Critical psychologists draw on a number of theoretical resources (e.g., feminism, poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, Marxism, etc.) in their critiques of mainstream (Euro-American) psychology. The central debate in critical psychology is whether critical psychology is providing a vision of a more ethical way of doing psychology, one that is grounded in history, philosophy, theory, qualitative methodology, etc.; or is critical psychology the negation of psychology proper? I live on both sides of the debate, but my preference on most days is for the latter position because I am a transdisciplinarian at heartâbeing not only a scholar-activist, but also a fine artist. In my approach, which I am calling critical border psychology (cf. Mignolo, 2007), I draw on postcolonialism/decoloniality along with Freudo-Lacanian psychoanalysis in an effort to imagine a pluriversal psychology grounded in liberation praxis (Beshara, 2019a); contrapuntal psychoanalysis is one such an attempt. Some of the critical psychologists who have paved the way for this kind of work include: Ian Parker (Parker & Siddiqui, 2019), Thomas Teo (2005), Tod Sloan (1996), Sunil Bhatia (2018), Erica Burman (2019), and Derek Hook (2008).
From Decolonial Psychoanalysis to Contrapuntal Psychoanalysis
This book is a sequel to Decolonial Psychoanalysis: Towards Critical Islamophobia Studies (Beshara, 2019b). In Decolonial Psychoanalysis, I analyzed the ideology of (counter)terrorism-Islamophobia/Islamophilia through the lens of critical psychology, while drawing in particular on psychoanalysis and decoloniality (Mignolo, 2007) as theoretico-methodological tools. I ended Decolonial Psychoanalysis with the question of liberation praxis, which I aspire to explore further in this book through what I will be describing as contrapuntal psychoanalysis, which is a kind of psychoanalysis as liberation praxis that accounts for both (post)colonial psychoanalysis and decolonial psychoanalysis in an effort to theorize oppressor/oppressed subjectivities in order to practice liberatory subjectivities. The challenge of liberation praxis is whether it is possible to theorize and practice psychoanalysis exterior to ideology? Or, even, whether it is possible to imagine a world without psychoanalysis (Spivak, 1994)?
In this book, while I will not be revisiting my analysis of the specific ideology of (counter)terrorism-Islamophobia/Islamophilia per se, I continue to be concerned, however, with the overall ideology of (post)modernity-(post)coloniality; or how the violent logic of (post)coloniality (e.g., Islamophobia/Islamophilia) fantasmatically sustains the oppressive rhetoric of (post)modern discourses (e.g., the War on Terror). Another name for this ideology is racialized capitalism, which as a modern world-system explains everything, in the case of the US, from the genocide of Indigenous peoples and the transatlantic slave trade to Jim Crow and New Jim Crow. Liberation praxis is the attempt to think and act exterior to racialized capitalism; contrapuntal psychoanalysis is one such attempt.
Racialized Capitalism
Racialized capitalism (Cole, 2016), however, is more than a modern ideology; it is equally a colonial materiality. For this reason, I conceive of racialized capitalism as a dispositif, or an apparatus, in Michel Foucaultâs (1980) sense of the term: âa thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositionsâin short, the said as much as the unsaidâ (p. 194). This apparatus goes by other names, such as âracial capitalismâ (Burden-Stelly, 2020; Gilmore, 2020; Kelley, 2017; Robinson, 1983) and âracist capitalismâ (Desmond, 2019). For Cedric J. Robinson (1983):
Racism, I maintain, was not simply a convention for ordering the relations of European to non-European peoples but has its genesis in the âinternalâ relations of European peoples. As part of the inventory of Western civilization it would reverberate within and without, transferring its toll from the past to the present. In contradistinction to Marxâs and Engelsâs expectations that bourgeois society would rationalize social relations and demystify social consciousness, the obverse occurred. The development, organization, and expansion of capitalist society pursued essentially racial directions, so too did social ideology. As a material force, then, it could be expected that racialism would inevitably permeate the social structures emergent from capitalism. I have used the term âracial capitalismâ to refer to this development and to the subsequent structure as a historical agency. (p. 2)
The racial axis is the central feature of racialized capitalism, which is a European modern/colonial project that can be traced back to 1492 (Dussel, 1995, p. 12). Hereâs AnĂbal Quijanoâs (2000) explication of the racial axis in the coloniality of power:
What is termed globalization is the culmination of a process that began with the constitution of America and colonial/modern Eurocentered capitalism as a new global power. One of the fundamental axes of this model of power is the social classification of the worldâs population around the idea of race, a mental construction that expresses the basic experience of colonial domination and pervades the more important dimensions of global power, including its specific rationality: Eurocentrism. (p. 533)
In racialized capitalism, racism is certainly the most oppressive structural element of the apparatus, but it often intersects with two other axes: labor and sex. Quijano (2000) argues that the âidea of race, in its modern meaning, does not have a known history before the colonization of Americaâ (p. 533). However, Geraldine Heng (2018) asserts that England is the first racial state in premodernity with its 1290 Edict of Expulsion, which was a royal decree expelling all Jews from the Kingdom of England. Colonialism and racism did undoubtedly exist in the premodern world (Heng, 2018), but the novelty of racialized capitalism, as a modern world-system, was and continues to be its accelerated global systematization of imperialism, colonialism, racism/classism/sexism, and capitalism in the name of civilization. Civilization is savage, but it projects its savagery onto the Other as a defense mechanism:
The civilized white man retains an irrational nostalgia for the extraordinary times of sexual licentiousness, orgies, unpunished rapes, and unrepressed incest. In a sense, these fantasies correspond to Freudâs life instinct. Projecting his desires onto the black man, the white man behaves as if the black man actually had them. (Fanon, 1952/2008, pp. 142â143)
The signifier âraceâ can be traced back to the Arabic word raâs (۱ۣ۳), which means head, beginning, or origin. James Sweet (1997) even makes the following argument: âThe racist ideologies of fifteenth-century Iberia grew out of the development of African slavery in the Islamic world as far back as the eighth centuryâ (p. 145). This is a fair critique, which will necessitate an analysis of the Aristotelian notion of natural slavery:
For the slave the result was a state of social death in which all rights and sense of personhood were denied. The appearance of this form of slavery [i.e., chattel slavery] in the ancient Mediterranean has led to the dominant modern view that Greece and Rome offer the first examples in world history of what can be called genuine slave societies. (Bradley & Cartledge, 2011, p. 1)
However, my focus is not on the premodern world, for the politico-economic configuration of the world today (e.g., US hegemony) is a function of the longue-durĂ©e of (Spanish, Portuguese, British, French, and/or Dutch) Euro-colonialism, which began in 1492 and came to a mild halt between 1945 and 1960 with the decolonization of Asia and Africa. I cautiously use the expression âmild haltâ for three reasons: (1) As Jacques Derrida argues, the Cold War has not ended (as cited in Borradori, 2003, p. 92); in fact, the War on Terror is a continuation of the Cold War by another name. (2) While classical colonialism is less frequent or visible today, neocolonialism (Nkrumah, 1965), humanitarian imperialism (Bricmont, 2006), coloniality (Quijano, 2000), auto-colonialism (Bulhan, 1985, p. 44), and endo-colonization (Virilio, 1983/2008) are all highly frequent and visible phenomena. (3) The majority of former franchise colonies have not truly decolonized themselves but instead are now postcolonies (cf. Mbembe, 2001) because the oppressive colonizers have been replaced by colonized sub-oppressors, which is akin to a sado-masochistic game of musical chairs.
To be evenhanded, we must consider the contributions of the Islamic world (i.e., modernityâs alterity), particularly the Golden Age (800â1258), while holding the colonial history of the Islamic Caliphates (632â1924) accountable:
Popular accounts of the history of science typically show a timeline in which no major scientific advances seem to have taken place during the period between the ancient Greeks and the European Renaissance. In between, so we are told, Western Europe and, by extrapolation, the rest of the world, languished in the Dark Ages for a thousand years.In fact, for a period stretching over seven hundred years, the international language of science was Arabic. For this was the language of the Qurâan, the holy book of Islam, and thus the official language of the vast Islamic Empire that, by the early eighth century CE, stretched from India t...