Episode Transcript
Antifascist Dad Episode 44.1: Psychic Militancy with Dr. Lara Sheehi, Part 2
Matthew Remski: Hello, Patreon supporters and everyone else. My name is Matthew Remski. This is Antifascist Dad Podcast, and this is episode 44.1, Psychic Militancy with Dr. Lara Sheehi, part 2.
I'm really grateful for your support. I hope this project brings some joy, hope and utility to your works and days.
As always, you can find me on Bluesky and Instagram under my name. I'm on YouTube and TikTok as antifascistdad, and the Patreon for this show is antifascistdadpodcast. If you're listening to this episode on the day it drops, you already know this, because you're a subscriber who gets early access to every second part of the main-feed episodes, including this one, in which I pick up where I left off in my conversation with Lara Sheehi. You'll probably want to listen to that episode first if you haven't, because in it we covered the basics of her book, From the Clinic to the Streets: Psychoanalysis for Revolutionary Futures, some basic vocabulary and the framework that she's working from.
We opened with the notion that clinical psychology's foundational unit of analysis, the nuclear family, being the primary shaper of the unconscious, is not a neutral scientific category or finding — it's a long-term political project. She said that the near-exclusive focus on parent-child dynamics as the source of a person's inner life really displaces attention from the social and political structures, like white supremacy, settler colonialism, capitalism, cis heteronormativity, that produce and stabilize that very family form. And so the nuclear, atomized household, she says, is itself a historically specific arrangement, and single-family homes actually are named for the ideology that they encode. And so a psychology that treats that as a universal, apolitical starting point, rather than a kind of fantasy, only helps to naturalize a particular social order.
Now, we also talked about how the profession trains clinicians to relocate political conflict into clinical language and affect. So we talked about this conference incident that she opens the book with — a guy showing up to a psychoanalytic conference, he's a psychoanalyst himself, and he shows up draped in Zionist regalia and blocks the doorway and declares there's no such thing as Palestinians, and things like there's no room for Palestine or Gaza in psychoanalysis. And there's this whole group assembled there, and Sheehi is speaking, and of course he's targeting her. But the group, rather than naming this guy as an aggressor, retreats into theorizing about the moment as if it belonged in some clinical session.
And so she called this reflex a mark of professional pruning, where practitioners are trained so thoroughly to relocate conflict into the clinic that they lose the capacity to recognize live, in-person political aggression as what it is. And they wind up treating this aggressor's disruption as the thing that needs therapeutic attention. And she calls this — this is a really important term — a psychic inversion, where the person exercising power is treated as the one suffering. Does this sound familiar?
She also critiqued the profession's core vocabulary — concepts like professionalism, collegiality, neutrality, positive regard — as saturated with what she calls civilizational discourse. These are categories that sound like technical and apolitical measures of clinical competence, like how you're going to be with your clients, but they actually function to discipline practitioners. And she has personal experience of this, which she recounts, when they name racism, or question fee structures, or refuse to treat colonial violence as an abstraction. So she talked about how her supervisors warned her that speaking up politically would cost her referrals and career advancement. And then she noted that their observations really fell within these predictable categories, or fault lines — it was all about racism, access, institutional complicity. If she brought these issues up, then, of course, she was in danger of not being clinically neutral.
Now, as I said at the top of part one for this interview, this is all the setup for what we get to in part two here, which goes beyond describing the effects of power structures on the psychological professions and gets into how psychic intrusions can be understood and reversed through daily practice.
Dr. Lara Sheehi is a Lebanese clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst whose work applies decolonial, anti-oppressive frameworks to psychoanalysis. She trained at George Washington University, where she later taught and founded the Psychoanalysis and the Arab World Lab. She co-authored Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine, which won the 2022 Palestine Book Award, and she authored From the Clinic to the Streets: Psychoanalysis for Revolutionary Futures. This is the book we're focusing on. And here's the second part of our conversation.
So far, I think you have given us a really good setup for the framework that you use, but it's really only the first step. And one of the things that I loved about your book so much is that most critical theory tends to stop here, with the kind of "sunlight is a good disinfectant" kind of presentation. I'm thinking about all of the critical theory books that I've read, including recent ones, like a wonderful book called Hyperpolitics by Anton Jäger, where it's like very precise political theory that describes, from a Marxist perspective, the complications that we find ourselves in, and it just kind of ends with, like, oh, my God, this is — I don't think he's doing a psychic intrusion, but it definitely feels despairing.
And you don't do this. You go on to offer at least two more concrete steps after this sort of analysis of what the psychological professions tend to do in the imperial core. First of all, you say that the categories of mental suffering focused on by mainstream psychology not only atomize us as subjects, but they also provide distinct tools, or as you call them, intrusions, for imperial powers to use against revolutionaries. And then secondly, you say that these intrusions, once they're understood, can be seized and used, I guess, judo-style, by everyday people.
So let's just turn to the first point. You say that armed with psychological awareness, the dominant culture can intrude on our inner lives with confusion, fear and despair. And this is within the context of atomization, specialization, which is another key term that you bring to bear, and also this focus on just the sort of immediate microcosm of the nuclear family. But can you break each one of these intrusions down? Confusion, fear and despair.
Lara Sheehi: Yeah, and exhaustion.
Matthew Remski: Right, and exhaustion, yes.
Lara Sheehi: Yeah. So I think, let me start just with the reason why I would use affect states. In my conversation, it was very important for me — and I really appreciate that you read so closely and saw this — it was very important for me that this does not remain just a theory book. The praxis was so important precisely because people invited me into their spaces to work alongside each other to figure this out. So a lot of my examples were from organizing spaces, examples from patients, supervision, speaking with comrades, engagement with the work of political prisoners, precisely for this reason, because I want everybody who reads this to be able to have an entry point where they can see themselves in some way. And I've been so grateful that people have shared that with me — they're like, I see myself in this, right? Because it permeates everything.
So these affect states that I talk about as the primary place of contact of a psychic intrusion, they become the symptomatic register which we recognize — oh, wait, maybe a psychic intrusion is happening. And their umbrella states — I'm very clear these are not comprehensive, but over the years, speaking to people, these are the primary affect states and emotions that people share with me: fear, confusion, despair, exhaustion.
So in the book, I use examples to flesh out what that means, and over and over and over again, the most important thing for me is, number one, no affect state is neutral. Meaning, to be able to analyze a psychic intrusion, it's to recognize that — I use the word intrusion on purpose, because I want us to always remember there's a long-term political project behind it with an intention. And the intention is to actually disrupt our ability to imagine that something else is possible, like we started off having a conversation about, and to disconnect us and dismember us from the actual movements that are trying to make that world happen.
So if we are feeling confused — we had an example of confusion where it's mobilized through this civilizational discourse of, like, "Lara, but don't you want to be helping? Aren't you concerned about his feelings?" And then you start to be like, I am concerned about his feelings, because I actually believe my politics. This is the way they capture us — they actually rely on our good-faith coherence with our politics, because we try not to be assholes. And that's the channel.
Matthew Remski: I'm just thinking about how a very pernicious example of this would be to tell the campus protester who's 22 years old at Columbia College, "You really don't know how complicated the world is."
Lara Sheehi: Yes. Right. Yes, exactly. Or, "you're disrupting somebody else's learning experience."
Matthew Remski: And is that really worth it? Is that what you want to do?
Lara Sheehi: Exactly.
Matthew Remski: Right.
Lara Sheehi: Exactly. Is that what you — and we can see, the fact that that didn't work, by and large, is why the university and the state had to come down even harder with these draconian measures. Because these students were right on and saw through it and kept saying stuff like, no, this is about empire, no, this is about capitalism, no, this is about you being ethical, I don't care about my degree if there's a genocide happening. I don't think power was prepared for those answers, which is why it had to escalate.
Matthew Remski: I spoke with one of the primary organizers here on this podcast, at the University of Toronto, Sarah Racik. And she told me that one of her Palestinian colleagues, in an exchange with the provost, or with whoever in the administration they were trying to get their point across to, was referred multiple times to mental health counseling. "We know this is very hard for you, we know that you're going through a difficult time, we hear this news about your family, we do have support services." Right. And there is, in the alternate universe, the other Lara Sheehi sitting at an office somewhere, getting ready to help this person really sort of come to grips with the fact that they're getting this news about their families.
Lara Sheehi: Yeah, exactly. And that's it. And it's you. And that's such a beautiful example of how therapy becomes counterinsurgency.
Matthew Remski: Yeah.
Lara Sheehi: It's like, that's really what's going on here. "I know, it's just you struggling, that's all, there is nothing else to see here." Right, that's another version of the confusion. We can use that as a segue into despair. Somebody sitting across from somebody, and they're consistently told, actually it's within you, actually it's within you, there's nothing else. It can feel despairing to believe. And the intention is for us to believe that nothing else is possible.
And what I often say is that psychic intrusions — they work on rewiring the future, of course, because it's all about taking offline any possibilities in the future. But the demand is for you to feel despairing now. You have to feel — it's not, go ahead, do all your shit, and then you're going to fall into despair. The psychic intrusion is, I need you to feel despairing now. And for us to sort of question, be like, what purpose in this particular moment does feeling despairing have in terms of stabilizing the forces of power? Because if we buy into the despair — which primarily what I talk about in the book, despair is based around believing the lie that power tells, that they've already won, even as we see, with exquisite and excruciating detail, all the ways in which they have to up the ante because they're not winning.
Right. So you can start to see, also, then we get confused. The despair makes it confusing — like, have they actually already — they're telling us we've already won. And much of this doesn't happen consciously — I'm animating it in this way. But the point of intrusions is they start to happen seamlessly, so we're not even aware of them. Which is why I felt such an urgency to document it for us and be like, actually, there's this entire process of association that's happening. And the psychological warriors, as they call themselves, which are the architects of psychological warfare, utilize these affects to make us stay in our place.
Matthew Remski: And in that fluidity between despair and confusion, that happens unconsciously and seamlessly in a way that you can't detect, you feel exhausted.
Lara Sheehi: Yes, we do. We feel, and we feel. And then to think about — again, if we're to take the premise that I'm hoping we will, about no affect state is neutral, and if we take the idea that it's a political project to disconnect us from enacting the possibilities we know can happen, to work against inevitabilities — how does exhaustion factor into this? We feel exhausted, therefore we feel despairing, we feel exhausted, we're not going to engage in a particular way. We also then read exhaustion as only one form. That exhaustion is — I'm not saying we're not going to be tired when we're in struggle, of course we are. But I think all of us who are engaged in struggle know the difference between feeling tired because we've been struggling and feeling exhausted because we're alienated and despairing.
Matthew Remski: Right.
Lara Sheehi: There's such a different texture to that, and it's life-giving. I'm tired because I've been struggling, and I'm struggling for the world I know can happen, against everything that's being told to me. We can register that — of course it's tiring, because it's always asymmetric warfare that we're engaged in. But alienation feels horrific — to live in a world in which we're like, oh my God, I'm just destined and doomed to live in this space forever.
Matthew Remski: Yeah. I think in that version you don't sleep, and in the tired, the struggle, post-struggle version, you sleep.
Lara Sheehi: Yeah, that's such a good way of saying it. Even if that's metaphorical — it could be literal — but even if, because there's a nourishment. Sleep is about nourishment and recharge. There's a nourishment in that. Right. And I think part of the reason, maybe, that it comes through the book that I'm trying to do — I'm not just trying to live in the theory — is because I'm actually not a pessimistic leftist. I actually believe this. Right. I believe in this partially because of the conversations I've been so lucky to be able to have, but also my own political commitment to this type of clarity that I will die having — that I'm not going to give power the win over my psyche, that somehow everything's written and circumscribed by them. Honestly, partially because I owe it to all the people that show us every single day that power actually doesn't own everything, including our psyche.
It's every single day, whether it's Indigenous folks in the settler colony of Canada, or Indigenous folks in the settler colony of the United States, or people organizing against ICE death squads, or the Cuban people fighting, or Venezuelan people in the street, the people of Iran, the people of Lebanon, the people of Palestine, people of Haiti — like, fuck, how many examples do we have of people being like, these are the worst possible conditions that we can imagine, that we are made to imagine and made to live under right now. Yemen fighting against Saudi Arabia and taking back territory. We were meant to believe that Yemen was in the worst state it could ever be, and they have nothing to lose. How many times are we told, this poorest country in the world, most devastated country in the world, they have nothing to lose. And today, this morning, they took back territory from Saudi Arabia, which we were meant to believe was the most powerful entity in the region, supported by all the fascistic states in the world, because they could see them as their beachhead in the region. For me, I'm like, how can I feel despairing?
Matthew Remski: So you use the word psyops. And here I just want to say that I've spent probably the last seven years in forms of journalism that are looking at right-wing disinformation and misinformation campaigns, and often the framework of the conspiracy theory is evoked, which I'm quite ambivalent about, because it can be weaponized in many different directions. And I think that it was really reading a book by Erica Lagalisse about the sort of conspiracy theory as working-class folk knowledge and source of intuition that actually really broke me free of the kind of scolding liberal perspective of "we have to make sure that people are rational," because speaking down to the folks who wind up having intuitions that are actually correct about the world has really bad downstream effects.
Now, that's all preface to say that when you use a term like psyop, and then you back it up with the history of active counterrevolution in the psychological professions, and you show that, yes, there is, on a professional, institutional level, a conspiracy for psychology writ large to have this mediating effect — almost in the same way that the Catholic Church would have been morally, psychologically supportive to the colonial project — I'm wondering how you would characterize the psychological professionals who have maybe little awareness of this history, who believe that they're simply doing good, evidence-based care work with good intentions. They have received training that you are labeling psyop-y. And I'm wondering how you distinguish the structure from the people who are working within it and trying their best, and probably would choose otherwise if they knew.
Lara Sheehi: Yeah, I love that question. Number one, I just kind of want to speak to what you were saying — there is no conspiracy when power is just power.
Matthew Remski: Yeah, just — I mean, it's a banal way of saying planning, isn't it?
Lara Sheehi: You're right, exactly. But I think that statement can feel so — well, of course — but then when we really think about it, we're like, oh, you're right. It's this liberal counterinsurgency for us to then associate conspiracy with a bad thing and feel like we all have tinfoil hats on, rather than — oh, conspiracy, which literally, to the root of the word, is when people come together and plan a certain thing. Power does that all the time. And it's okay for us to — because everything we're seeing unfold in the world right now, from the genocide in Gaza and across Palestine, to land confiscation and annexation in Lebanon, to the starvation of people in Cuba, to the stealing of oil in Venezuela and the kidnapping of a sitting fucking president, to the Epstein files, are all a mark of power, and power's voraciousness in needing to control and eat up everything, resources and people alike.
Right. We are meant to think that is a thing of the past. We are meant to associate that with kings — kings were the only ones who could kill anybody and demonstrate their power. Not Peter Thiel, who's literally saying he wants to kill humanity, right, with his AI buddies.
So that's number one — to regularize and normalize us talking about these things and recognize that taking offline certain words was actually part of the larger project to normalize power, empower's violence. And then conscript people like liberals into doing the carceral work to shame everybody who actually was like, I live under the boot of this, I know how power works.
So that's number one I would draw — I'm saying that because I draw the parallel to therapy — is to say to people that it's always interesting to me when people are like, "but I'm not this person, in it." And I'm like, great, then you should feel okay antagonizing and critiquing your field without mercy. And here's why: because fields and organizations, primarily, and like nation-states, demand an identification with them. When we identify with them to the degree that we feel any critique against them is fundamentally a critique of us as individual beings, we are in trouble. People can go at psychology and psychoanalysis all day long, and in fact I would be happy — we should be happy. As ethical practitioners, we need to be okay with people's ability to antagonize and question, and then to really be compelled to interrogate: why do I feel like, if this hurts, why does it hurt? What part of me is identified with this structure? And if I am, am I useful to the people I'm actually trying to walk alongside, or is then my allegiance to the profession rather than to people? Which is why, hopefully, we got into this to begin with.
Matthew Remski: Well, also, I wonder if one potential benefit, an invitation that I think your kind of discipline-smashing model really suggests, is that maybe there's a lot of people in the psychological professions who don't really know or understand that they actually have been disciplined in a way. And it would feel good to actually be able to say, "oh shit, I really learned some bullshit, didn't I? Boy, you know, I'm starting to question how I'm supposed to hold myself. I wonder what I'm doing when I do my therapy eyes." Right? You know what I mean? I think a lot of freeing questions that are actually in the spirit of therapy might come to light.
Lara Sheehi: Totally. And it's so true. And it's like to say, and to wonder — I think as an add-on, to wonder why it is that we don't know that history, that that's also not innocent, that a helping field — because you are meant to feel like I'm coming into a helping field, which smacks of civilizational saviorism, of course, and white supremacy. Right? Like, that somehow the concept of help is not complicated — to me that's bizarro land. Anything that involves care, including parenting and family life and caregiving in general, is always an aspect of negotiating power. How is it that an entire field that consolidates around care and access somehow is not politically involved in the work of power and exploitation?
The disavowal of that — to be able to hold on to the fantasy that I'm just doing good, or the therapeutic space is just a space of healing rather than also a potential space of harm. A potential — I'm not saying people are out there consciously harming people, there are some, there are some, but by and large people aren't. But for us to not even be able to contend with the fact that it has to have that question with it — that's the question I want us to ask ourselves. How did we get to the place where we are a field of relation and somehow we think that harm is not going to be intimately involved with that, let alone the ways that psychology has always worked hand in hand with the state to actually exact real carceral power?
Matthew Remski: It seems like the rhyming comparison might be the fantasy that, "well, I'm going to practice good capitalism, I'm going to practice the good kind" —
Lara Sheehi: Free of exploitation.
Matthew Remski: Free of exploitation, when actually the structure of how it works involves this problem.
Lara Sheehi: I think this is why I include a footnote very early on in my book where I say I use the word "patient" on purpose — not without recognition that that word has a long, sordid history of power, but precisely because of that. Because I don't want to be in the state where, like a Rogerian therapy, "client" comes to actually dispel the power imbalance that is always inbuilt in it. Using the word "patient" is a reminder to me — I actually can't get out of this. By virtue of my role, by virtue of my license with the state, I do have power. And so using different words to massage that and make it feel better is not going to be it. It's going to be how I am in relation with people, my political commitments to the world, my ability to engage with people's real concerns and suspicions of that work — precisely because of the history of psychology working with the state, whether through child protective services or through mandated reporting. The things that also are sold as "these are good things and how we protect people" are completely disconnected from the history of policing of certain communities. And there are many amazing people doing work around that, thinking about abolitionist ways of practicing that actually don't have to involve the state or police or anything.
Matthew Remski: Let me dig into the intrusions just a little bit further, starting with confusion. So I have the regular experience of talking with liberals or centrists about Palestine or other issues, and then suddenly feeling as though I'm at sea, and there's like nothing under my feet. What seems to be so obvious to me suddenly is not — it's suddenly up for debate, it's up for grabs. And after a while I can recognize, oh, you know what, I've just been bombarded with Zionist, or it might be Cold War, propaganda. But it always seems that that recognition comes too late — like it doesn't meet the moment. Is that an experience that you wind up trying to help people with? And how do you do that?
Lara Sheehi: Yeah, I love that. Number one, I think, yes. And here's why — because my experience, and this is what I sort of document in the book, is that the example you gave, I think, is probably recognizable to many people. And I think what ends up happening is then we also feel a hint of shame, of like, why didn't I hold my ground there, why did it come later, and why? And that collapses. And for me, I'm just like, okay — that is what I mean by symptomatic register. The fact that you tracked it later, to me, is an important piece of this, rather than collapsing into shame, being like, "okay, I actually recognize this." And then, of course, the hope is that we'd be able to catch ourselves in real time and practice: what does it mean to refuse the premise entirely that we are being engaged in?
I think part of the reason why it's confusing — and actually in the book, when I talk about fear, the organizers that I was speaking with were describing relational fear, not confrontation with the state. This one was particularly around confronting ICE agents, and they were like, we're ready for that, we were trained in confrontation and de-escalation and de-arrest. And it's the fear — and fear might not be — it's like how we're going to be seen and received relationally. That feels so icky, because we internalize all these messages around what my responsibilities are, to be polite, to engage in dialogue, to not come off as an extremist.
This is why we get ensnared in this feeling out to sea — feeling, right, precisely because of the bad faith when that liberal is engaging you with that propaganda, they're not doing it as just a point, a viewpoint, they are demanding you join them there. And you feel out to sea, partially, I imagine, because intuitively you can't join the actual rhetoric, but it's activating a persecutory, and what I call predatory grammar, inside of you, that's been placed there over a long period of time, that tells you the way to relate is in dialogue. And if I can't communicate this in a specific way, then I'm being an extremist, and how is that going to be seen? And it's actually better to engage in conversation, maybe I can reach them, maybe there's one way I can say this that is going to register with them, maybe I can change their mind — any version of that. I think that's why we end up feeling like — rather than a Fanonian, or Ghassan Kanafani, or any militant I use in the book, saying, reject the premise entirely, because they already see you that way anyway.
Matthew Remski: Well, okay, I wanted to bring this up because I had never heard of Ghassan Kanafani, and I went and I found the interview that you describe in the book, and I was absolutely electrified.
[Archival clip — 1970 interview with Ghassan Kanafani]
Richard Carleton: Why won't your organization engage in peace talks with the Israelis?
Ghassan Kanafani: You don't mean exactly peace talks. You mean Kanafani capitulation, surrendering.
Richard Carleton: Why not just talk?
Ghassan Kanafani: Talk to whom?
Richard Carleton: Talk to the Israeli leaders.
Ghassan Kanafani: That's kind of a conversation between the sword and the neck, you mean?
Richard Carleton: Well, if there were no swords and no guns in the room, you could still talk.
Ghassan Kanafani: No, I haven't. I had never seen any talk between a colonialist case and a national liberation movement.
Richard Carleton: But despite this, why not talk?
Ghassan Kanafani: Talk about what?
Richard Carleton: Talk about the possibility of not fighting.
Ghassan Kanafani: Not fighting for what?
Richard Carleton: Not fighting at all, no matter what, for —
Ghassan Kanafani: People usually fight for something, and they stop fighting for something. So you can't tell me even — why should we speak about "what"? Stop fighting, or talk about "stop fighting"?
Richard Carleton: Why talk? To stop the death and the misery, the destruction, the pain.
Ghassan Kanafani: The misery and the destruction and the pain and the death of whom?
Richard Carleton: Of Palestinians, of Israelis, of Arabs, of —
Ghassan Kanafani: The Palestinian people, who are uprooted, thrown in the camps, living in starvation, killed for 20 years, and forbidden to use even the name "Palestinians."
Richard Carleton: They're better that way than dead, though.
Ghassan Kanafani: Maybe to you, but to us, it's not. To us, to liberate our country, to have dignity, to have respect, to have our mere human rights, is something as essential as life itself.
[End archival clip]
Matthew Remski: He's being interviewed by this derpy guy from Australia, and he is gleaming with some kind of, I don't know, bullshit shield and resolve that I guess I haven't really — I'm sure there are many examples that I just haven't come across, but, like — and for the listeners, I'll put the video clip into the show notes, because I think it's kind of extraordinary. How did he learn to do that, and is that something that can be learned? And is this part of why you talk about psychic militancy as being kind of a daily practice?
Lara Sheehi: Absolutely, yes. And I'm so — thank you for saying that you didn't know him, and that then you were electrified by it.
Matthew Remski: Not only that, but, like, oh — then I'm like, oh, they killed him at 36, and he wrote poetry, and I write — I'm like, oh, like, my guy, come on, like, who? Why don't I know your name? Right? Like, sometimes you run into people historically and you're like, oh shit, why don't I know you? Why didn't I know you?
Lara Sheehi: Yeah, and there's so many — there's a multitude of reasons for that, but the affective experience of watching that — and maybe in some ways I wanted to use that because it comes across our timelines a lot, this snippet — it's a conversation between the sword and the neck, I think that's the most popular snippet that gets passed along on Twitter, on Instagram, all these sorts of things. I wanted to use something and reach to something that is in the popular world but might not be known in its entirety, to your point. And also an example, precisely as you said it, about — but in some ways, because I wanted to show somebody who's so exquisite, and he is exquisite, and I want to validate that, this is not just us being like — and that is why he needed to be murdered and assassinated, because there is something about him that is so exquisite. However, sometimes there are special people in the world in terms of their coherence with what they're doing, their chosen path in life. But that approach is not necessarily what's special about him — that is a practiced approach.
And it's a practiced approach, for me, what I say in the book, primarily because he is committed to a political cause and is clear on that as the primary space from which everything emerges for him, including his talking points. Those talking points were practiced talking points that supported a particular worldview of liberation, that did not confuse and engage in the psychic inversion that this interviewer was trying to invite him into, about who's actually the aggressor and who's not.
Matthew Remski: And why not just talk? Why not just talk, Ghassan? Why not just talk?
Lara Sheehi: Yeah, exactly.
Matthew Remski: Talk to whom?
Lara Sheehi: Exactly. And about what? Talk and about what? Right, exactly, exactly. And it's so brilliant, because in his refusal to engage in the relational dynamic, the coercive relational dynamic we were just talking about, he was making it known. He was, in my questions that people could see as pedantic — because we are pulled in to think, if I do this, I'm a troublemaker, I'll look like I'm obstinate, I'll look like I'm pedantic — he didn't care about any of that, because he knew. He knew. You watch that prologue — he was already fixed in place as the unreasonable revolutionary in the business of revolution. He was that.
Matthew Remski: What's hilarious is that it's almost as if Kanafani heard the intro to the interview before the guy came into the room. Of course, that was put together in post.
Lara Sheehi: Isn't that amazing?
Matthew Remski: But he knows what they're going to say about it.
Lara Sheehi: Yes, yes. And he did hear it, because he's aware of oppressor civilizational discourse. So without hearing it, he knew it, and that's what he functioned on. Rather than — always, the oppressor and the colonizer always want to engage us in a hypothetical of good faith on their part, rather than just, like the example I was using, in the room where the Zionist aggressor came in, my colleagues reached to a hypothetical about who he was rather than the reality of what was right in front of them, with the aggression. Kanafani rooted himself in that. He understood what civilizational discourse was, and he understood the coercive relational demands of that, to concede space preemptively. This is why he says — this is a death sentence, this is capitulation, this is a conversation between the sword and the neck. You prescribing dialogue between a liberation force, Indigenous people, and their oppressor, their colonizer, is a conversation between the sword and the neck, meaning I'm dead anyway, by —
Matthew Remski: Is that idiom traditional? Is it in Arabic? Did he just —
Lara Sheehi: That's his.
Matthew Remski: He just pulled that out of the air?
Lara Sheehi: Yes, out of his commitment. Because I think it's so precise. Right, it's probably one of the most beautiful sentences strung together that we have ever — honestly, I feel — it's so accurate. It's like, oh yeah, you're making me think this is a conversation, but then I have to pretend there isn't a sword on my neck as I'm having this conversation. It's such a beautiful encapsulation of it. And I think also what he did — and this is the practice part of it — in his connection to his comrades, because he recognized in this conversation, I'm not an individual, I'm representing a cause. And so that practice was as much for him to remain connected to the struggle and the points of unity of that struggle as it was for everybody watching to remember and not allow the colonizer the innocence that has always afforded them. That's the hypothetical — we are always extending generosity to those in power and trying to rehabilitate them, even as they aggress upon us. We, because of our good faith, are trying to rehabilitate them in real time, like maybe they don't actually think that, maybe they're misguided, maybe — and Kanafani cuts through that shit. He's like, nope, I'm going to make you confess what you're actually saying. And Carleton gets to that — he says, what about not fighting for anything? That's his prescription — don't fight. Now, he never says that the Zionist entity and the Zionist settlers aren't allowed to fight —
Matthew Remski: Should stop fighting.
Lara Sheehi: And that's the confession. Kanafani's hard line, holding the line, made the oppressor confess what the actual relational demand was: I want you to submit.
Matthew Remski: You don't go into this in the book, but I wonder if at some point you will, and it might be a very complex thing to map out — but the sense that I got in watching that, and also moving through the second half of the book, in which you're talking about psychic militancy as a daily practice of having really strong reality-checking on what's actually happening in a given moment in terms of power — this felt — so, I said at the beginning, this put me back together in a new way. I don't think I've ever felt a sense coming out of a book, or any kind of contemplation on psychology, that, oh my God, I could really feel better if I learned some shit like this. And I'm watching him now — I don't know what his internal life is like, but I'm watching him in that interview, and I can get the feeling that he feels alive, he feels alive in his body, that it feels wonderful to be able to see and speak clearly. And isn't that so much of what so many of us desire in this particular time — I mean, in all times, but in this time in particular. And so that's what I think, that's where I see the heart of your therapy actually being. Is that fair to say?
Lara Sheehi: It's so meaningful to me that you share that with me, and it feels very moving, actually. You write a book, and I don't think I could have ever dreamed that somebody would say, I read this book and I felt like I actually could feel better. And that feels very — I just want to own — that feels so moving.
Matthew Remski: Well, I'm not glazing you or anything, like, there's something about — I think you've put together resources, you come from a tradition, and you have figured out something about the way in which this shit has been used against people, and you've inverted that. And I guess it is strong and direct and material enough that I'm like, oh, this is not about working on my parts.
Lara Sheehi: Exactly.
Matthew Remski: This is not about figuring out, chasing that archetype. This is not about somatic experiencing — like, it is, I mean, that can be included in all of that, but, sure — and also, there's something about — you know, I asked you if Kanafani comes up with that line just sui generis. And it reminds me — it brings me back to my model for perhaps male wisdom, I quoted him early on — is Leonard Cohen, who — the irony is not lost on me — as a liberal Zionist, who goes and plays his guitar for the IDF in 1973. I have no idea about any of that, I didn't know about that growing up. But he sings these beautiful lines, but he never made me feel strong, he never made me feel happy. He made me feel like my psychology was some sort of eternal, swirling, burbling mess of, I don't know, it's me and God and who knows, like, whatever. And here's this guy who is able to deliver this line of poetry extempore, and he's actually talking about his life, his physical life, and the life of his community. And I'm like, did Leonard Cohen ever do that? He gave amazing lines, and he actually, I think, sort of coached us through a certain amount of despair and made it aesthetic.
Lara Sheehi: Yeah, that's such a beautiful way of saying that. You just described what Frantz Fanon calls confusion mongering.
Matthew Remski: Yeah.
Lara Sheehi: Like, in the — but in the making, you feel like your internal world is a perpetual swirl, that you're just going to be forever invested in a quagmire that you can never get out of, because that's the way of the world, is the inevitability we're talking about.
Matthew Remski: There's another workshop, though. You can always do another workshop.
Lara Sheehi: Exactly. Or nap. And then Ghassan Kanafani comes online for you, and what you see is clarity. And you're right — I mean, what we know, what we have, accounts of how he was and who he was with comrades, and in his writing — it's not without an interior world that struggles, but it does show us — and that's why I wanted to use him, just like I wanted to use Malcolm X and every other political prisoner, because I wanted people to be clear, this is not without suffering. People who struggle are actually incredibly connected to what suffering means, every version of it.
Matthew Remski: Right.
Lara Sheehi: But there is something so powerful and life-sustaining about remaining clear, coherent, and committed about material reality, and not being taken away from that as part of the political project to make us feel small, to make us feel despairing, to make us believe that there is no other version of this world, and that we don't have any power to join in the struggle of making that come into being.
Matthew Remski: Yeah, as opposed to — this is from Leonard Cohen's Stories of the Street: "We are so small between the stars, so large against the sky, and lost among the subway crowds, I try to catch your eye."
Lara Sheehi: Yeah, right.
Matthew Remski: Like, thank you, thank you for naming an experience. But I guess what Kanafani really showed me is that I didn't get liberatory poetry or literature or art — I got an aestheticization of my paralysis. And I settled for that.
Lara Sheehi: Stay-in-your-place therapy.
Matthew Remski: Yeah. Okay, so here's my last question. And you know what — I got in touch with you and I said I want to ask how you talk about this at home with your kids, and I haven't asked anything about that, because I think maybe I'll ask you to come back. Would that be okay?
Lara Sheehi: Oh, of course, I'd love to.
Matthew Remski: Okay, all right. Because that's a whole other thing — we have young people growing up into a world of, I would say, probably increasing levels of psychological pacification. And so here's my last question for now, though, which is that I'm very moved to consider despair as a weapon of psychic intrusion. And you have this amazing section where you quote these headlines — Newsweek saying "a glimpse of Gaza's miserable future," "Gaza and the end of history," "Gaza's erased future" — Jesus Christ, like, incredible, sort of from 30,000 feet, looking at all the rubble and imagining that everybody is gone, and just sort of foreclosing, as you say, on the possibility that people are still there, maybe they're still under the rubble and they're still alive and you have to go dig them out, but no, actually, the future is miserable.
And I think that the attraction of the weapon of despair seems very effective to me, because it pulls on the totalizing experience of the abject, of the horrible. And I think that there are scenes and contexts of despair in geopolitics, there are scenes and contexts of despair in climate disaster and in AI horrors that are coming, and many people, I think, are in the contemplation or the sensation of despair. And I would say that particularly in leftist politics, there is an affect tradition that comes from the brilliant work of Mark Fisher, who basically said that there's no way out of capitalist realism, that it's an impossibility to imagine anything beyond capitalism, and we really have to deal with that. But of course, he didn't really give any tools, and I think he was tortured by this, and then there was that tragic result. And so I'm wondering whether despair is answered if we learn how to grieve.
Lara Sheehi: Beautiful question. And I think for me, if grieving — yes, if grieving means that we get in the habit and practice and political commitment of not disavowing reality — because grieving does mean reality testing, we reality-test what's around us, right, rather than sort of suppress or sublimate or displace the feelings we're feeling. So if we are feeling despairing, rather than that locking us in place — "stay in your place" — right, and just wither in that — it's the grieving might be, there's an entire world that has been structured such that I feel like this, and I'm meant to believe I can't do anything. That's also a grieving process, of everything that has structured who I am as a person and what I've been sold, and includes disidentifying from heroes like Leonard Cohen, as the people who gave me something. That's part of divestment.
When we say divest, as part of divesting from power — of course, we see this in BDS, people oftentimes talk about the boycott but leave the divestment out of it. Divestment means we withdraw investment, psychic and affective and otherwise, and there is a grieving process that comes with that.
Matthew Remski: Right.
Lara Sheehi: But here's why — because when we learn to grieve in that version of the world that we've been brought up in, I think it also opens up the possibilities that there are other things that we're not attuning to. Because when you read off all those headlines that you did, they anger me every single time. They make me so angry, in the same ways that the AI is peddling in — this is like, we're going to have AI anyway, so you might as well jump on board. Well, that hasn't happened yet, actually. So it's like the writing of a history that hasn't even happened yet. And I want us to get into the habit of really interrogating what the purpose of us preemptively joining the story that power tells, as a way to circumvent the inevitable, is — because the logic breaks down.
Matthew Remski: It worked, I can tell you, because I think you probably instinctually read those headlines and felt anger immediately. I have read headlines like that and said, oh yeah, what a terrible situation.
Lara Sheehi: That's right.
Matthew Remski: Oh wow, boy, what can we do? Wow, God, that part of the world is just full of such suffering. And it's like — and I think it was coming across the headlines on your page, with the lead-up to, well, look at what's going to be, what strings or buttons are going to be pushed in you with this, that I was like, holy shit, that is incredibly abusive. That is incredible.
Lara Sheehi: It's sinister.
Matthew Remski: Like, would you say — would you ever say, in a parenting context, say to anybody, "well, it really doesn't seem like you have much of a future, does it?" You know, would you ever say that to a friend? Would you ever — I mean, just the —
Lara Sheehi: Just the abusers do.
Matthew Remski: I guess so.
Lara Sheehi: Yeah, that's right. But to your point, exactly — the only people who talk like that are abusers who are trying to snuff out a force of life inside somebody and to make them feel helpless and like shit about themselves.
Matthew Remski: Right. Dr. Sheehi, thank you so much for this time, and I really love this book, I hope that everybody reads it. I think it's an incredible intervention, and you really honor all of your sources as well — the bibliography is great, and you're constantly referencing where things come from and where you get your support. And so I think it is both heroic, but it is also like a heritage.
Lara Sheehi: Thank you.
Matthew Remski: So I really appreciate that, and thank you so much for your time.
Lara Sheehi: Thank you. I appreciate your generosity, both in spirit and in engaging in the work. This has been awesome, I really enjoyed it.
Matthew Remski: So that's the show, folks. Much thanks again to Dr. Sheehi and to all of her relations for this super illuminating work. I'm going to see you all next week. Please take care of each other.
