Ambivalent Attachment — Melancholia and Political Activism in Contemporary Palestine

Abstract

This article argues that over the course of the past three decades a mood change has occurred in terms of how Palestinians relate to the ideal of an independent Palestinian state. During the first Intifada, from 1987 to 1993, which constitutes the golden age of Palestinian resistance towards Israel's occupation, the Palestinian resistance movement was characterized by a passionate belief in the possibility of a revolutionary transformation. Due to the consistent stalemate and even worsening of the conflict that have followed in the wake of the Second Intifada, from 2000 to 2003, this passionate belief in the realization of a Palestinian state has been replaced by ambivalence toward that ideal. Based on insights from my intermittent fieldwork with families of Palestinian political prisoners from 2004 to 2011, this article suggests that the contemporary ambivalence surrounding the revolutionary project can be meaningfully analyzed using Freud's notion of melancholia. In Freud, melancholia accounts for the relation between a feeling of indeterminate loss and ambivalent attachment. The notion of melancholia thereby provides anthropology with a concept that can be used to name and explore the frayed attachment to the ideal of a Palestinian state in the context of an ongoing colonial occupation. The passionate politics of the First Intifada enabled a fusing of Palestinian personhood with the overall political project into a subject characterized by active resistance. In contrast, the ambivalent attachment that marks the link between self and state project in the Palestinian territories after the Second Intifada leads to a mood of melancholia. By analyzing the attachment to the political project as an indeterminate loss in the melancholic's ego, I argue that the Palestinian political project is part of the self and keeps its adherents in a repetitive temporal fold from which they are unable to escape, because they are obliged and compelled to keep fighting for a state that does not seem to materialize. Conceptually, melancholia has the capacity to elucidate the emotional and deeply intersubjective toll it takes to live and aspire to an ideal that seems further from realization by the hour.

Coping with trauma and adversity among Palestinians in the Gaza Strip: A qualitative, culture-informed analysis

“…afflictions and symptoms) is shaped, with a need to elicit support and to manage networks of a social or political nature. In her recent monograph, Segal (2016) further develops these ideas, eloquently demonstrating how trauma and other emotional responses (loss, grief, shame, isolation) among a small group of Palestinian prisoner-wives in a village on the West Bank are moulded by their sense of community and the normalcy of a gendered clan and family structure. She demonstrates clearly how the ways in which Palestinians cope with occupation and collective violence is shaped by their social networks and the meanings they ascribe to the relations within those relationships.…”

“…Within the social sciences, the effects of war and occupation in Palestine have mainly been addressed in terms of political resistance and formation of a national social memory (Allen, 2006, 2008, 2009; Hajjar, 2005; Khalili, 2007; Sa’di and Abu-Lughod, 2007). Meanwhile, less attention has been paid to describing and analysing Palestinian lives in terms of the daily routines, through which occupation and collective violence manifest themselves in people’s lives (Segal, 2016; Taraki, 2006).…”

“…Within the social sciences, the effects of war and occupation in Palestine have mainly been addressed in terms of political resistance and formation of a national social memory (Allen, collective violence manifest themselves in people's lives (Segal, 2016;Taraki, 2006).…”

Philippine Prison Marriages

“…Some of these studies emphasize how women are "doing time" on the outside, suff ering the consequences of separation and single parenting, and the stigma that imprisonment of their husbands brings about (Comfort 2009;Fishman 1990). In the context of the Palestinian liberation struggle, Segal (2010Segal ( , 2013Segal ( , 2016aSegal ( , 2016b provides insights into how loss, stigma, and grief are inscribed into the everyday lives of wives of political detainees. Th ese studies off er important insights on how imprisonment of husbands strongly impinges on the lives of the wives and help us understand the extent to which confi nement signifi cantly reconfi gures gender dynamics and family relationships.…”

Despairing Moods: Worldly Attunements and Permeable Personhood in Yap

“…Building upon Steinbock's analysis, Matthew Ratcliffe () has recently pointed out that despair arises when there is a radical break with one's ability to inhabit the “kinds of possibility the world incorporates” (see also Segal ). When engulfed by despair, I am thus faced with the impossibility of possibility itself.…”