Confusion
Confusion is not only an individualistic inability to cohere and process one’s thoughts under the “swarming” overwhelm of power, as Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian describes. Rather, Fanon poignantly tells us that confusion is central in creating and maintaining the naturalness of ideology’s hegemony, the naturalness of living in the “compartmentalised” and “divided” world between colonised and coloniser.
In capitalist societies, education, whether secular or religious, the teaching of moral reflexes … those aesthetic forms of respect for the status quo, instill in the exploited a mood of submission and inhibition which considerably eases the task of law and order. In capitalist countries a multitude of sermonisers, counselors, and “confusion-mongers” intervene between the exploited and the authorities … [agents of the state] bring violence into the homes and minds of the colonised subject.
Tellingly, as with all psychic intrusions, confusion is curated, implanted, and stoked by the colonizer with specific intent to shore up a hierarchical social order that only works to stabilize power. While the infrastructure of carcerality is imbricated in education and the transmission of normative being more broadly, the go-betweens, the conduits into the minds of the colonized are what Fanon terms “confusion-mongers.” Infrastructure alone will not suffice; rather, the psycho-politico-affective must be marshaled, mobilizing identifications such that carceral violence exacts its most pernicious reach into the psyche.
Fanon’s focus on confusion also helps us apprehend the grueling task of clarity—and its urgency—especially when key actors in the “psy-disciplines” are conscripted to do the stealth work of intrusions. It also helps us refocus on why seizing psychoanalysis for revolution emerges as a pressing step toward disrupting the psychic power these intrusions hold. Unseized psychoanalysts, sermonisers, and counsellors are confusion-mongers because they corral both the social and professional legitimacy with which they are imbued and their technical know-how, even if “innocently.” They form the professional army responsible for guiding the landing of psychic intrusions, in this case, in the form of a confusion that is intended to instil doubt about material reality, working to “slow people down” by prioritising reason over more “primitive” affect.
Reason, for Fanon, is a “moral reflex” used in ideological service of “fostering of love for harmony and wisdom”—a counterforce to revolutionary fire that sets off every psychic siren to scramble our connection to material reality and the force that is needed to dismantle the violent systems that reality entails. An over-reliance on pragmatism and the tendency toward centrist realpolitik strategies is one example of how confusion-mongering through an over-reliance on reason emerges in our revolutionary struggles—a consistent sticking point that student organisers across the USA, Europe and the Arab world have shared with me over the previous years.
In a meeting with one of the student groups at a large and prestigious state school in the United States, for example, students pored over the Chancellor’s 70-page mealy-mouthed “explanation” of why the use of law enforcement was necessary to “clear” a pro-Palestine student encampment on their campus. The students were not confused about the mobilisation of humanist liberal discourses that sold their brutalisation as paternalistic protection (reminiscent of Fanon’s colonising mother); rather, they were interested in maintaining clarity in relation to the confusion they described experiencing about why they felt themselves drawn, or conscripted into, political compromises.
These compromises often ran counter to their hardline political commitments and, more importantly, to the knowledge they held about the purposefully emotionally coercive process that was unfolding. Many explicitly voiced struggles with confusion related to whether they were being “unreasonable,” “too harsh,” or “hurting the cause” by being unbending. They shared how even some faculty advisers or mentors were coaching them to “tone it down” so that their message “wouldn’t be lost.”
If we understand the psychic grammar of intrusions, we can come to anticipate the ubiquitous presence of a pragmatist/realpolitik argument against freedom-dreaming, to borrow from Robin D.G. Kelley. And the people making this argument will always be those who “intervene between the exploited and the authorities,” whether they are psychoanalysts, faculty advisers, administrators, or tepid liberals. Every carceral system, whether under colonial, settler colonial, or corporatist guise, needs its confusion-mongers. Every carceral system relies on our interiority to be aptly primed for this intrusion. The psychic intrusion of confusion is especially important to attune to because, like fear, it also mobilises a psychic temporal plane to make its landing.
When thinking about pragmatist arguments, for example, we can see how often they devolve into accusations of fantastical presumptions of the future. This breakdown is not only due to the inherent affective fallacy on which they rely but also because they are meant to serve as purposeful detractions from how the present demands our practical engagement. That is, the pragmatist approach is meant to confuse us and disguise the knowledge we have that freedom-dreaming does not disentangle itself from practical engagement—forcing an impossible and binary choice that will always eschew militancy—and, important to us, that psycho-politico-affective processes are at work.
While the realpolitik argument is then always over-invested in the “delusion” through which freedom-dreaming may be engaged, it has already led us to psychically surrender emergent possibilities. This is how psychic carceral discipline works, matching the external chokeholds that Jasbir Puar contours with the foreclosures of dynamic movement in our interiority. As Fanon warned, being conscripted into the belief that there is a “reasonable” choice under searing conditions like those Daqqa found himself in is what confuses us, alienates us, and leads us away from the struggle. Confusion is a psychic intrusion that is always-already saturated by a coercive psychic compromise.
Despair
The headlines read:
“A glimpse of Gaza’s miserable future” (Newsweek, August 2025)
“Gaza and the End of History” (Boston Review, July 2025)
“Gaza’s erased future” (Le Monde, May 2025)
“Our Beloved Gaza is Gone” (The New York Times, January 2025)
“Even with a Ceasefire, Gaza has no Future” (Newsweek, January 2025).”
Each headline, though different in the cynicism with which it is written, despairingly eliminates every Palestinian who commits to life despite the genocidal violence wrought by the Zionist entity. Through the animation of despair, the headlines and the content of this puerile “journalism” disappear every Palestinian who continues to refuse to be erased in the present and, even more imperiously, every Palestinian who dares dwell in the future, especially in the Gaza Strip.
In the August 2025 Newsweek article, our affect is coercively squeezed, pulled to despair on behalf of “Gazans” who have not seen any shift in the state of famine they are experiencing despite the article’s lead-in about the United Nations, Arab and “Western” states “airdropping” food, and even a quote from the USA’s buffoon-in-chief. The coercion is not because the material reality is not true—Palestinians in Gaza are being starved, and the so-called powers of the world are more interested in lip-service than any meaningful action such as sanctions or arms embargos, let alone a legitimisation of armed resistance against a genocidal settler state that resorts to collective punishment such as famine because of its military failures. The coercion instead comes in the narration of a besieged Gaza in a voice that psycho-politico-affectively intends that we believe this is the only possible outcome while simultaneously not once naming who and what is besieging and forcibly starving Gaza, or why. If we are to despair over Gaza and the Palestinians who have been forced to live within the Zionist-enforced barbed wire, we are to despair in an equally curated way, cleaving the foreclosed future of Gaza from the conditions that have been carefully constructed by its settler colonial overlords for decades (not just in 2023, 2024, or 2025). The handwringing is a deflection of responsibility and reality, conscripting us into a despair that orients us away from the aggressor and into an amorphous and inevitably bleak future from which we cannot break out.
In the committedly genocidaire-promoting publication of The New York Times, we see yet another form of despair-mongering. While this version may be easier to detect by those of us committed to full Palestinian liberation, we must remain attuned to how content is the distraction for process. Grounding ourselves in Daqqa’s realizations about how consciousness is seared allows us to trace the logic of these types of despair-inducing interventions; processes that demand our attention if only to collate data to better defend our psyches against intrusion. Tellingly, this piece is written around the same time as a ceasefire announcement. The sinister project of naturalising despair in service of settler colonial logics is under way immediately when, in the first sentence, we are introduced to a “Gazan” who is “pretty much the opposite of Hamas.”
The “Gazan” who “before the war … admired Western democracy, condemned suicide bombings and yearned for Arabs and Jews to live in peace and harmony” is ventriloquizing his despair to us. Beyond the extractive and exploitative sleight of hand, despair emerges as the psycho-affective hook through which we are meant to identify with the protagonist who is “opposite of Hamas.” His defeat is our signal—our legitimizing invitation—to introject the despairing native informant27 as a fixture of our own interiority. Like Fanon’s colonizing mother, this conscriptive identification is for our own good, as the author laments about his “fear that the message about the futility of endless war hasn’t gotten through.” Joining the Westernised, civilised “Gazan” in his despair would mean that we could prove that we had finally understood this message.
If we are not attuned to the animation of the psycho-politicoaffective plane, we may find ourselves waylaid by the tedious violence of bothsidesism in the face of a genocidal war machine that had been rampaging with impunity for more than a year at the time of this article. More sinister in the searing process, however, is the construction of the representative despairing native as our primary identification. The despairing native Palestinian informant becomes the foil through which our own investments in the surety of the full and total liberation of Gaza, and all of Palestine, can be cannabilized. That is, he purposefully serves as a counter-identification and redirection of our psychic energies away from the unrelenting stamina, resolve, and force of the resistance fighters who are not despairing and who do not see their “beloved Gaza” as succumbing to the foreclosed machinations of empire and its settler colonial proxy. Far from being innocent, as with all psychic intrusions, this version of despair works in tandem ideologically with settler colonial state policy, illustrated within days of this article, for example, by settler organisations erecting a “No Future in Palestine” billboard in Arabic in the West Bank.
I detail what may seem like a mundane mobilisation of despair so that we can commit to noticing the process by which this psychic intrusion becomes woven into the psycho-politico-affective tapestry of oppression. And to remind us that the animation of all psychic intrusions like despair works through the psycho-politic-affective realm, not arbitrarily but rather as a necessity for the ever-expansive reach of the imperial, colonial, and settler colonial imaginary—and their pointed intent. In this tightly knotted affective foreclosure, we are meant to join not only in the rewiring of material reality (in the case of despair, pre-emptively sacrificing, and therefore murdering, the millions of Palestinians who remain in Gaza), but also our own interiority. The intended effect of this searing process is that the only shorthand affect available to us is the fait accompli ensured through despair.
In our psychic militancy, we must heed revolutionary Palestinian martyr Bassel Al-Araj’s caution: “do not contribute to instilling a sense of defeat.” We must remain vigilant that the purpose of psychic intrusions is not only to have us feel the affect; that is, to feel despairing. I am also not pointing to despair as a condition of alienation and modernity so obsessed upon by British and European writers of the twentieth century. More concretely, through these examples we can see “how despair is meant to ensure that we write Palestinians out of their and our future, out of Gaza, and out of Palestine. Despair as intended effect seeks to have us accept the futility of the notion that we would be able to engage in a reality-telling exercise that Mary Turfah poignantly models for us when she states: “Palestinians are not struggling to survive Gaza. They are struggling to survive Israel, a state whose existence is predicated on Palestinians’ annihilation-propelled ‘displacement.’” It is for this reason that I consider the implantation of despair as a psychic intrusion—precisely because we are actively derailed from our ability to do what Turfah does with the fervour and consistency that is needed. Despair is a desired effect and affect meant to create psychological blockage, to derail us from remaining tethered to and clearly able to identify material reality, and to regularise the impossibility of dismantling oppressive systems that stand in the way of our liberation.
—Lara Sheehi, From the Clinic to the Streets, e-book version, 2026, pp. 97-103
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