please subscribe to my musings on public things there….
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In a 1967 piece for The New Yorker magazine, title “Truth and Politics,” Hannah Arendt foretold something happening today as the alt-right attempts to whitewash away the reality of racial, ethnic, and sexual diversity and obliterate our historical knowledge of past failings, all an attempt to create an illusion of a nation whose identity is safe and stable and whose conscience is clear, free of any guilt or need to change a thing. Arendt didn’t have a crystal ball that would tell her about Trump and Elon and DOGE and the current wrecking ball we are experiencing, but she knew well the contours of these kinds of phenomena, how such sorts of people, “deliberate liars,” who, to counter their enemies, spin a web of lies, seeking to create an alternate reality.
“No doubt, the originators of the lying image who ‘inspire’ the hidden persuaders still know that they want to deceive an enemy on the social or the national level, but the result is that a whole group of people, and even whole nations, may take their bearings from a web of deceptions to which their leaders wished to subject their opponents. What then happens follows almost automatically. The main effort of both the deceived group and the deceivers themselves is likely to be directed toward keeping the propaganda image intact, and this image is threatened less by the enemy and by real hostile interests than by those inside the group itself who have managed to escape its spell and insist on talking about facts or events that do not fit the image.” (Published subsequently in Between Past and Future.)
Arendt was appalled by many of the propaganda moves of the twentieth century, from Hitler’s and Stalin’s totalitarian regimes to the complicity of regular citizens when faced by appalling circumstances. The latter was the occasion for the essay I’m quoting, when the Jewish community in New York and beyond attacked her when she relayed a fact in her reporting on the Eichmann trial: members of the Jewish councils in Europe during WWII identified and sent other Jews to their death. A fact like that was quite difficult to bear, and all kinds of defensive disavowals rose up against it and the truthteller Arendt. For a while in New York she was persona non grata, Grad students were warned away from working with her (as her then teaching assistant Elizabeth Minnich has told me).. It didn’t matter that she was just stating facts. These were facts that many needed at some unconscious level to completely disavow.
This brings me to the main point I want to make: today we are encountering a “web of deceptions” unlike anything we’ve seen since the totalitarian regimes of the mid-twentieth century, likely not yet on par with Hitler’s Germany but already more ominous than the McCarthy era. Where normally facts will stop people in their tracks with the reality of the situation and in those situations the occasional lie will be found out for what it is, when “deliberate liars” set out to create an entirely alternate reality, the very bearings that normally hold us together splinter. We don’t know where we are, who we are, what is real, or where we should go. The center no longer holds. This is especially true whenever people try to accommodate the alternate reality in small ways just to cover their ass, like Florida State University has recently done in precapitulating to anti-DEI directives.
Look at this list of terms that Florida State University has opted to expunge from its website – and thing about what kind of reality it is attempting to realize, all to help realize the wishes of their commanders:
- Advocacy
- Antiracist
- Biases
- Cultural relevance
- Diverse backgrounds
- Diversity
- Diversified
- Ethnicity
- Exclusion
- Inclusion
- Inclusive
- Inequities
- Marginalized
- Oppression
- Polarization
- Racially
- Segregation
- Systemic
- Woman
- Women
To me it is obvious that it would be a world in which none of these require our attention, where none of these matters obtain.
In passage I quoted above, Arendt suggests that the deceivers themselves know better, that they manage to escape the spell of the alternate reality they have created. But in the present moment I am thinking otherwise. From a psychoanalytic perspective, which Arendt shunned, it seems to me that those today feverishly intent on creating an alternative reality unconsciously need this alternative to be actually real. Every directive, every executive order, every “dear colleague” letter speaks to that unconscious exigency. Rather than reading these documents as glib and cynical political maneuvers, let’s read them as signs of their authors’ madness. Their psychical reality cannot bear a world that is otherwise than their delusions.
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[This press release used to reside at the Department of Education’s website but was removed by about January 19, 2025]
PRESS RELEASE
Emory University in Georgia enters into resolution agreement to ensure compliance with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 with respect to alleged harassment of students based on national origin – shared Palestinian and/or Muslim ancestry
January 16, 2025
The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) today announced that Emory University in Georgia has entered into a resolution agreement to ensure compliance with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 with respect to alleged harassment of students based on national origin (shared Palestinian and/or Muslim ancestry).
OCR’s investigation identified Title VI compliance concerns regarding the university’s response to campus protest activity and to notice the university received of discrimination against Palestinian, Arab, or Muslim university students, based on shared ancestry, that could contribute to or create a hostile environment for students. Specifically, OCR is concerned that the gratuitous violence of the law enforcement activity reflected in widely publicized videos from the arrests during the April 2024 protests may have created a hostile environment within the campus community for Palestinian, Arab, or Muslim university members and those perceived to have associated with them. Additionally, OCR identified concerns that the university’s publicly available policies and procedures for receiving and responding to reports of discrimination based on national origin and race lack the clarity necessary to ensure that the university provides a prompt and effective response, consistent with the requirements of Title VI, to reports and complaints of race and national origin discrimination. And at the university’s request, OCR agreed to resolve the allegations regarding different treatment without making a determination as to whether those allegations raise Title VI compliance concerns, given the scope of remedy already confirmed to date in this investigation.
OCR recognizes Emory’s efforts during the pendency of this investigation to address a climate that the university characterized as marked by anxiety, tension, and fear for Palestinian, Arab, and/or Muslim university students. The university acknowledged “shocking” and “deeply distressing” scenes from the law enforcement response to the April 24 protests and expressed willingness to launch a thorough review, including of how Emory engages external law enforcement. In conjunction with the commitments made today in signing this resolution agreement, Emory has committed to ensuring a safe and non-discriminatory educational environment for all students.
OCR determined that monitoring the university’s fulfillment of the following terms of the resolution agreement announced today will effectively ensure the university’s compliance with the requirements of Title VI not to discriminate based on national origin, including shared ancestry:
• Revising its nondiscrimination policies and procedures to ensure all university offices consistently and effectively comply with Title VI, including a definition of harassment that includes harassment based on actual or perceived shared ancestry.
• Revising its policies and procedures pertaining to campus protests, demonstrations, and related forms of expression, to ensure that they provide safeguards for non- discriminatory application and enforcement, including with regard to granting requests for approval of planned protest or demonstration, and its response to these activities including whether to contact outside law enforcement.
• Assessing its response to campus protests, and its decisions regarding student requests for approval to conduct protests, during the 2022-2023 and 2023-2024 academic years.
• Providing OCR copies of all complaints and reports concerning alleged national origin discrimination, including shared ancestry, or race, and the university’s response to those reports or complaints during the 2023-2024 and 2024-2025 academic years, and taking remedial actions if required; and
• Conducting annual training on nondiscrimination and harassment for all students and employees, Title VI investigators and law enforcement utilized at the university;
• Developing and administering a climate survey to students and employees (survey subjects) at the university to identify whether the survey subjects feel they have been or are currently subjected to or have witnessed discrimination, including harassment, on campus or during university related activities, based on race and national origin, specifically including shared ancestry and ethnic characteristics.
“Emory University’s commitments today promise to bring it into compliance with federal civil rights law, as its full school community deserves,” said Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Catherine E. Lhamon.
The resolution letter to the Emory University and the resolution agreement are available on the Office for Civil Rights’ website.
CONTACT
Press Office
[email protected]
(202) 401-1576
Office of Communications and Outreach (OCO)
Office of Communications and Outreach (OCO)
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January 16, 2025 -
I just submitted this proposal for a panel at the upcoming ISPP meeting. They better accept it. Can’t wait.
Panel Title: From Neoliberal to Authoritarian: The USA’s Fascist Tide
Panel Abstract: After fifty-plus years of neoliberalism, the United States is witnessing a bewildering right-angle turn from a politics that is laissez-faire, globalized, and individualistic to an authoritarian and increasingly fascist one that is chauvinistic, statist, and moralistic. While it might be tempting to say that we are in a post-neoliberal era, the papers in this panel argue that the rising tide of fascism in the USA — along with the terror and violence that might ensue from it — continues the neoliberal project. Each paper also investigates the psychological processes the new authoritarians employ to assuage the anxiety produced by neoliberalism while still continuing the neoliberal project. These processes are generally fascistic with a strong father figure promising protection from imagined enemies and forces. Noëlle McAfee argues that, rather than being a reversal of neoliberalism, the new authoritarianism is a vicissitude of it. The elements of its playbook feed on phobia and assuage the precariat’s anxieties while still shoring up the elite’s power. Catarina Kinnvall argues that the new authoritarians capitalize on precarity, making electoral promises they have no intention of delivering, increasing rather than decreasing insecurity among their constituencies. Pasko Kisić-Merino and Antonia Stanojević focus on how the new authoritarians employ genderphobic narratives to bemoan how ‘feminised’ liberal modernity robbed America and how American wholeness and enjoyment could be recaptured. Paul Nesbitt-Larking turns to how the rise of authoritarianism in the United States affects its northern neighbor’s capacity and willingness to assert political independence. In the asymmetrical relationship between the two countries, the American force field is seductive and attractive. While Canada’s dominant political communities have historically asserted their independence in various ways, the question arises as to how much the US’s mode of dividing communities and demonizing subaltern peoples might seep into Canada’s own political culture. To conclude, discussant James McAuley will offer reflections.
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On April 25, 2024, Emory University President Gregory Fenves violated Emory's open expression policy by abruptly terminating a peaceful protest brutally and violently, enlisting the police to attack demonstrators with pepper spray, rubber bullets, and tasers. Today Fenves violated the policy again, issuing restrictions unilaterally, completely disregarding long-standing principles of shared governance. His move is contrary to the the policy's clear statement that only the University Senate oversees any revisions to the policy. The university senate was told about the new policies but not consulted. The administration decided unilaterally and abruptly, claiming there was no time to consult the senate since students were already on campus -- even though it had the whole summer beforehand to do so.
As Emory University Senate President George Shepherd wrote to Fenves, "Indeed, Emory’s Respect for Open Expression Policy (ROEP) itself mandates a central role for the Senate in changes to the ROEP. Section 8.14.3.2 indicates that changes to the policy come from the Senate after the Committee on Open Expression (the Committee) fulfills its duty to regularly review this Policy and its applicability, and to recommend changes to the University Senate as necessary. For many years, that is how changes to the policy have occurred: the Committee and/or Senate suggests changes, and then the administration decides whether to adopt them, and usually does."
The university announcement of the new regulations excels in double-speak, making it sound as if it is working with the senate. Do not be fooled. This is absolutely not the case.
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The brilliant Avgi Saketopoulou has developed a new psychoanalytic political concept she is calling “exigent sadism.” At an online event Sunday June 23 at the Red Clinic in London, I will be engaging her new work, which I see to be a way to move to a new position beyond Melanie Klein’s depressive position.
From the announcement:
This presentation fleshes out the psychoanalyticopolitical implications of exigent sadism, applying pressure to a most valued concept in psychoanalytic and political theories: reparation. Repair promises to address injury, but because it is de-sexualized, Avgi Saketopoulou argues, it too often works to bind us, instead, to relationships – personal, social, and institutional -, that harm us. Enthralled by dialogue, however stale or non-dialogic it may be, the reparative keeps us tied to our circumstance. Magnetizing us by the health-conferring prestige of staying in relation (the depressive position) the reparative operates as psychoanalysis’s most potent moralizing, power-wielding tools.
Exigent sadism offers analytic thinking about the ethical necessity of divesting from harmful relationships/institutions. To draw out this concept, Saketopoulou leans on the Marquis de Sade, Jean Laplanche, and Fred Moten to suggest that psychoanalysis’s remarkable (and unrealized) insurgent potential decays when we turn away from the libidinal-which is how the reparative operates. Holocaust exceptionalism is one such powerful example and will be discussed in this context. And, traveling through Melanie Klein and David Eng’s critique of repair, this talk pushes further: to show the role that exigent sadism can play in resisting the ruse that our objects -individuals or institutions-, can save us. The ongoing student protests in response to Israel’s genocide in Palestine illuminate these ideas in stark and powerful ways. Ethical sadism is thus a critical tool for the transformations that our institutions in general, and psychoanalysis in particular, so formidably resist – and which as individuals, too, we are so often afraid to risk.
Discussants:
Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis, NYU.
Professor and Chair of Philosophy, Emory University.
Assistant Professor of Clinical Psychology, Doha Institute for Graduate Studies.
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Faculty Perspectives on Campus Protests
with Professors Jennifer Ruth, Bethany Letiecq, and Noëlle McAfee
This virtual forum will be broadcast live on YouTube, 12-1:30 pm Eastern/9-10:30 am Pacific, Friday, June 21, 2024. (Link below)
The subject of campus protests has dominated news cycles across America and worldwide. It has been highly publicized, largely mischaracterized, frequently politicized, and widely misunderstood.
Why are students and others (including faculty) protesting? What do they seek? What represents acceptable boundaries of protest? What should presidents/chancellors do? How should governing boards respond? When and when is police intervention acceptable (if ever)? What say should large donors have (if any)? When, if at all, should state- and Federal-level legislators get involved?
Those are a few of the myriad questions that those inside and outside higher education are asking.
While there is (and continues to be) considerable “noise” associated with the responses, what’s generally lacking is a concerted effort to understand what is happening and why, how today’s actions link historically to past protests, and perhaps most importantly, how campus protests can be interpreted in terms of the purpose of higher education, what a college education is for, and the role of higher education and democracy in a free society.
That is why we have invited a stellar panel of faculty respondents to share their thoughts about what is happening across the country, what it means, and how to address the complexities.
Jennifer Ruth
Jennifer Ruth is a film professor in the College of Arts at Portland State University and also serves as associate dean of the college. She teaches core courses in film history, theory, and interpretation, as well as topic courses. She is the co-author, with Michael Bérubé, of The Humanities, Higher Education, and Academic Freedom: Three Necessary Arguments (2015) and It’s Not Free Speech: Race, Democracy, and the Future of Academic Freedom (2022). She recently co-authored The Right to Learn: Resisting the Right-Wing Attack on Academic Freedom with Ellen Schrecker and Valerie Johnson (2024). Before moving to the School of Film in 2015, Ruth taught critical theory, cultural studies, and on the Victorian novel in PSUs English department. A member of the AAUP’s Committee A on academic freedom, she writes on higher education issues for AAUP’s Academe Blog, which she also serves as Contributing Editor.
Bethany Letiecq
Bethany Letiecq is an associate professor in the College of Education and Human Development at George Mason University, where she specializes in community-based participatory action research approaches and anti-racist research methods in work undertaken in partnership with minoritized and marginalized families. Her publications have appeared in the Journal of Marriage and Family, Family Relations, and Journal of Family Theory and Review, among other outlets. She currently serves as the Vice-President of the GMU Chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and President of the VA Conference of the AAUP.
Noëlle McAfee
Noëlle McAfee is a professor and chairperson of philosophy at Emery University and holds a secondary appointment as a Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences. In addition, she is a faculty member of the Emory University Psychoanalytic Institute, the director of Emory’s Psychoanalytic Studies Program, an affiliate faculty member in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and chairs the Faculty of Psychoanalysis. A critical theorist working in the tradition of the Frankfurt School, she draws on feminist philosophy, psychoanalysis, and political theory. McAfee is the author of over 80 articles/essays and five books: Fear of Breakdown: Politics and Psychoanalysis (Columbia, 2019), which won the American Psychoanalytic Association’s 2020 Courage to Dream Book Award; Feminism: A Quick Immersion (Tibidabo Publishing 2021); Democracy and the Political Unconscious (Columbia 2008); Julia Kristeva (Routledge 2004); and Habermas, Kristeva, and Citizenship (Cornell 2000). Her current research interests are in critical theory, psychoanalysis, feminist philosophy, and political theory. Her commentary regarding campus protests, University Presidents Should Study How Democracy Works, was published recently in Scientific American.
Rubén O. Martinez
Frank A. Fear
FutureU’s founder, Rubén O. Martinez (right), Michigan State University professor and director emeritus of the Julian Samora Research Institute, will co-host today’s Forum. Frank A. Fear, MSU professor and senior associate dean emeritus, who serves as FutureU’s Managing Editor and produces FutureU videos, will co-host the forum.
You can watch the forum live on FutureU’s YouTube Channel or watch the video following the presentation.
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When I stepped into the fray of police violence against peaceful protesters at Emory University on April 25, 2024, I didn’t think I was about to engage in civil disobedience. I just felt compelled to witness and document what was unfolding: armed police suddenly attacking a peaceful gathering that had been in place less than a few hours. One moment it was all kumbaya, some chants, some tents, people milling around on a beautiful spring morning; the next it was utter mayhem. I stepped into the fray and watched in horror as police attacked a young student trying to cover her head with her hands as they took turns lifting and then smashing her head to the ground. I did everything I could to witness and tape the scene without raising any alarms, knowing well how police work, my posture neutral, me standing a good distance from the scene, as I repeatedly yelled “stop.” Then one one of the cops stood up and looked me in the eye and said, “Ma’am, you need to step back.” I took a few seconds to think this over very carefully and then, knowing it would not go well, said, “No.” That was my civil disobedience.
This month I’ve discussed civil disobedience on two podcasts: the Overthink Podcast hosted by two philosophers in California and the Philosopher’s Zone produced by Australia’s public broadcasting network ABC. At first I did not get the connection. What did the student demonstrations about Gaza have to do with civil disobedience? They weren’t disobeying any laws since surely there is no law against freedom of expression. In fact there is a constitutional amendment defending it. Nor was there any Emory rule against pitching tents on the quad.
Protesting itself is not an act of civil disobedience. But the refusal to accept subsequent, illegitimate criminalization of free expression is civil disobedience.
Now I realize that it was me and the other onlookers who stood up to protect the students who were engaged in civil disobedience, along with the demonstrators who refused to leave the scene. This was only possible because the administration and the police suddenly rendered it a crime scene. Their rationale was that “outside agitators” had infiltrated campus and so everyone was told to avoid the campus quadrangle. So then anyone who remained on the quadrangle after this sudden criminalization of the space was guilty of criminal tresspassing.
Think about this end-run around the first amendment protection of free expression and assembly. “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.” It seems that while Congress may make no such law, the president of a university can. He or she can decide, even absent any policy, to prohibit and render illegal rights to speech and assembly that were free one moment and criminalized the next.
Many of us were charged with disorderly conduct even though we were simply standing alongside. How were we being disorderly — especially me — just standing there witnessing? It was when I said “no” to the directive to step away, that’s when I was being disorderly. As I wrote in an op ed for the Wheel, if the order to which I was being disorderly was the normalization of police brutality, then this order is utterly dystopic. So, yes, I am guilty of civil disobedience. And the “disorderly conduct” charge can only be legitimate in a dystopic universe.
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This photo was taken on April 25, 2025 by @cindy.hguerra.jpg , less than a minute before all those police you see alongside me and the 50-some others who had just arrived descended on a peaceful protest at Emory University. The result was horrible. The Emory University administration has yet to acknowledge its wrongs. But, along with many students and faculty, I am committed to setting things right.
I’ll keep this page updated with my recent writings and interviews on this. (For a list of other news stories where I am interviewed, see my previous post.)
“University Presidents Should Study How Democracy Works,” Op Ed, Scientific American (June 13, 2024). A philosophy department chair arrested at a campus protest offers university presidents a lesson in democracy.
Philosopher’s Zone podcast: “Civil Disobedience with Noëlle McAfee,” interviewed by Sarah Malik (June 7, 2024). “As protests continue on university campuses across the globe, we explore the history of political engagement and the interplay between philosophy and politics. How did the ancient philosophers respond to civil disobedience? How has that shaped the thinking of future generations?” (28 minutes)
Overthink Podcast on Civil Disobedience (June 4, 2024) Interviewed by hosts Ellie Anderson and David Peña-Guzmán, Noëlle McAfee describes the logic behind the disproportionate administrative and militarized crackdown on civil disobedience today. (54 minutes)
Emory Wheel Op Ed (May 31, 2024) “Lessons for University Presidents: Learn How Democracy Works.” (quick read)
Cultural Critique, Frame 9, “Assaults on the Conscience of Our Culture” (May 10, 2024) “Today’s administrators are like the phobic subjects Fanon describes, containing their anxiety in the figure of the outsider, the agitator, the one for whom the likes of the Georgia State Patrol needs to be called in.” (quick read)
Atlanta Journal Constitution Op Ed (May 10, 2024) “I was detained at an Emory protest. Here’s what the university got wrong.” Young people are the ones to take to the streets and the campus quads to raise the warning bell about what is amiss in the world. (quick read) (To avoid the pay wall, read text here.)
Chronicle of Higher Education Interview (May 7, 2024) “Call the philosophy department and tell them I’ve been arrested.” Interview with Nell Gluckman.
Interview with The Cut (May 3, 2024) “It Was Like An Ambush.” Interview with Claire Lampen.
11Alive Local Media Interview (April 26, 2024) 11-minute news video recorded (with the Altanta local NBC affiliate) the day after the April 25 police riot.
gonepublic by Noëlle McAfee