“Helplessness,” by Nadia Bou Ali, is forthcoming in print in Parapraxis‘ Winter Issue 07: “Romance, that would be fantastic.” It is now published as an original advance feature on Communis in digital form only with the kind permission of its author and Parapraxis.

“Helplessness does not translate, it is withheld from dependency by the image of its pathos: suffering does not become anything but counted bodies, in an infinite count. For the colonizer there is no count for the bodies because they do not signify. This is a wager that is hard to stomach for any liberal still entertaining fantasies of progress, still banking on democratic representation, on the public sphere, on theories of justification, on plural multiple forms of knowledge, on relativist epistemologies: this is really, really the end time, or the time of the end. The game is over: the bets are on the table, the only thing that will live on is the dead.”

— Nadia Bou Ali

Hilflosigkeit, helplessness, is a word that takes on the status of a concept in psychoanalysis. In the most complex moments of reflection on war and death, aggressivity, and narcissism, Freud often resorted to this crucial concept, helplessness, to understand the cruelest acts of humanity. Put otherwise, helplessness is the inhuman drive against which humanity seeks to assert itself: the becoming human of the subject against the regressive drive for dependence. We seek dependence because we want to ensure that the object we love will not become the very object we hate: we seek permanence in love, because we secretly harbor the fear of love being taken away. Love is the guarantee for our existence in so many ways: it offers a relation, a harbor, a place for which there is none. It binds us to a group, a master, a signifier, that then promises a guarantee for the original loss, our original helplessness, an amoeba like emotion that scourges the world in search of an extension, a binding, a libido in the place of spirit.

Freud suggested that this primary helplessness explains our most intense feelings of love and hate, and our most intense feeling of lack. A primary mover of non-Aristotelian nature, it is not a potentiality in search of actualization, but a burdensome negative that signs off at every encounter, in every relation. This helplessness is in a way ontological, but not only. It as well inflicts our ways of knowing, of enjoying, of making sense of the world. It is also the origin of sense. This was elaborated on by Lacan: hilflosigkeit is the springboard of sense, it propels the latching onto a primary signifier, language, meaning making, the symbolic; the entrapment in chains of signifiers, the enchainment in the guarantee of language. In many ways, this originary helplessness is the springboard of attachment, and the very sense of the end of analysis. Subjective destitution, the end of analysis, invokes yet again this sense of helplessness, of detachment, of a lack of guarantee. We begin yet again right where we ended: the means and ends problem is resolved, albeit momentarily.

Freud’s most incisive comments about hilflosigkeit occur in the wake of World War I, and make a strong appearance in his analysis of group formations. He maintained that we identify with the group precisely because we are so helpless in our ego. The ego strives to be omnipotent, to be great again, and again — yet it fails, it needs something outside of it, a sense of an outside that would both give it a boundary and threaten its limits at the same time. The ego is a master negotiator, always seeking the best deal, hedging against its loss, speculating on its eternal future, for it cannot be otherwise. The ego cannot avow its helplessness, it disavows it, weaves tales and stories, imagines otherwise, always imagines otherwise. This reliance on the help of others, the charity in social relations, is the ego’s fantasy. What psychoanalysis promises is that the subject will be able to survive while witnessing its own helplessness. This is not a group affair, though often groups canalize this primary originary emotion.

Franz Fanon maintained that this is made clear in colonial contexts, when the group or family abducts the libido: magic, myth, ghosts from the past haunt the colonized excessively. The enemy within, so to speak, is one that haunts the colonized in a “permanent confrontation on the phantasmatic plane”^[1]; there is a “disintegration of personality, a splitting and dissolution.”^[2] This dissolution of personality, this libidinal cooptation by the group, is precisely what the native, the colonized, sheds during the battle for freedom. The “centuries of unreality”^[3] are pushed back into the past as the native fights back against real demons of colonization. Fanon’s claim is that the “exit from the imaginary” compelled by colonization is a moment of violent confrontation: there can be no compromise except for the national bourgeoisie, the elite who will negotiate with the colonizer and run things on their behalf. Those natives or colonized who do not fight are beaten from the start, retreating into their helplessness as the “bombs are raining down on them.”^[4] This helplessness in the face of colonial power implies that one is already beaten, that whatever they do, they have already lost: the helplessness means they are yet again a mass, a population, a group. The only way to conquer this helplessness, to not give into it, is to fight. Though they know very well that only the violence of the colonizer will be justified, and not that of the colonized, they know also that it is only “this apparent folly alone that can put them out of reach of colonial oppression.”^[5]

Fanon accurately observes that the politics of anti-colonial liberation is always stuck between either being too quick (too much fighting that leads to burnout) or prematurely giving up. His comments come in the context of the Cold War, when he thought that “capitalism realizes its military strategy has everything to lose by the breakout of nationalist wars.”^[6] During this time, colonies had to disappear for capital’s development: “what must be avoided at all cost is strategic insecurity.”^[7] The binary Cold War system fed violence into the colonies — while the two blocks had peaceful co-existence, the colonies boiled. Fanon predicted that what would come next would be a politics of minorities (the Negro, the Muslim, and the Jew) that would entail the “use of the people against the people,”^[8] what has become the legacy of post-coloniality.

This was of course another world, another time, another stage of capital when neutralism dominated the Third World and aid flowed from both sides. The governing classes of the Third World, Fanon wrote, “men at the head of empty countries, who talk too loudly, are at most irritating. You’d like them to shut up. But on the contrary they are in great demand.”^[9] Meanwhile, the persistent outbreak of violence in the Third World, the Global South, is itself a result of the Manichean world of colonization: “it is them or us”^[10] is the lesson that the colonizer teaches, force is the only way forward, what brings together the colonized is the sole aim of taking out the settler, of getting rid of them, of uniting to kill them: “To work means to work for the death of the settler.”^[11] The cycle of armed struggle is one of no return: terror, counter-terror, violence, counter-violence. The story Fanon tells is not so out of date: colonialism unifies the colonized through violence, a violence which both reinforces their unity and threatens it with separation. The international order itself is built around this structural violence: any real move towards independence is threatened by the economic withdrawal of the West: “The apotheosis of independence is transformed into the curse of independence.”^[12] Fanon understood well that the only way to overcome colonial violence would be a global redistribution of wealth. We are now in the thralls of a neo-colonial violence of different proportions: the rise of mercantilism, the re-emergence of fascism, is propelled by the logic of redistribution of wealth amongst nations, blocks, empires… and not within them.

For instance, the excuse of wealth redistribution to benefit the American working class is a farce: the colony has come home, the new cycle for the Western lower and middle classes is recession, depression, rebellion, civil war–lest we forget that Nazism transformed all of Europe into a colony. While Germany did pay in retribution, Europe never paid its dues to the colonies. America never paid either, and is now seeking further extraction.

It is crucial here to quote in full the picture Fanon paints:

As soon as the capitalists know—and of course they are the first to know—that their government is getting ready to decolonize, they hasten to withdraw all their capital from the colony in question. The spectacular flight of capital is one of the most constant phenomena of decolonization. Private companies, when asked to invest in independent countries, lay down conditions which are shown in practice to be inacceptable or unrealizable. Faithful to the principle of immediate returns which is theirs as soon as they go “overseas,” the capitalists are very chary concerning all long-term investments. They are unamenable and often openly hostile to the prospective programs of planning laid down by the young teams which form the new government. At a pinch they willingly agree to lend money to the young states, but only on condition that this money is used to buy manufactured products and machines: in other words, that it serves to keep the factories in the mother country going.

In fact the cautiousness of the Western financial groups may be explained by their fear of taking any risk. They also demand political stability and a calm social climate which are impossible to obtain when account is taken of the appalling state of the population as a whole immediately after independence. Therefore, vainly looking for some guarantee which the former colony cannot give, they insist on garrisons being maintained or the inclusion of the young state in military or economic pacts. The private companies put pressure on their own governments to at least set up military bases in these countries for the purpose of assuring the protection of their interests. In the last resort these companies ask their government to guarantee the investments which they decide to make in such-and-such an underdeveloped region.

It happens that few countries fulfill the conditions demanded by the trusts and monopolies. Thus capital, failing to find a safe outlet, remains blocked in Europe, and is frozen. It is all the more frozen because the capitalists refuse to invest in their own countries. The returns in this case are in fact negligible and treasury control is the despair of even the boldest spirits.

In the long run the situation is catastrophic. Capital no longer circulates, or else its circulation is considerably diminished. In spite of the huge sums swallowed up by military budgets, international capitalism is in desperate straits.^[13]

The abandoned Third World, condemned to regression, is now stuck in a “collective autarky.” Fanon continues:

Thus the Western industries will quickly be deprived of their overseas markets. The machines will pile up their products in the warehouses and a merciless struggle will ensue on the European market between the trusts and the financial groups. The closing of factories, the paying off of workers and unemployment will force the European working class to engage in an open struggle against the capitalist regime. Then the monopolies will realize that their true interests lie in giving aid to the underdeveloped countries—unstinted aid with not too many conditions.^[14]

Aid is today precisely what is being blocked, more monopoly, more holding onto wealth, more avarice; all the gains of de-colonization are being lost.

It cannot escape us how close these conditions are to describing the conditions of the Western working class today: colonization has come home, full circle. Yet we are far from the unification of the European working class, or the American one. Instead, what we are witnessing is the rise of fascism yet again, under a liberal consensus.^[15] Helplessness, depression, dependency, fear of loss of love, anxiety, fascist populism… what a cocktail, a cock-a-doodle dandy.

The helplessness of the colonized is converted, just like that, into the helplessness of capital. Capital can’t help itself; it must be helped, it must be kept in its original version, industrial capital, not the suicidal drive of speculation and markets. While the first cold war was a bad idea for the colonized, a tragic end to anti-colonial struggle, as Fanon tirelessly repeated, the fabricated farcical cold war being staged today is even worse. The tariff wars have overshadowed colonial genocide, and just about everything else. Elon Musk losing one hundred billion-plus dollars makes the headlines, while the headless children accumulating in Gaza’s morgues do not. This is not a sentimental comment: it has to do with what we could call the law of conversion of helplessness into dependency. There is a courage in Fanon’s obstinance when he states there is no use repeating “that hunger with dignity is preferable to bread eaten in slavery.”^[16] Decolonization implies making sure the colonized don’t starve, that the material conditions for the existence of the colonized are furnished so that they may not forget their dignity. Dignity is gained through political reform; and only with dignity can the colonized fight colonization. It is this dignity that colonialism works to dismantle. The analogy Fanon makes is striking: colonization is not comparable to a protective mother who seeks to guide the colonized from darkness to light, but a mother who “seeks to restrain its fundamentally perverse offspring from managing to commit suicide and from giving free reign to its evil instincts. The colonial mother protects her child from itself, from its ego, and from its physiology, its biology and its own unhappiness which is its very essence.”^[17]

The colonial mother protects the colonized from its own version of helplessness, its being-unto-death. It is the colonial mother, then, that teaches its children not to turn themselves into human shields, not to self-destruct, not to self-incarcerate. They want to be in a prison, in an enclosure, they do not wish to leave, they wish to be governed, they are so helpless that they know not what to do with themselves. We offer them free trade, rivieras, havens of commerce, they want anachronistic things like a nationality and a name. How bizarre is their helplessness? How it conceals our own disavowed helplessness…

Yet we the colonized have another take on helplessness, an obstinate strength in living in it, in knowing that no one will come for you, no one will save you. There is nothing to be done except to hold your ground, refuse to be saved, despite wanting to be saved. Who does not want to be saved? How can we not want to save the helpless? There is a deep cruelty in psychoanalysis, one that does not sit well with Marxist politics. There is a cruelty in asserting that there is no escape from ambivalence: life and death, Eros and Thanatos, love and hate, desire and demand–helplessness and the demand for recognition. Nowhere is this problem more evident than in the colonial context. However, unlike Romanticism, and unlike Hegelianism, this eternal duel, this struggle unto eternity (of life and death, of the drive) is for psychoanalysis rooted in the body. It is the body on which the drama of helplessness, of ambivalence, of repression and the return of the repressed plays out. The eternity of the unconscious, its timeless struggle, betrays that in fact there is no time, time can be abolished. There is a way into the unreachable “noumenal” reality of Kant: time-consciousness is a rationalist disease, a disease of repression.^[18] There is no other time but this time. The anti-colonial struggle in Palestine is an opening of this problem of eternity: there is no delay, no postponement. The colonizer knows that, wishes to shut the gates of time, rushing to exterminate, get rid of the bodies that are aching with the timelessness of their struggle, in the eternal labor of becoming subjects, in the “Sabbath of eternity.”^[19]

This is perhaps the most radical proposition of a speculative theory of helplessness and ambivalence: there is a heroism in witnessing the dissolution of the fantasy of omnipotence generated by the disavowal of our impotence.

Anti-colonial struggles offer us a fundamental scene for such a traversal of fantasy. Not only is the impotence of the colonized avowed (a great lesson of Fanon’s account of doubled alienation), but it is also never realized. The fight against colonialism, against the violence of occupation and erasure, is a fight against the irrealization of impotence. Helplessness cannot be helpless, suffering is not a pathos: it is interrupted, unrealized. Suffering does not produce an image of recognition, a symbolic guarantee to hold it together. In a way, the drama of helplessness is coopted by colonization, withheld from developing into the dialectic of recognition and ensuant misrecognition. Why? Because helplessness does not translate, it is withheld from dependency by the image of its pathos: suffering does not become anything but counted bodies, in an infinite count. For the colonizer there is no count for the bodies because they do not signify. This is a wager that is hard to stomach for any liberal still entertaining fantasies of progress, still banking on democratic representation, on the public sphere, on theories of justification, on plural multiple forms of knowledge, on relativist epistemologies: this is really, really the end time, or the time of the end. The game is over: the bets are on the table, the only thing that will live on is the dead. Let me tell you why: the dead will live on precisely because we can never imagine their death: we can create apparatuses, algorithms, calculations for why their deaths make sense, but we cannot enter their count, their “set” of counting, how it is that they can be so helpless unto death. Not a being towards death that flags a fantasy of authenticity, but one that recognizes that helplessness cannot be overcome, stages it, heroically embraces it: the old die with the young, the young watch the old die, the old know that the young will die. No one is rushing to the borders of the desert seeking refuge, there is no messiah, no one to come to lead them anywhere, there is only the collapse of civilization.

And yet again, there is us, the spectators, those at the gates hoping for a messiah, a savior befitting our day of judgement that has become an eternity, an eternity of images we have seen before. Blade runner, drones, amputated cyborgs, woman cum machine, woman qua machine. The rationalists who hope for a moment of reason, when all this suffering will tally up, make sense, deliver us to the absolute, only for it to revert to its older forms… none of this works, it doesn’t work anymore. We are upon a real day of reckoning: the helplessness that we all work so hard to disavow is threatened by extinction, whereas the counter-enlightenment enlightenment promise was that somehow it would be precisely what propelled reason forward.

Notes

^[1] Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (Pluto Press, 2008), 56.

^[2] Ibid.

^[3] Ibid.

^[4] Fanon, 63.

^[5] Fanon, 58.

^[6] Fanon, 79.

^[7] Fanon, 80.

^[8] Fanon, 80-81.

^[9] Fanon, 80.

^[10] Fanon, 84.

^[11] Ibid.

^[12] Fanon, 97.

^[13] Fanon, 103-104.

^[14] Fanon, 105.

^[15] Zahi Zalloua, “Fascism from the Standpoint of Its Racialized Victims,” Philosophical Salon, March 24, 2025, https://thephilosophicalsalon.com/fascism-from-the-standpoint-of-its-racialized-victims/; Alberto Toscano, Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism, and the Politics of Crisis (Verso, 2023).

^[16] Fanon, 210.

^[17] Fanon, 211.

^[18] Norman Brown, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History (Wesleyan University Press, 1985), 95.

^[19] Ibid.

Nadia Bou Ali