On unbendingly holding the line
On November 23, 1964, during a layover on his way back from Africa to the USA, Malcolm X spoke to and took questions from an audience at the Salle de la MutualitƩ in Paris. Among many other interventions and questions, an audience member presented a challenge to Malcolm:
Mr. Malcolm, you want to form a movement which is extremist, and you have said that there must be a movement of Afro-Americans towards Africa—a philosophical, psychological and cultural return—but that struggle must take place in the United States. Consequently, in the event where the Afro-Americans’ demands are not satisfied, what means do they think of using to make an eventual return to Africa?
After asking where the audience member was from and determining he was from the Senegal, Malcolm responds:
Number one, if we are extremists we’re not ashamed of it. In fact, the conditions that our people suffer are extreme and an extreme illness cannot be cured with moderate medicine. We’re not against physical migration of our people back to Africa. Those who want to go back and have something to contribute to the development of Africa, we are for them, because we feel a strong Africa makes us strong also…. Those of us in the West were sold. We didn’t sell ourselves. This is the point we want our brothers, when they’re judging us, always to keep in their minds. We didn’t go to America voluntarily.
Our unbending commitment to the precondition is often received as an “extremist” position. Psychic militancy is in fact about consistently taking this “extremist” position despite moralizing accusations and, following Malcolm’s unflinching reminder, to not to be ashamed of it. More importantly to the work of this book, however, is for us to commit to the associative follow-up in Malcolm’s statement: the conditions that our people suffer are extreme and an extreme illness cannot be cured with moderate medicine. What Malcolm models for us in his psychic militancy is that it is not enough to have our endpoint just be the extremist position; rather, in his response, he highlights the necessity to remain militantly clear that our “extremism” exists in perpetual antagonistic relation with the essential violence enacted on us. In the extremist position we are affirming a truth of the source of that violence and tethering ourselves to material reality; we are engaging in a forceful and wilful refusal, one that interrupts the ability of psychic intrusions to mobilise psychic inversions.
In this case, the psychic inversion we are invited into is that the extremism begins with Malcolm, with his “movement,” with the supposed violence “they” impose on the state or the dogmatic ideological positions they enforce. In his psychic militancy, Malcolm cuts right through this seduction: “if we are extremists, we are not ashamed of it.” The assumption transforms into a contested conditional, and even in the conditional space, it is rooted in the militant clarity afforded to him by material reality and historicity. His psychic militancy does not end there; he does not become mired in the psycho-politico-affective baggage that saturates the lexical accusation of extremism. Malcom also does not allow it to rework “entire parameters (theatres) of conflict through the multi-faceted conquest and colonisation of words, definitions, and narratives,” as RodrĆguez warns. Malcolm instead brings us back to the originary source of extremism and the precondition to which we must commit. Chattel slavery is what is extreme. Stealing Black folks from their homelands and selling them is what is extreme. Refusing to name how the carceral violence of the state remains intimately linked up with this sordid history of violence against Black folks is what is extreme. Feigning that this “extreme illness” can “be cured with moderate medicine” is what is extreme.
The repetition of these points is as key for us as it was in a room poised to favourably listen to Malcolm’s message. These statements can read like platitudes if we are not attuned to the psycho-politico-affective realm and the psychic intrusions it mobilises within us. Even the most obvious truths are meant to be muddled by “confusion mongers” and the seemingly innocent identifications we are conscripted into, as Fanon reminds us. We can return to the previous chapter, for example, and remember how psychic intrusions intend to deflect from material reality and, by so doing, attempt to demobilise our commitments to revolutionary futures— to futures where, among other things, Black folks’ suffering is not an inevitability; a future where organised movements that antagonise white supremacy are not accused of being extremists just for insisting that the material conditions that cause suffering must be dismantled. As Malcolm shows us, there are no platitudes against the repetitious racist violence of the state, empire, colonialism and settler colonialism; only forceful repetitions of psychic militancy, which can simultaneously rivet us to the precondition while disrupting the psychic settlement of oppressive systems. Every instance in which we engage in a routine of psychic refusal of a seemingly mundane recounting of material reality and history— no matter how rudimentary or self-evident it may seem—is one in which we resist the rewiring of our interiority. In doing so, we do not allow abusive structures to do their work in secret, in private, or to feed off their belief that we will not confront them in real time; we do not retreat away from our extremism with shame.
Let us recall … the assaultive disruption by a Zionist at a conference panel titled “Talking about Palestine in Psychoanalysis.” His incursion into the space was absolutely meant to disrupt the ability of people to imagine Palestinians, or Palestine, in psychoanalysis, let alone in the real world. “There is no such thing as Palestinians!” he screamed. This is of course a colonial confession, one in which we could get mired, just as with the accusation of “extremist” lobbed against Malcom. If we return to our discussion about process vs. content, however, we can attune to something else. Any version of content—that is, even if the aggressive Zionist intruder had come to politely “dialogue” or insist to me, as Zionists often do, that “we are all ‘neighbours’ but our governments make us enemies—the process would have remained the same. The process of a Zionist feeling entitled to recreate, or parallel, the expansive reach of Zionism into all spaces that dare register indigenous Palestinian presence is the same process that would unironically affix “extreme” to Malcolm’s revolutionary project. The circumstances are different, but the logic repeats, meant to derail, to disorient, to ensnare. In this matrix, we are meant to be distracted from the material conditions unfolding before our eyes (a microcosm of a larger condition and logic, as Daqqa reminds us). In the case of Malcolm, the deflection is from the real-world, everyday violence against Black folks; and in the case of the conference, the deflection is from the reality of Palestine. Marshaling psychic militancy in that moment was less about combating a literal forgetting of what Zionism is and the violence this man was enacting on me, on all of us, in the name of his wretched ideology. Rather, it was about committing to a practice of attunement in real time; a honing of a skill that refuses to waver from the precondition and recognises every attempt at intrusion as one meant to at once normalise identifications that stabilise power and destabilise our revolutionary futures.
In our repetitious force to wrench the compulsion to repeat from the violent hands of its psychoanalytic architects, we are reminded that we must cede no psychic space. We must be extremists, and we must not be ashamed of it. We must commit to these positions not out of a vacuous or reactionary oppositional framework, but rather because we understand the intent of the psycho-politico-affective to work on well-worn channels of sociability, identifications with “goodness,” and with liberal notions of fairness, reason, and compromise. And because we understand that this psychic intent is not innocent but rather meant to reproduce models of relationality that work to stabilise power’s hold on us—whether that is in colonial, settler colonial, or imperialist conditions. Our extremist positions help us remain militantly clear on the material conditions that dictate our behaviour, the parameters of our fight, and the ever-expanding contested space of struggle. More, they help guide us in understanding our own power against the oppressor’s counterinsurgent insistence on our ineffectuality. Speaking of the “nameless compromises” in which political leaders are enticed to engage, including the affective seduction to believe in the magnanimity of the coloniser, Fanon insists that we must remain clear that “whatever gains the colonised make through armed or political struggle, they are not the result of the coloniser’s good will or goodness of heart but to the fact that he can longer postpone such concessions.” We must remain clear that our extremism is meant to make the coloniser bend, not us, just as we saw in Coulthard’s disciplined resentment.
Our “extremism” reminds us that ideological positions like Zionism, for example, animate a psycho-politico-affective response, demobilising identification with Palestinians and their desire for liberation by inverting the killer and the victim, the powerful and the powerless, the settler and the native. This is similar to the logic that positions Indigenous people of Turtle Island as the intruders, Malcolm as the violent “racist,” migrants as “criminals,” or trans people as “monsters.” Psychic militancy disrupts the naturalization of such identifications with the oppressor, to play off psychoanalyst SĆ”ndor Ferenczi’s notion of identification with the aggressor. The practice of psychic militancy repetitively returns us to the fact, as Assata Shakur powerfully articulates, that “the mind destroying machine works overtime, getting us to crave power and money instead of justice. We’ve all been a bit brainwashed and confused.” We have all been coercively aggressed upon precisely because invading the psychic province is a targeted means to derail us from our revolutionary fights. It is only our psychic militancy that follows through on Shakur’s insight that “the act of being free has a lot to do with becoming unbrainwashed”—that is, psychically divested from the “mind destroying machine” intent on becoming a permanent fixture within us. Psychically divested, and therefore counter-invested enough to be extremist in holding the line, in being militantly fettered to the precondition.
There is a material and political currency and importance for us to practice what it means to hold the line as part of our practice of psychic militancy—to not rush to indulge the impulse we feel to rehabilitate and repair, and, importantly, to take stock of what is being played on within us when we become aware of this pull. We need to be honest about feeling the impulse to loosen our position, and then our conversations and actions should include understanding what is being psychically demanded of us in the moment of that seduction, in the moment when we register the work of Assata’s mind-destroying machine that makes us fear our extremism. What part of the psycho-politico-affective is being animated within us in these moments, as with the organizers who felt afraid in the previous chapter? What does it mean to understand where this enticement might come from, to attune to it being a symptomatic register—which might include multiple and overlapping nodes of pressure—and then commit to unpacking and recognising all the moving pieces rather than just accept it at face value? The psychoanalytic method is about holding the multiplicity of possibilities and retaining an “even hovering attention” to the axis of experience and desire. In de specialising psychoanalysis for our revolutionary futures we can begin here—a reminder that the point of ideology is to hide seamlessly, having us act and orient ourselves to the world in ways and modes of relating that appear “normative” and “organic” or, as “psychoanalyst Nancy Caro Hollander says, “common sense.” The sharper we can get at recognising, pointing out, and outlining all the moving pieces that pull us into identifications with power, the more equipped we will be at warding off psychic intrusions and therefore the more honed our practice of psychic militancy can become.
—Lara Sheehi, From the Clinic to the Streets, e-book version, 2026, pp. pp. 147-154
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