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Disclaimer 18.02.2024
It has been since observed that neither Kanye nor Hitler is displayed at Madame Tussauds museum at the time of the reporting.
"Ye's figure has been retired from the attraction floor to our archive," a spokesperson for Madame Tussauds London told The Guardian. "Each profile earns their place at Madame Tussauds London and we listen to our guests and the public on who they expect to see at the attraction."
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/ye-tussauds-hitler/
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Two winters ago, I enjoyed seeing friends in a reading group, spoiled weekly with canapé and wine. We took turns reading texts from Kristeva on the abject and the erotic, the monstrous and the taboo: bodily fluids and decay, beyond disgust, blurring the line between the subject and the object. For Kristeva, the abject symbolizes the threat to one’s boundaries posed by what is expelled from the self, as excrement or from the maternal.
That was also the winter when Ye, or the artist formerly known as Kanye West, made his infamous antisemitic tweet. And so, as the night progressed, I couldn’t hold in my view, my excrement, my taboo any longer, “…you know, if the abject were to embody a personality today, it would have to be none other than Kanye West!“
In that room, the three white colleagues began to lecture me about my antisemitism as if I had never heard of the Schindler’s List. The audacity to even bring out the name of the canceled, it was as if I had dramatically failed my assimilation exam as a foreign alien. I had failed my position as a model minority. It was as if I had become yet another antisemite. I, too, was now socially ejected, egested, voided, and defecated.
Aside from racism endured and the willful ignorance of these colleagues, who stand behind the invisibility of whiteness, busily performing and maintaining Western ideologies as a moving object, I found the real intrigue was not the Superego insistence of Prolificity (as outlined by Hans-Georg Moeller & Paul J. D’ambrosio in Sincerity, Authenticity and Profilicity: Notes on the problem, a vocabulary and history of identity), as Madame Tussaud removed Ye’s wax sculpture, despite keeping Adolf Hitler on show. No, I was fascinated by the impossibility of dialogue as we touched on the traumatic Lacanian Real.
As a precursor to Oct 7, as a prelude to the fear and bigotry of the other masked as a denouncement of antisemitism, what lies in the realm of the unspeakable?
That same year, Robert K. Beshara published the timely book ‘A Psychoanalytic Biography of Ye, The Legacy of Unconditional Love.’ I speak to Dr. Beshara with all my heart’s content on the forbidden: a critique of the treatment of manic depression, psychosis, and melancholia in society, the zone of non-being for a racialized subject within a colonial/capitalist/imperial world, ethical listening within a society of microfascism and Islamophobia.
Robert K. Beshara روبرت بشارة, Ph.D., is a scholar, psychoanalyst, musician, actor, director and artist; he has authored Decolonial Psychoanalysis: Towards Critical Islamophobia Studies (Routledge, 2019), Freud & Said (2021), but I discovered his work through his book, A Psychoanalytic Biography of Ye (2023). You can receive 25% off with promo code: PROMO25
Additionally, from the episode, you may find interest in some further reading:
Through the Zone of Nonbeing: A Reading of Black Skin, White Masks in Celebration of Fanon’s Eightieth Birthday — LEWIS R. GORDON
The Man-Not: Race, Class, Genre, and the Dilemmas of Black Manhood — Tommy J. Curry
Can't Get You Out of My Head - Part 1: Bloodshed on Wolf Mountain — Adam Curtis
A Psychoanalytic Biography of Ye