Jesse Louis Jackson passed away on February 17, 2026. I have to admit that I did not know very much about Jesse Jackson, but I do have soundbites of angry white men, raging about the anger of Jesse Jackson.
But why?
Another memory. An older German friend from my undergrad, with whom I would go for late-night hangouts. It was from him that I learned that Gaddafi was an “evil man.” That was 2007. It would take another eighteen years to learn another perspective of Gaddafi. The revolutionary political theorist who was assassinated by Western imperialism. The man who had only female bodyguards, because men could not be trusted. The man who placed ads through the Italian modeling agency recruiting hundreds of “attractive women”, and promised “Libyan gifts” and were believed to be attending a VIP party but instead, Gaddafi kept them waiting in a hall for hours, only to deliver a two-hour lecture on Islam and the role of women, and handed each of them a copy of the Quran and his Green Book.1 But I digress. What I felt like writing about was the notion of anger. Of rage and its disavowal.
Dysthymia, now known also as Persistent Depressive Disorder2, is the disavowal of anger that produces a distinct clinical constellation, that of a chronic, low hum sulk that is embedded within the character. The subject knows they are aggrieved yet acts as if they are not entitled to that knowledge, creating a splitting Verleugnung rather than simple repression.3
Contrary to the acute hostility of major depression or the explosive rage, or the measured but persistent seething demand to be witnessed, dysthymic anger presents as a pervasive, background irritability. The internet is filled with videos of people who are no longer able to contain themselves in traffic jams, or crashouts over minor changes to their schedule, or during a discussion about how the dishwasher ought to be loaded. The tiniest friction can trigger seemingly disproportionate internal agitation that is immediately metabolised into self-recrimination, or else. The affect is felt somatically, it seeps out in migraines, the irritable bowel syndromes, but stripped of its aggressive signification.
The disavowed anger operates through actions that are held in order to defang the confrontation. For the possibility of confrontation is foreclosed. The psyche would rather chronic procrastination on tasks benefiting others. The “forgetting” of obligations. Subtle quality degradation in labour. To think that there is a nefarious plan is a misunderstanding, for ontologically, there is no subconscious, nor unconscious, but a knowing refusal that must remain unacknowledged to preserve the ego’s virtuous self-image. The dysthymic subject maintains the fantasy of being “nice” or “easygoing” while enacting precisely the opposite via micro-withdrawals.
There is a crucial distinction from alexithymia, where affects cannot be named, dysthymic disavowal involves successful translation of rage into bodily complaint. The soma, which the neoliberal subject obsesses over, as it is their preferred route. But here, in the negative, it is found in chronic fatigue, diffuse pain, collapse of sleep architecture, while the cognitive recognition of anger remains accessible but inoperative. The subject can articulate that I am angry, but cannot organise behaviour around the avowal. The knowledge floats free from the Real of the body.
Those moments before the midlife crisis. The career stagnation. Relational withdrawals. “Failure to launch” functions as a maintained façade of grievances against objects who have failed to recognise the subject’s sacrificed potential. The dysthymic position preserves the phantasy of unacknowledged greatness, making America great again, with endless I could have beens’… that requires the continued non-realisation of capacity. The anger turned the self’s own efficacy to punish the Other for its neglect.
Uncle Rico from Napoleon Dynamite (Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2004) operates as the paradigmatic dysthymic subject par excellence, with his “back in ‘82” fantasies of state championship glory literalize the maintained façade of grievances. Uncle Rico does not rage at the coach who benched him, instead, he metabolizes the injury into chronic self-sabotage with the Herbalife scams, the van life, the multi-layer marketing schemes of breast enlargements. The “state championship” functions as his lost cause of desire that gurantees his present obsolescence, permitting him to act as if his failure is an external imposition, while structurally prohibited from actualizing his capacity that would risk testing the fantasy against reality. His inability to confront the coach, or the system, preserves the “goodness” of the lost object, the idealized high school past, at the expense of his present boundary integrity. He remains the ideal dependent, his aggression foreclosed into the aesthetic of the has-been rather than mobilized into the politics of the could-be. Is it any wonder, those who are most dependent on the fantasy of white supremacy, the communism for the few, those who benefit from structural inequality, rages at those who demand equality, those who threaten to reveal the truth, as “needy” or “anxciously attached”?
The way it differs from the pathology of narcissism, where there is rage mobilised at the slightest narcissistic injury, dysthymia presents the inverse: a structural prohibition against righteous indignation. Perceived injustices trigger immediate self-doubt or guilt, prompting a search for evidence of deserving punishment, thereby preserving the object’s goodness at the expense of the subject’s boundary integrity. Herein lies the rigidity of the depressive position. The ideal white dependent, aggression cannot be modulated, lest it be utilised, only foreclosed.
This is where we can find the liberal demand, vis-à-vis the perfect victims. The liberal whites may sympathize for the Palestinians, the trans subject, the queers, the blacks, the Other. But they will only accept perfect victims. Dying victims. Voiceless victims. Because they themselves have long thrown away their own keys to their prison.
A note on structural differentiation: in melancholia, the aggressive charge is metabolised through the superego’s brutal self, whereas in dysthymia, the superego’s attack is a chronic, quiet, self-directed at the subject’s aspirations, rather than existence itself. The disavowal maintains a thin membrane, the mask for social functionality.4
For the alexithymic subject, on the other hand, anger is foreclosed. It cannot be located at all. At most, it is a theoretical construct that applies to others, but not to the self’s “real” experience of mere “tiredness” or “stress.”
Sociopolitically, we frequently observe dysthymic disavowal, with subordinate positioning within institutional hierarchies. The subject has internalised that overt anger risks realisation, exclusion, and social benefits, so it installs a permanent disavowal mechanism that becomes characterological. The face has melted into the mask.
I can remove the cause, but not the symptom.5
The symptom has thus become a survival strategy fossilised into pathology. An inability to avow aggression marks a successful internalisation of powerlessness. We can see the masses doomscrolling, privately, the endless redactions of horror from the Epstein files. The subject secretly enjoys the fantasy of hopelessness, in comfort. In private.
So, returning to Jesse Jackson. The dysthymic structure of white liberal subjectivity finds its perfect complement in the fetishistic economy of “Black rage.” The white subject projects not merely envy, as the white subject, prohibited from avowing their own structural fury, and normalised body within capitalist abstraction, can only fantasise the abject as possessing an unmediated, “authentic” access to anger that they themselves had to metabolise into somatic complaint.
The rage of the abject functions as an titilating, salacious, arousing cause of desire for the white dysthymic. It becomes the lost object that the subject believes the Other enjoys in their stead. The stereotype of the angry Other, the Jesse Jackson or Malcom X, is not feared by the liberal white woman, but coveted. It represents a libidinal position where anger can be felt without the crushing superegoic prohibition that converts white aggression into chronic self-sabotage. The white feminine position then fantasises about how wonderful it is that they get to feel. The fantasy becomes that they get to know what they feel and say it!
Fanon observes the epidermal schema in which the Black subject is fixed by the white gaze, as the repository of unreason, while the white subject experiences this fixation as privation.6 The zone of non-being gets inverted. The white subject here can occupy the grey, airless chamber of perpetual reasonableness, while the fetishised rage of the abject offers the sublime intensity of Being.7
This is why Martin Luther King Jr. is preferred by the nice white women, while Jesse Jackson is feared or repressed. Jesse Jackson represents the threat of avowed rage. Jesse Jackson maintained to keep hope alive. It was the raised black fists that required the white subject to recognise their own complicity. Jesse Jackson refused to perform rage for white consumption, nor did he allow his anger to metabolise into a titillating spectacle. Rather, the anger was utilised for political demands that gave a real threat to structural redistribution.
What was the white response to Jesse Jackson? Foreclosure. Reverse racism. Why do you have to always make it about race? The horror was that he refused to disavow what the white subject cannot avow. We must refuse the impotent guilt of white liberalism, which demands “awareness, “allyship,” and its fetishistic disavowals.
Careful how they will martyr the abject. One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This.8 The white subject knows very well the radicality of even Martin Luther King Jr, yet it will whitewash all of its radicality into a t-shirt slogan. I have a dream. What was the dream exactly? Anger without teeth.
Anyway, fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me.
Gaddafi, M. (1975). The Green book. Public Establishment for Publishing, Advertising and Distribution.
American Psychiatric Association. (2022). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (5th ed., text rev.). American Psychiatric Association Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.books.9780890425787
Freud distinguishes Verleugnung (disavowal) from Verdrängung (repression). The subject “knows” the traumatic fact, yet simultaneously “acts as if” that knowledge does not belong to their subjective experience. Octave Mannoni famously formulated it as “Je sais bien, mais quand même” [I know very well, but all the same].
Freud, S. (1961). Fetishism. In J. Strachey (Ed. and Trans.), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 21). Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1927)
Michel Foucault describes how power changed from antiquity to the modern era. Before, power was like a death sentence; it destroyed you completely. Today, power is a continuous management or administration. It keeps you alive, but regulates how you live. Melancholia works like the old style of power: the superego tells you that you are fundamentally worthless and should not exist.
Dysthymia operates like modern bio-power, in which the superego does not try to destroy you but keeps you in a state of permanent minor failure. You can barely function at work or in relationships, but you can never flourish or thrive. The thin membrane of functionality is what Foucault would call the “norm”, which is the minimum standard in which you must meet to remain part of society, while in a continuous, quiet punishment of fatigue, self-doubt, and inhibition prevents you from ever demanding more.
Foucault, M. (2003). “Society must be defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976 (D. Macey, Trans.). Picador. (Original work published 1997)
Sharman, J. (Director). (1975). The Rocky Horror Picture Show [Film]. 20th Century Fox.
Fanon describes a basic unfairness in how racism structures seeing and being seen. When white people look at Black people, they fix them in place, treating them as the “unreasonable” one, the body that feels too much, the overly sensitive person, the person who is all instinct and no control Black people get trapped in this look, reduced to their skin. But white people pay a price too, because they project all the “feeling” and “aliveness” onto Black bodies, they themselves are left feeling empty. They ight be reasonable, but robotic. Civilized but dead inside. The “zone of non-being” that Fanon says Black people get forced into becomes, for white people, a grey, perpetual “niceness” and control. They then envy the very vitality they forced onto the other. The schema is the automatic bodily way this happens before thought can even enter.
Fanon, F. (2008). Black skin, white masks (R. Philcox, Trans.). Grove Press. (Original work published 1952)
El Akkad, O. (2025). One day, everyone will have always been against this. Knopf.
