Preface

I wrote Divest in fall 2024, during the waning months of the Biden administration, Israel’s continued assault on Gaza, and a miserable election year that saw the Democratic Party fail to seize the political moment by refusing to give a damn about, well, anything: genocide, the debt crisis, ecological catastrophe, the erosion of LGBTQ+ rights and protections, women’s reproductive rights, and so on. During this time, administrators at US colleges and universities made it punishable to oppose genocide—a gutless betrayal of students, faculty, and the broader public. Administrators at Columbia University and elsewhere showed that big money interests, including weapons manufacturers and technology giants, rule the day, regardless of how many lives they dismember. That same year, Democrats and Republicans approved billions of dollars in weapons for the bipartisan slaughter of Palestinian civilians, most of them children.1 The university functioned as Louis Althusser theorized: an apparatus in lockstep with the state, reproducing Zionist-colonialist ideology in the interest of capital accumulation.2

Needless to say, I was angry. I was angry at the leaders who were complicit in the brutalization of faculty and students by the police, the surveillance and criminalization of student and nonstudent protestors, and the erosion of truth where truth should be defended: the classroom and the commons. But I was not only angry. I was also disillusioned by the university’s cowardice and willingness to terrorize its students. Willingness might be too gentle a word. Was there not also a degree of enjoyment shared among cops, admin, and trustees at endangering individuals who stood against their financial interests, calling for divestment? Although Donald Trump claims “pro-Hamas terrorists” were inciting fear on campus, the truth is that campus authorities were and still are terrorizing students under the cover of campus safety.3 I use terrorize pointedly. It is one of many words now being used against protesters on campus and off.4 If you are against the Israeli genocide, which has been deemed such by the International Court of Justice, Amnesty International, and numerous scholars and journalists,5 you risk being labeled either a “terrorist” or, according to Trump, an “antisemite.”6 Language itself is under attack, corroded by a political elite that takes sophism to a deadly extreme.

My belief, which I consider truth and which any leftist would avow, is that exterminating Palestinians in Gaza, decimating the Gaza Strip, furthering settler colonialism in the West Bank, committing scholasticide and ecocide, profiting from war, and policing dissent at home and abroad is disastrous, not only for “woke” activists but also for Jews, many of whom are among the activists fighting for Palestinian freedom. The weaponization of antisemitism converts an entire people (“Jews”) into a unit synonymous with victimization, meanwhile enabling the massacre of Palestinians.7 This conversion is sadistic. It needs the victim to extract its enjoyment.

Looking back, I did not know how dire the political landscape would be in 2025 with Trump back in office. I was naïve. The scale of the disaster that is Trumpism has already eclipsed what I anticipated: an emboldened, authoritarian president and a sadistic political party hellbent on empowering the ultra-rich. I did not know that colleges and universities would be among the first targets of the new American fascism, along with immigrants, who live in fear of being detained and deported to hellish prisons, and trans people, whose very existence is being denied and criminalized by Trump’s gender fascism.8 History tells us this is nothing new. But I could not imagine the absolute capitulation of university administrators to Trump’s threats. Columbia made headlines by inviting IOF-trained cops onto campus, arresting students and faculty, intimidating and surveilling pro-Palestinian students and organizations, and equivocating on the meaning of antisemitism, allowing the Far Right to co-opt it by falsely aligning antisemitism with anti-Zionism. Yet, I did not imagine what would come next: disappeared students, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on campus, and administrators sheepishly forfeiting their duty to protect faculty and students. We have entered a new stage in the endless “war on terror,” when the enemy can be anyone, Jew or non-Jew, citizen or noncitizen, so long as they condemn genocide.

I write this preface to set the record straight: I am a scholar of literature and film and a psychoanalytic theorist. I condemn antisemitism, which is, in the terms of this book, sadistic: an obfuscation and betrayal of our primary masochism. You will find in this book that I use the terms “our” and “we” freely. Some readers may balk at this universal reach. So be it. Psychoanalysis is a universalist discourse, and I adhere to its stricture. The unconscious does not undermine certain identities. It undermines all identities, and it is uncompromising. I take this psychoanalytic axiom as my starting point and develop it in the following pages.

The situation in the United States has devolved since Trump took office for a second time. Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University student, activist, green card holder, and permanent resident of the United States, was abducted from his New York City apartment by ICE on March 8, 2025.9 He was taken to a Louisiana detention center without any criminal charge against him.10 Columbia abetted ICE by divulging Khalil’s whereabouts.11 The school followed this grave humiliation by caving to Trump’s demands, further endangering students and relinquishing academic autonomy. More abductions and threats to faculty and students have occurred since then, creating a climate of fear on American campuses.

My book is a small contribution to a much larger movement for Palestinian freedom, including the movement for divestment from the economic beneficiaries of genocide. I offer it with some trepidation, not knowing to what end conservative forces will distort it. Academic books are usually risk averse. This book, which asserts masochism as the vehicle of leftist enjoyment and activism—in contrast to sadism, which currently dominates liberal and right-wing politics—feels to me more than a little risky. Today sadism proliferates, and the only guarantee is that we are hurtling toward ecological and political catastrophe at record speed, burning the planet in a fascist inferno brought about by the crises of multinational capitalism, neoliberalism, and, no doubt, an unquenchable appetite for hate.12

Walter Benjamin compares twentieth-century capitalism to a train going at full speed. He argues it’s time to pull the emergency brake.13 He’s not wrong. However, we are well past that time, and the emergency brakes have long since fallen off. Twenty-first-century capitalism may still resemble a locomotive, but it’s one that keeps going, as in Bong Joon Ho’s film Snowpiercer (2013), regardless of the devastation it unleashes.14 An apt philosophical text for the present might be the film Speed (1994), which imagines a public with nothing in common except that they are all trapped inside a moving vehicle, a bus wired with explosives, with no way to slow down, for if they do, the bus explodes, killing everyone.15Speed does not imagine a return to stasis, allowing everyone to get off and go their separate ways. Neither does Sigmund Freud.

In Freud’s early theory, pleasure is a release of excitation—a way to pump the brakes. In this model, one achieves satisfaction by slowing down and releasing tension. Freud later revised this theory in light of his patients who repeated unpleasurable experiences.16Whether through dreams or waking actions, these patients repeated tense experiences, disturbing their psychic equilibrium as well as Freud’s theory of the psyche. Freud responded by making masochism (or the increase of excitation) primary in the psychic system. He made the exception the rule. This change marked a revolution in Freud’s thought because it overturned the pleasure–release model. Henceforth, Freud treated masochism, or the painful buildup of excitation, as the underlying motor driving our actions or, better yet, failed actions. The failure to release tension (masochism) supplants pleasure. With no release and no way of shifting the drive into neutral, Freud transformed his theory of subjectivity into a theory of obstacles. The psychoanalytic theory of subjectivity shifts gears from pleasure to masochism.

Speed presents one obstacle: a bus wired with explosives. What makes it a psychoanalytic text is that it keeps presenting more obstacles and suggests that the obstacle itself is the only way out. “What, you thought you needed another challenge?” Annie (Sandra Bullock), a reluctant passenger, asks Jack Traven (Keanu Reeves), a cop with a self-destructive streak. We should read Annie’s question in the affirmative: We need another challenge. The film obliges by putting numerous obstacles in their path, including a fifty-foot gap in an unfinished highway they must somehow cross. They do. Yet, the point is not that they make it to the other side. The point is the gap itself, which keeps reappearing, frustrating their wish to be done with obstacles and leaving them no option but to drive into them. The gap is a barrier to their satisfaction—what Freud calls masochism. Ultimately, it is their masochism that keeps them alive, not the police, not a higher authority, and not their self-interest. Knowing that the bus is set to explode, Jack enters it with no escape plan. He says he is no longer a cop and throws his badge to the ground. He divests, removing his symbolic apparel. This act of divestment is a symbolic gesture (Jack does not actually quit) but a significant one. He ditches his identity as a cop in order to imperil himself in common. Everyone on that bus unites around the impossibility of pulling the emergency brake and accepts that the only way forward is through the gap that drives their masochistic enjoyment.

Speed is a film about the necessity of political masochism, not an endorsement of recklessness or accelerationist bravado. It argues that the only way off the bus is through the collective embrace of masochism. It contrasts this psychic investment with sadism, embodied by Howard Payne (Dennis Hopper), an ex-cop and explosives expert who lost his thumb trying to dismantle a bomb. Howard is a remarkable example of masochism turned into sadism. Not only does he endanger others by planting a bomb on the bus, but he also watches them on TV from the comfort of his hideout using a hidden camera. Dennis Hopper is the perfect actor for the role, given his past work as Frank Booth in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986), in which Frank repeatedly yells, “Don’t look at me,” while harming others.17 In Speed, he sees, but he is not seen. We can read Howard Payne alongside Freud’s essay “A Child Is Being Beaten,” wherein he describes patients who fantasize about harm coming to others. Freud’s patients see but are not seen. The first layer of the fantasy is sadistic. Freud pulls back this layer to reveal a second in which the observer is simultaneously the one being beaten.18

The genius of Speed is that it undermines the sadist precisely where he enjoys. When Jack realizes they are being watched, he records a video of himself and the passengers and plays it on a loop for Howard. Although Howard thinks he is watching a livestream, a fixed image, he is unwittingly watching a loop, repeating endlessly. The repetition glitches, eventually alerting Howard to the gap in the image: a woman’s purse appearing and disappearing where the recording cuts and begins. The purse, a signifier of means, is not accidental. It reveals that the three million dollars Howard demands is not the object of his enjoyment. The gap is the object of his enjoyment, which he has been watching repeatedly without knowing. Howard falls victim to his drive, the undermining repetition that is in the film and in him. The glitch reveals that he is in the picture. His desire is external in the object he observes. It reveals his unconscious masochism. Midway through the film, Howard says to Jack, “I am on top of you,” meaning that he is watching, always one step ahead. He is on top of Jack, much like the signified is on top of the signifier in Ferdinand de Saussure’s diagram of the sign: a voyeur (Howard) closely aligned with the image (the signified) sadistically dominating the lacking subject (Jack).

Ultimately, the subject of the unconscious, the lacking subject, wins. Howard dies on top of Jack in a struggle that sees Howard lose his head (his imaginary signified). The film’s hero isn’t Jack per se; it is the subject of the unconscious, the subject of the gap (lack) that glitches in the film, interrupting the illusion of self-sameness. The bus and its passengers circle the gap, as does the film.

The gap is a better metaphor for our times than Benjamin’s emergency brake. That is because it is a break (disjunction), not a cessation. The latter is too self-willed and close to Freud’s early conception of the pleasure principle. By making masochism primary, Freud pays fidelity to the insistence of the drive, which does not stop. I do not know if there’s a way off the bus that we currently find ourselves on, watched, surveilled, held hostage, and extorted by a sadistic ruling class, but I know that a communism that resists sadism, pulling back its fantasy to reveal the nonsovereignty at its core, starts with the masochistic identification.

Let’s begin.