Exigent Sadism: Austerity Logics and the Antireparative Turn
Author: Avgi Saketopoulou
Note from Pam: I am temporarily publishing this text, linked here, in order to make it possible to listen to it.
Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them.
— Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography
On April 7, 2025, a video that was taken in Khan Younis after Israel targeted a tent where members of the press were known to reside went viral. In it, you see people running in panic trying to escape a raging fire. You can hear their screams, the fire hissing, the crackling sounds of the inferno. Amid this holocaust you spot a stilled, seated body that will later turn out to be the body of Ahmad Mansour, a journalist for Palestine Today. You can tell it’s a body because, even though his head and torso are engulfed in flames, the human shape of his hips and legs still stand out in the blaze. You watch in shock. And then, he moves a leg, which is how you realize he is still alive. And it hits you: this person is alive while his body, which you are watching, is scorching. The entire world is watching, watching while Palestinian bodies are burnt, starved, raped, tortured. Watching while students protesting this genocide—a genocide you are told is necessary to keep Israel safe, a genocide Mansour was there to report—are being abducted and disappeared in the United States.
In great danger to himself, someone dashes through the flames. He gets close to Mansour. He grabs a flaming leg, trying to drag him out of the fire. But as he is pulling to haul him out, Mansour’s pant rips. The effort is futile, his body has to be left behind, impossible to save. You will later learn that this was Mansour’s colleague, freelance photographer Abed Shaat; “I don’t even know how I summoned the courage to approach the flames and try to pull [him] out,” Shaat said later, but afterward “I . . . felt really weak . . . and lost consciousness.”1Mansour died the next day, one of 232 journalists murdered by Israel so far in its assault on Gaza.2
Shaat risked his own life to save his colleague. What will it take for us to be jolted out of guarding ourselves and to take risks that may make a difference in the world?3
Theory with Teeth
Discussing Edward Said’s 2001 disinvitation from Vienna’s Freud Museum for being “an engagedPalestinian, who . . . throws stones against Israeli soldiers,” Middle Eastern studies scholar Stephen Sheehi called for theory that works like the throwing of a stone.4Sheehi was referring to the famous photograph of Edward Said throwing a stone at an Israeli Occupation Forces guard tower. It is time for us, too, to throw stones and to dare theory that throws stones, theory that is not defanged by fear of facing disinvitation, repression, or persecution. Even amid a US-funded, largely unopposed genocide in Palestine and amid fascism’s accelerating ascendancy in the United States,5 which threatens women, trans people, queers, people of color, immigrants, and anyone protesting or thinking critically, our theories still sag toward the reparative, as if dialogue, democratic process, and proceduralism have ever stopped violence or brought justice.6 Theory that works like the throwing of a stone, theory with teeth requires embracing forms of aggression that, to its detriment, the Left has felt all too squeamish about.
I offer exigent sadism as such theory with teeth, theory the writing of which is motivated by the obligation to respond to the political exigencies of our time. It is theory made not for contemplation but for action. Exigent sadism draws inspiration from Walter Benjamin’s belief that “to improve our position in the struggle against Fascism,” our task “is to bring about a real state of emergency,” a form of emergency that he contrasts with the normalized emergencies pleated through fascism.7 Bringing about a real state of emergency involves taking risks, even gambling some things away. As such, unlike earlier work where I explored the aesthetics and political possibilities of noninstrumentality,8 I heed here Carol Levine’s caution that anti-instrumental politics “do not in fact yield the revolutionary justice critics have so often hoped and claimed for it.”9Exigent sadism is a decidedly psychoanalytico-political concept that embraces instrumentality to usher in “crisis time.”10 To effectuate this crisis, exigent sadism demands that we relinquish repair. The reparative has not only failed to deliver the political futures we have imagined, but we are already, I would argue, in the early stages of an antireparative turn.11 When most political theory continues to be affectively bound to the project of democratic repair or of repairing democracy, the critical question before us is whether we can give up futile attempts to salvage the reparative, and to repair repair.12 It is in this context that I offer exigent sadism as a call to theoretical arms.
Repair is risk-averse and, therefore, antirevolutionary. But even more dangerously, it is a theory that engineers our own obedience. By putting us in the mindset of self-preservation, repair gives us a sedative politics that lulls us into choosing peace over dignity and justice. What depletes and impoverishes us is not the risk of disturbing relations, of losing access and privileges, or even the risk of our own lives—all of which repair tries to spare us from. What diminishes us is the unwillingness to take such risks, difficult and costly though they will be. Key to this line of thinking is interrogating the suffocating austerity logics that persistently caution us to guard what we have, to prioritize our well-being, and to look out for ourselves. By moralizing the preservation of ourselves and of our relations (with individuals, organizations, institutions), no matter their harm to us and to the world, repair becomes a powerful tool for imperial and racialized projects. Put starkly, repair sets the stage for a despotism of acquiescence. Consider, for example, how Israel’s settler colonialism is defended as repairing the wound of the Shoah, and how the Palestinian occupation is presented as a form of reparations owed to the Jewish people by an anti-Semitic world that genocided them.
Exigent sadism forgoes facile acknowledgments and superficial apologies with no material follow-up; it is not subdued by harmonizing relationships with those that harmed us. What it wants is nothing less than to confront the other with the harm they have caused. It arises out of a crisis in us—a thoroughgoing and demanding upheaval that, as I’ll discuss, accompanies the action of libidinal divestment and that in turn stands to inaugurate a crisis of reckoning in the other.13 Exigent sadism, that is, works to keep the wound open and to liberate harmed persons from the routine expectation placed on them that they owe those who harmed them a successful chance to repair, no matter how infirm the reparative gesture. Insofar as it normalizes certain types of sacrifices—differentially expected from racialized and otherwise minoritized subjects—the reparative is a Ponzi scheme that pacifies the psyche’s inherent insurgent potential, orienting us toward docility.
Austerity Thinking and Psychic Energy
I invoke the psychic domain not to return us to a universal individual subject, as psychoanalysis has often done, but because stepping into exigent sadism requires that we muster the courage to go against our personal well-being, to bend our will in order to do what has to be done, to divest from our libidinal attachments, to displease others, to transgress the taboo on severing relationships.14 This dimension of exigent sadism recalls Lauren Berlant’s important intervention about cruel optimism, “when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing.”15 But where Berlant thinks with the nondramatic, slow wear of impasse, my project is about what can be done, dramatic or not, to intensify an impasse, to bring impasse to a crisis of generative overwhelm.
Crisis, of course, is a risk: It can prove materially and psychically costly. And it is dysregulating to the ego, whose job is to maintain homeostatic equilibrium and to ensure the organism’s stability.16 Denial (e.g., of how bad/dire things are), silence (e.g., about the violences around us), even staying in harmful situations (e.g., with complicit institutions): All these are preferable to the ego than the disequilibration that is necessary for action. Our egos do not want us running into the fire—Shaat’s, as you may recall, didn’t either (“I don’t know how I summoned the courage to approach the flames”). To do so anyway, something else has to take over, something that overrides the psychic reflex to protect ourselves. I call this something else the revolutionary impulse, to capture how it revolts against the injustice of the world by giving oneself over to actions that stand to disrupt violence and resist oppression—actions that involve true risk for the person undertaking them, such as participating in protests, work stoppages, blockades, or shut-it-down actions and engaging in misconduct, counterconduct, or insubordination. We need the revolutionary impulse to stand up to power, to withdraw our consent from unjust social contracts, and to resist what Michel Foucault described as “the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us.”17 At times of brutal violence and fascist acceleration, it is tempting to want to turn to reparation, but that’s precisely why we should not: The reparative disarms us, taking away our capacity to resist.
The revolutionary impulse derives from the insurgent, more anarchic qualities of the libidinal current, and activating it has to override what I call the ego’s austerity thinking.18 We cannot revolt against injustice without decentering ourselves, and that involves superseding the ego’s tendency to want to keep us out of the fire and away from the heat.
Perennially fearful that its resources will be depleted, the ego, Sigmund Freud explained, has but one critical job: to fend off any threat to its homeostatic equilibrium.19 Starting with the premise that psychic energy is finite, the ego operates with the principle of scarcity, standing guard over our psychic energies. Anything that disturbs its energetic equilibrium—not just running into fires but other actions that disrupt our libidinal ties to objects (persons, organizations, ideals)—is aversive to the ego, which would rather conserve than risk itself. To tap into the revolutionary impulse, we have to liberate ourselves from austerity thinking, from the notion that our psychic resources are limited and that spending them down is dangerous to us.
In referring to austerity logics I lean on austerity economics, especially as discussed by the Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis. While austerity economicsformally refers to a set of fiscal policies that seek to reduce governmental budget deficits through spending cuts and/or tax increases, Varoufakis, whose thinking is shaped by his experience as finance minister during Greece’s financial crisis of 2015, sees austerity as “never working for the many, austerity always works for the very few . . . [as] a kind of class war.”20To explain his position succinctly: following the 2008 economic crush, the “troika,” comprising the European Commission, the European Central Bank (ECB), and the International Monetary Fund, imposed strict and socially devastating austerity measures on Greece. Representing Greeks as “lazy benefit suckers, . . . the ‘welfare queens’ of the 21st century” who would rather live on handouts than work, the troika demanded a new austerity plan in 2015 that would bring the country to its knees.21 The decision was so consequential that Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras held a public referendum to vote on whether or not to accept this ratcheting up of austerity. To drive the consequences home, the ECB restricted bank liquidity, forcing the government to close the banks to prevent a bank run. Refusing the imposition of more austerity measures, a majority of Greeks still voted no to new loans, knowingly opening themselves to the risk that the troika would further punish them. Rather than opt for short-lived protections, the people chose the revolutionary action of creating a real state of emergency, refusing the troika’s predatory lending and its accompanying surveillance. With the ECB continuing to refuse liquidity, people began to suffer. Tsipras recoiled, bringing the troika’s plan to Parliament, where the popular “no” was reversed: “the people rose up to the occasion,” Varoufakis noted, “and the leadership overthrew them.”22 It is not enough, as this example glaringly shows, to bring about a state of emergency—one has to be able to endure it.
For Varoufakis, Tsipras’s retreat put the nail in the Greek coffin, allowing the troika to prey upon any remaining healthy parts of the Greek economy, thereby saving failing French and German banks.23 The government’s inability to endure the state of emergency it had courted in calling for the referendum vote enabled the troika’s enforced lending. What this eventually established was a neocolonial regime in Greece, with foreign investors and conglomerates buying Greek property and infrastructure, overtouristing the country, and making it unaffordable for locals. Austerity, in other words, did not save Greece or Greeks as the troika’s fiscal interventions promised; austerity, rather, turned Greece into a “debt colony.”24 The Greek economy is “stronger” today, but Greeks are poor and the country has been sold off to the highest bidders: Greece has lost much of its national sovereignty and has seen its social fabric and social services destroyed. In 2024, some media told Greeks to abstain from vacationing in the Greek islands in the summer months, to protect the scant resource of water for tourists.25 A recent study by the Hellenic Observatory at the London School of Economics proclaimed Greece to have morphed into a “café economy.”26
I am drawing a parallel between how austerity economics exploits genuine fear and actual vulnerabilities to dominate and control, and how the threatened ego closes in on itself, directing its energies toward self-preservation. The impulse to self-preserve (rather than fight or risk) at times of crisis is almost reflexive, but it accomplishes only one thing: it disables our capacity for resistance. Austerity thinking is more than short-sighted and ineffective; when it becomes internalized, it becomes an affective link of subordination to state power.27 And that, in turn, eventually disconnects us from caring for others and for our world; it undercuts the building of collective solidarities and interferes with our ability to imagine and practice resistance.28
To break away from austerity logics, other forces—forces disloyal to the ego and undeterred by the turmoil of disequilibrating the ego—must be summoned. These forces have to do with our libidinality, a psychic domain connected to but not entirely reducible to sexuality. Libidinality has a distinctive sovereign quality unconcerned with economizing; it is open to expenditure, a term philosopher Georges Bataille used to express that psychic energy is not scarce but is in potentia available to us in excess.29 From this angle, risk and cost may be seen as forms of rebelling against the ruse that our resources are limited and that we are terribly imperiled if we do not watch over them.
Renewable Energy
My psychoanalytico-political intervention is nested within a psychoanalytic tradition called the economic model. This model draws on early Freud and on Jean Laplanche’s rereading of Freud to deprioritize a psychoanalysis preoccupied with the discovery of hidden symbolisms and meanings (a hermeneutical psychoanalysis) and to focus instead on a psychoanalysis interested in the flows, intensifications, and (re)distributions of libidinal energy.30 The economic model tracks the investment of psychic energy (cathexis), an energy that is always already sexual, and its sublimations and transformations. Contrary to a hermeneutical psychoanalysis, which conceptualizes the unconscious as a filled-in reservoir of repressed memories, incompatible ideas, and unbearable affects, the economic model assumes an unconscious that is sexual by virtue of its relationship with the excitable body. This sexual unconscious exerts a force on the psyche-soma, making a demand for psychic work. And unlike yet another psychoanalytic model, that of attachment, on which many academics—and in fact, many analysts—rely, the economic model foregrounds the drive’s unruliness.31
Neither the hermeneutical nor the attachment model, however, can help get us to the revolutionary impulse, because neither can get us to the insight that psychic energy is not finite but ongoingly renewable (and thus can be drawn on lavishly). An energetic psychoanalysis has the remarkable yet unrealized potential to show us how we may resist the ego’s demand to keep ourselves safe, how we may draw on the revolutionary impulse, how we may dare to take insurgent actions. Thus conceived, psychoanalysis can become a theory of revolution.
I have already discussed how the idea that our psychic energy is finite dovetails with austerity logics, and have touched on how Freud theorized the ego as operating on the ego’s self-preservative function—in a way that we might now think of as akin to austerity logics. Melanie Klein, as we will shortly see, also contributed to that current by building a desexualized theory of reparation organized around preserving relationships. What interests me now, however, is Laplanche’s alternative framework, which shows us that there is no reason to accept the premise that the amount of psychic energy available to us is finite. Elaborating how detranslation can produce new energies, he showed that psychic energy is an ever-renewable resource, making the guarding of our resources less of an existential necessity.32 In earlier work I took this further, fleshing out the relation between risk-taking and detranslation, showing how risk-taking is connected to the ego’s detranslation (overwhelm), and, thus, how risk-taking can involve the kindling of new psychic energies.33 But since the ego is primarily oriented towards preserving its own stability, a considerable amount of psychic force would be necessary to override its powerful opposition, its lack of consent, if you will, to detranslation and toward a state of overwhelm. Wherefrom would such a force derive?
For me, such a force could only be sourced from the sovereign, ineliminable quality of the sexual drive, from the drive’s anarchic and untamable character.34 Why do I describe the drive as sovereign? Because, while Laplanche sees the drive as a derivative of failed translational processes (i.e., the ego can never fully cull the foreignness of the other’s enigma), I would argue that such a view is partial to the ego’s perspective. Only an ego that wants to totalize the foreignness of enigma would see the unconscious as the result of a failed, botched operation. From the viewpoint of the unconscious, it is, rather, the ego’s “compulsion” to translate everything, exhaustively, that would be the problem.35 Different paths open up if we think Laplanche alongside Fred Moten’s concept of fugitivity.36 From this angle, the sexual drive may be seen as an escape artist, an undomesticated and ineliminable wildness that resists capture, and is thereby the guarantor of our freedom.37 With Moten, that is, we may recast translational “failure” as a lush fallout that opens us up to our dispossession.38
It is this indestructible capacity that I describe as the sexual drive’s sovereign quality. Sovereignty, here, is not used in its classical sense; that is, it does not refer to one’s supreme power and authority over other people or territories (as used earlier, for example, when I referred to Greece’s loss of national sovereignty). Instead, I have in mind how the concept of sovereignty is given to us through the philosophy of the Marquis de Sade and how it is complicated through Moten’s ideas on dispossession. To “own one’s dispossession,” Moten writes, “is to embrace the privilege of being sentenced to the gift of constant escape.”39 In Moten’s word play, George Schulman notes, “dispossession is a ‘sentence,’ but if dispossession is ‘owned,’ then sentence as a penalty, a noun denoting a condition of deprivation, is made a gift and a verb”—arming us, perhaps, with the force from which political resistance may be mounted.40
Let us now turn to Sade, whom the surrealists celebrated as a sexual pioneer and whose images of sexual brutality they read for the exquisite pleasure derived from transgression. In her landmark essay Must We Burn de Sade? Simone de Beauvoir noted that it “is neither as an author nor as a sexual pervert that Sade imposes himself on our attention. Sade’s anomalies take on their value [by the fact that he] develops an immense [philosophical] system in order to claim them.”41 “For Sade,” wrote Bataille, all “brakes are off,” making him “the paradigmatic sovereign man.”42 Sade’s sovereignty, however, was not about decisive, foundational, or supralegal power (of which he had none).43 What Bataille (who appreciated Sade) and Beauvoir (who did not) admired in him and recognized as sovereign was his capacity, even amid exceptional conditions of carcerality and solitary confinement, to maintain sovereignty over his mind, to retain his imaginative and critical capacities, to use writing to explore the limits of his body. It is this indestructible quality, no matter the pressure or its duration, that they described as sovereignty and that I see as a critical ingredient in exigent sadism—not sovereignty as a synonym for exercising power or control over another but as a nonpossessive force that persists in the face of oppression. This sovereign, unbending force issues from the sexual drive’s fugitivity, its unyielding quality to capture.
To be clear, I am not proposing that this sovereign quality of the unconscious makes the unconscious de facto revolutionary. To the extent that the unconscious is unbound energy, it is politically agnostic and, as such, can be as easily commandeered by just causes as by fascist ideologies.44 To use one’s sadism in a revolutionary way, that is, still requires the pairing of the drive with political commitments to justice, to antiracism, to decolonial thinking, to liberational politics. Exigent sadism, in other words, is not some natural or straightforward expression of the unconscious; an exigently sadistic refusal presupposes that drive’s energy (its sovereignty) be harnessed by an ethicopolitical stance.
New Forms of Sadism
Before proceeding, it’s important to underscore that when we talk about the sexual unconscious we are not referring to the capacity for attachment and interpersonal connection nor to sexual fantasies or sexual behaviors.45 The sexual unconscious, rather, refers to a force that encompasses the ferocity, even the brutishness, of libidinality, of which sadism is a critical component.46
Sadism is a heavy concept with a long and troubled history, the mere mention of which can call up intense anxieties.47My aim is to inject a new dynamism to sadism, opening up the fan of sadisms to appreciate sadism’s plurality: different sadisms are operated by different forces and behave, well, differently. The canonical understanding of sadism, which conflates it with human destructiveness (destructive sadism), is overly narrow. Sensible sadism is a more benign BDSM48 variant, where a top consensually delivers prenegotiated, carefully dosed “sadistic” encounters.49Both destructive and sensible sadisms involve the exercise of the will: the destructive sadist wills herself over another, while the sensible sadist wills herself over herself to ensure she does not exceed agreed-upon limits.
By contrast, exigent sadism is operated by passibility, which means that it’s neither active nor passive, involving instead a capacity to endure, even to suffer.50 If exigent sadism involves action, and it does, such action follows from having had to accept how bad things are and that something needs to be done, an acceptance that is not easy and that the ego formidably resists. Both on the personal and on the political level, disavowal and denial are powerful defenses—as, for example, when we don’t let ourselves acknowledge that someone we love is toxic to us, when someone refuses to recognize that their country is falling into fascism or committing genocide, and so on. To break through such defenses, we have to be willing to tolerate the intensification of the suffering that is brought about in the confrontation with truth.
Named after Laplanche’s insistence on the sexual unconscious’s exigency, “this object that keeps knocking at the door, this intruder, the other within us,”51exigent sadism is a determination that stops at nothing.52 It works by unbinding, calling up forces internal to us that may feel frightening by virtue of being sexual.53 Some examples of exigent sadism would be the refusal to eclipse Palestine from our conversations even though it makes others uncomfortable or hostile to us; turning down speaking invitations, positions, and awards that pinkwash genocide; opposing oppression by speaking up, participating in protests, sabotage, and so on. Such stances make this sadism a vulnerability for the sadist, because one has to risk, which means one may lose friends and connections, decline access and privilege (e.g., giving up scholarships), get arrested or disappeared, taking the exigent sadist down unexpected paths and toward costly outcomes.
In everyday parlance, exigency refers to an urgent demand, one that can’t wait. Exigent sadism shares this scorn for the usual argument that “calm gradualism,” debate, and the molasses of endless “dialogue” can ever sufficiently address issues of power.54 If it is impatient, this is not because it is impulsive or rushed but because it comes after the delay imposed by those in power, by the system, by structural factors, by proceduralism, and after the delay imposed by our defenses and the urge to self-preserve. In that sense, we don’t exactly “choose” exigent sadism (again, exigent sadism is not an exercise of our will); it is chosen for us when the exigency of the political moment meets our capacity to bend our will, to accept that action will have to be taken, and to take it. Rationalized and vague deferrals about waiting indefinitely for something to spontaneously change are antithetical to exigent sadism’s temporality of “crisis time,” which is another way of saying that exigent sadism is keenly attuned to the stakes of inaction.55 In high contrast to our programmatic devotion to repair, which weakens our appetite for resistance and consigns us to serving power, exigent sadism’s libidinal core draws out our revolutionary impulse. So while history is full of examples of people falling into destructiveness, it is also rife with instances of people risking themselves to resist oppression, to oppose fascism and the intensifications of ethnonationalism, to valiantly participate in anticolonial struggles. If psychoanalysis has had embarrassingly little to say about the psychic processes of how individuals are able to resist, it is because it has so easily exclusively relinquished the domain of the erotic: psychoanalysis turns to libidinality only to theorize fascism’s appeal (a.k.a. psychoanalysis has much to say about theories of fascism but embarrassingly little about theorizing revolution). Neither psychoanalysis nor political theory has taken libidinality’s capacity for resistance into account; rather, both have stayed with mostly desexualized discourses.
Desexualization
From Aristotle and Plato, through Rousseau’s social contract theory, to current thinking, Western political philosophy has largely ejected sexuality from theorizations of the political. This is not to say that no political theory has been interested in, or even preoccupied with, the sensuous body or with sexuality. Rousseau’s political philosophy, for example, is heavily inflected by and through his sexuality. But Elizabeth Rose Wingrove is the exception when, in her book Rousseau’s Republican Romance, she shows how Rousseau uses consensual nonconsent to elaborate the submission of our individual will to that of the collective (social contract theory).56 Her work proves the rule, namely, that links between sexuality and political theorization are rarely drawn out. In fact, when Rousseau’s sexual predilections arementioned, this is offered as biographical detail rather than as having contoured his political sensibilities. The same applies to Foucault, whose sexual sadomasochism is widely known but never linked to his political theorizations. Further proving the point, political thinkers and writers who dared broach the question of the sexual, such as Sade and Bataille, have been systematically left out of discussions of politics and the nation-state.57 It is time to bring in those historically excluded voices, even to turn to them to theorize what Sophie Lewis calls the erotics of antifascism.58
One of the most insistent authors on how the erotic and politics entwine, Sade gives us a way to think about the dangers of desexualization.59 To suggest that there is something dangerous in desexualization may seem startling—and all the more so in connection to Sade, whose reputation as a depraved libertine precedes him.60 But the truth is that, long before Max Weber’s analysis of the state’s monopoly of legitimate violence, Sade’s political treatises gave us the insight that the state legitimizes its violence by telling the story that its own violence is based solely on reason and calculation—that there is nothing enigmatic or pleasurable about it.61 That, of course, is not true: state power is, in fact, rife with sexuality’s sublimated version, what Wendy Brown calls “the sexual ethos of predator and conqueror.”62 And of course, we also see unsublimated versions of state violence, for example, when rape is used as a weapon of war, as in the orchestrated rapes of Bosnian women in Srebrenica, or when Israeli soldiers record themselves mockingly trying on lingerie looted from the ransacked home of refugeed Palestinian women. But my point here is not how state violence works but how the working of state violence is narrated bythe state: as rational, dutiful, and righteous—stripped of erotic intonations.
A discussion about how desexualization lays the groundwork for citizens to be disciplined by the state may seem counterintuitive given how much attention has been paid to the role the libidinal current plays in authoritarian and fascistic processes (e.g., in fascism’s appeal and in fascist aesthetics, feelings of belonging that fuel group identification, etc.).63 But what Sade was uniquely able to tune in to was how desexualization degrades our capacity for resistance, how it paves the way for the substitution of the reparative for justice.64 What better way for fascism to target our appetite for resistance than to push us into the self-preservative mode? One of the ways this works nowadays can be seen in how liberals—and even those in the secular Left—think and act as if fact-checking, education, and critical thinking could defuse the power of fascist erotics. What such a hyperrationalist, desexualized ethos does is distance us from our sexual drive and its aggressive elements, thereby effectively neutralizing our capacity for resistance and revolutionary action. Operating as propaganda for a life in which injustice is not something we suffer and may fight against but something to come to terms with and learn to live with, the reparative, more than any other desexualized process, defuses revolutionary possibilities.
Klein and Reparation
Melanie Klein, the principal theorist of repair, works with a form of aggression entirely cleaved from sexuality. In his essay “Should We Burn Melanie Klein?”—a titular parallel to de Beauvoir’s “Must We Burn de Sade?”—Laplanche took Klein to task on this point. “The reductive view,” he writes, “would be that [Freud] addedthe death drive to his account of sexuality and that it was Klein who gave this new development its full significance.”65 But Klein’s notion of an original sadism, he objects, oversimplifies sadism as if it were a simple synonym for human destructiveness, obscuring the “demonic” aspect of libidinality.66
For Klein, sadism is constitutional to the infant who sees the world as all good or all bad (splitting).67 The infant’s “sadistic impulses,” she writes, are directed against the mother’s body, “scooping it out, devouring the contents, destroying it by every means which sadism can suggest.”68 Concerned that her fantasized attacks have harmed the mother, whom she also loves, the infant becomes flooded with guilt. To expiate it, she extends reparative efforts that try to make “good the injuries which [she] did in phantasy [to the mother], and for which [she] still unconsciously feel[s] very guilty.”69Extending reparation is not enough, however: the parent has to also accept these gifts of reparation, thereby reassuring the child about her reparative capacities and solidifying the child’s sense of her own goodness. In offering “a psychic roadmap for the preservation of love,” Kleinian reparation sets the norm for how relationality can triumph over instinctual and primitive sadism.70
David Eng importantly probes “the psychic limits of reparation.”71 He notes how the Kleinian infant repairs not out of love but because obliterating her loved object would deplete the ego of its object of attachment. Pointing us to an unexpected leap in Klein’s argument that aligns the infant with the colonial explorer, he shows reparation to be “neither anxiety nor ambivalence toward an injured other, but the disavowal of responsibility in a history of colonial war and violence.”72 Put differently, repair is concerned not with the damage caused to the other but with repairing the aggressor, especially the aggressor’s sense of their own goodness. In this light, repair may be seen as a racialized form of self-interested affective reasoning that reifies the presumed goodness of whiteness.
Eng is not alone in tracing the racial and colonial dynamics innervating Kleinian reparation. Joshua Chambers-Letson similarly calls attention to how reparation, “including reparative reading, has historically been implicated in short-circuiting rather than successfully realizing attempts to break with the world as it is in order to create equality.”73 “Insofar as Klein and her patients,” he continues, “work through and repair the damage they have done to the self by way of . . . violent tendencies towards . . . racial others,” Kleinian reparation functions “to shore up whiteness.”74
Carolyn Laubender shares these concerns about reparation’s ethicopolitical failures. In Klein’s account of her work with her child patient Richard, Laubender notes, Klein describes his achievement of the depressive position as “best exemplified by his identification with Nazi Germany.”75 How is it, Laubender’s work invites us to wonder, that we have missed that at the heart of Klein’s theory of reparation lies the assumption that psychic maturity involves the capacity to identify with one’s aggressor even “at the height of a genocidal extermination”?76 Lara Sheehi and Stephen Sheehi augment such critiques by turning to Palestine. Their work shows how repair participates in the ideological production of a partners-in-peace mentality that “is ideologically misattuned in the context of settler colonial and racial domination.”77 In yet another context, one that traces the connections between white supremacy and queer deflationary histories, Jack Halberstam points out how fascism lives on in the techniques of repair, challenging us to wonder why we still have use for a concept that “amounts to the fixing of a shitty world?”78
To these important interventions, I would add that readers of Klein overlook the fact that the infant’s attacks on the mother are not actual attacks but are carried out in the infant’s unconscious fantasy. How peculiar, then, that at the origin of a theory of reparation that will eventually become paradigmatic for thinking repair is a concern not with material but fantasized aggressions. To put this more clearly, the Kleinian mother has nothing to forgive; the infant has not, in fact, harmed her, which means that Klein’s theory was never meant to attend to actual aggressions. Nor can the developmental paradigm she offers be simply transposed unto adult relations or the political realm because while the mother asymmetrically cares for the child, making her child’s developmental needs and the preservation of the child’s self-esteem her foremost tasks, adult relationships do not so grossly prioritize one party over another.
With these interventions, we are slowed down, made to see repair as joltingly out of sync with ethics and justice as having, in the words of Summer Kim Lee, “destructive capacities.”79 Such path-clearing work does more than strip repair of its ostensible innocence: it reveals the stakes of the antireparative turn. We begin to see, then, that by moralizing the expectation that the harmed person participate in the restoration of the aggressor’s sense of goodness, the reparative models developed in Klein’s wake involve nothing less than the imposition of the reparative process on the person harmed. Consider, for example, the expectation placed on people of color when they name racist enactments of having to hold the aggressor’s “pained” feelings, even to generate a bibliography to educate the white person, or—and this is presented as a great line on a CV—to chair a committee on antiracism. Why would you refuse a person or an institution, the reparative imperative bleats, the opportunity to improve, to learn and do better, to fix things? To put it more bluntly, the willingness to sacrifice oneself in the reparative process is one of psychoanalysis’s most potent moralizing, power-wielding tools.80 And for these reasons, repair may not only operate as an accountability dodge but, also, and especially, as a reenveloping entrapment that compels us to remain in relationships with our abusers. The reparative, we might say, is more interested in “working through” the injury in the hope that the reality and impact of violence disappear.81 In contrast, exigent sadism works toward the surfacing of friction; it keeps at the wound, refusing the illusory promises of repair, and, in this regard, we may think of exigent sadism as a traumatophilic force.82
Refusing the Allure of the Reparative
The refusal to sacrifice oneself as part of the reparative sequence, to say no to dialogue and to say no to consigning oneself to repair the aggressor are the domain of exigent sadism. Nowhere is the violence of the reparative made more obvious than when the object of aggression refuses the labor of docility demanded by the person (or institution) who harmed them. Not only that but the sacrifice (of facilitating the other’s repair) has to appear consensual, as if it were willingly produced by the subject rather than as having been coerced or forced. In this sense, exigent sadism’s refusal amounts to withdrawing one’s consent to certain aspects of the social contract. Even when we sense that “ongoing dialogue” is a sham or a delaying tactic, even when we intuit it may do nothing more than further engage us with an object interested only in its own self, stepping out of the social contract is not at all easy. The reparative has been sold to us as the ethical denunciation of narcissism, as “a fundamental element in love and in all human relationships” or as “constructive sociality itself.”83
Unquestionably, exigent sadism has a measure of cruelty in it, because the refusal to repair the other requires that a certain kind of ruthlessness be brought to the situation. And if we are honest with ourselves, that may be accompanied by a feeling of pleasure—and that can make us feel guilty, as if the refusal to repair the other should be solemn and serious, when a measure of joy always accompanies refusal. If we remember, however, that sadism is a sexual derivative, we should not be surprised to find pleasure in its wheelhouse; exigent sadism has an erotic hypostasis. There is a comfort in knowing that you resisted, insists James Joy, and that is itself a form of pleasure.84 What makes exigent sadism’s pleasure ethical, however, as opposed to self-indulgent is that it is not done self-righteously to aggrandize the ego, nor is exigent sadism about punishing those who harmed us—it is precisely not about revenge, retaliating, or “keeping score.”85 Exigent sadism, we begin to see, is a path to an erotics of resistance.
One of the challenges of refusing repair is being able to imagine not being in relation. Severing ties, breaking ranks, endangering connections, disaffiliating from organizations: all of these can feel scary and are accompanied by real relational and material losses. We might recall here Freud’s “observation that people never willingly abandon a libidinal position, not even, indeed, when a substitute is already beckoning to them.”86 Libidinal divestment, that is, is not an exercise of the will, but requires, rather, the bending of the will so that the ego and its homeostatic investments can be countered and opposed, which is to say that libidinal divestment often induces states of overwhelm and of loss. But if such loss occurs, this is not destructiveness; it is not, for example, about dumping someone when one does not get one’s way or when a relationship faces difficulty, nor is exigent sadism about promoting estrangement. Unlike destructive sadism, exigent sadism does not try to exert control over the other; it does not endanger relationships out of spite or narcissistic need. And if the relationship does break apart, the exigent sadist assumes a portion of responsibility, owning rather than disavowing their role. This is not to imply that sadism is impervious to the dangers of self-righteousness; it is only to underscore that when commandeered by one’s inflamed narcissism, we are no longer in the domain of exigent sadism but have entered the dynamics of domination, wherein one tries to impose one’s will over an other.
No doubt it can be terrifying to walk away from what one has mastered, from cultivated relationships and decidedly hard-won positions, from offers of inclusion, of awards, of scholarships, of publishing opportunities, of administrative power, and so on. Giving these up is no doubt costly, and may even feel to be beyond one’s affordances. Who has the privilege of being an exigent sadist, one might ask—who can afford to squander resources and opportunities like that? The implication that exigent sadism is only for the well resourced and a liability for all others, that only the privileged can afford to risk an exigently sadistic stance, and that minoritized subjects have too little to begin with to risk putting anything on the line, is not only inaccurate, it is also politically short-sighted. Far too often the liberal focus is on who can afford to take risks when risk is always unevenly distributed. From that perspective, discouraging risk-taking may be seen as a counterinsurgency tactic, a tactic operating to “countervail and to coopt trajectories of revolutionary potential.”87
To be clear, I want to see those who are well resourced take more risks and put themselves on the line—as Harvard University did in rejecting the Trump administration’s demand that it eliminate its diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and screen international students. But this is the (short-lived) exception that proves the rule: having access/privilege appears to lessen, not increase, one’s likelihood to resist and to risk. For the most part, it is not the powerful who stand up to power. So it is imperative to ask, Who profits from placing limits on expenditure? Who is served by austerity logics that expect those poor in resources not to take risks? (In Greece’s case, as we saw it was not the Greeks who were served by austerity.) Power would have us think that acts of refusal and resistance are only for the richly resourced perhaps precisely because it is those most precarious who are willing to generate states of emergency and to fight a revolution. Those for whom the world does not make a home will more readily risk overwhelm and loss, and it is for this reason that it is minoritized people who will most often be cautioned toward their own compliance, or discouraged from taking risks targeting their capacity for revolutionary action. The common sense that those with lesser resources have to protect themselves is, as Elsa Dorlin has argued, part of the technology of “the production of disarmed bodies.”88 Those whom power has already placed on their back foot are constantly being told that self-preservation is their best bet. Yes, exigent sadism is a risk, and risk is alwaysalready delineated along racial, classed, and gendered lines. Minoritized individuals are excellently equipped to use their experiences of disenfranchisement to make their own decisions about when to take those risks, with whom, and to what ends.
“Aren’t you afraid of losing your job?” an interviewer recently asked Tiffany Willoughby-Herard, professor at the University of California, Irvine, as she was being ferried away, restrained by cops in riot gear, for supporting her students’ protest against the genociding of Palestinians. Willoughby-Herard was not distracted by this question, which implicates her vulnerability as an African American woman. “What job do I have if my students don’t have a future?” she fiercely retorted. This type of question—“Aren’t you afraid to lose your job?”—wants us to think that there’s something masochistic in risking one’s resources, so accustomed are we to prioritizing ourselves over others: exigent sadism is an unwillingness to protect the self no matter the cost.89 Conflating exigent sadism with pathological self-sacrifice can have an interpellative effect, “calling” the subject back into ego’s austerity regimes and cooling down the energies of social movements. It is not hard to see who is served by austerity logics that masquerade as political sensitivity—in this case, a Black professor’s increased precarity—when liberatory struggles have always come down harder on the marginalized and those of color.
Relational Implications
So far I’ve been arguing that exigent sadism involves relational divestiture. But might it also have other relational implications?
In refusing repair, exigent sadism is not indifferent to the other’s gesture. To the contrary, the exigent sadist seeks to stage an encounter that stands to rearrange the terms by which the relationship proceeds. It does do so, however, not by reaching for a synthetic, relation-preservative solution (that is, the place of injustice is not the place to prioritize Hegelian sublation) but by demanding something more substantial of the other. The sadist, that is, delivers a traumatism, a psychic blow that stands to put in motion forces that may be psychically transformative for the other as well.90 A lot comes down to how passible the other will be to us, how susceptible to the ask. Ethical sadism, in other words, does not build a system, nor does it work by mastery or by trying to control the other, which would undermine the other’s sovereignty, but is a live process that proceeds through and in interaction with its environment.
Insofar as it may prove transformative for the other (if, for example, it inaugurates a crisis of conscience or ethics in the other), exigent sadism is an unusual type of care. But this care does not aim at the other’s betterment; it’s more accurate to think of it as a kind of relational militancy that prioritizes ethics and justice over sentiments and good feeling.91 To invoke relational militancy is to stress that exigent sadism gives relationships a true fighting chance, staging the opportunity for them to be transformed into something more viable, less harmful, more honest. This is also the space where relationships are truly tested, put to the test and to the anguish of potential rupture. As a full-throated task, exigent sadism is therefore also a vigorous act of hope. Herein resides also the sadist’s exquisite vulnerability, because the task exposes the rawness of the sadist’s need, in that it issues an invitation that the other may or may not accept. The other can refuse the engagement, recoiling into moralizing accusations about the sadist’s oversimplification, irrationality, rigidity, or demandingness. The exigent sadist keeps negation on the table; she takes the risk of discovering that she was, after all, not that special to the other—that she is fungible, easily exchangeable for another, more docile subject. For the sadist to have no attachment to how the other person responds is impossible; the sadist thus approaches the encounter with a sharpened sense of hope, a hope that she knows may be dashed, accepting the fact that hope always involves heartbreak.92From this angle, we might even say that exigent sadism nurtures an appreciation for one’s own strength, akin, perhaps, to what Ernst Bloch describes as militant hope, the unstoppable fervor to transform the world in the face of failure, catastrophe, and destruction.93
In Closing
Insofar as it is a true commitment to run toward the fire, exigent sadism is not to be romanticized. Nor, as I have tried to show, is it always easy to engage. If I have paid close attention to subjective processes, this is not to eschew concerns about the social and the political dimension (as psychoanalysis has been known to do) but to stay close to the experiential dimension of what makes us risk averse and to tend to the workings of processes undergirding our political presence in the world. There is “no possible change,” writes Paul Preciado, “that does not imply a mutation of our own processes of political subjectivation.”94 To bring about such mutation we need subjects able to access the revolutionary impulse, and that involves nothing less than the risk of destabilizing and restructuring one’s libidinal economies.
Exigent sadism is a response to the urgency and seriousness of what is at stake with the rise of fascism, of ethnonationalist intensification, of the state’s violent doubling down on trans people, on queers, on immigrants. It is a response that recognizes that revolutionary actions are not possible if we cannot find ways out of the fear and inner resistances that inevitably crop up when one takes action against power. And, of course, I do not offer exigent sadism as an answer to how we can remake the world, only as a possible way out of our self-interested individuality, a stepping stone to embracing insurgency. Each time you decide whether to sign a petition that condemns a person with power over you, to go to a protest where you might get arrested, to defy orders knowing you will be punished, to participate in an action that puts you at risk of getting doxed or beaten up, to withhold your labor even as you face sanction by your employer, to form or participate in an underground society—every such action requires you to bend your will and step into the fray. Exigent sadism is a true risking of the self that has to be wrested from the ego every single time.95 And this, as we have seen, is not without its pleasures.
To criticize the reparative as I have done is to ruffle articles of faith, and in this sense, this essay is itself an exercise in exigent sadism. I am taking aim at repair, arguing that we have fallen too hard for a concept that, in many contexts, can be dangerous, exploitative, even a tool of counterinsurgency. This is a harsh truth to confront. If this article is asking a lot of us, it is because it must. We should accept nothing less of each other and of our theories, especially if we want theories that slice the world open, theories that are made for resisting violence and for standing up to fascism.
I briefly discuss some of these ideas in relation to the revolutionary impulse, in a different context, in Texte zur Kunst.