For Sigmund Freud, in his development of psychoanalytic technique, resistance—which could constitute anything from falling silent to falling in love—was the stubborn trace that proved the existence of the unconscious: the place in the psyche that Lacan says is inevitably “marked by a blank or occupied by a lie”. “Where there is occupation there is resistance,” Leila Khaled has said, naming several examples of resistance in the Palestinian tradition, including street protests and embroidery. One struggles to defeat the lie, to write into the blank. I began with the question of the unspeakable, of what lies beyond and behind speech. I was struck by a convergence between the concept of “plum pit qi” in traditional Chinese medicine and the concept of “globus hystericus” in Western medicine. The latter is a classic hysterical “conversion symptom” in which the body registers the aftermath of traumatic incident: the sensation of a hard object stuck in the throat. In Chinese medicine, plum pit qi vividly figures a blocked flow; feeling stands in the throat like a border guard and demands attention. Freud dreamed of seeing strange white bone-like structures in the throat of Irma, a dream woman who bore some resemblance to a real patient mutilated by a less scrupulous colleague. Later Freud died of cancer of the jaw and throat. Anatomically there is in fact a bone floating in the throat, the only unattached bone in the body, kind of enigmatic and definite on an X-ray, called a hyoid bone. The hyoid relates to the functions of speaking and swallowing. Hazem Jamjoum says of Basel al-Araj that he was “one of those people who are masters of communication but for whom language feels like a curse... you can only say one word at a time.” There are many possible interpretations of dreams. The point is just to make an interpretation, to find out where the resistance lies, and therefore a contour of shared reality. From October 2023 onwards I could find nothing interesting in my chosen subject of the unspeakable. Horror and resistance to horror were very clear and on the surface. There was nothing else to think about. It was Nouria Behloul who pointed out to me that the question of the unspeakable was also active, to say the least, in the policing of discourse concerning Palestine. I took Nouria’s suggestion as a new starting point and arrived at a conflation between two very different senses of resistance, the psychoanalytic and the political, an incongruity that forms the fundamental basis of this exhibition. What is the most unspeakable thing? Something that I therefore do not know if I can say. I borrow the words of the internationalist communist MN Roy: “The oppressed people and exploited classes are not obliged to respect the moral philosophy of the ruling power. A despotic power is always overthrown by force. The force employed in this process is not criminal.” More carefully we could borrow Freud’s throat to say with it that the point is that to resist is necessary and inevitable, no matter what we think of it. When we went to the blacksmith we gave a simplified glider diagram and commissioned a useless, flightless abstraction of it, to establish a boundary, the boundary of abstraction that marks what is inside the gallery with a blankness that does not prevail outside. I know that representations of pain can cause pain. As my inheritance I have some right to the collective pain that it is proposed this representation causes, if this is the endless reverberation of a previous genocide, which it may or may not be. This whole subject has been stuck in my throat since I was born. So the bone, the unspeakable, stands in front of the possibility of pain. I say as loudly as I can, “Nothing can be said,” but I resist this nothing. The objects in the room and the flows between them navigate a path between imposed silence and complicated hope.
Hannah Black
Marseille, March 2024
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