and its causes are de-symbolised, as it were. For example, in response to the direct question posed to a Turkish-born immigrant mother in an interview (King et  al. 2013; Koller and King 2014) about whether she had experienced discrimination or not, she responded: No. Definitely not. Definitely not. Not a bit. In no way whatsoever. … Quite the opposite, there, I – perhaps through the language, perhaps the age, too, now, meanwhile, at the beginning (hesitates, then continues in a soft voice) – no, that was nothing, no, not at all. No, by no means!

Her husband set himself apart from other immigrants who did not adapt. He did everything he could to prove himself worthy of recognition, even though he had a Turkish name and ‘wasn’t called Hans Meier, after all.’ In the interview with the mother, there are 12 negations that, in effect, call into question the negation itself.

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Adolescent children, on the other hand, who find neither support nor a role model in these parents that could help them adequately deal with negative emotions and experiences of discrimination, carry out sometimes boundless forms of rebellion. We might speak of the delegation of rage and rebellion to the children – or, seen functionally, of a vicarious restitution of parental strength through their adolescent children. Insofar as it is aspects of parental psychological reality that cause the adolescents to act out, their behaviour is perceived by the parents as fully strange. For example, Mr. and Mrs. Y experienced their son, who was having problems in school because of his eruptive, aggressive behaviour, as, in their words, a ‘mysterious steam boiler.’ This type of intergenerational transmission we referred to as vicarious rebellion. A further typical constellation arises when migrant parents themselves grew up in a situation where both parents, or the father alone, were in a foreign country and the children joined them at a later date. Such situations result in a kind of void regarding the internalisation of the generationally defined parental position. In extreme cases, the destruction of bonds in the context of migration – through numerous separations, failed parental relationships, living without a mother or a father, or the lack of any reliable relationship – can dominate the psychological development of the subsequent generation, as in the case of Oktay (Zölch et al. 2012), who was subject to numerous breaks and losses, feelings of not belonging even within the family, and great longing for a father figure. During adolescence, he searched all the more for a sense of belonging, role models with which to identify, and a sense of security – without finding them. Initially, he wanted to take his idea of the German man as a role model: ‘All those beer drinkers, soccer players. Yeah, I thought: That’s the kind of man I need to become now. I lost there.’ A terrible crisis led him, as he relates, to drop out of school and begin a spiritual search. He tried meditation, Buddhism, Hinduism, yoga, and Islam. In the meantime, he began to imagine ‘fighting for something great.’ Oktay explains: I don’t even know myself what the path looks like. I mean, I would, could myself hope for armed conflict, let’s say, for the revolution. […] I would never, just somehow do whatever, I mean give that up, the dream or something. These days I’m, like I said, ready to die for it. If I can do that, that

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would, of course, be wonderful. If I can’t do that, then I know that’s anyway, like, Why am I even here? In that case, it would be better if I’d never been born at all. A bit harshly put, but that’s what I think.

Here, the destruction of bonds in his own and his parents’ biography has led to strong feelings of worthlessness and to what we have referred to as comprehensive disorientation – including a variation that is, in a particular way, susceptible to the influence of ideologies that promise stability and structure or the restitution of manhood. Ultimately, migration can also be associated, under positive external and intergenerational conditions, with very creative processes of transformation. For example, when the parental generation is able to keep their painful experiences and grief, at times, to themselves. When sons and daughters have enough positive conditions at school and in their living environment and are able to free themselves – most often in crisis-like processes  – from the logic of their parents’ migration history to forge their own life paths. This type of transformation we refer to as appropriative transformation. Structurally, migration offers a great deal of impetus for change and many starting points for productive reinvention, for the creation of something new. Although, as we know, migrant children tend to be at a disadvantage in the educational system, there are also a number of national and international examples of highly successful and exceptionally creative people and life stories.

 onclusions: Functions of Culturalisation C and Self-culturalisation in Adolescence Overall, our research has made clear the peculiar tension between mobility and immobility in the immigrant situation. The disjunction between the start of a better life and the social marginalisation that shapes the parents’ lives often produces a fundamental psychological tension in the lives of their children. This tension reaches a defining high point during the process of adolescent development. With regard to transgenerational entwinement, we see how those parts of the parental biography that remain unprocessed by the parents can be interpolated by the children

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into their own histories. Such constellations can lead to incomprehensible explosions of aggression or depressive reactions, in short, to life stories full of detours and ruptures. Attempts to overcome and resolve these issues can result in the recourse to self-ethnicisation in reference to tradition and religious interpretive patterns. In a productive variation, such attempts result in the development of creative appropriation and the creation of something new from facets of the culture of origin – and a new sense of self-possession and confidence (Nökel 2005). In a defensive and concretising variation, such attempts have the function of reinforcing one’s own fragile identity through a rigid understanding of tradition and religion (as described by Schröter 2016). This often comes in connection with the embrace of stereotypical gender roles and a more radical break from the parents, who, as the children accuse them, deny their own culture and religion. It must be emphasised again, here, that the adolescent recourse to rigid role models and gender stereotypes is less a cultural phenomenon than a symptomatic expression of the difficulties in dealing with their migration history. Whether the stronger relation of migrant sons and daughters to religion and tradition is more likely productive or destructive is, from a psychodynamic perspective, not a matter of content alone but of the structural level and defensive mechanisms corresponding to these model identities. It can either be about psychological integration or about rigid, concretised defence. As other research has also indicated, the type of person prone to the destruction of bonds and disorientation (as a result of experiencing fragile, unreliable relationships, dysfunctional bonding, missing father, and, in turn, pronounced gaps in identification and the crisis-ridden development of manhood) is most susceptible to ideologemes and fundamentalist simplifications. According to Peter Neumann, ‘Salafism’ is perhaps most attractive to those who are stranded, lacking orientation and left behind. … It speaks to people who feel abandoned by society or pushed to its margins and who are searching for a new identity. Young Muslims, in particular, who do not know where they belong, may be counted among this group, but also … young adults from broken families, petty criminals and outsiders. … Ultimately, Salafism offers its followers community and acceptance  – regardless of their personal history. (Cwiertnia 2015, p. 2)

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Here, too, the case of Oktay is representative. He describes wanting to ‘fight for something great,’ wanting to prove the meaning of his own existence and, at the same time, experience himself as a man. In the interview, he narrates at the level of fantasy – or, better said, all possible, sometimes confused, and meandering fantasies – and does not appear to be someone who would set these things into action. Yet, we see in his story the outline of a structure that could be instrumentalised in extreme existential crises and in connection with tailor-­ made fundamentalist promises that speak directly to such a person. This could be especially the case when media messages suggest to the isolated, despairing adolescent the existence of a significant other, a futilely yet perpetually sought after significant other, who actually sees and values his or her actions. Then, in the right circumstances, a manipulative idea, a media message could set into motion the leap from fantasy to real-life action. Violent acts – the combat, sacrifice, and triumph over one’s own fear – can then, it appears, give meaning to a life experienced as worthless. It is also thinkable that other constellations of intergenerational ­transmission (such as, vicarious rebellion or attempts to compensate shameful failure) strengthen the appeal of fundamentalist variants of ‘self-­culturalisation’ through latently effective transgenerational ­processes and the psychic dispositions associated with them. ­Over-adaptation in the parental generation, or the downward social mobility of the father, which is experienced as devaluation, defeat, and loss of potency and manliness, as well as the shame of having failed oneself, can all serve to strengthen the appeal of aggressive fundamentalism that appears so potent and masculine. Let it be emphasised, strengthen and not cause. The relationships between exterior and interior reality are complex and subtle. Media messages can facilitate radicalisation by appealing to particular psychological dispositions – which are, to a great extent, shaped by intergenerational dynamics. For this reason, it is imperative that we undertake a differentiated analysis of these relationships between exterior and interior reality and of intergenerational transmission to be able to adequately assess potentials of radicalisation, as well as the effects of media and discourse.

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Summary This article examines the possible effects of migration, as mediated through intergenerational relations, on the psychological developments of adolescence. It has shown how ‘external’ social factors and conditions (migration and the conditions of migration) are translated into behavioural and interpretive patterns and which ‘internal’ psychological consequences and patterns of processing them arise. Central, here, are the specific and psychologically critical conditions of migration  – namely, separation, loss, and risk, but hope as well, associated with embarking on the journey of migration – and, at the same time, the pervasive experience of discrimination. In other words, it is about experiences typical to migration that stand in the way of hopes of a better life, of ‘making it,’ which affect the subsequent generation with even greater intensity. The studies forming the basis of this argument analyse the consequences of migration in relation to the entwinement of the processes of migration and adolescence, that is, the reciprocal effects of the dynamics of psychic development under circumstances of immigration and adolescent transformation within the generational relationship. These studies do not directly deal with violent forms of radicalisation or Salafism and extremist adolescents. Rather, they are concerned, in a more basic sense, with illuminating how constellations can be created, which become f­ ertile ground for the ‘seduction’ to radicalisation. Such approaches can help to avoid rash, oversimplified explanations for the phenomenon of radicalisation and contribute to a differentiated understanding of the subtle risks of exclusion so frequently associated with migration.

Notes 1. The project was funded by the Max-Träger-Stiftung. See King 2005, 2008. 2. Headed by L.  Colin (Paris), V.  King (Frankfurt), B.  Müller (Berlin) & A. Terzian (Paris); funded by the Franco-German Youth Office. See King and Müller 2013; Colin and Terzian 2016. 3. With the research associates Janina Zölch and Javier Carnicer; funded by the German Research Foundation and coheaded with Hans-Christoph Koller. See King et al. 2011, 2013; Koller et al. 2010.

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4. Coheaded with Hans-Christoph Koller, with research associates Kathrin Böker and Michael Tressat; funded by the German Ministry of Education and Research. See Böker et al. 2018a, b; King and Koller 2014; Tressat et al. 2015. 5. Both projects examined the biographical development of sons, as particularly young men from families with Turkish and Italian migration backgrounds represent an above average percentage of the so-called ‘educationally disadvantaged.’

References Akthar, S. (1999). Immigration and identity: Turmoil, treatment and transformation. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson. Alba, R., & Waters, M. C. (Eds.). (2011). The next generation: Immigrant youth in a comparative perspective. New York: New York University Press. Apitzsch, U. (2003). Migrationsbiographien als Orte transnationaler Räume. In U.  Apitzsch & M.  M. Jansen (Eds.), Migration, Biographie und Geschlechterverhältnisse (pp. 67–80). Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot. Böker, K., King, V., & Koller, H.-C. (2018a). Elterliche Migrationserfahrung, adoleszente Entwicklung und Bildung. In Jahrbuch für Psychoanalytische Pädagogik (in Press). Gießen: Psychosozial. Böker, K., King, V., Koller, H.-C., & Tressat, M. (2018b). Migrationsgeschichte, Familienbeziehungen und Adoleszenz. (Bildungs-)biographische Entwicklungen junger Männer aus italienischen Migrantenfamilien. In M. Baader, P. Götte, & W. Gippert (Eds.), Migration und Familie (pp. 207– 221). Wiesbaden: Springer VS. Colin, L., & Terzian, A. (Eds.). (2016). Dialogues – Dialoge: Vol. 4. Chercher sa voie. Récits de jeunes issus des migrations en France et en Allemagne. Paris: Téraèdre. Cwiertnia, L. (2015, September 17). Der Terrorismus ist eine Jugendkultur. Zeit. Retrieved from http://www.zeit.de/campus/2015/05/islamischer-staatterrorismus-jugendkultur-dschihadismus. Dustmann, C. (2008). Return migration, investment in children and intergenerational mobility. Journal of Human Resources, 43(2), 299–324. Erdheim, M. (2003). Glück und Unglück in der Emigration. Psychosozial, 26(93), 81–87. Faimberg, H. (1988). The telescoping of generations: Genealogy of certain identifications. Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 24(1), 99–118.

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Gilles, K. (2016). Terror in Frankreich. Der neue Dschihad in Europa. München: Verlag Antje Kunstmann. Grinberg, L., & Grinberg, R. (2004). Psychoanalytic perspectives on migration and exile. New Haven & London: Yale University Press. Janz, O., & Sala, R. (Eds.) (2011). Dolce Vita? Das Bild der italienischen Migranten in Deutschland. Frankfurt: Campus. Karatza-Meents, A. (2014). »Kofferkinder«. Über traumatische Auswirkungen der Migration bei Kindern. Psyche – Z Psychoanal, 68, 713–734. King, V. (2002). Die Entstehung des Neuen in der Adoleszenz. Wiesbaden: Leske + Budrich. King, V. (2005). Bildungskarrieren und Männlichkeitsentwürfe bei Adoleszenten aus Migrantenfamilien. In V. King & K. Flaake (Eds.), Männliche Adoleszenz, (pp. 57–76). Frankfurt: Campus. King, V. (2008). Jenseits von Herkunft und Geschlechterungleichheiten? Biographische Vermittlungen von class, gender, ethnicity in Bildungs- und Identitätsbildungsprozessen. In C.  Klinger & G.  Axeli Knapp (Eds.), ÜberKreuzungen. Ungleichheit, Fremdheit, Differenz, (pp. 87–111). Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot. King, V. (2010). The generational rivalry for time. Time & Society, 19(1), 54–71. King, V. (2016). Zur Psychodynamik der Migration – Muster transgenerationaler Weitergabe und ihre Folgen in der Adoleszenz. Psyche  – Z Psychoanal, 70(9–10), 977–1002. King, V., & Koller, H.-Ch. (2014). Erfolgreiche und nicht-erfolgreiche Bildungsverläufe junger Männer aus italienischen Migrantenfamilien  – Transmission und Transformation in adoleszenten Generationenbeziehungen. Projektzusammenfassung und Befunde. https://www.empirische-bildungsforschung-bmbf.de/de/547.php King, V., & Koller, H.-C., (2015). Jugend im Kontext von Migration  – Adoleszente Entwicklungs- und Bildungsverläufe zwischen elterlichen Aufstiegserwartungen und sozialen Ausgrenzungserfahrungen. In W. Helsper, H.-H.  Krüger, & S.  Sandring (Eds.), Jugend: Theoriediskurse und Forschungsfelder, (pp. 105–127). Wiesbaden: Springer VS. King, V., Koller, H.-C., & Zölch, J. (2013). Dealing with discrimination and the struggle for social advancement in migrant families: Theoretical and methodological aspects of a study on adolescent generational dynamics in Turkish migrant families subjected to marginalization. International Journal of Conflict and Violence, 7(1), 121–134. King, V., Koller, H.-C., Zölch, J., & Carnicer, J. (2011). Bildungserfolg und adoleszente Ablösung bei Söhnen aus türkischen Migrantenfamilien. Eine

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Untersuchung aus intergenerationaler Perspektive. Zeitschrift für Erziehungswissenschaft, 14(4), 581–601. King, V., & Müller, B. (Eds.). (2013). Dialoge  – Dialogues: Vol. 3. Lebensgeschichten junger Frauen und Männer mit Migrationshintergrund in Deutschland und Frankreich. Interkulturelle Analysen eines deutsch-­ französischen Jugendforschungsprojekts. Münster: Waxmann. Koller, H.-C., Carnicer, J., King, V., Subow, E., & Zölch, J. (2010). Educational development processes of male adolescents from immigrant families. Journal of Identity and Migration Studies, 4(2), 44–60. Koller, H.-C., & King, V. (2014). Methodische Zugänge zu Bildungsbiographien und Generationendynamik in Migrantenfamilien. In W. Baros & W. Kempf (Eds.). Erkenntnisinteressen, Methodologie und Methoden interkultureller Bildungsforschung, (pp. 145–156). Berlin: Verlag Irena Regener. Machleidt, W. (2007). Die ›kulturelle Adoleszenz‹ als Integrationsleistung im Migrationsprozess. Psychotherapie & Sozialwissenschaft, 9(2), 13–23. Neumann, P. (2015). Die neuen Dschihadisten. IS, Europa und die nächste Welle des Terrorismus. Berlin: Ullstein. Nökel, S. (2005). Die Töchter der Gastarbeiter und der Islam. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag. Pott, A. (2002). Ethnizität und Raum im Aufstiegsprozess. Eine Untersuchung zum Bildungsauftsieg in der zweiten türkischen Migrantengeneration. Opladen: Leske + Budrich. Roy, O. (2016). Le Djihad et la mort. Paris: Seuil. Sayad, A. (1992). L’immigration ou les paradoxes de l’altérité. Paris: Seuil. Schröter, S. (2016). »Gott näher als der eigenen Halsschlagader«. Fromme Muslime in Deutschland. Frankfurt: Campus. Straub, J. (2014). Gewaltgeschichten in Verletzungsverhältnissen. Psychosozial, 37(136), 75–94. Tressat, M., Böker, K., King, V., & Koller, H.-C. (2015). Vater-Sohn-Dynamiken im Kontext von Migration: Adoleszente Entwicklung und Bildungsverläufe am Beispiel von Söhnen aus italienischen Migrantenfamilien. In K. Bueschges (Ed.), Bildung – Selbst(bild) – Geschlechterbilder, (pp. 249–277). Berlin: Lit-Verlag. Zhou, M. (1997). Growing up American: The challenge confronting immigrant children and children of immigrants. Annual Review of Sociology, 23(1), 63–95. Zölch, J., King, V., Koller, H.-C., & Carnicer, J. (2012). Männlichkeitsentwürfe und adoleszente Ablösungsmuster bei Söhnen aus türkischen Migrantenfamilien. Ausgewählte Ergebnisse einer intergenerationalen Studie. In M. Bereswill, P. Rieker, & A. Schnitzer (Eds.), Migration und Geschlecht, (pp. 17–39). Weinheim: Juventa.

A Most Brutal and Implacable Superego: Understanding the Pseudo-political Violence of the Islamic State Barry Richards

Abstract  This chapter examines an example of violent Islamist ideology, that propagated by Daesh. Text from Dabiq, the magazine published online by Daesh for two years, is analysed to identify the states of mind embedded in its ideology. The state of mind presented in the texts is seen to be one of terror in the face of a tyrannical superego. At some points the intensity of the demand for violence is such as to almost destroy any pretence of a moral agenda. Another text of violent takfiri Islamism, the monograph The Management of Savagery, illustrates an effort to re-moralise the project even at the extreme of cruelty and torture. The political benefits of this kind of psychological analysis of an extremist ideology are outlined.

B. Richards (*) Bournemouth University, Poole, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2018 S. Krüger et al. (eds.), Fomenting Political Violence, Studies in the Psychosocial, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97505-4_3

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Introduction As for the treacherous Jews of Europe and elsewhere … then their post-­ pubescent males would face a slaughter that would make the Holocaust sound like a bedtime story, as their women would be made to serve their husbands’ and fathers’ killers. (Dabiq 15, p. 80)

This statement appears in issue 15 of the Islamic State’s online magazine Dabiq. It follows assertions that had it been Muslims instead of Crusaders fighting the Japanese in World War II or the Vietnamese later, they would not have ceased war without forcing them to convert to Islam – or be subjected to ‘another nuke’ or more ‘beds of napalm.’ This glorification of destructive power, and competitive contempt for anything less than its limitless deployment, is disturbing enough to read, especially when at the foot of the page is a photograph of the moment of a beheading, apparently watched by a close crowd of adults and children. Even more disturbing is to realise that this magazine is an emanation of an ideology exerting enough influence to be a significant factor in contemporary world politics. Understanding the psychology of why people are drawn to this ideology is therefore an important and urgent task, and will be pursued here through a psychoanalytic reading of some key documents. I will argue that its appeal is best seen not as a matter of religious belief, nor of political aspiration, but of regressive fundamentalism. Psychologically, this takes the form of an unconscious phantasy of submission to a terrifying and perverse superego, represented in consciousness as a theocratic absolutism. This raises complex questions about its relationship to contemporary Islam. But on the evidence to be considered, Islamic State ideology is based on primitive states of mind which can and do find secular forms of expression, and which have no intrinsic or necessary connection with modern religion or spirituality, nor with politics – except in the sense that its vision of world dominion cancels out all other existing politics. As a security threat to all existing polities, it is also a force demanding political responses, since security is a political matter. It might be useful therefore to refer to it as a pseudo-political force.

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 olarisation, Psychoanalysis, and Public P Understanding So while we might see that this ideology is not at root a political one, in its deployment it inevitably becomes part of politics. In the early decades of the twenty-first century, we find democracies old and new struggling to sustain peaceful and cohesive societies. We are living in a period of polarisation, in which many countries are seeing the rise of extremist parties, particularly though not only on the ‘Far Right,’ some of which openly support violence, such as the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn in Greece, or Jobbik in Hungary. The process of polarisation is partly driven by groups at the extremes: their polemics and gestures and actions not only intensify their enmities with groups at the other extreme, but also push people from the centre ground towards whichever extreme they feel safer with, or at least less threatened by. A French woman on a street in Paris, happened upon by a TV journalist hours after the attacks in November 2015, is tearful. You can never tell with a brief vox pop, but she seems a decent enough person, not a hardline racist. She is frightened she says, and she looks it. She says, ‘We just want this to stop, we are scared. We just want the Front Nationale to be the government and to stop it.’ In the complementary situation, the so-called ‘radicalisation’ of some young Muslims may sometimes be seen as a turn to a group that will defend them as Muslims, in response to the hostility and threat they experience from some people in the non-Muslim population, most seriously from perpetrators of anti-Muslim hate crimes. The underlying dynamic in these two situations is the same, in the need to turn to a group that will offer defence against a perceived threat. So an extreme group attracts people in flight from what is seen as the diametrically opposite group, by which they feel threatened. This process of polarisation has been called cumulative or interactive extremism (Eatwell 2006), and although 2017 saw in the Netherlands and France a revival of centrist electoral fortunes, there has been for some years a polarising trend across Europe, and in the United States. In the psychology of the public, it depends upon the competing extremes being perceived as absolutely different. A lot of psychologically minded

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c­ommentary and analysis tells us that a key element in the polarising dynamic is ‘othering,’ whereby the feared object is perceived as radically different from oneself, and from the group one is now supporting in the hope of being defended by it. This critique of othering sits comfortably alongside the sociopolitical discourse of diversity and multiculturalism, according to which we are all different, and our task is to get used to that, to tolerate the otherness of others, indeed to appreciate and celebrate the differences which we live amongst, rather than to absolutise differences and to judge different others negatively. Of course there is an important truth in this discourse, but a psychoanalytic political psychology takes us to a different level. From a psychoanalytic viewpoint, we see that the ‘otherness’ of the other is actually a projection of disowned parts of the self. The inability to accept the other is basically the inability to accept parts of oneself. Typically these are primitive needs and impulses, expressions of dependency, desire, or destructiveness. These are fundamental and universal elements of human nature, though they are overlain by cultural differences. Those differences are very important in shaping collective identities, the psychological importance of which multiculturalism often fails to recognise. But they are secondary distinctions which we focus on defensively, in order to conceal our projections of unacceptable parts of ourselves at the primary level. In so doing we rationalise intergroup conflict and obscure our fundamental sameness. The psychoanalytic approach to intergroup conflict is to some extent convergent with a multiculturalist vision of a universal humanity underlying cultural difference. However, it offers a different conception of universal human sameness to that found in multiculturalism. This highlights that unfortunately our sameness does not necessarily generate harmony, because along with shared needs we also have a shared unease with ourselves which generates conflict. The tendency towards intolerance of parts of the self can lead to projection of those parts onto others, and therefore to intolerance of others. This elementary psychoanalytic observation on intergroup relations may be worth repeating in the context of today’s intercultural tensions, as a corrective to the argument that the failures of multiculturalism can be addressed by yet more multicultural rhetoric. In its relative superficiality,

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liberal multiculturalist ideology adds to the insecurities of those who feel their collective identities are being eroded, and who are therefore vulnerable to polarising rhetorics, while also missing the sources of such rhetoric in a universally shared malignancy. This is an argument for bringing a psychoanalytic perspective into debates about polarisation and violent extremism. However, there are two difficulties which often arise around efforts to use psychoanalytic insights in political analysis. One is the problem of what clinicians would see as resistance. While many people may be willing to take on board the proposition that they fear the cultural ‘other’ because it represents an unknown, an alien strangeness which interaction and familiarity may overcome, far fewer would find plausible or acceptable the idea that they are defensively creating a threatening other through projection. This sort of problem will arise in many if not most attempts to throw light on the unconscious dimensions of politics, though it is a problem which is exacerbated by the apparent difficulty of finding a non-esoteric language to express such ideas. The second problem is one of what we might call ‘hyper-­ pathologising’. There are some very different states of mind underlying support for extremist and divisive political parties and movements. They range from states of hatred and active hostility based on the projection of destructive and perverse elements of the self, to states of fearful uncertainty driving a search for safety. This range is reflected in the terms used in political debate, with terms like racism, Nazism, fascism, and perhaps bigotry connoting the most extreme states, while the terms xenophobia, prejudice, Islamophobia, and anti-immigrant feeling suggest lesser rage. There is a tendency in psychoanalytic political psychology to be oriented towards the more severely pathological forms of extremism – not surprisingly, given that psychoanalysis more than any other psychology has a capacity to explain the extremes of human destructiveness. But there is a risk here of reproducing the kind of mistake made by those who view the Brexit result mainly as an expression of popular racism, or who see anyone voting for a Far Right party as an incipient Nazi. Responding to the present situation with diagnoses of mass psychic malignancy would be both politically unhelpful and psychologically

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inaccurate. We need to understand not only the entrenched destructive malignancies at the extremes, but also the more ambivalent, shifting, and nuanced states of mind characteristic of large sections of the public. Worst-case analyses of the regressive appeal of demagoguery are necessary, but do not give us a full enough picture of what is driving the populist surge. It may seem somewhat contrary that, having said that, I am now going to move on from these general observations to a case study of the ideology linked with today’s most savage form of organised (pseudo-)political violence, namely that practised by the Islamic State. The point just made about the risk of hyper-pathologising might point instead towards the study of how the centre ground of politics can include pockets of fear and resentment in which an ethos of violence may incubate; and it would certainly be easier to set up interviews with U.K.  Independence Party voters or English Defence League sympathisers rather than with convicted terrorists. But like many other researchers and observers, I have found that the task of understanding the horror of something like IS presents itself with a compelling urgency, and there are materials at hand for study. Moreover, the psychoanalytic study of malignant fundamentalism may possibly lead to a valuable contribution to broader public discourse. As stated above, the spiral of polarisation and interactive extremism depends upon the antagonistic extremes being perceived as absolutely different. In the example of contemporary violent ‘Islamism’ to be studied here, a particular form of sadistic superego and the terror it produces can be seen at the heart of the ideology and the practices of the ‘Islamic State.’ Other forms of violent fundamentalism may or may not emanate from that kind of source, but in any event I would suggest that some state of catastrophic anxiety and dread is likely to underlie the rage that characterises all forms of extremist violence (see, for example, Lifton 2000; Wieland 2015). C. Fred Alford (1997) has suggested that the ‘autistic-contiguous’ state of mind described by Thomas Ogden underlies much of the behaviour that would be described as ‘evil.’ In that state, the terrible experience is of the self vanishing or fragmenting, perhaps an even more primitive level of experience from which different unconscious configurations of imminent annihilation can develop.

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So in any particular situation, the extremist groups in question – the feared one and the one turned to for protection (let us say Hizb ut-Tahrir and the English Defence League, whichever way around they are) – are in fact likely to be drawing on the same inner sources. If that sameness were more accurately captured and more widely recognised in public discourse, perhaps that could sometimes constrain the tendency for some individuals hitherto uncommitted to support or join in with the extreme which they feel protected by. The idea that you can escape the hatred and violence of one by turning to that of the other would be more readily seen as a delusion, because you are staying in the same psychic world of threat, violence, and terror. Of course, there is a popular apprehension of the sameness of the extremes, in the simple belief that all terrorists of any stripe are evil. While very influential in a tabloid headline, this is typically a thoughtless proposition, which is easily dismissed, as media lies or ignorance, by propaganda that seeks to defend or condone a particular form of terrorism. Instead, we might imagine a significant number of the public having a more sophisticated understanding of the state of mind of the violent extremist, which might enable them to grasp the damage and the anxiety at work, and to see very similar states of mind behind apparently opposite ideological positions.

Ideology as a State of Mind: Analysing Dabiq The overall online presence of IS has been the subject of much academic and media scrutiny. Farwell (2014) notes the social media strategy of promoting a soft, golden image of IS, albeit not at the cost of concealing its appetite for slaughter. Berger (2015) accounts for the rapid growth of IS and of its global influence by the rise of the time-cancelling technologies of social media, particularly Twitter. Millenarian ideologies predicting an early apocalypse are well-served by the easily febrile and rapid-fire discourses of social media, while searching and filters can create enclosed online spaces and networks within which conversions and recruitment to extreme groups can take place, protected from ideological challenge and social sanction. In this technological context, the strategy of IS has been

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to go for the high-tempo mass production of messages and other online content, immersing its potential recruits in a flow of propaganda, particularly news, romantic dramatisations of armed conflict, and the idealised descriptions of its civil society, of life under IS as ‘a demented kind of utopia’ in which one indicator of order and stability is the frequent public execution of adulterers and homosexuals (Berger 2015, p. 67). As counterterrorism measures have intensified on social media, the platform Telegram has proved particularly hospitable to IS for both propaganda and operational communications, due to its particular functionalities and to the company’s reluctance to close accounts (Yayla and Speckhard 2017). Overall, though, IS has made extensive use of all major social media platforms and of YouTube, evading censorship by constantly changing the ways that it posts material. The content of its propaganda, however, remained relatively stable across the period of the organisation’s greatest military strength, as seen in the online magazine Dabiq, which it published across 15 issues between July 2014 and July 2016. The magazine was then discontinued, and replaced by Rumiyah which – reflecting the unfavourably changing situation – placed less emphasis on an imminent apocalypse symbolised by an imagined battle at Dabiq in Syria, and more on the distant goal of the Islamist conquest of Europe symbolised by IS conquering Rumiyah, that is, Rome (Wignell et al. 2017). Dabiq was a curious mixture of different types of content. We regularly find eulogistic interviews with and obituaries of IS foreign fighters, and articles reporting briefly on the many military successes the organisation claims to be having. There are lengthy pieces damning groups and individuals seen as the enemy; this of course is potentially everyone outside IS itself, but the most intensive attack is usually on other Muslims, the ‘apostates’ as IS sees them. The recurrent need of a fundamentalist sect to maintain its sense of its own purity by massive splitting is well documented here. The splitting process involves the projection of all weakness and sin onto rival Islamist groups, as much as if not more than the major enemy of the kufr world outside Islam. Al-Qaeda, as a rival for the leadership of global, violent takfiri Islamism, not surprisingly has been a major target (Dabiq 6), as has the Muslim Brotherhood (Dabiq 14), and other organisations unfamiliar to many Western readers. In essence, this vilification of rivals is the same as that of the kufr, since only one’s own group

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can hold the real and full truth, and all those who deviate from that truth, by however little, are ultimately of the enemy – and are more dangerous if they claim to hold the same truth. Published online and presumably read mostly on screen, Dabiq would still have transposed well into a printed form owing to its bold design and strong coloured images  – pictures of heroes and villains, battle scenes, and other apocalyptic imagery. Much of the writing is stiff, dogmatic, and obscure, which must handicap the glossy attempt to reach out to the unconverted, as would the amount of space given to endless feuding with other Islamists. It is hard to see what audience-capturing strategies lie behind it, even though the main aim appears to be to speak to Muslims in the West who may be open to its worldview. In that regard, one type of article regularly carried seems the most likely to be effective in influencing readers: the didactic exposition of the (alleged) principles of Islam, sometimes mixed with discussion and advice on the dilemmas and doubts confronting prospective jihadists, or on everyday life more broadly. Sometimes the writing in these articles takes on a more colloquial style, or that of an undergraduate essay.

A Most Brutal and Implacable Superego In this chapter I report on the second part of a thematic analysis study of Dabiq and of a major strategic document, The Management of Savagery. The first part of the study, covering Dabiq issues 1–10, is reported elsewhere (Richards in press-a). The major theme to emerge in that first part was one of terror – not the terror to be inflicted upon the kufr world, though that features heavily, but a terror which Dabiq encourages its readers to feel in recognising the power of Allah, and in facing the certain prospect of judgment by him. The god depicted is an overwhelmingly punitive one, demanding the total submission of all believers to his omnipotent will. Those who manage somehow in life to avoid his wrath will be rewarded with paradise, but for countless others who stray there is no mercy. And for those who never believed, a most terrible eternity is unavoidable. The inner compulsion to join IS and inflict pain and death on others can thus be understood as a necessary

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act of compliance, a way of seeking safety through merger with the boundless power and will of god. In psychoanalytic terms, this is ‘identification with the aggressor’ (first defined by Anna Freud - see, for example, Ferenczi 1949), and it can bring a delusional calm to those who can sustain it. While they cannot escape the ‘reality’ of Allah’s omnipotent wrath, they can thereby pass on to others their terror in the face of this most brutal and implacable superego by joining forces with it and carrying out the punishments it decrees for those who do not worship it. This theme continued to dominate the final five issues of Dabiq. The San Bernardino terrorists, who killed 14 people in December 2015, were thus saved from a painful punishment for having lived in the West (Dabiq 13, pp. 3–4). If Allah decrees that people should kill themselves, they should do so (Dabiq 14, pp. 18–19), so there is no escaping that the attempt to save oneself by merging with the threat is, paradoxically, an annihilation of the self – but one that can be redeemed in the paradise of the hereafter. In places, there is an implicit recognition that the inhuman absolutism of IS ideology demands a collapse of the self: ‘if my right hand were to oppose me, I would wage jihad against it with my left hand’ (Dabiq 13, p. 29). And in another twist of the perverse fusion of the self with the merciless externalised superego, the reader is told that affliction is a sign of Allah’s love  – ‘if Allah loves a people, he strikes them with affliction’ (Dabiq 14, p. 21). The good Muslim must show pleasure at this affliction, since it is a sign of his religiousness. If angry at his situation, he will meet with Allah’s anger. It seems that once the principles of Allah’s omnipotence and omniscience have been accepted, there is no end to the contradiction, absurdity and inhumanity that may be prescribed. A recurrent motif in the discourse of perfect subjection, one which gives literal expression to the idea of seeking shelter within the threatening power, is that of ‘uniting behind the single man.’ Allegiance must be pledged to a single imam (Dabiq 15, p. 27), behind whom everyone must firmly stand, demonstrating the indissolubility of the ummah, or community. ‘Whoever comes to you wanting to break your strength or divide your unity while your matter is altogether under a single man, then kill him’ (Dabiq 13, p.  8). Aside from the possibly erotic connotations of the prepositions ‘behind’ and ‘under’ which are frequently used in this

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context, the homicidal rage expressed by such pronouncements testifies to the power of the anxiety felt when the pseudo-security of this union is threatened. A subsidiary aspect of the state of mind to which Dabiq appeals is a kind of narcissistic chafing at the constraints of reality: ‘for the life of this world, even at the height of its splendour and pleasantries, will always be the believer’s prison’ (Dabiq 14, p. 12). While in one form or another this sentiment is common in many different societies, it becomes potentially dangerous when linked with fantasies of a righteous apocalypse in which the reality of the present can be cast aside, and everyone will at last get what they deserve, whether that is ignominious slaughter or martyrdom. As the military and territorial position of IS began to weaken, and its image as a triumphant army was waning, the final issue carried an article extolling the merits of the suicide bomb mission – one form of Allah’s ‘sword of mercy’ (Dabiq 15, p. 34). This concept succinctly captures the perversity of the ideology – perversity in the sense of fusing evil and good, killing and compassion. This concept is not explained further in the magazine, but is at the centre of long passages in the other document which was analysed as part of this study. This is more of a handbook for leading cadres rather than a propaganda and recruiting tool. The Management of Savagery (Naji, n.d.) is a lengthy text by an Islamist intellectual named Abu Bakr Naji.1 It was written around 2005, and is an expression of thinking in al-Qaeda at that time. However, Stern and Berger (2015), in their authoritative work on the Islamic State, see it as an important influence on the philosophy of IS. The phrase ‘the management of savagery’ refers to how a conquering force of jihadists should set about governing a territory which it has taken control of when that territory is in a state of chaos and violence following the fall of an oppressive regime (a situation presumably like that in a number of countries after the ‘Arab Spring’). It’s not clear why the term ‘savagery’ was used here, although its use suggests that the author has an underlying Hobbesian belief in the natural tendency of humans towards violence and disorder once the restraining power of the state is weakened. Much of the document is taken up with philosophical statements on the nature of power and the purposes of war and violence, and with

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discussion of the correct line to take in political affairs, such as when to form alliances, how to communicate with publics inside and outside the territory controlled, and matters of local government and administration. Mostly, these discussions do not tell us much about the psychology of violent jihadism beyond the massive preoccupation with god’s law and the need to ensure that one chooses actions that conform with god’s law and so improve your chances of escaping eternal hellfire. In places, however, there are glimpses of particular failing or perverse superego formations. In one section, entitled ‘Using Violence’ (pp. 66–72), the capacity of the ideology to protect the jihadi mind from falling apart under the pressure of its impulse to violence appears stretched to breaking point. The superego ceases to function as a moral agency. The rationale for unlimited violence is purely pragmatic, in that it will terrorise the enemy. So for example, ‘hostages should be liquidated in a terrifying manner,’ to send fear into enemy hearts (p. 72). The enemy must know they will ‘pay a price,’ which may be extorted many years later in attacks on targets anywhere in the world, so almost any violence is rationalised. Massacres are a routine and inevitable part of war, so the statement ‘we need to massacre others’ (p. 69) is simply common sense. Victory always goes to the most brutal side. Any ‘softness’ (p. 66) must be expunged. The superego has all but collapsed into an ego based on a realpolitik of violence. There is a simple calculus of violence: only the most violent survive. This may represent a facet of IS which is closest to the otherwise inaccurate notion that it is a ‘death cult.’ Yet elsewhere there is an intense effort to keep the superego moralised, to regenerate the discourse of good and evil. This is most strikingly demonstrated in one of the seven articles on specific topics which are appended to the main document, to provide more detailed exposition and instruction on key issues. The fifth of these is entitled ‘Our Method is a Mercy to All Beings,’ and reminds readers that despite ‘the blood, corpses and ... killing’ which it entails, jihad is among the most blessed acts of worship, if not the most blessed. It is Satan who causes people to see jihad as filled only with blood, because in fact it is ‘the most merciful of the methods for all created things and the most sparing of the spilling of blood’ (p.  234). Immediately following this statement there is over a page of

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eulogy to ‘the Creator of this awesome, wondrous universe ... and He is the Merciful, the Compassionate and He is the Avenger, the Almighty and the Proud,’ whose perfection means that all violence in his name must also be, if not ‘perfect,’ at least basically good. This point is made through two utilitarian arguments. First, massacring the unbelievers and apostates cancels out the possibility of them reproducing and so spares endless future populations from eternal hellfire in the hereafter, because they won’t be born. This ‘salvation from the fire for coming generations’ (p. 237) offers a massive net reduction in human suffering. It is ‘a greater mercy to humanity than the awful torment of God being sent down directly upon them’ (loc. cit.). Then there is a second type of utilitarian case for violent jihad. Because it disposes of those people who bring corruption to the earth, it spares from the wrath of god those others who would have become their victims and been led down wrong paths. In both these arguments the case for the great mercy of god is premised upon his boundless rage. He is merciful not by commuting the punishments he inflicts on sinners, that is by tempering his rage, but by accepting a smaller number of sinners, towards the remaining numbers of whom he will remain implacably merciless. In these strange contortions of theological fantasy, we can see a perverse (con)fusion of good and evil described in the actions of god. The savage superego deity is good, because of its absolute insistence upon sadistic punishment.

Beyond Reason There are to date two other publications which share with this chapter an empirical focus on the content of Dabiq. One is the paper by Wignell et al. referred to earlier, which compares the style and topics of Dabiq with those in Rumiyah. The other is by the Australian researcher Haroro Ingram (2016), who analyses Dabiq content from a rationalistic perspective rather than a psychoanalytic viewpoint. Ingram identifies two types of content. One makes an appeal to the ‘identity’ values of readers, since it simply asserts either the rightness of the in-group (IS) or the wrongness of the out-group (in effect, the rest of the world). Other content is seen

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as presenting ‘rational choices,’ since it offers a dichotomous choice between in-group and out-group, or right and wrong. Ingram goes on to discuss this distinction in more detail, and to offer it as a key distinction in the analysis of IS propaganda. However, I argue this distinction is false. There is no real choice of any kind in the ‘rational’ content, since the terms of the dichotomy have preempted that: would you choose the only right path, which leads to paradise, or (the only alternative) sin and eternal hellfire? The classical philosophical distinction between value-based rationalities of ends and instrumental rationalities of means needs to be brought to the fore in the psychology of terrorism, so that any references to ‘rational’ choice could be heavily qualified, or avoided. There is arguably an instrumental ‘rationality’ of means in the conduct of IS; as we have seen, this lies in their strategic rationale for almost limitless violence. This is similar to the perverse instrumentalism of the Nazis as they built the death camps. The end (the Caliphate, and the brutality and genocides it requires) is based on a primitive phantasy of necessity, not any kind of reason in the Enlightenment sense – it is simply the necessity of avoiding eternal damnation and hellfire. As such it is simply asserted, as the only alternative to catastrophe, just as for the Nazis the Aryan paradise and the genocides it required were the only alternative to their own annihilation. Once that end value of paradise is in place, the only space for ‘rationality’ is in the exercise of a brutal principle of efficient progress towards the end.2 This is a delusion-based rationality, called into service only to act out the terrible defences necessary to preserve an existentially threatened identity. Yet in Ingram’s analysis, ‘identity’ and ‘rational-choice’ processes are differentiated. Although he acknowledges their frequent fusion in practice, the conceptual differentiation will continue to mislead, since all the textual content in Ingram’s data springs from a single source in the fundamentalist, Manichaean mind-set and its fixation on a cosmic good vs. evil dichotomy which is believed to be approaching resolution. Ingram himself notes the importance of a fundamentalist view of ‘a lethally bipolar world in the midst of a cosmic war leading to Armageddon’ (p. 472). This should lead us to see that ‘rationality’ is present only instrumentally, in the service of phantasy (spelt ‘ph’ as it refers to an unconscious configuration of mind).

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Beyond Religion and Politics What can be said about the sociocultural conditions which generate the state of mind that has been described? The diversity of backgrounds and biographies amongst international recruits to IS suggests that there is no shared pattern of family dynamics or socioeconomic context, and no common ground in the exposure to whatever theological and/or ideological influences which their early upbringing or adolescence may have involved. Rather, this diversity suggests that the invitation to violence which IS propaganda offers is a floating element which can be attached to a wide range of individual states of mind. I have been suggesting that these internal states are likely to have something in common – the predilection for phantasies of terrified subjection, and for a violent response to enable escape from that subjection, as described in this chapter. However, these are very primitive elements of mind. They are overlain by the segments and layers of social and interpersonal functioning which contribute more visibly to ‘personality,’ and which reflect the idiosyncratic products of experience in the world, of the complex interactions between internal states and external conditions. This means that when the phantasies of terror have erupted into reality, we can see how different perpetrators have taken different pathways to get to that point. A very important implication of this is that ‘Islamist’ terror has little to do with the Islam which Islamists claim to represent and to own. There is a clue to this in the relatively high proportion of converts amongst those convicted of terrorism offences (Mullins 2015; van San 2015). While Bartoszewicz (2013) reminds us that converts are not a homogenous ‘high risk’ group, we may suggest that for some their conversion was a result of what they saw as an opportunity to transcend humiliation and terror, if necessary with righteous violence (a point which connects this chapter to that of Vera King). There are many ways to do this, including other fundamentalist political ideologies, and violent crime – an increasingly common factor in the histories of ‘homegrown’ terrorists, with a number of conversions having taken place in prison. Violent Islamism happens to be the most globally high-profile way of legitimising antisocial violence at the present time, but its appeal to many western recruits does not connect with its geopolitical origins in the Middle East, nor with Islamic theology.

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It is, rather, simply a way for recruits to hold themselves together psychologically, partly through being ready to visit violence on others. And this can be the case as much for the extremist convert as for the ‘revert’ – that is, for the person of Muslim origins who has not been practising Islam for much of their life and then takes it up in extremist form. In those cases it may appear on the surface as if Islam per se is substantively involved, because the individual has some prior knowledge of it, and there may be some identification with devout family members which rationalises or supports the apparent rediscovery of the native religion. Of course, social and cultural locations and identities will anyway shape the likelihood of one ideological rationale rather than another being chosen by a given individual. As a black person who had grown up in very white parts of 1970s England, Adrian Elms (who as ‘Khalid Masood’ perpetrated the attack which killed four people in London in March 2017) was more likely to have become a Muslim than Thomas Mair, the socially isolated white consumer of Nazism who killed the MP Jo Cox in 2016. As we have noted, these are complex pathways which can have surprising endpoints; other socially isolated white people have become Islamist terrorists. But still, it is ascribed identities such as race, religion, and nation which play the major role in determining where people will look for a violent fundamentalism to help them manage their internal worlds. This does not however mean that for the revert there is necessarily an authentic discovery of a spiritually defined identity. In the cases of those ‘reverting’ to violent Islamism, it is from a psychological viewpoint just as plausible to see the identity as a way of managing terror and legitimising violence. Moreover, as the more freewheeling and indiscriminately brutal IS has supplanted al-Qaeda as the global leader of Islamist terror, the outreach to damaged and alienated individuals of all backgrounds in the West has increased. This century has also seen growth in the capacity of counterterrorism measures and of the security services to neutralise threats, and so elaborate and costly attacks like 9/11 have been harder to plan and execute. Creating a worldwide immersive propaganda environment which might ‘radicalise’ anyone, and thereby result in any kind of attack which can be claimed by IS as the work of its ‘soldiers,’ becomes a more attractive strategy than the careful identification, recruitment, and

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development of the individuals best equipped to carry out centrally defined tasks. The argument here then is that much if not most ‘homegrown’ Islamist terrorism in the West is only circumstantially related to Islamism. While some specific elements of IS propaganda may seem to offer insight or truth to some recruits (e.g. declarations about the corruption allegedly everywhere in the non-Muslim world), its basic appeal lies in its resonance with a preverbal unconscious phantasy of terror, to which its doctrine gives words and from which it promises escape. Hence the dangerous convergence between violent fundamentalist ideology and the needs and impulses of psychologically troubled individuals, a convergence which, as I have discussed elsewhere (Richards 2016), threatens to mobilise more and more individuals to pseudo-political violence. While all this may apply to the typical recruit in the West, what though of the recruits in the countries where those groups have originated, and what especially of the leadership cadres of IS and other Islamist groups, the people who originate the propaganda, or supervise its production? Might we not look for a more consistent psychocultural basis for their commitment to the cause, something perhaps in the direct experience of postcolonial and neo-imperial regional politics, or in the shared experience of authoritarian regimes in conservative Muslim societies? While psychoanalysis would tell us that the particular phantasies outlined earlier are found universally in the human psyche, why have they been articulated with such persistence, force, and consequence in violent takfiri Islamism? It is beyond the reach of this paper and this author to answer this question. Social historians of the region may be able to assess what effects the recent history of conflict (and perhaps also its older roots in sectarianism and colonialism) have had on relationships within families, and on the culture as a whole. But some pointers can be found in a disturbing essay by Ariel Ahram (2015) called ‘Sexual Violence and the Making of ISIS.’ Ahram notes that the hypermasculinity of the Islamist warrior ideal, and the idealisation, brutalisation, and commodification of women that are typical of IS, echo ‘practices that have been endemic for decades in Iraq and Syria’ (p. 58). He draws on the concept of ‘neo-patriarchy’ (Sharabi 1988) to place IS in the context of the postcolonial histories of the two countries, in which ethno-sectarian conflicts have underpinned despotic governments

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led by violent ‘father figures.’ He argues that violent rape has been commonly used in civil war and in government repression, while practices of sexual slavery, polygamy, concubinage, and honour killing all contributed to experiences of limitless patriarchal power, and ‘provided a blueprint for instrumentalising sexual violence as a tool of state-building’ (p. 70). If these observations are accurate, then sexual politics are likely to be of deep relevance to the psychodynamics of the Islamic State – as they are to the understanding of Nazism (Theweleit 1987) and, as I have suggested elsewhere, terrorists like the Norwegian Anders Breivik (Richards in press-b). However, the cultural roots of, and individual routes towards, the establishment of a malignant superego as described here may be many and various. The ability of IS to recruit individuals of diverse backgrounds from different countries suggests that the production of violent terror can be a final common pathway for many forms of disturbance. This points both to the importance of the mental health dimension of extremist violence, and to the difficulty of generalising about it.

Notes 1. It was translated from Arabic (by William McCants) with the support of the John M.  Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard University, and published by them in 2006. 2. This does not preclude the fact that for residents of an area controlled by IS, there may be some understandable calculus of cost and benefit in assessing the benefits of the policing, infrastructural, and welfare services, which IS has introduced or administered, and which as Ingram (p. 471) reports are sometimes celebrated in the pages of Dabiq, against the costs and risks of living in an oppressive theocracy to which total submission is demanded.

References Ahram, A. (2015). Sexual violence and the making of ISIS. Survival, 57(3), 57–78. Alford, C. F. (1997). What evil means to us. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

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Bartoszewicz, M. (2013). Controversies of conversions: the potential terrorist threat of European converts to Islam. Perspectives on Terrorism, 7(3), 17–29. Berger, J. (2015). The metronome of apocalyptic time: social media as carrier wave for millenarian contagion. Perspectives on Terrorism, 9(4), 61–71. Eatwell, R. (2006). Community cohesion and cumulative extremism in contemporary Britain. The Political Quarterly, 77(2), 204–216. Farwell, J. (2014, October 2). How ISIS uses social media. Politics and Strategy: The Survival Editors’ Blog. https://www.iiss.org/en/politics%20 and%20strategy/blogsections/2014-d2de/october-931b/isis-media-9d28. Accessed September 1, 2017. Ferenczi, S. (1949). Confusion of the tongues between the adults and the child. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 30(40), 225–230. Ingram, H. (2016). An analysis of Islamic State’s Dabiq magazine. Australian Journal of Political Science, 51(3), 458–477. Lifton, R. (2000). Destroying the world to save it: Aum Shinrikyo, apocalyptic violence, and the new global terrorism. London: Picador. Mullins, S. (2015). Re-examining the involvement of converts in Islamist terrorism: a comparison of the U.S. and U.K. Perspectives on Terrorism, 9(6), 72–84. Naji, A. B. (n.d.). The Management of Savagery (W. McCants, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard University. Richards, B. (2016). The voices of extremist violence: what can we hear? In H. Savigny, E. Thorsen, D. Jackson, & J. Alexander (Eds.), Media, margins and civic agency (pp. 62–74). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Richards, B. (in press-a). Terror in the mind of the terrorist. In J.  Adlam, T. Kluttig, & B. Lee (Eds.), Structural violence and creative structures. London: Jessica Kingsley. Richards, B. (in press-b). Collective identities, Breivik and the national container. In R. D. Hinshelwood & N. Mintchev (Eds.), The feeling of certainty. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Sharabi, H. (1988). Neopatriarchy: A theory of distorted change in Arab society. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stern, J., & Berger, J. (2015). ISIS: The state of terror. London: William Collins. Theweleit, K. (1987). Male fantasies. Cambridge: Polity. van San, M. (2015). Lost souls searching for answers? Belgian and Dutch converts joining the Islamic State. Perspectives on Terrorism, 9(5), 47–72. Wieland, C. (2015). The fascist state of mind and the manufacturing of masculinity. London: Routledge.

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Wignell, P., Tan, S., O’Halloran, K. L., & Lange, R. (2017). A mixed methods empirical examination of changes in emphasis and style in the extremist magazines Dabiq and Rumiyah. Perspectives on Terrorism, 11(2), 2–20. Yayla, A., & Speckhard, A. (2017). Telegram: The mighty application that ISIS loves. Fairfax, VA: International Center for the Study of Violent Extremism.

Pussy Riot, or the Return of the Repressed in Discourse Maria Brock

Abstract  While a ‘return of the repressed’ is commonly linked to neurotic symptoms, the title of this chapter reflects the argument that there can be a return of the repressed in and through discourse. The discussion is based on a reading of reactions to the performance and subsequent imprisonment of Russian feminist punk collective Pussy Riot in 2012. The strongly negative reactions to the group in Russia featured not only discursive reenactments of gendered fantasmatic violence; the language also frequently called to mind the linguistic repertoire of Stalinism. This  – linguistic and other – ­violence was symptomatic of a collective unease with the ambiguity inherent in the multiple meanings of the group’s name and the nature of their performances, as they evoked a return to instability and chaos. It may seem self-evident that societal antagonisms are revealed by such ‘spontaneous’ linguistic outbursts, but it is worth paying attention to the language employed in order to understand which elements of the past are conjured by it, and why. When language is uprooted and retrieved from a previous historical context, it can retain a violent charge that comes back to haunt the speaking M. Brock (*) School of Culture and Education, Centre for Baltic and East European Studies (CBEES), Södertörn University, Huddinge, Sweden © The Author(s) 2018 S. Krüger et al. (eds.), Fomenting Political Violence, Studies in the Psychosocial, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97505-4_4

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subject and its discourse. This chapter assumes a psychosocial perspective in order to reflect on the relationship between language and history, with the aim of finding a means of speaking of the social so as to understand the relationship between violent language and ‘unfinished history.’ On February 21, 2012, five members of the Russian feminist punk ‘collective’ Pussy Riot entered the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow, crossed themselves in front of the altar and started singing a ‘punk prayer,’ entreating the Mother of God to become a feminist and ‘chase Putin away,’ and calling Patriarch Kirill a ‘bitch.’ In March, members Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina were arrested, followed by third member Ekaterina Samutsevich shortly after. Prosecutors accused the women of attempting to ‘incite hatred against the Orthodox church’ and ‘hooliganism.’ On July 17 the verdict was announced: two years in a penal colony for each of the women – one year less than demanded by the prosecution. While Ekaterina Samutsevich was released on probation in October, Alekhina and Tolokonnikova were sent to penal colonies in Perm and Mordovia, where they spent 21 months sewing uniforms for members of the Russian military. Both women undertook separate hunger strikes in order to protest prison conditions, and Tolokonnikova was briefly hospitalised. In 2012, the year of the trial, the case became the subject of intense sociocultural debate, with national and international reactions to their church performance ranging from discomfort to outrage and disgust, and, at the other end of the spectrum, from support to unbridled excitement. The former faction is best exemplified by Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev’s statement in September of that year, indicating his viscerally negative response to the group: From an emotional point of view – and I apologise the un-parliamentary expression – what they did makes me nauseous, the way they look and the hysteria that’s accompanied this story.1

In Russia, the vehemence with which the Pussy Riot debate was conducted distinguished it from other public scandals that preceded it, as was pointed out by sociologist Lyubov Borusyak in a discussion of the context and impact of the group’s performance: ‘Nothing like it has ever taken

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place over here’ (Borusyak 2012). Generally characterised by negative affect, much of the aggression displayed in Russian discussions about the case was directed at the women’s (often imagined) lifestyles. Even in more benign manifestations of this strand of discourse, the three women were repeatedly referred to as ‘silly fools’ (дуры) or ‘idiots’ (идиотки) by both journalists and bloggers (Sharogradskii 2012). Finally, the group’s name and politics regarding gender and sexuality evoked a whole slew of negative responses, ranging from unease to revulsion and outright rejection. I previously analysed the type of enjoyment (as a potential basis for the creation of a ‘community of the offended’) that motivated some of the extreme reactions to the group (Brock 2016). This chapter will reflect on the kind of language used to disparage and attack the women, and how it forms part of a larger discursive repertoire whose historical links to totalitarian violence have been repressed. It is proposed here that a collective regression to a language characteristic of a previous era, which then erupts in violent speech acts, can be an instance of a ‘return of the repressed’ (Freud 1915/1957). By being a product of repression, rather than merely a form of ‘speech residue,’ this linguistic violence also retains its potency, carrying with it the weight of oppression and brutality enacted upon countless individuals. In this sense, the argument here aligns with Judith Butler’s claim that the force of an injurious name should be understood as an effect of its historicity (Butler 1997). Perhaps more controversially, it is argued that one of the symptoms of a failure or inability to work through the past is a return of its discursive manifestations. In Russia, an absence of cultural means to confront and work through its troubled history is now coupled with a more recent lack of political will to do so. Some argue this represents an attempt to rehabilitate a national narrative that is victorious rather than traumatic (Lezina 2017). However, it is important to clarify early on that while sociohistorical and political context forms the ‘conditions of possibility’ for these intensely negative responses to Pussy Riot – and some time will be spent exploring this background – hate speech targeting women, artists, and feminist artists in particular is not exclusive to Russia. Similarly, a recurrence of totalitarian language that denies the humanity of its targets happens in a number of contexts. In Germany, for example, the recurrent colloquial use of the category asozial (‘antisocial’) to refer to ‘socially undesirable’ or ‘deviant’ subjects – a category that goes back to National Socialism – is one case in point. Additionally, while the public denigration

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and silencing of women has a long history (Beard 2014), in the age of social media, when hatred can circulate as a kind of ‘affective currency’ (Kuntsman 2008, 2010), verbal attacks of a violent and sexual nature on women have become increasingly frequent. While this analysis is not arguing in favour of drawing a straight line from rhetorical to physical violence, the treatment the women of Pussy Riot experienced at the hands of the authorities shows that one can fairly easily escalate into the other. As the reactions to the group’s name, lyrics, and church performance demonstrate, a language of provocation here acts as a trigger, with a language of rejection and denigration then being produced in response. However, this violence can spill over and take on a more properly ‘material’ form, as is equally starkly illustrated through the experiences of the LGBT+ community in Russia in recent years. Indeed, as Lara Ryazanova-Clarke argues, when such language is implicitly or explicitly sanctioned by the state, it becomes hegemonic, as in the case of the law against ‘homosexual propaganda’ passed in 2013: The resignification of the violent verbal discourse of the State into non-­verbal discursive forms of violent social acts did not ask to wait. The symbolic hegemonic meanings and imaginary interdiscursively spread to the field of action of the supporting hegemonic grassroots, with the result of violence reverberating and producing more violence. (Ryazanova-Clarke 2016, p. 15)

It is argued here that language is one guise in which repressed violence can return, but that it is also merely one of the loci in which it erupts. As has been demonstrated in the aftermath of totalitarian regimes and cases of large-scale oppression or persecution of groups, it must be assumed that past violence is not forgotten even many decades after it occurred. At the same time, it cannot easily be ‘metabolised’ or integrated into memory, be it individual or collective, as the past continues to haunt the body social. Such haunting can take place in the form of chimera that pursue subjects and sites like ghosts, or through a return to certain linguistic or other patterns of behaviour that trip us up and seemingly strip us of agency. While psychoanalysis, beginning with its early topographical and archaeological models, supplies useful means with which to speak of the interrelation between different temporal ‘layers,’ the insight that the past continues to live in the present is perhaps less novel when speaking of the social than when speaking of the psyche.

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The approach assumed in this chapter concerns itself with speech and with the meanings and effects that are created by it, but also with the force that sets speech in motion: ‘What characteristically generates language in us is thus the workings of our defenses’ (Alcorn 2002, p. 80). While this chapter represents an attempt to speak of how historical phenomena continue to have a life in the present, the aim is not to merely map psychoanalysis onto history, or to merge the two by providing a history of the social as a history of collective pathology. Similar to the ways in which, in the life of the subject, repression becomes a precondition for entrance into society (Freud 1915/1957), there are clearly factors at work that reproduce these dynamics of repression in communities. This can also mean that when certain traumatic events are not confronted or worked through, they can return in the guise of symptoms. Examples include a regression to, or slips into, certain speech habits, meaning here both expressions prevalent or popular during a specific historical period, but also the discursive reenactment of violence – in the case of Pussy Riot a kind of public fantasy of how the women should be punished. A collective experience of totalitarian violence such as that of Stalinism, where its very dispersed nature meant that anyone could become its next victim, created a climate of extreme mutual suspicion and even paranoia. At the same time, this quality also made a separation between victims and perpetrators impossible, as the latter could at any one point become the former (Paperny 2002). Their fates were intertwined to the degree that the fear of being destroyed could go hand in hand with a wish or ability to destroy others. This chapter illustrates how, in times of greater societal antagonism, such a repressed history of violence can return in discourse, in particular to home in on, and victimise specific groups, such as members of the LGBT+ community, female artists, or those pursuing alternative lifestyles. A first step in the discussion of a return of the repressed in discourse is to examine the context in which it reemerged.

Antagonistic Context The air is filled with mutual aggression. The most obvious and easy-to-get­at objects of aggression are people that are not like you. – Russian poet Lev Rubinstein. (quoted in Krivyakina and Afonina 2012)

Accompanying the 2011 Russian parliamentary elections and reports of electoral fraud, as well as the subsequent announcement that Vladimir

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Putin would be running for president for a third time,2 a series of protests and mass demonstrations demanding fair elections took place in Moscow and other large Russian cities throughout 2012, before more or less dying down by 2013. The government and the Russian Orthodox Church, two of the country’s strongest authorities, quickly demonstrated their apprehension at a potential loss of influence. As Lyubov Borusyak commented at the time: The state, president and the institution of the Orthodox Church reacted badly to their loss of mass support. A pretext to return this support was necessary, even indispensable. And when a pretext is needed, it is always found. It turned out that Pussy Riot’s performance was perfectly suited for it. (Borusyak 2012)

Indeed, rather than giving in to the protesters’ demands or offer an acknowledgement thereof, the government’s immediate response was to introduce a series of repressive acts, ‘from raising the fines for participation in “unsanctioned” demonstrations and imposing harsh limits on NGOs, to the darkly absurd laws against “offending the rights of believers” and “homosexual propaganda”’ (Budraitskis 2014, p. 184), as well as laws recriminalising slander, to name just a few. There is a separate question to be asked about why, in times of increased societal antagonism, it is often women who become targets of violence, or whose freedoms such as reproductive rights come under fire (Yuval-Davis 1997), though the current discussion will chiefly deal with the form and consequences of such attacks. Indeed, this is not the first time that female artists were arrested and tried for ‘offending the feelings of believers’ (Ryklin 2005; Sandomirskaja 2012; Gradskova et  al. 2013). Feminist artist Anna Al’chuk was put on trial in 2002 after a controversial exhibition in Moscow, and while she was acquitted eventually, she committed suicide in 2008, an act which many linked to the trial. Artemy Mangun offers a more psycho-political reading of the societal climate around the arrest of Pussy Riot (Mangun 2016). In his analysis, the backlash against the feminist and LGBT+ movement, along with a turn to conservative family values are exemplary of the ‘gender anxiety’ symptomatic of what he terms Russia’s hysteria. Mangun locates the

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origin of this hysterical position in an insecurity regarding Russia’s identity vis-à-vis the West, as well as in the absence of a credible national project after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Consequently, in the climate of aggression that characterises contemporary Russian politics, internal symptoms and antagonisms are acted out, and projected onto the other, marking a shift away from the self-flagellation and sense of inferiority of the ‘melancholic’ 1990s. This also finds expression in a compensatory and punitive masculinity  – its most notorious incarnation being that of Vladimir Putin – which seeks to discipline a liberated and hence threatening femininity. While, after the introduction of the abovementioned repressive laws, Russian authorities tend to favour their application in a random, heavily symbolic manner rather than on a large scale, such scare tactics nevertheless manage to shape public discourse, and serve to create an atmosphere of mutual suspicion and oppression, reminiscent of earlier periods in Russian and Soviet history. The public’s relation to the name ‘Pussy Riot’ straightforwardly illustrates the gender anxiety theorised by Mangun. In contributions to the debate, a correlation was frequently made between a personal unease with the name, how one chooses to translate the original English name into Russian, and how the women should be judged altogether. Language, like any symbolic system, is marked by condensation and overdetermination of meaning, leaving it forever open to interpretation. However, this openness proved unsettling when it came to translations of the group’s name. The unease caused by the multiplicity of meanings became all the more pronounced as the name contains a threat – the promise of violence and change inherent in the word ‘riot,’ as well as sexual, potentially obscene connotations inherent in the word ‘pussy.’ The image that is evoked is thus doubly menacing: the wholesale chaos and destruction of one’s way of life, including that of traditional gender dynamics and gender identities. The women’s self-proclaimed feminism and nontraditional lifestyles are seen as direct attacks on the traditional family, with their choice of a Western name additionally seen as pandering to the Western gaze. The threat that the group represented is therefore partially embodied in its ambiguous name and needed to be managed  – meaning needed to be fixed, for example by staking a claim to the name’s definite translation. This translation could focus on regressive or progressive elements of the

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name, exaggerate or understate its sexual or violent associations – evident in Russian interpretations such as ‘Frenzied Vagina,’ or, assuming an entirely different direction, ‘Velvet Revolution’ (Brock 2016).

Fantasies of Violence Other means of responding to the provocation inherent in the group’s name and performance were a recurrent recourse to fantasised scenes of violence involving Pussy Riot’s members. Extensive debates on the ­usefulness and meanings of corporal punishment in Russia were triggered by the case: Maybe the icon defilers and Pussy Riot just need a good flogging? Incidentally, as a survey by the All-Russian Centre for the Study of Public Opinion showed, every fourth Russian is not opposed to such corporal punishment. Twenty-seven percent of respondents are in favour of adding corporal punishment to the Criminal Code. (TV100 2012)

Others also picked up on the unusual degree to which this theme ran through discussions around the Pussy Riot affair: The gender terror against Pussy Riot reached its peak in the motif of physical punishment that would be more appropriate for them than prison. The idea of a desirable, or even merciful spanking of Pussy Riot members was expressed by many ‘supporters’, beginning with the known leader of the protest movement, Nemtsov and seconded by the actor and director Ivan Okhlobystin as well as the Communist leader Gennadii Ziuganov. (Lipovetsky 2015, p. 51)

The latter, Gennadii Ziuganov, in fact provided a rather detailed account: ‘I would take a good leather belt, give them a good spanking, and then send them back to their children and parents. This would be a good administrative punishment for them. And I would tell them not to engage in such blasphemy anymore’ (quoted in Bernstein 2013, p. 225). Anya Bernstein provides a substantial number of examples of such discursive reenactments of physical punishment. The well-known journalist and TV

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presenter Maksim Shevchenko, for example, wrote: ‘I think Orthodox women should catch and flog these little bitches with birch rods. Let them also have a “performance”’ (Shevchenko 2012). The influential conservative intellectual Egor Kholmogorov opined that ‘if I was working for this church [i.e. the church in which Pussy Riot had their performance], I would first call the TV crews and then undress [the members of Pussy Riot], cover them with feathers and honey, shave their heads, and kick them out in the freezing cold in front of the cameras’ (Bernstein 2013, p. 224). In other contributions to the debate on how to go about punishing Pussy Riot, there is mention of tying them to a whipping post, thrashing them, or even giving them a ‘fatherly spanking’ (Bernstein 2013, p. 224). One way to read this public preoccupation with detailed strategies of corporal punishment is as a collective regression to archaic practices and institutions. Added to that is a remarkable predominance of men clamouring for the punishment of women, envisioning sexualised rituals of submission and mastery. This leads Bernstein to enquire whether these fantasmatic enactments of violence could mark a ‘return of the repressed,’ making the argument that, historically, in the Russian context a discourse of women needing to be ‘disciplined and punished’ traces back to Imperial Russia (Bernstein 2013, pp. 227–228). The bodies of women here emerge as one site upon which sovereignty is performed by the state, increasingly so in times when its authority or legitimacy are questioned. In Ryazanova-Clarke’s analysis of the linguistic violence that emerged around the introduction of the law banning the ‘Propaganda of Non-­ Traditional Sexual Relations Among Minors’ in Russia, the author observes a similar tendency to publicly imagine enactments of ritualised, archaic corporal punishment together with heavily sexualised imagery, inflicted upon those one purportedly feels disgust for  – in this case, LGBT+ subjects. She treats such sexualised fantasy scenes of punishment and humiliation as discursive strategies of magnification and intensification, applied to the hegemonic meaning of stigmatisation (Ryazanova-­ Clarke 2016, p. 17). Significantly, here too, a kind of legitimacy is sought by making references to punishment practices in Tsarist Russia or ancient Rus’. What all these fantasmatic enactments of violence in discourse demonstrate is how an undercurrent of violence permeates Russian society

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even today, with certain distant historical periods now open for rehabilitation. In turn, more recent historical periods, such as the Second World War, are harvested for their potential to enhance a narrative of national resilience, with its traumatic aspects silenced.

Ventriloquising the Past While official remembrance of Stalinism other than to celebrate the victory of World War II has been all but banished (Lezina 2017), the period’s linguistic manifestations have never fully disappeared. This state of affairs produces a particular kind of tension: the subject taking recourse to such language can be in denial about its force, as the link to historical violence either remains unacknowledged, or is deemphasised. Another example which illustrates the way language used in the present can reanimate not only the expressions but also the discursive context of a previous era is an official statement that had been prepared after a meeting by the ‘Workers’ Collective Togliattiazot’ in October 2012. In it, the workers of a chemical plant in Southern Russia announced that they were prepared to receive the Pussy Riot hooligans in their business after completion of their sentence in order to reeducate these party girls from the capital in their healthy work atmosphere so as to help them become worthy members of society, as well as real mothers. In these conditions the workers’ collective ‘Togliattiazot’ gives a firm workers’ ‘no’ in response to the boulevard-­haunting loafers from the capital and their ‘foreign’ group of supporters. (Interfax 2012)

The language in use is proto-Soviet: the announcement is made from a position of collectivity and propriety, in opposition to the small minority that is being condemned here for its loose morals and general attitude of frivolity. The threat of a compulsory reeducation programme smacks of the ambitions of the early Soviet period to create the New Soviet Man (Kelly 2016), and the reference to ‘real’ motherhood – presumably versus the simulacrum of maternity provided by ‘these party girls’ – is reminiscent of fascist discourse. The omnipresent paranoia and fear of foreign

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infiltration so typical of Stalinism is also represented here in the reference to support by non-Russians. One could argue that the Russian provinces have retained far more traces of the Soviet Union, from infrastructure to language, than large Russian cities. However, as the next section proves, this type of language can make a return even in entirely different Russian-­ speaking settings. Adi Kuntsman’s (2008) analysis of Russian-language online discussions of an LGBT+ Pride event in Jerusalem brings to the fore the reemergence of Stalinist language – in relation to a different country and time period. In the context of the event Kuntsman researches it has the effect of condemning and insulting LGBT+ subjects of Russian origin in Israel. In the author’s analysis of speech acts and their effects, it becomes apparent how certain insults evoke ‘the long history of physical and sexual abuse in Soviet prisons and camps’ and more specifically, ‘the history of the criminalization of male sodomy in the former Soviet Union, where in 1934 Stalin enacted Article 121 of the criminal code’ (Kuntsman 2008, p. 265). Such use of ‘fenya’ or ‘gulagspeak’ is illustrative not only of the extent to which a substantial part of Soviet citizenry went through, or was in proximity to, the prison system, but also of how, consequently, this language spread beyond the confines of prisons and camps and became used more widely. While eventually used in different historical and geographic settings, this type of language never completely severed its connection with its violent origins. By disavowing yet simultaneously implying them, it provided a channel for these origins to make seemingly cyclical returns. In order to understand this resort or regression to language characteristic of a previous historical period, that is, language which, while stripped of its original Stalinist context, evokes this context nevertheless in its demands of ritualised, public forms of punishment, it is helpful to turn to the arguments of the Russian cultural historians Irina Sandomirskaja and Gasan Gusejnov. With more than a hint of Kulturpessimismus, Gusejnov claims that the failure to conduct a proper ‘de-Stalinisation’ of language since the 1950s means such linguistic echoes have been available throughout, in fact they have been increasingly ‘in demand’ in the last decade (Gusejnov 2012). He claims that Stalinist rhetoric is ‘formulaic’ and ‘derisive,’ as well as uniquely ‘accessible to the common man.’ Be

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it the official Stalinist rhetoric with its strange euphemisms such as ‘Life has gotten better; life has become more cheerful,’ or the ubiquitous, thinly veiled references to state brutality, such as ‘Лес рубят, щепки летят,’ which can roughly be translated as ‘You cannot make an omelette without breaking eggs.’ Indeed, the remnants of Stalinism are virtually inescapable in the objects and categories that populate contemporary Russia, from the recent boom in patriotic war movies (Norris 2012) to the still-standing Stalin skyscrapers. Furthermore, according to Gusejnov the prevalent Stalinist social practice of a ‘joyful repression of consciousness’ (Gusejnov 2012, p. 6), that is, the suppression of any tendency towards empathy, coupled with the fear and suspicion so characteristic of that time, led to a society that is uniquely intolerant and rigorous in its demands to punish the other – perhaps as a result of having split off these uncomfortable aspects of itself, and then needing to locate them in others: ‘Let’s imagine a society which lives ... without self-analysis – not reflexively, but deflectively [emphasis added]’ (Gusejnov 2012, p. 4). It is these conditions, I argue, which also produce an intolerance towards any kind of ambiguity and, hence, a suspicion of the open-endedness of meanings, as is evident in the response to Pussy Riot’s name and performance. Of course, not all members of the Russian public felt equally offended by the group’s actions. The Russian intelligentsia, or ‘creative class,’ in fact largely supported the women, as for many of them defending Pussy Riot became synonymous with defending freedom of artistic expression. In their quest to show support, representatives of the creative class frequently took to the media to ‘explain’ the group’s artistic and political project. This in turn was frequently met with rejection, as it created, as much as it reproduced, an antagonistic relationship between liberal and ‘illiberal’ citizens, placing them in a kind of moral hierarchy of enlightenment. A not dissimilar campaign for public reeducation also took place during perestroika and the years that followed it, as members of the intelligentsia conducted numerous attempts to collectively confront and work through the totalitarian past (Sandomirskaja 1995). With many Stalinist crimes finally revealed and discussed in full, and censored literature, including Gulag memoirs, published for the first time, this period represented the first serious opportunity to face the horrors of the past, with a

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significant number of victims still alive. The intelligentsia took a leading role in the discussion and dissemination of these newly available historical and literary materials. Such sociocultural initiatives correspond to the intelligentsia’s self-ascribed role ‘as a social group onto which the important function of discourse production and control is conferred, the function of “discourse police”’ (Sandomirskaja 1995, p.  55). However, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the years that followed converted initial optimism about a more open, democratic future into eventual cynicism. After an initial sense of release, the removal of censorship even came to be resented (Gorham 2014), as depictions of ‘violence and horror became tantamount to truthtelling’ (Borenstein 2008, p. 13). The public mood therefore shifted from interest and engagement to a sense of needing to bury the past in order to move forward, at whatever cost.

Haunted by History Inevitably, in discussions around the internalisation of totalitarian experiences, the notion of trauma emerges. Indeed, one could easily interpret the whole of contemporary Russian society as (potentially) traumatised. However, from a scholarly perspective, one is forced to question the potential analytical traction of such a wholesale application of the concept. Rather than turning to trauma, Stephen Frosh, as well as Avery Gordon (1997), have pointed to the ways in which subjects are ‘haunted’ by history, especially the ways in which certain, extremely violent historical events such as political terror or slavery return as ghosts that haunt the present. In his book on Hauntings (2013), Frosh argues that what is unresolved in history ‘works its way into the present as a traumatic haunting that is profoundly social yet is lived out in the deepest recesses of individuals’ lives’ (Frosh 2013, p. 44). These ‘deepest recesses’ then push for a manifestation in symptomatic form, for example in the way language is used. What unites the phenomena of trauma and hauntedness is the idea of a failure of symbolisation. Importantly, this is what distinguishes these phenomena from mere history: they never become history proper, in the sense that traumas are never fully represented, or representable. This

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content remaining without symbolisation, however, is not a harmless, weightless presence. Its existence can appear ‘unbearable if it is also pressing for expression, if for instance it is too close to what is going on for the person now, if too many reminders of the repressed lie all around’ (Frosh 2013, p. 24), as is evidently the case in Russia. If one were to go beyond these notions, such an emphasis on a lack of symbolisation is also clearly ­reminiscent of the Lacanian notion of the Real, as the traumatic kernel that is inaccessible but that ‘keeps coming back, disrupting everything’ (Frosh 2013, p. 123), operating as an unrecognised past that saturates the present. Gusejnov (2008) locates the particular tension of contemporary Russia in the fact that its cultural trauma has been publicly misallocated, with the blame for current antagonisms linked firmly to the loss of status following the collapse of the USSR. The ‘national catastrophe’ of Russia is habitually seen to be the tumultuous 1990s, when in fact ‘the real trauma is the decades of unfreedom, physical destruction of whole segments of the population, the universal deportation of whole peoples, the punishment of individuals without trial or law’ by Soviet authorities, particularly during Stalinism (Gusejnov 2008, p.  7). He concludes that the Soviet Union’s real tragedy is not talked about anywhere but in civil society by nongovernmental organisations such as Memorial. Russia’s drive to suppress its violent past and focus on economic reconstruction even leads Gusejnov to draw comparisons with postwar Germany’s ‘inability to mourn,’ in the Mitscherlichs’ famous wording (1975). Indeed, whether it is a sense of haunting, the Real, or cultural trauma – on a societal level, all these concepts speak of a history that has not been fully acknowledged or represented. Vital aspects of the collective past have been repressed, but continue to push for expression. Language has imbibed these inherent tensions, which surface in situations of conflict, becoming manifest when discourse slips into ‘gulagspeak,’ or the language of state violence. Hence the impact of the language detailed earlier in this chapter derives much of its force from what is unacknowledged but nevertheless represents ‘a form of repetition that is linked to trauma, on what is, strictly speaking, not remembered, but relived, and relived in and through the linguistic substitution for the traumatic event’ (Butler 1997, p. 36).

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Conclusion Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alekhina were released on December 23, 2013 after Vladimir Putin granted a series of amnesties for political prisoners to soften public opinion at the onset of the Olympic Winter Games in Sochi. Since their release, Alekhina and Tolokonnikova have been campaigning internationally for prisoners’ rights, while going their separate ways creatively. However, the group was seen as emblematic enough of the Russian government’s conflicts with its opposition that they played themselves in an episode of the popular U.S. show House of Cards, facing off a Putinesque Russian president, as well as meriting two references in Andrey Zvyagintsev’s award-winning drama Leviathan (2014). As this chapter has discussed, the extreme treatment that the women of Pussy Riot experienced at the hands of the authorities demonstrates the inability of the latter to tolerate artistic provocation at a time when public support was waning. The way debates about their case at times appeared to unthinkingly ventriloquise past violence also showed how the social appears stuck at the level of repetition without memory, instead of following Freud’s (1914/1958) recommendation of ‘remembering, repeating, working-through.’ Rather than facing history, ‘in Russia politicians waxing nostalgic for the USSR run away exactly from knowledge as if running from a fire’ (Gusejnov 2008, p. 12). This is evident in initiatives which seek to highlight or recuperate certain aspects of Soviet history, such as the glory and sacrifice of World War II or the ‘pleasant normality’ of the Brezhnev period, while simultaneously silencing others. While this may not mean a regression to totalitarianism, it also shows that a postmodernist resurrection of the past in de-ideologised form (artistic and otherwise) is not possible, as the spectre of violence will continue to haunt any incarnation in the present. Language is not innocent, though it can, like discourse, also produce its own forms of resistance, or ‘hidden transcripts’ to borrow James C. Scott’s (1990) term. At the same time, there always exist limits to working through the past. There are elements of history which cannot but haunt subjects, whether they have

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direct memory of them, or whether they are passed on to the following generations. What is perhaps less intuitive is the idea that traces of history are also retained in linguistic repertoires, where they remain encapsulated yet pushing for expression. However, this expression is without consciousness, without reflection or comprehension, a dark presence that feeds on destructive impulses of the past and the present. It is possible to decrease or dismantle the charge inherent in certain linguistic constructs, but when a society shirks from undertaking a working through of its past, its antagonisms will continue to take recourse to such available structures. As Gabriele Schwab (2010) writes: ‘Silencing these violent and shameful histories casts them outside the continuity of psychic life but, unintegrated and unassimilated, they eat away at this continuity from within’ (p. 49).

Notes 1. Rosbalt.ru. (2012, September 12). Medvedev admits, that Pussy Riot case ‘nauseates’ him. Retrieved from http://www.rosbalt.ru/main/2012/09/12/ 1033560.html 2. Following his four-year ‘hiatus’ as Russian prime minister.

References Alcorn, M. W. (2002). Changing the subject in English class: Discourse and the constructions of desire. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Beard, M. (2014). The public voice of women. London Review of Books, 36(6), 11–14. Bernstein, A. (2013). An inadvertent sacrifice: Body politics and sovereign power in the Pussy Riot affair. Critical Inquiry, 40(1), 220–241. Borenstein, E. (2008). Overkill: Sex and violence in contemporary Russian popular culture. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Borusyak, L. (2012, October 5). After the performance. Nezavisimaya Gazeta. Retrieved from http://www.ng.ru/ideas/2012-10-05/5_reaction.html. Brock, M. (2016). A psychosocial analysis of Pussy Riot: Velvet Revolution or Frenzied Uteri. Subjectivity, 9(2), 126–144. https://doi.org/10.1057/sub.2016.5.

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Budraitskis, I. (2014). The weakest link of managed democracy: How the parliament gave birth to nonparliamentary politics. South Atlantic Quarterly, 113(1), 169–185. Butler, J.  (1997). Excitable speech: A politics of the performative. New  York & London: Routledge. Freud, S. (1957). Repression. In J. Strachey (Ed. & Trans.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 14), pp.  7–66. London: Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1915). Freud, S. (1958). Remembering, repeating and working-through (Further recommendations on the technique of psycho-analysis II). In J. Strachey (Ed. & Trans.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 12), pp. 145–156. London: Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1914). Frosh, S. (2013). Hauntings: Psychoanalysis and ghostly transmissions. Houndsmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Gordon, A. (1997). Ghostly matters: Haunting and the sociological imagination. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Gorham, M.S. (2014) After newspeak: Language culture and politics in Russia from Gorbachev to Putin. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Gradskova, Y., Sandomirskaja, I., & Petrusenko, N. (2013, February 20). Pussy Riot: Reflections on receptions. Baltic Worlds. Retrieved from: http://balticworlds.com/reflections-on-receptions/?s=pussy%20riot. Gusejnov, G. (2008). Язык и травма освобождения [Language and the trauma of liberation]. Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 94, 130–147. Gusejnov, G. (2012). Кондурация, или как понимать дело Pussy Riot. Logos, 1(85), 4–13. Interfax. (2012, October 4). The workers of “Togliattiazot” want to re-educate the Pussy Riot hooligans. Retrieved from http://www.interfax.ru/news. asp?id=269151. Kelly, C. (2016). The new Soviet man and woman. In S.  Dixon (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of modern Russian history. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Krivyakina, E., & Afonina, E. (2012, August 16). Lev Rubinstein: Vozdux v Rossii propitan agressiej, Kartina dnja. Radio KP. Retrieved from http:// www.kp.ru/daily/26511/3425745/. Kuntsman, A. (2008). Between gulags and pride parades: Sexuality, nation, and haunted speech acts. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 14(2), 263–287. Kuntsman, A. (2010). Webs of hate in diasporic cyberspaces: The Gaza War in the Russian- language blogosphere. Media, War & Conflict, 3(3), 299–313.

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Lezina, E. (2017, March 24). The revival of ideology. Eurozine. Retrieved from: http://www.eurozine.com/the-revival-of-ideology/. Lipovetsky, M. (2015). Pussy Riot as the trickstar. Apparatus: Film, Media and Digital Cultures in Central and Eastern Europe (1). https://doi.org/10.17892/ app.2015.0001.5. Mangun, A. (2016). Hysterical Machiavellianism: Russian foreign policy and the international non-relation. Theory & Event, 19(3). Mitscherlich, A., & Mitscherlich, M. (1975). The inability to mourn. New York: Grove Press. Norris, S. M. (2012). Blockbuster history in the new Russia: Movies, memory, and patriotism. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Paperny, V. (2002). Architecture in the age of Stalin: Culture two. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ryazanova-Clarke, L. (2016). Linguistic violence in contemporary Russian public discourses. Zeitschrift für Slawistik, 61(1), 3–28. https://doi.org/10.1515/ slaw-2016-0002. Ryklin, M. (2005). The new science of pogromology. #8: State of Emergency. Retrieved from: https://chtodelat.org/b8-newspapers/12-67/the-new-scienceof-pogromology/. Sandomirskaja, I. (1995). Old wives’ tales: Notes on the rhetoric of the post-­ Soviet intelligentsia. Slavica Lundensia, 14, 55–71. Sandomirskaja, I. (2012, December 20). A precedent of the Pussy Riot trial: The trial and suicide of Anna Al’chuk (2003–2008). Baltic Worlds. Retrieved from http://balticworlds.com/the-trial-and-suicide-of-anna-al’chuk-2003-2008/. Schwab, G. (2010). Haunting legacies: Violent histories and transgenerational trauma. New York: Columbia University Press. Scott, J. C. (1990). Domination and the arts of resistance: Hidden transcripts. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Sharogradskii, A. (2012, July 31) Obozrevatel’ RS Kirill Kobrin  – o smesi Gororukhina s Mikhalkovym. Radio Svoboda. Retrieved from http://www. svoboda.org/a/24662246.html. Shevchenko, M. (2012, February 21). Voina bl***I. Vzglyad. Retrieved from https://vz.ru/opinions/2012/2/21/563073.html. TV100. (2012, September 19). ‘Pussy Riot’ just needs a good flogging? Russian Public Opinion Research Center. Retrieved from https://wciom.ru/index. php?id=241&uid=113054. Yuval-Davis, N. (1997). Gender & nation. London: Sage Publications.

Violence and the Virtual: Right-wing, Anti-asylum Facebook Pages and the Fomenting of Political Violence Steffen Krüger

Abstract  This article sheds light on the role of social media in the instigation of acts of violence. It identifies and interprets the major forms of interaction emerging from the interplay between page owners and users on German right-wing, anti-asylum Facebook pages, bringing to the fore these pages’ interactional dynamic. Mainly two forms of interaction are identified. Firstly, by condensing news reports about crimes committed by foreigners into a coherent vision of reality, users are to be awakened to this reality. Secondly, by incessantly pointing to the intolerableness of this reality, the users’ continued inactivity is turned into a moral issue that goes to the core of their identities.

Introduction Numbers for the first half of 2016 presented by the German Ministry of the Interior show that politically motivated criminal acts against foreigners, refugees, and asylum seekers have more than doubled in comparison S. Krüger (*) Department of Media and Communication, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2018 S. Krüger et al. (eds.), Fomenting Political Violence, Studies in the Psychosocial, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97505-4_5

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with 2015 (Spiegel Online 2016). Worryingly, this means the doubling of an already high number. Parallel to the increase of refugees and migrants coming to Germany in the second half of 2014 and throughout 2015 – with around 900,000 in 2015 (e.g. Welt 2016) – attacks either against refugees or their homes (or both) were already seven times higher in 2015 than 2014 (Reinfrank and Brausam 2016, p. 235). Coinciding with the drastically rising numbers of violent acts against foreigners, there has been a public debate in Germany on how much this violence is fomented on social media, and especially on Facebook pages operated by right-wing activists (Bleich 2015; Reinbold 2015). As far as this question of the specific role of online media is concerned, interpretations of the above numbers diverge. In the 2016 publication of the Leipziger Mitte (‘Leipzig Centre’) study on right-extremism in Germany, Reinfrank and Brausam (2016) claim that, for nearly every German city in which there have been violent attacks against foreigners or attacks against the places in which migrants and refugees are housed, there exists or existed a Facebook page dedicated to the abolition of such refugee homes (p. 239), suggesting an intimate relation between symbolic interactions on social media and physical violent acts. The majority of the anti-asylum Facebook pages use the phrase Nein zum Heim (‘No to the Home’) a rhyming and catchy handle, followed by the name of their respective city, town, or region, for example ‘Nein zum Heim in Oranienburg’ and ‘Nein zum Heim in Guben.’1 Coinciding with the increase of refugees arriving in Germany as well as the increase of violence against foreigners, a study conducted by the project No-Nazi.net, published in late October 2015, finds a parallel rise in Nein zum Heim Facebook pages from around 100 such pages in January 2015 to 225 in October (Netz-gegen-Nazis.de 2015). For mid-2016, Reinfrank and Brausam (2016, p. 239) estimate over 300 such pages. However, while the parallel developments in numbers strongly suggest an intimate relation between the emergence of the Nein zum Heim (i.e. anti-asylum) pages and the increase in violence against foreigners, other researchers are more cautious than Reinfrank and Brausam (2016) when interpreting the correlation. A comparison of the places in Germany for which there exist(ed) anti-asylum Facebook pages with the places in which refugee shelters and asylum seeker homes were attacked does not always

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point towards a direct causal link between activities on Facebook and ‘violence in the streets’ (Bleich 2015). As Johannes Baldauf, the head of No-Nazi.net, dryly stated in an interview: ‘There were a lot of attacks in places for which there is not much happening in terms of “hate speech” on Facebook’ (quoted in Bleich 2015).2 Thus, as far as existing knowledge goes, the situation in Germany points to a rather ambiguous relationship between Facebook pages and right-extremist violence. At the national level, one can speak of a clear correlation between the increase in the numbers of refugees and migrants, violent acts against foreigners, and anti-migration activities on social media, especially on Facebook. Switching to a more fine-grained level of analysis, however, one can see that the correlations at the national level do not automatically result in direct cause-and-effect chains. Thus, while one can say with high probability that politically motivated physically violent acts are related to activities on Facebook, there is nothing in the various numbers at our disposal that would inform us about the quality and nature of this relation. It is this quality of the relation between the Nein zum Heim Facebook pages and acts of physical violence against foreigners in Germany that is at the centre of this paper’s interest. As a contribution to research into social media and violence (see, e.g., Patton et al. 2014), it inquires into the specific discursive and textual forms of symbolic interaction in which politically motivated violence against migrants and refugees is spoken about, suggested, and, as I will argue, fomented in the specific media context of the Nein zum Heim anti-asylum Facebook pages. Thus, the question I am seeking to answer in this paper is: Do antiasylum Facebook pages suggest and prepare the ground for acts of political violence and, if so, how? Ultimately, what my study shows is that the analysed pages bring forth two interrelated forms of interaction (Lorenzer 1977) that are again intimately tied to the characteristics of digital, social media. The first form of interaction consists in accumulating news items on individual cases of criminal deeds committed by foreigners. These are condensed on the Nein zum Heim pages to a systematic and coherent picture of reality – a condensation that is made possible mainly through mechanisms characteristic of digital data – searchability, spreadability, and recontextualisability

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(boyd 2014, p. 11). The second form of interaction consists in creating a disposition on the part of the mostly male page users (see endnote 9), not only to ‘defend themselves’ against foreigners, but also to defend against the threat of appearing emasculated and effeminate. This form of interaction, I argue, builds not only on a vagueness that is a key characteristic of populist communication (see Reinemann et al. 2017, p. 16), but also on the very quality of virtuality (Shields 2003, 2006) of interactions online that continuously ask to become actualised. Put simply, I claim in this article that the Nein zum Heim Facebook pages indeed foment acts of politically motivated physical violence by (a) condensing individual news items into a dense and dark vision of an intolerable reality and (b) by turning the blemish of inaction in the face of this reality into a threat to the users’ identity. Thus, there is a buildup towards violent acts, even if these acts cannot be deemed immediate results of the pages’ communication and need not be found in direct relation to the pages and the places these pages refer to. Before turning to my analysis, a few words on this study’s bearings on ongoing concerns within media and communication studies. With my analysis being supported and informed by recent findings on right extremism and the status of democracy in Germany (Decker et  al. 2016a), it is possible to address some of the questions that have been debated in media studies from a more concrete vantage point. Two of the issues to which my findings speak are the so-called reinforcement or ‘echo chamber’ effect of political communication online (Sunstein 2001, 2007) and the relation between media, its effects, and physical violence – a relation popularly captured in the question of whether use of (interaction with and/or consumption of ) specific media (communication) lead(s) to violent behaviour on the part of the audience/users (for an overview, see Cantor 2003)  – a reductionist and techno-deterministic question closely tied to incidences of moral/media panic (Nicholas and O’Malley 2013). In the following, then, I will first discuss recent sociological work upon which my analysis of the Nein zum Heim Facebook pages rests. Subsequently, I will present the major points of my analysis. I will close with theoretical observations as to the relation of social media and violence.

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 ontextualising the Relation Between Social C Media and Violence The so-called Leipziger Mitte study has been conducted biannually since 2002, measuring the quality and virulence of antidemocratic, right-wing attitudes in Germany. A national survey based on Likert scale questionnaires and supplemented with in-depth, narrative interviews, the Leipziger Mitte study offers representative findings on right-extreme attitudes amongst the German population at-large (Decker et al. 2016a).3 There is no particular focus on the role of media in this study, although some of the discussions refer to it (e.g. Reinfrank and Brausam 2016, see above). Comparing results from 2016 with those from 2006, the findings are indeed worrying. As indicated by the increase in crimes against foreigners, Decker and his colleagues find clear signs that the antidemocratic, authoritarian, and right-wing milieus have become more extreme (Decker and Brähler 2016, p. 16). In these circles, the political system has lost yet more trust, credibility, and legitimacy. While turning more radical, rightextremist groups in Germany now organise and experience themselves as political actors, with the right-wing party Alternative for Germany (AfD) managing to mobilise voters that before were bound to the mainstream Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and Social Democratic Party (SPD) (Decker and Brähler 2016, p.  20). At the same time, in these rightextremist circles, violence as a means of contention is now more accepted than ever before. The group of right-extremists might not have increased in numbers, but its members now welcome the violent actions of others explicitly and are readier than ever before to use violence themselves (p. 18). On the other hand, Decker and his colleagues find that the number of people with democratic and/or conformist attitudes – that is, attitudes that support the status quo – has grown. Also, in the more conservative and conformist circles, which used to have a more ambivalent attitude to nondemocratic means of contention, violence is now strictly rejected as a way to reach goals, and the political system has gained significantly in legitimacy (Decker and Brähler 2016, p. 18). In other words, throughout

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broad strata of German society, democratic attitudes have been strengthened. Thus, with the German mainstream more rooted in democratic ideals than ever before and an extremist margin that has never before been so loud, outspoken, self-confident, aggressive, and ready to use violence, the current situation in Germany has become decidedly polarised (Decker and Brähler 2016, p. 19). Returning to the question of the role of anti-asylum Facebook pages in relation to right-extremist violence against foreigners, the above results suggest the following: in view of the polarised relation between supporters of democratic ideals and extremists rejecting these ideals, it indeed seems highly probable that communication on online pages dedicated to the rejection and abolition of asylum seeker homes becomes homogenous and self-reinforcing, drawing mainly those that feel themselves in opposition to the German mainstream. Thus, in view of the radicalisation of extremists in Germany, their growing self-confidence and, at the same time, alienation from the societal mainstream and its institutions, expecting a tendency towards ‘online homophily,’ that is, the ‘tendency of similar individuals to form ties with each other’ (Colleoni et al. 2014, p. 318), and the echo chamber-like reinforcement of prior political views on the anti-asylum Facebook pages seems to be very plausible. Indeed, as my analysis shows, this is clearly the case on the Nein zum Heim pages.4 Generally speaking, in light of a political situation in which right-­ extremists are developing their political self-identity in an agonistic and radical opposition to the political mainstream, it becomes possible to see how online discussions are increasingly being conducted amongst the like-minded only, and how extremist views become reinforced in ‘chambers’ that carry sound on the inside, but are nearly isolated to the outside. Facebook’s newsfeed algorithm, which determines which followers are being served posts by whom (Hamilton et al. 2014) amplifies this effect (Pariser 2011). Against the above, it also becomes perceivable how online symbolic interactions amongst extremists will foment political violence against others and in the face of a majority that appears to firmly side with the status quo. Even though much of the rhetoric on the anti-asylum pages is about ‘awakening’ a slumbering majority,5 the worse extremists perceive

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their chances of successfully reaching out to this majority with a­ rguments, the less interested they will be in using symbolic means of persuasion outside their core group. Therefore, whereas psychoanalytically informed theories of subjectivity do not allow for the conception of a direct link between speech acts and acts of physical violence,6 the sociocultural setting within which the anti-asylum pages operate suggests an intimate relation between the two nevertheless. Against the polarised situation between democratic and antidemocratic milieus, a significant part of the communication amongst right-extremists online orbits around the uselessness, meaninglessness, and futileness of communication. It is in this atmosphere that the idea of violence emerges as a logical response.

The Nein zum Heim Pages: Existing Research Since the Nein zum Heim pages are a relatively recent online phenomenon, with most of them not going back further than 2014, not much analytical work has been done on them specifically.7 The Amadeu-­ Antonio Foundation (2016), a right-extremism monitoring group, published a 20-page booklet titled Agitation Against Refugees in Social Media (2016) that takes up the Nein zum Heim pages. Another brief analysis is offered in a journalistic article by Martin Giesler (2016). Both contributions offer brief content analyses of the pages. The booklet by the Amadeu-­Antonio Foundation (2016) gives an overview of typical rhetorical means of agitation against refugees and foreigners online, such as sweeping generalisations, scapegoating, and the construction of an opposition between ‘them’ and ‘us.’ Giesler (2016) in turn divides the pages’ posts into five main categories: xenophobic agitation, intended fearmongering, cheap populism, call to (participate in) demonstrations, and right-wing ‘jokes.’ While both contributions offer important tools for detecting right-wing agitation online in general, the value of their analyses becomes somewhat limited in that they do not aim at an understanding of how the individual modes of communication combine to give shape to a specific vision of reality and, with it, a disposition to act.

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Selection of Material With the aim of this study being to first identify the most pertinent forms of interaction on the Nein zum Heim anti-asylum pages, so as to then submit these to in-depth, qualitative analysis, the empirical base for this study consists of an exemplary choice of Nein zum Heim pages, and one closely representative of all existing pages: –– ‘Nein zum Heim in Guben.’ As the biggest of the anti-asylum Facebook pages in existence, with more than 10,000 ‘likes’8 (in comparison to just about 18,000 inhabitants of Guben [Giesler 2016]), it is the clearest example of how these pages can reach people far beyond their local point of reference. –– ‘Nein zum Heim in Schwarzwald-Baar-Heuberg.’ While numbers as high as several thousand ‘likes’ are only achieved by pages located in former East Germany (with Guben being one of them), the Schwarzwald-Baar-Heuberg page is one of the biggest pages for West Germany, with 1900 ‘likes.’ As with the Guben page, it refers to a rural, non-urban area. –– ‘Nein zum Heim in Köpenick.’ With 6400 ‘likes,’ the Köpenick page is one of the most ‘liked’ pages with an urban, East German reference point. (Köpenick is part of Berlin.) –– ‘Nein zum Heim in Oranienburg’ refers to a place geographically close to Köpenick. With 3300 ‘likes,’ the page is still one of the most successful. I have included it in the analysis to be able to check for similarities and differences between two pages in close geographical proximity. (This aspect will not become relevant for the present paper.) –– ‘Nein zum Heim in Freiburg’ and ‘Nein zum Heim in Trier.’ These pages have comparatively small followings. With 550 ‘likes’ for Freiburg and 650 ‘likes’ for Trier, they are typical for pages referring to more urban areas in West Germany. My analysis is based on the main posts on the listed pages published over the first nine months of 2016 (from 1 January 2016 to 22 September 2016, or 266 days), including the user comments in response to these

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posts. Regarding the number of main posts, the Schwarzwald-Baar-­ Heuberg page has had the highest output with 561 published posts. This is followed by Guben with 527 posts. Köpenick published 330 posts within the same time span. Its neighbouring district, Oranienburg, with nearly 180 posts, makes it to little more than half that. Freiburg published a mere 30 posts within the time span, a scarcity that puts a question mark above the functionality of the page. The Trier page only started in August 2016; within a month, from 22 August until 22 September, its administrators posted 31 times. The total number of posts selected for analysis is thus 1659 posts. The above numbers translate into the following frequencies: On average, the Schwarzwald-Baar-Heuberg page posted a little more than twice per day (2.1 posts/day); Guben posted content to its page very nearly twice a day (1.98 posts/day); Köpenick more than once a day (1.24 posts/ day), Trier once a day, Oranienburg a little more than once every other day (0.66 posts/day) and Freiburg not even once a week, only every ninth day (0.11 posts/day). What can be deduced from these numbers is the intention of most pages to have a frequent, regular output of posts and to become a steady part of their users’ everyday lives. In terms of user interaction, however, the numbers are modest. Even the Guben page, as the most ‘liked,’ does not often manage to generate triple-digit numbers of ‘likes’ or ‘shares’ on its posts. On average it receives between 60 and 70 ‘likes,’ between 50 and 60 ‘shares’ and between 5 and 15 comments, with numbers diverging vastly however.9 For the smaller pages, the ‘interaction stats’ were respectively lower, with the West German pages at the bottom end. The Schwarzwald-Baar-Heuberg page, for example, receives very little in return for all its activity. With more than two posts per day, there are hardly any ‘like’ numbers that are over 10 and barely any ‘shares’ and comments. Overall, comparing the Nein zum Heim Facebook pages with those of a similar political orientation, such as ‘Identitäre Bewegung – Deutschland’ (‘Identitarian Movement’) or ‘Wir für Deutschland’ (‘We for Germany’), which are designed to operate at the national level and which have follower numbers of more than 40,000, the Nein zum Heim pages’ follower counts appear insignificant. However, in view of the high numbers of

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existing Nein zum Heim pages – with the latest estimate being over 300 (Reinfrank and Brausam 2016, p. 239) – and in view of their local reference point, their grassroots activist, plebiscitary intent, and their populist appeal to the ‘people,’ the anti-asylum pages are relevant in that they convey a more straightforward appeal to action. Indeed, as can be gathered from the relatively low numbers of ‘likes,’ ‘shares,’ and comments and as could be expected in view of the findings of the Leipziger Mitte study (Decker and Brähler 2016), in most cases, the interaction on the pages is that of a small community consisting of the page owners and a relatively small number of active, faithful followers, most of whom are male,10 who interact with one another with little interference from outside. However, as also suggested above, it is in such closely knit and closed-off communities that the anti-asylum pages unfold their appeal – an appeal, which, as I will show, paradoxically is caught in a repetitive loop of the message that the time for talking is over.

Identifying and Interpreting Typical Forms of Interaction: Methodological Reflections My analysis is based on a mix of content and text analysis, backed up by simple corpus-analytical operations. Initially, an analysis of the content of the posts on the selected Nein zum Heim pages during the analysed time span served to work out the central forms of interaction that dominate and determine the pages’ character. Consecutively, I used ‘scenic understanding,’ a hermeneutic method of analysing texts and other cultural artefacts (e.g. Lorenzer 1970, 1986) to analyse the forms of interaction worked out in the content analysis. Scenic understanding is geared to detect inherent conflicts and contradictions in a given material. Like discourse analysis (e.g. Potter and Wetherell 1987), scenic understanding focuses on paradoxical formulations and inconsistencies in texts, such as gaps and broken off sentences, striking words and terms, repetitions, missing conclusions, and so forth. It understands such events quite literally to be ‘making a scene’ that involves not only a text’s dramatis personae, but also its audience (i.e. readers/users), which a given scene pulls towards itself.

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Consequently, scenic understanding interprets texts and cultural materials for their socialising effects on their audiences. It is this interest in how content, form, and effect go together which makes the method an interesting fit for the analysis of right-extremist online pages and their social impact. To support the findings of the scenic analysis, I used observations gained from simple corpus-analytical operations (i.e. word lists; see, e.g., McEnery et al. 2006 and endnotes 10, 11, and 14).

 nalysis: Forms of Interaction on the Nein zum A Heim Pages The content analysis of the selected Nein zum Heim pages resulted in no more than three core forms of interaction central to all analysed pages. At a basic, formal level, these can be described as (a) the reposting and sharing of news items and press reports found on other internet sites, an activity that serves a journalistic, reporting function; (b) the posting and sharing of opinion pieces in the form of filmed speeches or monologues, or written epigrams and aphorisms, often in a layout consisting of fat print combined with eye-catching images, which serves the function of political comment; and (c) spreading information regarding demonstrations – either calls for upcoming demonstrations or documentation of past ones – which serves as an activating function. In terms of quantity, while the reporting function, that is, the reposting of news items from other sources, is clearly the main activity of all pages, with over 50 percent of all posts serving this function, the number of opinion pieces ranges from 15 to over 30 percent. While calls for and reports on demonstrations are also standard on all pages, they occur significantly less frequently than the other two, with around 10–20 percent of all posts belonging to this genre. As indicated by the relative frequency of the three forms of interaction on the pages, it is mainly the first two – the sharing of news items and posting of opinion pieces – that are relevant to the kind of disposition created by the pages. Indeed, the following analysis points to the third form of interaction  – the calls for demonstrations  – as being a screen behind which the build up of violent acts can be made to hide.

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F orm of Interaction I: Condensing the Dispersed into the Characteristic Invariably, the kinds of news items that become reposted and shared on all anti-asylum Facebook pages are those in which foreigners, migrants, and/or asylum seekers are reported to have committed criminal acts and/ or pose a threat to ethnic Germans and social order. Thus, the function at the core of all Nein zum Heim pages is to accumulate and gather together the reports of asylum seekers ‘flooding’ Germany, of regions and cities becoming overwhelmed by the burden of the incoming ‘masses,’ of cases of sexual assault and/or rape committed by foreigners against ethnic German women, of robberies, knife attacks, and mass brawls in asylum seeker homes, of fights between asylum seekers and ethnic Germans, of indecent behaviour in public pools and on public transportation, of asylum seekers tricking and exploiting the German welfare system, of displays of insolence or ingratitude towards the German ‘hosts,’ of the helpers’ naivety, and, not least, of the ignorant, arrogant, and incompetent government that tolerates the above. Strikingly, the more successful anti-asylum pages all have developed a trademark gesture with which they routinely introduce these news items of criminal foreigners to their followers. The Köpenick page, for example, introduces many of the news items with a dry and seemingly detached phrase Zur Info, which is colloquial for FYI (for your information).11 With repetition, this emphasis on the neutral, informational character of the interaction brings to the fore an emotional attitude that appears to have spent itself. It performs the quasi-catatonic emptiness of affect characteristic of those that have turned numb through a process of traumatisation over time. ‘It is just too shocking to be real, but real nevertheless,’ the gesture seems to say. The Oranienburg page, in turn, prefaces several of the shared news reports with ‘welcome’: ‘Welcome to Oranienburg,’ ‘Welcome to Germany,’ ‘Welcome to the loony bin.’ The ‘ship of fools’ motif that thus comes to the fore underlines the apparently incredulous attitude of the page owners to the reality behind the news they spread. The most provocative and informative of these gestures, however, can be found on the Guben page. It is a gesture, I argue, that unlocks the meaning of the entire act of sharing news items on the Nein zum Heim

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pages. On the Guben page, the news items of criminal misdemeanours by foreigners are introduced with variations of the word Einzelfall, meaning an ‘individual’ or ‘unconnected case’ or ‘incident,’ for example ‘another unconnected incident,’ ‘all unconnected cases,’ and ‘just an individual case.’12 This repetitive reference to the news reports as Einzelfälle builds up a laconic, cynical attitude. It is to make clear that these reported incidences are the exact opposite of individual, unconnected cases. To the contrary, what is implied – or better, what is achieved – by the continuous, unending stream of case after case of crimes by foreigners on the pages is a vision of reality in which these crimes take on a systematic, unstoppable, and all-consuming character that threatens to subvert the German people and in which foreigners are attributed a natural proclivity to crime and an unfixable lack of adaptability to the host culture. Furthermore, while existing studies have claimed that the news reports shared on the anti-asylum pages are frequently fakes (Bleich 2015; Giesler 2016), my reading cannot verify this. To be sure, not all reports posted on the pages are credible. The site Hoaxmap offers a non-exhaustive overview of the known cases of fake reports (see also my analysis of the fakes collected there: Krüger 2017). Moreover, not all news sources used on the pages can be deemed trustworthy, with many of them following a clear political agenda, as for example Compact-Online.de, RT-Deutsch, ­Kein-­Freiwild.info, and AnonymousNews.ru. That there is indeed a wish on the part of the makers of many of the anti-asylum pages to actively fabricate a picture of reality can be gathered from the incidences in which older news items, which had already been posted once, are recycled and posted once again as current events. However, these instances seem to be neither particularly effective nor at all welcomed by the Nein zum Heim users, who often comment negatively on this practice. For example, when on 2 August 2016 the Schwarzwald-Baar-­Heuberg page re-used an article from the newspaper Bild headlined ‘Too many refugees  – the city of Munich calls out a case of disaster’ (Riechers 2015), originally published in the summer of 2015, a user complains ‘What’s that shit??? From 2015[.] Are you feeling quite alright?’ All in all, the number of cases of straightforward fakes is relatively low and should not be taken as the pages’ core activity. Rather, while there clearly is the wish to construct a reality that is biased towards a certain

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point of view, this is not done with fake news but rather by accumulating authentic reports on individual cases of criminal acts committed by foreigners from credible sources. Thus, in most cases, reports are verified and taken from established news sources.13 Clearly, (moderately) right-­ conservative news sources, such as Focus, are preferred, and left-liberal sources such as Spiegel or Die Zeit are linked to only with dismaying remarks, so as to retain ideological distance to them. Another source that is relatively often used by the Nein zum Heim pages are police report portals – a practice that goes well together with the finding of the Leipziger Mitte study that the police enjoy the highest degree of trust amongst the German population (Decker et al. 2016b, p. 59). Yet, the sources whose use is most telling in view of the strategy pursued by the anti-asylum pages are local and/or regional news sources that, astonishingly, are often located outside the region to which the respective Nein zum Heim page refers. For example, reports from Munich, Bonn, or the Ruhr area can be found on the Guben page, which is far away from these places, and news from Niederlausitz are posted on the ­Schwarzwald-­Beer-­Heuberg page.14 What shows in this utilisation of dispersed news items from all over Germany, as well as Austria and Germanspeaking Switzerland, is a possibility facilitated by and characteristic of digital, social media. The potential loss of context of information online and the effortless de- and recontextualisation of information so often debated in relation to the digital (e.g. boyd 2014, p. 8ff.), unfolds here in the form of an ongoing act of condensation that merges together the dispersed and unconnected and assembles it into an overdetermined picture of a reality in which these cases appear as exactly not dispersed and individual, but as an ongoing process resulting in a highly meaningful picture of reality.15

Form of Interaction II: Enduring Unendurable Injustice The opinion pieces – that is, the posts of statements and aphorisms, editorial comments, and videos of speeches and monologues – as the other main element of the anti-asylum pages go hand in hand with the sharing of news items and the construction of reality as the result of their condensation. While already the news items and the gestures accompanying

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them, such as ‘Welcome to the loony bin’ (see above), set a distinctly agonistic mood, the opinion pieces unpack this mood further by tirelessly emphasising the ongoing, incessant abuse and exploitation of ethnic Germans reported in the news items. Consequently, the atmosphere created by them is tragic, brooding, Cassandra-like, and apocalyptic, foreseeing the end of the German people and their replacement by foreigners. Having specialised in memes with political statements, the Guben page is most illustrative of the disposition that is to be created amongst the core users. For example, one such meme from 21 June 2016 uses a motive from the movie V for Vendetta – a shadowy outline of a male figure in a dark robe, with a Zorro-like hat, long hair, and a Guy Fawkes mask (made prominent by the film and then elevated to notoriety by the 4-chan-born Anonymous movement). The statement written in white upon the backdrop created by the black robe reads: ‘What right does our political elite have to claim almost 50% of our work, but refuse to secure the country’s borders and property and to protect the population?’ In this particular case, it seems somewhat unclear whether it is the political elite that is to be identified with the shadowy figure, or whether it is the page owners and users, who in continuing the tradition of Anonymous, are to avenge the ‘common people’ for the deeds done against them by their government and those against which the government fails to protect them. The distribution of sentiments, however, is clearly in line with what Aalberg and de Vreese (2017, p.  10) call ‘complete populism,’ which, as they state ‘includes reference and appeals to the people, as well as anti-elitism and exclusion of out-groups.’ As Reinemann et al. state, this ‘complete populism’ is characteristic mainly of right-wing populism (2017, p. 15). The distribution of loyalties, affiliations, and hostilities along the lines of complete, right-wing populism can be witnessed in a significant number of posts. To offer another example from ‘Nein zum Heim in Guben’ from 15 January 2016: ‘Only idiots allow that, due to open borders, they become the minority in their own country!!!’ Since it was the Merkel-led, CDU government that had opened the borders to asylum seekers in the summer of 2015 (e.g. Zeit Online 2016) and since it is asylum seekers and migrants who, in the imagination of the authors of this post, will be

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the root cause for Germans becoming the minority in their own country, the double opposition of right-wing populism towards the political elite and an out-group is actualised in this post. On average, the Guben page publishes such posts, frequently with a tombstone-esque design, every second to third day (over 30 percent of all posts), creating an overall pathos of injustice and suffering – a suffering that must appear endless, since the stream of migrants coming to the country as well as the stream of news items found on the internet about criminal foreigners does not end either. Through tireless variations and repetitions of the same plaint over time, what is produced is an impression of utter victimhood and stagnation. Despite all the information, all the warnings and complaints, the humiliation and violation of the German people goes on regardless, is the conclusion that the opinion pieces amount to. However, while these pieces claim to merely point to the injustice done, they actively produce the feeling of ongoing injustice and the vision of reality to go with it. In this way, the form of interaction that emerges from the opinion pieces is the suffering of an injustice that should be endured no more.

The Pleasure of Endurance and Its Backlash In the above form of interaction, however, resides the central conflict that the Nein zum Heim pages produce. Whereas, time and again, the injustice suffered at the hand of foreigners and the government is shown as unbearable, the unending stream of news of this injustice makes clear that, paradoxically, it is born and endured and must therefore be somehow bearable nevertheless. This is not unproblematic, since this ­contradiction holds an incriminating potential. If that which should not – must not – be endured is endured nevertheless, the suffering resulting from it is under suspicion of containing a degree of pleasure, or even neediness. Sara Ahmed (2014, p. 51) writes that the emotion of hate not only seeks to destroy the object that it constructs as other, but that it also forms a mode of attachment that must conserve the hated object because it needs it for its own identity formation. This seems to be realised on the

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anti-asylum Facebook pages in the form of the unending stream of plaints. In these plaints, fantasies of an aggressive pleasure to hurt are located in the out-group of foreigners and a pleasure to watch others suffer are placed within the government and the political elites. This distribution of pleasures, however, tacitly suggests a third such pleasure, namely, that of passively suffering, of receiving pain, on the part of the ethnic Germans. Now, it is not hard to see why this suggestion of a pleasurable suffering must appear completely unacceptable to the page users and as a threat to their identities. Interestingly, however, I want to argue that this is exactly what the Nein zum Heim pages provoke by repeating their plaints over and again. This is reality! and This is how we suffer! are the two provocations emanating from the pages. Ultimately, then, the turn to violent acts against foreigners and/or politicians emerge as a viable mode to defend oneself, not only against these others, but first and foremost against the threat of being seen as impassive, emasculated, or straightforwardly perverse which is implied in the possibility of enjoying one’s own suffering. It is the response to this threat – that If I remain passive, this means that I tacitly give my consent, or worse, secretly enjoy my suffering – which is at the heart of the affective disposition that the Nein zum Heim pages create.

‘Our women and children’: Gender Dynamics Clearly, this disposition is built on a gendered dynamic, with a major threat being that the majority of male page users might be seen, or see themselves, as effeminate. Nancy Chodorow, in her article ‘Hate, Humiliation and Masculinity’ (2012), works out two major ‘fault lines of masculinity and male selfhood’ that account for a specific proneness to violence in men (p. 134). First, ‘masculinity as not-female, and the male self as defensively separate from and warding off the female other, and second, maleness as adult man rather than boy-child, not humiliated, shamed, or defeated by another man’ (p. 134). These fault lines clearly play a role in the dynamics unfolding on the anti-asylum pages, where, in the shared news items, it is almost invariably women who become attacked, assaulted, groped, or approached in an indecent manner (with the events on New Year’s Eve 2015/16 in Cologne and other cities in Germany [see Amjahid

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et al. 2016], where women were assaulted by large groups of mostly North African men, being at the core of this narrative). In the shared opinion pieces, in turn, it is ‘our women and children’ who need to be protected from the ‘barbarous hordes.’ However, while this concern about women and children firmly positions those who are concerned as male, the continuing stream of news reports of such assaults implies that this maleness is not intact. After all, the reports are proof that page owners and users have not managed to protect their women and children – yet.

The Threat of the Feminine in Populism Interestingly, this problematic notion of maleness and masculinity can also be encountered in the dynamics of populism. As Reinemann et al. (2017, p. 16) observe, there is a vagueness in populist communication that can be seen as ‘one of the key characteristics’ and an ‘important reason for the success of populist messages.’ On the Nein zum Heim pages, this vagueness is most salient as regards the question of what action should be taken in response to the threat that foreigners pose. In other words, it is in the provocatively ‘real not real’ quality (Yates 2015, p. 22) with which acts of violence are alluded to that a populist vagueness is performed on the pages. One can say the page owners are flirting with violence in their posts, and, indeed, for the case of the Nein zum Heim pages, the vagueness found in populism seems to be best captured in the concept of flirtation (Yates 2015, p. 22ff.). Being associated with coquetry, dalliance, and play and connoting a lack of seriousness, Candida Yates notes in her assessment of flirtation that the cultural distrust of flirtation as a mode of relating is reflected in psychoanalytic discourse where flirtation becomes a signifier of lightweight, superficial human relations and aligned with the image of the coquette as the seductive, if shallow, feminine other. (Yates 2015, p. 33)

In order to avoid this identification with the female other, with dallying, not being serious, and being effeminate, what the Nein zum Heim pages build up over time is the belief that an act is needed that will stabilise the

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users’ identity as male. And with maleness being intimately tied to ideas of power and domination (Chodorow 2012, p. 126), this act must be a violent one, since nowhere is domination more radically asserted than in violence.

F orm of Interaction III: Calls for Demonstrations as a Screen It is in view of the above disposition, built up on the Nein zum Heim pages, that the third form of interaction, that is, the calls for and reports on demonstrations, cannot be seen as adequate outlets for this disposition. The term ‘evening walk,’ for example, which is regularly used on the Oranienburg page to emphasise the peacefulness of the demonstrations, again threatens to unfold effeminate connotations, evoking the figure of the flaneur, ‘whose voyeuristic gaze allows him to live his life one step removed from the stresses of emotional engagement in a transitory context’ (Yates 2015, p. 25). In this view, the calls for demonstrations must be seen as a screen in the psychoanalytic sense of repressed elements and a defence against them (see ‘screen memory’ in Laplanche and Pontalis 1973).

 Text Reading Itself: The Relation Between Posts A and User Comments That acts of violence are indeed what are tacitly suggested by the pages becomes perceivable from the ways in which users complement and, indeed, complete the main posts. What one thus finds on all analysed pages is a substantial number of comments that suggest an openly violent attitude as a direct continuation of the main posts. To list only a few examples: –– In response to the sexual assaults in Cologne on New Year’s Eve, 2015/16: ‘If the judiciary does not pronounce a couple of sensible verdicts soon, the people will soon take the sentencing of perpetrators into their own hands.’ And another: ‘In situations of self-­defence one

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can/is allowed to use anti-animal spray. This situation would be fully justified.’ And yet another: ‘Unfortunately we are not allowed to defend ourselves because in this country vigilante justice is forbidden. rather we have to put up with everything from this fucking pack……… but beware one carries an alarm gun, a baton or pepper spray one gets punished and reported to the police as a racist and nazi…….but those fucking asys [asylum seekers] can do everything, they also get everything……… thank you you depraved sh [sic]’ (‘Nein zum Heim in Guben,’ 2 August 2016). –– In response to a post advertising ‘Five legal and highly effective weapons for the defence of one’s own life’: ‘All that’s fun is forbidden!! But seriously, who doesn’t give a shit about what he defends himself with, whether it pleases the ladies and gentlemen that got us into that [mess] or not., the main thing is that one can defend oneself when it is necessary.’ (‘Nein zum Heim in Schwarzwald-Beer-­Heuberg,’ 22 August 2016) –– And in response to the news in Hamburger Morgenpost of a foreigner being beaten unconscious by four men after having tried to grope a ’ (‘Nein zum Heim in Köpenick,’ 26 woman: ‘ August 2016) The dynamic which I take these examples to highlight should by no means be regarded as one that comes with a degree of freedom or looseness, that is one that might or might not result in the dangerous play with and suggestions of violence shown above. To the contrary, it is my point here that the quoted comments are the psycho-logical conclusion to the disposition created by the main posts of the Nein zum Heim pages. They are the consequence of the forms of interaction initiated there. Together, main posts and user comments constitute what Bown and Bristow (2013) call a text that reads itself, meaning a text that ‘no longer simply imposes its shock effect on us when reading it’ but that, by virtue of the online comments it sows and harvests, ‘shocks itself into betraying its true content’ (p. 62).

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Conclusion This study does not claim any direct relation between symbolic interaction and physical acts of violence. Rather, one could say that physical violence always marks the breakdown and collapse of the symbolic realm. Yet, what I hope my analysis of German anti-asylum Facebook pages has brought to the fore is that it is exactly such a breakdown of communication and symbolic interaction that the Nein zum Heim pages work towards. By gathering news items of criminal deeds committed by foreigners and by condensing these into an agonistic reality in which sexual assault, rape, brutality, and disrespect are the order of the day and by depicting this reality as the cause for the ethnic Germans’ suffering, the conclusion which emerges from these provocations can only be to ‘fight back.’ This psycho-logic is further exacerbated by the deadlock quality of the reality performed by the anti-asylum pages. Even though this reality is unbearable, the posts on the pages show that it persists. And even though the resulting suffering is shown to be intolerable, the continuous stream of posts implies that it is in fact tolerated. Thus, through this notion of being stuck, powerless, and impotent, which arises over time, acting up becomes an identity issue. After all, one’s self-image as proper, decent, and ‘for real’ comes to depend upon taking action. Furthermore, since this identity is defined as male and depends on traditional notions of masculinity, the call for demonstrations and invitations to so-called ‘evening walks’16 cannot be seen as a viable way to vent the emotional disposition built up on the pages. Rather, the threat of humiliation can only be stamped out by an act that eradicates all possible association with passivity, immaturity, and femininity. Also in this respect, online, digital media in general and Facebook in particular play a major role, but not in the way frequently articulated in mainstream news, where Facebook has been accused of applying an excessively liberal understanding of free speech to incidences of hate speech on its platform. While this might well be so, the present analysis shows that it is more general qualities of the digital that play into the build-up of the affective disposition fostered on the Nein zum Heim

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pages. It is the characteristic qualities of digital data in online networks – persistence, visibility, spreadability, and searchability (boyd 2014, p. 11), as well as impartiality (in terms of context and meaning) and manipulability (Miller 2011, p. 75) – that facilitate the condensation of the dispersed that is at the heart of the vision of reality constructed by the Nein zum Heim pages. But that is not all. Rather, also the threat of the feminine – of becoming incriminated by one’s own impassivity on the part of the male users – seems to be something that is partly derived from a dynamic inherent to online interactions at large. More precisely, it seems that the virtual itself – that is, the very mode of reality shared by all online encounters – plays a role in fomenting the kind of violence that the pages suggest. Poignantly, this is captured in the appeal of one of the commentators to the pages who, in response to a terror warning, writes: ‘People, please wake up already…open your eyes and finally use them to see, instead of hunting pokemons’ (‘Nein zum Heim Oranienburg,’ 22 July 2016). The reference to the popular augmented reality game Pokémon Go is key here. In the game, people use their smartphones to roam the physical world in order to catch virtual cartoon monsters that the game app superimposes onto the physical environment shown on the phone’s screen. While moving in the ‘real,’ physical world, players do not purposefully engage with it. What the comment thus points to is a playful lightness and lack of consequence inherent in virtual (digital) communication that seems to haunt the participants on the Nein zum Heim pages. Drawing on Marcel Proust, Rob Shields (2006, p.  284) defines the virtual as ‘real without being actual, ideal without being abstract.’ This means that, in order to be turned into actual reality, the virtual needs to be actualised. Arguably, this is exactly what the Nein zum Heim pages tacitly require of their users. Just as in Shields’ example of the child claiming ‘to have “virtually completed” their homework’ (2006, p. 284), virtuality and virtue go together also on the anti-asylum pages, where the ideal reality refers just as much to the user’s self-identity  – to the user’s ego ideal. And while the pages indeed suggest that the act which actualises the ideal reality of the virtual is ‘virtually completed,’ the user still needs to fulfill this promise. This promise, however – the act – can never be the direct concretisation of the virtual of the Nein zum Heim pages, but always

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retains its distance and mediatedness. ‘Actualization is performative,’ writes Shields (2006, p. 285), ‘the Virtual itself is a multiplicity which can be actualized in different ways. If it is known by its effects, then it is known through a specific instantiation, not as a whole.’

Notes 1. Other names in frequent use now are Widerstand (‘resistance’) + [name of the region/town/city], for example ‘Widerstand Berlin,’ or [name of the region/town/city] wehrt sich (‘fights back’), for example ‘Parchim wehrt sich’ (see also Giesler 2016). 2. If not indicated otherwise, all translations from German to English are mine. 3. Of 5000 questionnaires sent out, 2420 were answered and returned, which amounts to a response rate of 49.9 percent. (Decker et al. 2016b, p. 26) 4. Whereas most pages claim to be independent from party politics (see Giesler 2016), party affinities of Nein zum Heim pages can easily be identified from the main posts and the users’ comments in response to them. These affinities range from extreme-right positions compatible with the National Party of Germany (NPD), to the more moderate right-wing AfD. A post on ‘Nein zum Heim in Köpenick,’ published the day before the county elections in Berlin and Brandenburg, captures the relation between the two parties well: ‘Squares vote AfD, real men NPD,’ reads the banner, signed by the Young Nationalists (JN). Arguably, this reveals the ideological range of page administrators and users and the dramatis personae on the ‘Nein zum Heim’ pages. 5. For example: ‘I am afraid for my children!!!! Now is the time to wake up!’ (‘Nein zum Heim in Guben,’ 6 January 2016); ‘Now some of our citizens seem to wake up, common sense is setting in’ (‘Nein zum Heim in Schwarzwald-Beer-Heuberg,’ 30 January 2016); ‘When does this damn state finally wake up and see that we are on the brink of disaster?’ (‘Nein zum Heim in Oranienburg,’ 25 August 2016). 6. Against a view of human existence as defined by what the political anthropologist Helmut Plessner (1982) calls ‘eccentric positionality,’ that is a mode of existence that is reflexive in that a person does not only experience life, but also experiences his/her own experience (Plessner 1982,

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p. 10), we cannot ever conceive of symbolic acts as directly triggering acts of violence. After all, the assumption of such a direct cause-and-effect chain must fall short of the reflexive mode of experiencing that defines us as human. However, with the help of psychoanalytic theories it is possible, for example, to approach an understanding of the powers that impede and inhibit this kind of reflection or that lead it to take on and accept (psycho-)logics that justify and redeem a departure from symbolic means of contention. It is that which I will do in this article. 7. However, there are studies on similar phenomena in existence that have informed the present article, most importantly: Berntzen and Weisskircher 2016; Neumayer 2016. 8. All numbers relating to the Facebook pages presented in this chapter are from autumn 2016 and might have been subject to changes over time. 9. The number of ‘likes’ ranged from below 10 to above 1000; ‘shares’ from zero to into the hundreds; and the number of comments ranged from zero to up into the forties. 10. On the Guben page, for example, the balance of comments from users with male and female names is 10 to two (i.e. 80 percent of comments come from male users, 20 percent from female users). On the Köpenick page, it is 10 to three (i.e. 70 percent to 30 percent). This seems characteristic for all pages looked into. With their defensive posture, they seem to be generally understood as male domains. 11. Indeed, submitting the analysed posts on the Köpenick page to a word list check shows that the word ‘info’ is the second most used noun on the page after ‘Berlin,’ with the phrase Zur Info being used 74 times (out of 330 instances of ‘info’). 12. In terms of frequency of usage on the Guben page, the word Einzelfall and the plural form Einzelfälle together (53 mentions in posts during the analysed time) put the word on a par with Flüchtlinge (‘refugees,’ 58 mentions) and Volk (‘people,’ 53 mentions). 13. That is, exactly those sources discredited by the page owners as well as other right-wing publications belonging to the ‘lying press,’ a term originally coined during the Nazi reign in Germany (1933–1945) and made popular again by the PEGIDA movement. 14. ‘Nein zum Heim in Schwarzwald-Beer-Heuberg,’ for example, shares three items from bz-berlin.de, two from ruhraktuell.com, one from niederlausitz-aktuell.de, two from wochenblick.at, nine items from krone. at, and so on.

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15. This conception of condensation is related to Freud’s use of the term. Freud conceived of condensation as a central dream mechanism, and ‘one of the central modes of the functioning of the unconscious processes: a sole idea represents several associative chains at whose point of intersection it is located’ (see discussion of ‘condensation’ in Laplanche and Pontalis 1973). 16. With 42 mentions, ‘evening walk’ (Abendspaziergang) is the second most used noun on the page, after ‘Oranienburg’ (59 mentions) and before ‘Brandenburg’ (39 mentions).

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Miller, V. (2011). Understanding digital culture. London: Sage. Netz-gegen-Nazis.de. (2015, October 22). Monitoring: 225 mal ‘Nein zum Heim’ auf Facebook. Retrieved October 30, 2016, from http://www.netzgegen-nazis.de/artikel/monitoring-225-mal-nein-zum-heim-auf-facebook10642. Neumayer, C. (2016). Nationalist and anti-fascist movements in social media. In A. Bruns, G. Enli, E. Skogerbø, A. O. Larsson, & C. Christensen (Eds.), The Routledge companion to social media and politics (pp. 296–308). New York and London: Routledge. Nicholas, S., & O’Malley, T. (2013). Moral panics, social fears and the media: Historical perspectives. London and New York: Routledge. Pariser, E. (2011). The filter bubble: What the internet is hiding from you. London: Penguin. Patton, D. U., Hong, J. S., Ranney, M., Patel, S., Kelley, C., Eschmann, R., & Washington, T. (2014). Social media as a vector for youth violence: A review of the literature. Computers in Human Behavior, 35, 548–553. Plessner, H. (1982). Mit anderen Augen. Aspekte einer philosophischen Anthropologie. Stuttgart: Reklam. Potter, J., & Wetherell, M. (1987). Discourse and social psychology: Beyond attitudes and behaviour. London: Sage. Reinbold, F. (2015, October 24). Das bisschen Hass. Spiegel Online. Retrieved October 30, 2016, from http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/netzpolitik/facebook-in-dublin-das-bisschen-hass-a-1059317.html. Reinemann, C., Aalberg, T., Esser, F., Strömbäck, J., & de Vreese, C. H. (2017). Populist political communication: Toward a model of its causes, forms, and effects. In T.  Aalberg, F.  Esser, C.  Reinemann, J.  Stromback, & C.  H. de Vreese (Eds.), Populist political communication in Europe (pp. 12–28) London and New York: Routledge. Reinfrank, T., & Brausam, E. (2016). Rechter Terror gegen Flüchtlinge – Die Rückkehr der Rechten Gewalt der 1990er Jahre. In O. Decker, J. Kiess, & E.  Brähler (Eds.), Die enthemmte Mitte. Autoritäre und rechtsextreme Einstellung in Deutschland (pp. 235–244). Giessen: Psychosozial. Riechers, K. (2015, July 30). Stadt München ruft Katastrophenfall aus. Bild. Retrieved October 31, 2016, from http://www.bild.de/regional/muenchen/ fluechtling/zu-viele-fluechtlinge-stadt-muenchen-ruft-katastrophenfallaus-42009138.bild.html. Shields, R. (2003). The Virtual. London and New York: Routledge. Shields, R. (2006). Virtualities. Theory, Culture & Society, 23(2–3), 284–286.

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Spiegel Online. (2016, September 24). Fremdenfeindliche Gewalt drastisch gestiegen. Retrieved October 31, 2016, from http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ deutschland/fluechtlinge-rechte-gewalt-gegen-auslaender-nimmt-zua-1113669.html. Sunstein, C. (2001). Republic.com. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Sunstein, C. (2007). Republic.com 2.0. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Welt. (2016, September 30). Deutschland korrigiert Flüchtlingszahl für 2015. Retrieved July 31, 2016, from https://www.welt.de/politik/deutschland/article158465433/Deutschland-korrigiert-Fluechtlingszahl-fuer-2015.html. Yates, C. (2015). The play of political culture, emotion and identity. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Zeit Online. (2016, June 1). Lernt einfach mal einen Flüchtling persönlich kennen. Retrieved October 31, 2016, from http://www.zeit.de/gesellschaft/ zeitgeschehen/2016-06/angela-merkel-fluechtlingspolitik-verteidigungbunte-interview.

Shaping Prejudice? Holocaust Remembrance and the Narrative of German Suffering Roger Frie

Abstract  This chapter maintains that right-wing extremism in Germany exists on a continuum with less extreme postwar German memory discourse. It suggests that memory discourse at the level of family and community has long perceived Germans as victims in the Second World War. The focus on German suffering in the Allied bombing campaigns has created a perception that they are unjustly treated and perceived. In the process, German suffering has been put on par with the suffering inflicted on the victims of the Holocaust. This inversion of the victim–victimiser relationship has created a situation in which some Germans are inherently sympathetic to right-wing discourse. Right-wing extremism is able to tap into this emotional discontent as a means to garner support for its nativist agenda.

This chapter draws on material from the author’s recent book, Not in My Family: German Memory and Responsibility After the Holocaust (Frie 2017a). Unless otherwise noted, all translations from German are the author’s own.

R. Frie (*) Faculty of Education, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, BC, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2018 S. Krüger et al. (eds.), Fomenting Political Violence, Studies in the Psychosocial, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97505-4_6

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Introduction Twenty years ago Germany became the first European nation to make January 27, the date on which the concentration camp of Auschwitz– Birkenau was liberated by the Soviet Red Army, an official day of remembrance. The German federal government’s policy of responsibility for the Holocaust is integral to the contemporary identity of the postwar democratic German nation. Yet in 2005, on the day of the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, an extraordinary and disturbing event took place. The State Parliament of Saxony in Germany marked the day of Holocaust remembrance with a one-minute moment of silence. In the midst of the silence, twelve elected members of the far-right, ultranationalist party, the National Democratic Party (NPD) of Germany, rose in unison and stormed out of the building. In a nation that has long sought to make amends for its perpetration of mass genocide, this bald-faced action was truly shocking. News of the event quickly spread throughout the international media. It was a national embarrassment and while most Germans were appalled by it, a minority silently applauded. Germany has contended with right-wing extremism since the end of the war and all Jewish institutions, whether cultural or religious, are closely guarded by the state. Acts of antisemitic violence are generally seen to be the work of isolated right-wing groups existing on the fringes of civil society. What distinguished the NPD’s action in Saxony was that it was carried out by elected members of parliament in direct opposition to Germany’s official policy of remembrance and responsibility. A few days before the walkout, the leader of the NPD faction in Saxony, Holger Apfel had argued in parliament that if Auschwitz was to be remembered with a moment of silence, then the victims of the Allied bombing of Dresden likewise needed to be remembered and commemorated. In making this argument Apfel was essentially equating Nazi Germany’s victims with the German civilians who died in the Allied bombing raids. During his tirade Apfel described the bombing attack on Dresden on February 13, 1945, as a ‘bombing Holocaust’ and as ‘cold-­ bloodedly planned, industrial mass-murder’ (as cited in Joel 2013, p. 243). At some point his microphone was unplugged, but his remarks would reach a wide audience.

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After the war Dresden became a rallying cry for Germans who felt that their wartime suffering had been unjustly ignored. The bombing itself has been the focus of many polemical works of scholarship (e.g. Irving 1963). There are certainly questions worth asking about the motivations behind the Allied bombing, coming as it did late in the war against a European centre of culture that was of limited military importance. But too often historical discussion and debate has declined into obfuscation and miscommunication, especially around how many Germans died in the bombing raid. Historians put the numbers of deaths at 25,000–30,000 (Overy 2014), but as recently as 10 years ago, local media and right-wing sources quoted numbers that were 10 times larger (see Joel 2013). Memory is inherently political. Since the turn of the millennium there have been a host of German books, media reports, and television specials focused on the German experience of the Allied bombing campaign. The NPD’s actions in the Saxon state parliament were an extension of this discourse. Even Apfel’s disturbing use of the term ‘bombing Holocaust’ was an echo of earlier comments made by the journalist Joerg Friedrich in his hugely popular book, The Fire. Published in German in 2003, The Fire discusses the aerial war from the perspective of the citizens of the German cities which were bombed. The firestorms that followed the bombing of cities like Hamburg, Pforzheim, and Dresden caused huge loss of life and massive destruction. All told, up to 400,000 Germans were killed in the bombings (Overy 2014). Friedrich’s descriptions of death by incineration, asphyxiation, or melting asphalt that resulted from the widespread use of incendiary bombs are horrific to contemplate. In his account it is the German civilians who are terrorised. Friedrich’s book is powerfully provocative and gives voice to a long-standing belief that the aerial bombardment constitutes an unacknowledged ‘Holocaust’ in its own right. When Friedrich (2006, pp. 93, 95, and 338) likens the cellars under burning buildings to ‘crematoria’ and explains the Allied policy as ‘annihilation from the air’ and as a ‘politics of extermination’ the responses he evokes in his readership are not about grieving but about grievance. The NPD sought to exploit these German memories of wartime suffering for their own political gain. But their action was also an outgrowth of this social memory discourse. To be

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sure, few Germans would ever publicly voice the notion of a ‘bombing Holocaust,’ but the sentiments supporting this point of view are not simply the product of a fringe minority. They have existed in one form or another alongside the culture of remembrance and responsibility since the end of the Second World War. This points to the existence of two distinct but interrelated memory discourses at work in postwar Germany. The official memory discourse, which led to the establishment of Holocaust memorials and Holocaust education in the late 1970s, and a private memory discourse shared in families and communicated through local histories. Whereas the former focuses on German responsibility, the latter tends to focus on German suffering. Social psychologists such as Harald Welzer (2005, see also Welzer et al. 2002) have convincingly shown that knowledge of the Nazi crimes is derived from the official memory discourse and based on a kind of cognitive awareness. By contrast, German memories of suffering that are communicated via private memory discourse and associated with strong emotion. The kind of felt memory I am describing accounts for the appeal of remembrance ceremonies of wartime suffering that are much closer to the emotional history of Germans than the memorialisation of the Holocaust and its victims. Recall of German wartime suffering at the level of family and community usually takes place in the absence of the historical contexts. When this happens, intergenerational memory discourse among family members is transformed into a narrative of victimisation. This moral slippage creates narratives of the past that are shared in essential isolation from the horrors committed, keeping the role of family members as Nazi perpetrators and enablers at bay. As a result, German suffering is remembered as a form of victimisation on par with the suffering that Germans inflicted on their victims. In a similar sense, antisemitism in Germany is not only a product of the far right. Recent government studies suggest that latent antisemitism is still strongly prevalent in German society.1 Apfel’s ­campaign to garner attention in Germany worked not only because it was so provocative, but also because he tapped into a well of felt memories and prejudicial attitudes that have existed at the local level of family and community since the end of the war.

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Seen from this perspective, Apfel’s right-wing extremism exists on a continuum with a less extreme but morally questionable memory discourse. In proposing a continuum of political views connected by a broader social memory discourse, I am not suggesting a relationship of cause and effect. I do not believe, for example, that the narrative of victimisation in Germany necessarily leads to right-wing extremism. What I am suggesting is that the discourse of German suffering has created a situation in which Apfel’s notion of a ‘bombing Holocaust’ is inherently linked to a socially learned and felt awareness. Memory discourse exists at the level of family and community and has long perceived Germans as victims in the Second World War. For example, the focus on German suffering in the Allied bombing campaigns over Germany has created a perception among many Germans that they are unjustly treated and perceived. In the process German suffering has been put on par with the suffering inflicted on the actual victims of Germany’s perpetration of the Holocaust. The inversion of the victim–victimiser relationship has created a situation in which many Germans are inherently sympathetic to right-wing discourse and in certain instances support it outright. Right-wing extremism is able to tap into this long-standing well of emotional discontent as a means to garner support for its nativist agenda. When it remains unchecked and unchallenged, or isolated from the reflective work of educative and political discourse, the sense of unrecognised victimisation can become a fertile ground for fomenting right-wing political violence. In the enclosed circles of family or community, emotions of resentment and victimisation can grow and fester. These emotional states make individuals and groups receptive to extremist rhetoric and can erupt into violence. This chapter will focus on the emotional forces at work in shaping a sense of German victimisation and consider the extremist sentiment and responses that can follow from it. My discussion will proceed by integrating historical analysis with narrative illustration in three stages. I begin by outlining the historical struggle to remember the Holocaust in Germany, be it through education or the memorialisation of the Holocaust’s victims and survivors. I then consider examples of inherent, often unconscious antisemitic attitudes that exist side by side with the official memory discourse about the Nazi

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past and the Holocaust. Finally, I discuss the ramifications of the discourse of German victimisation from a personal perspective. I use my own German family and my work as a practising psychoanalyst to consider the challenges for remembering and responsibility. My hope is that the observations I draw about the emotional complexity of German postwar memory can help to further discussion about the nature of prejudice and its transmission over time.

Knowing and Remembering The question of how to remember, memorialise, and educate about the Holocaust has been particularly challenging for postwar German society. In the immediate postwar years, antisemitism in Germany worked against memorialising Jewish victims of the Holocaust. At the former concentration camp of Dachau, for example, ceremonies were held in honour of the victims who died there, but German speakers often did not mention the fact that the large majority of those murdered were Jewish. The former director of the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Site, Barbara Distel, has described the complete absence of any discussion of Jewish victims of the Holocaust during her education in Munich in the 1950s: The only group of victims I encountered during my school years in Munich were Catholic priests who had been in Dachau. For me Dachau was thus the place where Catholic priests were imprisoned. I was not made aware of any other groups of victims during my time in school. The perpetrators were silent, and when they spoke then it was only the context of judicial proceedings against them. … Many victims also remained silent, or when they attempted to speak up, the majority in Germany did not want to ­listen and they found there was no one to hear them. (Distel 2001, pp. 149–150, my translation)

Distel’s description of her education was typical of the period and the question of Holocaust education in Germany was only slowly addressed. After a series of antisemitic incidents in 1959–60, the Standing Conference of State Cultural Ministers in Germany passed a recommendation in

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February 1960 about how to address the recent past in history and civics instruction in schools. This was repeated and expanded in April 1978 with a recommendation for ‘dealing with National Socialism in the classroom,’ and further extended in December 1980 with directives about the ‘classroom treatment of resistance during the Nazi era.’2 As a result, during the past four decades, German national education policy has ensured that all students ages 14 through 16 have been taught about National Socialism and the Holocaust. Yet the voices of those who survived the Holocaust are becoming ever smaller in number and many observers wonder how Holocaust education will be preserved once the victims and survivors have passed away. Memorialisation of the Holocaust in Germany has had a similar history to Holocaust education. It took 60 years after the end of World War II for Germany to erect the national Holocaust memorial in Berlin, which was unveiled in 2005. Today ‘The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe,’ as it is officially known, is central to the image of present day Germany: a reunified nation that would like to see itself as having come to terms with its Nazi past. Yet the long road toward the establishment of the memorial reflects the many political crosscurrents at work in postwar German society, above all the collective struggle to remember and take responsibility for the genocide (Figlio 2014; Frie 2014). The first monument to officially acknowledge the Jewish victims of the Holocaust was organised by the British occupying force and dedicated in 1952 in the former concentration camp of Bergen–Belsen. This was the exception rather than the rule and the memorial itself addressed an international audience rather than the local German population (Marcuse 2010). By the early 1960s, the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem and of Auschwitz guards in Frankfurt generated greater interest in the Holocaust. These events led to the creation of the first explicitly Jewish memorial in Dachau that was dedicated in 1967. The monument referred to Jewish martyrs rather than victims of National Socialism, reflecting the changing identity of Holocaust survivors at the time. In the years that followed, particularly after the student uprisings of 1968, the deeply conservative process of forgetting in West Germany was challenged. Institutions were questioned for the way in which they seamlessly transitioned from Nazism into postwar democracy. By the late 1970s, this

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cultural transformation led to the emergence of an official Holocaust education in Germany, and together with such media events as the televising of the U.S. miniseries, Holocaust, triggered a significant increase in attendance at Dachau and other concentration camp memorial sites, which continued through the following decades. An underlying and important question related to Holocaust education and memorialisation is whether the official governmental stance helped or may have hindered personal engagement with family memory about the Nazi past. Might the educative process even be used to enable Germans privately to reinvent themselves and so evade the past? No one doubts the importance of publicly remembering and taking responsibility for the horrors committed by the German people under the Nazi regime. At the level of collective public memory Germany has done much to acknowledge and atone for atrocities of the Holocaust. Indeed, there are few, if any, democratic nations today that live so closely with the painful reminders of their history. But at the level of private family memory, knowledge of the Nazi past often remains grey and murky. More to the point, what might be left out, cast aside, or denied in the process of remembering and taking responsibility? As a Holocaust survivor, the psychoanalyst Anna Ornstein is particularly able to speak to Germany’s struggle to remember. In 1944, after the Germans occupied Hungary, Ornstein (2004) was deported and survived the horrors of Auschwitz as an adolescent together with her mother. The rest of her family was killed. After the war, she and her husband, Paul Ornstein, another survivor of the Shoah, completed their medical school in Heidelberg before immigrating to the United States in the early 1950s. Ornstein is often invited to give talks in Germany to share her experience and her perspective on the importance of remembering. According to Ornstein (2014), ‘it took more than one generation to accept guilt for the crimes that had been committed by an earlier generation. Accepting guilt by the German government secured Germany’s recognition by the Western democracies. However, accepting guilt on the personal level represents a much greater challenge; only relatively few families’ histories are being researched by the children and grandchildren’ (p. 675). Despite Ornstein’s stress on the importance of researching German family memory, questions have inevitably been raised about the value of

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such work. The German journalist Alexandra Senfft (2007) has taken on this challenge and written about her own family’s struggle to acknowledge the crimes of her high-ranking Nazi grandfather. In her recent book Senfft (2016) explains why it is important for all Germans to understand what took place in their families: Up until now the period of National Socialism in Germany has been processed chiefly in an academic and intellectual sense. However, it is important to deal with the legacy of the Third Reich on a personal level and to research one’s own family, and thus inevitably to understand one’s own relationship to the period of National Socialism. Otherwise the perpetrators will always remain ‘the others’: abstract figures in history books, whose names one should know but then can also forget. Millions of entirely normal people … regardless of their educational level or societal status, contributed to the massive crimes against humanity. (Senfft 2016, p. 40, my translation)

Given the sheer magnitude of the atrocities, knowledge about what occurred is often abstract, limited to gruesome statistics that are matched by traumatic images of mass murder. For Senfft, it is the abstract nature of this learning in Germany that makes research into family histories so important. She suggests that once the direct and indirect role of own family members in the crimes is recognised, a personal connection to what took place is established. This kind of connection bridges the gap between abstract, cognitive learning and the kind of history and memory that are transmitted within families and across generations. Simply put, emotional engagement with the crimes of the past helps us grasp the very real and continuing effects of historical traumas like the Holocaust in the present. Without this kind of emotional understanding, Ornstein wonders whether government-sponsored memorialisation and education in Germany can actually help Germans to come to terms with their attitudes about the Holocaust. Recalling an experience in which she discussed the issue of Holocaust education in Germany, Ornstein states: I recently posed this question to a German grandmother whose answer I did not anticipate. She said that the teaching of the Holocaust in schools would have to stop because listening to the stories of survivors has been

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traumatizing to the children. She was of the opinion that only Jews insist on memorialization and on continuing to make the teaching of the Holocaust mandatory. She thinks they do this in order to undermine Germany’s efforts to be recognized as a democratic nation. This grandmother is experiencing herself not only as a victim but again (or still?) she views Jews as perpetrators who are trying to undermine German aspirations to re-gain their unblemished national identity. (Ornstein 2014, p. 675)

This unsettling example of Ornstein’s interaction with the German grandmother sheds light on the deep-seated ambivalence that many Germans still feel about remembering the Nazi past. Among some Germans the lack of any felt awareness of the human cost of the Holocaust can reinforce collective forgetting, antisemitic prejudice and even lead to outright denial of the crimes of the past. At the level of family and in small group settings that remain isolated from critical, public discourse, such prejudicial sentiments can fester and provide the basis for the growth of extremist views.

Responsibility and Prejudice Ornstein’s observations are supported by ongoing rates of antisemitism in contemporary Germany. Since 2002, the researchers Elmar Brähler and Oliver Decker have published a biannual survey of antidemocratic and prejudicial attitudes in Germany that demonstrates consistent if varying rates of explicit and implicit antisemitism among the German adult population (Decker et  al. 2016). A 2014 study by the Anti-­ Defamation League suggested up to 27 percent of Germans harbour ­antisemitic views. Antisemitism, like all prejudices, is a complex phenomenon and is variously motivated, particularly in Germany. One of the ways of understanding postwar German antisemitism is as a defensive reaction against being identified with Germany’s Nazi history. Moreover, some Germans believe the state of Israel treats the Palestinians the same way as the Nazis treated European Jews, and that this cancels out any guilt or responsibility postwar Germans should feel for the

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g­ enocide perpetrated by their forefathers under the Nazi German state (Frie 2017a, b). These kinds of reactions inevitably raise important questions about whether German education and memorialisation of the Holocaust are able to change such attitudes. In the mid-1990s the German journalist Peter Schneider undertook a wide-ranging study of attitudes toward Holocaust education among what are known as ‘third-generation’ Germans, (a term that refers to the grandchildren of the German generation of perpetrators, enablers, and bystanders) for which he interviewed hundreds of students. In his report Schneider (1995) notes that many of the students are actively curious about Germany’s history and want to know what took place during the period of National Socialism. But he also notes a strong negative reaction among some students toward compulsory school visits to concentration camp memorial sites. Schneider quotes one student who states: ‘A few months ago our class went on an excursion to Weimar. Right near there is Buchenwald, so off we go to Buchenwald. We happen to live near Sachsenhausen, so at least once a year, we go to Sachsenhausen. All this obligatory you-have-to-see-this and you-ought-to-feel-that. I can’t deal with it anymore.’ The reaction noted by Schneider is problematic for a number of reasons. For many Germans the term ‘Jew’ has become a generalised category, in effect an ‘other,’ who is encountered only in history classes, museums, or memorial sites. As a result, what it means to be Jewish has become distanced not only from the vibrant Jewish life that defined prewar German society, but also from the growing contemporary Jewish community in Germany. How does memorialisation and education of the Holocaust exist alongside recognition of Jewish life in today’s Germany? Moreover, can the increasingly stark prejudicial contrast between the ‘Jewish victim’ of the past and the stereotyped ‘Jewish aggressor’ in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict in the present be overcome? Some within Germany’s Jewish community (see Seligmann 2014) have argued that Germany does not need more Holocaust memorials that focus on the past, but rather places of dialogue where Germans and German Jews meet and interact with each other in the present. Schneider’s observations were published two decades ago, yet the attitudes he described are still prevalent. They are substantiated in research

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undertaken by the German psychologist and psychoanalyst Katharina Rothe (2012) who has examined the ways in which antisemitic attitudes are transmitted within families from one postwar generation to the next. Rothe believes that the inability or unwillingness of German families to confront their Nazi past can help explain the prevalence of antisemitism in Germany. Drawing on her interviews with second- and third-­ generation Germans she illustrates the varied reactions of her interviewees to the crimes of the Holocaust. While the second-generation Germans she interviews seek to deflect any sense of responsibility for remembering the horrors committed by their own parents, the third-generation demonstrate frustration at being asked to remember the crimes. Rothe uses her interview with ‘Alias Melzer,’ a third-generation German who was born in 1965, to illustrate this process. Melzer tells Rothe that she learned of the Holocaust for the first time at school and that she felt literally ‘bombarded’ by the theme. Indeed, Melzer complains to Rothe about the way she was taught the Holocaust: I am so tired of that topic, because going back in memory, my feeling is that it has been gone through (durchgekaut in German: chewed through) over and over again while we were at school. (KR: Uh-huh) … I would have liked to have gotten to know other things, not four times in a row, four times anew, with every teacher anew, this, this National-Socialism. … And that it comes out of my ears and I am totally on edge because of it … But this has not to do (KR: Uh-huh) with my parents or what they told me, but this was school. They totally rotted that topic for me. My perception is that one has tried to ram into us that we have to have a bad conscience. And I know that I’ve always been resistant to that because I said to myself: ‘I couldn’t help that I happen to have been born in Germany by chance. This is not my problem.’ (Rothe 2012, p. 29)

Melzer’s response to being asked to remember the Holocaust is not horror about the crimes themselves, but rather a sense of overwhelming fatigue about the subject. She questions why, as a German born after the war, she should still have to remember the crimes and she expresses annoyance at her repeated exposure to National Socialism in the context of her education. As Rothe (2012, p. 30) suggests, it seems easier for Melzer to connect with a sense of annoyance and frustration than to experience her inherited guilt and shame about what the generation of her grandparents

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actually did. In the course of the interview Melzer then goes on to seek to normalise the Holocaust in German history and world history more generally, pointing out that Germany is not the only country to have carried out crimes against humanity. Inherent in these kinds of responses is the antisemitic belief (cited by Ornstein above) that the Jews are the only ones who actually insist that Holocaust education and remembrance take place. This is what the Israeli psychoanalyst Zvi Rix meant when he said: ‘The Germans will never forgive us for Auschwitz’ (cited in Grünberg 2013, p. 279). As a third-generation German, Melzer’s reactions are familiar to me even though I was educated and grew up in Canada. When visiting Germany, or when I am among German-Canadians, I have often heard the following response to being asked about visiting a Holocaust museum or memorial site: ‘What would I want there? I know it happened. Surely that’s enough.’ This response captures the tension that exists between intellectual knowing about the Holocaust and what it means to experience one’s emotional response to what actually happened, particularly in the context of one’s own family. The defensive reaction that follows is to implicitly or explicitly blame the victims and survivors of the Holocaust for the unsettled feelings caused by being confronted with the reality of the crimes. But lurking in the background is the unarticulated possibility that one’s own family members, possibly the very people one knew and loved, were complicit in the horrors that took place. Even if we recognise the reality of inherited guilt and shame and accept the obligation of knowing and remembering, we are still faced with the question of how each succeeding generation will respond to crimes of the past. Bernhard Schlink, the celebrated German author of The Reader, has reflected on how the burden of German guilt and responsibility is ­experienced across generations of Germans. Reflecting on the third generation, Schlink, who was born in 1944, states: ‘Already, it makes a difference as to whether it was your father who was in the SS, or your grandfather. Was it a grandfather whom you actually met, maybe loved? Or is it a grandfather who is just a picture on the wall with other family photos? Already I see that my son has a different relation to the German past than I did’ (as cited in Connolly 2012). Schlink insists that Germans remain responsible for remembering the horrors committed by their forbearers. Though he also admits that the obligations of memory are no

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easy task. Schlink believes that Germans will remain ensnared in their past for some time to come, but that the ‘burden of nationality’ will change. Indeed, it is likely that fourth-generation Germans, those who have no direct experience or emotional connection to the generation of perpetrators and bystanders, may ask questions that previous generations have been unable to. It is also just as possible that the growing chronological distance will make them less likely to confront the meanings inherent in the lived histories of their families. Schlink develops this viewpoint in relation to his own grandchildren, who are members of the fourth generation: Even my own granddaughters will still have to cope with it. When they go abroad and go to Britain and see all these movies that still deal with ‘bad Germans’ … they will have to find a way to cope with it, and to understand that at least what they owe others is a sense of tact. They will have to learn where this anger comes from, that it comes from real wounds that still torment people. (as cited in Connolly 2012)

For Schlink, as for other concerned Germans, the crimes of the Nazi past and the obligations to remember the horrors of the Holocaust do not disappear with time. Yet the experience of that history and the nature of the responsibility will inevitably change with time. To my mind, the challenge is to move beyond abstract knowledge, to grasp the reality of individual lives and the suffering that took place. In order for meaningful remembering to occur, cognitive knowledge of the past needs to be combined with emotional engagement. Only thus is it possible to ask the difficult questions: How could this have happened? To what extent did my family participate in or support these atrocities? What does my responsibility to remember actually consist of?

Denial and Dissociation My knowledge of German history was first and foremost a felt awareness that I received from my parents. They were born in Germany in 1935 and lived through the bombing of the city of Hanover. In the postwar years my parents joined a host of other Germans who immigrated to

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Canada in search of a new beginning. As a result, I was born and grew up in a country that was at war with Germany and became a destination of hope for many Holocaust survivors. When I was 17 my parents returned to Europe, first to Switzerland, where I lived for a time, and then to Germany. As a child I came to assume that war was a natural topic of conversation amongst family members. I often travelled from Canada to Germany to visit my grandparents. When different generations of my family met, stories were shared about the past week and then conversation shifted almost unconsciously to stories of suffering from long ago. In the context of family gatherings, this movement between past and present became a normal part of the interaction. My grandparents would tell familiar stories of hardship and the retelling of these stories over time shaped how the events were portrayed and understood. It also structured what was said and what remained unsaid. My parents and aunts and uncles were all members of the second generation and would listen in silence or share versions of these same stories. I am a member of the third generation and became a kind of bearer of inherited memories and family narratives from the war years. My grandparents’ focus on the wartime traumas of my family, be it the bombings, the loss of their house and loved ones, or the difficulty of finding enough food and making ends meet in the years that followed, inevitably meant that the suffering of the victims of Nazi Germany was pushed aside, if not altogether denied. There was little talk of guilt or responsibility. Nor was there mention of my grandparents’ support for a regime whose intent on genocide was clear for all who wished to see it. There were no questions asked about the disappearance of Jewish neighbours or of the historical forces that led to the bombings. There was only talk of hardship and the loss of community and trust in the future. The physical and emotional traumas of the war years lingered like shadows, despite the eventual changes in my family’s fortunes and in the German nation more generally. In the postwar German lifeworld, perpetrators and victims had, in effect, become equal in their suffering. As a child in Canada I learned about the Holocaust at a young age from my parents. It was important to them that I know about the terrible crimes committed by the German nation. At the same time, there was what can best be described as an ‘intergenerational silence’ about my

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grandparents’ evident support for the Nazi regime. The dynamic I am describing in my family is hardly unusual (see Welzer 2005). While the vast majority of Germans today readily acknowledge the horrendous crimes of the Holocaust, family histories of participation and perpetration in the Nazi past remain largely unknown. Growing up, my felt-­ awareness of my family’s struggles seemed more real to me than any learned knowledge of the Holocaust, no matter how terrible, shocking, and unfathomable it was. I had learned to identify from the earliest age with the experiences of my family members. By contrast, the deathly consequences that followed from my grandparents’ support of a heinous regime bent on genocide remained at a distance. This was clearly a form of emotional denial and dissociation. I remember being overwhelmed by a fog of confusion when I first heard of the horrors committed by the generation of my grandparents. As I look back, I think my confusion was also a reflection of my parents’ own struggle to discuss what unfolded when they were children, and their subsequent attempts to make sense of what they saw and heard in the world around them at a young age. After all, how do you grasp, let alone understand, the fact that your parents were connected, however indirectly, with the terrible crimes? As Eva Hoffman (2004) has stated: How can you ever come to terms with the knowledge that your parents, your relatives, the very people for whom you have felt a natural, a necessary affection, are actually worthy of moral disgust? That the relative who was fond of you, or a neighbor who treated you nicely, or indeed your mother or father, may have performed ghastly deeds? Or that the whole previous generation, which has served as your first model of adulthood, is tainted by complicity with such deeds? (2004, pp. 118–119)

The Holocaust was only possible because of the collective support given to the Nazi regime by a vast majority of enthusiastic supporters. As a grandchild I was faced with a similar challenge as my parents. How could I feel my love for my grandparents given my knowledge that they belonged to the generation that perpetrated the Holocaust? My grandparents’ kindness to me seemed so utterly incompatible with my learned knowledge of the horrors. Seen from this perspective, it became easier for me to

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imagine the bomb shelter that offered protection to my mother and her family than the concentration camps that were dispersed throughout Hanover and the surrounding environment. It became easier for me to remember and empathise with the Germans who died in bombing raids than it was to remember and empathise with the victims of the Holocaust. Whereas the former meant acknowledging the emotional traumas experienced by those I loved, the latter required acknowledging the complicity of those I loved. The powerful but elusive wish among German families for a history that is free from entanglements or associations with the Nazi regime cannot be underestimated. But neither can we escape the past we are bequeathed through family and community. Descendants of the German generation of perpetrators and enablers like myself have a responsibility to claim their family histories and to know the actions and beliefs of their family members. Only thus is it possible, I believe, to empathise with the persecuted other and to overcome the learned and implicit prejudices of the histories we inherit. As long as dark family histories remain unarticulated, their effects linger on, providing a fertile emotional ground for prejudice, be it implicit antisemitism or right-wing extremism. The past does not simply disappear; it keeps coming back, disrupting the present. This speaks to the continued need for a participatory political and social discourse that addresses the effects of historical traumas and collective crimes in the present. Questions of how or why the Holocaust matters in Germany today are sorely misplaced. History’s ethical demands require us to engage with the past despite the distance succeeding generations increasingly (and understandably) feel from the terrible events that occurred. Seen from this perspective, meaningful remembering includes the personal responsibility to remember and a readiness to engage the emotional challenges this involves when it comes to knowing one’s own family history. As a practising psychoanalyst, the challenge of remembering the past and understanding the emotional forces, conscious and unconscious, that shape what and how we remember is of concern to me. I am especially interested in the formative role played by our historical and cultural past. In my clinical work I often hear stories of suffering from patients who have experienced trauma or who carry with them the effects of a family history of trauma.

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When I first began working with descendants of Holocaust survivors I struggled to listen to the stories my patients shared. In the presence of my patients I was caught in the inescapable web of history and the legacy of my grandparents’ lives. As they talked about the horrors of the Holocaust I sometimes found it difficult to continue empathising with my patients. I consider empathy, which the philosopher Martha Nussbaum (2007) describes as entering into the predicament of the other, central to my work as an analyst. My struggle to maintain a stance of empathy with my patients was connected to the inherited guilt and shame I felt in the knowledge that my grandparents were members of the German generation that perpetrated the violence against my patients’ families. There was also another dynamic at work, one that is harder for me to admit and relates directly to the narrative of victimisation. In the presence of my patients my stance of empathy would sometimes shift, imperceptibly at first and then more consciously, to self-centred thoughts about my own family history: the bombing of my mother’s home, the death of my paternal grandfather and the subsequent refugee status of my father and grandmother, the deaths of many relatives, the hunger and hardship of the war and postwar years, all leading to the eventual emigration of my parents. It was as if to say, surely my family history also requires attention, if not sympathy? Was I, in effect, seeking solace in my family’s own narrative of suffering? It took time for me to grasp what my reaction meant. On the face of it, my patients and I were both descendants of trauma. German and Jewish lives today are challenged by the traumatic effects of a past that is not of their making: postwar generations of Germans are confronted by family histories of perpetration and support for the crimes of National Socialism and by the effects of wartime trauma; descendants of Holocaust survivors are haunted by legacies of enormous loss and by memories of unimaginable cruelty and suffering that were endured before they were born. Both groups struggle with family secrets, silences, and dissociations about the past, giving rise to fearful thoughts and fantasies about what could have happened. Yet each is forced to address the legacy of the Third Reich and the Holocaust from radically divergent, historically determined perspectives. What does it mean when these historical differences are ignored or effaced?

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In these moments, I realised that I was effectively identifying with my patients, perhaps even seeking to level the distinction between perpetrator and victim. Research on German responses to the Holocaust demonstrates an oft-repeated but largely unconscious strategy that is used by second- and third-generation Germans to avoid confronting the perpetrator aspects of their families’ past and protect themselves from empathising with the victims of Nazi persecution (see Rosenthal 2010). In other words, I was engaging a cultural practice of avoidance, using my family’s memories of suffering as a means to deflect feelings of inherited guilt and responsibility. Speaking from her own German perspective, Gabriele Rosenthal (2010) states: ‘By putting one’s own suffering on a parallel with the suffering of Nazi victims and identifying with them, one can avoid confronting the perpetrator aspects of one’s family past on the one hand and protect oneself from empathising and taking on the perspective of the victims of Nazi persecution on the other’ (p. 312). This speaks to the emotional tension at the heart of German memory. My goal in this essay has been to examine this tension in order to understand how the shadows of the past continue to inscribe attitudes in the present. The issue of German wartime experience is emotive and its popularisation in Germany points to the political and emotional forces that shape German responses to the Holocaust. While the psychological effects of German wartime trauma can be real, so too is the moral context of guilt and responsibility within which that trauma took place. However, when the memory discourse of enclosed circles of family and community is shaped by emotions of resentment and victimisation, it can easily become fertile ground for extremist sentiment and may foment right-­ wing violence. The actions of Holger Apfel and the NPD faction in the state parliament in Saxony are an example of this process. I have suggested that it is important not only to understand overt acts of right-wing prejudice and violence, but also to address the emotional discourse that sustains them. The challenge for postwar German memory is to develop an informed understanding of personal, family, and community history that does not embrace a narrative of victimisation. The problem with the narrative of victimisation is that it reduces history to a single dimension and stands in the way of developing an empathic outlook. Empathy is essential for

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understanding and responding to the harmful effects of prejudice. Any meaningful account of German memory must therefore begin with the acknowledgment of German guilt and responsibility and a willingness to empathise with the victims and survivors. And the responsibility to remember at the collective level that public memory needs to be matched by a willingness to remember at the family level of private memory.

Notes 1. http://dipbt.bundestag.de/dip21/btd/17/077/1707700.pdf. This report was published by the German Bundestag (parliament) in October 2011 and is written by an “independent” panel of experts on antisemitism in Germany. 2. For an overview of the history of Holocaust education in Germany, see the educational site Learning From History: http://learning-from-history. de/International/Posting/7474. For an overview of current education goals in regard to National Socialism and the Holocaust, see the Standing Conference of the Ministers of Education and Cultural Affairs: http:// www.kmk.org/no_cache/bildung-schule/allgemeine-bildung/faecherund-unterrichtsinhalte/weitere-unterrichtsinhalte/nationalsozialismusund-holocaust.html?sword_list%5B0%5D=holocaust

References Anti-Defamation League. (2014). The ADL global 100: An index of anti-­ Semitism. Retrieved from: http://global100.adl.org/#country/germany/2014 Connolly, K. (2012, September 16). Bernhard Schlink: Being German is a huge burden. The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/ world/2012/sep/16/bernhard-schlink-germany-burden-euro-crisis Decker, O., Kiess, J., & Brähler, E. (Eds.). (2016). Die enthemmte Mitte: Autoritäre und rechtsextreme Einstellung in Deutschland. [The uninhibited middle: Authoritarian and extreme right attitudes in Germany] Giessen: Psychosozial-Verlag. Distel, B. (2001). Podiumsdikussion: Der Umgang mit dem Holocaust: “Wieviel Erinnerung” war zu welcher Zeit möglich? [Panel discussion: Living with the Holocaust: “How much memory” was possible at any given time?]. In N. Frei

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& S.  Steinbacher (Eds.), Beschweigen und Bekennen: Die deutsche Nachkriegsgesellschaft und der Holocaust [Silence and recognition: German postwar society and the Holocaust] (pp.  137–158). Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag. Figlio, K. (2014). Psychoanalysis, reparation and historical memory. American Imago, 71(4), 417–443. Frie, R. (2014). From memorials to bomb shelters: Navigating the emotional landscape of German memory. Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 34(7), 649–662. Frie, R. (2017a). Not in my family: German memory and responsibility after the Holocaust. New York: Oxford University Press. Frie, R. (2017b, May). The intersection of philo-Semitism and anti-Semitism: German responses to the Nazi past and the Holocaust. Presented at Zionism and Antisemitism: An International Conference, Pears Institute for the Study of Anti-Semitism, Birkbeck College, University of London. Friedrich, J. (2006). The fire: The bombing of Germany, 1940–1945. (A. Brown, Trans.). New York: Columbia University Press. (Originally published in 2002 as Der Brand: Deutschland im Bombenkrieg, 1940–1945, Munich: Propyläen Verlag). Grünberg, K. (2013). Ist das Antisemitismus? Deutsch- jüdische Erfahrungen nach der Shoah [Is that anti- Semitism? German- Jewish experiences after the Shoah]. Psychoanalyse. Texte zur Sozialforschung, 17, 275–286. Hoffman, E. (2004). After such knowledge: Memory, history, and the legacy of the Holocaust. New York: Public Affairs. Irving, D. (1963). The destruction of Dresden. London: William Kimber. Joel, T. (2013). The Dresden firebombing: Memory and politics of commemorating destruction. London: I. B. Tauris. Marcuse, H. (2010). Memorializing persecuted Jews in Dachau and other West German concentration camp memorial sites. In B. Niven & C. Paver (Eds.), Memorialization in Germany since 1945 (pp.  192–204). London: Palgrave Macmillan. Nussbaum, M. (2007). The clash within: Democracy, religious violence, and India’s future. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ornstein, A. (2004). My mother’s eyes: Holocaust memories of a young girl. Cincinatti: Emmis Books. Ornstein, A. (2014). The transformation of guilt into a sense of responsibility: Discussion of articles by Roger Frie and Martin Gossmann. Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 34(7), 671–679. Overy, R. (2014). The bombers and the bombed: Allied air war over Europe, 1940–1945. New York: Viking Press.

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Rosenthal, G. (Ed.). (2010). The Holocaust in three generations. Families of victims and perpetrators of the Nazi regime (2nd Rev. ed.). Farmington Hills, MI: Barbara Budrich Publishers. Rothe, K. (2012). Anti-Semitism in Germany today and the intergenerational transmission of guilt and shame. Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society, 17(1), 16–34. Schneider, P. (1995, December 3). The sins of the grandfathers. New York Times Magazine. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/1995/12/03/magazine/ the-sins-of-the-grandfathers.html Seligmann, R. (2014). Jewish voice from Germany: About us. Retrieved from http://jewish-voice-from-germany.de/cms/thank-you-for-raising-your-voice/ Senfft, A. (2007): Schweigen tut Weh: Eine Deutsche Familiengeschichte [Silence hurts: A German family history]. Berlin: Claasen Verlag. Senfft, A. (2016). Der Lange Schatten der Täter: Nachkommen stellen sich ihrer NS-Familiengeschichte [The long shadow of perpetrators: Descendants face their Nazi family histories]. Munich: Piper Verlag. Welzer, H. (2005). Grandpa wasn’t a Nazi: The Holocaust in Germany family remembrance. New York: American Jewish Committee. Welzer, H., Moller, S., & Tschuggnall, K. (2002). “Opa war kein Nazi”: Nationalsozialismus und Holocaust im Familiengedächtnis [“Grandpa wasn’t a Nazi”: National socialism and the Holocaust in the collective memory of the family]. Frankfurt: Fischer.

The Rhetorical Satisfactions of Hate Speech James Martin

Abstract  In this chapter I explore the phenomenon of ‘hate speech,’ understood as a rhetorical practice whereby aggressive hostility is directed at others. Drawing upon Jacques Lacan’s account of the tension between the imaginary and symbolic registers of subjectivity, I present political speech as a means to sublimate violence. Political controversies enact confrontations between rivals who seek to diminish the integrity of their opponent’s self-image. Speaking hatefully is thus a familiar dimension of most political contests. Yet it can also become a refusal of any symbolic mediation with one’s opponent. Lacan describes this type of hate as ‘a passion of being.’ I employ the example of the controversy over antisemitism in the British Labour Party after 2015 to illustrate this variety of hateful speech.

J. Martin (*) Department of Politics and International Relations, Goldsmiths College, University of London, London, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2018 S. Krüger et al. (eds.), Fomenting Political Violence, Studies in the Psychosocial, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97505-4_7

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Introduction Psychoanalysis has shown how hatred, aggression, and all kinds of interpersonal enmity are rooted in intolerance towards the self, a furious revulsion at something ‘inside’ that is projected onto an external other who becomes the object of intensely hostile feelings and attitudes (see Freud 1915/1957; Berke 1988). What I want to do in this chapter is extend that general line of enquiry to think about the place of hate in public discourse. ‘Hate’ is, of course, a very broad term that encompasses a varying constellation of feelings and behaviours: from quiet, seething contempt to overt expressions of anger; from direct physical violence to subtler forms of abuse, humiliation, or threat. This broad spectrum makes hate – like its antonym, love – a category whose form and significance often evades conceptual precision. It is, perhaps, more a conjectured disposition for appraising certain behaviours than the neutral description of a delineated object. This imprecision is no less so when it comes to speaking hatefully. ‘Hate speech,’ as it is commonly known, is a peculiarly communicative phenomenon, a ‘performative’ as much as a ‘constative’ type of speech act (Austin 1975). It not only describes its object but, moreover, enacts in that enunciation its hostility towards it. Although the term hate conjures the idea of a prior, affective condition – something that exists as a mental construct or felt emotion before it is expressed – its presence is typically given only intersubjectively, that is, in forms of language and discourse (see Waltman and Haas 2011). Hate is something we often end up inferring from people’s remarks, surmising from their comments, or abruptly encountering in dialogue with them. In short, hate is revealed rhetorically – often, if by no means always, in the guise of unelaborated exhortations, labels, and assertions whose precise relation to interior attitudes is rarely articulated. Haters don’t often admit to hating, and a large amount of discourse is frequently devoted to announcing, defining, and disputing accusations of hate. For all its evident force, hate is a strangely obscure phenomenon and difficult to access beyond the medium of speech. The evasiveness of hate and its distinctively virtual presence in communicative form was evident in recent controversies over antisemitism – the hatred of Jews – in the British Labour Party (see Freedland 2016; Rich

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2016). Unlike the much more familiar antisemitisms of the far right  – worn proudly as a marker of political identification – that of the left often goes unnoticed. Indeed, liberals and the left typically claim that their egalitarian credentials eliminate them from accusations of racism, hate, or arbitrary discrimination. So it is not surprising that the controversy over antisemitism in the Labour Party from 2015 unfolded largely in an atmosphere of defensive incredulity, rapid denial, and hostile counteraccusation. I will not go into all the details of this quite particular case but, unlike antisemitism on the far right, the left’s antisemitism cannot easily be reconciled with its political self-image, although there is a substantial history to the phenomenon (see Fine and Spencer 2017; Norwood 2013). Members of Labour (and of other liberal and left political movements) accused of antisemitism have often found it hard to accept that their own discourse  – which routinely attacks so-called ‘Zionism’ and Israel by invoking numerous, common tropes associated with Jew hatred – utilises what in other contexts would be viewed as hostile and prejudicial arguments (for an analysis, see Harrison 2006). Indeed, it is frequently claimed that the accusation of antisemitism itself aims to undermine ‘legitimate criticism’ of Israel by discrediting all such dissent as hate against Jews. This situation of argumentative controversy suggests to me that it might be useful to think both rhetorically and psychoanalytically about how hate operates. To do so, I will argue, means thinking of human subjectivity as itself constituted through controversy. One is never a perfectly harmonised human agent but is usually prepositioned ‘for’ or ‘against’ wider social causes or purposes, orienting towards certain attitudes and receptive to some outlooks and claims over others. Psychologists (such as Billig 1991) have pointed out how we think argumentatively by drawing upon propositions in public discourse to give coherence to our cognitions and supply ourselves with attitudinal dispositions. Similarly, a psychoanalytically informed approach to rhetoric points beyond cognition to the unconscious satisfactions in public and political argument, particularly in the ways discourse organises desire through the expulsion of an intolerable object (see Martin 2016a). For example, a strongly held attachment to national identity so often involves identifying and declaiming against the corrupting influence of ‘foreign’ agencies such as, for example, external governments, immigrants, or ‘alien’ cultural forces.

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In what follows, I explore this relation between rhetoric and psychic investments and expulsions by way of Jacques Lacan’s account of the interaction of ‘imaginary’ and ‘symbolic’ registers of subjectivity. Argumentative controversies testify to the frequently explosive tensions and misalignments between images of personal and collective identity that actors bring to politics and the symbolic exchanges in which they engage to preserve and advance themselves alongside others. Political actors are persistently under pressure to defend, adjust, or even recompose their self-images to enable them to coexist or even cooperate with rivals. The ongoing tension between imaginary identities (the wholesome image of integral collective identity on whose behalf actors claim to speak) and the symbolic terms of their interaction (that is, the vocabularies actors use to define cooperation, conflict, similarities, and differences with rivals) is played out in public rhetoric as they struggle to resist and control each other’s manoeuvres. Hateful speaking is a regular feature of this type of democratic conflict among adversaries who regard each other as rivals for influence and power. Yet, as the controversy over left antisemitism reveals, rivalry can reappear as hostile antagonism when the symbolic coordinates articulating different collectivities are weakened. In such instances, underlying investments in imaginary constructs intensify and a form of paranoid hostility emerges that brooks little or no symbolic mediation. In that scenario, political rhetoric functions to exclude and vilify the other for the excessive, destructive ‘enjoyment’  – an intense, surplus satisfaction beyond mere pleasure – that is perceived to be taken at one’s expense. In the case of Labour, a rhetorical hostility to Israel rather than Jews as such has emerged as the vehicle for a political hatred that affirms a certain radical left identity, yet at the cost of conciliation with its antagonists. If hatefulness is to be productive rather than simply destructive, I suggest at the end, it would help to learn lessons from other rhetorical genres in which conciliation rather than expulsion is endorsed.

Subjects of Controversy The starting point for my discussion is the view that speech has a peculiar if often unacknowledged proximity to violence. We tend to think of speech as a mundane practice of communicative exchange designed to

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accomplish practical everyday tasks. But public or political discourse regularly magnifies antagonistic dimensions of speech that are often missed (though they remain present) in the routine exchanges of everyday talk. Although political discourse has long been idealised as conforming to a certain pragmatic and peaceable model of human sociability, that is usually at the expense of giving proper recognition to the aggressive, competitive, and persistently ‘malicious’ undercurrents that circulate within and inflect public deliberations (Saint-Amand 1996). We might, instead, understand political speech and language as sublimations of violence – the displacement onto formalised, ritual exchanges of a ready propensity to aggressive, destructive, and antisocial behaviour. The regular incivility of Parliamentary Questions in the UK legislature, for example, expresses in stylised form the hostile divisions between two sides of the House of Commons. Not unreasonably, of course, political speech is widely conceived as the very opposite of physical violence. In key respects, this is true: to talk is not to engage directly in wanton destruction of people and property; life is preserved and conflicts may be resolved through dialogue and compromise. But speech is not the pure antonym of violence; destruction remains an ever-present possibility (if conflicts are not resolved) and, frequently, speech instigates violence or makes us complicit with it. So if we set aside the moralisation or idealisation of speech and think of language and language use as, instead, the sublimation of violence and enmity, it becomes clearer why exploring rhetoric might be of interest. Rhetoric – the study and practice of persuasive speech and argument – brings to light this proximity of discourse to violence by highlighting the way language and speech function in forms of public controversy (see Martin 2014). For rhetoricians, speech is about taking sides, making and defending contentious claims by appealing to arguments and evidence, minimising the strengths of opposing views, and neutralising logical or ethical inconsistencies, sometimes in order to bring about a shared judgement or orientation (see Fish 2016). Argument is thus a motivated form of speech and it subsists in the realm of controversy where difference and conflict characterise human relations. Rhetoric is thus often the medium of violence’s sublimation. This is partly why classical rhetoric is closely associated with moments of great transformation and danger such as war, funerals, and social and political crises. In moments such as these, the integrity

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of public life and the relations between its constituent elements are in contention and invite reassertion. The purpose of speech in such crises of the polity is to define a common measure by which precarious situations are to be judged, to make manifest a tone and direction for public institutions so that wider disputes and differences do not threaten to overwhelm us. But that function of rhetorically garnering confidence cannot entirely eliminate other, potentially violent differences. Nor does rhetoric always work or satisfy everyone. Political speech, debate, disputation, and criticism can always overflow the formal constraints of public deliberation and end up in confusion and outright conflict. The excesses of the UK’s recent EU referendum campaign are a case in point. Without a clear standard by which to focus debate and argument, advocates on either side lost any sense of measured judgement to their claims about the benefits or disadvantages of leaving the EU and, not surprisingly, acts of violence, open intolerance, and aggression also began to rise (see Martin 2016b). The proximity of speech to violence has undoubtedly informed the psychoanalytical enterprise from its inception. The so-called ‘talking cure’ of psychoanalytical therapy aims precisely at relieving the psychic pain and emotional distress individuals experience by encouraging them gradually to symbolise – and thereby transform – the ‘tyrannies,’ terrors, and conflicts at work in the unconscious (Lear 1998, pp. 22–23). The experience of unconscious conflict is also central to Lacan’s psychoanalytical work, although he is less convinced than others that it might be successfully overcome. For Lacan, the subject is an intrinsically controversial entity, constituted in an ongoing disputation between its unconscious and the imaginary and symbolic dimensions through which it endeavours to ‘feign’ its coherence (Lundberg 2012, pp. 2–3). Born of a ‘splitting’ between conscious and unconscious forces that permanently destabilises it and impresses upon it an imperative to seek out unicity, subjectivity simultaneously stages and conceals the ‘ontological inconsistency’ at the root of its being (Zupančič 2008, p. 20). In this ongoing dispute, symptoms and desires, as well as psychoanalytical therapy itself, all unfold through the medium of language. Attuned to this conflictual interplay within psychic experience, Lacan’s work might therefore help us understand how hate discourse functions to organise desire and manage enjoyment. Let me sketch briefly how.

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Lacan draws a close relation between death and the register of the symbolic. What does this mean? At first glance, we might associate speech exclusively with the symbolic domain – that is, the ‘chains of signifiers’ that constitute language and, in Lacan’s view, structure the unconscious (see Lacan 2006, pp.  237–268). For Lacan, subjects are so deeply immersed in the symbolic systems of language that they cannot help but think and act according to their logics of association and differentiation; we define ourselves by means of signifiers (‘son,’ ‘sister,’ ‘employee’) that discriminate us and align us in various ways to the wider, intersubjective symbolic order – what Lacan refers to as the ‘Other.’ The unconscious is thus ‘the discourse of the Other’ in the sense that we cannot identify ourselves in relation to this order without symbolic registration. Yet the symbolic order is not an all-determining register in Lacan’s work. Rather, it operates in permanent tension with that of the imaginary – the condensed layers of images that for Lacan supply the individual with a primitive sense of itself as a bounded and autonomous ‘ego,’ a perceptual ‘gestalt’ by which it locates and discriminates its desires as its own (Lacan 2006, pp.  75–81). The ego is in this way an object onto whose surface libidinal investments are projected, and which then functions to mark out a durable sense of self that belongs to the subject. That imaginary surface – which ‘captures’ the subject (Lacan 2006, p. 92) – originates in external images (such as those in the mirror), and generates a misleading expectation of bodily and psychic integrity for the infant that, for the rest of its life, informs its sense of being an independent subject in a world of separate and independent objects. Yet the ‘ideal unity’ and perceptual integrity that the imaginary ego anticipates is persistently under threat. Dependent upon external images to reinforce its own autonomy, it is vulnerable to a narcissistic and defensive self-regard that results in aggressive, ‘paranoiac’ rivalry with other egos it tries to master (Lacan 2006, pp. 95–98). It is at this point that the symbolic register – in the form of language and speech – emerges as a force of death. In Lacan’s account, language and speech coordinate but do not function exclusively in the service of the ego, rationalising its demands and defending its autonomy. Rather, language functions as the vehicle for what Freud enigmatically named the ‘death drive’ – the pressure on the psyche to break down unconscious imaginary forms of identity and

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perceptual unity, often to the distress of the individual’s ego. This is what Lacan meant when he claimed that ‘the signifier … materializes the instance of death’ (Lacan 2006, p. 16). Language and speech interrupt and disintegrate closed imaginary unities, breaking down the ego’s resistance to the organic forces it cannot assimilate, and thereby opening up the subject to new desires (see Boothby 1991). How is this achieved? By subjecting the simple binary structures of the imaginary (images of ‘me’ versus ‘not me’) to the ‘play’ of signifiers, which, as Boothby puts it, ‘introduces difference and discontinuity’ into subjectivity (Boothby 1991, p.  135). Language, for Lacan and other structuralists, functions by networks of such signifiers: ‘sound images’ whose phonic and conceptual differences from other sounds and ideas map out a comprehensive, meaningful world. Signifiers invoke meaning not by direct reference to objects but internally, by implicit references to other, absent signifiers. Patterns of linguistic and social signification  – open-ended ‘chains’ of symbolic association, difference, and hierarchy – enable a complex yet robust virtual world of interconnected and infinitely manipulable meanings that obliterate the closed simplicity of imaginary identification. The static fixations of the ego – the composite images that foreground a bounded perception of the self and its bodily integrity – are thus fundamentally weakened by their insertion into the dynamic processes of language, which contextualises the ego’s demands and ‘unbinds’ them from their attachment to a single object (Boothby 1991, p. 136). Language enables subjects to move their desire, shifting it from object to object. Metaphoric and metonymic processes of signification, with their perpetual interplay of absence and presence, constantly displace desire and fragment egoistic images (see Boothby 2001, pp.  124–132). Thus the symbolic, for Lacan, is an agency not of the death of the organism (as Freud had claimed) but, rather, of its illusory assumption of exclusive integrity and autonomy. In Lacan’s work, then, speech and language are not reducible to a closed symbolic system but, rather, open out onto a dynamic and conflictual process. The individual ego is caught up in networks of signification that both endorse and threaten the self, around which the ego organises its desires and frames its aversions and allegiances. Symbolic systems – linguistic or not – articulate subjects in unexpected ways with desires that

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cannot otherwise be assimilated and are often repressed, because individuals are fearful of ‘the disintegration of the imaginary unity that the ego constitutes’ (Lacan 2006, p. 355). For instance, one may enter a profession with a set of idealised images of one’s purpose and function only to find that interactions in the workplace, one’s colleagues, or gradual changes in the very idea of the profession  – for example, its declining association with the idea of ‘public service’ – pressure one eventually to radically alter or dispose altogether of the original image. This pressure on the boundaries of the ego by experiences and desires that are not permitted access to it is what Lacan referred to as ‘the real’  – unsymbolised organic forces that are excessive to one’s identity and that destabilise one’s ego. Sometimes this excess is terrifying, at other times it may be exhilarating. But our ability to accommodate it, to weave our self-images around it, and eventually to incorporate its otherwise disruptive presence, is achieved principally via speech and language. Thus in Lacan’s work, the movement of speech occurs not strictly within the symbolic realm but at the intersection of all three of the registers of subjectivity: the imaginary, symbolic, and real (see Lacan 2013; Boothby 1991, p. 136). What, then, might Lacan’s insights tell us about political speech and rhetoric? There are three things worth noting. First, as I have already suggested, they imply that political speech is not exclusively defensive of closed ego formations, such as social interests or personalities. Certainly, political actors speak from images of collective identity and purpose, conceived as already unified and robust positions. But, as Lacan pointed out, if subjectivity is reduced to a closed gestalt – that is, if actors address each other only from their imaginary identifications  – the result would be paranoia, permanent rivalry, and aggression. Social relations would collapse into ‘a permanent “it’s you or me” form of war’ where discourse forms ‘the retorting aggressiveness of verbal echo’ (Lacan 2006, p. 356). Instead, political debate enables the displacement of hostile confrontation by partially exposing imaginary identities to the shifting surfaces of signifiers. There isn’t just ‘us’ and ‘them’ but a shared relation to the Other: the signifiers of the law, national interest, the common good, justice, mutual respect, and so on, which service symbolic exchange, often in a lively discordance. Actual physical confrontation is reduced in favour of verbal ‘sparring’ – ‘antagonists’ become ‘adversaries’ as Chantal Mouffe

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puts it (Mouffe 2000, pp. 102–103) – when erstwhile enemies come to relate not as self-contained or preconstituted unities but as relatively persuadable rivals by way of the signifiers that mediate their interactions. Political discourse is often controversial and discomforting precisely because speakers are exposed to a deconstruction of their identities, pressuring each other to accede to demands and desires they prefer not to acknowledge. Second, if political rivalry entails the relatively orderly assault on imaginary formations primarily through symbolic manoeuvres, inevitably that highlights the mediation of conflict by rhetoric and rhetorical strategies. To speak, ‘speak out,’ interrogate, question, petition, ridicule, and so on, are all rhetorical ways to engage in symbolic re-contexualisation and re-­ elaboration. Claims by one side to have the common interest ‘at heart,’ for example, are exposed to rigorous questioning and revision by opponents seeking to test and reveal unspoken fixations or commitments folded into one’s preferred self-image. To argue politically is frequently to refigure one’s adversary and its programmes, ideas, and goals in ways that disrupt or even destroy its cherished identifications and foreground one’s own. Of course, such disruptions can in principle go on forever without conclusion, which is why most formalised arenas of debate and disputation are inclined to forms of arbitrary closure that bring verbal conflict to an end (though, of course, they continue unofficially): elections, referendums, timed debates, news cycles, and so on all supply constraining endpoints to delimit rhetorical controversy. Equally, rules of debate, censorship, and the simple refusal to acknowledge or speak with rivals also reduce the potential damage of symbolic conflict. Third, vital to the experience of rhetorical controversy are irruptions of enjoyment, mentioned earlier, as symbolic interactions disrupt rival imaginary identifications. There is, for example, a certain intense satisfaction in revealing one’s adversary as an inconsistent reasoner, a hypocrite, or a delusional dreamer indulging in self-serving sophistry. The opportunity in public debates to repunctuate another’s symbolic chains resembles how Freud explained jokes: speakers extend or reorder the other’s words and arguments in ways that are surprising and unexpected, introducing unintended conclusions that sabotage the imagined integrity of one’s interlocutor (see McGowan 2013, pp. 76–78). Much of the immediate

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thrill of argumentative controversy stems from the excitement of deflating an opponent’s irritating self-regard. However, enjoyment is not limited to the sabotage of the other’s self-­ image. The elaboration of argumentative claims involves articulating symbolic pathways – interlinking signifiers – the effect of which is, moreover, to figure a force ‘beyond’ speech that guarantees the speaker’s or the speech’s authenticity. In this instance, it is less an enjoyment experienced and more an enjoyment sacrificed that gives rhetoric its underlying attraction (see McGowan 2013). Political speakers regularly appeal to events or experiences that invoke something that exceeds simple description through symbols but which, nonetheless, propels their own speech and roots it in the plenitude of bodily desire. Think, for example of Nigel Farage’s repeated call, ‘We want our country back,’ or US President Donald Trump’s ‘Let’s make American great again.’ Beyond the apparent absurdity of these demands (they don’t really reference anything concrete) is a summons that evokes a sacrificed enjoyment – a phantasised fullness that is held back and calls for release. While political discourses often employ imagery to invoke this fullness – for example, the repeated invocation of the ‘Blitz spirit’ in British public culture, with its imagery of brave citizens under attack from the skies – its deeper allure derives from something ineffable, beyond words and images, that nonetheless invests words with an enigmatic appeal. The enjoyment provoked by appeals to loss or sacrifice in speech is a further figuration of the disruption brought by the real to the imaginary register. The symbolisation of loss (by sacrifice, invasion, theft, corruption, and so on) invites new investments of desire in signifiers that enable the subject to refigure its imaginary attachments. For loss, as Lacanian theorist Todd McGowan explains, supplies an all-encompassing c­ orporeal resonance that recalls the sacrifice of imaginary unity experienced as an infant when one enters into the symbolic order: Subjects invest the lost object with the idea of their own completion: the loss of the object retroactively causes a prior state of completion to arise – a state of completion that never actually existed – and the object itself bears the promise of inaugurating a return to this imaginary prior state. (McGowan 2013, p. 31)

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Importantly, the force of loss lies not in any excess enjoyment generated but in the invocation of its sacrifice. Thus, much political discourse is oriented towards gesturing this loss and not actually overcoming it. Narratives of betrayal, self-interest, failed leadership, venality, corruption, immorality, neglect, and so forth, are all directed by political actors at each other, and at the institutions they operate under, as they compete to diagnose societal disharmony. Rhetorical satisfaction, we might say, lies primarily in figuring the loss of enjoyment itself. In summary, I have claimed that political speech functions to sublimate violence, rather than wholly eliminate it. Because, as Lacan suggests, subjectivity is itself a site of intrinsic conflict and controversy  – revealed in tensions between imaginary and symbolic registers – political discourses seek to capture and organise this otherwise unstable clash of desires. This is achieved largely by argumentative contests between adversaries that attack and diminish rival imaginary identities and attachments, as well as advance their own. If such contests operate primarily on a symbolic plane – they are mostly undertaken in speech and language by means of signifiers  – nonetheless they are experienced, at least intermittently, as deeply personal and collective conflicts of an affective kind. Rhetorical contests can thus be said to help shift the potential for imaginary violence onto a more orderly and peaceable – but no less hostile – symbolic stage. As a consequence, the ‘real’ threat to imaginary identity is rhetorically refigured in the form of a loss or sacrifice of enjoyment. It is on this basis, I continue below, that we might understand the operations of hate speech.

Rhetorics of Hate If much formal democratic debate and advocacy is undertaken in a structured and relatively civil manner, nonetheless, I have suggested that, by their very nature, partisan conflicts and political disagreements at times give rise to fairly uncivil conduct (see Herbst 2010). Accusations of hateful behaviour regularly abound in civil and political disputes, often where entrenched and hostile positions are taken that invest heavily in

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imaginary identification and are unable to find symbolic mediation. Hate, then, might be understood to encapsulate – broadly speaking – an appraisal of group and personal dispositions where such mediation is refused or unavailable. In that case, far from being exceptional, the appearance of hateful speech and conduct is an ever-present possibility in diverse and plural societies. Of course, what counts as hate speech – or as sufficiently hateful speech to demand action by authorities – is a matter of interpretation. That is partly why it can be so difficult to regulate in law. We may be able to distinguish direct solicitations to violence with some precision, but it is harder to defend penalising all hateful opinions (see Heinze 2013; Waldron 2012). Malicious comments and disrespectful and unpleasant remarks about the integrity of other peoples’ opinions, bodies, customs, or actions are a routine – if perhaps distasteful – part of cultural and political dispute. Scorn, denigration, slurs, expressions of contempt, and use of hostile and reductive epithets are frequently unwholesome but nevertheless unavoidable accompaniments to civil discourse in as much as, at the very least, they serve to clarify the limits to symbolic exchange and illuminate the limits of common priorities (Conley 2010). While insulting remarks can sometimes escalate into wider conflicts (see Korostelina 2014), what is important to gauge is not merely the presence of particular words or phrases but the relations among subjects that they figure. Clearly, ‘hate’ covers an enormous spectrum of possible formulations in speech, making it unclear precisely where the hate is manifest in such utterances: is it in the use of specific words and ideas to describe others or in the tone and force used to demean them, or perhaps in the ­atmospheres and feelings these leave behind? Hateful things may be said with little intention to hurt, or with an abundance of intention but with little or no effect. Hate is often coupled with other affective states that enhance or obscure it, such as intense feelings of affection or extreme aggression and rage. The degrees of hate’s intensity, duration, and discursive organisation can vary considerably and, undoubtedly, the cultural and political context will make a difference to how it is perceived and experienced (see Boromisza-Habashi 2013). It is therefore worth being attentive to the way that hate unfolds rhetorically in particular situations and in different kinds of argumentative framework.

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What psychoanalytical enquiry alerts us to is the way hate reveals something structural within subjectivity that then plays out as intense hostility towards others: namely, the defensive character of the ego. Hateful remarks and behaviours seek to fend off or expel intolerable feelings that threaten the integrity of the imaginary self. This is not simply an expulsion of displeasurable sensations – according to the logic of Freud’s ‘pleasure principle’ – but, as I have tried to suggest, a deeper existential encounter. According to Lacan the imaginary ego is an intrinsically defensive site of investment, prone to aggressive and rivalrous encounters with the other egos (or the ‘other’ with a small o, to distinguish it from the ‘Other’ or symbolic authority) that appear to threaten its illusory unity. Unlike mere frustration at displeasurable sensations, narcissistic rivalry can take on a more obsessive and paranoid character, singling out an enemy and dwelling upon images of the other’s invasive presence. The rival other is, or has, something the narcissistic ego wants and the contest unravels as a confusing oscillation between desire and repulsion. As Lacan suggested, this ‘narcissistic aggressiveness’ is effectively captured in Melanie Klein’s account of ‘envy,’ whereby the infant attacks its object as a defence against a perceived (or anticipated) incursion into its own integrity (Lacan 2006, pp. 93–95; see also Klein 1997; Klein and Riviere 1964). As I have noted, Lacan’s account of the symbolic register underscores the ability of speech and language to diminish this prospect of openly hostile and violent ego encounters by permitting conflict to unfold by way of the Other – or symbolic systems of mediation (see Boothby 1991, pp. 176–184). Yet Lacan also acknowledged a form of hate that exceeded this symbolic mediation. That form was one of what he called the ‘passions of being’ that also included love and ignorance; modes of existence that subsist as intense commitments (Lacan 1988, p.  277). In Lacan’s reasoning, hate as a passion of being operates, uniquely, at the border of the real and the imaginary – that is, where one’s self-image encounters its roots in the organic forces of the body (Lacan 1992, p. 212). As psychoanalyst Massimo Recalcati explains (2012a, pp. 57–66), this type of hate is no mere rivalry between egos but, rather, a rejection of the symbolic Other as a point of reference to mediate its relations to other egos. Hate of this variety, continues Recalcati, is for the Other as such, conceived as

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a systematic ‘way of life’ to which the subject owes a symbolic debt; and, he claims, it is the distinctive structure of hatreds such as racism (see also Recalcati 2012b). What threatens the imaginary ego in this case, Recalcati elaborates, is the horrifying force of the real – that is, the anxiety-inducing pressure of the subject’s own unknowable and intolerable desire that it has refused in the construction of its identity. Passionate hatred functions as a mechanism to transfigure that threat and project it outward. But in so doing, it aims not to capture the Other (understood as the system of intersubjective coordination and exchange), but to reject it altogether. This is because the Other – the symbolic order itself – is perceived to enjoy at the subject’s expense; the Other enjoys when the subject cannot and so the subject assumes it cannot enjoy because the Other enjoys. This is the logic of radical hatred peculiar to, for example, the ideologue who directs their anger at civilisation as such, conceiving it as the incarnation of an order that systematically exploits and negates the community the ideologue stands for. As Recalcati characterises it: ‘Hate lashes out against the enjoyment of the Other, against the way the Other enjoys exclusively by stealing it from the subject without impunity’ (2012a, p. 63). To be a subject of hatred, in this sense, is to be opposed not merely to the image of a rival but, moreover, to a greedy desire felt to pervade the entire symbolic order. But how might these reflections illuminate our understanding of the rhetorics of hate? In essence, they point us to a difference between rhetoric that emphasises imaginary rivalries – for instance, derogatory and insulting remarks between competing politicians and parties that covet each other’s perceived advantages and often seek the same objects (namely, power and influence) – and rhetoric that rails against abstract ‘enemies’ purported to usurp the very vitality of the group. Each type conjures a distinct relation to the Other and a different way of articulating its modes of desire and enjoyment. Both defend against threats to imaginary identity but where the first is, in principle, open to symbolic mediation, the second refuses it; where the first seeks its own narcissistic enjoyment of the other or its objects, the second regards enjoyment as something sacrificed and now in the possession of the Other. That is not to say these two types cannot coexist or even converge with each other. But they offer distinct poles in the spectrum of hate by which to explore rhetorical strategies.

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If we return to the example of the Labour Party’s antisemitism row, we can see both types of hate at work simultaneously. Like any political party, Labour is a broad coalition of groups and interests that identify with particular images of the party’s purposes and goals. Each faction promotes its own imaginary identifications as convergent with those of the party as a whole. Internal rivalry is therefore a common feature of most organisational cultures, especially Labour’s because the party aims to speak for working people as if it were a moral community in need of a unifying voice. Recent realignments – associated with the election of veteran left-winger Jeremy Corbyn MP as leader – have brought new members to the party and a revival of radical factions and ideas that for some decades had been marginalised (see Klug et  al. 2016). The symbolic structure of the party that once framed it as a broad movement of social reform  – already disrupted in light of its loss of governmental power (since 2010) and the collapse of public confidence in its programme and competence – has been dealt a further blow by its members’ own disenchantment with its general direction. One consequence of Labour’s realignment around a new leader has therefore been a struggle for positions of power and initiative within the party, often against resistance from opposed politicians and other factions. In the wake of these shifts and conflicts have come verbal aggressions and coarse interchanges between groups and individuals vying with each other in order to diminish or defend a particular image of the party’s character and purpose (see Martin 2016; Thompson 2016). Abusive remarks and hateful attitudes – for instance, accusations from the left of established members being the hated ‘Blairites’ or, similarly, ‘red Tories’ – might reasonably be categorised as being of the ‘narcissistic rivalry’ variety. They represent hostilities among groups with competing (and contrasting) ideas of which offers the most authentic image of the party. Charges of antisemitism, however, suggest the presence of the second, more intense type of hate: hate as a ‘passion of being.’ In that instance, hostility is directed not so much at individuals per se but at abstract enemies labelled as ‘Zionists’ or the so-called ‘Israel Lobby,’ which are accused of having a malign, often undisclosed influence on democratic politics and efforts to achieve justice and equality in the international order, particularly the Middle East. These accusations and epithets often form part

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of a wider ideological framework associated with the radical left, which identifies closely with Palestinian causes and deeply mistrusts the policy orientation of western governments towards the region. Connections by western politicians and other advocacy groups to Israel are therefore frequently suspected as evidence of complicity with these policies and in contradiction with the left’s aims of social justice. This ideological framework does not obviously resemble the openly antisemitic positions of the far right. So how can it be said to approximate hate towards Jews? It is clearly not the same kind of Jew-hatred we associate with Nazism, which was obsessed with the imaginary dimensions of the Jews, their physiology and visible features. For many critics, however, left-wing antisemitism is a relatively new phenomenon with a distinctive rhetoric of its own (see Harrison 2006; Fine 2009). The object of hatred is not Jews as such but Israel and its supporters in the international order, which subjects Palestinians to numerous indignities and injustices. Hateful remarks are therefore addressed by way of the US-led ‘imperialist’ system – the Other in this scenario – for which the very existence of Israel and its function as an instrument of a purportedly racially based colonising power embodies an exclusive enjoyment at the expense of Arab communities. In this anti-imperialist discourse, ‘Zionism’ is understood not as Jewish nationalism so much as the greater force of a colonial desire to impose itself on foreign lands, violently robbing and displacing indigenous peoples. This ideology originated in the emergence of the ‘New Left’ in the 1950s and 1960s and eventually became a touchstone for many of the campaigning organisations of the European left, encouraging them to mobilise arguments that equate Zionism variously with South African apartheid, Nazism, and a host of other injustices of a colonial and authoritarian nature (see Rich 2016, pp. 31–69). Persistently drawing equivalence between Israel and these regimes (often by openly identifying Israel’s policies with Nazism and racism) frames the undoubted controversies of Israeli foreign policy as, ultimately, evidence of its similarity to the violence of the Holocaust. Because these narratives do not dwell on the imagery of Jews as such – that is, because they are frequently addressed to a generic imperialism of which Israel is a privileged instrument – and employ ‘Zionist’ as a metaphor for an invasive

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intent, accusations of antisemitism are firmly disavowed. Criticisms of Israel and its US supporters, it is claimed, should not be mistaken for an opposition to Jews but, rather, a critique of racist injustice. Such claims and disavowals reemerged as central threads in controversies in the Labour Party after 2015: in numerous passing insults and remarks on social media labelling Jews as ‘Zio’ or associating Israel with American foreign policy (see, for example, Chambre 2016), and explicitly calling for the eradication of Israel from the Middle East; in claims by a prominent Labour activist that Jews ‘were the chief financiers of the sugar and slave trade’ (quoted in Rich 2016, p. 243); in former London Mayor Ken Livingstone’s persistent assertion, defended as ‘historical fact,’ that Hitler and Zionists ‘collaborated’ with each other in the 1930s (Elgot 2017); and in other fabricated tales, such as linking Israel to ISIS and Islamist terror crimes (Rich 2016, pp. 248–249). Although the accumulation of these insults and assertions resulted in a number of suspensions from the party and various inquiries, nonetheless some on the left perceived such censure as politically motivated in order to undermine Corbyn’s leadership of Labour (see, for example, Davies and Lukes 2016). Yet, as critics have argued exhaustively, this disavowal of left antisemitism is hard to accept given the likelihood that Jews (Zionist or not) are those who most identify with Israel. Moreover, the treatment of Israel and Zionism as substitute signifiers for imperial/racist domination refuses Israel’s full legitimacy as a nation–state, thereby disparaging the very idea of a historic Jewish homeland and neglecting the (traumatic) historical reasons that brought that state into existence. The Israeli imaginary – images of Israel as an integral site of ethnic identification – is therefore dismissed and, for some, its eradication is seen as desirable. As Dave Rich (2016) points out, New Left antiracism assumed that skin colour was the primary factor in racist discourse; by consequence ‘Jews and antisemitism have been gradually squeezed out of popular understandings of what racism is’ (p.  205). Conceived as a uniquely racist colonial settlement, Israel receives a disproportionate amount of approbation for its policies in relation to Palestinians; it is the primary focus for ‘boycott and disinvestment’ campaigns that are rarely directed at other states, which commit more extensive human rights abuses; and obsessions with similarities and links to Nazism ‘remove the moral basis

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of Israel by suggesting that whatever status and privileges Jews as victims had as victims has been lost’ (Rich 2016, p.  221). The Israeli state is thereby singled out as a very particular kind of demon: one whose crimes are so malevolent they deserve maximum attention and targeted initiatives (see Hirsh 2016). Moreover, the tendency on the left to uncritically reproduce well-known conspiracy theories about secret but extensive ‘Zionist influence’ in western politics and the media, with furtive coalitions of powers organised by the Israel lobby, or the financial interests of the Rothschild’s and so on are all familiar antisemitic tropes that fill out the phantasy of a malignly constructed world order that must be opposed without further reflection. Thus the ideological frame within which all these arguments and labels are set borrows its structure from antisemitic discourse, even if Jew-­hatred is not the explicit or intended motivation of its advocates. Of course, antisemitism is a familiar formation for rhetorics of hate. As Stephen Frosh argues, this is not merely because it is a convenient form of scapegoating but, rather, the ‘Jew is a principle of otherness for the West,’ a potent, culturally institutionalised figure of excess that functions as a metaphor for all otherness (Frosh 2005, pp.  215–216). It is therefore conceivable that arguments can be rooted in antisemitic rhetorical formulations without being consciously or aggressively directed at Jews (though, in fact, individual Jews are regularly singled out as especially accountable for events in Israel). Whilst this structure of hate supplies a powerful motivation for a politics of opposition, its rejection of the symbolic Other as such (the US-led imperialist order) makes it distinctly resistant to conciliation and fundamentally isolates Jews for whom Israel is a source of imaginary identification. Indeed, a serious difficulty with this rhetoric is that it cannot acknowledge itself as hate and therefore engage effectively in dialogue with Jews and supporters of Israel. A whole variety of ‘factual’ arguments are frequently drawn upon in its defence so as to demonstrate its basis in simple reason rather than unconscious sentiment. To admit that it is desire, not knowledge, that is the source of its rhetorical stance would be to compromise the left’s self-image. In part this reflects the rationalistic orientation of the western left, which tends to see its arguments as founded primarily on the evidence of empirical experience, not radical intolerance. But it is

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also a consequence of the powerful collective narcissism that the left exhibits when it identifies itself as what David Hirsh (2015) calls the ‘community of the good.’ Here the imaginary source of one’s arguments is conceived as a place of privileged moral authority, unsullied by filthy compromise or complicity with power. However rousing this idealisation of the collective moral self may be, it renders severely limited the possibility for symbolic exchange with those outside it. Indeed, for Hirsh, the contemporary left’s new ‘identity politics’ – its obsession with who groups are and not what they say – increasingly involves what he calls a ‘politics of position’: the policing of the boundary of political discourse and the blank refusal of dialogue with those positioned outside. ‘That’s why, although there are good reasons to worry about antisemitism on the contemporary left, those reasons are not heard. They are silenced by the shared assumption that anyone wanting to give such reasons is really speaking in bad faith in order to collude with the oppression of the Palestinians’ (Hirsh 2015). Such defensiveness tallies with what Recalcati sees as the puritan fantasy – common to this kind of passionate hate – of making a breach with the prevailing order, refusing its dependence upon the Other, and anticipating its wholesale refoundation (Recalcati 2012a, pp. 60–61). But is it possible to speak hatefully without this infuriating and unproductive deadlock? Can rhetorics of hate be anything other than politically destructive? There is no room here for a lengthy investigation but from what has been said already a number of initial points may be highlighted. First, it helps to acknowledge hate as a way of desiring – organising the subject’s relation to the Other and to the lure of enjoyment. If we think of hate as premised upon knowledge, we neglect the ways it shapes us and the ways we speak as desiring subjects. To make hate productive, it is necessary to at least accept that subjects are themselves produced through it. Second, hate needs to find a way to restore the place of the Other, not demonise it. Without symbolic mediation, hate descends into the isolating, paranoid fury and precarious imbalance of antagonism. Identifying a source of conciliation, if only a virtual one, is a necessary bridge beyond narcissistic self-defence. Interestingly, religious rhetorical style can supply an example here: the American tradition of the jeremiad, for example,

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where society’s spiritual and moral failings in the present are lamented and a prophetic call for renewal is offered up (see Murphy 2009). This is a common device of Christian fundamentalism in the US but also of civil and political reformists such as Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. Here hatred directed at the damaging enjoyment of the prodigal Other (modern society and its fashionable pastimes, for instance) is uniquely twinned with hope and the prospect of eventual redemption. Of course, this tradition is rooted in a cultural confidence in the original virtues of the founding fathers and their divine guarantee. Whatever its undoubted shortcomings, however, this example indicates that not all rhetorics of hate need condemn us to mutual isolation and hostility.

Conclusion I have argued that hate should not be viewed as alien to political discourse but, rather, an integral and unavoidable dimension of it. A politics without any hate is probably not much of a politics at all. We speak to each other not merely to exchange information and opinion but to expose our imaginary identifications and our conceptions of the Good to symbolic mediation. Public speech is thus a combative and bruising experience at the best of times. Yet it holds out the prospect of limiting direct aggression and violence in favour of the ‘war of words.’ But beyond narcissistic rivalry (which itself can be deeply damaging if left unchecked) hate has the potential to dislodge us entirely from any mediating exchange. I have noted the example of recent debates over antisemitism in the Labour Party to highlight how this kind of hate (hate as a ‘passion of being’) is manifest as a point of destructive rhetorical deadlock. By definition, rhetorics of hate project intolerance onto the deeds and ideas of others, disguising the satisfactions such attitudes offer to the haters’ psychic organisation of desire. Antisemitism provides perhaps the template for a type of thinking and speaking about the invasive Other and its exclusive enjoyment at our expense. But I have also suggested that hate can be a productive source for political dialogue in so far as it enables us to define the stakes and limits of public argument. Taking ownership for

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what and how we hate – rather than abandoning ourselves to an isolating, narcissistic purity – means acknowledging hate as a means to desire and not as a vehicle of incontestable knowledge; and hence as a responsibility to find new forms of dialogue and conciliation. That is to say, we cannot eliminate hate but we might find better ways to let our hate speak.

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Lacan, J. (2006). Écrits: The first complete edition in English. (B. Fink, Trans.). London: Norton. Lacan, J. (2013). On the names-of-the-father. (B. Fink, Trans.). Cambridge: Polity. Lear, J.  (1998). Love and its place in nature: A philosophical interpretation of Freudian psychoanalysis. London: Yale University Press. Lundberg, C. (2012). Lacan in public: Psychoanalysis and the science of rhetoric. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press. Martin, J.  (2014). Politics and rhetoric: A critical introduction. London: Routledge. Martin, J. (2016a). Capturing desire: Rhetorical strategies and the affectivity of discourse. The British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 18(1), 143–160. Martin, J. (2016b, June 16). Arguing to excess: The rhetoric of the EU referendum. Disclaimer. Retrieved from http://www.disclaimermag.com/politics/ arguing-to-excess-the-rhetoric-of-the-eu-referendum-3631 Martin, P. (2016, July 20). Labour Party members clash over dealing with “vile abuse.” BBC News. Retrieved from http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-walespolitics-36850783 McGowan, T. (2013). Enjoying what we don’t have: The political project of psychoanalysis. London: University of Nebraska Press. Mouffe, C. (2000). The democratic paradox. London: Verso. Murphy, A.  R. (2009). Prodigal nation: Moral decline and divine punishment from New England to 9/11. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Norwood, S.  H. (2013). Antisemitism and the American far left. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Recalcati, M. (2012a). Jacques Lacan: Desiderio, godimento e soggettivazione. Milan: Raffaello Cortina. Recalcati, M. (2012b). Hate as a passion of being. Qui Parle, 2(20), 151–182. Rich, D. (2016). The left’s Jewish problem: Jeremy Corbyn, Israel and anti-­Semitism. London: Biteback. Saint-Amand, P. (1996). The laws of hostility: Politics, violence, and the Enlightenment. (J.  Curtiss Gage, Trans.) London: University of Minnesota Press. Thompson, P. (2016, August 24). Corbynism isn’t a social movement and Labour shouldn’t be one. Renewal [Blog post]. Retrieved from www.renewal.org.uk/ blog/corbynism-isnt-a-social-movement-and-labour-shouldnt-be-one Waldron, J. (2012). The harm in hate speech. London: Harvard University Press. Waltman, M., & Haas, J. (2011). The communication of hate. Oxford: Peter Lang. Zupančič, A. (2008). Why psychoanalysis? Three interventions. Aarhus: NSU Press.

Fundamentalism and the Delusional Creation of an Enemy Karl Figlio

Abstract  Fundamentalism is typically characterised by an absolute stance, based on a simplification and homogenisation of beliefs, a strident rejection of evidence that does not support these beliefs, a literalism in the understanding of texts taken to be sacred (whether religious or not) and the branding of others as enemies if they do not adhere to the same beliefs. One major consequence of this absolutist mentality is the rapid move to action, which can be physical or verbal and otherwise demonstrative. In any event, actions assault others who oppose the fundamentalist. These opponents are to be punished and forced to confirm to the absolutism of the fundamentalists, who press any wavering in their own positions into the (now) enemy by projective identification. This chapter takes up an additional, elemental current beneath these features of fundamentalism. It argues that a distortion of reality sets the scene for the creation of an enemy against which action is taken with a kind of logical necessity; indeed, the action is part of this creation. This tight, ‘rational’ connection between belief and action makes it difficult to K. Figlio (*) Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Essex, Colchester, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2018 S. Krüger et al. (eds.), Fomenting Political Violence, Studies in the Psychosocial, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97505-4_8

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understand fundamentalist motivation, to enter into dialogue with it and to achieve any reconciliation. It is appropriate to call it delusional. Drawing this common theme from two very different cases – an attack on the home of a paediatrician and Nazi-informed antisemitism – supports this thesis.

Hypothesis and Argument In an incident that was widely reported in the British press, vigilantes attacked the home of a local paediatrician in 2000. The word ‘paedo’ was daubed on the windows of her cottage. Their ire was kindled, apparently, by their belief that they were punishing not a paediatrician but a paedophile, in an eruption of righteous fury against her sinful behaviour. Ten years later, the original reporter for the BBC concluded that the media had created ‘one of the most hotly discussed, frequently visited, distorted and mythologised crimes of modern times’ out of the ‘daft antics’ of, according to the police, probably at most a handful of ‘teenage scallies’ (Press Gazette 2012). In my view, this incident brings out a core feature of fundamentalism. Psychoanalytic writers emphasise an absolute stance, requiring a simplification and homogenisation of beliefs, a rejection of evidence that does not support these beliefs, a literalism in the understanding of texts taken to be sacred (whether religious or not, as in the National Rifle Association’s position on the Second Amendment to the US Constitution) and the branding of others as enemies if they do not adhere to the same beliefs. In my view, the ‘paedo’ incident went further: the word itself reduced the level of thinking and belief to a vanishing point. There was an eruption of violence based on a piece of a word. Devoid of meaning, it kindled an explosion, followed by a wave of indignation against it. The counter-vigilantes called the vigilantes ignorant, ‘morally bereft, and easily swayed by paedophile-baiting tabloids’ in not knowing the meaning of paediatrician. The BBC reporter thought the ­counter-vigilantes were inflating an adolescent prank into moral outrage and that it was ‘time we put the paedo-paediatrician morality tale to bed.’ I think that this appeal to common sense is at the wrong level. Whoever the vigilantes were, what they did was to scrawl ‘paedo’ on the paediatrician’s windows. ‘Paedo’ was a meaningless utterance, not even a word, itself a violent attack, intensified by further violent acts. For them, the paediatrician

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was, in that violent act, neither a paedophile nor a paediatrician, but the meaningless particle, ‘paedo.’ It is not ignorant. It does not represent or symbolise anything: it is simply an inarticulate expletive. And the moral outrage of the counter-vigilantes missed the point for the same reason: calling the vigilantes stupid, they colluded with the vigilantes in concealing a psychotic eruption inside a language of apparent meaning. I argue that the vigilantes were fundamentalists, in lapsing into psychotic action against a delusionally created object. The unconscious mechanism, in psychoanalytic thinking, was projective identification. The aim was to deposit this delusional object inside a perceived object: a house with its owner. The particle, ‘paedo,’ with its few connections with English etymology, lends itself to projecting this degeneration of meaning, and of psychic and social coherence, into an object.1 The perceived object then carries the delusional ‘paedo’ object. The psychotic mode of functioning is subsumed within the apparently purposive act in external reality, in which the perceived action towards the perceived object seems to convey an intended warning: the ‘normal’ community will not accept someone parading as a professional, who threatens their children. The counter-vigilantes were drawn into a matching mode in the stridency of their repudiation, which aimed, on behalf of the community, to force this delusional object back into the vigilantes. The incident, including the reaction, then got stuck, leaving, as the reasonable way forward, what the reporter recommended: just forget it. At the psychotic level of functioning, the meaningless and shrill ‘paedo’ has horrendous kin. I will argue that ‘Jew’ in Nazi-evoked antisemitism is equivalent to ‘paedo.’ Neither represents a person or a people, their nature, beliefs, culture, nor the attitudes of their attackers, were they to try to articulate them. They are violent attacks. But attacks on what? I think this form of fundamentalist attack explodes thinking itself and reveals a catastrophe. The catastrophe, with its scattered fragments of what was coherent psychic and social life, is a destructive defence against a primitive, internal unease. It is an action taken against the unease, but as a defence, it only adds to the dread that already existed, which I am calling a ‘primal unease,’ a concept I will explain in the course of the paper. This unease and the catastrophic defence are akin to Winnicott’s (1974) view that disintegration of (by) the ego is a defence against the unintegration of the not-yet ego. Both are disturbing, but disintegration, as an action of the ego, aims to capture and limit the dread of there being no ego.

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The Delusionally Created Object To make this case, we need to look more closely at psychotic functioning, which can occur as an episode in otherwise ordinary or neurotic people. Freud (1924) distinguished psychosis from neurosis on the basis of the resolution of a conflict between the id and reality. In neurosis, the ego suppressed the id in favour of reality, in psychosis, the ego lost a piece of reality in favour of the id. The mechanism of psychosis, for Freud (1915), was characterised by the loss of an attachment of things to words, which brought them into the networks of association, memory, and thinking. Freud described a patient for whom every pore in his skin was a cavity from which, in the case of his blackheads, something spurted out, like an ejaculation. But even that confused representation lost ground to just an action. As far as the thing goes, there is only a very slight similarity between squeezing out a blackhead and an emission from the penis, and still less similarity between the innumerable shallow pores of the skin and the vagina; but in the former case there is, in both instances, a ‘spurting out.’… What has dictated the substitution is not the resemblance between the things denoted but the sameness of the words used to express them. (Freud 1915, pp. 200–201)

Words themselves, as things, took over from their use as representatives of perceptions or of thoughts that would normally form part of mental processing. ‘Spurting out’ is just an unembedded action-phrase equated to a word particle. ‘Paedo’ and ‘Jew’ (‘Jude’) are such word particles: action fragments without a context of meaning, including an agent and an object in the real world. Projective identification, an action taken to eliminate a sense of internal catastrophe, extirpated ‘paedo’ from the subject’s psyche by equating it to the object’s psyche – not as an observable reality, but psychic reality – eliminating the object as an other, reducing it to a state of mind as terror, dread, or fear. Let us look more closely at the inclusion and normalisation of psychotic functioning inside more organised, neurotic, or normal functioning. Bion (1958) argued that Oedipus’ crime was not sexual transgression – the nucleus of the Oedipus complex, which, unresolved, leads to neurosis  – but

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arrogance. In patients, he observed that scattered references to arrogance, along with stupidity and curiosity, were evidence of a psychic catastrophe and a sure sign of psychosis. What Bion unearthed was the more primitive layer of psychic functioning beneath the organised level of oedipal dynamics. Oedipal dynamics could be reported as a coherent narrative, but they covered a psychosis beneath the neurosis. He implied that, if arrogance, stupidity, and curiosity could be brought together, they would create the normal psychic functioning of thinking and narrative, albeit conflicted. Arrogance would become determination to find the truth; stupidity would become an unprejudiced openness to discovery; both would serve curiosity and be enhanced by it. But rend them apart and one is left with a desolate psychic landscape with fragments of its previous integrity and harmony strewn about, and with arrogance on its own as a delusion of an intact psyche. In this formulation, psychotic functioning is carried inside the defences of neurotic and borderline defences, such as disavowal. Oedipus ‘knew’ his wife was his mother but did not know it. He did kill his father, but he didn’t: it was a sudden eruption of rage against an obstacle. Added to his not-knowing, he did not seem curious in his inquest into the rumour that a crime had been committed: rather, he was certain – without doubt – that he would find the truth at any cost. Curiosity torn away from a wish to find the truth became arrogant and stupid. Arrogance, stupidity, and curiosity lay about the psychic landscape in scattered fragments; here was psychosis inside the apparently coherent intention to find the truth. Oedipus grounded his delusion in the normality of a j­udicial process – he would call witnesses and find the criminal – but the very process that hid the psychosis, in which he had been living in incest as a parricide, then exposed it. Following this line of thinking, I argue that ‘paedo,’ for the vigilantes, and as I will show later, ‘Jew’ (‘Jude’) for Nazi-inspired antisemitism, were psychotic eruptions. They were driven by the delusion that they would find the truth and punish the criminal whose presence in society corrupted it and made it sick. ‘Ordinary’ hatred and aggression are anchored in reality; their attack confirms the existence of an object, even to a certain extent in neurotic conflict, which can cover psychotic disorganisation. But in the case of the ‘paedo’ and the ‘Jew,’ delusions lost contact with reality and exploded as disconnected actions and became evidence of a psychic catastrophe.2

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I associate this catastrophe with a ‘primal unease.’ Although there are many references to ‘catastrophe’ in the psychoanalytic literature suggesting similar ideas to what I am proposing, such a state remains unnamed. (I have surveyed these usages in Figlio 2017a, pp.  101–118; Freud’s (1930) Civilization and its Discontents, for example, is better translated as The Unease in Culture). For my purposes in this paper, primal unease has three expressions. 1. Oedipus’ arrogance, first enacted in murdering his father, was evidence of a catastrophe and of protection from the psychotic level of oedipal dread: the dread of collapsing into the mother in an omnipotent drive to self-creation.3 2. ‘Paedo’ was an eruption of violence against ambivalence towards children, the psychotic level of which is self-extinction.4 3. ‘Jew,’ in the Nazi fomented extremity of antisemitism, is a version of ‘paedo,’ in this case an eruption of annihilating violence against the dread of internal dissolution. In each case, the ‘normal’ level of narrative, meaning, and purpose, which remains in neurotic conflict, carries inside a psychotic core in which a delusional assault on an ‘unease’ occurs, leaving as evidence a catastrophe: Oedipus’ arrogant inquest; the mindless attack on the ‘paedo,’ equated with the salvation of non-ambivalent love of children; the rampant attack on the ‘Jew,’ equated with the salvation of Aryan Germany. The delusional assault seems to have agency and purpose: ‘If we carry out this plan, we will have achieved justice and protected society from criminal activity.’ But this normal level of thinking includes an assault by projective identification, in which an (enemy) object has been created in order to bear (really to be) the dread that I have called ‘primal unease.’

Delusional Enemies5 My hypothesis, therefore, is that the incident of vigilantism and the outraged reaction to it was a psychotic eruption. It did not represent anything; no narrative of it, such as the press reports, captured this dimension. A psy-

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chotic fuse was touched, leading to an immediate explosion in place of the thinking that would ordinarily occur, or in place of the defences that would ordinarily remove its troublesome meaning from consciousness. Instead there was a delusional creation of an enemy, in which the catastrophic moment signalled both the primal unease and the defence against it. I want to turn in more detail to this creation of a delusional enemy, in the particularly horrendous historical case of the Holocaust. My analysis starts with the belief that we hate difference. Above, the object that was different from the vigilantes was the paedo; in the historical case below it was the ‘Jew’ who was different from the Nazi, and who, on that account, was to be exterminated. I reject this belief and show that the hated difference is a delusion provoked by an incapacity to bear the dread of an internal catastrophe of dissolution. In what Freud called the ‘narcissism of small differences,’ the elimination of this catastrophe is identical to a righteous attack on a delusionally created object; that is, an object perceived to be different. ‘Paedo’ is such an object; so is ‘Jew’ in Nazi minded antisemitism, to which we now turn.6 In his book on Nazi antisemitism, the historian Philippe Burrin (2005) makes the point that the Nazis progressively, then violently, excluded the Jews – from German citizenship, the German nation, German culture, and the German people – ultimately aiming to extinguish them as a people. The driver of this final total exclusion was the difference between Jews and Germans. Difference was increasingly exploited, and used to incite an anxiousness among the German people of a difference that could spread and contaminate them with its foreign qualities. But what goes unexamined is the origin of this difference. For Burrin, the Nazis exploited Jewish characteristics, casting them as the opposite of German characteristics, in order to intensify and idealise the latter. The contrivance of these manoeuvres seems obvious in the absurd measures taken against the Jews, some local, some national: Jews could not be employed in public administration, be jockeys, use Jewish names in telegrams or display Christian symbols at Christmas (see extensive list in Confino 2014, pp.  51, 101–108). The contrivance was built on putatively observable, demonstrable features of Jewishness, no matter how exaggerated, caricatured, and misused. One could recognise a Jew, then treat him or her appallingly.

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This line of thinking lacks an unconscious dimension. While we consciously revile and exclude others who are different, unconsciously we crave and dread sameness. Delusional differences are created and projected into the other that was created, there to be exterminated. The delusional differences are attached to perceived differences, to mask the delusional projection and the source of hatred in sameness. It is a quest for stability, but one that remains insecure. In the Unconscious, the ‘Jew’ was delusionally created to function as a repository of a German dread of sameness, in which the ‘Jew’ was identical to other Germans. In Freud’s (1921) theory of the group, a homogenous people is built on a collective ego under the aegis of a collective ego ideal. So the identicality of the ‘Jew’ as a collective delusion implied that the Jews were also an ego ideal. In that case, the German homogeneous group – also an ideal group with its collective ego ideal  – would be depleted by the identical, homogeneous – ideal – Jewish people. There cannot be two ideals in the same psychic space. The ‘Jew’ had to be expunged: its identity humiliated and erased, its inclusion in the history of the Germans eliminated. The ideal Germany was to be restored by removing the ideal of the Jew (Arlow 1992; Confino 2014, p. 80). In its detachment from reality, the relationship of German to Jew was psychotic. The psychosis included a confusion of (internal) phantasy and (external) reality, with a loss of secure empirical footing for individual and social mentalities; a dread of a menace from inside and everywhere, erupting from the ubiquitous ‘Jew’; a paranoid need of an external object as an empirical reality in which the German subject could defend itself, as if against an external threat. German rebirth meant in the Unconscious the repossession of a lost ego ideal, which was equated – concretely – to the extinction of the ‘Jews.’ The fear of difference in the Jew as a foreign body covered a dread of an indwelling alien presence, ultimately a primal unease, which tarnished the idea of the people as a unity – complete, homogeneous, and perfect in itself. For Ernst Rudolf Huber, the leading legislative and political theorist of National Socialism, writing in 1937, ‘The political Volk … is determined as a historical phenomenon by the principles of unity and totality. Only as unity and totality is the people a

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political actuality [an inner unity of the community unbroken by freedom and self-rule of the individual].’ … The principles of unity and totality presuppose … that inside the ‘unity of the people’ only ‘organic limbs’ can exist, not however ‘enemy groups and classes.’ … The political behaviour of the people is nothing other than the expression of the inherent striving ‘for self-formation and self-presentation, for the deepening and renewal of its type.’ (as quoted in Longerich 2006, p. 46)

The Nazi regime fed on, and developed, this idea of a Volksgemeinschaft, a homogeneous community, which transcended the differences of ordinary reality (Bajohr and Wildt 2009), and sought to create a public space that incorporated all opinion while suppressing all individual expression or debate (Longerich 2006, pp.  23–54). The unity and totality of the people meant absolute submissiveness to the leadership in a homogeneous, collective culture with a collective mind; and this fundamental character applied to the ‘Jewish Question’ (p. 47). The Volksgemeinschaft was a fantasy, a version of what Confino called an ‘imagination of a world without Jews.’7 In his detailed analysis of the German public, Peter Longerich (2006) speaks of the decisive intention of the Nazis to transcend ‘fine distinctions’ of habitus by a Volksgemeinschaft. The ‘reports’ of observations on the German population, generated by the regime, ‘confirmed’ existence of antisemitic stereotypes in the thinking of the regime (p.  47). These ‘fine distinctions’ suggest Freud’s ‘narcissism of small differences,’ in which neighbours harboured the most persistent grievances against each other. ‘Precisely communities with adjoining territories and related to each other in other ways as well … are engaged in constant feuds and in ridiculing each other’ (Freud 1930, p. 114). Freud went on to say that the Jewish people, scattered everywhere, have rendered the most useful services to the civilisations of the countries that have been their hosts; but unfortunately, all the massacres of the Jews in the Middle Ages did not suffice to make that period more peaceful and secure for their Christian fellows. When once the Apostle Paul had posited universal love between men as the foundation of his Christian community, extreme intolerance on the part of Christendom towards those who remained outside it became the inevitable consequence. (p. 114)

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The clear implication was that ‘Jews’ provided the ‘neighbour’ that the host community could vilify, exclude and annihilate, on behalf of its own coherence; and they provided it for any community. Without such a contribution, new neighbours would erupt from imminent rifts inside the host community. Narcissism intensifies as the overt differences between people decrease, producing the narcissism of small differences. At the heart of it lies an unease that must be projected. It is not that objects – ethnic identities – preexist, but that they are created in the process of projection. These delusions are the differences that spark violence, fostered by projection: that is implicit in the psychoanalytic concept of the group as an ego ideal for its members, whose demands are most immediately satisfied by violence against the nonideal, demeaned other (Anzieu 1975; Chasseguet-Smirgel 1985, pp. 76–93). As universal and eternal neighbours, Jews might be different from their hosts, but as Freud says, ‘often in an indefinable way’ (1939, p. 91). I think it is reasonable to extrapolate ‘indefinable’: Freud implies that the antipathy of the narcissism of small differences does not arise as a consequence of difference, but in the creation of difference. It seems that to be left with oneself, whether as an individual or as a group, is hateful; to be left with an other very like oneself is nearly as hateful, but it offers a target for a ballistic, projective attack as a way out. To create such an other most effectively eliminates inner hatred, because it can be done anytime, anywhere, as an omnipotent phantasy. To retreat into an enclave in which, externally, one appears to act rationally, while maintaining, internally, a delusional world, creates an imaginary, insecurely stable structure. The problem is not one of managing difference, but of managing an endogenous unease in human society through creating repositories for delusional hatred.

The Instability of the Narcissistic Ego We turn now to this unstable narcissistic ego. For Freud, the primal ego is without an object and the first object is itself. From this standpoint, narcissism is an achievement in which the ego comes into being for itself and in itself (Freud 1914).8 But it comes into being in a primal narcissistic state of tension between being an object for itself and being replaced

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by an external object. There is, therefore, a rift in the psyche from the moment one can speak of there being a psyche. In relating to an object, the ego suffers the violation of its narcissism by the external world. The virulent hatred that erupts from narcissism would be quenched only by the extermination of the object that unsettles this narcissism, and even that could not wholly satisfy, because the needed object, into which imperfection had been projected, would then have vanished. In other words, narcissism lives in a world of phantasy, in which contact with reality can only contaminate, but which nonetheless remains necessary. It is the world I called ‘primal unease.’ Thus, there is conflict in narcissism. Difference reassures because it fixes what, without difference, would be a deeper foreboding of depletion – even to extinction. In the world of narcissism, objects are replicas that steal the essence of the self. I present three clinical observations to demonstrate this conflict between ego and object, creating an instability in the narcissistic ego. A patient reported a dream, in which he was watching a little boy playing in a fenced children’s playground in a park. As he watched the child play, he realised that the child was himself as a child. Since he was both the child and the man who was watching, there could be only one penis [one, concentrated, narcissistic self ]. To whom did it belong? Father and son were reduced to the single penis that joined them: a narcissistic emblem that was the marker of both their sameness and their difference.

In this one-penis phantasy, father and son are separated by the difference between the generations, but the difference is eroded because they share the organ on which castration anxiety focuses (also see Isaacs 1940, p. 286, for a case with brothers). To the narcissistic ego, the object is a replica of itself, and, to the extent that the object continues to exist in its own right, it can only signify extinction of the ego. The analysis of siblings and doubles leads in the same direction. The second vignette portrays self-creation reinforced by the drive to extinguish the usurping object. Volker is the son of fanatical NS intellectuals, father having the rank of SS-Sturmbannführer. Volker attended an officer-training boarding school

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for sons of higher party members. Upon release at age 15, as the front collapsed, he volunteered for a machine gun unit to defend Berlin against the Red Army. He later found work in West Germany, and eventually found himself in a circle of anti-Nazis, where he began a new life without any conscious connection to his past. In analysis, in a dream-like state, he reported seeing a severely injured man left to die. Another man comes, shoots him repeatedly, but then returns and hefts the dead man onto his shoulder and walks towards the horizon, the two now bound together. Volker recognizes both men as himself. (drawn from Jokl 1997, pp. 25–48; see pp. 33–34) In a later scenario, he has become an evil, roaming animal, part of a murderous forest; then, later [there is] a monstrous animal in a round, dark hole, with light at the end. The animal is totally isolated … life is outside. Several times he creeps to the exit and catches a woman to stroke him. Then he kills her. Her anxiety is his satisfaction. That brings him alive, but he must kill her again and again; otherwise she would seem to be a mirror in which he saw himself. (pp. 40–41; author’s translation)

Here is the Nazi mind trying to get free of an internal catastrophe of narcissistic collapse by creating an other in which to carry it away and in which to extinguish it by murder. Usurpation by a narcissistic other is clear in the third vignette. A patient spoke about someone he knows who is in prison – and who suffers from an unusual bone disease. The man … appears to have two skeletons – or, rather, one full skeleton and another adjacent one that seems to shadow the first skeleton and to exist only in bits. The fragments of the second incomplete skeleton keep growing. … He believes that … at the time he was conceived … an inseminated ovum in part began to split; a pair of twins should have been formed; but the process was somehow arrested. The other twin never reached life, but its residue, the growing bits of bone, continue to exist as a disabling physical reproach within the twin who lives – or partially lives. … He now finds himself in a prison, both actual and symbolic. (Rhode 1994, p. 42)

This image captures well his patient’s view of himself. There is a ‘foetal consciousness that is vulnerable to binary division’ (p. 37) at birth, in the separation of the baby from a mother who, in the separated infant’s imag-

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ination, will replace it with another. The full skeleton as a scaffold for a full self is threatened by an undeveloped skeleton, as a scaffold-self that was expelled by the full self. It was a violent process, provoked by an absolute intolerance of the encroaching other: a psychotic world, in an ominous cloud of either ‘bad objects,’ or ‘bizarre objects’ (Bion 1957). In these primal narcissistic states, the subject is always threatened by the very existence of an object, because that object is its replica – the self, itself stolen by, and displaced into, the other. Such a state is psychotic, in that the object world as normal, perceived reality vanishes. In classical psychoanalytic terms, it would be a loss of ego and a merger of ego and ego ideal, with a collapse of the differences of gender and generations, as in the one-penis phantasy. The ego ideal is not attached to reality: it is a narcissistic agency, a preserve of primary narcissism. An identification of the ego with the ego ideal would be manic, an illusory world of omnipotence (Chasseguet-Smirgel 1985).

Narcissism and Hatred If the nuclear core is narcissism with its associated hatred, then the difference between subject and object, which we usually associate with hatred, would in fact conceal the narcissistic urge to assimilate the object, and the dread of sameness and dissolution that follows. That dread would be fastened to an external object by projective identification. Difference has to be established from such a primal undifferentiation of ego and object. José Bleger (2013) defines an ‘agglutinated nucleus’ as a condensed ego structure composed of such undifferentiated elements. Projection of the agglutinated nucleus replaces the dread of internal occupation by psychotic forces with persecution by an external enemy, and a semblance of normality can be maintained by stabilising this irrational ‘organisation’ in a social structure that harmonises with external situations. It achieves a degree of conscious, rational status, but remains unstable and needing reinforcement through recreating difference, followed by denigration and attack. This more elemental state is approached in the narcissism of small differences. Here, internal discord cannot find a ready repository for

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projection, because the approaching identicality of ego and object undermines the object as a repository. Freud (1930) points to such an indefinable, uneasy, internal state in his Civilization and its Discontents and I have suggested that his characterisation of the Jews, as ‘often in an indefinable way different’ (1939, p. 91) points to the same state. Although I am concerned with the place of the Jews in Nazi phantasy, enquiry into ethnic violence more broadly supports this case in which differences are ‘all-but-invisible’ (Jacoby 2011, p. 55, 56). In Nazi imagination, the protean ‘Jew’ spread everywhere. The ever-­ present ‘Jew’ became the conscious target of resentment at Jewish internationalism, international finance, statelessness, Bolshevism, conspiracy, and fundamental antagonism to German existence. In the unconscious, however, it would be more accurate to speak of an inner dread of primal catastrophe, projected into the Jews as a people. One can glimpse the confusion of this internal reality with a conscious legitimation of virulent hatred of the Jew in Nazi preoccupation with the near impossibility of discerning the Jew in an indigenous population (see Krüger 2011, pp. 246–248). The Jew was an uncannily subtle mimic, who could take the shape even of the leaders of a country. American politics, for example, was riddled with this Jewish shadow, a ‘fact’ confirmed by photographic evidence. One Nazi propagandist (Diebow 1941) purported to demonstrate this insinuation into American politics with photographs of New York Governor Herbert H. Lehman, who could look like any other American, but his Jewishness surfaced with sufficient photographic evidence. Similarly, President Franklin D. Roosevelt surrounded himself with a personal advisory committee, the Brain Trust, composed of Jews. The ‘Jew’ could be absorbed without anyone knowing it was happening, insidiously becoming German. This crypto-assimilation was experienced as a treacherous force that undermined German national character. It was ubiquitous, pressing inwards from everywhere. This usurpation and depletion was happening inside German nationalism and was therefore more like being drawn into an abyss. It was the social equivalent to psychosis: the ‘invasion’ by the ‘Jew’ was, psychically, the re-introjection of the fundamental projection into the Jews of the urgent need to infiltrate and possess them. The Holocaust was a violent eruption against this threat.

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Conclusion To return to the incident with which we began, I think ‘paedo’ threatened such an internal collapse. It was a delusionally created object projected into the house of the paediatrician as an empirical reality in which to anchor the delusion. In Nazi-inspired antisemitism, the delusionally created ‘Jew’ was the ‘paedo.’ In the case of the paedo, one can guess – though it is not the theme of my paper – that the troublesome thoughts had to do with ambivalence towards children. Ambivalence towards children is one of the most dreadful states imaginable. In psychoanalytic thinking, ambivalence to the point of child abuse and even infanticide constitutes an attack on the parental couple, on the infant as ego ideal and on life itself. In my analysis, a primal ambivalence strains to represent the dread of incoherence and involution of the psyche, in which repression is not yet available – only psychosis. The word particle, ‘paedo,’ lights an ­explosive fuse before any representational function of language can emerge. At this level, primal ambivalence threatens to blow its way into the psyche. The ‘paedo’ incident was so bizarre, that it could find no home in society, neither in consciousness nor in the Unconscious, managed by repression. Instead, the shriek of condemnation repulsed it. In the case of Nazi-inspired German antisemitism, the historical literature is extensive on the seeding of instability. In neither case is it my theme to go into the historical specificity of these extreme ideologies and actions. My concern has been with a frame of mind, in which ‘paedo’ and the ‘Jew’ of Nazi antisemitism are both templates of fundamentalism as a psychotic eruption.

Notes 1. Fundamentalism is better embedded in language, but as an ‘ism,’ it runs easily into abstraction and expansion beyond any representational function. 2. I compare the feeling of certainty in finding the truth empirically and with conceptual clarity, as opposed to a certainty that is asserted in place of evidence and the search for truth, in Figlio (2017b). In that paper, I am concerned with the role of doubt in facilitating a search for truth and an absence of doubt in the claim of certainty.

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3. Freud (1910, p. 173) points out that the Oedipus complex is a phantasy of fulfilling the wish, not just to replace father as mother’s sexual partner, but father himself. In my view, the neurotic conflict with father in the Oedipus complex covers the psychotic, omnipotent phantasy of self-­ creation, in which the mother is only the vehicle (Figlio 2017a, pp. 83–87). 4. Bakan (1971) has argued, with extensive documentation, that there is an inherent infanticidal impulse, which separates human beings in society from their animal nature. Winnicott (1949) thought it was essential to recognise hatred of one’s child. 5. The following sections on antisemitism are based on Figlio (2012, 2017a, pp.  73–100). The  material is drawn from  these sources but has been recontextualised for this paper. 6. I have explored this theme more fully, based on Freud’s ‘narcissism of small differences,’ in Figlio (2012, 2017a, pp. 80–83) 7. In my argument, the Volksgemeinschaft also stoked an idealisation of a people ‘working towards the Führer’ (Kershaw 1999), drawn towards merger with the group ego ideal in a delusional phantasy of oneness. It should be understood, along with its historical embeddedness, as psychotic: not marginalised as a psychopathy with no relevance to historical scholarship, but as a mechanism of social and individual existence in a created alternative to external, perceptual reality: a factitious reality in which ‘empirical’ data, such as small differences, are delusionally fabricated in order to annihilate them in a continuous renovation of the Volksgemeinschaft. 8. There has been substantial criticism of Freud’s model of the nascent ego, in its state of primary narcissism. I will not review this literature here. I will only note that, from the ego’s ‘point of view,’ such a state is not only credible, it is the starting point of a model of psychic functioning, and it is the model I am adopting. As an anchor point in this debate, one might consider Winnicott’s (1956) view of a not-yet-present ego, not yet able to experience an external reality that therefore is an impingement that destroys the sense of continuity of the ego.

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