Whiteness is not essence, biological, or even, strictly speaking, power. It is a defensive formation organized through refusal, idealization, and erasure. It has no content of its own, only survival strategies.
Survival of what?
Of a structure that cannot admit dependence. Of a fantasy that must not be interrupted. Whiteness parasitizes language.1 It grafts itself onto the self-image, masquerading as coherence while hollowing relation. It feeds on méconnaissance2 and fuses with the host’s image of the self.
This is why confrontations with whiteness, no matter how measured or how factual, so often provoke disproportionate rage. The subject clings to the identification as if survival depends on it.
And in a way, it does. To question whiteness is to threaten the scaffolding of the ego.
This is why the critique of white supremacy is so often met not with dialogue but with accusations of violence, murder, or genocide, especially when the critic is the one being violated. Projection is not a glitch in whiteness. It is its raison d'être. It accuses of deflecting and indicts to avoid recognition. It strikes first because it cannot bear to be seen.
As the world increasingly resists the ideological structure of whiteness, as its inevitability falters, its defenses multiply.
White defensiveness is not a singular issue but a topological formation. We must move beyond binaries and toward larger structural models to understand these topologies.3
One cannot rely on intuitions trained from the same ideological creations. It is about the architectures of recognition and refusal. Psychoanalysis offers us tools: not metaphors, but mechanisms, which are three modes, each a variant of whiteness as a defensive structure.
These are not psychologized nationalities. They have historically conditioned styles of defense. The United States represses with sentiment, Germany disavows through intellect, and the British-Nordic zone forecloses via erasure. All refuse asymmetry. Each has its own idiom. Each relates to the question of gratitude, a demand whiteness cannot bear, because it would mean acknowledging a debt it claims not to owe. And through this lens, we see whiteness not as a subject, but as a symptom: a parasite organized around the refusal of dependence, the denial of history, and the erasure of asymmetry.
Diagnosis
To diagnose whiteness, we must examine how it defends itself — not just against critique but against relation. It is not enough to track its gestures; we must read its structures. Whiteness defends itself through specific psychic mechanisms: repression, disavowal, and foreclosure. Each sustains a particular fantasy in relation to the Other, and each responds to gratitude, the possibility of gratitude, as a form of threat.
Because gratitude requires asymmetry, it reveals that something was given, unreciprocated, perhaps unasked for, that we are not self-made. To feel gratitude is to be touched by dependency. To receive care, history, or knowledge without being able to master it. Whiteness cannot tolerate this. So, it represses, it disavows, or it forecloses entirely.
In its repressive form, whiteness deals with gratitude by burying the need for it. Here, historical violence is wrapped in soft rituals: Thanksgiving, where genocide becomes a shared meal. The original act, the mass extermination of Indigenous people, is rebranded as an encounter of mutual hospitality. The white subject thanks the Native Other for being there, not for surviving. Gratitude is thus performed in the wrong direction — as a self-congratulatory performance of tolerance. Similarly, Columbus Day becomes an occasion to celebrate “discovery,” as opposed to invasion. Black History Month curates gratitude like a museum exhibit: the slave becomes the educator, the survivor becomes the content influencer. But the debt remains unacknowledged. Gratitude is instrumentalized. A sentimental cloak thrown over structural theft.4
Disavowal,5 in contrast, acknowledges history but splits it from implication. This is the stance of the liberal German feminist who has done the reading, who perhaps knows more than you. About genocide, colonialism, structural racism, but cannot bear to feel indebted. She knows the structures, but not the asymmetry. She will support you, yes, but not be grateful to you. Her knowledge circulates, but never lands. She will footnote the wound, not feel it. Gratitude, here, would imply that she received something she could not give herself. That knowledge was relational, not simply accumulated. And so she intellectualizes, moralizes, distances. She will critique her own privilege, but recoil if you call it a gift she must do something with. Her gratitude is short-circuited by suspicion. Dependency, to her, is a form of humiliation. She prefers moral autonomy, even if it costs her the possibility of intimacy.
In foreclosure, gratitude never enters the field. It is unthinkable because the Other was never symbolically present to begin with. Here, whiteness does not mourn, nor moralize. It deletes. This is the domain of Nordic neutrality and British bureaucratic civility, where the empire is spoken of in terms of “administration,” not extraction. There is no guilt, no pain, not even repression. Only silence. The British Museum stages plunder as prestige. Its display cases shimmer with theft and rape, but its lighting flatters. Tourism replaces mourning. Theft becomes history. Swedish humanitarianism, built on racialized hierarchies of aid, offers help to the “Global South” but recoils from any suggestion that Sweden might be indebted to those it profits from. Gratitude here is inverted: they should be grateful for being accepted, for being saved, for being included in the cold warmth of the rational state. The true asymmetry, the unpaid debt, has no name. It was never admitted.
Each of these formations refuses gratitude in its own way. The American represses it and dresses it up in performative mourning. The German disavows it by knowing too much and feeling too little. The British and Nordic formations foreclose it entirely, installing silence where relationality should be.
Gratitude, real gratitude, reveals dependence, inheritance, and the impossibility of self-sufficiency.6 It demands recognition of the gift, the wound, the world that pre-exists the white subject’s fantasy of autonomy. It is not just emotional. It is political. It is ontological. It breaks the mirror. And whiteness, faced with that break, will do anything to preserve the frame.
Prognosis
Structures do not vanish on their own. Like symptoms, they persist until they are either symbolized or collapse under the weight of their own contradictions. The defensive architectures of whiteness are no exception. If diagnosis names the structure, prognosis asks: what next? What becomes of these forms of whiteness when no intervention is made, when the defense mechanisms are left intact, undisturbed, and culturally reinforced?
For the repressive whiteness, while structurally defensive, retains the possibility of transformation, but only through symbolic reentry. That is, the subject must come to speak what was previously buried. This means reckoning with history not as content but as trauma: something that interrupts, reorganizes, and wounds the self-image. The repressed subject must be brought to language, to contradiction, to mourning. If this does not occur, if repression is maintained, the likely outcome is the repetition of trauma through affective inflation. We see this in kitsch activism: branded protests, corporate “diversity” pledges, influencers crying on camera about injustice while doing nothing to interrupt their structural complicity—the trauma returns, but in softened, aestheticized form. White tears flow easily. But they signify nothing.7
Without symbolic intervention, repression transforms whiteness into a theater of remorse. Guilt becomes performance. The subject “cares.” But care, here, is a mechanism of refusal—a way to avoid the asymmetry that gratitude would expose.
The disavowing subject is harder to reach. Their knowledge inoculates them from transformation. They already know. They’ve read the theory, cited the authors, attended the panels. Their defenses are not built on ignorance but on splitting, the ability to hold contradictory truths in mind while refusing to act on them. They can name colonial violence but still dominate every meeting. They can support “decolonial” work while hoarding institutional power.
The prognosis here is bleak. Unless there is collapse, psychic, institutional, or social, the likely outcome is chronic bad faith. Liberal paralysis dressed up as ethical caution. The disavowing subject will burn out, but not transform. Fatigue becomes performance. Exhaustion stands in for ethics. Burnout will be aestheticized. A halo that says: I’ve felt enough, so I need not act. They will confuse silence with humility, passivity with maturity. Their guilt is intellectualized, their complicity managed through discourse. Nothing changes. But everything is spoken of.
Collapse, in this schema, is not inevitable. It must be provoked. But even collapse offers no guarantee of reorganization. Many in this position simply fall deeper into cynicism. Others retreat into bureaucratic language, policy drafts, or premature “closure.” What they avoid, always, is relation.
Foreclosure offers the lowest possibility of transformation, and the highest danger. Here, the traumatic signifier was never admitted to the symbolic order. There is no repression, because nothing was ever registered. There is no disavowal, because nothing was ever known. The Other was never seen, never grieved, never integrated into the symbolic field. This is the structure of whiteness that governs liberal bureaucracies, Nordic neutrality, British civility. It is clean. It is polite. And it is violent in its erasure.
The prognosis here is not decay, but drift, toward authoritarianism, toward technocratic cruelty, toward an increasingly hollow structure that still claims legitimacy. The foreclosure structure reproduces itself through aggressive neutrality: policy over ethics, data over pain, civility over truth. The state offers services but no recognition. The subject offers tolerance but no gratitude. The migrant is processed. The protester is managed. The colonial subject is historicized, never mourned.
Without intervention, foreclosure breeds a world where nothing happened. Not because people deny the event, but because it never registered to begin with. This is the most dangerous form of whiteness because it cannot even imagine the Other as a speaking being. It requires not deconstruction, but displacement.
Treatment
To speak of treatment is to risk misunderstanding. These are not pathologies to be cured in the therapeutic sense. They are defensive structures: resilient, recursive, ideologically rewarded. Whiteness, in its various formations, does not seek help. It seeks continuity. It demands survival, not transformation.
Hence why, traumatophobic8 modalities always fail, not because they lack compassion, but because they mistake structure for symptom. They attempt to soothe when what is required is rupture. The dominant therapeutic stance — empathy, affirmation, validation — presumes a subject who wants to change. But whiteness, as a linguistic formation, is built to resist precisely that. It is designed to protect the ego from rupture, relation, and asymmetry. It is not suffering. It is protecting itself from the knowledge that it has caused suffering.
Therapy is not enough.
Analysis must intervene where identity retreats, where defense takes precedence over relation, and where history becomes unbearable. What follows is not a guide for recovery, but a set of strategies: partial, unstable, and often impossible.
Repressive whiteness can be worked with. Slowly, cautiously. If the subject is willing to confront what has been buried. The task here is symbolic mourning: to reintroduce the repressed trauma into language, to historicize not as information but as loss. This requires a refusal of kitsch. It requires us to interrupt the sentimental rituals: the apology videos, the DEI-sponsored catharsis, the poems about unity, and return the subject to contradiction.
Here, the goal is not shame but mourning. Not guilt, but recognition of the asymmetry that gratitude would imply.
Yet the risks are significant. Repression often converts into fetishism. Pain becomes performance; martyrdom becomes identity. The subject over-identifies with the oppressed to avoid their own complicity. This is the terrain of the white ally who centers themselves in every protest, whose guilt metastasizes into narcissism: always visible, always wounded. Their guilt demands applause. Their solidarity is a soliloquy. Without sustained analysis, repression becomes theatre.
The disavowing white is armed with knowledge. They already know. This makes treatment difficult but not impossible. The strategy here must hold the contradiction open. Deny the subject the escape route of moral superiority. Require speech. Return them, again and again, to their own division.
Disavowal depends on distance. The analyst discourse, or political interlocutor, must refuse to resolve the contradiction. No catharsis. No escape. The goal is not to reconcile knowledge and feeling, but to trap the subject in the very gap they have engineered.
But there are risks here too. The disavowing subject may retreat into cold intellectualism. They may flee, citing tone. They may weaponize complexity, or accuse you of being “divisive.” Their ultimate defense is refined deflection, a mode of ethical delay masked as thoughtfulness.
Treatment, in the classical sense, is theoretically not possible with foreclosure. The signifier is absent. The trauma was never registered. There is no wound to speak of because there was never an Other to hurt. This structure does not repress violence, it never encoded it.
Any attempt to bring the subject into symbolic relation will likely fail. They will smile. They will offer bureaucratic niceties. They will ask for your credentials. If pushed too far, they may collapse into psychotic rage, or drift into hardened authoritarianism. Polite cruelty becomes open domination.
What is needed here is not empathy, but refusal. One must refuse the invitation to civility, to policy speak, to “neutral” ground. You cannot reintroduce what was never introduced. Foreclosure may only be confronted through structural displacement—the building of new symbolic systems outside the white frame altogether.
Most therapeutic modalities fail because it seeks to connect with whiteness, mistaking it for a relational field rather than a structural refusal. But whiteness, in its systemic form, cannot bear connection. It is allergic to asymmetry. It recoils at gratitude. It resents dependence. It accepts only the performance of intimacy, never its demands.
To empathize with whiteness is often to serve it. Empathy toward whiteness too often becomes obedience. It flatters the defense. It soothes the injury. It keeps the mirror clean. To reach for it with softness is to risk being absorbed by its sentimental halo. Sentimentality flatters, but truth cuts. It seduces with its appearance of care, a tender touch, a wistful memory, a consoling phrase. And yet beneath the surface, it resists confrontation, blunts complexity, and dilutes the charge of the real.
Sentimentality,9 after all, does not deepen. It smooths.10 It converts agony into aesthetic. It takes the unbearable and renders it digestible. The mourner weeping at a war memorial while voting for the current genocide is not confronting history, but cloaking complicity in affect. The gesture feels profound, but it is, in fact, evasive.
There is nothing more self-referential than sentimental identification. I feel awful, they say—not to hold the pain of another, but to announce the depth of their own sensitivity. It becomes a performance of virtue that leaves the structure intact. Emotions are consumed, not metabolized. The spectacle of concern replaces the labor of transformation.
Politically, sentimentality is an anesthetic. It rocks the body into passivity, offering catharsis where there should be critique. "Thoughts and prayers" stand in for justice; symbolic tears displace structural change. Its function is pacification, not solidarity. It renders the moral world legible only in soft focus.
In writing, in art, in language, sentimentality becomes kitsch. The tragic rendered pleasing. The violence is made palatable. A sunset captioned with a quote from Eckart Tolle. Pain turned into ornament. As Adorno warned, reconciliation offered where none has occurred.11
Sentimentality is moral laziness. It bypasses the rigour of thought in favour of emotional ease. It cannot hold contradiction; it flinches at ambiguity. It wants the glow of care without the edge of risk.
What is needed is not emotional safety, but symbolic rupture. Not understanding, but confrontation. Not for the satisfaction of punishment, but for the fragile, flickering chance that something unspeakable might be spoken at last.
If there is treatment, it will not come through reconciliation but through fracture. If there is healing, it will not feel like care.
Triage12
Social political engagement is not group therapy, and not all subjects are ready for contact. One of the central failures of well-meaning radicalism is its overinvestment in the unworkable: the endless effort to reach those who have no intention of listening, let alone changing. We mistake persistence for ethics, when sometimes the ethical act is to withdraw, to name the structure, and move on.
This is triage, not salvation. You are not their saviour. You are here to read symptoms, not rescue souls. The question is not: can they be redeemed? The question is: can they be addressed?
What follows is not taxonomy but strategy. A typology of whiteness and its reactive postures in the face of critique. This is not a definitive list. But these are patterns that recur with numbing familiarity. You will know them by their tone, their silences, their need to be seen as good.
The Repressing Liberal will cry. They listen. They say “I feel so sad this is happening.” Their politics are affective, not structural; they mistake feeling bad for action. They are often first to nod but last to act. You will spend more time managing their emotions than addressing the issue at hand.13
And yet, they can be worked with, slowly. Not by affirming their goodness, but by revealing its limits. They must be disillusioned gently, otherwise they collapse into performative guilt or defensive fragility. The strategy here is slow disarmament. Show them that their repression is not neutrality but complicity. Offer critique without humiliation, at least at first. Their fear is to be seen as bad; your power lies in making them see that being seen is not the worst thing. Not seeing is worse.
The Disavowing Intellectual knows the right texts. They speak the right language. They are always already in agreement…in theory. But you will notice that their citations do not extend to themselves. They speak of hegemony but demand decorum. They quote Homi Bhabha but cannot hold your gaze. They want critique, but only in footnotes, ideally en français.
This one is harder. Their shield is irony; their weapon is detachment. The key here is mirror rupture. Forcing them to confront the discrepancy between what they know and what they enact. You must speak not only to the intellect but to the desire beneath it. Their need to remain untouched by the implications of their thought. Analysis through confrontation. No flattery. No pedagogical coddling. They must be split to be opened.
The Foreclosed Subject will smile when they’re uncomfortable. They nod as you speak. They offer nothing but vague agreement and end with “but I just think we all need to be kind.” They are not defensive. They are sealed. You will not reach them because there is no opening to enter through. Whatever was once plastic in them has calcified. They are not here for dialogue; they are here for containment.
Do not waste your metaphors on them. Do not explain. Do not beg. This is not a tragedy; it is a boundary. Walk away. You do not owe them your clarity. You do not owe them the burn of your attention.
Whiteness is not a monolith, but it is a field of affective rigidity, a system that prefers guilt to grief, sympathy to responsibility, and sentiment to risk. Our task is not to redeem it, nor to collapse under its gaze. Our task is to discern: when is engagement possible? And when is it politically strategic to conserve energy, to withhold response, to exit?
This is not cruelty. This is triage. You cannot treat what refuses diagnosis. You cannot open what is welded shut. You work where the fissures are, and you leave where the walls hold.
On The Failure of Therapy
Most contemporary counseling models—CBT, positive psychology, even trauma-informed care—are built on an assumption that the subject wants to change. That there is a kernel of desire for transformation, however buried, that can be coaxed into the light. But white supremacy, as a defensive formation, does not seek healing. It seeks continuity. Its illness is its immunity: the refusal to be touched, to be moved, to be altered by the Other.
Talk therapy fails because it individualizes what is structural, treating whiteness not as a system of defense, but as personal guilt. It seeks to soothe where it should disrupt. It hopes for gratitude where only narcissistic injury lives.
The white subject seeks comfort, not confrontation. They will confuse listening with safety, and safety with moral worth. Therapy remains within the discourse of the capitalist.
The analyst’s discourse14 offers a frame capable of holding the contradiction. It does not presume that insight leads to change. It does not flinch when the analysand begins to hate the analyst. It knows that resistance is not a detour from the work, but the very form the work takes.
It understands that for whiteness, even understanding is a defense. To say “I get it” is often just another way to avoid it.15
Psychoanalysis begins where empathy fails: when the tears dry, when the patient withdraws, when the rage surfaces—not in protest, but in recognition that something has been named.
Thus, gratitude is not a sentimentality but a symbolic rupture.
Gratitude is not politeness. It is not a thank-you note, or a virtue signal. It is an unmaking of the self. It is the admission that I was given something I cannot repay. That I am not the origin of my own life. That someone else's labor, pain, or insight has altered me irreversibly.
Whiteness recoils from this. It cannot tolerate the asymmetry of true indebtedness. It survives by pretending it owes nothing—to history, to the Other, to labor, to the colonized, to the stolen, to the silenced.
To accept the gift would be to surrender the fantasy of self-sufficiency. To feel gratitude would be to feel lack. And whiteness, as structure, as fantasy, cannot bear to lack.
The refusal of gratitude does more than defend whiteness. It deprives the white subject of transformation. Gratitude is not only a recognition of asymmetry; it is an encounter with history as something that exceeds the self. Without it, there can be no reckoning, no rupture, no entry into relation. What remains is a hollow form of moral autonomy: the subject insists on being good, but never changed. They rehearse care, but cannot be moved.
This is why the hosts of the linguistic parasite, those who unconsciously cling to whiteness, remain stuck in repetition, haunted by contradictions they refuse to symbolize. They recycle guilt without consequence. They consume critique without metabolization. They mirror the language of ethics while remaining untouched by its demands. The refusal of gratitude becomes a refusal of the world itself: a rejection of all that exceeds and precedes them.
And so they live inside a form of symbolic death. Their structures remain intact, but their capacity to relate withers. They speak of justice, but cannot grieve. They celebrate diversity, but cannot feel joy in the Other. They offer help, but recoil from debt. They mistake detachment for maturity, and neutrality for wisdom.
The tragedy is not just political. It is ontological.16 To refuse gratitude is to refuse entry into the symbolic social contract: to reject the possibility of transformation through relation. It is to cling to the myth of self-origin, and thereby condemn oneself to a life without rupture, without gift, without encounter. A life where nothing is owed, and thus nothing can be received.
This is not just the failure of whiteness. It is the failure of the subject trapped in its grammar, who will remain, for all their language, untouched by the world.
The question is not: Can whiteness be treated? The question is: What will you do when it cannot?
You will not be hated for being wrong. You will be hated for naming what they cannot say: that whiteness is not a people, but a refusal with a passport. Whiteness would rather the world burn than admit it owes you anything.
Under colonial modernity, language is not neutral. It is seized, weaponized, and made to serve the epistemic and moral order of whiteness. As Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o argues, colonial domination begins with the domination of the mental universe, and language becomes a key tool in that occupation.
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. (1986). Decolonising the mind: The politics of language in African literature. Heinemann.
Méconnaissance, in Lacanian theory, is misrecognition—not just a mistake, but a foundational form of illusion necessary for the formation of the self. It originates from the mirror stage: when the infant sees its reflection and identifies with it as a coherent whole, it misrecognizes itself. The image appears unified and stable, but the child’s actual bodily experience is fragmented and uncoordinated. This identification creates the illusion of a stable "I", which becomes the basis of ego formation. In Lacan’s terms, this is a constitutive méconnaissance: the ego is built on a fiction. The concept expands beyond infancy. All ideological identification, for Lacan, involves a similar process: we see an image, a role, a discourse, and misrecognize ourselves in it—as if it expresses who we are. This is how ideology works. Althusser adopts this from Lacan to describe how subjects are “hailed” into ideology: the subject says “Yes, that’s me!”—but it isn’t. Méconnaissance is not a glitch. It’s structural. It enables the subject to function, but only by being alienated from its truth. The ego is thus a defense: a lie that organizes coherence.
Evans, D. (1996). An introductory dictionary of Lacanian psychoanalysis. Routledge.
White defensiveness is not just a reaction. It is a structure that shifts, absorbs critique, and reasserts itself. Topology helps us see how. It studies shapes that bend, twist, and fold without breaking. Think of a Möbius strip. What looks like reflection can flip into denial. Guilt becomes moral superiority. Outrage masks fragility. Even agreement can be a tactic to defuse challenge. The surface changes. The structure holds. This is why binaries like racist or not-racist fail. A topological view lets us trace how defensiveness moves, how it survives, and how it keeps power intact.
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (B. Massumi, Trans.). University of Minnesota Press.
Moreton-Robinson, A. (2015). The white possessive: Property, power, and Indigenous sovereignty. University of Minnesota Press.
Alenka Zupančič's recent book, Disavowal, delves deeply into the psychoanalytic concept of disavowal and its manifestations in contemporary society. She explores how individuals acknowledge disturbing realities—such as climate change or social injustices—yet continue behaviors that contradict this awareness. Zupančič argues that this mechanism of "I know very well, but still..." has become a prevalent feature of modern life, affecting both personal actions and broader socio-political dynamics.
Zupančič, A. (2024). Disavowal. Polity Press.
For an exploration of gratitude and its role in fostering interconnectedness and reciprocity, see Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. Kimmerer, a botanist and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, weaves together Indigenous knowledge and scientific understanding to illustrate how genuine gratitude acknowledges our dependence on the natural world and challenges notions of autonomy.
Kimmerer, R. W. (2013). Braiding sweetgrass: Indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge, and the teachings of plants. Milkweed Editions.
Ruby Hamad’s White Tears/Brown Scars (2020) offers a powerful critique of how white women's emotional displays have historically deflected accountability while weaponizing vulnerability. Her analysis shows how white tears often function as a means of preserving power rather than confronting it.
Hamad, R. (2020). White tears/Brown scars: How white feminism betrays women of color. Catapult.
For a deeper exploration of how trauma is often misread in therapeutic discourse, see Avgi Saketopoulou’s Sexuality Beyond Consent (2023), where she argues for a turn toward “traumatophilia” — an orientation that doesn’t seek to avoid trauma but to work through its repetitions and intensities. Her approach challenges the culturally dominant reflex to soothe, especially when such soothing masks or blocks structural confrontation.
Saketopoulou, A. (2023). Sexuality beyond consent: Risk, race, trauma, and taboo. NYU Press.
Milan Kundera discusses the concept of kitsch as a form of sentimentality that denies the unpleasant aspects of existence. He describes kitsch as "the absolute denial of shit," excluding everything unacceptable in human existence. This aesthetic ideal transforms genuine suffering into a palatable form, allowing individuals to engage in superficial displays of emotion without confronting deeper realities.
Kundera, M. (1984). The unbearable lightness of being (M. H. Heim, Trans.). Harper & Row.
Byung-Chul Han’s The Scent of Time, The Burnout Society, and especially Saving Beauty are deeply engaged with the idea of smoothness as the aesthetic of late capitalist subjectivity. “Smoothness is the signature of the present time. It connects the sculptures of Jeff Koons, the interfaces of Apple, and Brazilian waxing. It is the aesthetic ideal of today’s society of positivity.” See Byung-Chul Han, Saving Beauty, for an extended meditation on “smoothness” as the aesthetic form of neoliberalism, where resistance is flattened and negativity erased. Han’s analysis aligns with the idea that sentimentality renders the unbearable digestible — not to confront it, but to maintain comfort and aesthetic pleasure in the face of violence.
Han, B.-C. (2017). Saving beauty (D. Steuer, Trans.). Polity Press.
Adorno, writing after Auschwitz, warned against art and discourse that prematurely soothe or reconcile. For him, genuine reconciliation is only possible through confrontation with suffering, not its erasure or aestheticization.
Adorno, T. W. (1973). Negative dialectics (E. B. Ashton, Trans.). Seabury Press. (Original work published 1966)
Triage originated on Napoleonic battlefields, where military medics had to decide which wounded soldiers to treat first. The term comes from the French trier, meaning “to sort.” Patients were classified into three groups: those likely to live regardless, those likely to die regardless, and those who could be saved with immediate care. This logic—brutal but necessary—was born of resource scarcity, time pressure, and the need for strategic prioritization. In critical theory and political life, triage becomes a way to navigate psychic and social exhaustion. We adopt it not because we lack compassion, but because endless engagement with the unmovable drains collective energy and obscures the work that can be done. It is a refusal to let urgency be confused with usefulness, or martyrdom mistaken for ethics.
Iserson, K. V., & Moskop, J. C. (2007). Triage in medicine, part I: Concept, history, and types. Annals of Emergency Medicine, 49(3), 275–281. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.annemergmed.2006.05.019
As Jasbir Puar argues in Terrorist Assemblages, liberal structures increasingly rely on affective performances — empathy, inclusion, “listening” — to manage and contain dissent. But affect, she shows, is not neutral. It is racialized, weaponized, and unevenly distributed. Some bodies get to feel; others get surveilled. What looks like care often operates as a form of soft domination.
Puar, J. K. (2007). Terrorist assemblages: Homonationalism in queer times. Duke University Press.
The analyst’s discourse is formalized by Lacan as: a → $ / S₂ ↓ S₁. The analyst occupies the position of object a, allowing the analysand to speak from their division rather than from mastery. This structure produces knowledge not by explaining or soothing, but by holding open the tension of the subject’s own contradictions.
Lacan, J. (2007). The seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book XVII: The other side of psychoanalysis (R. Grigg, Trans.). W. W. Norton & Company.
In psychoanalytic terms, intellectualization is a defense mechanism that distances the subject from affective truth. Within whiteness, “understanding” often becomes a performance of mastery that displaces guilt, disavows complicity, and forestalls transformation.
Matias, C. E. (2016). Feeling white: Whiteness, emotionality, and education. Sense Publishers.
Ontology here refers to the mode of being constructed by whiteness: a subject that imagines itself as self-originating, detached from history, relation, or debt. This refusal of entanglement forecloses the possibility of transformation. Sylvia Wynter critiques this mythic human-as-Man figure and calls for a new understanding of being grounded in relation and rupture. See:
Wynter, S., & McKittrick, K. (2015). Unparalleled catastrophes for our species? Or, to give humanness a different future: Conversations. In K. McKittrick (Ed.), Sylvia Wynter: On being human as praxis (pp. 9–89). Duke University Press.
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