Radical Hope

In Jonathan Lear’s significant book, Radical Hope: ethics in the face of cultural devastation, Lear tells us that shortly before he died, Plenty Coups, the last great Chief of the Crow Nation, told his story - up to a certain point. “When the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground, and they could not lift them up again. After this nothing happened” (Lear, 2006). It is precisely at this point - in the face of complete devastation, unimaginable loss and cultural collapse, of the kind we’ve become so brutally familiar with these days - that it becomes seductive to fall into the abyss of catastrophism. It is precisely at this significant juncture, in the face of complete vulnerability, a vulnerability indeed not foreign to the human condition, that Lear offers his vision of Radical hope. Which should unequivocally not be confused with hope.

The symptomatology of hope is a continent not too far away from the Lacanian jouissance (Lacan, 1961). Essentially, if one looks at the Freudian map of the psyche, they share clear borders. For you can hope for your immortality; for an Oedipal triumph; for limitless possibilities of enjoyment and choices. Hope for the re-finding of a fusional relationship with one’s primary love object; hope for a life without frustration, without separation or disturbance; hope for omnipotent possibilities and completeness within yourself and the other. In short we can say that hope is intertwined with jouissance and excess pleasure, in the territory of death, while hopelessness has a clear link to renunciation, limited choices, freedom, pleasure, passion and life. Thus Nietzsche says: “Hope in reality is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.” (Nietzsche, 1908). But this Nietzschean foundation should not be read as a pessimistic, or nihilist position; on the contrary, it is a yes to life, the affirmation of an active pessimist, a passionate pessimist, for life awaits only the hopeless. Said another way: hope becomes a defence against living a “Human all too Human” life.

So in a sense the hopeful and the catastrophizers become quite alike within the Freudian elaboration of the psyche, and both groups are not living passionately within the ethics of the social, both have become sleepless, terrified of their nightmares. For the catastrophizers and the hopeful refuse to mourn the inevitable loss of paradise, there is a refusal to face one’s wounds and those of the other. As a result, having fallen into the concrete, narcissistic state of melancholia, in the absence of the capacity to symbolize, to mourn loss, and come face-to-face with limitations. In both categories there is an ongoing wish for the possibility of the perfect world one can envision, without disturbance and frustration, and the inescapable danger of complete withdrawal and absolute passivity in light of the inevitable disappointment of such a wish.

Radical hope on the other hand is acting with hope “in the absence not just of rational justification for hope but in the absence of the conceptual building blocks out of which a better future might be constituted” (Lear, 2006). Where we move from the moral cowardice of hope à la Nietzsche to a sense of ethics embedded within radical hope, part and parcel of an ethics of life and nothing else, of the erotic, of the social. Following Lear: How should one face the possibility that one’s world as one knows it might collapse? This is a vulnerability that affects us all - insofar as we are all humans and part of civilization, and civilizations are themselves vulnerable to collapse. How should we live - and not just survive - in light of or even because of such vulnerability? Can we make any sense of facing such a challenge in a way that is ethical, unpredictable, passionate and communal – all derivatives of radical hope – or do we choose the very predictable, concrete, closed, dreamless temptation of catastrophism?

In a sense the notion of radical hope is a psychic position, one that is embedded within the capacity to dream, one maintained in spite of imposed socio-political traumas. It is a no to the internal and external traumatizers, not out of a sense of denial nor any liberal notions of cure, but because one does not let go of the capacity to dream, to become, not despite our wounds but because of them.

It seems that catastrophism is particularly seductive when it comes to certain geographies, the idea of radical hope is definitely and easily foreclosed for certain lands and peoples, via both internal and external forces. As such the catastrophizer and the internal catastrophizing psychic position, become the traumatizers the moment they indicate that any possibility of radical hope is foreclosed, for example, in their consideration or lack thereof towards certain lands and people… The first thing that is killed in the traumatized is the capacity to dream. Today’s traumatized become the catastrophizers of the future for they cannot dream things up anymore … so any catastrophizer is a traumatized non-dreamer, and we need to transform the catastrophe into a dream. Not out of a sense of denial or superficial optimism, nor hope, but as an invitation to not foreclose dream-work, out of a vision of radical hope, of an ethics of the social. We are not closing ourselves in the prison of their fixed and definite narrative, for the hopeful and the catastrophizer have, a-priori, figured it all out. For that would be the collapse of imagination; no play, no curiosity, a resignation of passions and wishes. And without wishes there will be no dream-work in the best sense of our Freudian metapsychology.

Radical hope is ultimately the objectilizing function of the life drive (Green, 1999), it is the wish for community, a sense of sociability, the “I” that only becomes possible via the Other. Radical hope is essentially the ethics of the social. So in a sense the catastrophizers are lurking in the land of the psychotic, at best they are paranoiacs and at worst deathly boring, caught up in a regression to the non-symbolic, a place with neither irony, poetry nor doubt, all the derivatives of the erotic. Which in final analysis is a question of ethics, an ethics of life and its conditions: not because one denies death or the destructive capacities of the death drive, internally and externally, but precisely because one has embraced it within oneself and the other.

Can we live a life that is ethical, passionate, pleasurable and not just solely a condition of survival –that is, of the imaginary illusions and false promises of hope – but within communality, part and parcel of the thinking subject, leading to a social sense of responsibility and freedom? Which a priori requires that one develops the capacity to mourn. Catastrophizing is a refusal to mourn absence, and it’s a narcissistic wish to not give up our omnipotence, nor that of the other; it’s a refusal to face absence, disturbance and limitations; it is a no to the confines of the reality principle, with all its limitations and delays. Morality certainly does not work for it strengthens the punitive superego, so intimately connected to the id. Radical hope is a march towards the becoming of a thinking/ethical subject.

For Hanna Arendt reminds us that “a life without thinking is quite possible; it then fails to develop its own essence -it is not merely meaningless; it is not fully alive” (Arendt, 1960). A thinking/desirous subject is born via a linking to the other; not out of a sense of belonging which in final analysis isolates every intimate contact but towards an un-belonging. This un-belonging is the necessary step towards the becoming of the ethical subject that opens itself up to the outside world. Not confined to the imprisonments of clans, groups, families, countries, religious groups, and ideologies. For any attempt at belonging is an unfinished mourning, any attempt at belonging is a refusal of absence, is a refusal to lose. The need for belonging might give us the illusion of safety but it will inevitably end up in Dante’s inferno with no Virgil in sight, as we are currently observing in various contexts in the world.

Can we wake up from our current nightmare (nightmares are nothing but failed dreams) and find our way to the land of dream-work? This will require radical hope, which a priori necessitates giving language back its metaphoricity, to have an internal sense of trust that we are all interconnected; this sense of ethics is not a morality, that often reeks of blood. But to come face to face with all that is unacceptable/refutable within, our darkest, oddest secrets, of our sexuality and of the death drive inevitably pulsing within all of us, on the edge of language. To move beyond good and evil, not out of any liberal sense of empathy or cure, nor the wish to heal our wounds or those of the others. But out of a sense of our interconnectedness, recognizing that this ethics of the social must underlie any liberating praxis, and to be reminded of our common human heritage, of our common fragility. This communal reminder and joint injury to our narcissism becomes a welcome messenger, a way of re-finding, in final analysis, that we are all linked, far and near, in sickness and in health.

Radical hope is a social/ethical act of defiance towards ideologies, not a rebellion without a cause but a defiance that will be revolutionary, an event that will disturb various levels of significations, internal/external, private and public, personal, political, social, and the very discourse of subjectivity. Not in the name of sameness that does nothing but exclude, but for difference, with a genuine comprehension that our emancipation is inherently intertwined.

The Buffalo is gone. Can we begin to imagine and name her? First we must learn how to lose, on the edge of construction/destruction, on the edge of desire, giving primacy to the ethics of the social; not in the confines of our parochial belongings but within a subversive defiance that can be a revolutionary beginning, intimately connected to bearing/baring the psychical position of Radical hope.

For Arendt (1960) is right when she says freedom is identical with the capacity to begin. Shall we do the unexpected? To begin again and again, “If not here, then there. If not now, then soon. Elsewhere as well as here.” (Sontag, 2007).

 

 

References

Arendt, H. (1960). Freedom and Politics: A Lecture. Chicago Review, 14(1), 28–46.

Green, A. (1999). The Work of the Negative. Free Association Books.

Lacan, J. (2001). The Directions of the Treatment and the Principles of its Power. In A. Sheridan (Trans.), Écrits: A Selection, W.W. Norton & Company. (Original work published 1961)

Lear, J. (2006). Radical hope: ethics in the face of cultural devastation. Harvard University Press.

Nietzsche, F. (1908). Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits (A. Harvey, Trans.). Charles H. Kerr & Company. (Original work published 1878)

Nietzsche, F. (1967). The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner (W. Kaufmann, Trans.). Random House. (Original work published 1888)

Sontag, S. (2007). At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

 

Gohar Homayounpour is a psychoanalyst and Gradiva award-winning author. She is a member of the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA), the American Psychoanalytic Association (APsaA), the Italian Psychoanalytical Society (SPI), and the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis (NAAP). She is a Training and Supervising psychoanalyst of the Freudian Group of Tehran, of which she is also founder and immediate past president. She is also a member of the IPA group Geographies of Psychoanalysis. Homayounpour has published various psychoanalytic articles, including in the International and Canadian Journals of Psychoanalysis. Her first book, Doing Psychoanalysis in Tehran (2012, MIT) won the Gradiva award and has been translated into languages including French, German, Italian, Turkish and Spanish. Her latest book is titled Persian Blues, Psychoanalysis and Mourning (2022, Routledge). Other recent publications and book chapters include “The Dislocated Subject” (2019) and “Islamic Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Islam” (2019).