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We are living in times of incredible systemic violence - economic and ecological catastrophe, xenophobia and racial inequality, gendered and sexualized violence - raised to a fever pitch during COVID-19 pandemic. In his most recent work, Robert K. Beshara, ‘a scholar-activist and a fine artist’ committed to Freudo-Lacanian psychoanalysis, makes an important contribution initiating a movement between the colonial and postcolonial towards the decolonial, and with it, challenges us to imagine new horizons beyond the violence that surrounds us presently. Beshara seems self-conscious of the import of these contributions, providing powerful insights and assertions meant to ‘trouble’ and prompt the reader to consider important questions and produce new knowledge. This reveals his genius and makes this work an intervention in the truest and psychoanalytic sense of the term - not the act of binding up and synthesizing knowledge for the patient-qua-reader, but that of troubling them in order to produce the knowledge of the unconscious. And troubled I have been.
The first chapter, ‘Post-/De-colonial Psychoanalysis: Critical Border Psychology’, is one of the most detailed reviews I have read on decolonial psychoanalysis from Frantz Fanon and Paulo Freire to Hussein Bulhan and Homi Bhabha, a powerful bibliographic reference on its own. Beshara outlines his goals against this backdrop: to articulate ‘contrapuntal psychoanalysis’ as liberation praxis, which he describes as ‘the attempt to think and act exterior to racialized capitalism’ (p. 2). He defines racialized capitalism as a ‘colonial materiality’ whose central feature is the ‘racial axis’ (p. 3), noting like Maria Lugones (2007) how colonial racism structures sex/gender/class as such. Beshara states unambiguously that ‘decolonial psychoanalysis must be explicitly both antiracist and anti-capitalist (and certainly, anti-sexist)’ (p. 8). He sets upon the task of decolonizing Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysing Edward Said to ar