How psychiatry as interior metropolitan colonialism made possible the Holocaust

(From a work in progress).

The Holocaust was made possible less by anti-semitism than by two things that preceded and helped prepare the way for the biopolitical exclusions of the post-Darwinian European world. These two things are: colonialism, and psychiatry. Both were exclusionary discourses that claimed to rule on normal humanity. Colonialism is part of what made possible the developmental ideology that dominated the 19th century, including in Marxism and so in the socialist movement.

Colonialism is mostly dead, as we are in a postcolonial world of neoliberal capitalist exploitation where regional territoriality matters less.

But psychiatry is very much still with us, as is its close cousin: the police and prisons. Colonialism was replaced by capitalism's global condition of civil war. All of these things form a complex.

The Nazi regime was the purest form of essentially medicalized government the world had yet seen, and it was this both in its metaphors and its procedures. The Jews were treated as a pestilence to be eliminated. It is no coincidence that the same regime that produced a genocide of the Jews and Gipsies also exterminated the physically “disabled” and the “mentally ill.” It is not coincidence that this was a regime obsessed with the physical and mental health and well-being of its populace, and that, like the very concept of health, which by definition is a normality of the body that borders and excludes illness, it functioned partly by excluding. Its rites of purification might be thought as horrifyingly parodic repetitions of religious notions of purity and danger, but they were also fully modernized as a set of medical procedures authorized by “science.” As a regime of health and purity must be governmental and anti-political, fascism in this most modern and bureaucratic form involved the efficient elimination of persons in the name of a God of well-being in the face of whom imperfect bodies and minds can easily be found lacking. The functionaries, in light of this, performed the duties responsibly, and carried an elimination of people in a plurality of categories who were deemed improper, not belonging, not healthy, maybe even not happy enough by the light of those concerned about them, and these dutiful men and women did what was “necessary” in light of the demands placed upon them.

Law and medicine being distinct approaches to the same kind of thing -- correctional treatments and procedures for deviance to normality -- is nothing new. In the ancient world, something began to break with both of them. In fact, there were two such breaks, both of which are still not as well understood as they should be. One was the revolution that made God and religion subject to ethical and moral considerations of justice and the universality of happiness and the good, and did so in a remarkably rigorous way. This was ancient Judaism. The other was the intellectual revolution of ancient Greece. It invented thinking as we know it and the political as we know it. Religion was replaced in one sense by law and medicine, but more fully by tragedy, politics, and philosophy or theory, which later led to modern science, a greatly misunderstood approach of the thinking subject to the world. (It is not the production of a body of true statements, so much as a mode of inquiry, yet is generally appreciated only as the former, which makes it similar to "religion" in the dogmatism of its uses). The two revolutions were compatible and quickly began to be integrated by those exposed to both. This happened three centuries before Christianity, which was both a step forward and backward, because it is ethically revolutionary yet anti-political. Christ only save, at least directly, individuals; the faith appeals to the conscience. Others revolted against the empire's rule, its militarism, and its dependence on slaves; Christians focused on the inner life. That produced in time, mostly about a milennium later, a lot of great art and literature, and lousy politics.

Now the world threatens to be subsumed by Christianity's successor, which is psychiatry and the medical management and governance of populations. It promises salvation of a kind, but at the price of really treating everyone as damned. You cannot save yourself if psychiatry decides, in its arbitrary manner, applying concepts based on theories that are never questioned, as they are just part of a body of "knowledge," or true statements; this is "science" in the service of bureaucracy, or the totalizing administrative state. This state knows only of an administered justice and no true political life at all. It is sad and cannot be happy, but people condemned to the sadness of living in this regime have no recourse against it but sad managers giving them apprenticeships in the sadness of a life that must managed because its potentialities are only risks, they are potentialities of precarious lives to violate others or be violated by them, a power of death and its management. The reliance on Stoic and Buddhist thinking, an ingenious reappropriation of antiquity, in a world that did still have slaves, and made individuals responsible for whatever happens to them, and happy only in triumphing in a mental state over a condition of sadness, this is unsurprising, and equally sad. It is not joy but resignation.

People who are treated as irrevocably damned, which is what the medical system now produces, to its own great profit, are another version of the colonial subject. What has happened in our late capitalist societies is that colonialism has come home in its aftermath to rule all of us.

The Holocaust is paradigmatic in the way that extreme forms of something, that reveal its essential and most profound logic, precisely in taking it to the limit of what it is possible of. The Holocaust was a result of colonialism and the interiorizing of it in the life of the European mind and societies, on the basis of separations, that place those to be preserved, protected, and their lives and well being enhanced on one side, and those to be rejected and eliminated on the other. Interior to European society, the concomitant of colonialism as exercised by it but outside it in other territorial spaces, was the Inquisition, the intolerance of the late medieval and early modern Christian European social order, and practices like, and above all, psychiatry, with its exclusions. Colonialism interiorized in the metropole was a war of terror against the population itself that the local government ruled and was part of. Suspect yourself and everyone of being a hostile, violent, dysfunctional, breaking down, dirty or unwashed or unclean, virulent and metaphorically infecting, other, who can only be eliminated. The Holocaust was the logical culmination of that. But the logic it was part of is still with us, and drives much of modern capitalist society and its states and institutions.

An urgent task in this context is to move beyond health and sickness as dominant metaphors for the mental states of persons. We must reclaim the political and the task of thinking as the fundamental duty and desire of the citizen. We must say: Everyone is an intellectual, every is an artist, in potentiality. We affirm our own potentialities and joy, instead of merely fearing them in terror. And we do not seek redemption. Redemption, like creation and revelation, exists, and is fully “secular,” not something removed into a space that transcends us in glory. Seizing the good life as our natural right, we can equally pursue its increase, without regimes of lack, without needing to be normal, without fearing as inimical every stranger including the one we are to ourselves. We are nor sick or healthy, deviant or normal, lacking or solitarily self-sufficient. We should not be troubled about being troubled; baroque representations are disabling. Do not seek treatment for your lack and do not apologize. People are not justified by their faith or their good deeds; why treat your existence as needing to be justified, unless your are being both assaulted and made responsible for this. There is a destiny of thinking and art, and politics, in the world’s languages and traditions, including those of the European languages, including our own American English, and that destiny is beyond colonialism and all of its subjections, and so too beyond the state based on terror, fear of poverty or death, the management of such fears, including among those of the world’s peoples whose lives are made precarious. We are the poor and the future is ours and one of plenty, and beyond policing, prisons, psychological correctional treatments, and all the walls everywhere and endless wars. So you really are a lacking subject, says the therapist, social worker, doctor, teacher, or cop. And let me help you, once I figure out how you need to be managed. The first word in the great film epic of struggle against colonialism, “Battle of Algiers,” is worth repeating: No! is our resounding reply. Yes to a life of plenty and pleasures, of creativity and joy; no to the sad society of managers of a world of a few rich persons and billions who lack and are exposed to their mortality.