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Philipp Sarasin is emeritus professor of modern history at the University of Zurich and one of the foremost scholars of Michel Foucault in the German-speaking world. Among his many publications are Darwin und Foucault. Genealogie und Geschichte im Zeitalter der Biologie (Darwin and Foucault. Genealogy and History in the Age of Biology), and Michel Foucault zur Einführung (An Introduction to Michel Foucault), the influential standard introduction to Foucault’s thought in German. His most recent book is the widely read 1977. Eine kurze Geschichte der Gegenwart (1977. A Brief History of the Present), in which he traces the cultural, political, and technological upheavals that have shaped the recent past. This interview is centred around the enduring political actuality of Foucault’s thought and what his analytical tools can still offer us in making sense of the present. This interview was conducted on 22 May 2026. CJLPA: The major crises of recent years—amongst them the pandemic and Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine—have generated a great many analyses drawing on Foucault, employing concepts such as biopolitics, discipline, and governmentality, amongst others. At the same time, these events have also exposed Foucault’s limitations: a virus that takes no interest in discourses, and a war that has demonstrated, at least in part, that classical categories such as sovereignty, ‘the West’, and old-fashioned geopolitics have by no means disappeared. Do you think these crises have made Foucault’s limitations visible, or is it possible to understand them with Foucault? Philipp Sarasin: Oh, a very large question indeed. During the pandemic, I genuinely asked myself what Foucault would have said about compulsory mask-wearing. On the one hand, there are clearly many elements in his work—above all, his treatment of medicine, hospitals, and the healthcare system as a whole—where one might superficially say: here is the state reaching out and controlling us all through biopolitical means. And there were indeed various contrarian thinkers, up to and including the Foucault reader Giorgio Agamben, who interpreted the situation in exactly that way. On the other hand, Foucault ultimately held a very strong and positive view of the natural sciences. He was in no way hostile to science as such. He was critical of dubious sciences such as sexual pathology and similar fields, including psychiatry, but the hard natural sciences—including biomedicine and its knowledge about viruses, for example—he absolutely endorsed. He was firmly on the side of science. And he did also, in the lectures on governmentality at the end of the 1970s, speak of the potential release of pathogenic viruses as an absolute threat, alongside the omnipresent danger of a nuclear war. I would not say, therefore, that the pandemic exposed Foucault’s limitations, even though there are Foucauldian quotations that can be put to use if one wishes to respond to the pandemic in a contrarian spirit. As for Russia’s war against Ukraine: Foucault was always highly critical of the Soviet Union. He was well aware that it was an imperial power, and, for example in 1977, expressed serious concern about its influence in Ethiopia, so much so that he fell into dispute with Jacques Rancière over it, with Rancière shaking his head at the vehemence with which Foucault argued against the Soviet Union. And when martial law was declared in Poland in 1980, he travelled with Simone Signoret and Bernard Kouchner to Gdańsk, brought medical supplies, and was of course wholly on the side of Solidarność. I have not the slightest doubt, therefore, that he would have had a clear political perspective on this war of aggression. CJLPA: That is to say, you have sufficient confidence in his critical faculties that one does not need to take refuge in the unfinished nature of his work. Does the incompleteness of his work due to his early death save him in a sense too? PS: Yes, perhaps. Because with respect to other topics, I am no longer quite so certain. At the end, of course, he presented a very positive reading of neoliberalism. Or rather, a positively engaged and also well-informed reading, one might say. And through his emphasis on technologies of the self and this care of the self, he certainly foregrounded a theme that can, shall we say, be interpreted in neoliberal terms. How that would have developed further, I have no idea. But I think he would certainly have continued to attract criticism had he pursued that line further. And yet, having said that, one must also note that he was always politically clear-sighted. He was always fully aware that liberalism can also have an extremely violent face. He harboured no illusions about the power that neoliberalism deploys. But this stance of shaping oneself, of leading and taking one’s own life into one’s own hands, of making a work of art of it, all of these things can be interpreted in neoliberal terms. To be honest, I don’t know how that would have played out in his further thoughts. But the possibility certainly exists that he might have become, how shall I put it, more conservative. CJLPA: Foucault’s work stands at a historical threshold—which you yourself have written about in your last book, 1977: A Brief History of the Present—where a fundamental shift is occurring in the matrix of modernity: the certainties, such as belief in evolution and social-state management of the population, are entering into crisis and eroding. Against this background, one must also ask whether this development is irreversible. Are we now in the postmodern age? What does the postmodern world look like? PS: I think this would represent a limit of Foucault’s theoretical horizon. He had not thought about postmodernity, although one can argue that he contributed certain elements to it. He in fact resisted the term, saying he did not even know what it meant, and so on. On this topic, I recently wrote an essay on Jean-François Lyotard—on his 1979 book The Postmodern Condition—in which I argued that, from that vantage point, with Lyotard’s concept of postmodernity, one can certainly make the case that we are living in postmodernity. We are self-evidently living in a postmodern age, because— as you have just indicated—several of the certainties and constitutive matrices of modernity have shifted or even dissolved. Foucault, however, wanted to remain a modern thinker, and ultimately to hold fast to the certainties of the Enlightenment. He was genuinely concerned with rationality, despite what some people claim to the contrary: that claim is simply incorrect. It is quite clear that, in an elementary sense, the critique of power proceeds from the perspective of a critical reason, without reason being hypostasised into something supra-historical. To be sure, reason remains historical and contingent, but it is a potential, an instrument available for the criticism of power. And that is something in which Foucault retained belief. Lyotard speaks of language games, and Foucault’s concept of discourse has overlaps with the model of language games, but Lyotard goes several steps further in the multiplication of possibilities of truth. In Foucault, there is of course no absolute concept of truth, but discourses are larger blocks, so to speak. Although they are of course contingent, they are, in a given historical moment, the almost insurmountable horizon. Lyotard on the other hand sort of ‘dynamises’ this concept much more strongly and sees more an unfolding diversity of possible language games, each of which can generate its own truths, without there being a meta-language that declares: but this is how things really are. That is, of course, absent in Foucault too, but the discursive formations in Foucault are somewhat more stable. They are still slightly more modern; the grand formations: physics, medicine, and others constitute the horizon on which truth is asserted. In Lyotard’s postmodernity, that is more thoroughly dissolved. CJLPA: But at the same time, throughout his entire work Foucault is strongly interested in the non-modern, in what lies outside modernity, in the sense of what modernity excludes and what transgresses it. And on the basis of these analyses, there is not one Reason but rather rationalities, which are historical. PS: Exactly. Rationalities are historical, that is absolutely clear. But it is still an instrument that one can use to criticise power. In fact, Foucault initially made the attempt to criticise modernity from ‘outside’, from the perspective of madness, focusing on ‘the great madmen’ such as Friedrich Hölderlin, the Marquis de Sade, Friedrich Nietzsche, or Antonin Artaud. But it became clear to him that this was a perspective he could not genuinely adopt: it is simply self-contradictory and unliveable. But of course, the gaze towards what is excluded, towards the margins, towards those who do not fit into modern conceptions of normality—that is indeed important. Yet I would not say that Foucault thereby developed a concept of the postmodern. Rather, these are critical self-interrogations within the logic of a modern thinking that inevitably excludes this or that. And this awareness of ‘we in fact exclude this (or them)’ meant for Foucault: we have to take to the streets for these people and fight so that they can be heard. Or we distribute questionnaires in prisons so that they can speak, so that these voices become audible. One of the most important texts, from my own perspective, is the essay on the Iranian Revolution, the 1979 piece ‘Inutile de se soulever?’ (‘Is it useless to stand up?’), where Foucault describes precisely this: it is not a question of morality, but, as he says, of reality and realism, of perceiving these voices. That does not mean the voices speak the truth. The voices of prisoners, of the oppressed, of the mad do not necessarily speak the truth. But they are there, and we must take note of them, in order to live in a society where these voices could ultimately also be included, or where one at least understands how the mechanisms of exclusion function. That is critical thinking about exclusions and power relations, ultimately from the perspective of a critique of power. Much of modern thought is critique of power, it has to be said. After all, the whole of liberalism is a critique of absolutist power, and of state power, to be sure. In that sense, this is a classically modern stance. Radicalised, without doubt. But classically modern. CJLPA: Does that mean one has to translate Foucault into the language of the postmodern? Or how should one relate to modern thought in general, in order to render it pertinent for the present-day world, for a postmodern actuality? Is there an entirely new thinking to be initiated, or does one need to modify or break with modern ways of thought? PS: Well, what in postmodernity—speaking schematically from my own perspective—is added or radicalised, is basically the erosion of the metaphysical, of meaning, of central meaning, of shared meaning, and that is: truth. For Lyotard, and I guess he was right, this subversion of truth begins already with Nietzsche, or with Robert Musil. Nevertheless, for a long time modernity holds things together, as Foucault has put it, under conceptions of normality and authoritatively deployed truths, without ultimately knowing on what grounds. The metaphysical foundation for these claims is ultimately absent. Lyotard, for his part, says: well, we simply have a set of language games, and the only thing one can do is trust in communication, just as Jürgen Habermas too essentially has argued. I would say that what Foucault does in this situation is to go back to these antique technologies of the self—on the notion that, ultimately, each individual can only stabilise for themselves what is true, what is good for them, how they can live. There is no one, and no universal law derived from some metaphysics, to tell me how I must live. Ironically, the technologies of the self are a genuine modern concept because it draws on the ancient Greeks. That reference, that invocation, is indeed a classically modern move, like what is found, for instance, in the modern thinking about hygiene, in the political concepts of democracy, or in Le Corbusier’s architectural theory. They all refer to the ancient Greeks. CJLPA: And yet it is a modernity that is inflected from the East… PS: Yes, indeed, there enters, not untypical of the 1950s to 1970s (and right up until today…), this fascination with Eastern religions. That comes in and is of course incorporated, as one can clearly see in many of Foucault’s interviews in the 1970s and early 80s. Though significantly, he then deals, in his latest books, with Greek and Roman antiquity rather than with Japan, which was in any case closer to him and better known to him. But yes, it is the attempt to ask: how can one lead one’s own life? How can one give oneself rules of conduct without being subject to a universal law that would ultimately require a metaphysical grounding, which he of course rejects? And in this regard, he was clearly fascinated by the techniques of Zen Buddhism. CJLPA: It seems rather difficult to articulate the political content of Foucault’s late turn, this shift towards the subject and the technologies of the self that you have just mentioned, as it tends to be interpreted either as apolitical, or as a turn towards neoliberalism, as previously mentioned, where politics plays out only within the individual sphere. Is there, in the late Foucault, a political theory to be unfolded? Is his late thinking pertinent to today’s conditions, where neoliberalism has had markedly negative effects? PS: In the governmentality lectures of the late 1970s, the concept of technologies of the self is famously not present. But of course it is already the case there that Foucault says liberalism is a technique of power, or a form of government, that to some extent limits the reach of state power over individuals. That is what distinguishes it from absolutism, from the police state. Thus his question was: how was it possible to overcome the absolutist police state, hence the Panopticon? Because it became clear to him that in fact we do not really live in a Panopticon. And to that extent, this core idea of liberalism—that the state cannot fully control society, cannot, first of all, set prices, and that it therefore must, to some degree, respect the ‘opacity’ of society and the individual freedoms and actions of individuals—that imposes essentially a certain limit on power. And for him, as a long-standing critic of power, one might say: ‘Well, Michel, you have come to this rather late’. But anyway, that is, in a sense, the core idea of liberalism. And it is for this reason that I am absolutely appalled that Slavoj Žižek has now come out openly with a book called Liberal Fascisms, essentially arguing that fascism brings the essence of liberalism to light. I mean, it is simply nonsense. I know what liberalism can mean in concrete terms, beginning with colonialism, or with Chile 1973, or the exploitation and extraction of natural wealth in the Global South still today—all of that is true. But the critical potential of a social theory that says one must set certain limits on state power through equality before the law, through division of powers, through the rule of law, through recognition of individual freedom—that is a potential that is fundamentally at odds with any form of fascism. Liberalism differs from fascism at its very core. And to smooth that over and say that it is actually just another form of fascism is, I find, politically utterly disastrous, a catastrophe. Foucault would certainly not have gone along with that. There are indeed readings of Foucault and governmentality which claim that Foucault allegedly said that neoliberalism is in fact only an even more perfidious form of control. Yet in the second series of his governmentality lectures, he explicitly says that this is not the case. He addresses precisely this interpretation and rejects it. Liberal freedom is fundamental. Partially free, not absolutely free—historically structured and constrained, of course—but it is fundamental and is not a ruse for yet more power. I find that very important. And in this respect, I believe he then wrote about technologies of the self because that was the problem ultimately closest to him personally, meaning: how can I, as a homosexual man, lead a decent life? That was, in a sense, his central question since his time at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where he attempted suicide and had problems with alcohol, and had always said: if I kiss a man, I am committing a criminal offence in France—which was indeed the case. So, to shorten up very briefly his long and winding road of thoughts: for Foucault, the technologies of the self represent the only possible form of giving oneself one’s own law, and therefore appeared to him as the one theoretical concept he had always been looking for. CJLPA: And yet there is also still that dimension, particularly in the late work, where Foucault insists, together with liberalism, on a certain rule of law and also mentions human rights, as for example in his writings on Iran. And I then wonder how human rights—without recourse to a new humanism, which Foucault would certainly have rejected—can function without being rather easily undermined? PS: Yes, starting in 1977, he suddenly comes out with claiming absolute rights—inalienable human rights—and one does not know where they come from. Things moved obviously very quickly in these years. Even in the lecture ‘What is Critique?’ he says: we want to be governed, ‘but not too much’. So he invokes some right that we do not wish to surrender; everyone has this right, and it is fundamental. However, Foucault is not very explicit and rather vague on this topic. CJLPA: What would you say—from a perspective sharpened and informed by Foucault—in a time where the singular and the particular have very strongly come to dominate: are the political solutions to be found in a return to certain structures of the universal? Or is what is required rather a new way of thinking the particular that does not lead to deregulation and a complete erosion of shared structures? PS: I think this would probably go beyond Foucault, but I do genuinely believe that what is needed is a way of thinking the particular without losing what is shared—not necessarily the universal in the sense of abstract sameness, but that which connects, which is held in common, while simultaneously strengthening and maintaining it. And of course there are forms of universality—universal equality before the law, for example—that one would not wish to abandon as a concept. Unfortunately, that is indeed happening; these rights are under pressure. Look at the United States, where with the recent Supreme Court decision, Black Americans are once again being disenfranchised. I find this a very difficult and very large question: how must one think this anew? What is of course also happening is that we now live in the age of AI, of generative AI. At present we are in any case being re-sorted by machines and algorithms that radically individualise us. A machine can tell me which songs I will enjoy on Spotify, and then it turns out to be right, the wretched thing. With more than a billion songs on Spotify, this is extraordinary, is it not? It works like this, of course, because the system know my previous choices. And of course there are small or big groups of consumers with similar preferences, hence I’m also ‘part’ of such a group. But this has nothing to do with real live communities, with something ‘in common’, even universal. It consists only in the fact that I too am listening to an artist with 31 million or so monthly listeners… CJLPA: That is to say, it would be a false universal, which then... PS: Yes, exactly, it’s a fake universal, certainly no longer the modern universal, but something quite different from modern universals like shared societal norms, values or ideals. It’s technically produced, and it can always only appear as the radical particular, as the expression of my own choices and preferences. But obviously, even this ‘particular’ is an illusion, manufactured by algorithms. And therefore, speaking of power: A small number of people are in fact producing this illusion of the particular and this fake universal. If anything, that is truly postmodern—or rather, it goes completely beyond anything to do with modernity. CJLPA: In your book, 1977, you also wrote about identity as this new catchword of modern politics. It is something that is in some respects ambivalent: on the one hand, it can provide safe spaces for people who have always been oppressed, but on the other hand it also involves a retreat into the particular self that can become rather too rigid. I think Foucault himself would, in my view, have been very sceptical of identity politics, precisely because he emphasised becoming very strongly over being—including in relation to his own homosexuality. What would a Foucauldian identity politics look like? Does such a thing exist, or would he have been a strong critic of such politics? PS: No. There are important texts—like ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’ from 1969—where he explicitly criticises the idea of a stable identity; something like that simply cannot exist for him. This goes all the way to his readings of Charles Darwin and Nietzsche. The notion of stable identities is a chimera. One must constitute oneself. That is indeed the trick of the technologies of the self. There is no inner core that is stable and simply waiting to unfold; rather, subjects create themselves. But with a certain degree of freedom, one can create oneself and is not simply created. That is the game: either power constructs us, normalises us, and so on, or we have techniques with which we can carve out for ourselves a certain space of withdrawal from power, a space of protection, such as within liberalism itself, without that being an expression of some permanent and stable identity. This is a concept that radically contradicts Foucault. In that sense, I would be extremely sceptical of the identitarian left. CJLPA: Yet there is something I have not entirely understood in the whole business of the technologies of the self: there does after all remain an entity that can create itself, that can somehow constitute itself as free. I have the feeling that a psychological dimension is missing in Foucault’s late thought. This might be due to his strong criticism of, for example, Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytical notions of universal symbolic laws. It sometimes seems to me as if his late thought adopts a very technical vocabulary, and that the entire social-psychological dimension of the subject has been weeded out along with Lacan. PS: Yes, I think that is right. I would myself lean more towards Lacan, who says—to take the classic example—one is born into language, and language makes us equal; without it, we would each be in our own individual madness. And language also creates psychic structures: how one relates to oneself, the relationship of the self to itself. For Foucault, by contrast, that is a technical question of how one steers this, as you rightly say. I am not a psychologist, but yes, I think one can say the concept is somewhat thin. It is not a strong concept of what a person actually is. Others have thought much more about this: what does it even mean to be conscious, to have self-consciousness, to be a person, to be able to relate to oneself? Of course, he does give a strong role to the body—bodily experiences and impressions do constitute what one calls a person. But what interests him about all this, exclusively, is: what can I do? That technical aspect of constructing a subject that is not a sujet, meaning not subjected, but rather follows its own rules. One could say it is somewhat masculine and bourgeois in character. And, as has often been criticised, there is not really an other, no social relations apart from instrumental ones: how does one deal with women, with slaves, with young men? But that only in relation to the question of how one governs one’s desires. But there is no concept of dependency, of mutual relatedness. And that is where I would see Foucault’s most significant limitations, because the fundamental concept of dependencies and relatedness—not only bodily, but the fact that we are language-beings and must communicate in the same idiom, and without that we are lost—he simply rejects as a metaphysical blunder mascarading as ‘law’. CJLPA: But could one say with Foucault, as you yourself have written in the concluding section of 1977, that the collapse of shared structures of truth, or rules of truth, began in some sense in the 1970s, and that the effects of that are very directly visible today, further exacerbated by social media and all the technical developments we have been discussing? Can one think facts or factuality with Foucault? Because I have the feeling that Foucault himself has often been held responsible and charged with being someone who hollowed out truth, one of those who contributed to the present situation where nothing has any validity and nothing is stable. How can one assess the current erosion of shared facts through Foucault’s thought? PS: As I said at the outset, he does genuinely believe in the natural sciences and does not call them into question. And that is not contradicted by his saying that these are, of course, historically contingent formations of truth, but not as mere language games. One cannot simply say: tomorrow we shall just do things differently. There are unimaginably densely woven discursive machines for the production of truth. With historical or other large-scale distance, they certainly show their contingency; other perspectives on the natural sciences would have been conceivable, other concepts possible. That happens within the natural sciences themselves, including at great ruptures, paradigm shifts, where it becomes apparent that what we previously took to be the whole truth was actually a rather limited perspective. There is in Lyotard an interesting passage where he says: yes, there are these new language games, but the claim to truth does not thereby disappear; it must, however, be arguable within the bounds of our best available possibilities, demonstrable in the sense that there are techniques of proof and of argument. This process does not take place in some ideal heaven of ideas; it is woven into our world, but it is the best explanation that we have available. One cannot simply say there is a pink elephant out there and the answer would be: oh, yes, alright, I suppose I believe you. That is not how it works. CJLPA: That would then also be a strong distinction from Paul Feyerabend and from ‘anything goes’. PS: I would certainly argue that, yes, of course. CJLPA: Although one might say that in other cultures there are different forms of scientificity or rationalities that are not necessarily to be rejected outright following the situatedness of knowledge theorised by Foucault. PS: Yes, they are conceivable, of course. And within their context they are truths that are produced, which, however, just like our own truths, stand in competition with other language games or discourses. However, as is the case for all discourses and language games, at some point a certain piece of evidence might collapse. You might come to the point of saying: this might actually not be correct, or this framework is no longer helping us to understand the world—there are better explanatory forms that offer us more possibilities. That is never excluded, how could it be? Hence, to that extent it is a false opposition to say: either absolute truth or pure contingency and pure chance. Inbetween lies the historically mutable character of truth. CJLPA: In your book Darwin and Foucault, you attempted to wrest Foucault from a pure culturalism and to show that he operates with considerable nuance, evading both biologism and culturalism. Can you elaborate on that, and delineate the thesis of your book: in what sense does Foucault descend from Darwin? PS: Oh, if I can still recall it… I wrote that book a long time ago. Well, firstly, one can say: Foucault had read Darwin, he knew his work. Of course the translator was often Nietzsche, who had himself read Darwin and deeply understood him—despite a few disparaging remarks. What unites the perspectives of Darwin, Nietzsche and Foucault, though, is for all three of them the fundamental concept of genealogy: the tracing of derivations, of lineages that contain no identity. There is no original plan and its unfolding, in fact no ‘evolution’. The term ‘evolution’ does not—fun fact, but important—appear in Darwin’s writing until the sixth edition of the Origin of Species (it was recommended to him by Herbert Spencer). And it does not really correspond to his concept at all. His concept is descent, meaning lineage, derivation, or Herkunft, as Nietzsche has put it, which, however, does not imply any shared ‘essence’ which ‘evolves’. Darwin thus emphasises, for example, that the apes of today have nothing whatsoever to do with the apes of some distant antiquity. And the fact that human beings descend from apes also doesn’t mean that there is an ‘identity’ between apes and humans; there is rather a long history of permanent change, and these changes are contingent, dependent on particular circumstances and conditions. (That does not mean that certain patterns cannot stabilise: the vertebral column and four limbs, for instance, proved to be quite useful and establish themselves as a stable pattern.) Well, and quite a bit—no, in fact, all—of this thinking can be seen very clearly in Foucault’s essay ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, focused an the one fundamental idea: there is no origin, there is no plan, there is no creation, and there is no identity. What is most fundamental in Darwin is that the absolutely decisive factor for the whole of evolutionary processes is ‘the relation of one organism to another’. The relation between organisms is what determines whether they survive, and thus any further development. And now, Foucault says, equally clearly, that there is nothing fundamental in society, in history, in human beings, but that there are only relations, ie relations of power. The entire web of power relations is precisely Darwin’s web of relations between organisms. There are stronger and weaker ones, of course, dominant and less dominant ones, but it is a web of relations. I think those are the main features of this genealogical thinking that Foucault derived from Darwin. And I would argue that this is actually the most radical mode of thought that modernity has produced. Please note that the Origin of Species has a title that is highly ironic, since Darwin says in book length that there is no origin and there are no species as such. There is no lion-in-itself as a stable entity. That is merely an optical illusion because we have so little time in our own lives. Rather, there is permanent flux. So the irony is clear. It is the irony of modernity as such: modern thought permanently dissolves stability, it fundamentally undermines the idea of a plan and an order. Darwin was absolutely fundamental in this respect, and Nietzsche and Foucault follow very explicitly in this track. CJLPA: This modern critique—that of genealogy—how can one extend it to the present day, in the sense that all that is solid melts into air? PS: Well, that is Marx, yes. CJLPA: Yes, all of that. But today, in a time where contingency, fragility, and flux are far more pronounced, is this still a pertinent form of critique? PS: Good question. Well, one cannot simply place unconditional trust in such criticism, since the Right has now adopted the concept of disruption as something to celebrate, because everything keeps breaking down: the critique as such seems therefore no longer valid. However, I would hold on to this form of critique. Of course there are forms of destruction and fantasies of disruption that are cynical. But there are still plenty of forms of power that attempt to ground themselves in something eternal through trying to assert concepts of the human being or the world, or defending certain truths against their historical transformation. And there, this critical thinking still has, at the very least, the potential to be important. CJLPA: To conclude, can you say which aspects of Foucault one must clearly historicise—by pointing out he was a child of his time—and which aspects of his thought you would wish to highlight for today, those with which one must continuously work, and which have not lost their relevance and actuality? PS: Yes, it is an interesting question, and not a simple one. On the one hand, what one must retain is this mode of historically critical thinking—of genealogical thinking, to be more precise. I find the scepticism towards claims of identity very central, very important. On the other hand, I would say, no longer so terribly relevant are perhaps his conceptions of the Panopticon, which describes societies as excessively controlled, as prison-like. Well, today societies are certainly controlled in various ways—and one might consider whether the technological change we have talked about constitutes a ‘Panopticon’. But this was simply beyond Foucault’s technical horizon, of course, and therefore the metaphor doesn’t fit today. What I do find enduringly valuable are certain ideas about the organisation of politics, as they appear in the lecture ‘What is Critique?’. Roughly: we certainly must be governed, but not excessively so. That ‘not too much’ is somehow very important. Or likewise the essay already mentioned, ‘Is it useless to stand up?’, his conclusions from the Iranian Revolution: the recognition that people are excluded. That does not mean that they speak the truth, but we must listen to them, because their voices form part of reality. Those are things I find fundamental still, yes. The technologies of the self is not my favourite topic, let us say. CJLPA: And yet Discipline and Punish also contains the famous concept of the ‘history of the present’—that programme, if I am not mistaken, which is also at work in your own work. PS: Yes, the idea that as a historian one does not imagine oneself to be writing origin stories and evolutionary progressions towards something better, higher, and pre-given, but rather that one practices genealogical deep-drilling as a historian based on the issues and stakes emanating from the contemporary. Yes, that is fundamental, it has to remain. Mats Inauen is a historian whose research interests include poststructuralist thought, anthropology, the history of science, and twentieth-century intellectual history. He holds a BA in Politics and Modern History from the University of Zürich and an MA in Political Theory from Goethe University Frankfurt, which included an Erasmus semester at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. At the University of Cambridge, he is pursuing a PhD examining the relationship between philosophy and anthropology in 1980s France.

Uncle Sam points an accusatory finger directly at the viewer, his expression stern and uncompromising. Behind him, the Statue of Liberty appears damaged, her torch dimmed, and surrounded by text reading ‘Protect Her’ and ‘Restore America’. Another post lists crimes attributed to undocumented migrants alongside the slogan ‘Report Foreign Invaders’.[1] Uncle Sam’s pointing finger does not invite. It demands. The damaged Liberty does not welcome but calls for protection. Nothing in the visual register of these images suggests bureaucratic process or administrative function. That they are in fact recruitment materials, published by federal enforcement agencies to attract new officers, makes their ideological freight all the more significant. Fig 1. Join Ice Today. Defend the Homeland (posted 7 August 2025). Caption: No age cap. $50,000 signing bonus. Defending the Homeland. What are you waiting for? Answer the call to serve at ICE. JOIN.ICE.GOV. In the first year of its second term, the Trump administration’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) circulated a series of recruitment images through their official Instagram accounts. The posts formed part of a broader recruitment drive following increased congressional authorisation for enforcement personnel, establishing the administration’s immigration enforcement priorities at the outset of its tenure. Rather than presenting neutral employment information, the campaign relied on emotional appeal, nationalist symbolism, and moral urgency. Immigration enforcement was framed not as an administrative function but as a civilisational obligation. The campaign, therefore, represents a significant intensification of how the American state communicates authority, legitimacy, and belonging. This article argues that the DHS and ICE Instagram campaign constitutes a contemporary example of how state political art is used to both construct the idea of the homeland and to legitimise internal security institutions. The concept of the homeland in American political discourse has been shaped by competing traditions, with the civic ideal of constitutional principles, democratic pluralism, and inclusivity existing in persistent tension with exclusionary ethnocultural strands.[2] The civic strand of this tradition positioned the nation as a perpetual project of becoming rather than a fixed cultural inheritance. Although the imagery draws heavily on nationalist aesthetics associated with the current Trump administration, its ongoing circulation demonstrates the persistence of these visual strategies within federal bureaucratic institutions. The campaign reveals how state agencies deploy nostalgia, symbolism, and moral binaries to shape public perceptions of immigration and enforcement. By situating these images within the historiography of nationalism, state-building, and political aesthetics, this article reveals how visual culture functions as a mechanism of governance, and how the meaning of homeland is being actively reworked from a civic ideal into a cultural possession requiring defence. The use of political art by states has a long history. Governments have repeatedly relied on visual media to mobilise populations, recruit personnel, and define threats. During the First and Second World Wars, recruitment posters in the United States and Europe fused patriotism with moral duty. In the twentieth century, authoritarian regimes employed political art to legitimise repression and to naturalise exclusion. In Nazi Germany, monumental aesthetics and symbolic ritual transformed political authority into moral necessity, rendering persecution as the defence of a sacred national community. In the Soviet Union, socialist realist imagery similarly mobilised idealised representations of labour and collective identity to naturalise the coercive apparatus of the state. Across these contexts, visual culture served not merely as decoration but as an instrument of political power. What distinguishes the DHS campaign is not the novelty of its techniques but, rather, their deployment within a contemporary democratic state, directed at domestic audiences during peacetime. This is not uniquely American. Similar visual strategies have been employed by far-right parties in European democracies. Nicole Doerr’s analysis of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in Germany, for example, identifies the deployment of ethno-nationalist imagery, anti-Islam rhetoric, and gendered representations of the nation as a woman requiring protection from cultural outsiders, strategies that closely parallel the rhetorical logic of the DHS campaign.[3] What is notable in the American case is the adoption of these techniques by federal enforcement agencies themselves rather than political parties alone. The United States has its own history of exclusionary nativist visual culture, from the anti-immigration imagery of the 1920s to Cold War era security communications (see figs 1 and 2). What distinguishes the present campaign is not the nativism itself but its combination with social media distribution, the embedding of extremist coded language within official federal communications, and the deployment of recruitment imagery to perform ideological work that formal policy language could not sustain. The campaign should thus be understood not as a novel departure but as the continuation of established visual strategies through contemporary digital media, now operationalised within the institutional apparatus of the state itself. Fig 2. Hold: Re-Elect James D. Phelan U.S. Senator And let him finish the work he now has under way to stop the Silent Invasion (Dan Sweeney 1920, election poster, 35 x 22 cm). Cornell University – PJ Mode Collection of Persuasive Cartography. Fig 3. The Red Iceberg (Impact Publications / Catholic Catechetical Guild 1960, comic book). The political intelligibility of this campaign is inseparable from the Trump administration’s immigration stance during its current term. Immigration has been framed not primarily as either a regulatory or a labour-market issue, but as a civilisational and cultural threat in which enforcement is cast as the defence of national identity rather than the administration of law. This orientation privileges symbolism, loyalty, and exclusion over procedural legality. The DHS and ICE imagery translates this framing into visual form, allowing it to circulate without the friction of policy debate or legal justification. That this framing was legible beyond its intended audience is evidenced by the breadth and intensity of the public response it provoked. Public reaction was sharply polarised. Organisations, including the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, publicly condemned the imagery, identifying the posts as referencing neo-Nazi and white supremacist material.[4] Several Democratic lawmakers took formal action, with Representatives Pramila Jayapal and Becca Balint writing letters to Meta and Google demanding that they end their digital advertising partnerships with DHS, citing the use of federal funds to run recruitment content that relies on white nationalist imagery and rhetoric.[5] The controversy generated substantial media coverage, with major outlets such as NPR and CBC publishing analyses of the visual rhetoric and its historical antecedents, tracing the lineage of specific slogans and images to the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazi publishing, and white supremacist online spaces.[6] This public attention amplified the campaign’s reach well beyond its original recruitment audience, drawing mixed responses from ordinary Instagram users and transforming the recruitment imagery into contested national symbols. Understanding how recruitment imagery acquires the force of national symbolism requires paying attention to the deeper mechanisms by which nations are imagined and represented. The theoretical framework of this article draws on scholarship that treats the state as both an administrative and a symbolic actor. Benedict Anderson’s concept of the nation as an imagined community provides an essential foundation. Anderson argues that nations persist because members share representations that allow them to imagine collective belonging despite social distance.[7] Visual symbols play a central role in this process by condensing history, territory, and identity into recognisable forms. In the DHS campaign, this condensation is performed through two iconic figures. Uncle Sam carries the accumulated weight of American military and civic history, his pointing gesture evoking a tradition of national obligation stretching back to the First World War, whilst the Statue of Liberty condenses the nation’s self-image as a space of arrival, asylum, and democratic promise. By recruiting these figures into the context of enforcement, the campaign draws on the emotional and historical legibility they already possess, redirecting their accumulated meanings toward exclusion and defence rather than welcome and inclusion. George Mosse’s work on the nationalisation of the masses further clarifies the political role of aesthetics. Mosse argues that nationalism sacralises politics through ritual, myth, and visual order, transforming political authority into moral necessity.[8] Symbols such as monuments and allegorical figures acquire normative force by presenting the nation as timeless and unified. In this framework, threats to the nation appear as moral violations rather than political disagreements. The DHS campaign reflects this tradition by framing immigration enforcement as the defence of a sacred homeland. Where Anderson and Mosse explain how nations are imagined and sacralised through visual form, James C Scott’s analysis of state legibility explains how such imagery simultaneously serves the administrative imperatives of governance. Scott argues that modern states seek to render societies legible by reducing complexity into administratively manageable categories.[9] Visual culture can perform this simplification by collapsing diverse social realities into stark binaries. In the posts disseminated by DHS, immigration is rendered as a singular threat rather than a multifaceted, legal, and economic phenomenon. This visual reduction facilitates the expansion of coercive authority by making enforcement appear obvious and necessary. Charles Tilly’s work on state formation situates these dynamics within a broader historical pattern. Tilly argued that states consolidate power through the mobilisation of coercive capacity in response to threat, a logic that extends beyond external war to the construction of internal enemies as justifications for authority.[10] The DHS campaign exemplifies this logic, but with a significant contemporary inflection, mobilising citizens as opposed to standing armies. By addressing viewers as moral actors with an obligation to report, surveil, and support enforcement operations, the imagery recruits ordinary Americans into the coercive apparatus of the state. Immigration is presented not as a regulatory challenge requiring administrative management but as an existential danger demanding civic participation in its suppression. Visual rhetoric substitutes for military mobilisation by producing a symbolic battlefield within the nation itself, in which every citizen is a potential auxiliary of state power. Functionally, the campaign operates to normalise enforcement authority, to morally valorise participation in immigration control, and to align agency identity with executive priorities. It also serves to reinforce institutional legitimacy for an agency that has been the subject of sustained public controversy and legal challenge. Recruitment imagery framed as moral defence elevates enforcement from bureaucratic labour to civic calling. These functions are politically consequential regardless of whether they reflect explicit intent. Turning to the images themselves, the Statue of Liberty occupies a central role across the campaign. Historically associated with migration, asylum, and civic inclusion, Liberty is reimagined as vulnerable and in need of protection. In several posts, she appears damaged, under restoration, or accompanied by slogans such as ‘Protect Her’ and ‘Restore America’. This transformation recodes a symbol of openness into one of defence. The gendered dynamics of this representation warrant attention. By feminising the nation as a woman requiring protection, the imagery activates patriarchal anxieties about possession and violation. Women become symbolic property to be defended, and immigration is framed as a threat not merely to territory but to gendered ownership. This rhetorical move has deep roots in nationalist discourse, where the nation-as-woman trope reinforces both gender-essentialised hierarchies and exclusionary boundaries.[11] The homeland is no longer a space of arrival but a possession under threat. Fig 4. Protect Her (posted 1 October 2025). Caption: Recapture the America your forefathers created. Prevent foreign infiltration USCIS.GOV/JOIN. Fig 5. Restore America (posted 1 October 2025). Caption: “We have room for but one flag, the American flag. We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language. And we have room for but one sole loyalty and that is a loyalty to the American people.” - Theodore Roosevelt USCIS.GOV/JOIN. Uncle Sam functions as the primary agent of moral address and redress. Drawing on early twentieth-century recruitment posters, the DHS adaptations intensify his accusatory posture. He glances at the viewer, he bears lists of crimes attributed to undocumented migrants, and he calls on citizens to report foreign invaders. Civic duty is redefined as participation in surveillance and enforcement. The citizen is interpellated not as a democratic actor but as an auxiliary of state power. Fig 6. Uncle Sam’s Big Headache (posted 20 August 2025). Caption: Uncle Sam’s big headache: Illegal alien crime. JOIN.ICE.GOV. Fig 7. Report All Foreign Invaders (posted 11 June 2025). Caption: Help your country locate and arrest illegal aliens. To report criminal activity, call 866-DHS-2-ICE (866-347-2423). The aesthetic choices underpinning the campaign reinforce its message. Muted colour palettes, distressed textures, and retro typography evoke moments of perceived national unity. As Mosse has observed, nostalgia functions politically by borrowing authority from the past while obscuring its exclusions. The DHS imagery invokes historical legitimacy without acknowledging the coercive realities of those periods. The past is aestheticised rather than interrogated. The appearance of the earliest posts in the first few months of the Trump administration's second term is particularly significant. Published as the administration's immigration enforcement operations were being rolled out, the campaign worked to shape public understanding of those operations, framing them in civilisational and cultural terms that formal policy language could not easily sustain. That a federal enforcement agency deployed such framing from the outset suggests that this orientation was not incidental but institutionalised. Visual culture operated alongside formal policy language, circulating ideological content without the friction of legislative debate or legal scrutiny. The homeland imagined in these images is culturally narrow and normatively prescriptive. Captions reference forefathers, the English language, and a singular American spirit. Quotations attributed to historical figures are deployed to imply that belonging is conditional upon cultural conformity. This is precisely the dynamic Ernest Gellner identified in his analysis of nationalism: the drive to achieve congruence between political and cultural boundaries, such that the state and the nation it governs are imagined as coextensive.[12] The state positions itself as the arbiter of authentic national identity. The choice of Instagram as a dissemination platform intensifies the political effects of this imagery. As a platform organised around visual consumption rather than political commentary, Instagram embeds state messaging within the everyday stream of personal photography and lifestyle content, normalising ideological material through proximity to the mundane. Engagement metrics are structured to favour polarising and affectively charged content, which risks creating the appearance of organic consensus around state priorities. State communication conducted through social media is shaped by visibility and affect in ways that sit uneasily alongside the impersonal, rule-bound conduct on which bureaucratic legitimacy depends. Where Scott and Tilly illuminate how visual culture expands coercive authority, Max Weber’s theory of bureaucratic legitimacy explains what is at stake institutionally when enforcement agencies adopt overtly ideological imagery. Modern administration derives its legitimacy from adherence to impersonal authority and procedural consistency.[13] Departure from this principle risks eroding perceptions of neutrality, a concern that is particularly acute for ICE, an agency that has faced sustained public controversy, legal challenge, and accusations of racial profiling throughout its history. When recruitment imagery frames enforcement as civilisational defence rather than administrative duty, it risks reshaping how officers understand their own role. Officers recruited through appeals to moral obligation rather than professional vocation may come to understand themselves as defenders of a cultural homeland rather than administrators of law, with consequences for how discretion is exercised in the field. Public trust becomes contingent on ideological alignment rather than institutional accountability, and the basis of legitimate authority shifts from the rule of law to the defence of a particular vision of the nation. The DHS and ICE Instagram campaign reveals how the meaning of homeland is being actively reworked within the institutional apparatus of the contemporary American state. It imagines a nation, sacralises its defence, simplifies its enemies, and mobilises its citizens, not through legislation or force alone, but through visual culture circulated on a social media platform. That federal enforcement agencies have adopted these techniques, historically associated with wartime mobilisation and authoritarian governance, within a peacetime democratic state represents a significant escalation in how institutional authority is communicated and legitimised. The campaign both recruits enforcement personnel and prescribes the terms of belonging. Its images are evidence that the homeland is not only administered, but also imagined into existence. Ray Morgan Ray Morgan is a postgraduate student at the University of Cambridge whose work examines how Russian and Soviet states justified and projected their authority across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His Masters research investigates the economic logic underpinning Russian imperial expansion into the South Caucasus, and his forthcoming doctoral work extends that interest into the Cold War era, examining how Soviet, American, and British states used visual media to construct and contest political legitimacy. [1] See for some examples of such posts Caleb Kieffer and RG Cravens, ‘Homeland Security Deploys White Nationalist, Anti-Immigrant Graphics to Recruit’ (Southern Poverty Law Center, 28 August 2025) accessed 22 March 2026. Several posts consulted in the preparation of this analysis appear to have since been removed from the official accounts, suggesting that the imagery proved legible beyond its intended recruitment audience in ways that required subsequent management. That these posts appear to have been removed rather than defended indicates the limits of the campaign’s official framing as straightforward recruitment material. [2] Rogers M Smith, ‘The “American Creed” and American Identity: The Limits of Liberal Citizenship in the United States’ (1988) 41 Western Political Quarterly 225. [3] Nicole Doerr, ‘The Visual Politics of the Alternative for Germany (AfD): Anti-Islam, Ethno-Nationalism, and Gendered Images’ (2021) 10 Social Sciences 20. [4] Kieffer and Cravens (n 1); Ayesha Rascoe, ‘As white nationalist slogans, images, and memes become normalized, can we go back?’ (NPR, 15 February 2026) accessed 22 March 2026. [5] Pramila Jayapal and Becca Balint, ‘Reps Jayapal and Balint Push Meta and Google to End ICE Ad Partnerships Using White Nationalist Propaganda’ (22 January 2026) accessed 22 March 2026. [6] Stephen Fowler and Jude Joffe-Block, ‘Minnesota Shows What Happens When Governing and Content Creation Merge’ (NPR, 16 January 2026) accessed 22 March 2026; Jonathan Montpetit, ‘ICE Nodding to Far-Right Extremists in Recruitment Posts, Experts Say’ (CBC News, 25 January 2026) accessed 22 March 2026. [7] Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (Verso 1983). [8] George L Mosse, The Nationalization of the Masses: Political Symbolism and Mass Movements in Germany from the Napoleonic Wars through the Third Reich (Howard Fertig 1975). [9] James C Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (Yale University Press 1998). [10] Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990–1992 (Blackwell 1992). [11] Nira Yuval-Davis, Gender and Nation (SAGE Publications 1997). [12] Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Cornell University Press 1983). [13] Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology (University of California Press 1978).

Convince an enemy, convince him that he’s wrong Is to win a bloodless battle where victory is long A simple act of faith, in reason over might To blow up his children will only prove him right History will teach us nothing…[1] And many more Destructions played In this ghastly masquerade, All disguised, even to the eyes, Like Bishops, lawyers, peers, or spies.[2] Introducing turmoil Reflecting on the ‘atomistic chaos’ of his day, Friedrich Nietzsche pointed out some troubling attributes of the world, which was getting ‘poorer in love and goodness’ the ‘more worldly’ it became.[3] Individuals, seized by the ‘anxiety of waiting’, grew restless. Pretending to know ‘nothing of these anxieties’, they withdrew into their shells, inside which they could ‘think with an exclusive preoccupation with themselves’ and ‘build and plant for their own day alone’. The urgency surrounding the ‘quest for happiness’ intensified, as though ‘it had to be caught that very day or tomorrow: because perhaps by the day after tomorrow there would be no more hunting at all’. The growing foreboding of the coming ‘winter’s day’ was countered by the ‘greedy exploitation of every minute’, which laid bare ‘all the cowardice and the self-seeking drives of the human soul’. In his later works Nietzsche wondered whether ‘licence and luxury follow when a people approaches destruction, when it degenerates physiologically’, in a manner that could explain ‘craving for ever stronger and more frequent stimulation’.[4] It seemed as though individuals en masse, akin to the characters of Alexander Pushkin’s Feast in Time of Plague, inadvertently beckoned their impending demise by celebrating it as a form of release—almost as deliverance, rather than confronting menace. Politicians—‘poor wretches’—feigned ignorance and also pretended not to notice that ‘the spirit of humanity was in great danger’, worsening the situation. Whenever one dared to ‘speak of their weakness and resist their pernicious lying spirit’, they spared no effort to make everyone ‘believe that of all the centuries theirs has borne the prize away’. Well-versed in all ‘types of murder that required neither daggers nor assault; they knew that whatever was said well would be believed’.[5] They even ‘shook with artificial merriment’ as they fervently embodied their falsehoods day after day, increasingly emboldened by their perceived sense of impunity. The sciences, together with the arts, ‘pursued without any restraint and in a spirit of the blindest laissez faire’, inadvertently ‘served the coming barbarism’. The ‘educated classes’ no longer fulfilled the role of ‘lighthouses or refuges’ to safeguard society at large. In silent accord with the ‘physiologically condemned’ potentates, who ascended to the very ‘top of society’ only to direct the proceedings of the cirque diabolique, the ‘cultured wo/man’, in a remarkable feat of self-deception, had no trouble ‘lyingly denying the existence of the universal sickness’, and sybaritically continued ‘obstructing the physicians’.[6] The economy was fuelled by the ‘brutal greed for money alone’.[7] The emerging ‘immense conglomerates’ sought to replace isolated capitalists in almost every branch of industry, trade and finance.[8] Uncontrolled private credit creation, fuelled by as well as exacerbating the speculative excesses, played out, for a time, in the ‘stock markets, which fell under the curse that casinos had fallen to earlier’.[9] Powerful individual and institutional economic actors systematically ‘misused politics as an instrument of the stock exchange and both the state and society as mechanisms for their own enrichment’.[10] The geopolitics of the day was marred by the escalating rivalry between the ‘Anglo-Saxons and the Slavs’—ie, the ‘English, Americans, and Russians’—jostling for ‘mastery of the world’.[11] This translated into an urgent demand on Europe to come together as ‘One’ in its bid to remain the world’s ‘centre of culture’ and to ‘retain its intellectual influence’.[12] The juxtaposition of antagonistic forces and the play of perceived historical destinies placed Germany in a precarious position: were it not to transcend the customary role of a ‘mediator and broker’—stuck on the crossroads ‘between Mephistopheles and Wagner’—it would risk being thrust from the side-lines of history into the eye of a geopolitical storm not of its making.[13] Sovereign nation-states, one after another, were ‘swept along by a hugely contemptible money economy’. Gradually, yet inevitably they succumbed to the ‘crudest and most evil forces’, eventually falling into the hands of ‘the money-makers and the military despots’, who came to ‘hold sway over almost everything on earth’. Under their myopic and self-serving leadership, the nations ‘once again drew away from one another in the most hostile fashion and longed to tear one another to pieces’. Until they did. First in 1914 and then again in 1939, Nietzsche’s warning notwithstanding—or possibly, as suggested by some, because of it. Might Nietzsche’s analysis of his time and his forewarnings of a tumultuous future have summoned it into being, compelling the troublesome flesh of reality to conform to his visions? Could he see something others did not? Before answering these questions, it is important to appreciate one other thing. Nietzsche’s truly disturbing finding was that the psychic architecture of his contemporary society lacked the (agonistic) mechanisms by which the accrued pressure of systemic antagonisms could be safely released without spilling into armed conflict and bloodshed, in order to reset, for a time, the general rules of engagement known under the name of the ‘social contract’. The resulting question, for us, is whether this precipitous design flaw in the system has been rectified by the tragic history of the two world wars, or whether, in Koselleck’s terms, the tension between the ‘different and jarring layers of time’, contingent on the ‘structures of repetition’, is liable to once again erupt in a succession of ‘singular historical events’, whose unfurling would inevitably ‘surprise those who experience them’?[14] Malign velocities of secularisation Fast-forwarding Nietzsche’s fever dream some hundred and fifty years, once again—with or without his eyes—it should not be difficult to notice the unfolding play of ‘tremendous forces’ which are ‘savage, primal, and wholly merciless’. Whether we admit it to ourselves or not, more frequently these days we fix our inward gaze upon them ‘with a fearful expectation, as though gazing into the cauldron of a witch’s kitchen’, from which ‘at any moment sparks and flashes may herald dreadful apparitions’.[15] Yet, somewhere overhead ‘the Maestro’ keeps on telling us ‘it is Mozart’ and, even though it distinctly ‘sounds like bubble gum’, mesmerised we sit and listen, waiting ‘for the miracle to come’.[16] In these circumstances, it might be worth having a brief Breaking Dawn (of The Twilight Saga, 2008-2012) moment, where Alice Cullen helps the arch-enemy, Aro of the Volturi, to visualise the version of the future he most dreaded. By lifting the Veil of Maya obscuring the deeper workings of History, which presents itself to the naked eye as a vibrant and cacophonous tapestry of events, herded by discrete spatiotemporal logics and compressed by the passage of time into narratives we would later call ‘history’, Alice succeeded in preventing History from actualising its consequences. The tragedy which seemed all but inevitable remained unconsummated. This example illustrates the intricate and frequently misunderstood relationship between small-h history—the catalogue of discrete events marked by clear beginnings and ends—and capital-H History, the unseen forces driving the perpetual cycles of human existence. Small-h history gives us digestible moments: World War I, World War II, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the 2008 financial crisis, and the COVID-19 pandemic, all condensed by the passage of time into neatly packaged narratives of what has come to pass. These ‘parcels of the past’—contained, manageable, and imminently manipulable—serve their current masters by framing a blissful ‘before’ and a hopeful ‘after,’ helping us cope with the calamity at hand. The past remains forever unpredictable, enslaved by a present that endlessly mutilates it to justify its own lies, all while chaining itself to an unknowable future—a phantom it weaponizes to sanctify its every misdeed and delusion of progress. Yet today, as is ever the case with small-h history, these seemingly fragmented and loosely connected ‘past’ events, propelled by some unseen structuring logic, are hurtling toward a collision with capital-H History, which recognizes no isolated wars or crises—only the ongoing, unbroken clash of opposing forces, worldviews, and values. When the small and large arcs of history converge, the wars we fight, the recessions we suffer, and the health crises we endure cease to appear as singular disruptions and instead reveal themselves as manifestations of a deeper, cyclical struggle—one that re-emerges to reshape the course of human destiny. The growing awareness of impending disaster not only incapacitates but augments the thinking concerning such a possible cataclysm as a form of release from the accrued debris of secular modernity. It stimulates obliviousness of the present. Once again, every one of the current ‘theories of the state, of the nation, of the economy, trade and justice’ betrays an air of a deeply cynical and, at times, hysterical ‘defence and exculpation of the present before its own bad conscience’.[17] The more obvious it becomes that the ‘constitutive power of the so-called nation state’ only ‘serves to augment the universal insecurity and atmosphere of menace’, the harder the political establishment tries to convince its electorates that, despite stumbling haphazardly from one crisis to the next and oscillating ever more precariously between the two extremes of the ‘deepest of modern inclinations—to collapse or to explode’, they have actually, for almost a century, been diligently ‘preparing for the absolutely fundamental convulsions’ which—today they tell us—were always inevitable and just a matter of time.[18] It is not surprising that times such as ours, once described by Nietzsche as times of ‘great danger’ and ‘great exhaustion’, should be characterised by the pervasive corruption of the ruling classes. Spreading from the top down, the ‘corruption’ and ‘paralysis’ of collective reason eventually reaches a critical threshold where it transforms into the collective consciousness of denial, manifesting itself in a steadfast refusal to recognise the ‘mendaciously fabricated world’ for what it is.[19] An equally troubling reckoning is that such corruption and ethical bankruptcy become more likely when the wider society’s communitarian instincts have been systematically weakened, lowering its psychological immunity and making individuals simultaneously more susceptible to a relapse of apathy and the sway of inflammatory and apocalyptic discourses, both ignited by the onset of the crisis.[20] The closed loop forms where depleted psychic resources and the paralysis of reason reinforce each other, aggravating the trauma of the modern spirit, which Nietzsche conceptualises in terms of the ‘rape of the conscience’.[21] These ‘times of exhaustion’ expose the insanity of continuing to live ‘normally’ in a world which has gone completely mad. Insanity, in this case, is not simply turning a blind eye to the world’s madness, pretending it is not there, that it doesn’t concern and will spare you, or, as Heidegger put it, when ‘people pretend to know what is “happening” but do not surmise what is occurring with themselves’.[22] Insanity runs deeper, as a creeping realisation that by carrying on as though normally—in the vain hope that somehow, if one just tried a little harder and for a little longer, insanity, like a bad dream, would dissipate, or one would peacefully expire before the music stops—one is inevitably contributing to the growing madness and is unable to do otherwise. As Stiegler insisted, we would only be deluding ourselves if we believed that we could ‘leap across two centuries’ simply ‘by failing to see that an historic struggle is underway and in full swing’.[23] The music will not stop. The world is on the move and the gathering storm is already breaking out in thunderous eruptions. Tremors of once distant earthquakes draw ever nearer. The rousing battle cries resound ever more passionately. Many a volcano hitherto concealed by the thin veneer of modern Western civilisation is no longer dormant. The ‘one size fits all’ corset of the ‘rules-based’ world order is crumbling under the weight of irreconcilable schisms. The relentless assault of mass media-driven hysteria crashes with increasing intensity into the exhausted depths of the public psyche, precariously balanced on the razor-sharp edges of a post-welfare state capitalist dystopia, once shielded by the fleeting semblance of civility. Neo-con-liberalism,[24] the deranged brainchild of laissez-faire, is convulsing under the worktable of history as it awaits an overhaul and re-distribution. Today’s world—America’s Frankenstein—grows impatient. Not yet near its end, at least according to Heidegger, Americanism—‘the pinnacle of nihilism’—is showing unmistakable signs of getting ‘fed up with its own vacuousness’.[25] Americanism is the organization of the unconditional meaninglessness of ‘existence’, joined to the prospect of an enhanced ‘standard of living’. Historiologically, the proliferation and entrenchment of machination are visible in various forms: one form is the commercial calculation (covered with a veneer of morality) of the Anglo-American world. The doom hastened by this form does not consist merely in what the form produces but still more in what it cannot perform: it is alienated from every essential spiritual decision and has geared everything toward ‘psychology’ and Logistical reckoning […] without any creative impulse.[26] As the sun sets over Pax Americana, its creators become increasingly overwhelmed by the inexorable rise of forces they once fostered and contained. The bonds that once firmly held the ‘hostile forces’ in check are breaking one after another, and as the ‘pressure is relaxed’ they do not take long to ‘rebel against one another’.[27] Political histrionics and ideological hysterics have long since merged, precipitating the mutation of collective neurosis into mass psychosis, the logical consequence of a world of ‘massive thoughtlessness’ where everyone ‘interprets’ and ‘no one thinks’.[28] There is something to be said for not making things in one’s own image when one is not God. The psychic trauma sustained in the 2008 financial crisis, which remains unaddressed and unresolved, has deeply affected Western collective consciousness. Persistent rumours and insinuations of an impending war between ‘good and evil’ have continually activated the deep-seated Judeo-Christian narratives embedded in the Western psyche, progressively steering it towards a more militarized stance. This shift reflects not only in policy and rhetoric but also in public sentiment and media portrayal, marking a subtle yet significant transformation in societal attitudes.[29] The Hollywood style of propaganda-by-entertainment has mastered the dark art of enchantment over many decades, weaving increasingly apocalyptic visions with enviable consistency. This cinematic tapestry portrays an unchanging narrative: the external villain, the brewing conflict, the prophesied day of reckoning, the epic struggle, and the inevitable triumph of ‘good’ over ‘evil’—elements etched permanently into the script, gaining more precise contours through time.[30] The ‘Symbolic’, systematically ostracized and demonized as the foe of virtue, is nearly destined to materialize in the ‘Real’ of war. The puppeteers of these conflicts know too well the potency of spinning a self-fulfilling prophecy—a guaranteed ‘win-win’. This is the sinister psychology now in motion, and the window to halt its manifestation is closing swiftly. The query we revisited with Nietzsche lingers still: is this merely a patchwork of fiction, unmoored from reality, or are the narrators deliberately foretelling our fates, weaving us into the fabric of the Inevitable and making us its flesh and blood? In vain may one recall Plato’s admonition that despotism and democracy are siblings joined by destiny at the hip.[31] Long possessed of ‘anarchical temper’, the world’s despots, dictators, and other ‘servants of the people’—while posing as ‘friends of democracy’ and calling themselves ‘protectors’—are spiteful jesters (and each other’s carbon copies) competing in the dark arts of tyranny.[32] The methods of delivering the latter and its side effects may differ these days, but its substance remains unaltered. As in the Middle Ages, clown, puppet, and freak shows are the daily staple of entertaining the masses: the meagre price of keeping them at bay, for now. Heidegger’s prescient warning concerned ‘mechanistic and biological ways of thinking’ as always expressing ‘merely consequences of the hidden interpretation of beings in terms of machination’, where the latter (Machenschaft) is taken to mean the ‘domination of making and what is made’.[33] Recently schooled in the harsh forms of compliance, like a child who has just been scolded—half ashamed, half afraid but still yearning to trust, be good, and belong—the credulous masses, fed on undiluted ideology, do not simply lack awareness of the deeds carried out in their name but celebrate the very ignorance that would prove the undoing of the dreamworld they inhabit. As Losurdo surmised on Nietzsche’s behalf, the oblivious ‘egoism of the masses or their representatives’ would not stop short of helping to nurture ‘a horror of war’.[34] The form of social life ‘maintained without entering consciousness’—the complete ‘psychological and moral “loss of self”’ stemming from ‘the fact that the masses are deprived of a ground’ and that this very ‘groundlessness’ is celebrated as the ‘terra firma’ of their ‘sovereignty’—is today’s stark reality.[35] In its bosom, under the shimmering light of Agamben’s ‘vanishing points’, regularly administered to humankind as booster vaccines to keep it unquestioningly partaking in ‘progress’, unsavoury things proliferate unchecked.[36] The unrestrained pursuit of values deemed universal—liberty, equality, democracy, and dignity—has willed into existence their aberrations, in the shape of deep state, ubiquitous big-data driven surveillance and the rising cross-border tide of marketized ‘wokeness’, which crushes the remnants of healthy sense in its path. The collective and individual reservoirs of internalised cruelty and repressed violence (towards the self)—today’s multiplying echo chambers—are filled to the brim and starting to spill over into society with extraordinary effects. The institutional dams will not withstand the rising pressure much longer: the inhumanity of the current human society is forming into the whirlwind of social chaos and uncivil unrest— the ‘two strifes’ which Hesiod considered unhealthy. Desperate foraging for identity—a kind of ‘its own essential volition into starvation’—revealed no traces of belonging, no existential anchors for the homeless modern soul, able no longer to either ‘win or lose a war’.[37] Revelling in the ephemeral extremes of diversity, inclusivity, and equality, society ends up gripped in the jaws of indignant uniformity. Our progressive aspirations might lead us to see modern social movements—from BLM to MeToo and the transgender revolution—as forces for emancipation, democratization, social equity, and authenticity. However, we must consider the possibility that these movements may merely represent reactionary outgrowths on the weakened carapace of a sickly patriarchy. This could represent its most ‘insidious entrenchment’ yet—an ‘inversion of patriarchal metaphysics’.[38] This suggests a frenzied scramble to plant as many false flags as possible within our fragile collective consciousness. Such actions aim to dominate the Anthropocene, potentially severing the link between humanity and nature irreparably. Indeed, ‘no one is more solidly fixated on the figure of the father, the male, or on principles, than he who claims to have freed himself from it’.[39] The consummation of modernity: in the age of unconditional machination, the gigantism of criminality becomes public under the title of ‘truth’.[40] At the core of concepts such as ‘build back better’, ‘great reset’, ‘fourth industrial revolution’, ‘stakeholder economy’, and ESG—all surreptitiously legitimized by COVID-19 and now propelled by AI—lies a singular and unassailable objective: to enact the definitive separation of humanity from nature.[41] Underwriting these new ‘battle cries’ of crippled post-modernity is the same old profit logic. As Nietzsche aptly observed, ‘the means employed by the lust for power’ may change overtime, but ‘the same volcano continues to glow underneath’.[42] Dressed up in new seductive slogans, this immoderate monster is gradually prizing humankind out of nature, as it seeks to dismantle the ultimate boundary of human freedom. Removing it would allow to herd a disempowered and hollowed out humanity into the corrals of virtual reality, ushering in the Anthropocene. Clumsily slapped together from the Greek terms for ‘human’ (‘anthropo’) and ‘new’ (‘cene’), the concept is not only controversial but also highly misleading as it provides no disclosure on the meaning of ‘new humans’, once they have been severed from nature and its gifts. Estrangement from Nature confines us within an increasingly virtual bubble of hollow illusions, where agency is systematically dissolved, the emergence of ‘great’ characters becomes nigh impossible, and history—no longer flowing cyclically or organically—accelerates into a fevered compression of time. This rupture gives rise to ever more violent collisions: unresolved tensions of the past, distant as well as recent, clash with the unbridled ambitions of the future, shattering the present and leaving it trapped in relentless repetition. Re-occurrence of the same at different times is no longer an anomaly but the integral feature of lived reality. In this fractured landscape, there is no space for authentic creation, transcendence, or the kind of greatness that once shaped the course of human destiny. The simple yet overlooked point is that a deepening disconnect between humanity and nature allows for an unprecedented consolidation of control over the human environment, behaviour, and experience in disturbingly small number of clammy and covetous hands trembling at the scent of money and power. An ever increasing swathe of human existence, ‘reduced to a mere exercise for a calculator’—digitally captured and readily available—presents unlimited opportunities for rewiring society and disciplining the outliers with measures as crude or nuanced as the Anthropocene’s architects’ imagination would allow it.[43] The omniscience of today’s digital profiling dwarfs the confessional of the nineteenth and statistical tyranny of the twentieth century. Every sin, secret, misdeed, mis-speak (and soon ‘mis-think’) is meticulously recorded, processed, and carefully deposited.[44] Turned into series of algorithmic data points, we sway like blades of grass in the ominous winds of data politics, while the deep state builds expedient correlations to support increasingly sinister political, economic, and social agendas. In this fertile soil, the insanity of techno-libertarians like Paul Romer actively spawns conceptions of the neo-colonial incubators of economic growth known to some as ‘charter cities’. These tie the impoverished and underdeveloped pockets of the world into a specific form of governance, where economy and property rights not only reign supreme but bulldoze the cherished Western concept of the autonomous individual, levelling democratic aspirations down to the ground. Irrespective of whether she ever truly grasped the ramifications of her favourite phraseology, Thatcher’s infamous ‘TINA’ (‘there is no alternative’) represents one of the clearest articulations of the completeness and unassailability of the monstrous enterprise of lies which sits at the very core of today’s governing worldview. Akin to Hegel’s ‘bad infinity’, doomed to endlessly seek its own definition and endorsement outside itself, there appears to be no getting to the end of it.[45] The constant striving to overcome or abolish the predicament of ‘bad infinity’ only hatches more perverse turns of it. The impenetrable and (within the Western worldview) incontestable ideological net, cast over the wider world during the past four centuries, presents a significant challenge in the depth of its influence on the modern psyche, which is profound and often debilitating, making it even more difficult to find the ‘starting point of a causal chain’ needed to unravel it: [W]e are on dangerous ground; in getting too close to it we observe suddenly how our consistency, our positivity, is dissolving itself […] knowledge is marked by a lethal dimension: the subject must pay the approach to it with his own being. In other words, to abolish the misrecognition means at the same time to abolish, to dissolve, the ‘substance’ which was supposed to hide itself behind the form-illusion of misrecognition.[46] Yet precisely this realisation is necessary to appreciate that there is nothing accidental about billionaires’ fortunes surging throughout the pandemic and the multiplying military conflicts. Likewise, there is nothing accidental about the spectacular rise of Big Tech as the crowning jewel of the US economy’s resilience in the wake of the conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East. Something else—at a deeper level, invisible to the eye—always happens in parallel. Under the palatable and outwardly progressive corporate personas, disembodied monsters feed on blood, destruction, misery, and strife. Such are the structural underpinnings of today’s world, in the twilight of which these faceless ‘predators’, agitated by ‘the unpleasantness of hunger’, which, fused with ‘other impulses’, has turned into the ‘rage at the victim’, are once again wide awake and on the prowl for prey.[47] Today’s geopolitical gambles are not concocted using the anachronistic calculus of land, markets, trading routes, people, resources (save for energy and the 17 chemical elements, known as ‘rare earths’, vital to the Big Tech’s domination of the world), or even the latest technological know-how. The real battles of today are waged for tomorrow’s control over the Anthropocene; the puzzling ‘political homogeneity of the future opponents’ of the existing social order only highlights ‘the hardness of the impending struggle’.[48] The vast, pervasive, borderless (supra-global), and permanently energy-thirsty neo-feudal structures—Apple, Microsoft, Google (‘Alphabet’), Amazon, Netflix, Tesla / Starlink / SpaceX, Facebook (‘Meta Platforms’), Oracle, Adobe, NVIDIA, and AMD—irretrievably embedded in the social fabric and psyche of modern digital society—are busy scoping out Anthropocene’s terrain, from the melting ice-caps of the Arctic to interplanetary dimensions.[49] The energy demands of today’s ‘big tech’ giants are truly boundless, with no limit they won’t exceed, no boundary they won’t cross, and no ‘outdated’, in their view, socio-political structure they won’t seek to dismantle in order to satisfy their insatiable appetite. Drawing on the experience of Germany in the 1930s, Kiesel observed that ideology entwined with the high-tech exhibits a tendency to solidify into an ‘unbending worldview’, which makes history repeating itself all but inevitable.[50] Fundamentally, neo-feudalism represents an existential condition where one’s life is lived increasingly in the artificial digital environs created and controlled by a small number of excessively powerful commercial entities, from whom lives as well as livelihoods are effectively rented or loaned to their dependents down the pseudo-corporatist architecture (amongst them the vast web of parasitic commercial suckerfish feeding on ‘cookies’) to the individual human dwellers who are digitally constituted, consumed, and recycled ad infinitum. Neo-feudalism is a ubiquitous socio-economic environment with a minimal political sphere and a diminished (in size and significance) middle class. The system is predicated on severe inequality in terms of the distribution of power and wealth, which forms a social vacuum: the actual detachment of the tech-elites from the fortunes and concerns of the wider serf-like population. Neo-feudal social relations are maximally reduced to impersonal transactions of rent in the conditions of acutely constrained mobility: individual serfs—fully accounted for (that is, digitised and pervasively surveyed)—rent from the global technological corporate structures only that which these structures present to them as comprising their ‘life’ and to which there is no viable and, increasingly, no legal ‘off-grid’ alternative. The critical difference between the feudalism of old and the hatching neo-feudalism of today is that the former, as an existential predicament, was not chosen. Rather, it was a given construct within a rigid social architecture. Neo-feudalism, at least partially, is chosen: we actively exercise our free will to become digital serfs. What this tells us, on a deeper level, is that the vast majority will inadvertently relapse into serfdom. We do not mind being enslaved, provided we are enslaved in the right way. One way or another—reactively, proactively, or perhaps subconsciously—we fall into slavery, albeit that we prefer to be coerced by reason and persuasion than by force and faith. Remember Cypher, the traitorous crewmember of the Nebuchadnezzar, from The Matrix? Nietzsche saw clearly the coming of an age which, amid all the ‘raving, especially under scientific disguises, about the conditions of society in which “the exploitative aspect” will be removed’, would only succeed in producing the ‘counter-effect of a despairing boredom of the soul’ and revel in supplying ‘every individual as material for heating the great machines that are an end in themselves’.[51] Today’s colossal digital neo-feudal harvesters are reshaping society from within, driving a deep and deliberate fracture through the dialectic of polarization. On one side, they champion an ever-expanding array of progressive, inclusive, de-colonizing, and ‘un-othering-the-other’ narratives, weaponizing these ‘ideals’ to induce mass conformity and societal complacency. Meanwhile, they counterbalance this by inflaming reactionary forces, gaslighting ‘woke hysteria’ with dangerously far-right, and at times openly neo-fascist, agitation. This calculated manipulation, pitting extremes against each other, sows division while consolidating their own unchecked influence. In both cases time horizons are shortened, the scope of concerns is narrowed, and discreet agendas are maximally hyped up. Paraphrasing Chomsky, the way to keep people oblivious and obedient is to maximise the amplitude of discussions within the strictly limited spectrums of acceptable opinions.[52] All the while, behind the glittering façade of today’s increasingly fragmented sensibility lurks the spirit of growing lethargy and exhaustion: To put to sleep or to intoxicate! To silence the conscience, by one means or the other! To help the modern soul to forget its feeling of guilt, not to help it to return to innocence![53] Simultaneously, by relentlessly controlling communication flows, ruthlessly commoditizing the remnants of human autonomy, and creating inescapable techno-monetary harnesses of increasingly repressive (yet perfectly rational) social control from without, these digital levellers inexorably drive humanity towards the only form of equality thus achievable: the equality of comatose and obsequious digits. Remember Hegel’s idealistic lament over the statues of Ancient Greece: ‘the statues are now only stones from which the living soul has flown, just as the hymns are words from which belief has gone’.[54] The same sentiment applies here: the human being systematically reduced to a digit from which all humanity will have flown—‘reduction of the human psyche itself to an object of technological manipulation’—is the goal.[55] Heidegger was not far off in observing the coming of this juncture, as a ‘resultant of the power of machination, which must reduce beings in all spheres into scheduled [planhafte] calculation’:[56] To say that the quantitative becomes quality, therefore, means that re-presentation, in which what is own-most to the quantitative lets be-ing ‘count’ as mainly what is the most general and as what is the emptiest.[57] Meanwhile, dissentient opinions are systematically eliminated: big-data driven surveillance is married with hystericized emancipatory vernaculars. Squadrons of ‘co-opted activists’ stand ready to carry out executions-by-media in broad daylight.[58] We live in the age when propositions asserting that ‘nothing happens in a vacuum’ and that ‘outbursts of physical violence are, more often than not, outcomes of systemic violence’ have become sackable offences.[59] One may resolutely dismiss the protection of ‘scholastic sanctuary’ à la Pullman’s Dark Materials as a mere flight of fancy: censorship of academic opinion is near total and reflects the impassioned value absolutism demanded by the unhinged political juggernaut.[60] Even ‘today’s “poets,” ie, pen pushers, have meetings as do the shareholders and directors of a corporation’, while the ‘up-and-coming philosophers are indoctrinated in suitable camps’.[61] Once again, no distinction between philosophy and politics is tolerated. Forget about Nietzsche, Spengler, Heidegger, Schmitt, and Arendt: how much longer will Orff’s Carmina Burana be allowed to be performed on stage? Rota Fortunae must certainly stop (at least to catch its breath) at some point soon: tomorrow’s Fahrenheit 451 firefighters will make sure of that. Meanwhile, words—heavy words—like ‘genocide’, ‘fascism / Nazism’, and ‘holocaust’ have been abraded of their cognitive weight, deprived of their contextual grounding. Their historical meaning has been hollowed out: they have become commonplace, cheap trinkets of political expediency and ideological manipulation.[62] And that is just the current state of value polarisation: the lines are drawn, and all bets are off, as are the gloves. The ideological echo chambers are all but hermetically sealed. The growing problems humans face in the hyper-technological digital age of big data demonstrate decisively that there is no one ‘human condition’, no one ‘humankind’ or ‘human community’ which could be mobilised to tackle any of these challenges.[63] Schopenhauer’s desolate boatman is as ever adrift in the ‘stormy sea’ of existence—‘boundless in every direction, rising and falling with the howling, mountainous waves’—clutching to the crumbling edges of his ‘frail craft and [still] trusting in the principium individuationis’.[64] Atomisation and polarisation grow in sync, seemingly reinforcing one another. To think otherwise, in some desperate attempt to grab hold of the ‘right side of history’, exhibits the signs of clinging on to the few remaining ropes hanging off the sides of Noah’s (or should we say Elon’s?) rapidly departing Ark. The troubles and conflicts will continue to proliferate and, as humanity grows ever more fractured and helpless to face them, its devout well-wishers, purporting to see beyond the storm, will continue to rummage enthusiastically around for the last remaining rabbits still taking shelter in the long since unfashionable top hats, with an air of unblemished entitlement and unwavering delusion in their intrinsic self-worth, occasionally mistaken for the innocent, childlike displays of quintessentially English eccentricity. Those who today speak loudest of reform, advocate tough measures, call for the restoration of truth and respect in public discourse, and defend the need for direct collective action to solve this urgent problem and stop that bloody conflict, like those who champion investing resolutely in the brighter, greener future—the cynical preachers of equality—are tarantulas with revenge in their hearts, wishing ‘that the world become full of the thunderstorms of [their] revenge that we would regard as justice’. As Nietzsche put it, ‘they speak in favour of life, these poisonous spiders, even though they are sitting in their holes and have turned against life, because they want to do harm’.[65] Make no mistake: the architects of time in their many guises—busy readying the great Halls of the Present to receive the Gift of the Future which is already browning in the ovens of the crumbling social order—are the most rotten ones and the greatest danger. Their corruption is irreversible, as is their task: to introduce the future as the fait accompli. They will unleash the fireworks of chaos to achieve this objective. As Dante remarked, ‘they think not there how much blood it costs’.[66] Their stakes—to become ‘master not over something in life but over life itself’, even if it means destroying it in the process—keep rising; inflation is the only ‘iron law’ they abide by, and they are resolutely prepared to perish in its flames. Only exposure and capture they fear most.[67] This is so, according to Nietzsche, because ‘all power structures of society’ created by them ‘are based on lies’, and ‘in order to maintain a lie’ one ‘has to invent twenty more’.[68] Or, as Lewis Carroll aptly put it, ‘it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place and, if you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast’.[69] In the final reckoning, these actors would prefer to engineer the end of the world than risk being caught red-handed. It should hardly come as a surprise that Europe’s geopolitical predicament, in a world gripped by the all-absorbing ‘encounter between global technology and modern humanity’, has not fundamentally altered and only intensified since Heidegger (stalking Nietzsche) last pondered it in 1953, and since Derrida re-visited Heidegger’s diagnosis in 1989.[70] As Heidegger wrote: This Europe, in its unholy blindness always on the point of cutting its own throat, lies today in the great pincers between Russia on the one side and America on the other. Russia and America, seen metaphysically, are both the same: the same hopeless frenzy of unchained technology and of the rootless organization of the average man. The situation of Europe is all the more dire because the disempowering of the spirit comes from Europe itself and—though prepared by earlier factors—is determined at last by its own spiritual situation in the first half of the nineteenth century.[71] When the farthest corner of the globe has been conquered technologically and can be exploited economically; when any incident you like, in any place you like, at any time you like, becomes accessible as fast as you like; when you can simultaneously ‘experience’ an assassination attempt against a king in France and a symphony concert in Tokyo; when time is nothing but speed, instantaneity and simultaneity, and time as history has vanished from all Dasein of all peoples; when a boxer counts as the great man of a people; when the tallies of millions at mass meetings are a triumph, then, yes then, there still looms like a spectre over all this uproar the question: what for?—where to?—and what then?[72] That which is presently obvious to the few will soon become abundantly clear to all. Not, however, as a realisation, but as an inescapable vice of reality. The world is about to be torn asunder: the social pyramid will crumble and split in two. The microscopic top—delirious from having ‘pulled it off’ and wielding the overwhelming power of artificial intelligence—will reign supreme. The vast majority will be commanded and abjectly grateful for their mercy; even the reproduction of human biomass will no longer be contingent on them. Every notion of freedom, equality, and dignity will disappear like a puff of morning mist. Subservience—ennobled with some new, proud, aspirational, and universal name—will run the show. As Schürmann surmised in Broken Hegemonies (2003), ‘the agony is what those who inhabit the monstrous site have to keep alive by resolutely placing themselves under the legislative-transgressive diremption’.[73] Conceptual wreck diving The symptomatology outlined above exhibits a certain directionality and a degree of correlation. Some form of abuse of the conscience seems present at every level of society, from the individual (‘ατομική’) to the structures of economic and political power crushing them. A collective consciousness primed for conflict relies on the individual conscience being silenced ‘by one means or another’.[74] The rising levels of internal psychic distress, ‘quelled’ on the inside by the escalating establishmentarian untruths, which only cover up the governments’ inability ‘to do anything towards alleviating the psychic sufferings of the private person’, and the single-minded projection of an external enemy as the cause of all internal problems become positively correlated.[75] This is not a new phenomenon. Although explained painstakingly by Nietzsche in On the Genealogy of Morality (1887), its causal mechanisms still evade our understanding, leaving us incapable of disabling, let alone dismantling, the ‘infernal machine’ (Höllenmaschine).[76] A brief Koselleckean look at the conceptual shifts of the historico-cultural phenomenon of ‘Salem’ may help guide us a little deeper into the issue. Deriving primarily from the Hebrew ‘Shalem’, meaning ‘complete’ or ‘peaceful’, which is echoed in the Arabic ‘Salaam’, ‘Salem’ denotes—etymologically speaking—a process of overcoming internal discord and achieving a state of peace. But, in the realm of puritan imagineering, Salem projects the opposite: the unattainability of such a wholesome and self-sufficient condition. It is as though, once disturbed in some way, perfection can never be restored. And precisely this realisation places an overwhelming emphasis on ‘restitution’, which becomes punishment handed out to the different (or othered) for blighting the hopes of completeness and tainting the dreams of paradise (when really it is rage against oneself, realisation of one’s own ontological incompleteness). Something is already amiss here. Was that which is presumed to have been disturbed, some lost ‘perfection’, really present in the first instance? Sometimes, it is the loss of what we never had in the first place that hurts the most. Could it be that this ‘harmony’ was only the embedding of an ‘idea’—an equation the mind is unable to solve using the existential calculus it can muster—which clogged up the psychic algorithm? It is in this latter capacity that the collective imagination of the West engages with the concept of Salem. Mr Creakle, the ‘heavy handed’ proprietor of Salem House in David Copperfield, expressed the meaning of Salem best: Now, boys, this is a new half. Take care what you’re about, in this new half. Come fresh up to the lessons, I advise you, for I come fresh up to the punishment. I won’t flinch. It will be of no use your rubbing yourselves; you won’t rub the marks out that I shall give you.[77] The ‘special marks of distinction’ Creakle wholeheartedly handed out to the boys in his care on a daily basis made ‘half the establishment writhe and cry before the day’s work began’, and there was no telling whether any of the establishment did not join in the tears ‘before the day’s work was over’: I should think there never can have been a man who enjoyed his profession more than Mr. Creakle did. He had a delight in cutting at the boys, which was like the satisfaction of a craving appetite. I am confident that he couldn’t resist a chubby boy, especially; that there was a fascination in such a subject, which made him restless in his mind, until he had scored and marked him for the day.[78] This punitive puritan Geist time-travels from the Salem Witch Trials of 1692-93, through Dickens’s ‘Salem House’ (where David Copperfield is sent after biting his stepfather), over to Miller’s The Crucible (1953), which allegorises the ‘Red Scare’ of the 1950s, across to Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot (1975), echoed in Eminem’s ‘Lose Yourself’ (2002) and, more recently, in Fantastic Beasts (2016), where Mary Lou Barebone of New York’s Second Salem Church, not unlike Mr. Creakle of Salem House, lovingly (mostly through repeated impassioned beatings from the heart’s good intentions) nurtured the destructive ‘Obscurial’ superpowers of Credence Barebone. Mary Lou Barebone, Credence’s foster mother and the leader of the New Salem Philanthropic Society, represents the consummation of Mr Creakle. Possessed of intense hatred—matured through the generations of Scourers—she is unhinged, ruthless, frenzied and unequivocal in her drive to eradicate witchcraft: Hear my words and heed my warning and laugh if you dare: witches live among us! We have to fight—join us, the Second Salemers, in our fight! Through these examples—both real and fictional—runs the inextinguishable dark irony of inevitability that once drew the devout puritan community, fleeing religious persecution, to establish a society based on extreme intolerance. Having suffered for their faith and painfully aware of the old world’s pitfalls, their providential mission was to begin history anew. Adamant in their belief that Satan—invisible yet undeniably present—would test their faith, they took his appearance in Salem as proof that the New Englanders were somehow the chosen people. The one thing with which they struggled was the idea that the demonic mastermind was never on the outside. Heidegger aptly captured this socio-psychological predicament: In the metaphysically machinational domain, all concepts, principles, and axioms are simply ‘expedients’ which according to need can turn into their opposites.[79] All along, the deeply theological underbelly of ‘Salem’ has contained and concealed the dark otherness of the very ‘peace’ it sought to signify. Multiple passages in the Testaments, Old and New, combine into a chilling portrayal of justice as a form of disinterested, objectifying indignation, dispensed with an implacable—almost reptilian—unequivocality. The sentiment, conveying the inevitable triumph of ‘good’ over ‘evil’, dripping with gratuitous imagery, is communicated through a series of grotesque metaphors which conjure up visions of crushing enemies underfoot, making ‘footstools’ out of them, consigning them to a ‘burning lake of sulphur’ for ‘eternal torment’ in ‘second death’, and burning sinners and evildoers in ‘furnaces’ until ‘not a root or branch’ is left of them, to ensure once and for all that all sinners are obliterated and absolutely ‘no future’ is left for the wicked’.[80] Over the centuries, Salem has become a conduit for this particular kind of energy and signifier of a distinctive disposition—a horcrux of sorts, containing a fragment of primordial unhappiness. Lamenting its inability to delve deep within and find the switch to that hidden, dark part of its being to extinguish the anguish at its source, Salem sustains itself by continually pitting the proverbial Dr Jekyll against Mr Hyde, and draws power from filling the space between them with the thick smoke of fear and ressentiment, from which the villains and the fiery flames of righteous rage can be easily conjured. As anguish grows and rage over the inability to attain purity mounts, the choice on how to survive becomes more pressing. Unable to reconcile itself to being incompletely and imperfectly constituted, owing precisely to being endowed with the faculties to imagine harmony and perfection, the theological kernel of Salem is faced with the existential—Kierkegaardian—moment: either tear itself to pieces, or find someone else to blame, someone who robbed Salem of its original innocence and completeness (neither of which ever existed). This ‘choice’ becomes the inception point of every ‘monstrous site’, including Salem. Adorno observed that: The system in which the sovereign mind imagined itself transfigured, has its primal history in the pre-mental, the animal life of the species. […] In the advance to humanity this is rationalized by projection. The ‘rational animal’ with an appetite for his opponent […] must find a reason [so that it ‘may devour it without misgivings’] […] The animal to be devoured must be evil […] This justifies the principle of the thought as much as it increases the appetite. The system is the belly turned mind, and rage is the mark of each and every idealism.[81] Construction of the threatening other is invariably a reflection of the inner deficit of the entity which projects it in the image of a symbolic enemy external to the system. In the final reckoning, however, it is only a projection of a certain hidden part of its own psyche—its internal antagonistic nature. The more fervent such construction becomes, the greater the internal psychic plight. Following the logic of this inverse displacement, when the antagonistic otherness is maximised it also tends to become maximally antagonised, effacing the difference between the demonised (exteriorised evil) and the demonising (internalised violence). In this liminal space where ‘no one is safe’, the demonic comes to reign undivided. Arthur Miller described it as the ‘projection of one’s vileness onto others in order to wipe it out with their blood’.[82] As though crystallising Nietzsche’s curse of having become the monsters it once set out to fight, Salem’s ‘cleansing idea’ ends up preying on itself.[83] Something else happens within the confines of the vicious circle thus constituted. Salem’s targets—branded as incarnations of evil—are precluded from understanding, let alone realising their identity, which militarises their anguish. And so is Salem: continually denying its own evil by fighting it as images projected onto others, it fails to engage with a critical part of its own genealogical identity in order to learn ways of sublimating it, rather than repressing it to the point where containment becomes impossible, and sparks start to fly.[84] Salem and any one of its countless Others are not separate entities. There is no outside to any of them, no fixed boundary by which they are immanently separated; they continually flow into each other. Their seeming mutual exclusivity forms the unbreakable bond by which they remain connected. Nietzsche explained this in the following terms: One belongs to the whole, one is in the whole; there nothing which could judge, measure, compare, or sentence our being, for that would mean judging, measuring, comparing, or sentencing the whole. But there is nothing besides the whole.[85] What, then, are some examples of the recurring ‘real’ of ‘Salem’ as symptom and symbol of the world we live in? In some respects, ‘Salem’ is not so different from what Žižek described in relation to the concentration camps: What are they if not so many attempts to elude the fact that we are dealing here with the ‘real’ of our civilization which returns as the same traumatic kernel in all social systems? […] We should not forget that concentration camps were an invention of ‘liberal’ England, dating from the Boer War; that they were also used in the US to isolate the Japanese population, and so on.[86] The indefinite ‘war on terror’, initiated by Bush Junior, is another oft-cited instance. Initiated with a fervent desire to conclude his father’s (and The Father’s) unfinished business, it reflected a personal quest to ‘prove himself to his father’ (and The Father) by defeating the externally constituted evil and establishing his own sense of righteousness, akin to a religious crusade.[87] The evil, as we have subsequently (with considerable delay) come to learn, was not the enemy deemed worthy of obliterating. The re-constitution of ‘good’ remained incomplete because the wrong deficit was targeted, allowing that which needed re-constituting to metamorphose into something else—‘another’ inconspicuous situation. And so the search for the real enemy goes on, all the while only augmenting the darkness and strife inside. Unabated, Salem’s punitive zest endures in all of today’s conflicts—both external and internal. A symbol of forces obsessed with immortality and the eternal, it strives to reassert or safeguard something ‘sacred’, battered and besieged by the unpredictable fluctuations and occasional upheavals of history’s unfolding events. The prospect of making whole that which never was is resolutely lacking, adding, with each iteration, to the daunting task of salvaging perfection. Every situation presented as ‘the battle of civilization against barbarism’, where only ‘total victory’ would suffice, invariably reveals traces of the existential predicament where both the victor and the defeated, the offender and the avenger ‘still stand and fall on the level of metaphysics and remain excluded from what is other’.[88] Waging war against an externally perceived and constituted evil, as a means of removing some internal blockage in the system, does not only work by distorting causal relationships. The guise of an external threat allows one to imperceptibly shift the internal problem into a higher gear or to warehouse it in the different corner of the system. When the searching gaze refocuses on it, it will be invariably surprised to discover a new face, or a different acuteness seemingly disconnected from the original condition, which will have become irretrievable ground, suggesting that moving forward notwithstanding is the only possibility. In this game, from the very beginning, in the end, there was nothing to reclaim: the ‘thief’s treasured money-chest was ever empty’.[89] Žižek points to the deeper issue at stake: Here we encounter a kind of ‘reflexivity’ which cannot be reduced to philosophical reflection: the very feature which seems to exclude the subject from the Other is already a ‘reflexive determination’ of the Other; precisely as excluded from the Other, we are already part of its game.[90] That ‘Other’—who you fear, resent or hate—is unavoidably inside you, as one of your many yous. Perhaps as some unresolved echo of the past, or a yet unexplored part of your physiology. But there is more to it. In the act of othering, you don’t just confront an external entity. You are that other who is doing the othering. Meta-narratives like religion fuel this internal strife by resonating with and sometimes exploiting the darker, weaker, and injured aspects of these many selves. They aggregate and command impaired ‘souls’ by offering them to exteriorise if not their suffering than at least the responsibility and blame for it. To overcome Salem’s predacity and break its vicious circle, we must embrace its demon as our own, instead of making it ‘the other’ and endowing it with a separate reality. This prevents it from becoming fortified and returning to haunt and hunt us, particularly when we are further impaired by the guilt associated with having spilt the blood of those we falsely believed were carriers of Salem’s spectral presence. Time to end it? As though paraphrasing Nietzsche with an eye on today’s secular upheaval, Josep Borrell recently lamented that ‘we live in a world where there is more and more confrontation and less co-operation’.[91] If Nietzsche’s dissection of his day should bear any resemblance to our present reality, it is because Nietzsche was correct in his audacious claim to be telling us the ‘history of the next two centuries’ which could ‘no longer come otherwise’.[92] Can we yet thwart Nietzsche’s forecast for the tragic unfolding of modernity as the ‘great drama’ played out ‘in a hundred acts’ across ‘two centuries’?[93] Intoxicated by history, blind to a darkening future, and increasingly ensnared by the ghostly rhythms of History, echoing the beat of inevitable fate—with 90 seconds left on the Doomsday Clock—can we still wake up from the dream, which dreams within a dream, in the nick of time? Can we snatch history from the undiscriminating jaws of History before it once again spits out our present as the indigestible ‘surplus-object, the leftover of the Real eluding symbolization’?[94] The story of the Titanic offers a compelling parallel. In 1898, a little-known, struggling American author named Morgan Robertson produced a novella about a ‘fabulous Atlantic liner, far larger than any that had ever been built’. Unwittingly articulating the psychic hauntings of his time—‘the Zeitgeist that a certain age was coming to an end’—the author ‘loaded his ship with rich and complacent people and then wrecked it one cold April night on an iceberg’. This somehow showed the ‘futility of everything’, and in fact, the book was called Futility or the Wreck of the Titan. [95] Most troubling was the inexplicable accuracy and detail with which the author predicted the coming tragedy. Many subsequent inquiries into the wreck of the Titanic revealed dozens of meaningful warning signs ahead of the sinking, far more than would have been necessary to prevent the accident from occurring.[96] Despite, or perhaps because of, this ‘psychic foreshadowing’, the real Titanic sunk spectacularly, albeit horrifyingly, on 10 April 1912. The impression is created that the Titanic, for reasons we cannot know, was earmarked by a far greater calamity, already unfolding, as its harbinger, and no amount of pre-cognition would be sufficient to stop it. It was already selected by History as its sacrificial lamb. The Great War, waiting in the wings, produced an obvious symptom, a leading indicator, which would retroactively become its chilling symbol as well. The world at large did not identify with the Titanic as a symptom of its own condition and continued to celebrate it as the highest achievement the tragic sinking notwithstanding. Consequently, only the unfolding of actual catastrophic events on a grander canvas was lagging: the machinations of history lagged behind the inertia of History. What is the Titanic of our era, the moment when history once again accelerated beyond the designated cruising pace, to catch a glimpse of History before its descent into the abyss? Could it have been misinterpreted as the collapse of the Soviet Union, inadvertently revealing the iceberg we failed to notice as we rejoiced in slaying the authoritarian monster, consigning it to a fleeting micro-narrative filled to the brim with negative connotations and soon to be written out from history textbooks, except as a scarecrow from the past? Are we presently aboard the Titanic, having barely avoided the tip of the iceberg and convinced ourselves that the vessel escaped the collision entirely (perhaps even strengthened and reinvigorated by the scare it experienced in the process), blindly forging ahead towards the presumed felicitous singularity where history, having finally converged with History, would sign off on a happy note? If so, if the Soviet Union was not the proverbial Titanic we imagined but merely the tip of the emerging iceberg, and we are not the observers of the sinking ship from afar, but passengers aboard the Titanic which has hit the iceberg and is starting to sink, then what is underneath the surface? What awaits us just beyond the darkening horizon? There can be little doubt that today we inhabit a ‘monstrous site’—filled with the precipitancy of crisis, extreme ‘diremption’ and ‘terrible warnings’ of every kind—where we ‘dwell dangerously and in poverty’.[97] All the sophistication of academic discourse on conceptualising history and contextualising historical knowledge notwithstanding, we are yet to grasp the relationship between History and history. We remain unable to claim ‘missed’ lessons from the former, to preclude the latter appearing as some inexplicable repetition of itself, becoming increasingly more grotesque with each turn. It may well be, as Žižek claims (building on Marx), that ‘the Symbolic returns in the Real—in the form of hallucinatory phenomena’.[98] Small-‘h’ history is the semantic debris left at the base of the strainer from which the turbulent waters of History have drained away. Neither ‘history’ nor ‘History’ can definitively delineate the nature of the ‘strainer’, but their modes of entanglement with it reveal much about situating human experience. Through the intricate interplay of History and history, we can discern the contours of the ‘strainer’—those hidden dimensions that underpin and reveal the complexities of human experience. While History emerges from and withdraws into the depths, history often operates under the cover of darkness. It is not, however, to be confused with ‘the owl of Minerva’, which ‘spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk’.[99] The confusing trail left by History becomes known to us as history, documenting and interpreting past events. The Titanic was an event, a trigger, a history-in-the-making, a symptom of what was already happening, but not yet a symbol of what could not have come otherwise. It was an instrument in the invisible hand of History and, if we could only snatch it from this guiding hand, History, momentarily startled by such Promethean audacity, would retreat into the shadows of a yet undisclosed future. By not revealing itself in the present, it would allow history to run a different course, explore a different narrative and take a different turn instead of repeating itself. Yet, the unfolding of history-as-events which suspends, erases, or redraws boundaries that just yesterday seemed unshakeable, only exposes the inherent illusoriness of meta-narratives, including the one sketched out here, making them less revealing, relevant, and impactful. The disconnect which arises, explaining some of the high-pitch dissonance in today’s world, is that specific situations, possessed of Titanic-like precipitancy, such as the tragic conflicts in Palestine and Ukraine, still have meta-narratives, which make an appeal to History under the guise of ‘universal human values’, forcibly projected over them through the medium of ideology, in the hands of those busy stitching up history. It is painfully clear that using such ethically bankrupt and outdated discourses in conjunction with the worn and cynically abused ‘values’ of yonder years as filters for understanding the world’s current happenings cannot suffice. Although it may not be entirely as Sting suggested—that our entire ‘written history is a catalogue of crime’ concocted by ‘the sordid and the powerful’—we can certainly no longer ‘seek solace in the prisons of the distant past’, nor trust in the ‘security in human systems we were told would always last’.[100] Nietzsche, in particular, exposes the ‘counterfeit quality’ within the legitimizing assertions of meta-narratives which lay claim to exclusive insights, supposedly bestowed by History itself, into ‘why humankind is here’.[101] This claim not only serves as the inception point and genesis of all subsequent historical trajectories but also assumes authority in defining the concepts of ‘good’ and ‘evil’. Meta-narratives wield this authority as their primary instrument for steering and occasionally ‘correcting’ history’s course, all the while zealously guarding against any disruption to the delicate fabric of History, allowing it to retreat back into the indecipherable depths from whence it emerged, in order to illuminate the farthest reaches of existence but once. Whichever way we wish to conceptualise the current juncture, it is clear that history is once again knocking more resolutely on the invisibly-present and presently-locked proverbial door, on the other side of which History awaits.[102] Nietzsche and Marx thought that barricading this door from the inside—permanently blocking human imagination, arresting emancipation, and inhibiting becoming—was the totalising creed of Judeo-Christianity. This hegemonic doctrine continues to make History inaudible to history, as well as antagonising humanity’s relationship with nature. Akin to a deep scratch on the LP of History, it traps the needle of history, causing it to skip, replaying the same line of the song over and over again, seemingly unable to get past it. Overcoming this creed is not the same as ‘destroying’ it (as in Heidegger). For Nietzsche, Judeo-Christianity is the Manifesto of Slave Morality: an unrepentant articulation of the blighted soul which, held up to an unreachable standard, becomes fragmented in the chaos of secularisation. Deposited in a number of horcruxes, it lives on, causing continual annihilation (Vernichtung) of the world and devastation (Verwüstung) of the earth: God makes himself small and pushes his way through the whole world […] also as a demon of annihilation.[103] Earlier we touched on the cultural trope of Salem, which has become a horcrux domiciling a fragment of the blighted soul. Marx finds the horcrux of capital—the indigestible ‘surplus-object, the leftover of the Real’, which becomes secular modernity’s absorbing meta-narrative.[104] Capital represents the frontier of intelligibility, which history needs to dismantle in order to unchain human imagination and enable it to see past the end of capitalism to the consummation of History. Marx’s Capital—a particularly protean form of private property—is more than the nexus of capitalistic social relations. Not unlike Salem, it externalises society’s own deeply rooted antagonistic nature. It is unable to deliver humankind from the dregs of psychic disorder, to help it become whole again, on account of it being endowed with the very characteristics of the reactive kernel which it is meant to expel from society’s psyche. Capital, like Salem, is powered by the very reactive energy it is meant to have removed. As a result, its real impact is to return as the meta-narrative of modernity, which enslaves the dismembered society and precludes it from achieving fuller identity. Not only was the internal antagonism expelled solely in abstract form, but the abstraction itself, re-packaged into a dream, returned to haunt the fractured psyche, exacerbating its predicament within a self-sustaining cycle. This complex metamorphosis conceals the return of the most pernicious component of the Judaeo-Christian creed, hard-wired to the constant expropriation of nature and alienation of human essence. The source of capital’s energy as well as its power is none other than this theological machination, which disables the agonistic reception of the world and replaces it with immanent antagonism. How can we at least think about preventing the ‘same traumatic kernel’ from returning indefinitely and ‘in all social systems’?[105] Žižek suggests that dismantling of meta-narratives starts by detecting ‘in a given ideological edifice, the element which represents within it its own impossibility’ and precludes the possibility of discerning, let alone experiencing ‘full identity’. Such exposure, by inverting the ‘causality as perceived by the totalitarian gaze’, subverts and splinters it.[106] The danger, however, does not simply dissipate at this point. It lurks in losing sight of the forest for seeing the trees. In their time, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida all warned of this. We are living through a fundamental fissure in historical time, where the world (humanity) is becoming ever more fractured and polarised, while the earth (nature) is becoming increasingly homogenised. All the while, the world and the earth are pulling away from each other, seemingly unstoppably. The fourth dimension, concealed underneath that phenomenal flux—be it Einstein’s ‘spacetime’, Heidegger’s ‘temporality’, Bergson’s ‘la durée’, or Kant’s ‘transcendental time’ which govern the motions of Emerson’s ‘Oversoul’ and Nietzsche’s ‘will to power’—reveals that the world and the earth share the same inescapable direction: both are becoming less controllable and more themselves. Humans can no longer adequately control nature’s power, just as the world is seeking to de-couple from nature in every sense which used to inform the meaning of being-‘human’.[107] This de-coupling may mean both the end of human history (albeit not of History), understood both physically and metaphorically, and the concealment of the meaning of the Earth: In some remote corner of the universe poured out into countless flickering solar systems there was once a star on which some clever animals invented knowledge. It was the most arrogant and most untruthful minute of world history, but still only a minute. When nature had drawn a few breaths the star solidified, and the clever animals died. It was time, too: for although they prided themselves on knowing a lot, they had finally discovered, to their great annoyance, that they knew everything wrongly.[108] Following in Nietzsche’s footsteps and leaving a few of his own bombshells behind as a parting shot, Heidegger insinuated that ‘only God can help us now’, to which Schürmann retorted: ‘only Proteus’.[109] The originary sea-god Proteus—symbol of the ‘primordial unconsciousness’ and ‘perfection of the art’ (Khunrath) with ‘power over all things’ (Jung)—is a poignant riposte.[110] Able to foretell the future, unable to lie, and forever changing shapes and colours—he resists capture in the metaphysical nets of meta-narratives and would reveal his prophetic knowledge only to those able to hold him without corrupting the ‘original, non-differentiated unity of the world’. History, which lays the groundwork of history, weaves its profound, underlying narrative that forms the fabric of our collective consciousness and channels its flow. We can catch but glimpses of the ontological structures that underpin and configure the realm of existence in Nietzsche’s insatiable ‘will to power’, Heidegger’s ‘being in the world’ as Dasein’s primordial condition, Derrida’s inexhaustible ‘textuality of experience’, and Koselleck’s tapestry of experience and expectation, crafting the temporal frameworks of historical consciousness. Fundamental questions, pertaining to history, which track the evolution of key concepts shaping our understanding of the world and defining historical paradigms—‘revolution’, ‘progress’, ‘democracy’, or ‘freedom’, to name but a few—have not yielded satisfactory answers for some time. All fundamental words have long since been used up, recycled and exhausted. Foundational questions, the remit of History, may well remain beyond our grasp. Stranded between the inexorable fate, as History, and the inevitable fallacy of history, how do we chart our course? For us there is no way out of history and no way into History: our standpoint is the liminal space between, where the circle of life inevitably forms and spins from the same ‘unseen forces which twist our hearts’.[111] These forces originate well before we are born and continue long after we perish: Our lives are not our own. From womb to tomb, we are bound to others, past and present, and by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future.[112] Our vital insight into the vicious circles of history is never that they cannot be broken or stopped, but that this only happens when those undaunted by History itself rise up from the turmoil and step forward to face its constitutional unknowability, prepared to ground themselves in the recognition of the abyss rather than being wrapped in the rags of dubious truths. Interrupting history’s repeating circles is only a matter of who can take the cost of breaking them. Thinking at the end of metaphysics, they have many names. Whether Plato’s philosopher-kings, Aristotle’s great-souled men, Hegel’s world-historical individuals, or Nietzsche’s Hyperboreans, it is not the name that defines these figures, but their ability to rise above the chaos and bluster of history—the transient, noisy events that mark our times—and harness the untamed forces of History itself. They are not mere instruments of fate but the mercurial declinations of the atom, confounding the Void, weaving from the discordant voices of History a new direction shaped by their will. What truly matters is not their title but that they emerge to lead humanity when it stands on the precipice of disaster. Borrowing from Heidegger, we may even call them ‘grounders of the abyss’.[113] Their true distinguishing quality, however, is repose—capable of calming existential storms and persuading even Proteus to speak. Dmitri Safronov Dmitri Safronov holds a PhD in Political Economy from the University of Cambridge for research on ‘Nietzsche’s Political Economy’ (2020). Dmitri received an M.Sc. from the London School of Economics, and Honors BA in Philosophy and Politics from Trent University. Prior to matriculating at Cambridge, he spent over 20 years in the City of London, working for the leading global investment banking franchises. Dmitri’s profile and list of recent publications can be found on . [1] Sting, ‘History Will Teach Us Nothing’ [1987] (Sting) accessed 1 February 2025. [2] Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘The Masque of Anarchy’ [1819] (Scottish Poetry Library) accessed 1 February 2025. [3] Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations (Cambridge University Press 1997) III §4. Unless indicated otherwise, all subsequent citations in ‘Introducing Turmoil’ are from §4 of Nietzsche’s third untimely meditation, ‘Schopenhauer as Educator’. [4] Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of The Idols, Or How to Philosophise with a Hammer in Walter Kaufmann (ed), The Portable Nietzsche (Penguin Classics 1994) Errors §2. [5] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (Vintage Books 1974) §23. [6] NF-1888:25[1]. NB: This article quotes extensively from Nietzsche’s unpublished notes. These are assembled in the Nachlass and accessed from . Notes in the Nachlass are organized according to the year, number of the notebook, and number of the notebook entry, eg NF-1885:2[179]. [7] Nietzsche (n 3) IV §4. [8] NF-1870:5[105]; Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All-Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits (Cambridge University Press 1996) I §472. [9] NF-1870:5[105]; Nietzsche (n 8) II The Wanderer and His Shadow [WS] §§209, 285. [10] NF-1871:10[1]. [11] NF-1880:7[205]; NF-1884:25[112], [137]; Nietzsche (n 4) Maxims §23. [12] Nietzsche (n 8) II WS §87; NF-1884:25[112]; NF-1885:37[9]; Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil in Walter Kaufmann (ed), Basic Writings of Nietzsche (Modern Library 2000) §256. See also Hugo Drochon, Nietzsche’s Great Politics (Princeton University Press 2016) 20, 160-2, 183. [13] NF-1885:37[9]; Nietzsche (n 8) I §408. [14] See Reinhart Koselleck, Sediments of Time (Stanford University Press 2018) 4-7, 158-77. [15] Nietzsche (n 3) III §4. [16] Leonard Cohen, ‘Waiting for the Miracle’ (1992). Cohen relays the miracle of ‘The Future’ with astonishing prescience. [17] Nietzsche (n 3) IV §6. [18] ibid III §4. [19] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist in Kaufmann (n 4) §§5-10, 55. [20] Nietzsche (n 5) §23. [21] Nietzsche (n 4) Skirmishes §36; see Nietzsche (n 19) §43. [22] Martin Heidegger, Ponderings XII–XV, Black Notebooks 1939–1941 (Indiana University Press 2017) 153. [23] Bernard Stiegler, The Decadence of Industrial Democracies vol 1 (Polity Press 2011) 55. [24] See Michael Schwartz, ‘The liberal neocon: The paradox of liberal foreign policy’ (March 2011) 76 International Socialist Review accessed 1 February 2025. [25] For reasons never properly explained, Heidegger thought it would take until ‘around the year 2300 at the earliest’ before Americanism fully ‘exhausted itself’. Heidegger (n 22) 177. [26] ibid 89, 176-7, 208-13; my emphasis. For a rebuttal of Heidegger’s views (with reference to Schmitt and Weber) see Paul Slama, ‘Heidegger on Americanism, After Carl Schmitt and Max Weber: The United States as a Figure of a Historical Transcendental’ in John Rogove and Pietro D’Oriano (eds), Heidegger and his Anglo-American Reception (Springer 2022) 311-33. [27] Nietzsche (n 3) III §4. [28] Heidegger (n 22) 218. [29] The idea of a ‘coming war’ in Judeo-Christian narratives features prominently in the context of apocalyptic literature, in both Old (eg the Book of Daniel) and New (eg the Book of Revelation) Testaments, which describe the end times, involving great battles or wars between the forces of good and evil and the ultimate triumph of God’s kingdom. As far back as 2016, the ‘critically minded’ audiences at the leading UK universities, including Cambridge, welcomed with open arms such dubious ‘masterpieces’ as Richard Shirreff, War with Russia: An Urgent Warning from Senior Military Command (Coronet 2016). [30] The Hunt for Red October and Red Phoenix came out in 1990, followed by The Sum of All Fears in 1991. This particular deeply theological well of fearmongering has never dried up, either on screen or in pop-literature. Ask ChatGPT 3.5 for a list of Hollywood flicks since 1990 portraying Russkis as the baddies and it will respond with at least 62 titles—circa 2.0 notable items per year—adding up, some thirty years later, to our collective astonishment that the self-fulfilling prophecy has fulfilled itself and now this is really so. For completeness, also run the ‘opposite’ search for the Russian flicks where Americans/Brits are portrayed as antagonists. Let me know if you find anything besides Brother 2 (2000) and War (2002), both of which I recommend watching before passing judgement. [31] Plato, The Republic (Penguin 2007) §545b. [32] ibid §§562e, 566b. [33] Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning) (Indiana University Press 1999) 88-92. [34] Domenico Losurdo, Nietzsche, the Aristocratic Rebel (Brill 2019) 133. [35] Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality (Cambridge University Press 1994) III §7; Heidegger (n 22) 160. [36] See Minoli Salgado, ‘Vanishing points/visible fictions: the textual politics of terror’ (2013) 27(2) Textual Practice 207-23. [37] Heidegger (n 22) 213. [38] ibid 104. [39] Reiner Schürmann, Broken Hegemonies (Indiana University Press 2003) 514. See INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex (Duke University Press 2017) 21-63; Heidegger (n 22) 104. [40] Heidegger (n 22) 90. [41] Klaus Schwab’s ‘Fourth Industrial revolution’ openly beckons the blurring of boundaries between the physical, digital, and biological worlds, largely driven by new technologies like artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things. [42] Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak (Cambridge University Press 1997) §§204, 206; NF-1887:9[173]. [43] Nietzsche (n 5) §373. [44] Heidegger correctly warned that by virtue of its ‘decisive knowing’, ‘modern science’ is structurally complicit in ‘machination’. Heidegger (n 33) 98. [45] See Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Science of Logic (Cambridge University Press 2010) 192-212, 572-3, 596-613, 733. [46] Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (Verso 1989) 73. [47] Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics (Continuum 2007) 22. Think also of the allegory portrayed in Venom (2018), where failed journalist Eddie suddenly gains superpowers after becoming the host of an alien symbiote, Venom, whose species are bent on the destruction of Earth. [48] Heidegger (n 22) 161. [49] See John Gray, The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism (Allen Lane 2023) 22-49, 131; Joel Kotkin, The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class (Encounter Books 2023) 27-41; Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism (Bodley Head) 58-92; Slavoj Žižek, Freedom: A Disease Without Cure (Bloomsbury Academic 2023) 161-85. [50] Theodor Kiesel, ‘Heidegger’s Philosophical Geopolitics in the Third Reich’ in Richard Polt and Gregory Fried (eds), A Companion to Heidegger's “Introduction to Metaphysics” (Yale University Press 2001) 248. [51] Nietzsche (n 12) §259; Nietzsche (n 8) II WS §§218, 220; I §585. [52] Noam Chomsky, The Common Good (Odonian Press) 29-31. [53] Nietzsche (n 3) IV §6. [54] Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit (Oxford University Press 1977) 455. [55] Žižek (n 49) 38. [56] Quoted in Babette Babich, ‘Heidegger’s Black Night: The Nachlass and its Wirkungsgeschichte’ in Ingo Farin and Jeff Malpas (eds), Reading Heidegger’s Black Notebooks 1931-1941 (MIT Press 2016) 77. [57] Heidegger (n 33) 95. [58] See Karen Kurczynski, ‘Expression as vandalism: Asger Jorn’s “Modifications”’ (2008) 53/54 RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 295; or, for a more visceral, up-to-date, and less-politically correct description of the same, Urfaust’s ‘New Salem’ (2019). [59] See the thought-provoking discussion in Slavoj Žižek, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (Profile Books 2009) 2, 12-14, 80. [60] Ponder the difference between the Salem witch trials of 1692-93, McCarthy’s ‘Red Scare’ trials of the 1950s, and the recent grilling of US academics over the hypothetical on campus consequences of the Israel-Hamas conflict. See also Heidegger on ‘celebrated academic freedom’ in Germany in the 1930s (Martin Heidegger, ‘Nur noch ein Gott kann uns retten’ Der Spiegel (Hamburg, 30 May 1976)). Was not the same impassioned religiosity of righteous fury the real fuel of them all? [61] Heidegger (n 22) 72, 154. [62] Ironically, didn’t Heidegger predict precisely this, when he warned that all ‘fundamental words’ would be used up and the ‘genuine relation to the word’ would be destroyed? See John Sallis, ‘Grounders of the abyss’ in Charles E Scott, Susan Schoenbohm, Daniela Vallega-Neu, and Alejandro Arturo Vallega (eds), Companion to Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy (Indiana University Press 2001) 181. [63] See NF-1887:11[226]. [64] Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, vol 1 (Dover 1969) 352. [65] Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Random House 1954) III Tarantulas. [66] Dante Alighieri, Divine Comedy (Houghton, Mifflin and Company 1867) 588 [Paradiso XXIX, line 91]. [67] Nietzsche (n 42) §453; Nietzsche (n 35) III §11. [68] Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo in Kaufmann (n 12) Destiny §1; Nietzsche (n 8) II Assorted Opinions and Maxims [AOM] §54. [69] Lewis Carroll, Through The Looking Glass (Macmillan & Co. 1872) 42. [70] Heidegger’s summation is a clear poke at Nietzsche’s ‘Ending’ (Schluß). See NF-1885: 2[207]; 38[13]. For further context see Nietzsche (n 12) §§106, 211, 282. Regarding Derrida see Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question (University of Chicago Press 1989) 45-6. [71] Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics (Yale University Press 2000) 40. [72] ibid 48. [73] Schürmann (n 39) 527; my emphasis. [74] Nietzsche (n 3) IV §6. [75] Nietzsche (n 8) I §472. [76] Nietzsche (n 68) Wise §3. [77] Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (T.B. Peterson & Brothers 1850) 125. See ibid 113: when David, punished for a ‘misdoing’ during the holiday-time, finds a ‘beautifully written’ plasterboard placard which ‘bore these words: “TAKE CARE OF HIM. HE BITES”, and starts looking for a dangerous dog, hoping that protecting his master might grant him forgiveness for his sins and reinstatement into the ranks of humans, Creakle hurries to clarify: ‘that’s not a dog. That’s a boy. My instructions are, Copperfield, to put this placard on your back’ (my emphasis). [78] ibid 126. [79] Heidegger (n 22) 88. See Kellner’s criticism of Bush’s war rhetoric in 2001, which, ‘like that of fascism, deploys a mistrust of language, reducing it to manipulative speechifying, speaking in codes, repeating the same phrases over and over. Bush’s discourse displayed Orwellian features of Doublespeak, where war against Iraq is for peace, the occupation of Iraq is its liberation, destroying its food and water supplies enables “humanitarian” action, and the killing of countless Iraqis and destruction of the country will produce “freedom” and “democracy”’. Douglas Kellner, ‘Bushspeak and the politics of lying: presidential rhetoric in the “war on terror”’ (2007) 37(4) Presidential Studies Quarterly 636. [80] See NIV Psalm 37:20; Psalm 37:38; Psalm 92:7; Psalm 110:1-2; Revelation 20:7-15; Peter 3:10; Romans 16:20; 1 Corinthians 15:24-27; Malachi 4:1; Matthew 13:49-50; 2 Thessalonians 1:9; Psalm 37:20. [81] Adorno (n 47) 22-3; my emphasis. [82] Arthur Miller, Timebends (Methuen Books 1987) 337. [83] Nietzsche (n 12) §146. [84] See Žižek (n 46) 143. [85] Nietzsche (n 4) Great Errors §8; my emphasis. [86] Žižek (n 46) 51. [87] Kellner (n 79) 635. [88] Heidegger (n 22) 104. [89] Nietzsche (n 8) I §209. [90] Probing the ontology of antisemitism, Žižek ((n 46) 70-1, 174)) expresses this point exquisitely. Still, one of the most powerful and imperforate explorations of antisemitism, even surpassing Žižek’s analysis, is Shakespeare’s examination of persecuted otherness in The Merchant of Venice (1600), inspired by Giovanni Fiorentino’s Il Pecorone (‘The Dunce’, 1378-85), which pondered the mind-crushing predicament of ‘not cutting more or less, and shedding no blood’, when claiming the ‘pound of flesh’ (Ser Giovanni, day iv, 57). [91] Lyse Doucet, ‘Munich security talks marked by global “lose-lose” anxiety’ (BBC News, 19 February 2024) accessed 8 February 2025. [92] NF-1887:11[411]. [93] Nietzsche (n 35) III §27. [94] Žižek (n 46) 51. [95] I am borrowing from Žižek’s animated recounting of the Titanic lore (ibid 74-77). [96] See George Behe, Titanic: Psychic Forewarnings of a Tragedy (Patrick Stephens Ltd 1997). [97] Nietzsche (n 3) III §4; Schürmann (n 39) 515-22. [98] Žižek (n 46) 78. [99] Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Philosophy of Right (Oxford University Press 1949) 13. [100] Sting (n 1). [101] NF-1888:15[48]. [102] See Jameson’s proposition that ‘it is easier […] to imagine the end of the world than of capitalism’ and Žižek’s that it is easier to envisage ‘a total catastrophe which ends all life on earth than it is to imagine a real change in capitalist relations’, which delimit our existential vision by the strictly monetary logic of Capital. Frederic Jameson, ‘Future City’ (2003) 21 New Left Review accessed 13 February 2025; Slavoj Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes (Verso 2008) 334. [103] NF-1884:26[220]. [104] Žižek (n 46) 50. [105] ibid 51. [106] ibid 143. [107] See discussion in Kohei Saito, Marx in the Anthropocene (Cambridge University Press 2022) 2-22. [108] Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘On the Pathos of Truth’ in Raymond Geuss and Alexander Nehamas, Writings from the Early Notebooks (Cambridge University Press 2015) §2. [109] Reiner Schürmann, ‘“Only Proteus Can Save Us Now”: On Anarchy and Broken Hegemonies’ (2021) 41(1) Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 1. [110] Carl Jung, The Collected Works vol. 14, Mysterium Coniunctionis (Princeton University Press, 1970) 56 [§50], 462 [§660]. [111] The wording is inspired by Cloud Atlas (2012), a film adapted from David Mitchell’s novel of the same name by Lilly and Lana Wachowski, and Tom Tykwer. See accessed 8 February 2025. [112] ibid. [113] Sallis (n 62) 181, 197.

Introduction It is easy to overlook the endurance of British imperial structures in its former colonies, particularly in the legal and moral frameworks that govern gender and sexuality. Despite the formal end of the British Empire in the twentieth century, colonial legislation that criminalises same-sex relationships and / or gender variance continues to serve as the legal foundation for the persecution of LGBTQ+[1] people throughout the former colonies and prolongs their marginalisation. By the time homosexuality was decriminalised in the UK, many countries had gained independence and did not reform inherited colonial laws. As of 2024, homosexuality remained a crime in 29 Commonwealth countries,[2] representing around half of the total number of UN member states that criminalise homosexuality worldwide.[3] The British Empire was unparalleled in its systematic export of laws criminalising same-sex conduct, leaving an institutional legacy of homophobia unmatched by any other empire.[4] In a comparative analysis of 185 countries, Han and O’Mahoney found former British colonies far more likely to have legislation that criminalises homosexual conduct than colonies of other European empires or countries in general.[5] Colonial anxieties about gender non-conformity also persist: as of 2019, at least 26 states used public order, vagrancy, and misdemeanour offences to harass and criminalise gender-nonconforming people, while at least 15 jurisdictions criminalised gender expression through laws on ‘cross-dressing’, disguise, impersonation, and / or imitation—the vast majority of which originated from British colonial penal codes.[6] This paper examines the continuity and discontinuity of British colonial-era laws relating to gender and sexuality in India and how these legal frameworks remain contested in contemporary politics. In doing so, it highlights how India’s legal system has functioned not only as a means of governance, but also as an instrument for enforcing moral and ideological codes that sustain exclusion. The paper situates India’s debates over gender and sexuality within their historical context, tracing the evolution of norms from pre-colonial traditions and histories of gender and sexual fluidity to the colonial imposition of Judeo-Christian norms, and finally to contemporary debates shaped by the constitutional promise of equality. Colonial legislation, such as the Criminal Tribes Act (CTA) and Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, institutionalised ideals of heteronormativity and a strict gender binary, criminalising those that fell outside of these norms and casting them as threats to the social order. In particular, the paper explores the experiences of India’s hijra community, a gender non-conforming people who form an important part of India’s ‘third gender’, examining their historical significance in South Asia and the enduring influence of colonial laws on the community. Post-independence, India’s Constitution brought commitments to equality, non-discrimination, and freedom of expression, but legacies of colonial morality and normative hierarchies persist in both legal and social spheres. Recent rulings illustrate both the possibilities and limitations of legal reforms in reshaping these norms and hierarchies. Finally, the paper reflects on the contemporary politics of LGBTQ+ rights across the former British colonies, exploring the divergent legal trajectories of countries that are negotiating similar colonial legacies. Queer identities in Indian cultural history Records of queer identities in India can be traced back to Hindu mythology and ancient regional folklore, with gender and sexual fluidity abundantly depicted in Indian scripture, literature, and temple art, as well as in ancient texts including the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, which detail narratives of sex changes, homoerotic encounters, and transgender characters such as Shikandi.[7] For instance, the Hindu deity Ardhanarishvara is reportedly said to have been created by the merging of the god Shiva and his consort Parvati, depicted with a body which is masculine on the right and feminine on the left. This can be interpreted as emblematic of the harmonious bond between husband and wife, but also reflects Shiva’s androgynous identity in this form—the name itself translates to ‘the lord (Isvara) who is half (Ardha) woman (Nari)’.[8] Vatsyayana’s Kamasutra—an ‘astonishingly sophisticated’ Sanskrit textbook on social conduct and human relations, dating back to the third century—also describes same-sex relations and non-binary gender identities, and medieval Hindu temples, such as those in Khajuraho, Madhya Pradesh (900-1050 AD), and Bhubaneswar, Odisha (750-1250 AD), explicitly depict homosexuality among the erotic imagery in their sculptures.[9] Fig 1. 6th century Ravanaphadi cave temple, Ardhanarishvara (half Shiva, half Parvati), Aihole Hindu monuments Karnataka. Fig 2. Ardhanarishvara, Chola period, 11th century, Government Museum, Chennai. South Asia’s third gender While the acknowledgement of genders outside the male / female binary has recently gained prominence in Western societies, people of varied gender expressions have been accepted as legitimate citizens in South Asia for centuries.[10] Among the most visible in these groups are the hijra community, who are generally phenotypical males or intersex people who adopt a feminine gender identity, some of whom undergo ritual castration.[11] Considered neither men nor women, hijras have long lived outside the Western gender binary and survived the colonial project of elimination to form an important part of the present-day (and legally recognised) ‘third gender’ in India.[12] The concept of a ‘third gender’ is derived from a complex history, encompassing various categories of gender non-conforming identities that have existed in their own right. For instance, khwajasaras (or ‘eunuchs’)[13] held prominent roles in the Sultanate and Mughal empires, providing widely varied services ranging from administrative duties to harem attendance. As in other Islamic courts, their perceived asexuality allowed them to navigate gender-segregated spaces, travelling freely between the mardana (men’s side) and zenana (women’s side), and serving as guardians of Mughal harems. They also had the prerogative to collect taxes and duties in certain areas and, as essential parts of the bureaucracy, many rose to significant positions of power during sixteenth to eighteenth-century Mughal India.[14] Today, hijras view khwajasaras as an important dimension of their past, although they have occupied distinct gendered, social, and temporal categories. Khwajasaras were masculine-embodied (castrated) slaves who worked in various roles, often in close proximity to the emperor (a social function that is now obsolete), whereas hijras expressed femininity and typically occupied a more marginal social position.[15] Historically and in the present, the hijra community has formed kinship systems, customarily living together and engaging in public performances and dances, as well as collecting donations for their blessings (badhai), which are believed to be auspicious, during events such as weddings or childbirth.[16] In the eighteenth century, hijra lineages and badhai practices were recognised by some Indian polities, and hijra subjects were entitled to state support. The Maratha Kings of Satara granted hijras small cash allowances and rent-free land grants that could be passed down between generations, and other rulers also offered patronage to hijras. In some cases, hijras apparently held a ‘codified right to beg’, but the community also became entangled with prostitution from early on. As such, the social position of hijras in pre-colonial India was somewhat ambivalent, but it nonetheless indicates a level of acceptance of gender fluidity that allowed hijras to ‘survive if not thrive without forcing a resolution’.[17] That there was space for gender non-conforming people to exist and fulfil alternative social roles—which were often associated with considerable authority or auspiciousness—is reflective of a more accommodating and plural society. Same-sex love and romantic friendships similarly existed ‘without any extended history of overt persecution’.[18] British colonial morality and the policing of gender and sexuality After the demise of the Mughal empire in the eighteenth century, South Asia was washed over with new norms imposed by British colonial administrators. The tolerance of varying expressions of gender and sexuality in India, long embedded in culture and society, stood in stark contrast to Britain’s Victorian, Judeo-Christian conceptions of a clear ‘male’ and ‘female’ binary and strict heteronormativity, thereby becoming focal points for colonial regulation.[19] The queerphobic sentiments that were previously a peripheral puritanical voice in India thus became dominant under colonial rule. British merchants had been depicting hijras as immoral and ‘disgusting’ people from at least the late eighteenth century, and by the 1850s and 1860s, the community was perceived as a serious cause of concern for the empire.[20] The murder of a hijra, ‘Bhoorah’, in the North-Western Provinces, coupled with accusations of hijras kidnapping, enslaving, and castrating children, prompted a moral panic which quickly translated into intense scrutiny and surveillance.[21] To the imperial administration, any perceived deviance posed a threat to the colonial order and therefore needed to be controlled. The ‘eunuchs’, as hijras and other non-normative gender identities were referred to in the British colonial language, were rendered an ‘ungovernable people’, who could not be assimilated into respectable Indian society and were subject to ‘gradual extinction’.[22] From 1860 onwards, the British Empire imposed numerous criminal laws on its colonies, beginning with India, through which it sought to restructure social norms. The introduction of Section 377 (S377) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) as a legal transfer of the 1533 British Buggery Act made sexual activities ‘against the order of nature’, namely homosexuality, punishable by imprisonment.[23] Gender-nonconforming people, primarily hijras, were then explicitly criminalised in the CTA Part II Act of 1871. The law required the North-Western Provinces and Punjab government to keep a register of all ‘eunuchs’ who were ‘reasonably suspected of kidnapping or castrating children or committing offences under Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code’.[24] Those on the register were prohibited from performing and wearing feminine clothing in public (in an effort to eliminate their culture) and barred from living with male children under 17 (so as to prevent the community from expanding). The law also interfered with inheritance by banning ‘eunuchs’ from making wills or gifts.[25] The entire community of hijras in India were impacted, as many sections of the Act were enforced across the whole country and key customs such as public performance and cross-dressing were deemed suspicious and sufficient to implicate them.[26] For instance, in 1884, a hijra named Khairati was tried for an unnatural offence under S377 with little proof besides their habitual wearing of female clothes.[27] In some cases, the law was enforced beyond its scope, effectively criminalising all male cross-dressing. Thus, the law became a tool for producing and policing normative identities in line with colonial morality, and hijras were reduced to objects of moral suspicion, characterised as a form of perverse sexuality. Women’s agency and sexualities were also particular sites of anxiety, and the colonial administration sought to extensively discipline them within the boundaries of Victorian morality. For instance, devadasis, women who were symbolically married to Hindu gods and performed dances as part of the rituals in the temples they inhabited, were traditionally respected cultural and religious figures and even enjoyed royal patronage in some cases.[28] Under colonial rule, the devadasi system—and particularly their freedom to exercise relationships with multiple partners—was deemed impure and unacceptable, with these women being recast as prostitutes and criminalised under the Indian Penal Code (1860) and the Contagious Diseases Act (1864).[29] In this way the colonial legal architecture conflated complex social roles with deviance and criminality, subjecting gender identity and any perceived sexual deviance to intense scrutiny, surveillance, and discipline. Contemporary legal debates surrounding gender and sexuality By framing gender and sexual diversity as inherently criminal, colonial laws entrenched a moral hierarchy that endures in legal and social frameworks, as well as in deep social stigma. As the following section will explore, these colonial legacies remain at the centre of contemporary legal debates surrounding gender and sexuality in India. While recent legal reforms have attempted to dismantle the structures of normative heterosexuality and the gender binary in line with constitutional principles, the evolution of laws such as S377 and CTA Part II exemplify how the policing of gender and sexuality has persisted long beyond India gaining independence. CTA Part II and the continued policing of hijras Hijras today face extreme marginalisation and violence and are ‘pushed to the fringes of society’ where begging and sometimes prostitution become lifelines, and access to employment, healthcare, and justice is uncertain, if at all possible.[30] Despite Part II of the CTA being repealed in 1911, its ideology has been carried forward in various institutions including state legislature and local police practices. For instance, the 1919 Telangana Eunuchs Act—a derivative of the CTA that gave police powers to arrest any ‘eunuch’ found ‘cross-dressing’ or performing and entertaining in public spaces—was retained in the state of Telangana until 2023, when it was declared unconstitutional following a petition by trans activists.[31] Similarly, in the state of Karnataka, Amendment 36A ‘Power to Regulate Eunuchs’ was implemented in the Karnataka Police Act in 2011, which granted police the right to register ‘eunuchs’ who are ‘reasonably suspected of kidnapping and emasculating boys or of committing unnatural offences’—language that is clearly adopted from the 1871 CTA.[32] Registered people are thenceforth prohibited from engaging in ‘undesirable’ acts. After a petition contested the unrestrained and arbitrary power granted to the police to persecute hijras, the local government changed the term ‘eunuch’ to ‘person’ in the law, but this, grievously, only widened the scope of the legislation, thereby facilitating further abuse of power against marginalised communities.[33] The resurgence of such archaic elements of the 1871 CTA illustrates the continued influence of colonial legislation on hijras in contemporary policing, reinforcing discrimination with a perennial threat of arbitrary arrest and prosecution. Progress and pitfalls: Gender identity rights Over the past decade, there have been some noteworthy legal reforms that have invoked the Indian Constitution[34] to enhance protections for gender minorities, including by establishing the right to self-determination of gender identity. In 2014, the Supreme Court of India ruled to legally recognise a third gender in response to a petition filed by the National Legal Services Authority of India (NALSA).[35] The Court highlighted transgender persons’[36] human rights based on international treaties, and also discussed the history of transgender persons in India, noting their shift from being respected figures in Indian mythology and Mughal courts to being criminalised under British colonial rule.[37] The Court identified the severe discrimination faced by transgender people in society as a violation of their right to equality (Article 14 of the Indian Constitution), and also expanded the scope of freedom of expression (Article 19(1)(a) of the Indian Constitution) to include the right to express one’s gender through dress, words, action, or behaviour. The judgment also held that discrimination on the grounds of ‘sex’, which is explicitly prohibited under Articles 15 and 16 of the Constitution, included discrimination on the basis of gender (based on one’s self-perception)—an interpretation that effectively prohibits discrimination based on gender identity. Thus, the Supreme Court acknowledged the rights of all persons to self-identify their gender and declared that those who fall outside the male/female gender binary, including hijras, can legally identify as ‘third gender’. The government was directed to ensure recognition of ‘third gender’ in all documents and to create affirmative action quotas for third-gender persons in education and employment, in line with other minorities.[38] This was a ground-breaking decision that, for the first time, established legal recognition of non-binary gender identities in India and declared their constitutional rights, marking a welcome divergence from the Western gender binary construct and helping to dismantle some of the structures that restrict India’s transgender community from fully and equally participating in society. The judgment has global significance as one of the first comprehensive applications of the Yogyakarta Principles[39] by any national-level court. By contextualising the issue within India’s historical tolerance of gender diversity, the Court also made an impactful statement on the colonial roots of anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment in a political climate where ‘traditional’ values are frequently weaponised to legitimise discriminatory norms and social hierarchies. In a recent case, the High Court of Andhra Pradesh ruled that trans women were legally entitled to recognition as women, rejecting claims that womanhood applies only to those who can bear children.[40] This case is a further example of the Court demonstrating an acute understanding of both the letter and the spirit of the Constitution and its vision for universal equality. On the other hand, some legal changes have proven harmful in practice. The government’s Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act, 2019 was widely criticised as a step backwards for trans rights, and for undermining the 2014 constitutional right to self-determination. The Act appeared to be a positive development, prohibiting discrimination against transgender persons in education, employment, healthcare, and property access, and seeming to affirm the right to self-determination of gender identity. However, the law has several shortcomings, particularly regarding the mandated procedure for legal gender recognition. To be officially recognised as ‘transgender’, individuals must first obtain a ‘certificate of identity’ from the District Magistrate based on self-declared identity, after which they can apply for a ‘change in gender certificate’ to legally alter their gender. However, this second certificate is only issued with proof of sex reassignment surgery, raising serious concerns about the relationship between legal recognition and bodily autonomy. By putting a condition on legal recognition, the law risks creating a pressure on individuals to undergo medical procedures. This conflicts with the 2014 Supreme Court verdict and with international standards such as the Yogyakarta Principles, which oppose medical procedures being set as a condition for legal recognition of gender identity. Consequently, petitions have been filed before the Supreme Court, challenging the constitutionality of the Act.[41] The path to decriminalising homosexuality The colonial-era S377 legislation (the criminalisation of homosexuality) remained the foundation for the persecution of the LGBTQ+ community in India until 2018. Despite previous unsuccessful petitions, NGO Naz Foundation fought for the removal of S377 in 2006, arguing that it violates articles of the Indian Constitution, including Article 15, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of religion, race, caste, sex, or place of birth.[42] In a landmark judgement, the Delhi High Court repealed the act in 2009. However, in 2013, the Supreme Court of India overturned this judgement after appeals made by religious groups, leaving it up to parliament to legislate on the issue, meaning homosexuality was once again illegal.[43] Given that the Supreme Court legally recognised a third gender in 2014, this put third-gender people in a strange situation: on the one hand, they were now constitutionally protected, but on the other hand, they could be criminalised for consensual gay sex.[44] Finally in 2018, following further petitions, the Court expanded the understanding of discrimination on ‘grounds of sex’ under Article 15, and S377 was annulled on the basis that it violated citizens’ fundamental rights.[45] This landmark decision legitimised sexual fluidity, correcting a historical injustice against the queer community and marking a promising step towards decolonising domestic law. However, it also illustrated the resistance to overturning imperial laws in a society where heterosexual norms remain deeply embedded in domestic institutions. The next battle: Legalising same-sex marriage Despite the pivotal ruling decriminalising same-sex relationships in 2018, the fight for equality persists, with same-sex marriages yet to be legalised (at the time of writing). In 2023, India’s Supreme Court declined to extend recognition of non-heterosexual marriages in response to petitions filed by activists seeking a gender neutral interpretation of the Special Marriage Act, 1954 (SMA).[46] The SMA allows civil unions irrespective of religion but recognises marriage only between a ‘male’ and a ‘female’, thereby excluding same-sex couples and contradicting the constitutional rights to equality and dignity. Marriage in India carries significant social and legal significance and is deeply tied to notions of family, legitimacy, and respectability, granting legal entitlements to inheritance, next of kin status, joint adoption, and surrogacy.[47] The denial of marriage equality perpetuates the marginalisation and exclusion of same-sex couples in society, reaffirming heteronormative values and indicating a broader reluctance to reimagine hegemonic family models. Strong opposition to the proposed reform came from the government and religious leaders, who argued that same-sex unions are ‘not comparable with the Indian family unit concept of a husband, a wife and children’.[48] This reasoning highlights how the law continues to serve as the state’s instrument for codifying dominant moral ideologies about sexuality. While the five-judge bench was divided on several matters, the court ultimately upheld the constitutionality of the SMA, concluding that there is no fundamental right to marry and leaving it up to parliament to legislate on the issue. Crucially, this ruling not only reflects the resistance to opening up marriage to same-sex couples, but also the Court’s institutional constraints and the substantial legal consequences of amending the SMA, which intersects with an array of laws on divorce, succession, and inheritance. Striking down the SMA was equally unviable because it remains an important piece of legislation that facilitates interfaith marriage. The Chief Justice’s directives to the government to end all discrimination against queer couples signal will for reform, but the complexities of this case suggest that the journey towards achieving marriage equality is likely to be protracted.[49] Colonial legacies, constitutional visions, and the politics of gender Contemporary legal debates over gender and sexuality demonstrate a persistent tension between entrenched colonial legacies and normative social hierarchies on the one hand and the constitutional promise of equality, non-discrimination, and freedom of expression on the other. Questions remain about why laws that are inconsistent with the principles of the Constitution have been retained and why challenges to these laws have also been unsuccessful. For instance, why did it take until 2018 to remove S377? Why do some states retain derivatives of the draconian CTA Part II legislation? Colonial legal and epistemic frameworks that criminalised homosexuality and codified a rigid binary of ‘male’ and ‘female’ as naturalised and exclusive categories have been absorbed and reinforced by social, cultural, and religious institutions that continue to regulate bodies and sexualities in India. Socialised gender roles underpin heteronormative family systems, as well as structures of labour, care, and reproduction, sustaining a binary organisation of gender as a basis for social and economic relations. Non-normative gender and sexual identities remain the subjects of heightened political anxiety, with religious groups and conservative sections of society often mobilising against progressive legal reforms that seek to expand rights for minorities. Making changes to the ‘status quo’ therefore becomes difficult to achieve. Contemporary legal debates about gender and sexuality also reflect an inconsistent application of constitutional morality. Bhatia identifies two distinct and conflicting readings of the Indian Constitution: the conservative reading, which is the dominant interpretation that the Supreme Court has placed upon the Constitution; and the transformative reading, which uncovers the Constitution’s founding aspirations for political and social transformation.[50] The Supreme Court’s jurisprudence on LGBTQ+ rights has oscillated between these two readings, affirming and expanding rights in some cases (eg recognising the right to self-identify gender in 2014) and restricting progressive change in others (eg declining to legalise same-sex marriage in 2023). This ambivalence reflects a broader societal reality: despite legal recognition of queer identities, normative frameworks that sustain exclusion and inequalities remain entrenched in political, social, and cultural institutions. As such, achieving substantive equality will require moving beyond formal legal recognition to interrogate these frameworks both in the public and private domain. A commitment to transformative constitutionalism—in which the state is directed towards achieving certain social goals—offers a means for challenging these norms and fostering a more genuinely inclusive society that reflects the constitutional principles of equality, dignity, non-discrimination, and freedom of expression. The broader global politics of LGBTQ+ rights Shared histories, colonial legacies and legal trajectories The debates concerning gender and sexuality in India are part of a broader global landscape in which states have navigated similar colonial legacies, but demonstrate divergent jurisprudential trajectories. The British administration exported Victorian norms and institutionalised the criminalisation of homosexual conduct throughout its global colonies by transferring and adapting the IPC, making homosexuality socially unacceptable and deeply stigmatised across Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean.[51] Much like India, histories of other countries demonstrate that strict heteronormativity and gender binary systems were far from the convention in pre-colonial societies, as many indigenous cultures similarly recognised and accommodated gender and sexual fluidity. King Mwanga II of Buganda (who reigned from 1884-97 in present-day Uganda) was widely known to engage in relations with other men.[52] More broadly, there is evidence of same-sex relationships throughout pre-colonial Africa.[53] The people of Igbo and Yorùbáland (in present-day Nigeria) also existed outside of Western gender and patriarchal constructs before British colonisation. Traditionally, women were not differentiated from or subordinated to men in these societies and were highly autonomous and powerful; evidenced through social institutions such as matrilineality, dual sex systems, gender flexibility in social roles, and neuter linguistic elements.[54] In Malaysia, too, there are records from as early as the fifteenth century of gender-nonconforming or androgynous priests and courtiers (‘sida-sida’) who held positions in the royal courts of the Malay sultans.[55] Today, there is significant variation in the jurisprudence pertaining to homosexuality in former British colonies. In some states, courts have repudiated colonial legacies, invoking constitutional morality to decriminalise same-sex relationships and affirm equality, dignity and privacy as foundational values. For instance, in 2016, the Supreme Court of Belize found that Section 53 of the Penal Code, which criminalised same-sex activity between men, was unconstitutional and violated the rights to dignity, privacy, equality before the law and non-discrimination.[56] Similarly, when Botswana overturned the colonial-era anti-gay laws in 2019, the judge explicitly stated that they were a ‘British import’ developed ‘without the consultation of local peoples’.[57] In contrast, other states have retained or even strengthened colonial-era surveillance and persecution, with legal punishment varying from imprisonment to the death penalty.[58] In 2023, for example, Uganda passed the Anti-Homosexuality Act which increased the prison sentence for attempted same-sex conduct to ten years and introduced the death penalty for acts considered ‘aggravated homosexuality’.[59] This stark divergence between countries reflects the varied and complex negotiations of these colonial legacies. Yet it also evidences some commonality among states that have adopted an explicitly anti-colonial—or indeed ‘transformational’—interpretation of the Constitution to dismantle hierarchies, reimagine morality, and foster greater equality. The contemporary politics of LGBTQ+ rights The jurisprudential trajectories of postcolonial states are shaped by and contribute to a broader global politics of LGBTQ+ rights, where shared colonial legacies intersect with transnational actors, geopolitics, and the development industry. In one respect, there has been a growing recognition of LGBTQ+ rights as an indicator for modernity and development in Western (especially Western European) politics and the international development industry. Termed ‘homodevelopmentalism’, LGBTQ+ inclusive development agendas have gained prominence amidst the increasing employment of a human rights based approach as a development paradigm.[60] This phenomenon can be situated within the broader discourse of what Puar termed ‘homonationalism’, whereby ‘the right to, or quality of sovereignty is now evaluated by how a nation treats its homosexuals’, ie nations are evaluated on how ‘advanced’ they are depending on how they respond to homosexuality.[61] In this context, the ‘queering’ of development cooperation and policies, ie the demand for LGBTQ+ rights by governments, international organisations such as the UN, and Western capitalist institutions, has enforced a power dynamic that has proliferated the international politicisation of LGBTQ+ rights and mandated a global trend towards decriminalisation.[62] For instance, after Uganda announced an Act in 2014 that would have made homosexuality punishable by death, the World Bank rescinded a $90m loan and the country’s sovereign credit rating suffered.[63] Uganda annulled the Act in response, but in 2023, the country backtracked to pass the anti-homosexuality law that imposes the death penalty for ‘aggravated’ cases, and has again faced sanctions by The World Bank and the US.[64] In 2011, UK Prime Minister David Cameron considered making bilateral aid to Commonwealth nations conditional on the decriminalisation of homosexuality and in 2018, Prime Minister Theresa May urged Commonwealth nations to reform outdated anti-gay legislation preserved from British colonial rule.[65] While these demands from the West may heighten pressure on states to take progressive measures with regard to decriminalisation, it is important to recognise that (apparent) advancements in LGBTQ+ rights do not always correlate with advancements in freedom and / or democracy, particularly when LGBTQ+ movements are co-opted by capitalist, imperial, and political forces. In the context of global politics, ‘pinkwashing’ refers to states that adopt an ‘LGBTQ+ friendly’ image to signal progressiveness and modernity as a means to gain international political acceptance, despite ambiguous political aims, or whilst neglecting other human rights issues.[66] Much of the discussion on pinkwashing points to Israel’s ‘gay-friendly public relations campaign’, which is viewed as a deliberate strategy to conceal or legitimise violations of Palestinians’ human rights and ongoing settler colonialism by projecting an image of progressiveness on the global stage and reframing narratives about the occupation of Palestine through the lens of (sexual) modernity.[67] Pinkwashing as a political strategy only works in the context of homonationalism, where the status of ‘gay-friendly’ or ‘homophobic’ has implications for international relations.[68] While legal reforms favouring LGBTQ+ communities may therefore be increasingly spotlighted, they do not necessarily reflect broader progress in democratic freedoms or human rights. Critically, they may also obscure the state’s failure to protect other marginalised communities. In India, the striking down of S377, while significant, potentially creates a ‘halo effect’, diverting attention from systemic issues such as the persecution of religious minorities and the entrenched violence against lower caste communities.[69] As Tamalapakula observes, India’s caste system perpetuates a ‘graded patriarchy’ that so deeply normalises violence against Dalit women that their rape is scarcely recognised as a violation at all.[70] This systemic violence and disregard for their rights is not only tolerated, but often reinforced by the same societal and state mechanisms that attempt to project an image of modernity and progressiveness internationally. Thus, viewing state support for LGBTQ+ rights as a proxy indicator of development or human rights risks neglecting broader realities, particularly in contexts where the LGBTQ+ movement is co-opted for sinister political purposes. On the other hand, many Commonwealth nations scrutinise the demands of LGBTQ+ rights legislation from the West as a form of ‘modern-day Western interference’, asserting that tactics such as donor sanctions are inherently coercive and reinforce unequal power dynamics between donor countries and recipients.[71] There are also criticisms that LGBTQ+ inclusive development strategies reproduce narratives of Western civilisational exceptionalism by creating a divide between the ‘sexually developed’ West and the ‘sexually backward’ rest.[72] The imposition of human rights paradigms formulated at the international level can be met with resistance by states from the Global South, especially where those norms are perceived to interfere with a state’s autonomy to legislate. There are also contestations about the legitimacy of the Global North imposing human rights norms at the global level. Neo-colonialism refers to external policy and economic control that undermines the sovereignty and autonomy of former colonies, resulting in their continued exploitation.[73] However, in some states, the notion of neo-colonialism has become weaponised to equate rejecting LGBTQ+ rights with rejecting neo-colonialism: former Zimbabwean President Mugabe, for instance, called homosexuality a ‘white disease’.[74] The staunch moralities that were planted under Empire have grown so entrenched in some cultures that, somewhat perversely, the notion of homosexuality as something Western, and therefore suspicious, resounds throughout many countries. Thus, the politics of LGBTQ+ rights is shaped by a combination of homonationalism, anti-neo-colonialism, and domestic political agendas. Conclusion This paper has reflected on the impact of British colonial laws that imposed puritanical moral codes of heteronormativity and binary gender norms in India, erasing earlier ambiguities and recasting complex social roles and cultural practices through the lens of immorality and deviance. These legal interventions were underpinned by orientalist assumptions that hypersexualised aspects of Indian society and sought to categorise social and economic relations within a strict gendered framework. The colonial imposition of laws S377 and CTA Part II criminalised and pushed to the fringe communities that were previously accommodated within society. In particular, the attempted erasure of hijras resulted in an enduring legacy of exclusion and marginalisation, leaving the community today facing ‘ambivalence around their legal and socio-political status’.[75] By framing gender and sexual diversity as inherently criminal, colonial laws entrenched a moral hierarchy that continues to inform contemporary policing and lasts in deep social stigma. Recently, there have been notable shifts for LGBTQ+ rights in India. Legal challenges to outdated laws, such as the litigation brought by the Naz Foundation, demonstrate how grassroots and community-led initiatives can achieve meaningful change on a case-by-case basis. The Supreme Court’s invocation of constitutional morality in cases such as the 2014 ruling to recognise a third gender and the 2018 decriminalisation of homosexuality reflect the transformative potential of the Indian Constitution to promote greater inclusiveness and pluralism. While these rulings have demonstrated a significant departure from colonial moral constructs, legal and social frameworks remain entangled in structures of heteronormativity and patriarchy. Achieving substantive equality therefore requires not only progressive jurisprudence but also a broader interrogation of the normative hierarchies embedded within India’s political, social, and cultural institutions. In the global context, the British Empire appears ‘substantially responsible’ for the anti-LGBTQ+ legislation that remains prevalent amongst many former colonies, where the imposition of homophobic penal codes into indigenous cultures that did not previously criminalise gender and sexual variance has had deep and lasting impacts.[76] Post-independence jurisprudential trajectories have proven to be complex and uneven: while some countries have repudiated colonial-era laws, others have increased penalties for homosexual conduct. Comparative study on the evolution of jurisprudence across former British colonies could therefore help to foster greater understanding of these divergent pathways and identify commonalities. Given the global politicisation of LGBTQ+ rights, it is important to recognise the colonial origin of the norms that reproduce exclusion, violence and inequality worldwide. Reframing decriminalisation as a form of decolonisation not only challenges the persistence of imposed colonial moralities, but also reclaims those indigenous epistemologies that historically demonstrated greater pluralism. Anushka Sisodia Anushka Sisodia is a researcher at ODI Global, where her work applies political economy analysis to global issues including conflict and fragility, gender, digital societies, and development finance. She has previously led projects for UN Women UK and the Loomba Foundation, written for The Diplomat, and worked with Cambridge Central Asia Forum. Anushka holds an MPhil in Development Studies (Distinction) from the University of Cambridge and a BSc in Geography with Economics (First-Class Honours) from the LSE. [1] Acronym used to describe lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, and / or questioning people. Other commonly used acronyms include LGBT (lesbian, gay, bi, and trans), LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer), and LGBTI (lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and intersex). [2] The term ‘Commonwealth’ is used here to refer to the political association of countries that largely constitute former British colonies, although today any country can voluntarily join the modern Commonwealth. [3] International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association (ILGA), ‘Legal Frameworks | Criminalisation of consensual same-sex sexual acts’ accessed 1 October 2025. There is some discrepancy in these statistics between sources. [4] Alok Gupta, ‘This Alien Legacy: The Origins of “Sodomy” Laws in British Colonialism’ (Human Rights Watch, 17 December 2008) accessed 1 October 2025. [5] Enze Han and Joseph O’Mahoney, ‘British colonialism and the criminalization of homosexuality’ (2014) 27(2) Cambridge Review of International Affairs 268-88. [6] Human Dignity Trust, ‘Injustice Exposed: The criminalisation of transgender people and its impacts’ (17 May 2019) 9 accessed 1 October 2025. [7] Kavita Kané, ‘Storytelling: LGBT themes in Hindu mythology’ (Indian Express, 14 July 2020) accessed 1 October 2025. [8] Betty Seid, ‘The Lord Who Is Half Woman (Ardhanarishvara)’ (2004) 30(1) Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies 48-9. [9] Wendy Doniger, ‘On the Kamasutra’ (2002) 131(2) Daedalus 126. [10] Pre-modern historical references are situated broadly in South Asia, given that the national borders of contemporary India emerged only in recent history. [11] Gayatri Reddy, ‘Geographies of contagion: Hijras, Kothis, and the politics of sexual marginality in Hyderabad’ (2006) 12(3) Anthropology and Medicine 255-70; Jessica Hinchy, ‘The eunuch archive: Colonial records of non-normative gender and sexuality in India’ (2017) 58(2) Culture, Theory and Critique 127-46; Jessica Hinchy, Governing Gender and Sexuality in Colonial India: The Hijra, c.1850-1900 (Cambridge University Press 2019). [12] For further reading on the paradigms of classification pertaining to hijras see Vinay Lal, ‘Not This, Not That: The Hijras of India and the Cultural Politics of Sexuality’ (1999) 61 Social Text 119-40. [13] In the South Asian context, the word ‘eunuch’ itself is a legacy of the colonial-era translation and classification of a broad range of distinct social practices. See Emma Kalb, ‘A eunuch at the threshold: mediating access and intimacy in the Mughal world’ (2023) 33(3) Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 747-68. [14] Lubna Irfan, ‘Nature of slavery and servitude in Mughal India’ (2022) 13(4) South Asian History and Culture 466-80; Ina Goel, ‘Understanding Caste and Kinship within Hijras, a “Third” Gender Community in India’ in Katie Nelson and Nadine T Fernandez (eds), Gendered Lives: Global Issues (State University of New York Press 2022); Anjali Arondekar, For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India (Duke University Press 2009; Kristofer Rhude, ‘The Third Gender and Hijras’ (Harvard Divinity School, 2018) accessed 1 October 2025. For further reading on the role of eunuchs in Mughal courts see Ruby Lal, ‘Harem and eunuchs: Liminality and networks of Mughal authority’ in Almut Höfert, Matthew Mesley, and Serena Tolino (eds), Celibate and Childless Men in Power: Ruling Eunuchs and Bishops in the Pre-Modern World (Routledge 2017). [15] Jessica Hinchy, ‘Hijras and South Asian historiography’ (2022) 20(1) History Compass; Kalb (n 13). [16] Jessica Hinchy, Governing Gender and Sexuality in Colonial India: The Hijra, c.1850-1900 (Cambridge University Press 2019). [17] Lal (n 12) 131. [18] Ruth Vanita, ‘Homosexuality in India: Past and Present’ (2002) 29 IIAS Newsletter 10 accessed 1 October 2025. [19] Amy Bhatt, ‘India’s sodomy ban, now ruled illegal, was a British colonial legacy’ (UMBC Magazine, 14 September 2018) accessed 1 October 2025. [20] Laurence W Preston, ‘A Right to Exist: Eunuchs and the State in Nineteenth-Century India’ (1987) 21(2) Modern Asian Studies 371-87. [21] Hinchy (n 16). [22] Hinchy (n 16) 9, 100. [23] Enze Han and Joseph O’Mahoney, British Colonialism and the Criminalization of Homosexuality: Queens, Crime and Empire (Routledge 2018). [24] Shakthi Nataraj, ‘Criminal “folk” and “legal” lore: the kidnap and castrate narrative in colonial India and contemporary Chennai’ (2017) 8(4) South Asian History and Culture 523-41; Gayatri Reddy, With Respect to Sex: Negotiating Hijra Identity in South India (University of Chicago Press 2005). [25] Jessica Hinchy, ‘The eunuch archive: Colonial records of non-normative gender and sexuality in India’ (2017) 58(2) Culture, Theory and Critique 127-46. [26] Nataraj (n 24). [27] Arondekar (n 14). [28] Janaki Nair, ‘The Devadasi, Dharma and the State’ (1994) 29(50) Economic and Political Weekly 3157-67; Shriya Patnaik, ‘Marginalizing the matriarchal, minority subject: a critical analysis of human rights and women's reform projects in colonial and postcolonial India through the case-study of the “Mahari-Devadasi”’ (2021) 2(1) Electronic Journal of Social and Strategic Studies 59-88. There is evidence of exploitation and coerced prostitution within the devadasi system in some parts of India, both historically and in the present, however it is generally understood that the intention of the original role of the devadasi was devotion to temple service. See Tameshnie Deane, ‘The devadasi system: an exploitation of women and children in the name of god and culture’ (2022) 24(1) Journal of International Women’s Studies. [29] Nair (n 28); Kalpana Kannabiran, ‘Judiciary, Social Reform and Debate on “Religious Prostitution” in Colonial India’ (1995) 30(43) Economic and Political Weekly 59-69; Jisa Thomas and SP Vagishwari, ‘Surveilling bodies, governing morality: Biopower and the contagious diseases acts in colonial India’ (2025) 33 Ethics, Medicine and Public Health. [30] Ajita Banerjie, ‘Decriminalising Begging Will Protect Transgender Persons From Police Harassment’ (The Wire, 17 August 2018) accessed 1 October 2025. [31] Ankita Dhar Karmakar, ‘How A Regressive Transgender Act Was Finally Thrown Out’ (Behan Box, 17 July 2023) accessed 1 October 2025. [32] Nataraj (n 24); Jayna Kothari and Diksha Sanyal, ‘Courts Recognizing Transgender Rights’ (Oxford Human Rights Hub, 28 February 2017) accessed 1 October 2025. [33] Banerjie (n 30); Bindu N Doddahatti, ‘Karnataka Trans Policy May Be a Step in the Right Direction, But Needs Work’ (The Wire, 20 March 2018) accessed 1 October 2025; Jessica Hinchy, ‘The long history of criminalising Hijras’ (Himal Southasian, 2 July 2019) accessed 1 October 2025. [34] The Indian Constitution, which came into force on 26 January 1950, is the foundation of the country’s political and legal systems and of its citizens’ fundamental rights. [35] National Legal Services Authority v Union of India [2014] INSC 275. NALSA provides legal services for marginalised communities. [36] Transgender was described as an umbrella term for persons whose gender identity or gender expression does not conform to their biological sex. This encompasses those who do not identify with their sex assigned at birth, including hijras/eunuchs who, in the petition, describe themselves as ‘third gender’, identifying as neither male nor female. [37] Christina Zampas, ‘Embracing difference – India’s ground-breaking judgment on transgender rights’ (Amnesty International, 2 May 2014) accessed 1 October 2025. [38] ‘India court recognises transgender people as third gender’ (BBC News, 15 April 2014) accessed 1 October 2025; National Legal Services Authority (n 35). [39] A set of international principles relating to sexual orientation and gender identity drawn up in 2006 by human rights experts. See Zampas (n 37). [40] Ankush Kumar, ‘Indian court rules a transgender woman is a woman’ (Washington Blade, 25 June 2025) accessed 1 October 2025. [41] Kyle Knight, ‘India’s Transgender Rights Law Isn’t Worth Celebrating’ (Human Rights Watch, 5 December 2019) accessed 1 October 2025; Alexandra Oancea, ‘The Shortcomings Of India’s New Transgender People’s Act’ (Human Rights Pulse, 29 November 2021) accessed 1 October 2025. [42] Maria Thomas, Madhura Karnik, and Michael Thomas, ‘Timeline: The struggle against section 377 began over two decades ago’ (Quartz, 21 July 2022) accessed 1 October 2025. [43] Han and O’Mahoney (n 23). [44] BBC News (n 38). [45] Gautam Bhatia, ‘Indian Supreme Court Decriminalizes Same-Sex Relations’ (Oxford Human Rights Hub, 6 September 2018) accessed 1 October 2025. [46] Geeta Pandey, ‘India Supreme Court declines to legalise same-sex marriage’ (BBC News, 17 October 2023) accessed 1 October 2025. [47] Supriyo v Union of India [2023] INSC 920; Hannah Ellis-Petersen, ‘India’s supreme court declines to legally recognise same-sex marriage’ Guardian (London, 17 October 2023) accessed 1 October 2025. While the SMA cannot be interpreted to include non-heterosexual couples, transgender persons in heterosexual relationships can marry under the existing framework. [48] Arpan Chaturvedi, ‘India government opposes recognising same-sex marriage’ (Reuters, 12 March 2023) accessed 1 October 2025. [49] ‘Plea for Marriage Equality: Judgement Summary’ (Supreme Court Observer, 18 October 2023) accessed 1 October 2025; ‘India: Failure to legalise same-sex marriage a ‘setback’ for human rights’ (Amnesty International, 17 October 2023) accessed 1 October 2025. [50] Gautam Bhatia, The Transformative Constitution: A Radical Biography in Nine Acts (HarperCollins India 2019). [51] Han and O’Mahoney (n 5). Countries that directly inherited laws criminalising homosexual conduct from the British Empire include: Australia, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Botswana, Brunei, Eswatini, Fiji, Gambia, Ghana, Hong Kong, India, Kenya, Kiribati, Lesotho, Malawi, Malaysia, Maldives, Marshall Islands, Mauritius, Myanmar (Burma), Nauru, New Zealand, Nigeria, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Singapore, Solomon Islands, Somalia, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Tanzania, Tonga, Tuvalu, Uganda, Samoa, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. [52] Thabo Msibi, ‘The Lies We Have Been Told: On (Homo) Sexuality in Africa’ (2011) 58(1) Africa Today 55-77. [53] Leah Buckle, ‘African sexuality and the legacy of imported homophobia’ (Stonewall, 1 October 2020) accessed 1 October 2025. [54] Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí, The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses (University Of Minnesota Press 1997). [55] Neela Ghoshal, ‘“I’m Scared to Be a Woman”: Human Rights Abuses Against Transgender People in Malaysia’ (Human Rights Watch, 24 September 2014) accessed 1 October 2025; Mayang Al-Mohdhar and Sarah Ngu, ‘Uncovering Malaysia’s Rich History of Gender and Sexual Diversity: Challenging the Narrative of LGBT Rights as “Western” and “Un-Asian”’ (Europe Solidaire Sans Frontières, 1 July 2019) accessed 1 October 2025. [56] ‘A History of LGBT Criminalisation’ (Human Dignity Trust, 17 September 2025) accessed 1 October 2025. [57] Buckle (n 53). [58] Daniele Paletta, ‘ILGA World Updates State-Sponsored Homophobia Report: “There’s Progress In Times Of Uncertainty”’ (ILGA, 15 December 2020) accessed 1 October 2025. [59] ILGA (n 3); Ashwanee Budoo-Scholtz, ‘Uganda’s President Signs Repressive Anti-LGBT Law’ (Human Rights Watch, 30 May 2023) accessed 1 October 2025. [60] Christine Klapeer, ‘Queering Development in Homotransnationalist Times: A Postcolonial Reading of LGBTIQ Inclusive Development Agendas’ (2018) 22(2-3) Lambda Nordica 41-67. [61] Jasbir Puar, ‘Rethinking Homonationalism’ (2013) 45(2) Rethinking Homonationalism 336-9; Jasbir Puar and Maya Mikdashi, ‘Pinkwatching And Pinkwashing: Interpenetration and its Discontents’ (Jadaliyya, 9 August 2012) accessed 1 October 2025; Sarah Schulman, ‘Israel and “Pinkwashing”’ New York Times (New York, 22 November 2011) accessed 1 October 2025. [62] Han and O’Mahoney (n 5). [63] Fox Odoi-Oywelowo, ‘No, Uganda is not making it illegal to be gay (again)’ (Al Jazeera, 6 June 2021) accessed 1 October 2025. [64] ‘Uganda's President Museveni approves tough new anti-gay law’ (BBC News, 29 May 2023) accessed 1 October 2025. [65] ‘Cameron threat to dock some UK aid to anti-gay nations’ (BBC News, 30 October 2011) accessed 1 October 2025. Pippa Crerar, ‘Theresa May says she deeply regrets Britain's legacy of anti-gay laws’ Guardian (London, 17 April 2018) accessed 1 October 2025. [66] The term ‘pinkwashing’ in relation to LGBTQ+ issues emerged in the 2010s by gay rights movements, referring to the practice of capitalising on alleged support for LGBTQ+ rights as a way to profit or to distract from another agenda. Pinkwashing may also be used to refer to the corporate appropriation of Pride and ‘rainbow capitalism’. [67] See citations at (n 61). [68] Puar (n 61). [69] Sue A Cooper, Krishnamurthy K Raman, and Jennifer Yin, ‘Halo effect or fallen angel effect? Firm value consequences of greenhouse gas emissions and reputation for corporate social responsibility’ (2018) 37 Journal of Accounting and Public Policy 226-40. [70] Sowjanya Tamalapakula, ‘Who is a woman and who is a dalit?’ (no date) 3(1) Anveshi Broadsheet on Contemporary Politics 14-5. [71] Odoi-Oywelowo (n 63). [72] Klapeer (n 60); Daryl WJ Yang, ‘From Conditionality to Convergence: Tracing the Discursive Shift in Homo-Developmentalism’ (2020) 46(1) Australian Feminist Law Journal. [73] Kwame Nkrumah, Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism (International Publishers 1965). [74] Buckle (n 53). [75] Sarah Elizabeth Newport, ‘“Unnatural Offences”, Postcolonial Problems: The ambivalent position of hijras in contemporary Indian law and literature’ (2018) 38(1) South Asian Review 87-99 [quotation from abstract]. [76] Han and O’Mahoney (n 5).

Wassim Hassan is a Syrian political activist. He is a member of the The Syrian Women’s Political Movement and the Mouatana Movement, a group of Syrian democratic secular activists who devote their time to bringing the truth to Syrians through literature, media, and legal analysis on how they can change the political sphere in Syria. They aim to present the facts without affiliation to religious, nationalist, or leftist ideologies. Wassim has risked his safety on multiple occasions to stand up against the tyranny of the Syrian regime. He currently resides in the Netherlands after having to leave Syria due to the many threats on his life and to protect the safety of his family. CJLPA: Welcome, Mr Wassim Hassan. I’d like to begin by thanking you for taking the time to come and interview with The Cambridge Journal of Law, Politics, and Art to discuss your story as a political activist and human rights fighter. Freedom of expression and democracy have been foreign concepts in Syria for the last 60 years, with one family controlling all aspects of government, education, military, and natural resources. Anyone with an opposing ideology to the regime is often persecuted in an improper justice system. Having spent a majority of your life living in Damascus, what influenced you to get into politics having known the risks this may have on your life and your family’s life? Wassim Hassan: The deteriorating human rights conditions; the high levels of injustice; the absence of justice, freedom of expression, and participation in opinion; and the absence of equality and job opportunities force an oppressed person to enter the world of politics, especially after reading world history. The ancient and contemporary history of Syria prompted me to reject and denounce the reality of life in Syria, which is based on dictatorship, corruption, and criminality by an exclusionary mafia regime that exploits, plunders, practises atrocities, accumulates sectarian hatreds, discriminates between the people of the country, and invests in media propaganda. Slogans such as ‘resistance to imperialism, Israel, socialism, and freedom’ are used in order to perpetuate his rule and abolish the simplest mechanisms for practising democracy, such as the peaceful transfer of power and freedom of choice, expression, and media. This regime has abolished the independence of the legislative, judicial, and executive authorities, which passed over Syria for a short period in the 1950s, during the end of the colonial era. The absence of rights, fairness of opportunity, and the right to expression and criticism prompted me to take an emotional and moral stand against this oppression and corruption, pushing me into the furnace of working in public affairs. Politics was forbidden to opponents except in basements and prison cells, so secret work was the only potential means of activism, and this is what I followed from the eighties until the mid-nineties as a member of the Arab Revolutionary Workers Party. After the invasion of Kuwait and the failure of the party, like other parties of the National Democratic Assembly, I left politics and got busy in my own engineering work and devoted myself to the affairs of my family and my daughters who came to the life of the nascent family, until the popular Intifada in March 2011. I ended up leaving all my successful engineering work to be in the right place among the people in confronting the corrupt junta and within the movement of the rising street for democracy and political change in Syria. CJLPA: Can you tell us of times where your activism has risked your or any of your colleagues’ lives? WH: My comrades were subjected to frequent arrest campaigns as a result of their secular, democratic political position and their opinion opposing the approach of Hafez al-Assad and the alliance he engineered in the ‘National Progressive Front’, where he gathered wings from leftist and nationalist parties loyal to his authority. Most of my comrades were subjected to incarcerations ranging from four to 26 years in the prisons of the authority. Later some of them were arrested and imprisoned in the detention centres of the heir, Bashar al-Assad, for up to six years. During the uprising, my comrades were also subjected to many violations, such as abuse, forced disappearance, and liquidation in detention centres. Most of my comrades (95%) are in the prison cells of the authorities, and some of them were kidnapped in the prisons of extremist factions and gangs, which were later produced by corruption and the security vacuum. Since the 1980s, I have personally been exposed to security questions from the Syrian secret police. In addition to my opposition to the current regime, my refusal to join the ruling Baath Party led me to be deprived of many job opportunities in advanced positions that were offered to me at the head of the engineering institutions where I worked. Then, because of my secular position during the revolution, I was kidnapped by members of al-Nusra Front in the countryside of Damascus for three weeks, during which I was subjected to severe physical and psychological methods of torture, death threats, and ransom demands, until I was able to escape with the help of one of my colleagues who was kidnapped with me, through a very complex operation. CJLPA: You are a member of the Mouatana Movement, a party looking to establish a secular democratic system within Syria. Can you please tell us more about your party’s ideology and policies? WH: We are a group of secular democratic activists under the name ‘Mouatana Movement’. Our liberal movement and political line is characterised by political realism and the avoidance of intimidation and exaggerations in its proposition. We practise internal democracy in a horizontal organisation in which there is no leader or leaders, but a collective leadership elected in periodic conferences. We seek through our literature, our publications, through websites, and media to analyse reality without affiliation of religious, nationalist, or leftist ideologies. We have made a detailed criticism of the main lies spread among the elites and by the groups of Syrians mobilised with ideology and delusions that distort reality to serve their ideas. The Mouatana Movement has entered and contributed to building several political alliances, including the ‘Syrian National Coalition for Revolutionary and Opposition Forces’, but we soon left it in 2017, for political reasons that we clarified in our departure letter. We also conducted a comprehensive critical review of our intellectual line, our role, and our discourse in our periodic conferences that try to build policies and present inspiring studies for a generation of change in Syria. We do this through political editorials on our website and through a political forum that hosts actors and active personalities to discuss the situation and provide the appropriate vision and analysis. CJLPA: Can you touch on the importance of establishing a system that removes any religious influence in a diverse country like Syria? WH: During my activism in the secular democracy, in general, and in work for the Syrian women’s political movement with many activists, we sought to spread the ideology of freedom and respect to others with a difference in opinion and by supporting marginalised groups and minorities in any field or level. Therefore this means supporting diversity, uniqueness, creativity and pluralism; preventing the domination of one group over the masses; preventing the monopoly of power control; and confronting oppression and dictatorship; and pushing for the achievement of equal citizenship and social justice; with respect for different religions, beliefs, and individual and collective choices within a democratic state through decentralisation, dominated by citizenship, the law, the independence of the judiciary, the media, and the freedom to establish organisations, unions, and parties as contemporary secular democratic systems. Regarding your question about the importance of establishing a system that removes any religious influence in a diverse country, it is known that the Syrian society is multi-sectarian and ethnically diverse, and is predominantly Muslim. Therefore, it would not be possible to remove the influence of religion in society or completely cancel its influence through a decentralised democratic administration which the authority submits to a monolithic and exclusionary religious vision. Instead we rather the establishment of a state that respects all religious visions. The secular democratic state that we seek will not be an authority hostile to religions, but rather take a neutral approach towards beliefs; protect the freedom of religion; and prevent the oppression of any group over the rest, governed by law, equal citizenship, and equal opportunities. CJLPA: Many young Syrians are not familiar with the oppression and atrocities that occurred under Hafez al-Assad due to the lack of transparent reporting at that time. Having experienced life under Hafez al-Assad, how would you describe the life of Syrians under Hafez al-Assad’s rule to people who are unaware? WH: Hafez al-Assad seized power after his coup against his comrades in power and the leadership of the Baath Party on 16 November 1970. With his comrades, the members of the previous government he dissolved were imprisoned in Mezzeh prison in Damascus for more than a quarter of a century. He pursued new policies characterised by hidden sectarian fanaticism. His rule aroused the ire of the Muslim Brotherhood, which, around 1976, in turn began assassination operations against Alawites and those close to the regime, carried out by extremists from the ‘Fighting Vanguard’, such as the massacre of Alawite students at the Military College in Aleppo in 1979, and the Azbakeya massacre in Damascus. This raised the level of mobilisation and incitement against them. Hafez al-Assad’s regime, in cooperation with his brother Rifaat and his officers, carried out many massacres, including in Jisr al-Shughur and Aleppo, and concluded them in Hama in 1982, in which thousands of civilians were killed, many of whom were innocent and not at all involved in the Muslim Brotherhood. The number of Islamist detainees in the famous Tadmor prison reached more than ten thousand, alongside the almost eight thousand liquidated on different occasions. The nationalist and leftist parties that did not accept joining his mock front were also pursued by the coalition that al-Assad formed in 1974 to absorb the political workers and tame them with temptations and some formal roles, and present the democratic appearance of government, even if only formally. Those who rejected this alliance were imprisoned, including the new left, especially the Labor Party. The campaigns of arrests did not stop from 1976-1992, affecting most of the cadres and activists, and Palmyra desert prison was filled with them. Sednaya prison was subsequently established to accommodate thousands of prisoners of conscience. It also continued to track down activists and individuals and prevent gatherings and organisations under the blows of the emergency law that ruled the country. With the Baath’s takeover of power in 1963, political life in the country was completely desertified, opportunities for expression and freedom of the press were completely absent, and authoritarian and canned media prevailed without taste, colour, or smell, until the death of the tyrant Hafez al-Assad in the year 2000. CJLPA: After the death of Hafez al-Assad in 2000, his son, Bashar al-Assad, took power and advertised himself as a reformist bringing change to Syria’s political system. What changes did Bashar al-Assad promise to make in regard to the Syrian government and were any of them ever enforced? WH: Things had been arranged for the transfer of power without obstacles, as the People’s Assembly (parliament) held an emergency and urgent session, so the decision was taken to jump the son Bashar into five major military ranks, to become a first lieutenant general and commander of the army. The council unanimously amended the constitution with an article related to the age of the candidate for the presidency, making it 34 years old. The so-called Sham Ballot was held without competitors. Within the articles of the constitution detailed by al-Assad, the Baath Party was the leading party of the state and society, and the candidate of that leading party is not allowed to compete with anyone, who is of course in our case the heir, Bashar. In his swearing-in speech on 17 July 2000, Bashar al-Assad made many promises, and began issuing frequent decrees suggesting the start of a new phase of modernization and development. For two years, living conditions improved slightly as intended, and some leniency appeared in the security forces’ grip on the population, but soon the situation returned to its previous state, following the US-British invasion of Iraq and the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003, and after the assassination of Rafic Hariri in 2005 and Security Council Resolution 1559 to remove the Syrian forces from Lebanon, where confusion and fear prevailed in the ranks of the authority, with the defections and liquidations that took place (such as the defection of Vice President Abdel Halim Khaddam and the death of Interior Minister Ghazi Kanaan and several officers involved in the Hariri assassination). The security forces’ grip was tightened, and the opponents who signed the ‘Damascus for Democratic Change Declaration’ document were persecuted and closed the door to the activities of forums and committees to revive civil society, which had flourished after the oath speech mentioned above. The Bashar al-Assad regime was able to evade the consequences of the International Tribunal for the assassination of Rafic Hariri, and the tribunal continued ineffectively, despite the crimes the regime committed against the Syrians over the years of the Syrian revolution since 2011, on top of which was the crime of using chemical weapons against opposition sites. In his famous speech a few days after its outbreak, al-Assad described that as a global conspiracy, comparing the rising opponents with germs that must be cleansed: ‘If they want it to be a war, then it will be’. The sectarian and Iranian militias, and later the Russian forces in 2015, did not hesitate to bomb cities and urban areas with barrels and chemical weapons. In an interesting statement by Mustafa Tlass, a senior colleague of Hafez al-Assad, he says: ‘The fall of this regime requires a change in the form of the global system, because Hafez al-Assad has woven his regime into the fabric of the global system’. This raises a question about the nature of Assad’s authority and its functional role within the region and the global system after the end of the non-aligned system and the Soviet bloc, and the exploitation of the role of the military regimes leaping to power through coups, the role that Assad mastered and succeeded in playing, moving between the ropes of the Russians and the West. This constituted a guarantee for him to continue in the most complex international transformations and so far at least he has been successful, especially if we add the influence of Islamophobia and the Islamic awakening, and the fear of the development of the role of extremist political Islamic organisations in the era of the ‘Arab Spring’. CJLPA: Hama faced one of the biggest massacres under the rule of the then-President Hafez al-Assad. The military force commanded by Rifaat al-Assad entered the city of Hama and conducted a series of bombing on buildings with civilian inhabitants. The government’s justification for their ‘military operations’ was the need to eliminate the Muslim Brotherhood, having a disregard for any of the civilian casualties it took to get to that goal. Tens of thousands of casualties occurred, but due to the lack of reliable reporting at the time, the incident did not receive much coverage on a national or international basis. Can you please touch on the power of state propaganda in Syria, and how they have taken advantage of religious extremism to paint themselves as the ‘good guys’ or the ‘best option in Syria?’ WH: Religious extremism is not confined to Syria and the Assad regime. It is religious fanaticism based on the legacies of the old authorities throughout the periods of caliphate and Islamic rule in the region, but it has exacerbated since the decline of the nationalist tide and later the leftism and the rise of the Islamic awakening. Enthusiasm for this awakening was increased by the victory of Khomeini in his ‘Islamic revolution’ in Iran in 1979 and the possibility of realising the dream of its sisters. We witnessed a remarkable development in the religious, especially Wahhabi and radical, organisations and their multiplication, leading to the phenomenon of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda and provoking international responses, especially from America and Russia. Hafez al-Assad’s regime, like other international intelligence agencies, soon picked up on this to invest in the Islamic Awakening organisations. By virtue of the closeness of Assad’s authority and its understanding of this violent ideological environment, it was able to confront certain aspects and exploit others. Assad and his media excelled in demonising the popular movement in Syria since the first hours of the uprising. It was a choice for the extremist Islamists who struck terror among civilians in the West of Syria, while his regime and the mullahs’ regime in Iran and their militias did not attack in the cities of the West of Syria and played it cunningly. Better the devil you know, as they say. The regime’s exploitation of the vertical division in Syrian society and the fear of minorities from the discourse of Sunni extremism, which began to spread on important media platforms such as al-Jazeera, Orient, and other sectarian channels and social media, prompted Christians and Druze to join the Alawites in their fears, and rally behind the regime’s masterful use of the propaganda of ‘opposition and resistance’. He was able to isolate, besiege, bombard, and destroy Sunni cities and displace their people under the pretext of confronting terrorist gangs. CJLPA: Can you provide us with examples of how this playbook was used by Bashar al-Assad in the 2011 uprisings? WH: Although the Syrian popular uprising presented general national concerns and did not rely on Islamic slogans at the outset, it was quickly exploited by the Islamic organisations formed in recent decades, whose role appeared since the first months, as important bombings and assassinations were carried out by al-Nusra Front. The role of al-Qaeda escalated after the Islamic State’s invasion of Iraq’s Mosul to Raqqa in Syria, and the Islamic factions grew like mushrooms following the support of the Gulf countries and their peoples for this phenomenon (Jaysh al-Islam, Ahrar al-Sham, Ahrar al-Sunna, and so on). It was not only the will of the Syrian intelligence behind this proliferation. The Islamic factions played the worst roles in the Syrian revolution and contributed to the exclusion of the other in their rhetoric and performance and their demonization of democracy, patriotism, and secularism. CJLPA: In 2011, Syrians began to protest the government after decades of oppressive rule. This was one of the biggest acts of protest ever recorded in modern Syrian history. The Syrian government reacted with violence and by arresting the people involved in orchestrating the protests. What was your reaction when you knew that protests were taking place all around the major Syrian cities? WH: The Syrians yearning for freedom were watching the ‘Arab Spring’ uprisings taking place in Tunisia and Egypt and then Libya and Yemen with great passion, and I was following the developments hour by hour, until the Syrian street moved in Damascus in the Hamidiyah market and in Daraa, the cradle of the revolution. I rushed to meet my old friends from political activists and we started by the founding of the ‘Mouatana Movement’; I was one of its activists dreaming of a new Syria. We met and discussed what to do and how to contribute to what was happening. Those were days full of fervour and vivid dreams when the barrier of fear was broken and the door to becoming in the country opened again after it had been locked away by Assad and the Baath for decades. I participated with activists in the Sahnaya region in the Damascus countryside, taking every opportunity for demonstrations and sit-ins in the Damascus countryside, in al-Qadam, Darayya, al-Asali, Barzeh, Harasta, Douma, al-Qaboun, and Jdeidet Artouz. Soon, the demonstrations expanded and became every Friday. The Islamic discourse began to appear, so my activity focused during that period on participating in the demonstrations of As-Suwayda and contributing to them with many activists in Jabal al-Arab. This was done in the squares of Shula, al-Fukhar, Tishreen, al-Sir in As-Suwayda, and in the streets and squares of Shahba and al-Qurayyah. At that time, Fella of the mountain activists called upon us to participate in the Free Army in the Sultan al-Atrash Brigade, which was led by the martyr, Khaldoun Zain al-Din, an officer who defected from al-Assad’s army. Later, with the escalation of the whistle of bullets and the decline of the voice of demonstrations, the armed Men of Dignity Movement emerged in the mountain. It hastened, with the fans of free and patriotic discourse behind it, away from the sectarian entrenchment that the regime and some religious Druze sought to corner it in. I worked as a political advisor to the leader of the movement from 2013-2015, the young Sheikh Waheed al-Balous, who put forward the political project that I worked on. The project worked on spreading his call with activists (the National Peace Initiative from As-Suwayda) and calling for a comprehensive national solution in Jabal al-Arab, more specifically in the town of al-Qurayya, the cradle of the national symbol Sultan al-Atrash. It would host a Syrian conference inclusive of all the parties to the Syrian conflict, which was turning into a complex civil war between Syrians (Sunnis-Alawites and minorities), provided that the conference be independent and under the auspices and protection of the Men of Dignity (perhaps the Druze who played a patriotic role in the establishment of Syria during the days of Sultan al-Atrash). The regime faced this by blowing up the convoy of the leader of the Men of Dignity (Waheed al-Balous) and his comrades with two large explosions in As-Suwayda. With the assassination, it almost destroyed that promising attempt. During that period I was in a media course for the Citizen Movement in Gaziantep, Turkey, followed by a family visit to my daughter Razan, who was studying at a university in Istanbul at that time. I felt the difficulty of my return to Syria, where the Assad intelligence services were waiting for me at the airport, and made the decision to take refuge in Europe, where I live today. CJLPA: With Syrians having access to social media sites, everyone in Syria who had an opposing ideology had the freedom to express it. How much of a role did social media play in the spread of the protests? WH: There is no doubt that the means of communication contributed to the spread of news, the interaction of people, the exchange of messages, the participation in planning and organisation, and the speed of exchanging information. However, at the same time social media deluded a wide segment of the rising youth regarding their superiority, so they had some arrogance, and were thus not communicating with and benefiting from the wisdom of the older generations, who were more experienced with the nature of this brutal power. The young generation, with the rapid assimilation of new technologies, developed a feeling of fullness and contributed to an unfavourable rupture between young people and the previous generation, which was negatively reflected in the form and nature of the movement later on. CJLPA: The violent reaction of the regime led to a brutal civil war that took the lives of thousands of Syrians and displaced millions around the world. Throughout the modern civil war, the Syrian regime committed a vast amount of war crimes by continuously using chemical weapons on civilian targets. What were your experiences living in Syria throughout the war? WH: It became increasingly clear to me that the fall of the regime was not possible with the tools used in the past decade. The vertical division was great in the country, and the Alawite sect, alongside other sectarian minorities, were lined up strongly around power. This contradicts the statements of many that all the Syrian people revolted against Bashar al-Assad, and this should be corrected, as it is not enough for the opponents to repeat their desires and dreams, without realising the realities on the ground. On the basis of the existing sectarian division, the regime would not have fallen, as most of us dreamed, even if the army of Islam entered Damascus. Bashar al-Assad’s army would have gone to base itself with his supporters in Latakia and Tartous, and regained support from his allies later to attack those who outweighed him in other cities. One of the additional reasons for the inability of the opposition to achieve a decisive victory was the absence of military and political unity, not achieved at any stage since 2011, despite the contributions of the countries of the region and the West to bring together the Syrian factions and forces, in preparation for negotiations that can be conducted with the authority or with its representatives. Many members of the Syrian opposition brazenly deny the reality of the support provided by the West to the Syrian revolution and accuse the West of negligence. Indeed, many consider the West supportive of the Assad regime, explaining what happened in terms of military and political interventions of the Russians, Iranians, and Turks, by American, French, and perhaps Israeli orders to maintain the continuity of their protégé, Bashar al-Assad, in in a series of conspiratorial interpretations of what is going on. These narratives unfairly deny and twist the facts. As for the sanctions, they did not achieve a significant response from the tyrannical authorities that they were applied to in North Korea, Saddam’s Iraq’s, and Gaddafi’s Libya, where the authorities continue to oppress and increase the crushing of popular groups, in many cases under the pretext of those sanctions. Here originates the heavy blame on the West and the Americans, especially because their contribution to supporting the movement of the Syrian people and their just cause did not live up to the desired level as democratic governments and societies. The Americans only intervene when their interests are threatened and not for principled positions in support of democracy and for the sake of the peoples in the ‘Third World’, as they claim. Without military pressure, we will not have negotiations advancing, and there is no real military pressure on the authority of Damascus, which has benefited from its Russian and Iranian allies more than the Syrian people have benefited from their friends and allies. An exclusionary extremist no less tyrannical than Assad’s sectarian authority, unless the West seriously contributes to developing and bringing the democratic team in opposition and the loyalists to work together to save the country from the domination of the military and sheikhs. I still believe that the Baathists—with all my observations on their exclusionary and corrupt behaviour—are included in the rhetoric of opposition and resistance, and they have a serious desire for independence from the Russian and Iranian allies. Although the Baath has no significant role and the party does not support the Assad security authority in Damascus, Damascus is still in their view the ‘beating heart of Arabism’ and they want to play this role. This is not to say, as many opponents believe, that the Syrian authority is fallen, crumbling, and just a tool that lacks will and does not sustain anything. Rather, Assad’s authority has great strength and influence on the scene, and it is still dominant over decision-making and in all previous and current stages, despite the misery in the economic and living scene. What is the point of a disaster? The security and military authority is in his hands in Damascus, and it is not right to underestimate facts and twist their necks to pass illusions and lies. In conclusion, on the issue of accountability and justice, I believe that at the stage of calling for a political transition and a governing body that will include the two conflicting parties, justice cannot be achieved immediately—as agreed upon in accordance with international resolutions, for example—because the decision of the transitional government will be between hands that are unfortunately equally stained with blood. Justice will come later, after decades, if the fervour of struggle continues among legal and human rights organisations and institutions, as has happened in the experiences of other countries. With the chances of establishing the Islamic caliphate state substantially declining after the intervention of the international coalition and the Syrian Democratic Forces, ending the state of ISIS, which is the worst alternative, the Assad regime with its allies is still the most dangerous enemy for building democracy in Syria. We need today to reach a settlement that stops the bloodbath and launches the process of political transition, in which all parties from all categories—Syrians, Arabs, Kurds, Muslims, Christians, minorities, organisations, etc—will participate. Thus, we will end the phase of the Assad regime’s monopoly, stop the war, start rebuilding the country, and launch the process of community recovery. CJLPA: On an international level, how do you believe we can bring accountability and justice to the crimes committed, when countries like Russia and China constantly use their veto powers to stop any investigations from happening in Syria? WH: With this international polarisation between the world of tyrannical tyrants (Russia, China, Iran…) and the democratic world in the West, especially after Putin’s war on Ukraine, the United Nations and the UN Security Council are no longer able to control the organisation of conflict management and reduction. The exacerbation of corporate control, the escalation of climate disasters, and the weakness of international commitment are all further hindrances on effective action. The great impact on the Syrian issue was in terms of enthusiasm to end the suffering of the Syrians, and also regarding accountability and justice. The reality has increased the living suffering and exacerbated the plight of the refugees in the countries of the diaspora close to Syria, and the veto that the Russians will frequently use in the Security Council is still a major obstacle, whether in holding war criminals accountable or in getting out of the bottleneck in the Syrian issue. CJLPA: What do you think is the best course of action from within Syria? WH: It goes without saying that the Syrian issue no longer concerns Syrians only, as the region and the international situation are strongly concerned with what is happening on Syrian territory. Therefore, I can claim that the continuation of work and civil movement within the country is necessary to prevent the situation from sinking. We must keep the flame hot. The West remains extremely important in preventing Al-Jazzar’s rehabilitation and pushing the political transition process in accordance with the relevant international resolutions, most notably Resolution 2254. The policy of sanctions and slow death is no longer sufficient to destabilise the situation and push Assad’s arrogant authority to the negotiating table to make real concessions. Al-Assad’s authority still possesses some strength that prevents it from negotiating seriously with the opposition forces, whose negotiating and field power has begun to erode and decline. We need higher levels of force and pressure rather than just sanctions. The launch of the As-Suwayda uprising in August 2023, which continues with its peacefulness and which is carried by a bright face for the Syrians (despite their differences and diversity) has brought many democratic and secular slogans and the necessity of political transition in accordance with international resolutions. The uprisings in ‘Dignity Square’ wrote the alternative discourse that the Syrians deserve in order to build a homeland. It accommodates all Syrians and achieves peace, freedom, and political and economic transition for the country, away from wars and in harmony with its regional surroundings. Within it, Syria does not remain a chess pawn in the game of regional countries such as Iran and Turkey. The Syrian people, despite their ethnic and racial diversity, have the right to live in dignity in a homeland that has many resources and reasons for growth to build a neutral state. Recently, it has become clear that betting on a religious caliphate or tyrannical regimes has failed, and it has become necessary for the obscurantist, exclusionary de facto forces or tyrannical authorities to retreat in favour of democracy and diversity. It is important to build on the Suwayda movement internally in order to move against the de facto forces currently there and to bet on building a body of Syrian democratic opposition. It is not like those residing in exclusionary Islamist Turkey. Rather, we have to build a democratic opposition centred in Europe, where there is the right of expression and the possibility of adopting free and independent Syrian policies. The Berlin conference to build the ‘Syrian Democratic Alliance’ held in October 2023 was a step in this direction, as it brought together many people of the political and civil forces in one front, and it has become a duty for the democratic forces in the world to support this trend in action and not just through the media. Protesters in Al-Suwayda rally against the Assad regime, demanding justice and change. This marks a new wave of peaceful protests that began on 17 August 2023. CJLPA: Now we see many Arab nations turning a blind eye to these atrocities by normalising relations with the Syrian government. It seems that the current regime is not going to be leaving power any time soon. Can you please tell us the dangers of normalising relations with the Assad regime? WH: The project to rehabilitate al-Assad and normalise relations with his government before he submits to international resolutions is an additional disaster for the Syrian people. The solution in Syria is not the victory of any of the parties to the armed conflict, but rather the loss of all of them, in favour of a democratic, civil administration for the country with a project that brings together Syrians in a decentralised Syria for all Syrians, regardless of their plurality and diversity. Without the domination of the military or the Islamist extremists, and this is the least that the Syrians aspire to, it can open the horizons of the process in the country again. The continuation of Assad’s rule is nothing but a recipe for the continuation of tragedy, suffering, and death. CJLPA: One aim of the Syria segment in the Journal is to explore the challenges faced by refugees across the world in integrating in the countries they seek refuge in. We would like to ask you a few questions on the obstacles you faced integrating into the culture and lifestyle in the Netherlands. When did you decide to leave Syria and what was the sequence of events that led to your departure? Can you please touch on the challenges you faced in your journey leaving Syria? WH: Leaving the homeland is a personal loss that cannot be compensated for in any way, regardless of the degree of integration with new societies. Forcibly uprooting a person from his soil is a great personal tragedy. I went with my daughter Razan, facing, like all those who ride the sea in rubber boats on the way to Europe, severe threats to my life. This is what happened with our Syrian brothers who boarded the boat of the child Ilan, which sank on the shores of the Greek islands after sailing from the same point that we left the shores of Turkey. There is a great degree of manipulation; a large number of smugglers exploited and intimidated most of those wishing to leave by sea via Greece to Western Europe. The other challenge comes after obtaining residency as a refugee and a newcomer in a new country with a different language and culture, and with the continuation of the Syrian ordeal. One’s personality in the country of asylum is divided between the path of self-building, learning the new language and integrating, and attachment to one’s family in war-torn Syria, continuing to hear about every violation or deterioration and the war crimes that frequently happened to my family and the country. There is no doubt that the Netherlands offers an advanced package of services to newcomers, and this is the point of my appreciation and respect. Here we learned a lot, thanks to programs to support refugees and ensure they are living in dignity. We were allowed to exercise the right of expression and choice that we were denied so much in Syria, and later granted citizenship—available for those who wish after five years of residency—which paved the way for education and work. This added to our awareness and experience and will also have important role in the return of generations of Syrians, endowed with competencies and a human horizon that will contribute a lot to Syria. CJLPA: You have continuously fought for the human rights of Syrians even after your departure from Syria. What is a piece of advice you would like to give to young Syrians around the world that are looking to make a change in their country? WH: The great destitution and lack of human rights in Syria and its Arab and Islamic surroundings remains the main cause of the unrest there, and the first engine for the movement of young men and women. Therefore, the demands and uprisings will not stop, regardless of the cause of oppression and terrorism, such as the suppression and silencing of free voices. Here arises the role of the Syrian youth in the diaspora around the world to support their country. Syria is filled with ideas, money, and works that rekindle the movement for a democratic Syria for all, similar to the modern countries of the world. Our alienation in Europe taught us a lot about respect for difference and acceptance of diversity and human rights. We learned a lot through the decentralisation of its municipal governments, which ensures correcting mistakes and continuous progress according to the needs of each municipality. The benefits of elections and the importance of voting in them, the importance of political programs for candidates, development plans, the development and improvement of facilities, overcoming mistakes, and addressing them in law. We learned that a politician is an employee to serve his country and among his citizens and not a master over slaves who tyrannises them, and the importance of dialogue between cultures and their convergence to serve man and humanity, instead of fanaticism. This interview was conducted by Nour Kachi, Legal Researcher on CJLPA 3: The Human Agenda. In addition to his role at CJLPA, Nour is currently working on qualifying as a lawyer in the US and UK.

We must not make a scarecrow of the law, Setting it up to fear the birds of prey, And let it keep one shape, till custom make it Their perch and not their terror. (Measure for Measure, II.i.1-4) Angelo may have been the bloodthirsty antagonist who becomes an abuser of the very law he enforces, but his speech opening Act II of Measure for Measure recognises the impotence of law without proper enforcement. While few are calling for the legal system to act as a ‘terror’ to deter rule-breakers (Angelo had a penchant for execution), recent events have led to concerns that the Ministerial Code has become a rather comfortable ‘perch’ for ruling politicians. The code—which outlines standards of conduct for government ministers—is a set of guiding principles rather than law (it has no statutory footing) but the opening quotation resonates with the ongoing debate about the extent to which those in power are held to account in Britain. In particular, various controversies over alleged breaches during Mr Johnson’s premiership have contributed to a perception that there is an issue with the application of the Ministerial Code, namely, that apparent contraventions do not appear to result in sanctions.[1] In the opening months of 2022, many, including members of Mr Johnson’s own party, expressed concern at his failure to resign despite being the first sitting Prime Minister to be sanctioned for breaking the law and in spite of multiple claims that he misled Parliament about Downing Street parties during lockdown (at the time of writing these claims are being investigated by the Privileges Committee). In May 2022, within days of the publication of senior civil servant Sue Gray’s report, which found ‘failures of leadership and judgment [in] No 10’, Mr Johnson responded by publishing an ‘updated’ Ministerial Code which was met with controversy in the press, not least because of the timing. The Prime Minister is the ultimate arbiter of the Ministerial Code: only the Prime Minister can initiate or consent to the launch of an inquiry into whether a Minister has broken the code, but the Prime Minister does not have to accept such an inquiry’s findings. It is for the Prime Minister to decide what, if any, sanctions should be applied. In a sense, it is up to the Prime Minister to ‘shape’ the code. Thanks to its previous drafting, popular conception has been that any breach of the Ministerial Code should result in dismissal or resignation, but Mr Johnson’s recently updated code has introduced a range of sanctions available for breach, which has led to some critics alleging a watering-down. The updated code does retain the only specific breach with a defined punishment: knowingly misleading parliament. It keeps the pre-existing clause that ‘[i]t is of paramount importance that Ministers give accurate and truthful information to Parliament, correcting any inadvertent error at the earliest opportunity’ and that Ministers ‘who knowingly mislead Parliament’ will ‘be expected to offer their resignation to the Prime Minister’.[2] It seems that its original writers did not conceive that the Prime Minister may be the person so accused. ‘Partygate’ and other recent scandals are far from the first ministerial breaches that have engaged a possible misleading of Parliament. Applying the terms of the title quotation to selected examples over time, has the Ministerial Code served more as a ‘terror’ or a ‘perch’? Background to the Ministerial Code Mr Johnson’s Foreword to the previous code (before his recent update) summarised the standards expected of Ministers as follows, There must be no bullying and no harassment; no leaking; no breach of collective responsibility. No misuse of taxpayer money and no actual or perceived conflicts of interest. The precious principles of public life enshrined in this document—integrity, objectivity, accountability, transparency, honesty and leadership in the public interest—must be honoured at all times; as must the political impartiality of our much admired civil service. The updated code includes a new Foreword which removes references to ‘integrity, objectivity, accountability, transparency, honesty and leadership’ (although the principles are embedded in the code itself). The Ministerial Code started life in 1945 as two documents, ‘Cabinet Procedure’ and ‘Questions of Procedure’, both introduced by then Prime Minister Clement Attlee.[3] In 1946, Attlee re-issued the guidance as one document called ‘Questions of Procedure for Ministers’. The code is generally revised at the start of each new administration and it remained confidential until John Major approved its publication in May 1992, opening it to external scrutiny. The code was given its current name under Tony Blair’s government in 1997. The Ministerial Code’s guidelines are intended to serve as a yardstick of procedure and conduct for all ministers, including the Prime Minister. However, as noted, the Prime Minister is the ultimate judge of breaches of the code and this has been the case since 1997.[4] Prior to then, the code stated that it was for ‘individual Ministers to judge how best to act in order to uphold the highest standards’. The First Report of the Committee on Standards in Public Life recommended that the code be changed so that ‘It will be for individual Ministers to judge how best to act in order to uphold the highest standards. It will be for the Prime Minister to determine whether or not they have done so in any particular circumstance’.[5] This recommendation is reflected at paragraph 1.6 of the current Ministerial Code. The Ministerial Code and Misleading Parliament One of the most high-profile ministerial resignations in the 20th century was that of John Profumo in 1963. Profumo, then Secretary of State for War, denied his affair with Christine Keeler stating there was ‘no impropriety whatsoever’ (impropriety in this case meaning sexual relations), thereby knowingly misleading the House of Commons.[6] The relevance of the relationship was not purely a moral issue; Ms Keeler was also involved with Colonel Yevgeny Ivanov, a naval attaché at the Soviet Embassy. Lord Denning’s subsequent inquiry into the scandal was primarily concerned with the potential security risk. Then Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, lamented the level of the lie in the debate following Profumo’s resignation, stating: I do not remember in the whole of my life, or even in the political history of the past, a case of a Minister of the Crown who has told a deliberate lie to his wife, to his legal advisers and to his Ministerial colleagues, not once but over and over again, who has then repeated this lie to the House of Commons as a personal statement which, as the right hon. Gentleman reminded us, implies that it is privileged, and has subsequently taken legal action and recovered damages on the basis of a falsehood. This is almost unbelievable, but it is true.[7] In Profumo’s case, there was no question that he had blatantly misled the House of Commons. Once the truth came out, he had no choice but to resign. Breach of the Ministerial Code was not necessarily the only factor behind the resignation but the single misdemeanour that should prompt resignation in today’s code—knowingly misleading Parliament—was enough to do so then, tilting the balance towards the code at least having teeth, if not serving as a ‘terror’. However, subsequent examples are not as clear-cut. The Scott Inquiry was launched in 1992 after government lawyers instructed prosecutors to stop the trial of executives from machine tool firm, Matrix Churchill, who were accused of selling arms-related equipment to Iraq in breach of export controls.[8] The collapse of the trial led Prime Minister, John Major, to launch an inquiry under Sir Richard Scott, resulting in the publication of the Scott report in 1996 which found, amongst other things, that government ministers had misled Parliament over the export policy. The report concluded with the seemingly clear indictment that, ‘[i]n the circumstances, the Government statements in 1989 and 1990 about policy on defence exports to Iraq consistently failed, in my opinion, to comply with the standard set by paragraph 27 of the Questions of Procedure for Ministers and, more important, failed to discharge the obligations imposed by the constitutional principle of Ministerial accountability’.[9] However, in a vote over the findings of the report, John Major’s government narrowly survived (by a single vote) ‘by quite simply brazening it out and by openly disagreeing with the verdict that the Scott report had reached’.[10] The report led to no resignations. At the time of the Scott report’s publication, only William Waldegrave (who had been a junior minister in the foreign office), remained in office from the time period in question. Following the report’s publication, there were calls for Mr Waldegrave to resign—as Adam Tomkins writes, ‘on a number of occasions, the Scott report did find that Mr Waldegrave had misled Parliament, albeit without apparently realizing so at the time’.[11] Tomkins queries, ‘[h]ow did we get from the strong words (‘inaccurate’, ‘misleading’, ‘designedly uninformative’) of the Scott report to the position where no minister resigned?’ and proffers a variety of reasons in answer to this.[12] These range from the fact that the Major government had access to the report prior to its publication meaning they had time to analyse it and ‘[p]ublish an extremely partial (in two senses) and in places positively (i.e. knowingly and deliberately) misleading summary of and response to the report’, to the lack of highlighted conclusions in the report’s dense 1806 pages, which in themselves were not ‘sharp verdicts’.[13] In relation to Waldegrave, the report held that he did not intentionally mislead Parliament (even though Parliament was indeed misled and he ought to have realised the same). Further, there was no ‘duplicitous intention’ behind potentially misleading statements by government ministers to Parliament.[14] This is an example of a literal interpretation of the wording of the Ministerial Code being utilised in the government’s favour, in doing so potentially rendering it more of a ‘perch’ than a ‘terror’, particularly in the context of the wider report’s findings on government failings. This calls to mind some potential similarities with the current ‘Partygate’ scandal and, as with the Scott report, specifically, the Ministerial Code’s prescription that a Minister must ‘knowingly’ mislead Parliament. Boris Johnson has stated, Let me also say—not by way of mitigation or excuse, but purely because it explains my previous words in this House—that it did not occur to me, then or subsequently, that a gathering in the Cabinet Room just before a vital meeting on covid strategy could amount to a breach of the rules [emphasis added].[15] Mr Johnson’s defence here relied on inadvertent error and a more literal application of the Ministerial Code’s wording that only those who ‘knowingly mislead’ Parliament are expected to resign. A contrasting example of the inadvertent misleading of Parliament came to the fore in 2018 when Amber Rudd resigned as Home Secretary after unintentionally misleading the Home Affairs Select Committee within the context of the Windrush Scandal. Arguably, ‘[i]n constitutional terms, this is a precedent’.[16] Amber Rudd’s resignation letter to Prime Minister Theresa May was produced in response to a leak of an internal document setting out immigration targets. In the letter, Ms Rudd described her resignation as necessary ‘because I inadvertently misled the Home Affairs Select Committee over targets for removal of illegal immigrants during their questions on Windrush’. Although Ms Rudd continued to deny any awareness of specific removal targets, she accepted that ‘I should have been aware of this, and I take full responsibility for the fact that I was not’. Arguably, this indicates that a literal application of the linguistics of the Ministerial Code is not always appropriate or sufficient and the question is whether a minister ‘should have been aware’ and should therefore, as Rudd did, take responsibility. There were a number of other high-profile resignations under the May administration for improper behaviour that could be seen to breach the standards expected under the Ministerial Code. These included Secretary of State for Defence Michael Fallon, Secretary of State for International Development (and current Home Secretary) Priti Patel, and First Secretary of State Minister for the Cabinet Office Damian Green. Theresa May has been viewed by various political commentators as a ‘stickler for the rules’.[17] This raises the speculative question of whether the behaviour in question would have resulted in resignations had it occurred under a different administration led by a different leader. Scarecrow of the law? In his book The Good State: On the Principles of Democracy, A C Grayling quotes Roman poet Juvenal’s question, ‘quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (who watches the watchmen?)’ in relation to the House of Commons Code of Conduct.[18] The same might apply to the Ministerial Code. The instances explored above are merely selected examples and are too few and unrepresentative to seek to arrive at a definitive evaluation—there are obviously a myriad of factors that contribute to any ministerial resignation. However, they do illustrate that the Ministerial Code, with its lack of statutory footing, appears to have been applied inconsistently over time, depending on the current administration and Prime Minister. The code consequently operates with an extremely wide discretion and, to some degree, at the whim of the incumbent Prime Minister. Returning to the title quotation, would Angelo consider the Prime Minister’s approach to ministerial breaches to be making a ‘scarecrow’ of the Ministerial Code by offering the sanctuary of a ‘perch’ instead of serving as a ‘terror’? Almost certainly yes. However, Angelo calls for the law to be carried out to the letter and without discretion in order to be adhered to. This is not necessarily the answer either, not least given that the code’s historic lack of specificity on sanctions often led to a perception or expectation that any breach should lead to a blanket resignation, regardless of the scale or significance of the breach in question. This may alter now that the updated code provides for a range of sanctions, presumably to be applied proportionately with the gravity of the breach.[19] However, enforcement still relies on each Prime Minister’s discretion. Angelo may have been the chief advocate for rigid enforcement of definable rules, but at the end of Measure for Measure his own life is spared (after breaking those same rules) by an act of political mercy. As the title of the play suggests, balance is key. Shakespeare well understood that neither ‘perch’ nor ‘terror’ equates to good governance: a helpful reminder when considering the Ministerial Code and how it might best serve its purpose. Shulamit Aberbach, Mishcon de Reya Shulamit Aberbach is an Associate in the Politics & Law Team at Mishcon de Reya. Shulamit regularly advises clients in relation to political disputes and public law. She has acted for members of various political parties in a range of disputes, including in relation to internal party disciplinary procedures. Shulamit also contributed to the firm’s responses to the Judicial Review and Human Rights Act government consultations. Mishcon de Reya is an independent law firm, which now employs more than 1200 people with over 600 lawyers offering a wide range of legal services to companies and individuals. With presence in London, Singapore and Hong Kong (through its association with Karas LLP), the firm services an international community of clients and provides advice in situations where the constraints of geography often do not apply. This sponsored article was written in May 2022. [1] For example, the scandal surrounding Priti Patel’s alleged bullying of Home Office civil servants (paragraph 1.2 of the Code states that bullying and harassment by Ministers ‘will not be tolerated’). Sir Alex Allan, the then Independent Adviser on Ministers’ Interests, found that Ms Patel had not consistently met the ‘high standards required by the Ministerial Code’, concluded that on occasion her treatment of civil service staff amounted to behaviour that could be described as bullying and confirmed that her behaviour was in breach of the code. Notwithstanding Sir Allan’s conclusions, the Prime Minister took the view that her behaviour did not breach the code and declared his full confidence in Ms Patel, resulting in Sir Allan’s resignation. [2] Ministerial Code, para 1.3(c). [3] Although based on an earlier document, ‘The War Cabinet: Rules of Procedure’, produced in 1917—see FDA v Prime Minister [2021] EWHC 3279 (Admin) [5]. [4] ibid [12]. [5] ‘The First Report of the Committee on Standards in Public Life’ (1995) 49. Proposed addition emphasized. [6] HC Deb 22 March 1963, vol 674 col 810. [7] HC Deb 17 June 1963, vol 679 col 55. [8] Richard Norton-Taylor, ‘Iraq arms prosecutions led to string of miscarriages of justice’ The Guardian (London, 9 November 2012). [9] See HL Deb 26 February 1996, vol 569 col 1238. [10] Adam Tomkins, The Constitution After Scott: Government Unwrapped (Oxford University Press 1998) 36. [11] ibid 35-6. [12] ibid 36. [13] ibid 36-7. [14] ibid and see HL Deb 26 February 1996 vol 569 col 1259. [15] Boris Johnson, ‘Easter Recess: Government Update’ Hansard, vol 712, debated on 19 April 2022. [16] Mike Gordon, ‘The Prime Minister, the Parties, and the Ministerial Code’ (UK Constitutional Law Blog, 27 April 2022). [17] ‘Britain’s good-chap model of government is coming apart’ The Economist (London, 18 December 2018). [18] AC Grayling, The Good State: On the Principles of Democracy (Oneworld Publications 2020) 88. [19] The Institute for Government’s July 2021 report in fact recommended an updated code including, amongst other things, a range of possible sanctions. Tim Durrant, Jack Pannell, and Catherine Haddon, ‘Institute for Government: Updating the Ministerial Code’ (July 2021). In April 2021, the Committee on Standards in Public Life called for the same. See the letter from Lord Evans, Chairman of the Committee, to the Prime Minister dated 15 April 2021.

I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening truth. —Tim O’Brien[1] Given law’s position as a mechanism of social control and organisation, along with its inherently persuasive focus, it follows that studying effective storytelling can enhance law’s power.[2] However, a successful narrative is seldom strictly factual. In literature, this is where persuasive and rhetorical devices often enter: to convince a reader to believe something that resonates with their emotions or values. Law is similar; ‘an emotionally engaging narrative bypasses the intellectual resistance of the most skeptical judge or juror and enables your story to be heard’.[3] To this end, jurist Henry Sumner Maine described ‘legal fiction’ as the idea that most legal doctrines are persuasive fictions, having been generated by courts to fill in legislative gaps. Primarily, Maine writes, legal fiction is expressed by the proposition that courts do not make new law but merely find the law.[4] The concept of persuasive legal fiction has a substantive parallel in literature’s pursuit of emotional truth to find resonance with readers, despite its inherently creative or fictitious nature. Tim O’Brien’s body of work illustrates this tension well, his 1990 novel The Things They Carried being a particularly good example. In it, a narrator with the author’s name—and many of his same characteristics and experiences—depicts his time as an American platoon soldier fighting in the Vietnam War. The book’s structure is fragmented, it contains short stories, essays, anecdotes, sketches, and asides, and because the author blends his own voice and the narrative voice, the limit between fiction and fact is blurry and uncertain. The Things They Carried is categorised as metafiction, which Patricia Waugh describes as ‘fictional writing which self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artefact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality’.[5] I argue that both law’s exertion and metafictional literature focus on emotional truth at their cores. In establishing this, I use Jane Baron’s narrative lens, which takes interest in stories told within law ‘not for moral uplift or interpretive insight, but rather for evaluating the stories’ persuasive impact, their evidentiary value, and their epistemological implications’.[6] Legal doctrine as legal fiction Constituted by Henry Sumner Maine, a legal fiction is best defined as a ‘legal assumption that something is true which is, or may be, false—being an assumption of an innocent and beneficial character, made to advance the interests of justice’.[7] These fictions are ‘necessarily under the control of trial judges and juries from case to case’.[8] This control is due to the fact that legal fictions have allowed laws to change while avoiding outward alteration in the rules since before the Magna Carta in 1215 and Parliament’s subsequent formation in England.[9] Maine’s is the definition of legal fiction used over the course of this paper, given its acknowledgement that legal fictions have historically worked to aid the development of jurisprudence and are inherent to common law. Maine recognises the ubiquity of legal fictions and thus focuses on their role in social progress, rather than indicting their mere existence. He calls attention to the fact that even when law is stable, society is progressive, and that fictions ‘at a particular stage of social progress are invaluable expedients for overcoming the rigidity of law’.[10] Legal fictions call attention to the ways in which law has been shaped by individuals to suit the needs of both the craft of persuasion and subsequent desired human ends based on our changing social values. After all, ‘law is often quite open about its creative capacity’—and today’s commentators are interested in law’s ability to invent concepts as a means of ‘narrative coherence’.[11] The purpose of legal fictions might be to achieve legal values like convenience, consistency, equity, or justice. These fictions are articulated by legal courts seeking to preserve the rights of certain individuals and institutions and advance particular areas of public policy in doing so. Notably, legal fictions are distinguishable from legal presumptions, which assume a certain state of facts until proven otherwise. For instance, a legal presumption might be a court’s statement on a motion to dismiss that, for the purposes of the motion, they must assume all allegations pleaded in the complaint to be true.[12] This statement is not strictly a legal fiction but rather a presumption because it does not, by Maine’s definition, claim to adjust a particular area of law on the basis of desired public policy change or different legal results for the impacted individuals. Rather, it is a conditional feature of law applicable across contexts. For instance, in England—in 1930s Brighton—divorce had to be ‘arranged’ by legal fiction. During this period, divorce by consent alone was not permitted by law; it was necessary to petition for divorce on grounds of adultery. To bypass this legal requirement, courts acknowledged and supported ‘stage-managed’ evidence of adultery introduced by the parties of the divorce.[13] In fact, courts deemed this ‘fiction […] morally preferable to real adultery’, denying contesting the falsified evidence.[14] This constitutes a legal fiction as courts colluded with divorce parties through their proceedings in the pursuit of specific public policy ends; namely, the granting of a divorce to parties seeking one despite the state of law at the time. Adoption is also one of the earliest legal fictions. Maine wrote, ‘[t]he earliest and most extensively employed of legal fictions was that which permitted family relations to be created artificially’.[15] In Rome, adoption reached its widest and most documented acceptance.[16] The family unit was an element of society’s objective normative structure and manifested in law as patria potestas. This ‘power of a father’ allowed a family’s male head authority over his descendants, including inflicting capital punishment and determining descendants’ rights in private law.[17] Accordingly, Romans resorted to legal fiction in their adoption of a male person into a family as a son and descendant of the line where a son was not born. This civil legal process was supervised by Roman magistrates, who, in legally transferring the adoptee to their adopter, ensured the adoptee’s life prior to adoption disappeared.[18] The adoptee’s debts, if any, were cancelled, and their legal records prior to adoption were expunged, so they took on full legitimacy as their adopter’s heir, both legally and socially. Legal fiction allowed Romans to exert their social values, which took on truth and importance to them in their best-recognised form: the family unit. These examples underscore Maine’s proposition that legal fiction is expressed through the belief, noted above, that courts ‘find’ the law based on their social milieu rather than making it based solely on legal thinking. I concur that ’finding’ the law comes from judges and courts considering the emotional or moral truth of the society they promulgate in their legal decisions. Past academics have considered the same theme of emotional truth’s significance to legal fiction—namely, Maine and Simon Stern. Maine was one of the first jurists to discuss legal fictions, working in the mid- to late 1800s. Stern is a current law and literature professor at the University of Toronto, who has interpreted and adapted Maine’s views to draw his own conclusions about legal fictions. This chronological canvassing of pertinent literature allows my own analysis to draw upon a stronger understanding of legal fiction when applying the concept of emotional truth to legal doctrine. Maine’s definition includes any assumption where a legal rule or its operation has undergone alteration, even if its strict letter might remain unchanged. He believed that legal fictions ‘satisfy the desire for improvement […] at the same time that they do not offend the superstitious disrelish for change which is always present’. This analysis is prescient for a nineteenth-century writer: it speaks to the consistency with which common law courts have shaped public policy through strict doctrinal interpretation to better match social values and development. For instance, he characterised the legal fiction of adoption as an advancement in the creation of family ties, without which society would never have ‘escaped from its swaddling clothes’.[19] Legal fictions as Maine has described them enable courts to practice attaching operative facts to their normative consequences. Those courts might then evaluate, on a mix of jurisprudence and analytical thinking, where it might be appropriate to explicitly solidify some of these associations which prove useful to society at large. Even mature societies constantly evolve and develop in their values. In the modern context, Stern explicitly links legal fiction to literary and narrative inquiry. This is why his work is valuable to this exploration of legal and literary fiction coalescing in emotional truth. Unlike Maine, Stern posits the ‘significance of legal fiction lies not only in its starting point but also in what flows from it’—namely, the fiction ‘holds the seed of a plot’. Stern theorises that legal fiction solicits a heightened attention to a case’s narratological inquiry, much as literary fiction—particularly metafiction—calls attention to its own narrative by making its fictional nature clear to readers. In law, Stern points to the characterisation of ‘corporate personhood’ as an example of this. This ingrained use of metaphor solicits attention to an area of study—corporate law—not usually considered to ‘exhibit such self-consciously literary features’.[20] Stern applies this lens to legal doctrine as a whole. He draws the connection that ‘legal fictions seem, to modern commentators, to do for law what metafiction does for imaginative writing’, a proposition upon which this article fundamentally builds its case.[21] Stern argues that analogies and equivalencies alike are critical ingredients of legal reasoning, and the ‘lines of argument they will ultimately support are rarely discernible in advance’.[22] Thus, he suggests that it is irrelevant to pick apart which legal doctrines might constitute legal fictions—most legal doctrines involve fiction through their work in cohering a plot of persuasive argument or slotting non-legal phenomena into legal analyses. As for metafiction, Stern sees the appeal of Maine’s work as the attitude it conveys, not the framework it delineates. Maine recognised something about the productive, creative work of fictions separating them from other forms of legal invention. As a modern commentator, Stern applies that recognition to a different focus—law’s creative capacity—to Maine’s on fiction’s falsity and instrumental value. However, Stern draws a critical distinction between literary and legal fictions: whereas literary fiction writers self-consciously work to break the illusion of realism, legal fictions are not deployed by judges seeking to remind those reading their decisions about law’s creative capacities. As a result, legal fictions tend to work ‘in the eye of the beholder’.[23] In my view, most legal doctrines involve legal fiction as judges work to compel audiences to find truth and trust in their written words. It is therefore necessary to explore the impact of emotional truth as a means of persuasion across literature and law. Law, literature, and emotional truth While the scholars above discussed the utility of legal and literary fictions, it is prudent to extend this consideration of fiction to the broader notion of narrative, along with its utility to law and literature. Critical race and feminist theorists started making the case for legal scholarship to incorporate the lived experiences and stories of members of marginalised communities over 30 years ago. They noted that traditional scholarship had excluded the perspectives of subordinated groups for centuries. This resulted in ‘neutral’ legal principles with sexist and racist normative roots that therefore failed to serve individuals equally.[24] These theorists taught jurisprudential scholars that stories provide shared understandings working as ‘powerful means for destroying mindset[s]’.[25] This increasing emphasis on narrative was met with opposition by traditional legal scholars, who argued that stories pose issues of reliability and validity. They felt stories were one-sided and emotional, making them insufficiently analytical or verifiable for legal application.[26] Nonetheless, cognitive neuroscience and psychology studies, as cited by Nancy Levit, underscore the practical utility of narratives: storylines are fundamental to how humans understand and remember events and experiences. Our brains are structured to detect patterns, which stories furnish by providing a structure for organising and understanding disparate events and concepts. Notably, people retain about 20 percent of what they read, but closer to 80 percent of the images they form in their minds. As they activate both the rational and emotional hemispheres of the brain, stories ‘provoke interest, invite involvement, encourage empathetic imagination, [and] create a connection between listener and teller’.[27] These cognitive studies emphasise narrative both generally and in law as an influential method of persuasion. As a result, narratives have taken on greater value across legal discourse. Law review articles, decisions, and other legal texts have transformed from objective and depersonalised media to those willing to convey experiential insight. This was once controversial—lawyer Louis Auchincloss’s short story ‘The Senior Partner’s Ghost’ was the first piece of fiction published in a law review when it reached the Virginia Law Review in 1964.[28] 50 years later, Parker B Potter Jr’s 63-page account of judicial decision references to Kafka’s work was published in the Pierce Law Review to no apparent fanfare.[29] Now, it is widely accepted that a lawyer is also a ‘raconteur’, constructing stories and sharing them persuasively with other lawyers and decision-makers.[30] As legal scholarship’s acceptance of narrative has grown, so has the discipline’s understanding of many legal structures’ inadequacy in conveying the complicated realities of marginalised people’s experiences. Mainstream legal narratives are not neutral. Rather, they represent the entrenchment of dominant perspectives—the upper-class, male, white, heterosexual, cissexual—historically allowed entry into the legal profession. Patricia Bryan has observed that the role of any legal judgement ‘depends on community acceptance and validation’.[31] This makes intuitive sense when one considers a courtroom’s reliance on a ‘reliable narrator’—a trained lawyer—persuasively detailing a party’s individual experience. Legal emphasis on narrative can counter the systemic narrowness of structures and stories historically accepted within law, along with providing a platform for diverse experiences that can reshape justice to better reflect the human experience. For these non-traditional narratives to succeed persuasively and achieve community validation, they must use schemata—frameworks used to understand a story—sufficiently identifiable for audiences to process and understand the information.[32] This is particularly necessary when the traditional chronology of events does not paint a positive image of the client or party in question. A compelling advocate must sometimes challenge traditional means to achieve successful ends. The following schemata may be used persuasively in both law and literature, but are described primarily in a legal context to lend focus to their persuasive nature. One alternate schema recognisable enough for this persuasion is disruptive narrative. Disruptive narratives tell stories out of chronological order, as a series of flashbacks or snapshots of moments in an individual’s story. It is a particularly persuasive tactic because it allows audiences to see the steps of an event or moment separated from the timing of the event itself. This strategy deters audiences from seeing events in a cause-and-effect context, placing emphasis on factors and characters outside the client’s role in an incident that might reflect on them poorly.[33] Another untraditional yet persuasive schema is point of view. Here, a story generally focuses on a linear series of events—but from the different perspectives of characters playing a role in the incident in question. This technique is particularly effective for a client’s advocacy because it follows a familiar, recognisable narrative structure but enriches the audience’s view of the inciting event’s cause by forcing them to question that view multiple times over. Thus, the audience is encouraged to re-examine the assumptions that led to their preconceived notion of how the story would or should end, resulting in an unexpected ending supporting the client’s perspective.[34] Stephanie Kane writes, ‘novelists and lawyers alike […] must create and operate in a domain structured to resonate with other human beings’.[35] A lawyer who uses a diversity of methods—like point of view or disruptive narrative—to tell their ‘litigation stories’ thereby largely controls the theme or understanding their listener draws from their advocacy.[36] Fundamentally, the lawyer who tells a compelling story is the lawyer who achieves their desired outcome by imparting a certain understanding of events. This is not limited to law or literature alone. We tell ourselves certain convincing stories that constitute emotional truths, even if those stories do not align strictly with fact. For example: a person might tell themselves they tried their hardest to accomplish something, whether successful or not. Finding evidence of such a claim is difficult, given its subjectivity and reliance on factors including the person’s individual and variable capacity of energy, time, and focus. But by telling oneself this is the case and casting one’s actions in a specific light—like focusing on one’s efforts in a specific chronology or on their ability to balance their efforts with other personal commitments—it may very well be an emotional truth. This ability to use persuasive narrative to find an understanding of a person’s own actions or the actions of others has great intrinsic and instrumental value. James R Elkins observes that ‘one might experience, in writing, the power of telling a story, or getting at the truth […] or revealing something new about yourself. Whatever you write—legal or otherwise—there must be something of you reflected in the outcome.’[37] In this way, one’s understanding of their own actions—particularly when those actions are emotionally, factually, or morally complex, like fighting in a war—can be heightened by using a narrative framework to determine the emotional truth. In so doing, one establishes emotional truth to be just as psychologically and practically relevant as the factual truth in some cases. According to posttraumatic stress disorder psychologists, traumatic memory manifests itself as ‘experience that reoccurs’.[38] This manifestation aligns with a reality of war that soldiers reconsider over and over, weighing various events, actions, and morals from different perspectives. Finding an emotional truth in these cases means coming to terms with a personal understanding of one’s own wartime experience, recognising while that understanding is not universal, it is individually useful if it brings peace and closure. This parallels legal cases across practice areas, from criminal to employment law and beyond—one’s understanding of events is not necessarily universal, but it is helpful for them to understand the consequences of their actions. This is also explored in The Things They Carried. I draw this connection to underscore the validity of emotional truth in reasoning and persuasion. Creating a narrative out of one’s complex moral or ethical experience can help individuals process surrounding emotions. This is where metafiction becomes useful. Waugh states that, because our knowledge of the world is largely mediated by language, metafiction is a useful model for learning about the construction of ‘reality’ itself.[39] It is only possible to represent our environment’s discourses in literature, rather than any one universal truth about the environment itself. Exploring metafiction’s utility has a specifically legal context, too: ‘legal fictions seem, to modern commentators, to do for law what metafiction does for imaginative writing’.[40] In an increasingly pluralistic and uncertain world, contemporary metafictional writing can assist us in exploring different conceptions of reality and calling attention to artificial social structures.[41] This same ability may be translated into legal fictions, allowing us to critically parse which legal institutions, customs, and norms were created to reflect and uphold traditional values and power structures, rather than being ‘found’ by courts.[42] Narrative and fiction’s capacity to call attention to morally ambiguous structures in society is therefore subsequently explored through the vehicle of the metafictional novel The Things They Carried. O’Brien engages in several metafictional writing strategies to depict the Vietnam War which are of unique potential and interest in displaying the necessity of emotional truth to the nuanced discussion of seemingly objective past events. The Things They Carried: Emotional truth as reality Through studying The Things They Carried, I point to three ways in which O’Brien uses the genre of metafiction in his narrative to call attention to the importance of emotions in establishing truth. These three ways are his blurring of narrator and author, his ambiguous structuring of the novel, and the intentional nature of his revisions between drafts and final publication. I. Narrator/author distinction Tim O’Brien the author and his book’s narrator Tim O’Brien share several similarities. Both men are from Minnesota and attended Macalester College. Both fought in the Vietnam War. Both describe themselves as politically opposed to the war they fought in. Both are named Tim O’Brien.[43] And yet they are not the same person. The author is clear about this distinction. As he said in one interview, ‘the guy who’s narrating this story has my name and a lot of my characteristics, but it isn’t really me’.[44] For instance, Tim has a daughter, but O’Brien does not. Tim speaks of the aesthetic beauty of war: ‘sunlight’, ‘the special way that dawn spreads out on a river’.[45] O’Brien, however, ‘never felt or thought that war’s pretty’.[46] Seeing similar biographical characteristics shared between narrator and author, yet differentiating their mentalities, calls readers’ attention to their own role as audience to a careful performance. ‘[S]tory-truth is a product which evolves more or less unconsciously in the reader’s mind through the act of reading’, but that makes ‘story-truth’ no less genuine or valuable than the ‘relatively passive’ ‘happening-truth’.[47] By making the reader an active participant in the text through forcing such critical thinking, O’Brien asks the reader to ‘become immediately involved in the incredibly frustrating act of trying to make sense of events that resist understanding’.[48] The reader witnesses firsthand the war’s ‘only certainty’: ‘overwhelming ambiguity’, and accordingly gains a more thorough feeling for the narrator’s tentative portrayal of his own reality.[49] While the reader grasps at stable—that is, truthful—footing, Tim seeks to position himself as a reliable narrator. He describes one character as not just from Oklahoma City, but ‘Oklahoma City, Oklahoma’, as if mentioning the state provides a sense of authority or attention to detail.[50] Similarly, in the first chapter about things the soldiers carried—‘slingshot’, ‘brass knuckles’, ‘antipersonnel mine’, ‘pebble’, ‘a silent awe for the terrible power of the things they carried’—Tim uses neutral transitional phrases typically associated with factual description, akin to a government report. These include repetition of examples introduced with ‘for instance’ and ‘because’,[51] and weight measurements of everything the soldiers carried, including letters (‘4 ounces’)[52] and a ‘VC corpse[‘s]’ thumb (‘3 ounces’).[53] Describing tokens of sentiment and conflict in these strict terms displays the narrator’s desire to convince readers of his own authority in sharing the narrative he does. Despite this, Tim admits to his own embellishments. For instance, the chapter ‘Notes’[54] discusses the writing of another chapter, ‘Speaking of Courage’, ‘in 1975 at the suggestion of Norman Bowker, who three years later hanged himself in the locker room of a YMCA in his hometown in central Iowa’.[55] It includes excerpts of Bowker’s letter, who suggested Tim write about Bowker’s depression after taking responsibility for the death of another platoon member, Kiowa. Tim writes in ‘Notes’ that by telling stories, you objectify your experience. You ‘start sometimes with an incident that truly happened […] and you carry it forward by inventing incidents that did not in fact occur but that nonetheless help to clarify and explain’.[56] As Tim explains his process in telling these stories, he references writing earlier drafts designed for a previous novel O’Brien, in fact, wrote: Going After Cacciato. Nonetheless, at the end of ‘Notes’, Tim says: ‘In the interests of truth […] I want to make it clear that Norman Bowker was in no way responsible for what happened to Kiowa. […] That part of the story is my own’.[57] Passages like this, vacillating between admissions of fictionality and references to reality, point to the objectifying function of stories as a place of confession and trauma processing. The reader gets a sense of the story-obsessed narrator’s desire to relieve his conscience and understand his own experiences. O’Brien’s publication of letters from other characters citing the importance of storytelling as a means of processing trauma further lends the narrator’s stories an interpersonal function. Even when a letter’s lifespan exceeds its writer’s lifespan, as with Bowker, it can connect two people over their shared experience and make that narrative permanent. In doing so, it works as a record that establishes an emotional truth. Readers do not know if Bowker or Kiowa exist outside the book, and if they do, whether Bowker does bear responsibility for Kiowa’s death. Nonetheless, the reader is left with an impression of the extent of trauma, guilt, responsibility, and connection carried by Vietnam soldiers like O’Brien. The narrator as writer, character, and theorist at once displays the relative irrelevance of ‘what really happened’ by calling attention to the chasm between depictions of the same experience, as with Kiowa’s death. In writing a narrator who describes telling stories as ‘partly catharsis, partly communication’, O’Brien equates one’s understanding of their own experience with truth.[58] In doing so, the author convinces his readers of the ‘concrete certainty’ of the things he carries with him: not facts, but feelings.[59] II. Ambiguous book structure The Things They Carried is structured as a series of chapters varying in length and structure, from brief anecdotes to longer narratives. Some stories are abandoned and continue chapters or pages later; in other cases, Tim starts a story just to have another character pick it up or challenge its validity pages later. This structural variation draws the reader’s attention to the stories as epistemological tools, allowing the ways of storytelling to be viewed from different angles and perspectives.[60] This begins early in the book, with its ‘loving’ dedication to the ‘men of the Alpha Company’, including several characters by name—‘Jimmy Cross, Norman Bowker, Rat Kiley, Mitchell Sanders, Henry Dobbins, and Kiowa’.[61] This dedication’s strict fact is challenged on the title page immediately prior: ‘A work of fiction by Tim O’Brien’.[62] The author’s use of the word ‘loving’ despite the apparent fictionality of the named men is inherently emotional. It implies that one can love these characters and honour their memories, regardless of whether they exist outside the book. This happens in the first pages of the novel, priming the reader for what is to come: a real devotion to the emotional truth of the stories, regardless of whether their content can be fact-checked. From the jump, O’Brien establishes his central theme with the reader: the relationship between fact and fiction. He does so on pages typically skipped by a reader, suggesting that the reader must actively engage in every aspect of the text to understand its purpose. This is reminiscent of the creative capacity legal fictions have within the strict structural confines of a legal decision’s majority or concurrence. Across both contexts, it suggests fictions may be—and are—accepted within traditional formatting. This acceptance of alternative realities could have implications for accepting marginalised perspectives within structures that unthinkingly reproduce dominant voices as unquestioned truth, as in law. The same attention to structure may be afforded to the first three chapters of the novel: ‘The Things They Carried’, ‘Love’, and ‘Spin’, in the context of character deaths throughout the book portrayed as core events through different narrative perspectives. The death of Ted Lavender, a platoon soldier, is first mentioned in ‘The Things They Carried’ in an almost academic, overt fashion: ‘Ted Lavender, who was scared, carried tranquilizers until he was shot in the head outside the village of Than Khe in mid-April’.[63] This tone carries the reader through several more casual mentions in the chapter, as with the two-pound poncho only worth its weight when used to wrap Lavender’s dead body.[64] Tim then moves to a more animated, but still neutral, description of Lavender’s death from Kiowa’s perspective: ‘Kiowa said, the poor bastard just flat-fuck fell. Boom. Down’.[65] From Jimmy Cross’s perspective, lovelorn over a girl back home, ‘Ted Lavender was dead because he loved her so much and could not stop thinking of her’.[66] These three perspectives repeat through the first story so the reader can imagine the seemingly simplistic death. However, in ‘Love’, the reader finds that Lavender’s death still holds weight with his fellow soldiers years post-war. Tim and Cross look over old photographs and pause on Lavender’s photo, at which point ‘Jimmy rubbed his eyes and said he’d never forgiven himself for Lavender’s death’. Tim agrees: ‘It was something that would never go away’.[67] The spatial and narrative gap between these two references call the reader’s attention to what goes unsaid between chapters, and how the narrator’s undramatic portrayal in the first story is potentially untrustworthy. In so doing, O’Brien challenges his own narrator’s veracity of statements and implies that the emotional weight of such trauma is not easily articulated nor processed in words alone. The writing calls attention to the messy lack of linearity in life and in feelings, and how it makes those experiences’ emotions no less significant or true. As a result, the story resists easy unification or categorisation. It brings the reader’s focus to the reality of disparate views of the same single event. The following ‘Spin’ is just six pages, made up of more than a dozen short narrative fragments, all from different perspectives. At this point in the book, the reader knows only of Lavender’s fate, though the deaths of Curt Lemon and Kiowa, along with a Vietnamese civilian, are introduced. Despite the serious content, these memories of the tragic—a Vietnamese boy with one leg, Curt Lemon’s body ‘soar[ing] into a tree’—are interspersed with moments of peace, like playing checkers and imitating a rain dance. Tim explicitly editorialises on these perspectives throughout in the context of memory and storytelling. He describes his stories as ‘memory-traffic feed[ing] into a rotary up in your head’ and says that as a writer, ‘all you can do is pick a street and go for the ride, putting things down as they come at you’.[68] Through this, the narrator makes clear that he wants to make his past experiences permanent. To do so, one can give memories a life of their own by objectifying them as stories. Again, this calls attention to the fictionality of stories given their constantly subjective nature. The dissonance of jumping from narrative to narrative, from the playful to the catastrophic, is exacerbated by the narrator’s wandering style, which is true to how most people process the world around them. The disruptive narration and point of view separate audiences from clean cause-and-effect interpretation; they persuade readers of the truth of the story being told despite its jumbled movement. As a result, the novel’s structure asserts emotional truth as persuasive, even when the described experience lacks traditional linearity. III. Revisions Readers of The Things They Carried know from the text that O’Brien serially revises the events he writes about, as he tells and contradicts the same stories from different viewpoints. John K Young, a literary scholar, takes a critical view of these revisions through a textual lens in his book, How to Revise a True War Story, where he treats chapter drafts and different published versions as equal objects of study. As he rephrases O’Brien: ‘You can tell a true war story if you just keep on revising it’.[69] Young asserts that ‘the most faithful aesthetic representation of […] memory is through the fiction that reoccurs’.[70] In digging through archival chapter iterations, he finds several instances within which O’Brien has removed signals pointing to stories’ fictionality through the editing process. For instance, in the original version of the chapter ‘Good Form’, Tim admits he never killed anybody, did not have a daughter, and never knew anybody named Jimmy Cross or Kiowa: ‘it’s all made up’.[71] This is deleted in the published copy. Studying this, one can only guess the motivation behind these edits, such as that these admissions might have lessened reader engagement or trust in the narrator. I take the position that in so doing, O’Brien asks his reader not to simply delineate fact and fiction, but to observe them working in tandem and find truth in the feelings he describes. My stance is underscored by O’Brien’s own statement in an interview that classifying fact or fiction is artificial: literature ‘should be looked at not for its literal truths but for its emotional qualities’: ‘whether it moves me or not, whether it feels true’.[72] To this end, one of O’Brien’s real-world war buddies, Erik Hansen, wrote a letter to him in 1972 upon reviewing early drafts of the book’s chapters. Hansen states, ‘When will yuz guys learn that when it comes to the big “I” there are no facts! Precisely because it’s there that you run up against the dialectic of the inner self and the outer order—and then you’ve got hot, for angst ain’t no statistic’.[73] O’Brien’s revisions display his focus in the story not on a strict retelling of war, but on the difficulty of categorising the traumatic experience either individually or collectively. The reader is called to mediate the book’s statements in protest against war’s traditional description in terms of performative statistics around deaths and medals. Tracing these revisions’ path affords readers a more complex interaction with the ambiguity of war and other seminal life experiences. This is seen in the penultimate chapter of the book, ‘Night Life’. O’Brien adjusted the original description of a soldier’s difficulty completing duties in darkness to add the following introductory lines in a later revision: ‘A few words about Rat Kiley. I wasn’t there when he got hurt, but Mitchell Sanders later told me the essential facts. Apparently he lost his cool’.[74] This third-person narrative shift is underscored by the narrator’s repetition of ‘Sanders said’ five times in the chapter’s first three pages. Read in isolation, this revision seemingly lends the story authenticity, as it comes from a character separate from the narrator who admits to playing with memory and storytelling. By transferring the responsibility for the ‘happening-truth’ to a fellow soldier, the narrator offers the reader more trust in what really happened to Kiley. However, Sanders is the same character who, in the earlier chapter entitled ‘How to Tell a True War Story’, tells a blatantly fantastic story he clearly wants Tim to ‘feel [as] the truth, to believe by the raw force of feeling’.[75] Sanders later tells Tim that while he invented the story’s facts, ‘it’s still true’.[76] O’Brien’s revised inclusion of this abdication of responsibility for the narrative focuses the reader on the soldiers’ shared focus on emotional truth. It works as an example of how a ‘true’ war story will always communicate a felt experience, rather than the exact ‘happening-truth’. By placing this acknowledgement toward the novel’s end, it denies readers the ability to become complacent toward the importance of perspective in storytelling. O’Brien himself stated that ‘exercising the imagination is the main way of finding truth’.[77] This directly connects to legal fiction’s legitimacy in law’s practice and study. Legal judgements are inherently persuasive through careful narrative and strategic use of evidence and perspective. Even black-letter law scholars have noted that ‘we no longer live in a legal culture dominated by formalism where we believe that legal reasoning is the process of finding one true “correct” answer’. Instead, to understand law, we should acknowledge its ‘indeterminacy’ and ‘subjective influences on legal interpretation’.[78] Truth is a subjective exercise, as exemplified by common law. Within common-law courts, textual and evidentiary interpretation and depiction are largely what make the difference between a majority, concurrence, and dissent decision. This is only highlighted by the recognition that legal structures we take for granted—adoption, divorce—were invented to reflect and serve changing social values and priorities. By studying O’Brien’s metafictional practice, legal scholars may gain a stronger ability to critically parse the law instead of taking the social values it reflects for granted. O’Brien’s writing underscores the infinite difference a separate perspective or word choice can make to a narrative, and how that narrative might remain truthful regardless through its emotional resonance. The law as it stands primarily reflects dominant narratives. As shown by O’Brien’s distinction between ‘story-truth’ and ‘happening-truth’, legal doctrine and decision-making could benefit from acknowledging the emotional truth upon which they already rely. Conclusion Persuasive story-telling is fundamentally driven by emotional truth. Metafiction’s exploration of emotional realities may thus be effectively applied to recognise legal fictions as manifestations of past and current social values framed as fact by dominant legal systems. Legal fictions underscore the power of persuasion inherent to law’s determination and reinforcement of our social rules and standards. Similarly, metafiction as studied through The Things They Carried belies the subjectivity of any experience woven into a given narrative. This comparison may be leveraged to emphasise how acknowledging emotional truth in law does not betray law’s supposed neutral arbitration of fact. Instead, once acknowledged and accepted, emotional truth can be used to build stronger, more convincing narratives and provide a window for powerful legal institutions to better understand and appreciate marginalised voices. Literature’s device of metafiction should garner greater attention in the study of law and its persuasive ability so law may more effectively serve broader swaths of our society. It is helpful here to provide some brief examples of how this acknowledgement might tangibly shape law moving forward. In writing about the gendered implications of a woman accused of murdering her allegedly abusive husband in 1901, Patricia Bryan noted that ‘stories give us the potential to acquire an empathetic understanding of other people, an understanding which helps us to recognise the stereotypical notions that may be embedded in the law even though they stand at odds with the reality and complexity of the lives of many’. As metafiction displays, narratives focusing on emotional truth offer audiences the ability to envision an unfamiliar context—an abusive marriage, for instance—they may never otherwise encounter. In acknowledging the emotional truth inherent to one’s experience and motivating one’s decisions, legal decision-makers and scholars may be better able to mete out justice by focusing on truly restitutive outcomes based on the context at hand. As a result, those decision-makers can ‘define justice in a way that more broadly reflects the diversity of the human experience’.[79] O’Brien has commented that ‘fiction is a way of testing possibilities and testing hypotheses, and not defining’.[80] This view should be applied to studying law to gain an understanding of experiences outside our own scopes. After all, justice works best when its outcomes are tailored to the context at hand. If law is intended to sensitively serve a diverse society of varying needs, it may do so best by acknowledging its own reliance on values-based fictions in the narratives it creates and legitimises. Meredith Wilson-Smith Meredith Wilson-Smith practices public, constitutional, and administrative law in Toronto, Ontario. She graduated from Osgoode Hall Law School in 2024. As a recovering journalist and editor, she’s interested in questions of truth, narrative, and access to justice. [1] Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried (Mariner Books 2009) 179. [2] Douglas Lind, ‘The Pragmatic Value of Legal Fictions’ in Maksymilian Del Mar and William Del Twining (eds), Legal Fictions in Theory and Practice (Springer International Publishing 2015) 83. [3] Stephanie Kane, ‘Narrative, the Essential Trial Strategy’ (2008) 34(4) Litigation 52. [4] Henry Sumner Maine, ‘Legal Fictions’ in Ancient Law (Routledge 2017) 26. [5] Patricia Waugh, Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction (Methuen 1984) 2 quoted in Simon Stern, ‘Legal Fictions and Legal Fabrication’ in Hans Lind (ed), Fictional Discourse and the Law (Routledge 2020) 199. [6] Jane B Baron, ‘Law, Literature, and the Problems of Interdisciplinarity’ (1999) 108 Yale LJ 1066. [7] Sidney T Miller, ‘The Reasons for Some Legal Fictions’ (1910) 8(8) Mich L Rev 623. [8] John Baker, ‘Legal Fictions’ in The Law’s Two Bodies: Some Evidential Problems in English Legal History (Oxford University Press 2001) 53. [9] ibid 34. [10] Maine (n 4) 24 quoted in Miller (n 7) 623. [11] Stern (n 5) 190. [12] ibid 191. [13] Baker (n 8) 36. [14] ibid 39. [15] Quoted in Louis Quarles, ‘The Law of Adoption – A Legal Anomaly’ (1949) 32(4) Marq L Rev 238. [16] Leo A Huard, ‘The Law of Adoption: Ancient and Modern’ (1956) 4(4) Vand L Rev 743. [17] Andrey M Shirvindt, ‘The Meaning of Fiction in Roman Law: The Case of Adrogatio’ (2011) 278(3) Journal of Ancient History 1. [18] Huard (n 16) 745. [19] Maine (n 4) 26-7. [20] Simon Stern, ‘Legal and Literary Fictions’ in Elizabeth S Anker and Bernadette Meyler (eds), New Directions in Law and Literature (Oxford University Press 2017) 317. [21] Stern (n 5) 193. [22] Stern (n 20) 320. [23] Stern (n 5) 199. [24] Nancy Levit, ‘Reshaping the Narrative Debate’ (2011) 34(3) Seattle UL Rev 753. [25] ibid 757. [26] ibid 754. [27] ibid 758-9. [28] Louis Auchincloss, ‘The Senior Partner’s Ghosts’ (1964) in Fred R Shapiro & Jane Garry (eds), Trial and Error: An Oxford Anthology of Legal Stories (Oxford University Press 1998) 357. [29] Parker B Potter, Jr, ‘Ordeal by Trial: Judicial References to the Nightmare World of Franz Kafka,’ (2005) 3 Pierce L Rev 195. [30] Levit (n 24) 756. [31] Patricia L Bryan, ‘Stories in Fiction and in Fact: Susan Glaspell’s A Jury of Her Peers and the 1901 Murder Trial of Margaret Hossack’ (1997) 49 Stan L Rev 1303-4. [32] Kimberly YW Holst, ‘Non-Traditional Narrative Techniques and Effective Client Advocacy’ (2014) 48(2) L Teacher 169. [33] ibid 170. [34] ibid 173. [35] Kane (n 3) 53. [36] Philip N Meyer, ‘Telling Unfinished Stories: How Lawyers can Craft a Case Narrative to Spark Jurists’ and Jurors’ Interest in Writing the Ending’ (2015) 101(1) ABA Journal 29. [37] James R Elkins, ‘The Things They Carry into Legal Writing (and Legal Education)’ (1998) 22(4) Legal Stud F 753. [38] John K Young, How to Revise a True War Story: Tim O’Brien’s Process of Textual Production (University of Iowa Press 2017) viii. [39] Patricia Waugh, ‘What is metafiction and why are they saying such awful things about it?’ in Metafiction (Routledge 1984) 3. [40] Stern (n 5) 192. [41] Waugh (n 39) 7. [42] Stern (n 5) 195. [43] For the sake of clarity in this paper, I henceforth refer to the author as ‘O’Brien’ and the narrator as ‘Tim.’ [44] Martin Naparsteck, ‘An Interview with Tim O’Brien’ (1991) 32(1) Contemporary Literature 9. [45] O’Brien (n 1) 81. [46] Naparsteck (n 44) 9. [47] Mats Tegmark, In the shoes of a soldier: Communication in Tim O’Brien’s Vietnam narratives (PhD thesis, Uppsala University 1998) 219. [48] Steven Kaplan, ‘The Undying Uncertainty of the Narrator in Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried’ (1993) 35(1) Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 48. [49] O’Brien (n 1) 78. [50] ibid 3. [51] ibid. [52] ibid 2. [53] ibid 12. [54] This chapter’s title furthers the blurring of narrator and author: it is taken from the literary tradition of an author’s explanatory note meant to clarify an aspect of their story for the reader. [55] O’Brien (n 1) 149. [56] ibid 152. [57] ibid 154. [58] ibid 151. [59] Kaplan (n 48) 45. [60] Catherine Calloway, ‘“How to Tell a True War Story”: Metafiction in The Things They Carried’ (1995) 36(4) Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 249. [61] O’Brien (n 1) iii. [62] ibid ii. [63] ibid 2. [64] ibid 3. [65] ibid 6. [66] ibid 6. [67] ibid 26. [68] ibid 33. [69] Young (n 38) 2. [70] ibid viii. [71] ibid 89. [72] Naparsteck (n 44) 9. [73] David Buchanan, ‘Reporting Is Not a Holy Word: Tim O’Brien’s Edits in If I Die in a CombZone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home and The Things They Carried (2019) 65(4) MFS Modern Fiction Studies 622. [74] O’Brien (n 1) 208. [75] ibid 70. [76] ibid 73. [77] Naparsteck (n 44) 10. [78] Adam M Dodek, ‘Lawyering the Intersection of Public Law and Legal Ethics: Government Lawyers as Custodians of the Rule of Law’ (2010) 33(1) Dal LJ 23. [79] Bryan (n 31) 1305. [80] Naparsteck (n 44) 8.

She envelops man in darkness, and urges him constantly to the light. She makes him dependent on the earth, heavy and sluggish, and always rouses him up afresh (Goethe, Nature Aphorisms )   Abstract [1]   The extensive and in large parts forensic Newton-Goethe scholarship notwithstanding, one conjecture, teeming with possibilities, appears yet to have been sufficiently explored. It is that of a closer connection between Newton and Goethe, explored through the liminal figure of Dr Faust, who concomitantly symbolises and confounds modernity. This article, by triangulating Newton, Goethe, and Faust, examines the exciting possibility that none other than Isaac Newton may have been cast by Goethe as his tragic hero in what was the continuation—’by other means’—of their intellectual debate over the ‘physics of light’, and, more consequentially, of their cultural feud over the provenance and the rightful domicile of genius, as humankind’s guiding light and guardian.   Introduction   In ‘Goethe’s Faust as a Renaissance Man’, Harold Jantz argued that no ‘actual personalities of the eighteenth century’ could have presented Goethe with a prototype of Faust.[2] Elsewhere, Hans Christoph Binswanger suggested that ‘Goethe’s model for Faust as a creator of quick wealth’ was the infamous Scotsman John Law.[3] Although Law was neither a scientist nor an alchemist (in a non-financial sense) and would, therefore, fall short of being an adequate prototype of Faust, Binswanger’s claim nonetheless hints at something important that Jantz’s misses. Namely, that the character of Faust—inevitably a socio-cultural patchwork woven of multiple and iterative influences, synthesised into a singular haunting expression of the troubled psyche of an epoch en route to modernity—may well have been informed by real-world actors.   Reflecting on this question of historical inspiration makes one wonder whether none other than Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727) may have presented Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) with the real-life avatar of the despairing scholar and passionate alchemist driven to the edge of suicide, only to be ‘rescued’ by the seemingly magical powers of Mephistopheles, with the true meaning and consequences of this bailout becoming apparent in Part II of Goethe’s retelling of the tragic tale, where the existential wagers are abruptly called in.[4] Paraphrasing Jantz, could Newton himself perhaps have become the archetypal example of an unfulfilled Renaissance man, caught up in the intricate web of Enlightenment’s predicament, which tested the ‘limits of the Socratic lust for knowledge’?[5]   A curious gap in the Newton-Goethe- Faust scholarship exists, insofar as it is not possible to make a definitive   case concerning the extent of Goethe’s knowledge of Newton’s life and activities post-1692.[6] The assumed position, particularly among the Newton scholars, is that it is unlikely (although not impossible) that Goethe would have known enough of Newton’s life after the so-called Cambridge years. This, however, touches on a lesser-explored intersection of Goethe and Newton scholarship, specifically focusing on their ventures into the realms of political economy and finance—an area often overlooked in discussions of their intellectual contributions. In turn, it becomes difficult to dismiss a fascinating—albeit consciously speculative—possibility that none other than Newton could have been cast by Goethe in his retelling of the Faust legend. Using retrospective pattern recognition and circumstantial evidence, this essay pursues the striking conjecture that Goethe knew, or intuited, enough  about Newton, more than is generally assumed in the existing scholarship, in order to cast him as his Faust, as well as a reflection of himself.   Goethe, a polymath in his own right, was well-versed in matters of political economy, including finance and tax. He was an avid reader of both James Steuart and Adam Smith (himself a keen follower of the Newtonian method in the broad sense of that word).[7] Furthermore, in his role as finance minister of the duchy of Saxe-Weimar, Goethe was, in effect, dealing with some of the consequences of the economic and financial forces that Newton helped to shape during his extended tenure as Master of the Royal Mint.   By the time Goethe’s literary masterpiece had created a sustained ‘interest in all that pertained to Faust’, most of the original manuscripts that nurtured the Faust narrative across the centuries had been lost.[8] The story of an obscure magician wondering from village to village, and the protagonist himself, needed an overhaul as the ebbing tide of Renaissance reluctantly ushered in the new epoch: the Age of Enlightenment. The two eras, like their changing methods in the pursuit of knowledge, had to remain connected through a liminal figure, who could perhaps act as a conduit for their continuity. John Maynard Keynes concluded his brilliant essay on ‘Newton, The Man’ (1942) by describing him as ‘Copernicus and Faustus in one’.[9] Earlier, Oswald Spengler had insisted that the ‘existence of the Faustian soul’ was the prerequisite for the emergence of ‘that of Newton’s’.[10] But, as Faustus casts a long shadow back in time stretching towards Newton, could the reverse be true: namely, that the great British mathematician and physicist directly informed Goethe’s Faust?   Nietzsche and Schopenhauer’s clues   With Newton, the very definition of ‘genius’ underwent a great recoinage, as it transitioned from the creative to the intellectual sphere of human endeavour, and to the secular from the spiritual domain, yet without severing—indeed, reinforcing and amplifying­—the religious connotations linking the genius to the supernatural. Nietzsche, who argued that modern science developed directly from the spirit of Christianity, observed that:   Science has been promoted in the last centuries, partly because with it and through it one hoped to best understand God’s goodness and wisdom—the main motive in the souls of the great Englishmen (like Newton) […].[11]   Balancing the scales of inquiry, however, Nietzsche also recognised the dangers of taking Faust as gospel, for this would be an example of a ‘moral prejudice against the value of knowledge’.[12] Earlier, in the second of his Untimely Meditations  (1873), commenting on a passage by Goethe concerning Newton’s personality, Nietzsche curiously observed:   Goethe presented to us a comparable enigma in regard to the individual personality in his noteworthy account of Newton: he discovers at the foundation (or, more correctly, at the highest point) of his being ‘a troubled presentiment that he is in error’, the momentary expression, as it were, of a superior consciousness that has attained to a certain ironical overview of his inherent nature.[13]   This comment makes one wonder whether the thread of Nietzsche’s thought may extend further and help to account for the genealogy of Goethe’s Faust , if not of the Faustiad itself? Newton’s long-standing obsession with alchemy—culminating in the trials and tribulations during his tenure as Warden and Master of the Royal Mint (1696-1727), and the resulting curtailment of scientific endeavours in favour of the monetary pursuits en route to considerable personal wealth and status—arguably represented the earthly voyage of a divided soul that, although endowed with an inquisitive mind par excellence, failed to attain satisfaction either in the immediate ‘small world’, or in the macrocosm.[14] This case perhaps adds credibility to Schopenhauer’s observations that:   Wealth is like sea-water; the more we drink, the thirstier we become; and the same is true of fame […].   Money is human happiness in abstracto ; and so, the man who is no longer capable of enjoying such happiness in concreto , sets his whole heart on money.[15]   Newton’s pursuit of monetary wealth, particularly in his later years, stands as a stark illustration of how his profound intellectual energies were siphoned off toward unworthy ends. Schopenhauer, a great admirer of both Goethe and Faust , further reflects on the uneasy relationship between money and genius in Parerga and Paralipomena , where Faust emerges as the figure embodying this destructive and insoluble tension.   It is deeply ironic that both Newton and Goethe experienced a decline in their creative endeavours just as their worldly ambitions reached their peak. Goethe’s literary output faltered as his civic responsibilities expanded, while Newton’s scientific achievements diminished after he shifted his focus to state service. In both cases, the worldly demands of civic and public life came into conflict with their higher callings, stifling the very intellectual and artistic pursuits that had defined them.   Newton and Faust   Newton’s own relationship with the story of Faust is as uncertain and inviting of speculation as the ‘obscure origins’ of the Faustian narrative itself,[16] often believed to be a Volksbuch .[17] The original anonymous account, which became the cautionary tale Historia von D. Johann Fausten by Johann Spies (c.1587), appeared at the crossroads of the ‘Renaissance thirst for knowledge of all kinds and the Reformation insistence on the purity of faith’.[18] Was it, perhaps, a reincarnation of the Greek myths of Prometheus and Icarus, restated in the vernacular of the Lutheran tradition, or even of Dionysus, as asserted by Spengler[19] and Jung?[20] It has also been suggested that the historical figure of Simon Magus, a native of Samaria, who lived in the first century AD, may have represented a ‘gnostic’ prototype for the Faust legend, at least in Marlowe’s retelling of it.[21] If that were so, Simon Magus could be an important link by which Faust and Newton were, at least indirectly, connected.   Newton’s notorious lack of interest in art and literature notwithstanding, it would have been remiss of him not to have read at least Marlowe’s version of 1588. Here, Faustus obtains his Doctorate from none other than the University of Wittenberg, which Hamlet is said to have attended as a student, and where Martin Luther—who ‘saw Faustus as a diabolical magician’[22]—taught Theology until 1517, when his famous 95 theses, apocryphally appended to the door of the Castle Church in the same city, launched the tidal wave of Reformation that swept through Europe, imprinting directly on a certain Isaac Newton.[23] Suffice it to say, however, it is highly unlikely that Newton would have in any way fashioned himself on Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, even if he were aware of Simon Magus.[24] Could the reverse, however, be possible in relation to Goethe’s Faust, appearing between 1808 (Part I) and 1832 (Part II)?   Faust and Newton   The ‘strivings and strayings’[25] of Goethe’s Faust and Newton exhibit a number of uncanny resemblances. Both were very complex and contradictory characters. A certain notion of otherworldliness is imputed to both men, who tried in earnest to create, rather than to simply find, the Philosopher’s Stone. Jung tells us that Faust, both the work and the character, ‘is not of this world’,[26] just as the fanatical Newtonians, with some assistance from Newton, who considered himself the ‘last of the prophets’,[27] aimed to elevate his genius to a supernatural height.[28]   Goethe’s tale begins on Holy Saturday, at the end of Lent, and Part II of Faust opens with the Mardi Gras Carnival, a day preceding the start of Lent. The significance of Easter and Lent for Newton’s lengthy efforts to re-trace the life cycle of Jesus in an attempt to unlock the secrets of the divine prophecies—with an emphasis on the date of the crucifixion—can hardly be understated.   If it could be supposed that Goethe engaged with the depressed Newton at the time of his ‘derangement of the intellect’ in mid-1693, this would bear resemblance to the depressed Faust who, having worked his way right through philosophy, medicine, and jurisprudence, was driven by despair to the edge of suicide.[29] Newton, not unlike Faust, eventually emerged from his ailment, albeit having seemingly lost interest in science and with his mind firmly focused on the more esoteric matters, which included the interpretation of prophecy and scripture, admixed with continued alchemic inquiries.   The thin red line between Newton’s physics and Dr. Faust’s chemistry melts in the nature-defying flames of alchemy (or, chymistry ), which burnt bright in the hearts and minds of both men as testament to their ‘desire to fathom and control the secrets of nature’,[30] even if Newton, unlike many of his contemporaries, pursued alchemy as a science rather than magic. A propensity for mental and emotional frailty, possibly a consequence of the inability to find binding love, perhaps along with perhaps excessive exposure to mercury,[31] plagued the lives of both Newton and Dr. Faust.[32] Faust’s abandonment of Gretchen, ‘because his goal is self-fulfilment without consideration of society’, could also be relevant in relation to the understanding of Newton, who never married and was known to shun society at large for extended periods of time.[33]   In Part II of Goethe’s Faust , we are introduced to an ‘emperor, whose realm is in total disarray’.[34] This is not entirely unlike the circumstances which led to Newton’s appointment as Warden of the Royal Mint in 1696 during the reign of William III, when English currency was in disarray and counterfeiting was rife. This transition from personal despair, suffered by both Newton (prior to 1696) and Faust (in Part I), to facing a ‘similar condition on a collective and a transpersonal level’, which offers a glimpse of redemption for a corrupted ego if the latter’s fraudulent motivations can be overcome, is as important to understanding Newton’s post-Cambridge life as it is to following the mysterious twists and turns of Goethe’s Faustian plot.[35] Furthermore, Faust’s subsequent travails in and out of the underworld and the world of myth bear considerable resemblance to Newton’s own attempts at deciphering divine prophecies whilst contending in person with the gory realities of London’s counterfeiting underworld. Following the taxing encounter with the underworld (‘Nekyia’), Mephistopheles brought the exhausted and unconscious Faust back to his study to convalesce.[36] Newton, enervated by his exploits at the Royal Mint, often sought refuge in his London flat, where he could lock the world out and be left alone with alchemy.   Both men waged open wars of sorts, Newton against the counterfeiters and alleged plagiarists, aka Leibniz, whereas Faust was compelled by Mephistopheles to come to the aid of his beleaguered Emperor, forced to defend his throne in the aftermath of Faust’s paper-money scheme fiasco. (Goethe too was summoned to accompany Duke Karl August in the invasion of France in 1792.) The victorious and grateful Emperor granted Faust the shoreline for the latter to reclaim it from the sea. Newton’s not inconsiderable personal fortune, earned with some controversy at the Royal Mint, provided an irresistible temptation to augment it by investing in stocks, into which Newton had an insider’s track.   Having accomplished his speculative scheme by ignominious means—following the death of Philemon and Baucis at the hands of Mephistopheles’ ‘three Mighty Men’—Faust was accosted by four shadowy figures named Lack ( Mangel ), Debt-Guilt ( Schuld ), Need ( Not ), and Care ( Sorge ).[37] Where the first three failed to gain access to the wealthy Faust’s house (signifying his conscience), Care succeeded, having slipped through a keyhole, and in so doing blinded Faust, tormented but unrepentant and refusing to suffer. Standing on the edge of the grave being dug out for him by Mephistopheles’ unscrupulous aides, oblivious to what was to come, Faust delivered his final speech on ‘progress’, which both signalled the end his earthly passage and issued the most prescient warning to modernity, an important door to which had been opened by the equally unrepentant Newton—Master of the Mint to his final day—who died in his sleep, having lost consciousness a day or so prior, due to the severe bouts of indigestion from which he suffered during his final years.[38] Faust’s concluding earthly deed, his liminal epiphany, may hold the key to his subsequent redemption, which is also of significance for considering Newton’s enduring legacy.   Both men lived the real tension between ambition and satisfaction. Both were introverted yet excessively vain and actively sought public recognition. Both were obsessive when it came to their work. Both underwent a remarkable metamorphosis from fairly obscure academic loners, who hastily moved on ‘through little clouds of local scandal’, into figures of prominence and significant influence.[39] Both tested their prolific gifts in the field of civic activities and in politics; for a brief time in 1689-90 and 1701-02, Newton was a member of parliament for Cambridge. In their time, both men were responsible for causing a death or two.[40] Both presided over the grandest alchemic ‘successes’ of their times: Faust whilst an advisor to the Emperor and Newton in his tenure at the Royal Mint. Faust (Part II) provides a prescient account of the genesis of the modern economic order with its newly discovered powers to create fiat money, while Newton’s arrival at the Royal Mint coincided with the climax of the debate on the future of the English currency between the ‘restorers’ (aka John Locke) and the ‘devaluers’ (aka William Lowndes, Secretary of the Treasury), with Newton throwing his support behind the latter.[41] In an important sense, Faust II  deals with the consequences of the financial trends which Newton helped inaugurate.[42]    Both Newton and Faust were investors in the major financial bubbles of their times. Newton, notably, was involved in the South Sea Bubble of 1720, ‘after the South Sea Company promised massive returns from its slave-trading enterprise’.[43] Faust, infamously, invested his proceeds from the paper money scheme in land reclaimed from the sea, a venture doomed to failure for denying the laws of nature and ignoring the basic tenets of economics. Both men considerably exceeded the average life expectancy of their respective times.   Goethe and Newton   What of Newton and Goethe, though? Separated by almost a century, both lived well into their eighties. Both were prodigious talents, geniuses, ennobled by their respective monarchs, staunch Puritans in the matters of faith, devout naturalists, and experimentalists, where their science was concerned. Both men experienced the ‘unsparing censure’ of ‘judging, unfeeling mankind’ in relation to their scientific discoveries.[44] Both harboured a certain disdain for the frivolity involved in hypothesising, which arguably haunted them equally.[45] The above notwithstanding, both shared a passion for symbolism and the occult, repeatedly traversing ‘from mystics to physics’ and ‘from physics to magic’.[46] Both men knew how to bear a grudge.[47] Both held important offices of the State. Neither proved entirely immune to the temptations of fame and fortune. Both appear to have harboured unresolved psychological childhood trauma. It has been suggested that both great men may have been gay.[48]   Was it all about light?   Newton and Goethe’s career paths diverge in at least one important respect. Goethe’s prescient insight anticipated the coming era of fiat (ie paper) money, as a continuation of alchemists’ quest for the elusive Philosopher’s Stone: the singularity that would enable turning lead into gold and the meeting point of the physical and the metaphysical. To borrow from Nietzsche, it was as though Goethe was able to see the consequences of ‘the track along which this wheel had yet to roll’.[49] Where Goethe once fought hard against the Scotsman-inspired idea—originally implemented by the French[50]—of erasing his Duke Karl August’s substantial debts by embracing the new trend of printing paper money, Newton’s endeavours at the Royal Mint laid the groundwork for turning money into a commodity of commerce. This development proceeded via a curious case of the first great ‘gold-silver’ carry trade, which saw England briefly establish a de-facto gold standard in 1717, and all but precipitated Britain’s full move to the Gold Standard by 1816. This was an early harbinger of the ‘consumer revolution’ which would sweep through the eighteenth century, paving the way to the kind of modernity Goethe had staunchly resisted.[51] In a certain sense, Newton became an exponent of financial alchemy (which Goethe opposed) and may be said to have partly and perhaps unwittingly realised his alchemic ambition in his role at the Royal Mint. This divergence between the two great men, however, was neither superficial nor accidental.   Although Goethe considered Newton a redoubtable genius, he had little patience for the cults of self-appointed Newtonians—English as well as German—who busied themselves by fashioning Newton into a Christ-like figure, a quasi-catholic saint, something he started out by opposing yet may have inadvertently contributed to. More of an artist himself, Goethe was a proponent of the higher synthesis of the rational (science) and the irrational (art, religion). His Theory of Colours  (1810) openly challenged Newton’s Opticks  (1704) as a shallow theoretical falsification of nature and of the history of colour—to the point where the difference between the two geniuses developed into a protracted acrimony which straddled the empirical and the metaphysical.   Should I not be proud, when for twenty years I have had to admit to myself that the great Newton and all the mathematicians and noble calculators along with him were involved in a decisive error with respect to the doctrine of colour, and that I among millions was the only one who knew what was right in this great subject of nature?[52]    Goethe’s criticism was aimed squarely at Newton’s most sacred, albeit consciously anti-metaphysical claim, made in his General Scholium , appended to the second edition of the Principia  in 1713: ‘ hypotheses non fingo ’. In other circumstances, it should have been possible for Goethe to rise above the desire to critique Newton’s theory. He had earlier noted that ‘if two masters of the same art differ in their statement of it, in all likelihood the insoluble problem lies midway between them’.[53] However, having waged an almost forty-year campaign to ‘establish a non-Newtonian theory of colour’, Goethe appeared to ascribe an almost existential significance to it, as though the higher Light itself were ‘suffering at the hands of Newton’.[54] In so doing, as John Tyndall noted, Goethe ventured to undertake the task, the magnitude of which would be comparable to Newton attempting ‘to produce a “Faust”’: something which Newton would never tackle in view of the ‘poverty of his intellect on the poetic and dramatic side’.[55] Ultimately, Wittgenstein might have been right to note in relation to Goethe’s alleged ‘great error’[56] that ‘what Goethe was really seeking was not a physiological but a psychological theory of colours’.[57]    The aphotic depths of the Newton-Goethe divide   There was, however, something else at play that made the Goethe-Newton polemics atypical.[58] As the battle over the rightful domicile of ‘genius’ (artistic or scientific) raged on between the two of its brightest manifestations, it also exemplified the clash of the worldviews that would forge the advent of modernity. Seen in this light, it appears that the texture of Goethe’s polemic vis-à-vis Newton and the difference in their respective frames of reference was projected onto and reflected in Faust’s own skirmishes at the furthest boundaries of contemporary science. If Goethe can be said to have attempted a ‘physics of colour’ based on experience, as a way of achieving an elusive authentic wholeness of reflection by dwelling in the phenomenon instead of representing it with abstract mathematical formulae,[59] then the warning of the ‘artist’s conscience’[60] concerning the perilous consequences of pursuing any ‘one-sided preference, whether it be science […] or art’ to its extreme resonates throughout his Faust .[61]   The lesson from Faust is not unlike the images that cry out to us from Joseph Wright of Derby’s famous paintings An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump  (1768) and The Alchemist Discovering Phosphorus  (1771), which have been associated with Newton,[62] or the image of Shelley’s Frankenstein  (1818). These and notable other examples problematised the unbridled pursuit of scientific discovery as resulting in chaos, tragedy, and despair for all involved in earnestly trying to deliver on science’s emancipatory promise. A deeper cultural change underwrote the Newton-Goethe intellectual divide, which the liminal figure of Faust inadvertently straddled: an age-old premonition that science, unless it be tempered by art and the mythical, would lead to a dehumanisation of society.   Could Faust  have been Goethe’s veiled apology to Newton?   Unsurprisingly, further signs of antipathy towards Newton and his disciples—his ‘furor anti-Newtonianus’[63]—emerge from Goethe’s writings, in particular the Maxims and Reflections . This antipathy appears to run deeper than simply intellectual differences over the physics of colour. Goethe’s Maxims #1242-1248, in which he accuses Newton of embedding ‘a hidden anthropomorphism’ into his scientific theories, vividly reflects Goethe’s intellectual opposition to the mechanistic and reductive nature of Newton’s laws of motion and astronomy.[64] This critique is not merely scientific but philosophical, representing Goethe’s broader resistance to the dehumanizing implications of Newtonian mechanics. It reveals Goethe’s preference for a more organic, holistic understanding of nature, one that transcends the rigid framework of mechanical causality. Beneath this intellectual resistance, however, there lurks a subtle undercurrent of personal rivalry—perhaps tinged with Goethe’s resentment over Newton’s audacious claims to the invention of calculus, a matter of great contention with Leibniz, whom Goethe greatly admired. This philosophical feud underscores not only the clash of their worldviews but also the personal stakes embedded within the scientific and intellectual ambitions of their age. At times, Goethe almost appears to bear a misguidedly patriotic, cultural, and spiritual grudge towards the great Englishman:   The battle against Newton  is really being carried on in a very low region. One is contesting a badly envisaged, badly developed, badly applied, badly theorized phenomenon. He is being accused of a lack of caution in his early experiments, of intentionality in those that followed, of precipitation in his theorizing, of obstinacy in his defence, and overall of a half-unconscious, half-conscious lack of straightforwardness. A hundred grey horses don’t make up one single white horse .[65]   Could, however, Goethe’s lack of recognition as a scientist by scientists compared to that enjoyed by Newton during his lifetime have played a role here?[66] Could this have been a problem Goethe recognised and confronted artistically?   There can be no doubt that Faust  is sublime and extraordinarily complex in its influences, but was it also a result of Goethe’s creative sublimation, transfiguring what he lacked and possibly coveted in terms of critical acclaim for his scientific endeavours into an enduring artistic masterpiece? Could the Faust of the dawn of the nineteenth century, therefore, have been a discarnate child of Goethe’s creative sublimation of the envy for Newton the man and, more so, Newton the scientist? Furthermore, could this self-inflicted ‘trauma’—experienced through the tragic eyes of Faust and with the added humility of an artist—have inadvertently heightened Goethe’s creativity, thus enabling him to see farther than Newton?[67] And, finally, could Part II of Goethe’s Faust, which appeared in print almost a quarter of a century after Part I—near to Goethe’s own passing and containing a radical departure from Marlowe’s version in respect of Faust’s fate—have become the means by which Goethe sought to settle his differences and make peace with Newton?[68]    Conclusion   Faust’s provenance as a Volksbuch  will always favour a ‘collective portrait, which is bound to neither time, place, or person’.[69] As Palmer and More noted, the Faust tradition is the ‘vehicle of certain fundamental religious and philosophical problems which have ever fascinated and tormented mankind’.[70] However, to capture the Geist of a particular epoch—in order to speak to it in the vernacular it would understand, as well as to see the unfolding of its implications beyond the inevitable short-sightedness of any present moment—is the generic need also embody specific attributes.[71] Isaac Newton, sourced from the archives of real life, provides a plausible match for Goethe’s Faust . If this resemblance should be a mere coincidence, then—at least—we have learned that seemingly credible matches can sometimes be purely the play of chance and imagination which, akin to Penelope, tirelessly weave their web of human existence afresh.   I am not convinced this connection is entirely random. I am of the view that we do not yet (or no longer) possess the sensibility to grasp the quantum transformations of energy, including information and thinking more generally, which underwrites human relations and crafts narratives. When it comes to Goethe’s retelling of the tragic tale, even though Faust remained an allegorical collage, there is to my mind sufficient evidence to support further exploring the hypothesis that Newton played anything but a peripheral role in firing up the creative genius of Goethe, who conjured up his Faust in Newton’s likeness. His failure to reference this connection explicitly might be explained as the result of a desire not to embolden and inadvertently contribute to the cultic efforts of Newtonians either side of the English Channel, whom Goethe opposed as staunchly as Newton once opposed the Catholicization of Cambridge. In the end, Goethe provided his own—ambiguous and unexpected—version of redemption for the tormented genius and the divided soul of Faust, perhaps one he would have wished for Newton, who, in some important respects, may have been a doppelgänger of Goethe himself. This kind of redemption requires reconciling with oneself. It echoes in Nietzsche’s equally perplexing amor fati, which he quite possibly arrived at having contemplated Goethe’s Faust: ‘“Love that which is necessary”— amor fati —this would be my morality, to do the best to raise mankind above its terrible origins and up to your level’.[72] Dmitri Safronov Dmitri Safronov holds a PhD in Political Economy from the University of Cambridge for research on ‘Nietzsche’s Political Economy’ (2020). Dmitri received an M.Sc. from the London School of Economics, and Honors BA in Philosophy and Politics from Trent University. Prior to matriculating at Cambridge, he spent over 20 years in the City of London, working for the leading global investment banking franchises. Dmitri’s profile and list of recent publications can be found on < https://philpeople.org/profiles/dmitri-safronov >. [1] I am incredibly grateful to Dr Patricia Fara, Professor Simon Schaffer, Professor Robert Iliffe, and Professor Myles Jackson for their valuable and educational comments on the early drafts of this paper, particularly in relation to Newton, as well as for the suggestions for further research. [2] Harold Jantz, ‘Goethe’s Faust as a Renaissance Man: Sources and Prototypes’ (1949) 1(4) Comparative Literature 348. See also Harry Levin, ‘A Faustian Typology’ in Peter Boerner and Sidney Johnson (eds), Faust through Four Centuries—Vierhundert Jahre Faust  (Max Niemeyer 1989) 1-13. [3] Hans Christoph Binswanger, Money and Magic: A Critique of the Modern Economy in the Light of Goethe’s Faust  (University of Chicago Press 1994) 30. [4] Fara alludes to this possibility when referring to Carlyle’s inclusion of both Newton and Faust in his ‘catalogue of innate geniuses’. Patricia Fara, Newton: The Making of Genius  (Columbia University Press 2002) 227. [5] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings  (Cambridge University Press 1999) §18. [6] In 1692-3, Newton suffered a serious nervous breakdown followed by a prolonged depression. These events have been linked to a possible mercury poisoning. Newton’s career pursuits thereafter gravitated away from science and, through a brief flirtation with politics, towards a 30-year stint as a distinguished civil servant. [7] See William H Carter, ‘Faust’s Begehren : Revisiting the History of Political Economy in Faust II ’ (2014) 21 Goethe Yearbook 104. Smith expressed reservations about some of Newton’s financial ideas—see RC Fay, ‘Newton and the Gold Standard’ (1935) 5(1) The Cambridge Historical Journal 115. [8] Philip M Palmer and Robert P More, The Sources of the Faust Tradition from Simon Magus to Lessing  (Routledge 1936) 242. [9] John Maynard Keynes, ‘Newton, The Man’ in Elizabeth Johnson and Donald Moggridge (eds), The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes , vol 10:  Essays in Biography  (Cambridge University Press 1978) 374. [10] Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West (Oxford University Press 1919) 119. [11] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science  (Vintage 1974) §105. [12] ibid §203. [13] Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations (Cambridge University Press 1997) II §8. [14] See Thomas Levenson, Newton and the Counterfeiter (Faber & Faber 2009) 241. [15] Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena (Oxford University Press 1974) vol 1 §360 (‘What One Has’); vol 2 §320. [16] Palmer and More (n 8) 3. [17] See ibid 15; Frank Baron, ‘Georg Lukács on the Origins of the Faust Legend’ in Boerner and Johnson (n 2) 13; Gerald Strauss, ‘How to Read a Volksbuch ’ in Boerner and Johnson (n 2) 27. [18] Jane K Brown, ‘ Faust’  in Lesley Sharpe (ed), The Cambridge Companion to Goethe  (Cambridge University Press 2002) 88. [19] Spengler (n 10) 99-100. [20] Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy  (Princeton University Press 1968) 168. [21] Beatrice Daw Brown, ‘Marlowe, Faustus, and Simon Magus’ (1939) 54(1) PMLA 83-6; Stephen Haar, Simon Magus: The First Gnostic? (De Gruyter 2003); Karl P Wentersdorf, ‘Some Observations on the Historical Faust’ (1978) 89(2) Folklore 213. [22] Baron (n 17) 18. [23] See Jantz (n 2) 340-1; GB Deason, ‘The Protestant Reformation and the Rise of Modern Science’ (1985) 38(2) Scottish Journal of Theology 238. [24]  See The Death of Simon Magus , a drawing in the Nuremberg Chronicle by an unknown artist, of 1493. [25] Levin (n 2) 4. [26] Carl Jung, Letters of C. G. Jung: Volume I, 1906-1950  (Routledge 1973) 89. [27] Frank E Manuel, A Portrait of Isaac Newton  (Frederick Muller Limited 1980) 391. [28] Compare Alexander Pope’s 1730 ‘Epitaph: Intended for Sir Isaac Newton’: ‘Nature, and Nature’s laws lay hid in night. God said, Let Newton be! and all was light’. [29] William R Newman, Newton the Alchemist  (Princeton University Press 2019) 393. [30] Levin (n 2) 5. [31] See Robert Iliffe and George E Smith (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Newton  (Cambridge University Press 2016) 128; LW Johnson and ML Wolbarsht, ‘Mercury Poisoning: A Probable Cause of Isaac Newton’s Physical and Mental Ills’ (1979) 34(1) Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 1-9; Newman (n 29) 477. [32] See also Goethe’s tale of unrequited love in Die Leiden des jungen Werthers  ( The Sorrows of Young Werther , 1774). [33] Edward F Edinger, Goethe’s Faust: Notes for a Jungian Commentary  (Inner City Books 1990) 44. [34] ibid 46. [35] ibid. [36]  The name ‘Mephistopheles’ is of unknown origins. KJ Schröer, a prominent Goethe scholar, suggested that it is a compound of Hebrew mephitz ‘destroyer’ (or ‘spoiler’) + tophel ‘liar’ (short for tophel sheqer, literally ‘falsehood plasterer’; see also Job xiii:4). [37] Fittingly, the brother of the four grey women was called ‘Death’. [38] Manuel (n 27) 388-91. [39] Levin (n 2) 1. [40] In Newton’s case, William Chaloner (hanged 1699) and around 28 others for counterfeiting (see Manuel (n 27) 244); in Faust’s, Gretchen’s mother, brother, and daughter, as well as Philemon and Baucis. [41]  Already in the early scenes, Mephistopheles persuades the heavily indebted Holy Roman Emperor to print paper money—only notionally backed by gold that had not yet been mined—to solve an economic crisis, with initially happy results until more and more money is printed and rampant inflation ensues. Regarding Newton, see Glyn Davies, A History of Money  (University of Wales Press 2002) 245-8. [42] For an insightful discussion connecting Newton, Goethe, their respective theories of light, and the ‘Gold Standard’, see Christopher Houghton Budd, Finance at the Threshold: Rethinking the Real and Financial Economies  (Routledge 2017) 14-21. [43] Patricia Fara, ‘When Isaac Newton was Master of the Royal Mint’ ( Prospect Magazine , 21 April 2021) < https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/economics-and-finance/isaac-newton-royal-mint-physics-gravity-currency > accessed 29 January 2025. Founded in 1711, the South Sea Company was largely a scheme for managing British government debt. Newton was an early investor and profited handsomely as the price of South Sea stock rose over the course of the 1710s. In 1720, however, the company’s stock experienced one of the most spectacular rises and falls in financial history. [44] Walter Kaufmann, Goethe’s Faust  (Anchor Books 1961) 401. [45] Consider Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Maxims and Reflections  (Penguin 1998) maxims #520, 560, 1221-1222 and Newton’s famous ‘hypotheses non fingo’ from his   General Scholium . [46] Victor Barsan and Andrei Merticariu, ‘Goethe’s theory of colors between the ancient philosophy, middle ages occultism and modern science’ (2016) 3 Cogent Arts & Humanities 12 . [47] Newton against Hooke, Huygens, Leibniz, and the English Jesuits in Liège (regarding the criticism of gravity, invention of calculus, and theory of colours); and Goethe against Newton himself. [48] Regarding Goethe, see Karl Hugo Pruys, Die Liebkosungen des Tigers. Eine erotische Goethe-Biographie  (Edition q 1995). Regarding Newton, see Manuel (n 27); Richard S Westfall, Never at Rest  (Cambridge University Press 1980); Natalie M Rosinky, Sir Isaac Newton: Brilliant Mathematician and Scientist  (Compass Point Books 2007). These claims remain a much disputed conjecture; in particular, Scott Mandelbrote and Robert Iliffe argue to the contrary. [49] Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All-Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits  (Cambridge University Press 1996) II Assorted Opinions and Maxims §106. [50] Specifically, Louis XV of France and John Law (1671-1729), the mastermind behind the Mississippi Bubble (1720). Goethe followed closely the exploits of Law, a Scottish financier and monetary theorist, in his role as chief financial adviser to King Louis XV of France. Law’s ideas to revive the war-ravaged French economy, by printing paper money (ie, debt) and replacing the existing national debt with equity investments in dubious economic ventures, ended in economic disaster. [51] For Goethe’s views on the principles of economic management, see the excellent discussion in Myles W Jackson, ‘Goethe’s Economy of Nature and the Nature of His Economy’ (1992) 17(5) Accounting, Organizations and Society 459-69; Binswanger (n 3). [52] Goethe, Letter to Eckermann, 30 December, 1823, quoted in Dennis L Sepper, Goethe Contra Newton: Polemics and the Project for a New Science of Color  (Cambridge University Press 2003) 1. See also Goethe (n 45) maxim #1285. [53] Goethe (n 45) maxim #527. [54] Nicholas Boyle, Goethe: The Poet and the Age: Volume I: The Poetry of Desire (1749-1790)  (Oxford University Press 1991) 645-7. [55] John Tyndall, Goethe’s Farbenlehre: Theory of Colors  (independently published 2019, originally published 1880) 78. [56] Dennis L Sepper, ‘Goethe Against Newton: Towards Saving the Phenomenon’ in Frederick Amrine, Francis J Zucker, and Harvey Wheeler (eds), Goethe and the Sciences: A Reappraisal  (Springer 1987) 175. [57] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value  (Blackwell 1978) 26e. [58] See also Barsan and Merticariu (n 46); Spengler (n 10) 384-90; Sepper (n 56) 181; Michael Duck and Michael Petry (trans), Goethe’s “Exposure of Newton’s Theory”  (Imperial College Press 2016)  for further exploration of the intellectual and aesthetic tensions underwriting the Goethe-Newton disagreements. [59] See discussion in Henry Bortoft, The Wholeness of Nature  (Lindisfarne Books 1996) 18-20, 31. [60] Ronald Douglas Gray, Goethe the Alchemist  (Cambridge University Press 2010) 260. [61] Nietzsche (n 49) II Assorted Opinions and Maxims §186 [62] See Fara (n 4) 21-2. [63] Friedrich Nietzsche, Letter to Carl von Gersdorff, 12 December 1870 ( Nietzsche Source ) < http://www.nietzschesource.org/#eKGWB/BVN-1870,111 > accessed 30 January 2025. [64] Goethe (n 45) maxim #1242; see the sequence of #1242-1248. [65] ibid maxims #1294-95; my emphasis. [66] Schelling and Hegel, as well as a handful of naturalists, asserted Goethe’s ‘victory’ over Newton, but not the physicists. [67] See Gray (n 60) 262. [68]  Barsan and Merticariu aptly conclude their thought-provoking study of the Goethe-Newton feud with the comment that ‘Goethe is defeated by Newton, just like the Greek Gods were defeated by monotheism. He is defeated, but not crushed; what is left is rich enough to reveal a fascinating facet of his genius’. See Barsan and Merticariu (n 46) 27. [69] Edinger (n 33) 52. [70] Palmer and More (n 8) 3. [71] Such attributes as are on display between Parts I and II of Goethe’s Faust , where the latter explores the socio-political problems of Goethe’s age, in a diversion from but also establishing inedible links with the metaphysical themes problematised in Part I. [72] Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘Nachgelassene Fragmente 1881 15[20]’ ( Nietzsche Source ) < http://www.nietzschesource.org/#eKGWB/NF-1881,15 > accessed 30 January 2025.

In recent years, many Queer and / or Indigenous, Black, and other racialized artists, writers, and scholars have exposed the relationship between colonialism, climate change, and environmental issues around the world. These discourses point to the need for highlighting and resisting the colonial undertones and structures embedded in climate change policy or future environmental planning. Some artists have even stepped outside of conventional ways of thinking through climate change and colonialism, bringing together seemingly disparate themes in their practices and work. Dr Léuli Eshrāghi is a Sāmoan / Persian curator, artist and scholar whose research and work explores artistic themes of sexuality, queer kinships, relationality, ancestral knowledge(s), and gender identities from a decolonial and Indigenous lens. [1]  In their chapter, ‘Rimming Islands: Fa’afafine-Fa’atane Pleasure and Decoloniality’, from the 2022 book Sex Ecologies , Eshrāghi speaks of a Sāmoan Ancestor, referring to them by their pronoun i’a, to offer a gentle yet provocative way of exploring ancestry in relation to sexuality and queerness:   To me, this Ancestor holds a tender, but firm gaze, daring us to remember our ways from before the fall of colonization and domination. Rather than embodying shame, would i’a giggle as we gossip about the meagre offering on Grindr or Tinder in the village? Would i’a regale younger queers with hxstories of sex in the forest with cousins, with neighbours from a far-off village who have come for ceremony and exchange?   While Eshrāghi’s work has been considered within the context of Indigenous, queer scholarship and artistic practice, very little has been written about Eshrāghi’s thoughtful consideration of land, water, and other elements of nature as it relates to these themes. What is the significance of the forest that hold those hxstories of sex?[2] Why would Eshrāghi evoke an image of full, lush green trees that cover the bodies and experience pleasure with each other? Why does nature, or the environment more broadly, matter in their work? The answers to these questions can be found in Eshrāghi’s many performance video works, specifically Golden Flow of the Merri Yaluk (2015), SOGI MAI (2016), and re(cul)naissance  (2021). Through an analysis of these works, I argue that Eshrāghi’s artistic practice circumvents colonial and gendered relationships with the environment and with their human kin. My framework of analysis for these works comes primarily from Eshrāghi’s own notion of ‘rimming islands’ and ‘rimming time’. C entral to Eshrāghi’s notion of rimming is a projection of Queer and Indigenous relationships. In this article, I will draw out the significance of water and time using this conceptual practice of rimming to argue that Eshrāghi’s work disrupts colonial and gendered relationships with various environments.   Rimming is a sexual act performed between lovers when one uses their tongue to pleasure another’s anus. Eshrāghi’s notion of rimming follows the work of many Queer scholars, artists, and writers who consider anal sex, the buttocks, or ‘ass-play’ as a site of conceptual engagement to make (non)sense of Queer sexuality, intimacies, representation, or community experiences. [3]   Throughout, I will demonstrate the significance of Queer and/or Indigenous perspectives that have the potential to disrupt colonial discourses around the climate and the environment, especially important during our current climate crisis. Moreover, I will situate Eshrāghi’s practice within the context of their own Sāmoan diasporic experience, as well as the colonial oppression of global Indigenous gender identities. My framework of analysis purposefully leans on Eshrāghi’s own ideas because their scholarly and artistic practices all arise from these themes of pleasure, sexuality, Indigeneity, and relational thinking, and my own positionality as a non-Sāmoan, non-Indigenous scholar can limit my understanding of their work. In other words, this paper takes cues from Eshraghi’s own theoretical concepts to analyze their work, offering a new way of thinking through climate change which considers sexuality, queerness, and colonialism.   Rimming: Pleasure, desire, and relationality   Eshrāghi has written extensively on Indigenous pleasure and how capitalism, colonialism, and Christianity across the Great Ocean [4]  have repressed genders, desires, and sexualities, resulting in gender-based violence against non-binary and Trans-Indigenous bodies. In pre-colonial Sāmoan culture, those who adopted other Indigenous gender identities were accepted as part of the community and sexual relations with the same sex were never shamed. In fact, there existed and continue to exist terms for those who do not experience gender as ‘women’ or ‘men’: fa’afafine  (becoming woman, or the way of the woman) and fa’atane  (becoming man, or the way of the man). [5] Sāmoan scholar Johanna Schmidt explains that historically Sāmoans have had a collective idea about culture, and that during pre-colonial times gender markers of any kind were established as a way to contribute labour ‘for the good of the group’. [6] Because of this relationship between gender and labour, fa’afafine  were not necessarily marked by behaviour or appearance. Schmidt explains that this might be the reason why fa’afafines  are relatively invisible within early colonial documentation of Sāmoan culture, [7] in addition to the fact that, as Eshrāghi points out, European missionaries did not consider fa’afafine  and fa’atane  human beings. [8] However, fa’afafine  had a constant presence in Sāmoan cultural hxstories and were integral parts of their communities and villages. For example, fa’afafine and fa’atane  had nurturing and housekeeping roles in village performances and ceremonies but their existence was threatened by colonialism. [9] Anyone who exhibited any expression or behaviour that did not conform to heteronormative relationships or the colonial gender binary was punished, killed, or experienced other forms of gender-based violence.   Eshrāghi suggests that the non-colonial action of rimming explores pleasure as emancipatory and part of both chosen kinships and actual bloodlines. [10]  For Eshrāghi, pleasure is a conduit for Indigenous ‘cumlines’, the sexual and spiritual genealogies that assert desire as the foundation for kinships. [11] Eshrāghi evokes the body as part of kinship-making, writing, such that ‘our bodies are the skins, waters, airs of the nations where we come from’. [12] Eshrāghi also considers the physical aspects of sexuality and pleasure, asking how ‘antics with lovers’ can resist colonial legacies in the form of feeding, licking, eating, devouring, pouring, furrowing, and rimming. [13] They consider the last point of rimming to think about movement and intimacy and to centre pleasure as part of community-building. Within the context of water and the islands, the concept of rimming offers a way of freely flowing relationships across the Great Ocean, centring water as part of that relationality between different people. As it relates to time, rimming suggests that time moves back, forth, and around. Though water and time both flow, I analyse them in isolation to draw out the meaning of both water (as part of islands) and time (as disrupting time) within this broader notion of rimming. I argue that by isolating the rimming of time and the rimming of water, we can more fully understand the concept of rimming that manifests in different ways throughout Eshrāghi’s works.   Eshrāghi highlights Queer, Indigenous experiences to reclaim repressed gender identities and advocate for the safety of those who experience gender-based colonial violence within their communities. However, these acts of reclamation are not referential to the heteronormativity and binaries that are established by colonial powers. Rather, they rebuild communities in a way that embraces the integral roles that are possible within a community. The relationships that are established between the participants and environments in Eshrāghi’s works build kinship within and beyond communities—kinship that does not exist through the exclusion of oppressed people such as fa’afafine or fa’atane. This is reminiscent of Cree / Métis / Saulteaux scholar Jas M Morgan and Cree scholar Billy-Ray Belcourt’s conversation about Queer Indigenous ethics, where they explicitly highlight a ‘relational way of being’. [14]  As Belcourt explains, differently gendered Indigenous peoples often ‘seek and/or perform alternative sites of political action and community building’, further signifying relationality as part of Queer Indigenous ethics and aesthetics. [15] They even suggest that Queer Indigenous ethics connect the past, present, and future of Indigenous communities where enactments of care and ‘relational transformation’ take precedence. In many ways, Eshrāghi’s practice works through this Queer Indigenous aesthetic considers Indigenous Queer and trans pasts and futures. In the following sections, I will separately analyse time and water to explore how Eshrāghi rims both throughout three video works: Golden Flow of the Merri Yaluk , SOGI MAI , and re(cul)naissance . Through these works, I argue that by rimming water and time, Eshrāghi disrupts gendered and sexual relationships to the environment.   Rimming time: Projecting futures   Eshrāghi introduces rimming time as a way to circumvent what they call ‘Gregorian shame-time’, which was imposed upon Indigenous peoples across the Great Ocean with the arrival of colonizers. [16] Eshrāghi’s use of ‘shame’ points to how other Indigenous gendered peoples of the Great Ocean are cast within a ‘backward, whiteward trajectory of annihilation’ that sees their existence hinging on pain, death, and unbelonging. [17] Instead of aligning kinships and Indigenous pleasure to the linear process of Gregorian calendrical time, Eshrāghi suggests that rimming time allows for hxstories that move backwards and forward, where relationships are based on Indigenous pleasures. [18] Eshrāghi’s idea of Gregorian shame-time resonates with settler-scholar Mark Rifkin’s explanation of settler-time, a white, western framing of time that asserts linear temporal experiences and the ‘orderings, articulations and reckonings of time’. [19] Settler-time emphasizes settler-futurities: that is, the survival of settler societies and ideologies, often excluding Indigenous communities, Queer communities, and differently gendered peoples.   Non-linear temporal explorations can resist settler-time, especially when Black, Indigenous, People of Colour (BIPOC), Two-Spirit, Queer, and Trans artists employ non-linear temporal formations that foreground their own communities’ futures. [20]  I argue that rimming time embraces a non-linear temporal formation that is rooted in both pleasure and Indigenous formations of time. In Punā’oa ‘Upu Mai ‘O Atumotu / Glossaire des Archipels (2022), Eshrāghi mentions rimming to define the Sāmoan word taumamuli taking cues from Sāmoan scholar Leali’fano Albert Refiti. They state   that taumamuli  is the ‘realization of Indigenous time through acts of rimming or surrounding butts or the end of the world’ (fig 1). Taumamuli  denotes Indigenous formations of time and implies a futuristic perspective in thinking about the end of the world. I argue that the use of futurism in Eshrāghi’s practice points to the forward-looking perspective of rimming that does not exist at the expense of Indigenous, Queer, Trans, or non-binary bodies. Fig 1. Punāʻoa o ʻupu mai ʻo atumotu / Glossaire des archipels (Léuli Eshrāghi 2019, inkjet print on heavyweight paper, 33 x 46 inches). Edition of 20. Collection of the artist. Image taken from < http://leulieshraghi.art/punaoa-o-upu-mai-o-atumotu >. © Léuli Eshrāghi The use of rimming time considers the past, present, and future of Queer, Indigenous peoples, resisting a colonial narrative that might situate them in the past or render them nonexistent, by reimagining relationships with the environment, now and into the future, as including or even underscored by pleasure. This suggestion of new relationships is timely considering the current climate crisis; it resists the feeling of isolation from the environment with intimacy and pleasure. The result is that the rimming of time can encourage us to care for the environment in times of climate crisis.   Rimming water in/of/around islands   In Eshrāghi’s performance videos, participants construct relationships with each other through different actions like touching and breathing while engaging with their environments. In addition to creating relationships between themselves, participants construct relationships with the various environments. Eshrāghi’s notion of rimming islands acknowledges their own Great Ocean context and the significance of water in the various environments presented in the performance videos. Water complements Eshrāghi’s curatorial, scholarly, and artistic practice that references ways of knowing or relating across the Great Ocean. Many scholars, such as Tongan scholar Epeli Hau’ofa and Sāmoan scholar Lana Lopesi, have explained that water, seas, and oceans is a significant part of the cultural heritage and ways of relating across different communities around the Great Ocean. These bodies of water flow freely, transcending political borders to connect communities across the Great Ocean. The Great Ocean context and holds weight in Eshrāghi’s practice as well.   Similar to white settler feminist and scholar Astrida Neimanis, I strive to think with water to understand rimming as fluid, moving freely, slipping, spreading, flowing in no particular direction, and connecting bodies to each other, including more-than-human ones. [21]  In this way, thinking with water can disrupt anthropocentrism in research or conversations about the environment and climate. As Eshrāghi writes, Western knowledge systems are typically centred around human life, a result of colonial epistemologies hailing from Europe that sever relationships and ‘responsibilities to rivers, lakes, fields, mountains, and deltas’. [22] White settler Australian scholar Val Plumwood describes how European colonization has resulted in colonial relationships between humans and more-than-human, like nature and animals, where the former come to control and dominate the latter. [23] This ideology insists that land is unused, underused, and empty, which then justifies the colonial domination of nature and non-human life. Nature and animals are othered, their differences are ignored, and they are not seen as independent. This othering of nature and animals directly follows the othering of Indigenous peoples. Plumwood argues for a decolonization of relationships with nature by affirming the presence of the other’s difference ‘as an independent presence to be engaged with on their own terms’. [24]   Referencing Refiti, Eshrāghi explains that many Indigenous communities across the Great Ocean experience kinships with different beings as described in the concept of vā , the ‘relational space between all things, a spatiality that is visual, emotional, political, and in constant flux’. [25] Refiti describes vā  as the ‘great tension that pushes the world outwards and gathers it inwards in its totality’. [26]   Vā  thus seeks to establish kinships beyond the human, existing outside of human-centric notions within colonial ways of being and living. As Refiti further outlines, oceanic perspectives include lalolagi , a holistic worldview where   nothing is unrelated, everything has a relation. Mountains, rivers, rocks, celestial movements, and people form a contiguous fabric, a network drawn in and out, thus always in tension, spreading, to māvae and regathering/reordering – tōfiga . [27]   I argue that Eshrāghi looks to Refiti’s scholarly and written work to think through Sāmoan knowledge, such that water is not only part of rimming but part of lalolagi  and vā . Thinking with water in Eshrāghi’s works resists a colonial relationship to the environment as a resource. Water, here, furthers the importance of care and meaningful relationships to the environment. This confronts the climate crisis by establishing better relationships between humans and the environment, rather than one of isolation.   In the following section, I will analyse three of Eshrāghi’s performance video works. First, I analyse Golden Flow of the Merri Yaluk , one of Eshrāghi’s earlier works, that shows three individuals interacting with each other and the Merri Yaluk Creek. I analyse how the participants rim time and water by interacting with each other, touching, caressing, and greeting each other, while curiously exploring the different nooks and crannies of the creek. After, I explore SOGI MAI , a performance video that shows participants greeting each other through sogi (so-ngi)—a Sāmoan practice of greeting where individuals share breath to affirm each other’s presence. The participants perform this greeting on top of a snowy, cold mountain framed by the sound of rapids, contrasting with the warmer climates in Eshrāghi’s other works. I consider how the practice of sogi establishes an intimacy with different people that resists settler-time and reinforces relationships with and through water. Finally, I explore Eshrāghi’s most recent body of work at the time of writing, re(cul)naissance . This work is an installation that includes a video-work. In re(cul)naissance , Eshrāghi explores Indigenous pleasures and non-colonial Indigenous actions with different participants through intimate actions of gentle caressing and other forms of tactile pleasure. As will be seen, re(cul)naissance  offers the most obvious examples of rimming time and water compared to the other videos.   Golden Flow of the Merri Yaluk   Golden Flow of the Merri Yaluk  is the earliest work by Eshrāghi analyzed here. In it, Eshrāghi and two other individuals, Joe Joe Orangias and Darcy Jones, explore the waters of a creek called Merri Yaluk (figs 2-4). This creek is known to be a ‘sacred source of life for the Wurundjeri people’, who are Indigenous to the area of so-called Australia known as Melbourne. [28]  As Eshrāghi mentions, this creek is a place for ‘liminal, Queer’ ways of relating, and the video’s participants accordingly explore the environment and their relationships. [29] Simply put, desire underpins all the actions of these individuals. They engage in a relational practice of rimming by gently and consensually wiping and caressing each other’s bodies, marking them with liquid as they explore the creek. Eshrāghi notes that these actions can resist the ‘pressure…to assert title over Indigenous territories in the marking of space’. [30] One of the ways European colonizers established control over lands was by naming them, erasing Indigenous names and ways of knowing about places. Part of this naming is the intention of removing the hxstory of a place, in this case, the hxstory and ancestral knowledge held in a place, in order to bring about a settler-colonial futurity at the expense of Indigenous lives. Gregorian shame-time then is rimmed by the actions of the participants, who use desire to relate with the environment and with each other. Equally significant in this rimming is the non-linear flow of the video. The beginning of the video establishes a kind of greeting between Eshrāghi and one of the participants, but then another participant joins and, from there, the scenes shift from one to another completely outside of chronological order. This hints at a future that makes space for other kinds of relating beyond shame-time.   Eshrāghi notes that the creek itself is ‘a secluded space where young and old interact in liminal, Queer ways unbeknownst to heteropatriarchal society’. [31] It carries great meaning as the waterway that surrounds and holds these non-colonial actions. Eshrāghi chose the creek to highlight another way of engaging with the environment that is rooted in desire and pleasure. Hau’ofa has written that waterways and seas are part of the cultural heritage of many communities across the Great Ocean, calling places like Sāmoa existing as part of a ‘sea of islands’ instead of an island in a vast sea. [32] Furthermore, Eshrāghi has likely come across the literature and research on Queer ‘cruising spots’ that point to green spaces, like forests or parks, as safe places for sex because Queer sex and intimacies are stigmatized within heteropatriarchal society. [33]   I argue that Eshrāghi enacts these liminal actions in the space with the participants in the video, to realize those actions rooted in pleasure. However, I do not believe the intention is to normalize those actions in the space. Instead, Eshrāghi and the individuals rim the waters, acting within and around the creek which comes to symbolize a flow of connections, meetings, and intimacies between each other. Indeed, the golden fluid is clearly part of the creek, as suggested in the title of the work: Golden Flow of the Merri Yaluk . Eshrāghi rims the waters of the creek, not literally but as a method of relating, to highlight the creek’s waters that hold these pleasures and intimacies. Figs 2-4. Golden Flow of the Merri Yaluk   (Léuli Eshrāghi 2015, single-channel HD video, 9 minutes, 54 seconds). Collection of the artist. Screenshots taken from < http://leulieshraghi.art/goldenflow >. © Léuli Eshrāghi SOGI MAI   Sogi   SOGI MAI  is a performance video that Eshrāghi created during their 2016 Indigenous Visual & Digital Arts Residency at The Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, in Mihrpha [34] (‘Banff’), Treaty Seven Territory. Sogi  (so-ngi) is a Sāmoan practice of greeting where individuals share breath to affirm each other’s presence, or ‘mana, cumulative energy’. [35]  In the video, Eshrāghi and one individual gently touch their foreheads against each other and deeply inhale the air between them. Eshrāghi performs this greeting with seven participants, including one greeting Eshrāghi with a young baby perched on their back (figs 5-6). [36] The participants perform their greetings against a wintry backdrop, with tall green trees and snowy ground. What is interesting here is the sharing of breath, visible as condensation in the cold air, and the crunch   of the participants’ footsteps on the snowy land as they walk to meet each other. At different points in the video, water flowing as rapids can be heard, sometimes harshly and loudly, sometimes gently and faintly. Through the residency, Eshrāghi was a guest on the Sacred Buffalo Guardian Mountain in Mirhnpa. This area also comprises the oral practices of the Îyârhe Nakoda (‘Stoney Nakoda’), comprised of the Bearspaw, Chiniki, and Goodstoney Nations, the Tsuut’ina First Nation, and nations part of the Blackfoot Confederacy: The Siksika, The Piikani, and The Kanai. This territory is home to the Shuswap Nations, Ktunaxa Nations, and the Métis Nation of Alberta, Region 3. [37] Eshrāghi’s employment of the practice of sogi is a careful and thoughtful practice to consider how to respectfully greet different people on different lands. It is significant that an Indigenous artist from relatively isolated parts of the world, The Great Ocean and so-called Australia, can engage in this deep, intimate relationality with others from different cultural backgrounds or nationalities in a faraway place. The effect of colonialism globally is often felt as isolation from other communities, even Indigenous communities who have once had relationships with each other, but which were disrupted by colonial and imperial practices of geopolitical border-making. [38]   Sogi Mai can be seen   as an extension of rimming, not only as a way of relating that can disrupt time and centre pleasure but establishing relationships beyond one’s own immediate, local communities.   Though it might not be readily apparent, water forms the foundation of Sogi Ma, especially considering Eshrāghi’s cultural heritage around water, and experiences and connections to islands in the Great Ocean. Looking closely at Sogi Mai , water is seen as the snow covering the mountains and the trees around the participants, but it is also heard as the crunch   under their feet as they walk towards each other and the quick flow of rapids in the background. Eshrāghi chose to include the snowy scenery, the sounds of walking on the snow, and the sometimes gentle, sometimes harsh movement of the rapids. I see Eshrāghi trying to make the environment familiar to them, as the water they have learnt from and through in their life has likely been warm and flowy. However, they emphasize the snowy, cold landscape, acknowledging how water in diverse forms can hold these connections to people in different kinds of places. That being said, the practice of sogi  generates some level of warmth, seen in the condensation of breath when the participants breathe in the air between them. Condensation, here, is still water, simply in the form of liquid vapour or steam, when warm air is exposed to cold air. Sogi  is a traditional Sāmoan greeting and would not usually be practised in cold weather, but the warm breath hints at Eshrāghi’s lessons from water from their own Great Ocean context. Eshrāghi then, engages in rimming here in the sense of moving freely and respectfully around a new, unfamiliar place, establishing a connection that is literally fluid at times or speaks to a kind of fluidity in how to create a connection with others in a new environment.   Eshrāghi also rims time in the video, but once again it might not be readily apparent. The artist notes that sogi  is undertaken as a way to consider fleeting, temporary connections, or meetings between people from various kinds of backgrounds. [39]  The fragmented sounds of the rapids indicate that the video is entirely non-linear. Moreover, it is difficult to tell who Eshrāghi meets first and last, perhaps suggesting that a linear chronology of relationality between the participants does not matter. The temporality of the video resists a settler time, insisting on the relationships above all else. The intimate act of sharing breath signifies that these connections, while fleeting, are deep and meaningful. Time, then, does not necessarily matter within those relationships, resisting any sense of Gregorian shame-time. Water and time may not be clear as elements of the video, but Eshrāghi does rim both to engage in relational practice. Figs 5-6. Sogi Mai (Léuli Eshrāghi 2016, single-channel HD video, 1 minute, 20 seconds). Collection of the artist. Screenshots taken from < http://leulieshraghi.art/sogi-mai >. © Léuli Eshrāghi re(cul)naissance   In re(cul)naissance , Eshrāghi and four other participants touch, caress, and wipe water on each other, set against tall green trees, branches, and stacked stones, with the sound of a river and rain gently flowing on Obelisk nude beach on Eora Nation territory  (figs 7-8) . [40] Throughout the video, the participants look as if they are in a state of pleasure, and at some points, they stare back at the camera, almost to involve the viewer in their actions. Their gazes could imply defiance, as many Indigenous artists have used this as a tactic to resist a colonial gaze from anthropological photographs that have often rendered Indigenous peoples as stuck in the past, primitive, or victims. [41] But based on Eshrāghi’s practice of pleasure, it feels more appropriate to think of the gaze as an invitational one—a gaze that asks how we can all engage in a relationality with others from a place of pleasure and desire. Eshrāghi mentions that this video is meant to think through kink practices and Indigenous pleasures as part of non-colonial actions that imagine futures after Gregorian shame-time. This figures ‘softness, hardness, fluid states, openness, closedness’ as a key part of those futures. [42] Eshrāghi has discussed that the title of the work re(cul)naissance  comes from the French word ‘renaissance’, meaning rebirth or stepping back, and ‘cul’, a French slang word for ‘ass’. [43]  Of all works in this essay, re(cul)naissance most fully captures Eshrāghi’s notion of rimming islands and time.   The environment in re(cul)naissance is more similar to the warm ones that Eshrāghi experienced living across the Great Ocean. In fact, the performance took place in an area that experiences relatively mild temperatures year-round. The ancestors of many Indigenous First Nations are known to have lived on the island, particularly the nations who are descended from the Eora People. [44]  As a contested site that has been altered by colonialism, the Indigenous, Queer, gender non-conforming, and / or non-binary participants, engage with the island through non-colonial actions, resisting the present state of the island which distorts the diverse Indigenous hxstories of the place and the people who inhabited it. These actions are framed by water in the form of rain and the river that lubricates the bodies as they caress and massage each other. While viewers might feel like voyeurs intruding in an intimate, sexual act, these actions do not only signify actual sexual intimacies. This performance video demonstrates that a relationship between individuals is meant to be fluid, soft, hard, or wet, where different people are meant to feel comfortable and good in their bodies and acknowledge those bodies through affectionate touch. Through their non-colonial actions, all the participants assert a Queer Indigenous presence and futurity based on pleasure.   Like Eshrāghi’s previously discussed works, this performance video does not follow a chronological order. However, what is more indicative of the rimming of Gregorian shame-time is the combination of cul and renaissance  in the title, which suggests that Eshrāghi projects a desire for a future that actively centres the relationships based on pleasure and desire between Queer Indigenous peoples. Eshrāghi uses the word cul to   evoke Queer pleasure and sex in the video. On the one hand, Eshrāghi suggests a reclamation of Queer relationships that were forcibly lost through assimilation and genocide at the onset of colonialism. On the other, the artist suggests a rebirth of those relationships that now look different because of the effects of colonialism on differently gendered Indigenous and Queer people. The title of the video suggests that Queer, Trans, and non-binary Indigenous peoples must work through their cumlines and bloodlines to move forward into the future. The term cumlines is reminiscent of Queer notions of ‘chosen family’, when Queer people seek acceptance and belongingness outside of their family, or bloodlines. However, cumlines is an Indigenous practice that circumvents the Western whiteness that is pervasive within practices of Queer chosen families. [45] Cumlines likewise disrupt the colonial practice of blood quantum:, that is, the amount of Indigenous blood that one might have in them. Generally, settler-colonial states globally used blood quantum as an attempt to assimilate Indigenous peoples into settler society. [46] But re(cul)naissance  circumvents blood quantum by demonstrating the deeply intimate relationships that could arise from exploring cumlines as well as bloodlines. Cumlines is not positioned as a binary to blood quantum or bloodlines; it encompasses all of these things and, as seen in this performance-video, a way to rim both is through pleasure. Figs 7-8. re(cul)naissance (Léuli Eshrāghi 2021, single-channel HD video, 3 minutes, 29 seconds). Collection of the artist. Screenshots taken from < http://leulieshraghi.art/reculnaissance >. © Léuli Eshrāghi Pleasure and / in the environment   While each performance video seemingly emphasizes the relationships between Eshrāghi and the participants, my focus on time and water points to the need for understanding human relationships with the environment. The water covers or surrounds the participants’ bodies and intervenes in these relationships to remind the viewer of the spaces, places, and hxstories that have held and will continue to hold some form of greeting and exchange between people. Though colonial relationships with the environment are premised on domination, extraction, and use, they are not the only ways of relating to the environment. Indigenous scholars stress the need for reciprocal, respectful relationships with the environment through such concepts as rimming time, rimming water, vā , and lalolagi . These views assert connections with everything, including the more-than-human world, challenging the colonial ideologies that have resulted in the current climate and ecological crises. [47]     Within the context of the current climate and ecological crises, Eshrāghi’s practice is extremely important because it implicates relationships between peoples and their surrounding environments. Eshrāghi offers a tangible way of establishing those relationships, like gently wiping or massaging waters onto each other, frolicking around a creek, or breathing and taking in the air no matter how cold it might be. These actions are non-colonial, in that they do not seek to extract from the land or people. Furthermore, taumamuli  or rimming considers the ‘end of the world’, suggesting an exploration into what the ‘end’ of the world could mean. I have written elsewhere that mainstream discourses around climate change always seem to delve into ideas of environmental apocalypse rooted in Judeo-Christian notions of Judgement Day, but Indigenous formations of time would not consider the end of the world in this way. [48] Eshrāghi would agree with this in re(cul)naissance , which proposes a kind of rebirth of ways of relating with others. Moreover, Eshrāghi’s work suggests pleasure as part of how we respond to climate environmental apocalypse and climate change by re-establishing respectful relationships with the environment. Their performance videos ask how we can ensure that respect and pleasure are part of ecological restoration projects, or how we can state climate disaster policies and future planning in ways that do not infringe upon Indigenous sovereignties. How can centring pleasure insist upon listening to, working with, and following the leadership of 2SQTBIPOC climate and environmental activists? And how does pleasure allow us to ensure the health and well-being of those whose lives are deeply and intimately affected by climate disasters? Pleasure and rimming might seem as though they have nothing to do with climate change, but Eshrāghi’s work shows that they have everything to do with it.   Conclusion: What’s to cum?   In this essay, I draw out themes of water and time within Eshrāghi’s notion of rimming to analyze their performance video works. As a scholar working around the arts, climate change, and the environment, I am particularly interested in the presence of the environment through water across Eshrāghi's works. I see immense potential for these videos of pleasure to offer another way of relating to the environment—a necessary pursuit considering the climate crisis. I consider the importance of Queer and Indigenous perspectives and ways of thinking or relating within the climate change discourse without overshadowing how Eshrāghi makes space for Queer, Trans, Non-binary, Two-Spirit, and Indigenous peoples. By assessing these works, we gain an understanding of the importance of spaces created by and for Two-Spirit, Queer, Trans, non-binary, and differently gendered Indigenous peoples. They ensure safety and belonging within a heteropatriarchal   society that enacts violence on those who do not conform, underscored by better relationships with the environment. The relationality between the participants in all of the works suggests a desire for relationship-building and solidarity across various communities and environments. Vulnerable groups like 2SQTBIPOC will be the most disrupted by climate disasters and will make up a large percentage of climate refugees’ populations.  [49] Therefore, as we continue to move into difficult climate futures, meaningful connections, relationships, and solidarities might prove to be key for the survival and well-being of all. In light of Eshrāghi’s analysis, I argue that we can only survive if we are brave enough to rim—both literally and figuratively. Jasmine Sihra Born and raised in Tsí tkaròn:to (‘Toronto’), Dr. Jasmine Sihra is a Punjabi researcher and curator. She completed her PhD in Art History at Concordia University in 2026. Her career and research focus on how the arts can contribute to planning for inevitable climate disasters and environmental pollution, particularly for underserved and underrepresented communities. [1] Léuli Eshrāghi, ‘Rimming Islands: Fa’afafine-Fa’atane Pleasure and Decoloniality’ in Stefanie Hessler (ed), Sex Ecologies  (MIT Press 2021) 108. [2] Hxstories is a term used by queer and feminist scholars to interrogate the commonly told histories of places and people from a mostly White, male, cisgender, straight perspective, which are typically taken as fact. Hxstories creates space for different kinds of narratives, accounts, and perspectives, especially marginalized ones. [3] See Leo Bersani,  Is the Rectum a Grave? And Other Essays  (University of Chicago Press 2009); Chris A Eng, ‘Apprehending the “Angry Ethnic Fag”: The Queer (Non) Sense of Shame in Justin Chin’s “Currency” and “Lick My Butt”’ (2020) 26(1)   GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 105; Jennifer C Nash, ‘Black Anality’ (2014) 20(4) GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 440. [4]  Eshrāghi uses the phrase ‘the Great Ocean’ to refer to the area known as the Pacific Islands, likely to point to the cultural exchange, migration flows, and shared hxstories across these areas. [5]  Eshrāghi (n 1) 103. [6] Johanna Schmidt, ‘Samoan fa'afafine’ in Howard Chiang (ed),  The Global Encyclopedia of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ) History  (Charles Scribner’s Sons 2019) 1408. [7]  ibid 1408. [8]  Eshrāghi (n 1) 101. [9]  Léuli Eshrāghi and Lucreccia Quintanilla, ‘Trueno tropical / Faititili a motu / Tropical thunder’ (2013) 1(2) Writing From Below Journal 94. [10] Léuli Eshrāghi, ‘Privilégier le plaisir autochtone / Priority to Indigenous pleasures’ in Jessyca Hutchens, Brook Andrew, Stuart Geddes, and Trent Walter (eds),  NIRIN NGAAY  (Biennale of Sydney 2020) 2. [11]  ibid 2. [12]  ibid 6. [13]  ibid 8. [14] Billy-Ray Belcourt and Lindsay Nixon, ‘What Do We Mean by Queer Indigenous Ethics?’ ( Canadian Art Magazine , 23 May 2018) < https://canadianart.ca/features/what-do-we-mean-by-queerindigenousethics/ > accessed 1 June 2024. [15]  ibid. [16]  Eshrāghi, (n 1) 103. [17]  ibid 104. [18]  ibid 104. [19]  Mark Rifkin, ‘One: Indigenous Orientations’ in Mark Rifkin (ed), Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination  (Duke University Press 2017) 3, 5. [20] Jasmine Sihra, ‘She Falls for Ages and Imagines Future After Apocalypse’ (2021) 3(1) Tba: Journal of Art, Media, and Visual Culture 228. [21] Astrida Neimanis,  Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology  (Bloomsbury 2017) 2. [22]  Eshrāghi (n 1) 105. [23] Val Plumwood, ‘Decolonising Relationships with Nature’ (2002) 2(2) Pan 9. [24]  ibid 15. [25]  Albert Refiti, ‘Vā Moana swells within a global sea of islands’ in Alexandra Chang, Charlotte Huddleston, and Janine Randerson (eds),  2020 Global Asia/Pacific Art Exchange Aotearoa: Ngā Tai o te Ao: the global tides  (St Paul St Gallery AUT; Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU 2021) 1. [26]  ibid 6. [27]  ibid 6. [28] ‘Walking Tours’ ( Wurundjeri Woi-Wurrung Cultural Heritage Aboriginal Corporation ) < https://wurundjericulturaltours.com.au/ > accessed 1 June 2024. [29]  Léuli   Eshrāghi, ‘Golden Flow of the Merri Yaluk (2015)’ ( LÉULI ESHRĀGHI ) < http://leulieshraghi.art/goldenflow > accessed 1 June 2024. [30]  ibid. [31]  Eshrāghi (n 29). [32] Epeli Hau'ofa, ‘Our Seas of Islands’ in We are the Ocean: Selected Works  (University of Hawai’i Press 2008) 31. [33]  Gavin Brown, ‘Ceramics, clothing and other bodies: affective geographies of homoerotic cruising encounters’ (2008) 9(8) Social & Cultural Geography 916. [34]  Translated from Stoney Nakoda as ‘the waterfalls’. [35] Léuli Eshrāghi, ‘SOGI MAI (2016)’ ( LÉULI ESHRĀGHI ) < http://leulieshraghi.art/sogi-mai >. [36]  ibid. [37] ‘Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity’ ( Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity ) < https://www.banffcentre.ca/ > accessed 1 June 2024. [38] Lana Lopesi, False Divides (Bridget Williams Books Limited 2018) 8. [39]  Eshrāghi (n 35). [40] Léuli Eshrāghi, ‘Re(cul)naissance (2020)’ ( LÉULI ESHRĀGHI ) < http://leulieshraghi.art/reculnaissance >. [41] Julie Nagam, ‘Deciphering the Digital and Binary Codes of Sovereignty/ Self-determination and Recognition/Emancipation’ (2016) 27(54) Public 78. [42]  ibid 78. [43]  Léuli Eshrāghi, ‘Untitled Lecture on Artistic, Curatorial, and Scholarly Practice’ (presentation in Dr. Alice Ming Wai Jim’s Graduate Seminar ARTH 649 Curatorial Studies: Theory and Practice in the Department of Art History, Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec, October 2022). [44] ‘Cockatoo Island’ ( Cockatoo Island ) < https://www.cockatooisland.gov.au/en/our-story/first-nations/ > accessed 1 June 2024. [45]  Tyler Bradway and Elizabeth Freeman, Queer Kinship: Race, Sex, Belonging, Form  (Duke University Press 2022) 10. [46]Annette M Jaimes, ‘Some Kind of Indian: On Race, Eugenics, and Mixed-Bloods’ in Naomi Zack (ed),  American Mixed Race: The Culture of Microdiversity  (Rowman & Littlefield 1995) 138.  [47]  See also eg Joanna Barker, ‘Confluence: Water as an Analytic of Indigenous Feminisms’ (2019) 43(3) American Indian Culture and Research Journal 2; Cutcha R Baldy and Melanie K Yazzie, ‘Introduction: Indigenous peoples and the politics of water’ (2018) 7(1) Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education and Society 10; Zoe Todd, ‘Fish, Kin, and Hope: Tending to Water Violations in Amiskwaciwâskahikan and Treaty Six Territory’ (2017) 43 Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry 102. [48] Sihra (n 20) 229. [49] Kirsten Vinyeta, Kyle Whyte, and Kathy Lynn, Climate change through an intersectional lens: gendered vulnerability and resilience in indigenous communities in the United States  (United States Department of Agriculture 2015) 3.

Professor Judith Butler is a world-renowned philosopher and theorist whose writing has made them a household name. Their work has shaped and continues to shape how we conceive of gender, post-structuralism, embodiment, sexuality, and language. This interview is centred around Butler’s recent work Who’s Afraid of Gender?  (Allen Lane 2024), which addresses the cultural and political anxieties surrounding gender and gender nonconformity. The following discussion dissects the rise of anti-gender ideology and explores the possibilities provided by psychoanalysis, feminist coalitions, the law, language, and art in counteracting this ideology in order to achieve liveability.   This interview was conducted on 15 July 2024 . The views and opinions expressed by Judith Butler in this interview are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the interviewer or CJLPA . The interviewer assumes no responsibility for the accuracy or completeness of the interviewee’s statements.   CJLPA : Who’s Afraid of Gender,  as the title suggests, is centred around various fears surrounding gender. The ‘anti-gender’ movement encapsulates multiple fears, whether of a destabilisation of norms, of invasion, inversion, regression, or also progression. Why is it that gender has become the site on which these fears have been projected? And what is it about gender that makes it so potent?   Judith Butler : It’s an excellent question. First, let me say that the anti-gender ideology movement does identify gender as a particularly dangerous and fearsome enemy. This anti-gender movement is largely part of broader right-wing movements, which target critical race theory, sexuality studies, ethnic studies, and migration studies as well. The teaching of race, gender, and sexuality tend also to be anti-migrant and/or subscribe to the Great Replacement theory. So, there are racial, sexual, gendered dimensions of this right-wing, psychosocial constellation, and gender can’t be easily or fully extricated from these other matters.   Secondly, I think it’s fair to say that potentially everyone is afraid of gender—that is, gender understood as gender identity or as a set of norms that convey both expectations and possible punishments. Gender and gender identity are, of course, distinct. Gender can be for some a way to establish a place in the world, who experience their body in a certain way, many of whom take gender for granted at the same time that they value its social operation. For some, gender anchors their experience and as such, when certain questions about gender get raised, they feel that anchor loosening, and fear a destabilisation or going adrift in directions that are unknown and possibly frightening.   That’s an abstract way of saying that many people don’t want to hear questions about how others can and do change their sex assignments or how the complexity of gender identity is lived. This fear also attends to the new vocabularies, including new pronouns, that have been developed to recognise that complexity of gender experience, not just among young people, but across generations, and which generally exist alongside political claims for equality and freedom, for protection against violence, and for protection against discrimination and pathologisation.   So, I ultimately think it is destabilising for those who hold the worldview, sometimes a religious view, that male and female are to be taken not only as naturally given or God given (divinely given through natural law) but also given for all time. That is, sex, or binary sex is considered to be an immutable thing we should not be debating—something that should not be subject to change or reinterpretation, something that is what it is for the time of life without alteration.   CJLPA : I wish to expand on the links you mentioned between race, gender, and sexuality a little later. However, prior to this, I wanted to focus more explicitly on some of the book’s terminology. The book ubiquitously refers to gender being construed as a ‘phantasm’ with purported destructive powers and draws on Jean Laplanche’s formulation of the ‘phantasmatic scene’. For the benefit of our readers, could you explain what it means for gender to be a ‘phantasm’ in the context of anti-gender ideology?   JB : One of the regrets I have about this book is that I didn’t spend enough time distinguishing the phantasmatic scene articulated by Laplanche from the adaptation I make of his theory for critical and political purposes—an appropriation that Laplanche himself or his followers would not have appreciated. The phantasmatic is invariably a structured scene where various elements come into a dynamic interplay. It has its own syntax governing the ways that elements can be related to one another. There are fantasies that we have that are more or less conscious. According to Susan Isaacs, ‘Phantasy’ with the ‘ph’ should designate unconscious processes. The phantasmatic is the syntactically organised scene in which phantasy plays out.   I was drawn to thinking about Laplanche’s phantasmatic scene because it gives us a way of understanding the psychosocial elements involved in what Umberto Eco identified as the ‘jumbled character of fascism’. Eco pointed out that those who are drawn to fascist movements are very often enticed by the fact that they don’t have to reconcile certain fears they’re living with. They are not governed by any standard of consistency or non-contradiction.   In other words, the enemy—in this case ‘gender ideology’—can stand for the acceleration of capitalism and hyper-individualism at the same time that it is taken to be a sign of an oncoming totalitarianism or state communism. Alternately, gender could represent the incarnation of the devil in our time, one which will destroy Biblical law and its mandates regarding men, women, and the family: its heteronormativity, heterosexuality, and the specific meanings of feminine and masculine. Is it an excess of freedom, of individualism, or is gender state control, a dogma, a campaign of indoctrination? It is said that gender is a doctrine of radical determinism. It is said that gender supports a totalitarian regime that will take people’s sex assignment away with the consequence that no one will any longer be able to be a man or woman. Supposedly, you will no longer be able to be a mother or a father as well! Gender is going to strip people of established sex identities. Those who fear the phantasm of gender can easily hold all these views at the same time, and land upon a ‘cause’ for their anxiety about what is happening to the world they once knew. And then we also have a different version of problems: gender permits for trans women to enter prisons and take over the place or invade it or do harm.   So, there are many different kinds of phantasmatic elements that are held together in one place or by one people, and that means they’re under no obligation to reconcile them. There’s no consistency mandate. There’s no coherency mandate because this ‘ideology’ collects them all and promises a relief from every point of anxiety or fear. There is something nearly religious in that promise which most fascists make. They’re going to restore order. They’re going to restore society to the way it used to be—in the case of anti-gender fascists, it is often patriarchal order or heteronormativity that needs to be restored. In this way, a promise of the restoration of order tends to also be part of the promise of fascism.   There’s one more point I would like to add. Freud’s interpretation of dreams was important to Laplanche, but also to me in thinking through the appropriation of Laplanche’s theory here. This is because in a dream sequence, as opposed to a logical one or most conscious ones that take a straightforward narrative form, there are elements that hold together different psychic issues—they could include an anxiety, a desire, or a fear. When one looks at how a dream is organised in terms of the characters, the landscape, the transitions, and the ambient feeling, it seems as if the psyche of the dreamer is, in fact, distributed in a certain way across the scene. It is, as we know, sometimes difficult to understand that the dream scene is the scene of one’s own psyche. It may well be informed by a profound residue from everyday life or infantile histories, or impressions from others. It’s never freed of the environment or social interaction—it carries those traces as well.   The phantasmatic scene is a particular way of rearranging those elements that doesn’t necessarily correspond in any mimetic way to reality; rather, it gives us a refraction of reality of a certain kind. I think that this way of thinking about phantasmatic scene helps us with Eco’s idea that here are these apparently disparate issues that are somehow brought together in a scene without having to be reconciled according to conscious, logical measures—criteria that we might usually seek to use.   CJLPA : That’s a very helpful framework. When you referenced Freud in the context of dreams, the first thing that came to me was his idea of Verschiebung  (displacement) which brings to mind how gender has been distorted in order to accommodate disparate, often conflicting, elements of anti-gender ideology.   JB : Yes, Freud’s ideas of both displacement and condensation are at play, but so too is externalisation. I continue to think that we can’t do an ideology critique of the critique of gender ‘ideology’ without Freud.   CJLPA : Building on the aforementioned fears surrounding gender, the book also identifies that one of the consequences has been a rise of trans exclusionary feminism. The politics of fear, here, is generally centred around a fear of replacement and/or of violation. How seriously should this fear be taken? Additionally, I wonder whether over-engaging with these concerns risks dominating the discourse, allowing this fear to have primacy over the right to existence for trans women?   JB : Well, first of all, the fear of violation when stated should always be taken seriously. I think we all have a fear of violation. I don’t know anyone who belongs to a vulnerable community—whether that’s gay, lesbian, bisexual people, travestis in Latin America, trans people, or Black and Brown people, especially migrants—who doesn’t fear violation. But how we define who or what is threatening to violate us is a different matter. If we decide that members of other vulnerable communities are the real threat, then we have forgotten to ask what makes any of us vulnerable. The answer to that involves knowing the broader map of power, including extractivism and exploitation, abjection and effacement.   If many of us live in fear of violation, harassment, harm, rape, and murder, then we need to think clearly about the conditions under which those fears are rightly registered, and those in which they are incited and magnified to serve a fully different political purpose. I find it especially hard these days when countries who had earlier signed the Istanbul Convention are now unsigning that convention that did seek, for instance, to protect women against marital rape and gay and lesbian people against discrimination and harm. It mandated various kinds of social policies to help people understand the harm of homophobia and misogyny, and these are mocked and distorted by the political right as totalitarian educational projects.   Indeed, we have leaders now who mock feminist aims or misuse them for their own purposes. Both Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer, in their debate preceding the general election, debunked trans claims in ways that I found profoundly disrespectful and politically regressive. And Giorgia Meloni, who now fashions herself as a centrist despite her prior affiliations with fascism, promotes the restriction of reproductive rights, including access to reproductive technology. She also has begun the process of nullifying trans rights and challenging the legitimacy of gay and lesbian parenting rights. There are many people on the loose in positions of power who make us all feel the fear of violation, because it’s not just that we are losing legal protection, but violation is being renamed as something normal, and this discourse gives permission for a certain kind of violation.   There seems to be no recourse when the laws that are supposed to protect us actually harm us. Protection is itself a problematic notion, since it assumes a ‘protector’ who has power over us, and without whom our safety is put in question. Equally, when the laws that protect us are withdrawn or mocked or rendered inoperative, we are left even more vulnerable, having to find resources and support in extra-legal networks and communities. So, I understand the fear of violation, and I don’t blame any of the trans exclusionary women from voicing the fear of violation, but I do hold them accountable for making trans people, who suffer that same fear, into the paradigmatic abusers. This move is painful, unknowing, and unjust, amplifying prejudice rather than destroying it.   I have suggested several reasons for the fear of violation. These fears are multiplied for Black and Brown women, trans people, non-gender conforming people, and migrants. One question I have is how did it come to be that trans women, who have historically broken with certain notions of manhood to embrace an identity necessary for their lives—an identity that puts them at greater risk of discrimination, harm, and even murder—are now the targets of feminists who understand what it is to be vulnerable and courageous? Why wouldn’t we object to rape, violation, harm, and discrimination against all vulnerable communities? Identifying another vulnerable community as the true enemy, the one with all the power to hurt us, not only breaks solidarity but also misreads the map of power in our times. That is a perilous error and plays into the Right’s plan of action.   Unfortunately, many trans-exclusionary feminists use rhetoric similar to that of the new fascists and neo-authoritarians. I’m not saying they are, therefore, fascists or neo-authoritarians, but it remains remarkable how rarely they have stepped forward to distinguish their criticism of trans people from a right-wing eliminationist discourse. I wish they would, because if they don’t like being called fascists, they should show that they aren’t.   Feminists need to consider what alliances we want to be part of. In Latin American feminism, trans people are at the centre of the battle against fascism and state violence. Even the emerging left in France, although fragmented, shows how quickly people can overcome deep divisions when they see the necessity of opposing right-wing, white supremacist, misogynist, homophobic, and transphobic forces. Our alliances need to be as deep or deeper than their hatreds. We make a grave mistake when we become hyper-sectarian or separatist, identifying other vulnerable communities as the true danger to our lives.   CJLPA : This brings up several important points. You pointed out that many people understandably fear violence, and you also mentioned the lack of recourse when protective laws are rescinded. Additionally, you touched on how shifting political landscapes influence this situation. Given this context, how do you view the law’s potential: is it still effective, or is it too closely tied to shifting politics, making its protections inherently unstable and prone to change?   JB : I think the law is really important. I appreciate left legal scholars and organisations—especially those who take on lost cases to make a point. I don’t share the deep suspicion of the law that some people on the left have. However, I believe it would be terrible if legal frameworks became the ultimate political frameworks. We need a larger framework for politics that includes the law and allows it to serve broader political and social aims. The law cannot effectively support goals like freedom, equality, or justice without a political movement and a firmly built vision of politics that provides the aspirations, ideals, and principles guiding our legal activism.   CJLPA : Practically speaking, how can we leverage the law to achieve these desired changes?   JB : Some years ago, I was on the board of the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York, and now I am excited to see how they use legal strategies to advance progressive politics. They have an extraordinary way of thinking about the law. There’s also the National Lawyers Guild in the US, and I’m sure there are UK equivalents that I’m not familiar with, which are committed to political aims that drive their decisions about cases to take, how to argue them, and which precedents to establish in order to support our political struggles. This dynamic is happening, and as academics we might need to engage more deeply with these legal organisations to understand how they work and perceive the relationship between law and politics, allowing that to inform our own efforts to distinguish and ally the two.   CJLPA : I now want to turn to the audience of the book. In the work, you describe experiences encountering individuals who are unwilling to engage in debate, some of whom even view your work and ideology as demonic. Moving beyond this group of people, I wonder how you navigate discussing the issues raised in this work with those who are willing to engage but who are outside of academic contexts? I noticed that this book, unlike your previous works, was published by a non-academic publishing house. Is there a deliberate shift in the audience you aim to reach with this book?   JB : There is often a difference between the audience you wish to reach and the one you actually reach. According to Amazon, my work reaches people in gay and lesbian studies, women’s studies, and those interested in the critique of fascism, which isn’t surprising. There has been some mainstream crossover, which I’m glad about. Even though I conceived this book as a non-academic one and deliberately published it with trade presses, it may still be a bit dense and lengthy for a broader public. Non-academics can get certain things from it, based on my conversations with many readers.   I wasn’t trying to defend my former positions in this book; I didn’t revisit my previous works like Gender Trouble  or Bodies That Matter  to clarify or defend past ideas. It wasn’t an academic self-defence or clarification. The concept of performativity is mentioned only a few times and in passing, which was deliberate because the book is not about me or my work.   Additionally, I dispute the idea that I have an ideology or that gender is an ideology. For me, self-criticism is important as I embark upon a new project. Often in my scholarship, I end up questioning presumptions from my earlier work. I appreciate the living character of theoretical work, where you can write a book with full conviction and then revise it based on people’s responses that you found persuasive. Academic humility is important. We shouldn’t hold positions over time and defend them against all opposition. Instead, we should listen to those who have good criticisms, or feel excluded or misunderstood by our positions, and be willing to change if we want to be responsive and overcome our own blind spots and unwitting prejudices.   Regarding the performativity of gender, I’m no longer sure how I feel about it. Other issues seem more important to me now. I became interested in talking to people who are unsure about what’s going on with the contemporary discourse on gender. For example, are women in prisons truly threatened by trans women? Or is the real threat from guards, or the prison system itself? The same people who threaten women in prisons often threaten trans people as well. What do we make of that? The violence of the prison system should be a focus, not just individual violent acts, but the harm inflicted by largely unsupervised guards, psychiatric personnel, and sentencing protocols.   Similarly, are women (AFAB) truly threatened by trans women using the same bathroom? Understanding the challenges trans people face when deciding which bathroom to use is crucial. Trans women and trans men face significant vulnerabilities and violence in these situations. For example, I have a friend, a trans man, who was thrown against a wall by police for choosing to use the women’s bathroom because he didn’t feel comfortable or safe in the men’s room. He was trying to avoid a potential scene of harassment by using the women’s bathroom. He figured he could be taken to be a very masculine lesbian butch. Why should such a person be in an imperilled situation no matter which bathroom they used? We should be identifying these vulnerabilities and sharing strategies and forms of resistance in a collective fashion rather than viewing each other as primary enemies, and letting the larger structures of oppressive power fade from view. This also applies to trans people who see feminism as their enemy. What a terrible and unnecessary division! The issue isn’t feminism as a whole but the broader transphobic world, with some feminists engaging in transphobia in horrific ways. Let us keep those larger structures in mind. We are more easily gathered together as a right-wing phantasm than by ourselves, in the interests of solidarity.   CJLPA : I would like to hone in on the importance of listening to those who feel excluded and allowing our own perspectives to be shaped by the lived experiences of others. I also appreciate you sharing your friend’s experience. With this in mind, I’m wondering whether you see a clear distinction between scholarship and activism, and if so, how would you define that distinction?   JB : I think there is a distinction. I think this book tries to show a not fully scholarly audience what scholarship actually does—that the false things that are said about gender can be defeated or debunked in a patient and informed way. For instance, I discuss biology at some length because people often wrongly say that gender denies the materiality of the body. That’s simply not the case. Look at the incredible work in feminist biology and feminist science studies—it is an extraordinarily rich field.   There are different ways to debunk or to oppose the false things that are said about gender. That’s important to do, but I’m also trying to deflate the fears that have become prevalent in the public discourse. People believe that their traditional households will be disrupted or destroyed by some gender ideology that’s let loose into the world. That’s not the case. A trans or queer couple living next to you won’t disrupt your traditional heteronormative marriage with your children and a dog. They won’t come rushing into your home to take your sexed identity away.   Many feel that their sense of being natural, necessary, and universal is profoundly challenged by the existence of queer kinship and trans folks trying to find reproductive technology that works for them. They feel deeply threatened. But are they truly threatened? What is it they’re actually at risk of losing? The only thing a traditionalist who’s afraid of gender ideology is losing is the sense of being superior, exclusive, and universal. My advice to them is to mourn that loss. You still get to have your life. It’s the same thing you’d say to a white supremacist: yes, you’re losing that sense of supremacy. That’s good. You’re going to live in a better world governed by equality, and that loss is necessary to live in that better world.   I don’t expect the most avid proponents of anti-gender ideology to be convinced by me. I suppose I am trying to talk to people who are confused in the political centre or who don’t know how to adjudicate some of the claims that are circulated without support on social media and news outlets. I looked at the Sex Matters internet site, for instance. They take established scientific journals and reject their claims without offering evidence to the contrary. This is bad scholarship and bad journalism. We need to listen carefully and distinguish between informed and ill-informed views.   I had someone come to a talk in San Francisco recently; she was a member of a trans-exclusionary feminist group. She and her cohorts leafleted the event in advance, and some of them came inside and then lined up to speak after the presentation concluded. One of them asked a question, and I thought that was good opportunity to see whether dialogue is possible. That person spoke about her fear of violation, identifying trans women as the threat to her personal safety. My approach was to have provisional empathy with that fear and then to open it up, and to ask if what you say you’re fearing is indeed the source, the reason for your fear. Are there other sources of this feeling that many of us share that something is, in fact, threatening our lives? I said, ‘like you, I fear violation. But unlike you, I understand its sources and instruments differently’. If we had been able to pursue a conversation, that would have been a starting point. It’s important to understand the kind of fear trans exclusionary feminists feel, and to offer them another way of understanding how widely shared that fear is, what might be accounting for it, and to let them know that trans and queer people share that fear. That can lead to a potential solidarity. Maybe we could overcome what I take to be a lamentable division among some feminists—a very minority view within feminists—that is trans exclusionary, creating a division between them and trans and queer allies.   CJLPA : In the book, you propose a form of coalition wherein all those targeted unite effectively, despite their differing viewpoints, leveraging their power in numbers. You note that a coalition, at its best, is not comfortable. However, beyond discomfort what do you think are the primary obstacles standing in the way of achieving this coalition? And how do we go about minimising these?   JB : I think it’s perfectly possible to ally without overcoming obstacles. To accept that there are, at least for now, irresolvable differences, and at the same time, to realise that an alliance is necessary in order to fight off a form of power—whether it’s fascist, neo-fascist, or authoritarian—that is going to strip people of their rights.   Here I am talking about women of all kinds, trans people, gay and lesbian people, queer people, migrants, vulnerable people, especially Black and Brown people, and indigenous people. We really identify and document who is involved in the attacks on such people and what powers are undermining the economic futures of those who are most precarious, including workers whose unions have been weakened or disbanded. We would be very foolish not to see the larger picture.   People ask me, ‘How would we get along? There’s so much vitriolic antagonism. How could we ever make an alliance?’ Ultimately, there are times when that vitriol and antagonism are not resolved but are understood to be secondary when threats are more appropriately identified as coming from fascist or right-wing sources of profit and power, both state and non-state powers. Ecologically speaking, we don’t have time for these internecine conflicts or, if they are necessary, we can accept the unresolved character of those conflicts as we join in the fight against fascism. When the question becomes, ‘How are trans and feminist people going to get along?’, we need to ask: What is the framework in which you’re asking that question? It’s very small and has narrowed into this little fight. What’s the background for that fight? What happens if we open up the frame to understand the background of that fight?   To what extent are we having that fight in order not to see ecological catastrophe, the true damage of hyper-capitalism, whose trace is in fascist discourse, or the true damage of amplified state power, whose trace is also in fascist discourse? What would a left, feminist, queer, trans, and anti-racist alliance look like that could identify these issues given all the resources we have from socialist history and theory and from ecological criticism? What could we do if we understood those internal differences as persistent but secondary?   CJLPA : Looking at the bigger picture is clearly essential in the context of this coalition. However, some might be concerned that within a diverse and pluralistic feminist coalition, marginalised voices could risk being overshadowed by more dominant perspectives. What is your view on this potential issue?   JB : The form of coalition that I advance is one that Black feminists have articulated. I think that Black feminism is the future of feminism, and that it should indeed lead the way. Feminism from the Global South that has been building coalitions knows how to do it. These are the most important points of reference for thinking about coalition. It’s from that hard-won understanding that the rest of us need to learn. In that sense, those who emerge fighting from a history of subordination are leading the way.   CJLPA : I fully agree that intersectional feminism is the way forward. This also ties in with a discussion of language, as the book mentions how Eurocentric fictions have organised language into fixed and normative binaries. Therefore, while there is power in putting oneself into discourse (through the use of pronouns, for example), not everyone is given this power. What, then, does a decolonial approach to understanding gender look like, and how do we go about widening the ambits of discourse?   JB : This is one of those moments that Naomi Klein refers to as a ‘doppelgänger issue’. The Vatican claims that gender is an ideology seeking to colonise  the Global South, asserting that gender is another imperialist export and will undermine local cultures, especially the culture of the poor. Of course, if you’re on the left, you recognise the left version of this argument: ‘Oh no, we don’t want a feminism that’s imperialistic. We want an anti-colonial feminism. We want a decolonial feminism. We want a feminism that thinks seriously about white supremacy and colonial power and how feminism has been deployed to support those forms of objectionable power’. Of course, we want to deploy feminism against those colonial powers. There’s just no question about that. So, we could be taken aback or even taken in by the Vatican’s claim. But here is where we need to make a distinction.   What the Vatican would like to impose on the Global South is a Christian missionary view of the natural family: white, heteronormative, and anti-feminist. This view re-subjugates women and challenges the notion of gay and lesbian marriage or gay and lesbian forms of intimate association or kinship that are not necessarily marital or conjugal. So, we see a different kind of colonial imposition, the one that the Church has always been imposing, acting as if it is the protection against colonial domination. Now that needs to be exposed and analysed in detail. It’s not easy because we do know that there are colonial forms of feminism, and that feminism has been deployed in a pernicious and horrible way to wage wars against Muslim and Arab peoples, for instance. Such ‘feminist’ war tactics fail to recognise both Muslim feminist networks and anti-colonial feminist movements. The US has used feminism to advance war and colonial occupation, as we see in the mainstream coverage of the war against Palestine. But Palestinian women and children have been the ones to suffer most in that war.   So, we do need very strong criticisms of colonial feminism, but we also need to understand how versions of colonialism can be furthered by the right-wing appropriation of left arguments and the creation of a kind of confusion among people who cannot see the difference. It cannot be the case that we conclude, ‘Oh, the anti-colonial thing to do is to accept the Church’s teachings!’ No, that’s to accept a different version of colonialism, or sometimes the same version that the Church says is imposed by the Global North as they themselves impose it (from the Vatican, part of the Global North). I do think the Global North imposes ideas of gay rights, lesbian rights, and feminism that are very often smug, arrogant, and destructive, assuming what forms resistance and liberation should take for all people, imposing local norms as if they are, or should be, universal. That is actually a critique I have made alongside many others, and I continue to make it. Unfortunately, it rhymes with the Vatican view. Here again drawing distinctions is crucial, marking off the critique of colonial feminism and the one that’s being advanced by the Church as a subterfuge for the amplification of its own colonial power. I do try to address that a bit in the book. It’s not a large section, but I point to the scholarship that is doing that and should surely be read.   CJLPA : Who’s Afraid of Gender?  also explores ‘monolingual obstinacy’ and the productive potential of translation. Could you explain these concepts briefly, so that those readers who may not have read the book yet have a sense of how this ties in with our discussion.   JB : Well, one way of entering that question is autobiographical. I wrote Gender Trouble  in 1987 and 1988. It came out in late 1989. Suddenly that book took off in the US and the UK, Australia as well, and was translated into twenty-something languages in the following years. I was invited to various places, met those translators who were working with my language in Latin America but also in Eastern Europe. Those translators were also scholars. They were, and remain, scholars of the topic and they knew things about gender, sexuality, law, social theory, philosophy, and psychoanalysis that I didn’t know. I ended up learning from them not only about theory and the problem of translation, but the asymmetry of translation, how English floods non-English markets, how scholarship from an array of languages rarely finds its way into English unless the scholars master academic English. I also had to confront the limits of English, the arrogance of anglophone theory, and the importance of attending to the non-translatable.   Indeed, exposed to other languages through the translations of Gender Trouble  actually allowed me to learn different ways in which gender—as a term, a concept—is and is not translatable. Gender produced a disturbance in the so-called ‘target language’—I hate that military word, but that’s how translation theory works. I learned all kinds of things about why it doesn’t work. For instance, many people in South Africa explained to me why the term gender doesn’t work because there are all sorts of local ways in different African languages for designating what we call gender positions in kinship and community. Many people in East Asia explained why it was so hard to translate and the various political debates about translation. Even in Germany, where it seemed like ‘Geschlecht’ was the only thing you could use, it was too biological, related more to ‘species’ than to difference or identity. Maybe we should just say ‘gender’, or in French, could you really say ‘genre’ given the literary traditions that distinguish among them with such enthusiasm? So, I learned a huge amount as a consequence of being translated and actually came to be able to read in Spanish, which I never could do before, even though I live in California—and should have, much earlier. My own first-worldism was appropriately challenged, if not shattered. I became very interested in all the examples of why gender does not work. And I made friends with my translators, many of whom are among my most important interlocutors. My views on the importance of multilingualism to any theory of gender were established only after being translated.   Perhaps one insight I have now is the result of translation: gender sometimes works in ways we don’t anticipate and is sometimes feared in ways that are completely different from what it means in the scholarship or even in law and social policy. But sometimes it doesn’t work. Sometimes it’s not the term; sometimes it needs to be forfeited for another vocabulary altogether. Those of us who’ve been working in that framework of gender, or gender studies, need to listen and learn and revise what we think according to what folks who are grappling with the issue of translation tell us.   Even though I haven’t been strictly monolingual as an adult, I still think every English language speaker and writer has to deconstruct their monolingual obstinacy, take apart the assumption that English is the language in which theory takes place or English is the language in which things become most clear. It’s not the case. Theory is not produced in the Global North, or in English, and then applied to the South. For those who work with that unexamined assumption, they operate with an arrogance that has to be undone. Embracing the practice of translation is a knowledge-seeking activity. It is, in fact, one of the main ways to learn about the world, that is, how the world is organised differently. It is also one of the main ways to learn how to speak across languages with greater care and openness, letting another language enter and transform one’s thought. I am a strong supporter of a transnational and multilingual forms of coalition. Those are both enormously important for any global movement that addresses the conditions of destruction, exploitation, extractivism, and domination.   CJLPA : It is crucial to go beyond one’s own perspective, rooted in one’s language, to understand how gender is currently understood by others and how it possibly could be understood looking forward. With this in mind, it is interesting that some feminists or gender theorists advocate for a post-gender world. Yet, your approach emphasises making diverse social embodiments more liveable.   Within the transgender community you acknowledge that while the binary framework works for some to articulate their gender identity, it is unworkable for others. Specifically, for those for whom the binary is unworkable, there is a form of hermeneutical injustice when it comes to the intelligibility of non-normative expressions of gender identity. There seems to be a tension between the flexibility to self-describe and this social intelligibility—I wonder what you make of this tension.   JB : Well, look, there are those who say to me, don’t we want to simply abolish the gender system? And I generally respond, from what position would we, or could we, do that? I accept that we’re historically formed and that we act from a distinct situation. I would not say that we are historically determined in a deterministic sense by all kinds of norms. We can, and do, break with them. But the conditions of that break? How do we understand that historically, as evidence of the open-ended and nondetermined character of history and historical formation? I don’t think we can leap out of history or our own historical formations to simply get rid of gender. We can do that in a play or a film, or maybe a dream, and dreams are important for politics, to be sure. But what precisely is the practice of abolishing gender?   We could start by saying, ‘Okay, hospitals shouldn’t assign sex’—which is a very interesting idea, one that Monique Wittig proposed, and I liked it when I first heard it, but I took it as a thought experiment. If we seized power in hospitals and banned sex assignment, then we would be accused of being those totalitarians who are going to strip people of their sexed identities. Is that what we want? Or are we on the side of freedom, wanting to expand the domain of gender freedom? Of course, that threatens the Right from another side, but so be it. If we want to abolish gender through law, then through what state power would we act? And would we then be aligned with the State, or would we be State powers? Is that what we want?   I think of sex assignment as iterable, meaning it happens not just once, but throughout life. It happens again and again. I suggest that that’s true for people who stay with their original sex assignments, who effectively say ‘I was assigned female. I like being female. Female is great. I’m assigning myself female all the time. I am in my life living out that assignment and repeating it and reproducing it’. No one simply has a sex assignment. It is being renewed all the time, or broken with, recommenced with another category. So we might say there’s an iterable or performative dimension to sex assignment (which does not mean it is fake or an artifice). No, it’s part of the temporality of a life. Sex assignment happens when we rely on observations about what sex someone is. There are chains of such acts, and those chains can be broken by those who actually need to break the chain to live, and to start another sequence as a way of living, if not flourishing.   I think that takes us away from the idea of a punctual and definitive sex assignment, which I don’t think does justice to the way that assignment works in a lifetime over the course of a life—and how it can change.   CJLPA : I find this approach highly compelling. I am also curious to hear what role you think art—especially visual art which transcends language—has in this venture of ‘curating’ one’s self-expression and broadening the remits of how gender is perceived.   JB : I think art is crucial. I think we need a new imaginary or, rather, counter-imaginary. The right wing is filling the world with these phantasms. They appeal to passions like fear and anxiety, longing for a different world, mainly an ideal of a former way of life. And what do we on the Left offer? What passions are ours? And how do we appeal to them imagining a future in a different way—not the imagined future in which patriarchy and racism is restored, but an imagined picture of greater liveability, equality, justice, and freedom?   I do think that liveability has to be included as a goal. It sounds like a very modest goal, but it’s not. It actually includes survival and flourishing. And it assumes equality and universality, since I cannot achieve a liveable life if the conditions for that life are not accessible to everyone else. At the same time, it is not easy to stipulate for everyone what constitutes the ‘liveable’. I published a short book with Frédéric Worms on this.[1] For instance, I’m not going to say from the outset that anybody who stays in the binary gender system is not living a liveable life—who would I be to say that? That’s just wrong. However, if they live in that binary system and say that no one can live outside of it, then I’m going to oppose them. So, I think we need to accept from the outset that people find liveable very different ways of naming and practicing embodiment. Affirming that complexity is important with the caveat that certain ways of practicing sexuality can be coercive and violent and must be categorically opposed.   I understand that Gender Trouble  was taken by some readers to license self-expression as a value. Although that is certainly important, I’m less interested in self-expression than in establishing modes of liveability that includes the affirmation of complexity. Once we go back to self-expression as the core of our aesthetic practice—focusing on issues such as self-crafting, we’re also implicitly or explicitly subscribing to individualism. And then we’re forgetting that what we need to do is fight for a world in which liveability is achieved by affirming complexity and difference. So, I want a common, if not collective, vision, and not simply an individualistic one.   CJLPA : Finally, I’m aware that you have put off writing a book on Kafka to write Who’s Afraid of Gender?  I’m curious about whether you believe Kafka’s writings offer any insights into countering anti-gender ideology.   JB : I always have—there might even be a brief reference to Kafka in Gender Trouble . I had read Derrida, I’d seen Derrida give a talk on Kafka’s ‘Before the Law’   as I was writing Gender Trouble , and I’ve been teaching Kafka for many years. I love his humour, and I appreciate his ways of seeking to flee a world that is fundamentally unliveable. There are fundamental questions in Kafka about the ways that legal life confounds human existence, extending key legal concepts like judgment and prison to everyday life. He lets us to see that the promises of law to deliver justice, for instance, are very often broken, or that some legal systems built on property relations and racism, break their promise of justice at the moment of making it. As a result, we have to reconceive our way of understanding law as bound up with that broken promise and the way that promise works in our lives, inspiring the very hope that it tends to destroy.   It is easier to think about the false promises of authoritarian and fascist leaders than the ones we live within democracies governed by the rule of law. Of course, there are false promises that are made by fascist leaders right now, but we would be wrong to think that the fascism at issue is not produced in the midst of democracies that are supposed to be their opposite. The false promise is exciting and blinding, and some people would rather have the promise, regardless of its falsity, than not have it at all. Very often in these cases, the promises of a restoration to a former time are fuelled by a restoration fantasy.   Kafka exposes how that works. In his short fiction, mainly parables, but also the novels, the narrative expectation is established that law will deliver justice, that liberation is at hand, that a way out can be found. And then, in The Trial  for instance, it turns out that sentencing and punishment precede the trial that never arrives. This destruction of a narrative expectation relates, for instance, to the work of Ruth First’s 117 Days . That work speaks, of course, to questions of indefinite detention under South African Apartheid, but it also speaks to the scrambled sequences that now govern our lives. So, I would argue that there are temporal and fictive dimensions to fascist passion and fascist promise that would benefit from a reading of Kafka.   CJLPA : What strikes me most about Kafka’s writing is the quintessential narrative manipulation of time and space. To me, it seems that this disfiguration and disorientation from conventional coordinates also prompts readers to reimagine the status quo and to consider different realities which easily extends to gender.   JB : For sure, if you think about developmental narratives—‘oh, you’re born a girl, you’re supposed to become a woman’, many ways of blocking freedom and complexity are taking place. The detour, the error, the ‘failure’ are all constitutive of the scene of gender, as are new beginnings and persistent modes of ambivalence. This temporal elaboration within which we seem to live, almost unconsciously, is generally accompanied by great disturbance, and that is significant. This doesn’t mean I don’t believe in forward motion of any kind; I am in favour of forms of hope that can be shared and grounded in workable solidarities. Kafka disturbs the temporal developments that are often assumed or expected in literature, law, and life, so one question is how such expectations inform promises of a political or legal kind, or even religious expectations of fulfilment. That disturbance does open up a different kind of imaginary, one perhaps that we don’t know how to expect, but which will change the course of our political expectations of justice. Or so I hope—see, I do hope. This interview was conducted by Helena de Guise. Helena graduated from Trinity College, Cambridge in 2022. She remains academically interested and personally engaged in feminism, law, German literature, and postcolonial theory. [1] Judith Butler and Frédéric Worms, The Liveable and the Unliveable  (Fordham University Press 2023).

Art has been part of our being for millions of years—possibly even before the beginning of our genus Homo—without being understood as what we now call art. From the beginning, it was simply another way of knowing, probably our first, of coping with what confronted us in our environment as a necessary way of surviving in it and sharing that knowledge with others. It sprang from an emotional reaction to what existed outside of us and how we translated that feeling to pass it on. Often that shock was significant enough for our ancestors to know instinctively to communicate it wordlessly, since it predates language, and to do so with the limited means at their disposal. They did this by creating sounds, movements, or things to represent those emotions—symbols, through things found or made, to pass on those feelings subconsciously. This is what we have come to call art.   We were not put on earth to master it as many religions and political systems espouse. We are a product of the earth and to continue that existence we must know our environment, the earth in all its dimensions. The ‘purpose’ of life is to know, to learn, and through knowing ensure its survival. To live is to learn, to learn is to live. The need to know our environment in order to survive in it is something we share with all living things. Each manifestation of life, from the simplest to the most complex, has evolved means of interacting with its immediate environment in order to find in it sustenance, protection, and whatever is needed to survive. We, as humans, have one of the most complex such manifestations, which has evolved to provide us with both our instinct and our intellect as ways of interacting with our surroundings and knowing in our own limited way.   Henri Bergson defined the two, instinct—feeling, emotion—and intellect—memory and reason—along with intuition, which he calls the instinct educated by the intellect, meaning that instinct is also something which evolves.[1]   As we did eventually with art, our species continued to split knowing into other categories, whether religion, philosophy, or science. This has been effective to some extent by focusing more deeply on different aspects of human behaviour, but it has also created boundaries to knowing. Because those categories are relatively recent human creations, they provide insights useful to understanding how humans express the different dimensions of their being, how they are communicated, and how that communication becomes expressed socially. That first way of knowing is through feeling, the response most living creatures have to their surroundings. In our case, it was a pre-intellectual reaction to those experiences which collectively evolved into symbolic thought and symbolic representation and eventually manifested as art.   The need to know, to which art is one response, is at the heart of existence, something we share with other species, each of which has its way of knowing and sharing. We started, as all living organisms do, by having an emotional reaction to something, whether positive or negative for our survival, and storing that memory as a mental sign, the root of instinct. As the genus Homo evolved, the accumulation of emotionally provoked memories became our intellect and retained knowledge passed on through generations, which in turn coloured our emotional responses to our environment and allowed us to eventually communicate them through speech.   In a long career in art, I often asked artist friends which came first in their minds, speech or art. They all responded, as if a given, that we had art in the way I have defined it before speech as a way of communicating our feelings to others.   The first ‘good or bad’ response to situations in nature was the primal emotional reaction to external stimuli. Is it something dangerous or useful to my survival? Is it something I can eat or will it eat me? That response and the memory of those responses is what allowed us to survive. It is seeing from another part of ourselves, our instinctive side, internal, founded on experience and memory, in an attempt to understand the world around us, survive in it, and share that knowledge with others. Sentient before intelligent.   That emotion and memory are located in the amygdala and the limbic system, this most primal part of our brains, is significant in understanding how ancient this process must be. We can almost see our ‘lizard’ brain’s head darting back and forth in response to possible pleasure or potential danger. That emotional response, a reaction between the individual and the external stimulus, is recorded in the memory as an image, a sign, a seed of a symbol, what Gilbert Simondon called a symbole-souvenir  or memory-symbol. [2] When one or another of those reactions enter our memory, the grounding of the intellect, we have the very primitive beginning of symbolic thought—one might say instinct. What we understand as art today is rooted in this early beginning; it was always there from the start and evolved in complexity and capacity as everything involving life and humanity did. As we embarked on that Bergsonian two-step, an emotional reaction to a confrontation, positive or negative, to something outside of us, we started building up experiences to guide us further. The fact that the amygdala is involved in memory gave our perception the information accumulated through experience to help decide what was good or bad by recalling reactions to past encounters. One might call this the evolving intellect.   Neuroscience has confirmed that role of the amygdala as proposed by James McGaugh several years ago:   The findings of human brain imaging studies are consistent with those of animal studies in suggesting that activation of the amygdala influences the consolidation of long-term memory; the degree of activation of the amygdala by emotional arousal during encoding of emotionally arousing material (either pleasant or unpleasant) correlates highly with subsequent recall. The activation of neuromodulatory systems affecting the basolateral amygdala and its projections to other brain regions involved in processing different kinds of information plays a key role in enabling emotionally significant experiences to be well remembered.[3]   This beginning of symbolic thought in embryonic form evolved to become art—founded on artists’ emotional reaction to the ‘real’ in their time and space, developed with the action of the intellect, and then communicated to others through their own emotional reactions to it.   When we are confronted with something we don’t know, something not already clearly part of our memories, we make up an answer, inventing something to explain what is in front of us from our limited experiences. This is essential to our being able to move forward. Edwige Armand and I propose that creativity is provoked by a crisis in perception caused when the givens we possess for understanding what we are experiencing are insufficient to explain it. When we don’t understand what we are confronting, we will make up an answer, linking things not necessarily related, but with an internal logic of its own through invented relationships with things already believed. British neuroscientist Iain McGilchrist has described this as ‘sensing the lack of fit between perception and cognition, and using this as a stimulus to shift the way we both see and think’. [4]  That stimulus is what we proposed as the crisis-provoked call to creativity in which our intuition dips into what Armand named ‘forgotten memories’ to find or invent a suitable explanation. [5]   The same process is what creates mythologies, the mental shorthand used to transmit an understanding our world: a solution pulled from our unconscious through reinvention that changes forever our perception, how we see, think, and imagine. Perception is what artist Robert Irwin calls the subject of art [6]  and why Marshall McLuhan called artists educators of perception. [7]  That being so, artists generally sense a change in perception before the rest of the population, which is why society takes time to digest and understand their proposals, sometimes as long as a century. It is also why artists have always been interested in what we’ve come to know as science, how we understand the world intellectually, knowledge which feeds our imaginations. If science defines our reality as is the case in our society, it becomes a major subject of art, in both its intellectual proposals—structures—and the technologies it produces—tools.   Bergson’s understanding of perception, its limitations and potential, led him to recognise the special relation between perception and the artist:   For hundreds of years there have been men [and women] whose function has been precisely to see and make us see what we do not naturally perceive. They are the artists. What is the aim of art if not to show us, in nature and in the mind, outside of us and within us, things which did not explicitly strike our senses and our consciousness […] The great painters are men [and women] who possess a certain vision of things which has or will become the vision of all […] Art would suffice then to show us that an extension of the faculties of perceiving is possible.[8]   That communication is triggered by the emotion of the creator connecting through the emotion of the receptor. Art is about emotion and emotion is about the body and the body’s encounter with the exterior. It is the other way of knowing, long before the evolution of our intellect pushed it aside, touting reason as the only way of comprehending, a limiting inheritance from the Enlightenment. Our emotional response to an artwork is our connection to the emotion of the artist who created it. That response literally incorporates it into us and makes it part of our being. Learning in depth must be more than intellectual to become truly part of us.   Art is born out of our curiosity toward our environment and an effort to engage with it and understand it on a first level, knowing it with the whole self. Art is an emotional engagement with our surroundings and calls on an emotional response from the receiver to complete the effort. Those emotions, even though overlapping, are as unique to the artist who created it as they are to each of us, a result of our life experiences, our physical make-up, a product of our embodied minds, as Varela put it. [9] Emotions cannot exist without a physical body to experience them. They can be communicated intellectually but not completely, which is what makes the artistic experience sometimes difficult to explain in words. Each person’s emotional response to someone else’s emotions is coloured by their own. Emotions can be imitated, which we have ritualised and even made into an art form. In theatre, in cinema, the performing arts, we have what we call ‘suspension of disbelief’, a convention by which we accept the imitation as temporarily real and offer our emotional selves to the spectacle to mix with the simulated emotions of the players.   Parenthetically, this seems also to apply to politics, which are never very far from theatre. It is in syncing our emotional experiences with others that a bond is made between humans and is how society functions. Our emotions can fool us and many societies have mistrusted them, often for good reason. When the emotions are faked it can cause confusion and a skewed response. We seem to be up to our eyes and ears in that today, in our contrived and manipulated communication space. If the shared emotions are negative the resulting pact will be negative, if not flat-out evil. We have seen many examples of the evil it can cause throughout human history, particularly in movements appealing heavily to emotion, as the twentieth-century authoritarian regimes— whether Fascist, Nazi, or Communist—did very effectively. In art the Italian Futurists demonstrated how precarious that borderline can be. That danger is present today with emotion gaining over reason in the public domain, as we at the same time add more and more dimensions to our communication space. The resulting social networks are full of fascist tropes of hatred for the other. They grew in an unregulated fashion, creating a media free-for-all focused on the violent and the shocking for financial gain through increasing the number of online users exposed to advertising.   I define communication space as the sum of all means we have of transmitting and receiving information as individuals and collectively. I have a personal communication space. My social group or nation has a collective communication space. It is made up of what we exchange with others, our education in its broadest sense, what we read and learn, and, in our time, mass communications and the media. It is where a society sees itself and where its members learn how to function, where we find our models of comportment.   My emphasis on emotion in art is not to dismiss the importance of the intellect to the artist’s search for solutions to the self-imposed problems—perceptual crises—leading to a work’s final form. That finality is a question of feeling, both an emotional and intellectual satisfaction with the work, and the artist’s first audience is the artist him- or herself. Art is not made in the first instance to communicate but to satisfy the personal need to record that feeling. In much prehistoric cave painting the images are often in obscure and inaccessible parts of the cave, limiting who saw them. Art is a very private thing until the moment when the artist dares to put it before a public. When does one arrive at the satisfaction of work completed, the solution to that self-imposed problem? One of hardest things for an artist is to know when to stop, when the work is finished, simply because there is no predetermined finality in art. Giorgio de Chirico used to sneak into museums to continue working on some of his paintings, which were still evolving in his mind.   In general, we give, consciously or unconsciously, an emotional weight and symbolic significance to what we perceive, another dimension depending on our reaction to it. Some of that might be based on new intellectual givens we have discovered, some uniquely on feelings derived from our culture and the need to fit what we see into our belief system. The new and the old are often in conflict. Some might eventually become superstitions. Many millennia ago, if I killed an albino bear and the next day a volcano erupts, I would never kill an albino bear again. We are always looking for links between things, patterns, and making up why things are related. This we share with every culture which ever existed. It is what we call culture and our first way of knowing together. Later, we try doing this in an objective and logical way, supposedly eliminating the emotional aspect, and we call that science.   Christianity as the dominant European philosophical, psychological, and moral guide throughout the Middle Ages and into the early Renaissance exhausted itself in the Thirty Years’ War of the early seventeenth century. The way was opened to fill that vacuum through the Enlightenment which codified the changed worldview wrought by the Renaissance, proposing a clockwork paradigm, the Mechanical Universe. It gave Western society a new model of how things work based solely on reason. The excess of emotion witnessed during those years of slaughter provoked an understandable mistrust of that side of humanity. What became the governing paradigm was founded uniquely on the material and measurable. The Mechanical Universe was invented as the ultimate explanation of how the world worked and reason the only accepted method for understanding. That gave birth to Positivism and its banning of emotion and total reliance on science. That mistrust exists to this day among ‘serious’ people, but as long as emotion is suppressed it will always find a way out and when it does the results are not usually beneficial. We ignore it at our own risk.   Eliminating emotion in the scientist is an illusion and a distortion of what science is, an unfortunate fallout from Positivism. Cogito ergo sum —I think, therefore I am— was a useful but limited approach to how humanity is defined . René Descartes’ formula helped promote the idea of individual agency, one of the defining elements of modernity, but its focus on reason as the only way of knowing ignored the other half of the human to the detriment of the model of how humans actually function. Sentio ergo sum —I feel, therefore I am—is how most people first react to sensory input. Recognising that aspect of humanity not only allows us to understand the whole human by recognising the other half, but also connects our species with the rest of the living world which reacts principally through feeling. Objectivity is a tool, an important one, but to imagine that scientists manage to eliminate their emotional side is a distortion. The scientists operate as all of us do with their fullest selves—indivisibly—but recognise when emotion colours the scientific search for answers. Peer review is the method developed to guard against just that.   In western history, Positivism, evolving from the debates of the Enlightenment, tried to deny the emotional side by declaring rationality the only approach to true knowledge, such that all else must be rejected. Anything coming from feeling was unreliable, even dangerous, and excluded from a mechanical quantifiable view of how things work. It has created a distorted perception for many human beings, a worldview based on a diminished idea of the human. That may work for understanding material processes but not how human beings function. Reason helps curb emotion’s excesses but emotion modifies reason’s rigidity. The interaction between Sentio…  and Cogito…  defines us and may be the space of Bergson’s élan vital , where life grows. Dualisms are useful only if we understand them as two points of a triangulation leading to a deeper understanding of what they address , the third point. In Bergson’s case his dualism of instinct and intellect defines understanding.   For over 40 years I have promoted the idea that we are living a new renaissance based on the premise that, historically, when art and science fundamentally change the definition of reality and its representation, we are confronted by a profound transformation which demands a reinvention of the institutions by which we interact and govern. Those new structures will eventually replace the older ones which no longer work or function in a degraded and decadent mode, a distortion of their original mandate. The new institutions will be based on a different operational schema, a new paradigm, which for me is the interactive network replacing the mechanical model which has dominated since the Enlightenment. That reinvention brings front and centre the relationship between individual and society and the foundation of the authority to govern—sovereignty, redefining both and their interaction. We are once again confronted by that need today.   The machine model recognised and credited the person, individuals as distinct parts operating together through opposing parts—friction between gears. The network model again recognises the individual as a singularity but as connected, cooperating members—the person and his or her network of others. The distinguishing fundamental definition of the new renaissance is the difference between opposition and cooperation.   A renaissance is always a violent period with the old order stubbornly defended by those that profit from it most and the so-called new often being promoted with equal energy. A renaissance takes time to move from destruction to construction which is the frontier we now inhabit. The new paradigm which replaces the clockwork of the mechanical universe is, I proposed, the interactive network, whereby everything is understood as connected and interdependent. Art and science, because they represent broadly the two principal ways of how human beings interact with their environment in trying to understand it, are our evolved tools for doing so, instinct and intellect. Both have pointed to that new schema for well over 150 years. [10]   In 2001, I organised a conference on art and science with Benoit Mandelbrot, father of fractal geometry, at the Rockefeller Conference Centre in Bellagio, Italy. [11] We brought together a small group of people from both fields to talk freely over several days about how we understand human creativity, which came up consistently during our five days together. One of the participants, Margaret Boden, a founder of cognitive science and an early explorer of AI and creativity, described creativity in an analysis as profound, complete, and intellectual as science would demand. Mandelbrot objected strenuously, proclaiming that ‘no, no, no, creativity was like a hand coming down from heaven touching you with inspiration’. The dispute between the two scientists was, of course, the core argument which still exists today, the pull between cogito  and sentio  in understanding humanity.   The capacity for symbolic thought, as I have explained above, has always been part of our makeup in its earliest primitive forms since the beginning of our genus and most probably well before. It comes from an instinctive and unintellectual operation of that curiosity which is part of every living being’s functioning as a way of exploring the environment. With our ancestors it often led to finding and keeping objects, stones, fossils, organic or inorganic, which excited that curiosity by whatever made the objects exceptional. We can also imagine sound as being a found object in that our earliest ancestors were very alert to the sounds in nature, imitating them in hunting and possibly as a beginning of articulated communication among themselves. When the found object, the first overt manifestation of what we now know as art, was kept and shared with others it acquired a symbolic sense for the group as well as the individual who found it, an unarticulated meaning but something felt to be important. We still have traces of this today when we come home from the beach with a bag of stones and shells which we found fascinating and decided to keep. Our keeping them gave them a personal, thus human, value, intangible but real. With the evolution of our intellectual capacity this process became more elaborate in providing a ‘why’ to that selection giving those objects an explanation of their symbolic value as a means of communicating it and the beginning of what can be seen as a belief system—the root of religion. In the beginning, this was not an intellectual exercise; the choosing came from feeling rather than understanding. It became more intellectually elaborated in time through the need to be communicated, probably diluting the experience of the first person to experience it but making it transferable to others and incorporating other reactions to it.   The found object is one of the first forms of artistic experience, going back some millions of years to when our ancestors were attracted to an object by its unusual appearance or whatever made it stand out for them. That attraction was instinctive, more feeling or emotion, not because it had any obvious utility. Keeping it and sharing it with others made it art.   Fig 1. This pebble was discovered in Makapansgat, South Africa, an Australopithecus site dated to three million years ago. The mineral matches a site several kilometres away where it was found, transported and kept. It is naturally worn and not sculpted. Duchamp resuscitated the objet trouvé  for our times and it has been a major motivation in art ever since. Just as Duchamp used the found object in his ready-mades, other twentieth-century artists did the same with sound. John Cages’s 4’33”  prepares people to listen to music and then presents them with silence, directing them to hear the other sounds around them. Max Neuhaus, the inventor of sound installations, always worked at the threshold of sound perception and his intricate sound weavings became found objects for the small percent of the public alert enough to engage with them. It is not hard to see this process in art using new technologies. They were designed for a specific reason and to accomplish a certain task. The encounter with artists took them somewhere else and changed their role. That also explains why the public has often reacted negatively to that work as not doing what the technology was designed to do. That has been the history of twentieth-century art, as wave after wave of artistic invention has been met with scandalised reactions, only to become canon a generation or two later. It underlines what McLuhan identified as the artist’s role, the education of perception in action.   The earliest toolmaking was never totally utilitarian; we can often see that artistic manifestation, the extra added to it which makes it art. One of the best ancient examples I know is a biface brought to my attention by paleo-anthropologist Jean-Jacques Hublin, dating from between a quarter- to half a million years ago.[12]   The maker recognised a shell fossil in the stone and shaped it to emphasise it—an aesthetic act. Many of those early tools were never used physically and tool making always went beyond the utilitarian to include the symbolic. We have consistently assigned that kind of meaning to our technologies ever since, seeing them as symbolically representing something prideful about ourselves. Fig 2. Handaxe knapped around a fossil shell, located centrally on one face, identified as the Cretaceous bivalve mollusc Spondylus spinosus. Found in West Tofts, Norfolk. Between 250 to 500 thousand years old. © Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. This is the root of artistic creativity—an individual act of symbolic expression—and its eventual integration into culture, socially communicated. For most of human history, art was the external expression of religion and its means of communication. This process can be seen clearly in the elaborate cave art found world-wide. It was the symbolic representation of a group’s belief system, produced with enormous effort underlining its importance to the group. That role lasted for millennia and became the principal reason for making art.   As another end result of the Enlightenment, art broke from religion to express the symbolic sense of the individual artist rather than the collective belief of the group. Still, during the symbiotic relationship between art and religion there were certainly individuals who created for themselves and even in religious art the expressiveness of the individual artist is present, as more obviously so in the Italian Renaissance.   The symbolic is very much part of us and ignoring it or pretending it is less important or something to be overcome demonstrates a dangerous misunderstanding of how humans function. All of us operate under a mythology of sorts, recognised or not. Myths are shorthand symbolism of how things are, how people expounding them think the world works. We’ve eliminated myth as beneath our human intellect but in this we fool ourselves. Myths can actually unite people in a common emotional understanding of who we are and how we are connected. They are fundamental to any group, a kind of code expressing a shared and necessary value to its members. In the publication cited above, Edwige Armand and I proposed a new myth for society given what we know today, a kind of neo-animism whereby we understand that everything is alive and connected. [13] It was edited out of our chapter by the science publisher.   ***   Art, as mentioned above, is the very ancient way our species interacted with the world. What we understand as art today already lay in our lineage millions of years ago and evolved. It eventually became the symbolic recreation of an emotional response to the exterior before we had the intellectual resources available to explain what we were experiencing. We still act in that way when confronted with something we don’t understand by making up an explanation, by expressing in some way our feelings toward that experience, creating patterns and links which we alone imagine. That eventually became symbolic thought and its expression and, shared, grew in sophistication as our species evolved. The symbolic has always played a major role in our world view and art expresses a good part of it. It is an essential element to our survival in aiding our understanding even when that understanding is misplaced or erroneous. It is the emotional response, feeling, that colours what we know for good or for bad. This makes it a major field for human conflict, your symbol verses mine. It is not an unconscious reaction on our part, but a response coming from somewhere else in us but as important, and sometimes more so, as our intellect. If we ignore it in any human enterprise we witness or undertake we deprive ourselves of a fuller understanding.   Artistic exploration has been a manifestation of that need and produced the actual symbols in our cultures. For that reason, art has for many centuries and in many cultures been subservient to religion, since religion provided that symbolic content which art interpreted and a degree of its emotion impact. This is ironic since the symbolic sense of the world proposed through art predates religion by many millennia. Religion is a derivative of art as that symbolic sense increased in complexity, was codified and communicated to larger numbers, and became institutionalised.   Humanity always seems to search outside itself for some literal deus ex machina solution for guidance, some imagined or proposed superior force to which we bend the knee to a greater or lesser degree depending on our tolerance for superstition. We have seen in the West alone various gods, religions, and related divine-right sovereignties, science with Positivism, the market and its invisible hand, some automatic system into which we must put our full faith as something above us and accepted as infallible, the source of authority. To turn the bible around, our Gods, Golems, and Frankensteins are usually made in a misunderstood or limited image of ourselves. They have also been a convenient way to avoid personal responsibility for our actions and have been used as such often in history.   Artificial Intelligence is the latest saviour to be promoted to that role, as if algorithms came down to us from the mountain as a gift from who knows whom. This attitude is directly traceable to Norbert Wiener’s horror of the Second World War and the Holocaust which ‘proved’ to him that humanity was incapable of governing itself, a parallel to the reaction to the Thirty Years’ War. The pure logic of the machine was to provide a disinterested guide to our actions and we were supposed to accept it as neutral and just. No questions asked of course, about who built it and why, just as in previous ‘infallibilities’. Wiener himself saw the dangers in the blind trust in such mechanical solutions and warned against it. [14]   Art is never neutral. The goal of art doesn’t change over time but the means for making it do. The expression of our emotional reactions to our world is still central to art but the move from religious to the personal expression as its principal source is another product of the Enlightenment and relatively new in history. The tools that artists choose have always evolved and had an impact on artistic practice, whilst the resulting work starts a cycle of the effect of the technology on the artist and the artist on the technology. They help explore the world in a new way, to see new dimensions of it, and tell us much about ourselves who invented them. As the technologies of communication continue to expand at an ever increasing speed, artists will respond. Experimentation with their new possibilities and how they change our perception will continue. They will use them to express something more than an exchange of information, going beyond the ‘objective’ to a personal, emotional, and symbolic response to our changing environment and our place in it. In changing the way we think we see the world, artists open up other ways of imagining, thinking, and seeing.   The close analyses now possible of stone bifaces produced a half a million years ago reveal much about our ancestors and how they thought and acted. Sites have indicated that they organised production demonstrating how they interacted and communicated and has even pushed further into the past the development of language.[15] The tools, as in the case of artisans or anyone using tools to achieve their end, become an extension of the body, the technique a reflection of the mental process producing the work.   What was used to create art was what was at hand, from a found object in the beginning to sophisticated computers today and a long list of everything in between. Whatever is needed will be taken or invented to respond to that artistic drive which, because it is emotional and intellectual, is doubly compelling. With our expanded intellect, we eventually named it art to distinguish it from other forms of making and knowing.   Artistic experimentation was and is part of that process as each new technology appeared and expanded our communication space with the usual mix of information or entertainment. But artists were often taking it in a different direction, which is why society had such a difficult time dealing with the new work and the ideas it proposed. The belief that the image mirrored what was seen began to change artistically long before our era and continued to do so with the evolution of communication technologies. Man Ray’s filming in the 1920s with the camera on its side or upside down revealed that this was a tool to be manipulated and not a window on reality; it was rather a new proposed reality invented by art or whoever dominates its production.   There are four artists, two couples, whom I know personally, who exemplify the artistic exploration of new technologies. Steina and Woody Vasulka[16] began with video, analogue and digital, in the late sixties and spent their entire careers experimenting with its artistic potential in both tape and installations. Their work is finally being recognised in the depth it deserves more than two generations later, as more and more of the population lives in the mental space they created with the new tools. Fig 3. ‘The Maiden’, one of the five interactive installations of ‘The Brotherhood’, each containing a bit of artificial intelligence. Woody Vasulka, ICC Tokyo, 1998.   Steina Vasulka playing her midi violin interactively with ‘The Maiden’, one of the many ways of interacting with the five pieces. Another couple, Maria Barthélémy and René Sultra,[17] have been doing the same with newer technologies, especially photogrammetry, creating images, fixed and moving, from multiple photos of a situation from several angles. They create new spaces which challenge the habitual Euclidean space we inhabit and help us see differently. All four have demonstrated how artists in a highly personal and subjective manner open a novel means of expression to new and different levels of understanding. They set a pattern for exploring new potentials in the new tools in a non-objective open-ended way learning and teaching at the same time. This exploration is essential to any new means of expression and very pertinent to AI today. Fig 4. Photo of a woven fibre glass rug, 11 meters long, built by Barthélémy and Sultra as a screen for streaming images. Video of an apartment using photogrammetry, photographed from several points of view, in this case over 400, recreating a Euclidean space acting in a non-Euclidean manner, 2024-5. The idea of total art has been with us for centuries, as different artistic endeavours attempted to unify all forms of creativity into a coherent whole. This was especially so in music and architecture in the nineteenth century, becoming more common in the twentieth. Evolving technologies made experimenting with it possible and, in spite of different ingrained habits and market pressures, it has never stopped. Many gatekeepers of traditional artistic expression try to keep the arts in their habitual spaces, but they tend to leak out naturally. In virtual space, total art is a given, where visual arts approach performance and the performing arts become recorded images in time. It is challenging in many ways, particularly in how we bring the public into the work—a question throughout the history of art. I have always proposed that prehistoric caves were our first multi-media spaces where image, music, and dance were performed together. Artists carry within themselves that total space as they create.   The previous century witnessed an explosion of possibilities that were more than ways of making art, which changed the practice of it fundamentally. First, we had duration added to the image with cinema and all the other image technologies to follow. This brought it closer to performance. Adding time made it easier to involve the spectator and bringing in the spectator’s reactions to the work became an early ambition. New technologies made it possible to reach out to people instead of waiting for them to show up in some designated space. Kupka, one of the most important artists of the twentieth century, said in the 1940s that wireless transmission was the future of art anticipating the so-called media arts. [16]  Each new wave (tool) was open for artistic exploration which needs to be increased exponentially as the technologies play an even bigger role in our lives. But support for that is drying up in both public and private domains. We have actually accomplished Plato’s goal of barring artists and poets from the Republic by making them irrelevant and marginal. Plato saw them as people who create imagined ‘realities’ disturbing and dangerous to the dominant world view and therefore necessarily banished. What is lost is the understanding that that is the role of art and often those ‘realities’ reflect coming changes and help us adjust to them, once again a change in perception.   The art world is now dominated by the market; the saleable object is what counts, and this is usually not the experimental. Monetising art, as we have, kills it, making it a carcass, a shadow of itself, devoid of the life it is supposed to reflect. Monetising anything to make it more ‘pertinent’ reflects a society whose dominant value is money. Art no longer informs but simply exists and its importance is determined by marketing. We no longer have gatekeepers, no connoisseurs, for good or for bad, who give their lives to trying to understand what artists are saying. We may agree or not, but at least they were operating from human judgement and not some artificially neutral mechanism, yet another ‘invisible hand’ divorced from human interference. Even art institutions no longer fulfil that role, taking their direction from the market on who is and isn’t an artist. The ‘stars’ are stars because they say so and people buy it. Museums will inevitably defend it as art to justify their purchases, and the game of smoke and mirrors goes on. Art stars like J eff Koons are to art what Donald Trump is to politics, devoid of all sense, spectacle without meaning. In that regard they are, unfortunately, a reflection of contemporary society: as Macbeth lamented, ‘full of sound and fury, signifying nothing’.   It is time our society understands that art is not the plaything of the rich or the raw material of financial markets and finally acknowledges how absolutely essential it is to us and our survival, which should make its exploration of our social evolution a priority. When governments cut budgets, the first thing to go is the no-longer affordable ‘luxury’, art and culture. Why is it then that when governmental institutions rescue children from traumatic situations, they give them materials to draw, to express the emotions they cannot put in words. Art is our essential emotional educator.   A friend, a Parisian galeriste , opened a branch in New York. In his many meetings with other gallery owners there he would ask questions about meaning and was usually mocked for being philosophical, French, and not business oriented. His response was, ‘You want to make money. I want to make sense’.   Art using AI and the overhyped world its creators propose cannot operate through Sentio —feeling. It can only do so through being understood as the tool it is in the hands of a human where the necessary feeling exists. On its own, it can trigger emotions by appealing to emotional memories, rehashing the past, but it cannot itself create new emotional reactions since a body is needed to do so. That is how we respond to newness, provoked by something never before experienced which calls on our creativity to respond accordingly by pulling an explanation from our subconscious. AI must still be explored by art as a communications tool to better understand it, how it interfaces with us, and if it has the potential for kind of creativity we understand as art. It remains a tool but the tools artist uses affect the artist as much as the artist affects the technology, exposing dimensions of it not anticipated by the developers.   ‘Artificial Intelligence’ is an oxymoron, since intelligence is a living thing and anything artificial an imitation and not the real thing. Intelligence is informed by bodily experiences, the emotional responses to outside stimuli, which is key to how the memories, good or bad, are coloured and stored. A key part of intelligence is the memory of those experiences recalled when needed, usually when a similar emotional reaction is provoked. AI is based on massive past memories, plus pattern recognition drawn from that pool but without the emotional responses which triggered the retention. The bigger the memory, the bigger the base for identifying patterns, but the missing values which memories have for us become a product of programming and cannot evolve in a situation the way humans do. If it does, it is reacting with programmed responses—but whose responses and whose values? Even stocked with thousands and thousands of human emotional responses, they will be responses from the past and not something new.   Emotion demands a body capable of feeling. Would AI be an imitation of the perfect emotional response based on an averaged ideal system of values—statistical emotions? Averaged emotions would belong to everybody and nobody. Even when we know something intellectually it has an emotional dimension to it based on who we are. And when we know emotionally it becomes a little bit more than simply knowing and more a part of our value system which evolves through both reason and emotion.   With humans, pure reasoning usually happens within a set of established parameters and is an attempt to overcome the emotional associations, making it more objective and communicable to a greater number, which we consider rational. Yet rationality is an attempt to overcome subjectivity by removing those emotional dimensions, a nearly impossible task because of the intricate reaction between emotion and values, more a goal than an achievement.   The need to know, what might be popularly referred to as curiosity, is something shared with all living creatures. Every living thing continually pokes, smells, probes into all corners of its surroundings to assure its survival. We need to know our environment in order to survive in it. Human beings share that with all other life forms but with an abundance which has taken us further than most living creatures. The depths of our consciousness, memory, and feelings have allowed us to advance further and we have developed several directions in which to apply them: art, science, religion, and philosophy. All are answers to the need to know and to understand and explain. That abundance is apparent in both art and science as elaborate manifestations of that curiosity in operation, two important ways of trying to probe what is out there, what we understand as real, how we fit into it, and how it can serve us. What we, as a culture, are finally beginning to understand is the ancient wisdom of serving it in exchange.   Art and science each bring to a situation their own methods of looking—or rather seeing—and from each comes something new to understanding. The experiences and practices of each prepare them in different ways to ask questions and propose solutions. A work of art is a proposed solution as much as any scientific proposal, albeit coming from the personal perspective of the individual artist. Science operates from a generally accepted worldview applied to specific examined situations and artists from a personal worldview expressed through specific works. Both change and evolve and that evolution results in change, which affects the world view of us who experience them.   We need both and in situations where both are operative that approach provides better, richer, and more complete answers. They are complementary like two legs for walking or two eyes for depth. They are the two angles of a triangulation, as mentioned, where together they give a more complete understanding of what is being pursued, the third point, our being in the world.   Communicating information is one form of fundamental communication. Another, central to art, is communicating emotion. Art was probably our first effort in trying to pass on an experience, before language, the emotional reaction we had to something, good or bad, which gave it an urgency, the need to be transmitted to others. Today, when our many forms of communication manage to transmit emotion we react to them with a higher degree of attention, recognising something special in itself.   Bergson, as mentioned, called intellect and instinct the two sources of how we know and evaluate our exterior and our place in it.   This fuller way of knowing is by becoming one with what we perceive. It is the opposite of standing outside as a disengaged observer, but means incorporating what is perceived by joining with it for the duration. That demands the fullest participation of the person. This is what the artist does which does not mean that others don’t. But for art it is the metier. Art is perhaps the most misunderstood activity of the human being and, in our highly educated society, that misunderstanding, as profound as it is, is incomprehensible. Art is a way of knowing in order to survive.   We live in a time of necessary experimentation to reinvent ourselves and the institutions which represent us. Art has always been a major way of doing so, particularly in the last 200 years, the sine qua non  of the new renaissance I propose. It evolved from representing the powers that be and became the expression of individuals who made it from their interaction with the world.  The collection of those individual expressions is an important part of that experimentation taking place and fundamental to it.   Art is a proposition coming from the individual and sum of those individualities is what we call culture. The open-ended approach of art is essential now as we rebuild our institutions on a new model of interactivity and without hype, without self-serving salesmanship, without the conviction that we hold the truth but with openness and honesty in building back the trust essential to any social order.   ‘Aux arts citoyens’. Don Foresta Don Foresta, Advisory Editor to CJLPA 4, is a research artist and art theoretician in art and science and new technologies. His 1990 book in French, Mondes Multiples , is considered a landmark on the relation between these subjects. He holds a Sorbonne doctorate in Information Science and is a Chevalier of France’s Order of Arts and Letters. [1] See Henri Bergson, Les Deux sources de la morale et de la religion  (Félix Alcan 1932). [2] Gilbert Simondon, Imagination et Invention, 1965-1966  (Presse universitaire de France 2014) 4. [3]  James L McGaugh,  ‘The amygdala modulates the consolidation of memories of emotionally arousing experiences’ (2004) 27 Annual Review of Neuroscience 1-28. [4]  Private correspondence (2015). [5]  Edwige Armand, Don Foresta et al, Sapiens : métamorphose ou extinction?  (Humensciences 2022) 176 [6]  Lawrence Weschler, Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: A Life of Contemporary Artist Robert Irwin  (University of California Press 1982) 184. The title of the book is an expression of the reverse of the operation, a necessary step to really ‘see’. We must forget the name of something, its intellectual designation, to ‘know’ it in another way. [7]  Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media  (Signet 1964) xi. [8]  Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics (Citadel 1998) 135. Translation has been lightly altered based on original at La perception du changement : conférences faites a l'université d'Oxford les 26 et 27 Mai 1911  (Oxford 1911). [9] Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch, The Embodied Mind  (MIT Press 1993). [10]  Don Foresta, Mondes Multiples  (Edition BàS 1991). [11] See ‘Bellagio Report and Conclusions’ ( Don Foresta , 21 December 2015) < https://donforesta.net/conferences/bellagio/start > accessed 23 September 2025. [12] See image at < https://www.nashersculpturecenter.org/art/exhibitions/object/id/3147-535 > accessed 23 September 2025. The biface handaxe was found in West Tofts, England in the nineteenth century and is in the collection of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology of Cambridge University. [13] See Armand, Foresta et al (n 5). [14] Norbert Wiener, God & Golem, Inc  (Boston 1964). [15] Michael Pitts and Mark Roberts, Fairweather Eden (London 1997). [16] See < https://vasulka.org/ > accessed 23 September 2025. [17] See < https://www.sultra-barthelemy.eu/ > accessed 23 September 2025. [18]  Pascal Rousseau,   Le Rêve de Kupka: La vérité nue de la peinture  (Institut national d'histoire de l'art 2022) 21.

Introduction   Governments have launched a series of ambitious digital strategies over recent decades to improve how they operate and interact with citizens. However, many of their anticipated benefits have yet to be achieved, leaving governments ill-equipped to respond effectively to a growing array of social and economic policy challenges, both domestic and international. The House of Commons Public Accounts Committee recently expressed concerns at:   T he number of complex, large-scale digital programmes we continue to see fail […] Departments have failed to understand the difference between improving what currently exists and real digital transformation, meaning they have missed opportunities to move to modern, efficient ways of working. [1]   These setbacks come despite nearly three decades of digital initiatives in which the UK was a pioneer: its first pan-government website launched in 1994 and within a few years brought together information from 180 separate public sector organisations. [2]  By 1996, the UK government was exploring ‘the opportunity to transform the whole operation of government’. [3] And in 1998, work was underway to exploit technology to ‘facilitate fundamental changes in the relationships between the citizen and the state […] with implications for the democratic process and structures of government’. [4] By 2002, the ambition was ‘to enhance our democratic structures […] to give individuals more choice about how they can participate in the political process’. [5] Technology was increasingly seen as integral to the creation of a more participative, transparent, and collaborative form of democratic governance and citizen empowerment. [6]   However, between the idea and the reality falls the shadow. As futurist Alvin Toffler predicted over fifty years ago, governments’ industrial era institutions and practices have proved ill-equipped to cope with the pace of technological change. [7] In place of a democratic renaissance, subsequent decades have seen the mass digitisation and automation of governments’ industrial-era institutions and practices, creating often undesirable results. [8]  Technology has all too often become synonymous with processes that undermine the rule of law [9] and democracy. [10] It’s used to industrialise surveillance, [11]  erode legal but ‘offensive’ free speech, [12]  and automate injustice and inequality in the name of bureaucratic ‘efficiency’. [13]   These outcomes are the opposite of what was originally promised. They stifle democratic reform and disadvantage the most vulnerable members of society. [14] In parallel, governments exhibit a near-perpetual state of panic about all things digital—artificial intelligence, AdTech, the gig economy, hybrid warfare—and provide inadequate and lethargic political responses to proven harms, including the toxic impact of social media. [15]  No wonder many democracies ‘are experiencing serious institutional debilities and weak public confidence’, [16] with over half the world’s democracies reported to be in retreat. [17]   Western governments’ failure to exploit technology as a strategic asset stands in sharp contrast to its exploitation by authoritarian regimes. From China [18] to Iran, [19] North Korea, [20] and Russia, [21] autocracies have integrated technology deep within their policies and plans, from pervasive national surveillance and suppression of free speech and civil society, to disrupting the affairs of other nations using everything from bot-driven false information to deepfakes and cyber-attacks. [22]   Failing to harness technology as a means of democratic renewal has left our governments ill-placed to tackle an increasingly complex and challenging political landscape. If democracies are to survive and prosper, they need a more effective and principled approach to technology—rooted in a vision of what they stand for:   A n affirmative, persuasive, secure and privacy-preserving, values-driven, and rights-respecting view of how technology can enable individual dignity and economic prosperity, and also what they will stand against—the misuse and abuse of technology to repress, control, divide, discriminate, and disenfranchise. [23]   Rethinking government   The use of technology to digitise policy and administrative silos within and between central government departments and local, regional, and national administration, creates painful—and sometimes deadly [24] —divisions in people’s lives. These boundaries prevent governments from working across their historical organisational structures to become more effective in how they learn, plan, adapt, and respond to domestic and international challenges.   Ed Vaizey, a former UK government minister, commented in 2017 that he ‘would completely re-engineer government. I would abolish government departments, I would have government by task’. [25]  His remarks echo the earlier political desire to use technology as a force for good in the modernisation and reform of government, and to:   P rovide better and more efficient services to businesses and to citizens, improve the efficiency and openness of government administration, and secure substantial cost savings for the taxpayer. (1996). [26]   M ake sure that public service users, not providers, are the focus, by matching services more closely to people’s lives […] [and] deliver public services that are high quality and efficient. (1999). [27]   Such sentiments reveal an enlightened political interest in harnessing the positive potential of science and technology, one memorably expressed in Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s 1963 speech when he asserted that ‘The Britain that is going to be forged in the white heat of this revolution will be no place for restrictive practices or for outdated methods on either side of industry’. [28] However, the subsequent failure of successive governments to modernise their ‘outdated methods’ and ‘industrial era institutions and practices’ has become a contributory factor to the decline in democracy and our public institutions. [29]   Technology’s policy implications   Digital technologies and practices can help governments access, analyse, and model information within and between the silo boundaries of current public administration. They offer new opportunities to engage communities and individuals in shaping and co-creating their own futures. They can inform the evidence base, continuously enlightening policymaking to deliver better outcomes. And they have an essential role in helping to reshape, redesign, and optimise organisational structures and practices to deliver better outcomes that escape the outdated methods prevalent in both public and private sectors. [30]   However, the political perception of technology is stuck in the web-centric mindset of the late twentieth century. Digital government programmes focus on creating elegant website veneers over industrial era processes, [31] marginalising the citizen/state relationship into a transactional one between ‘customers’ and ‘services’. This digitisation of point-to-point online transactions comes at a high cost: it displaces the role of technology in transforming governments’ ability to better understand and solve complex and interweaving social and economic problems. And it prioritises bureaucratic structures and processes over the radical overhaul of public policymaking and administration. [32]   The customer/service mindset is in part a toxic hangover of new public management (NPM), the private sector concepts parachuted into the public sector during the 1980s. Digital government strategies adopt the language and mindset of NPM in their ideological emphasis on ‘users’ and ‘services’. They often lack formal mechanisms to assess whether digital initiatives are legally compliant: developers can make decisions and write code that creates or breaks policy, bypassing policymakers, legislators, and voters—a problem described by Lawrence Lessig, an American academic and attorney, as ‘code as law’:   The code regulates. It implements values, or not. It enables freedoms, or disables them. It protects privacy, or promotes monitoring. People choose how the code does these things. People write the code. Thus the choice is not whether people will decide how cyberspace regulates. People—coders—will. [33]   The mass digitisation of paper-era transactions has become the primary output of many digital programmes. Yet governments knew as early as 1996 that ‘applying technology to existing working practices, or at the customer interface, will not achieve the full benefits that information technology has the power to deliver’. [34]  The result is that digital strategies all too often fail three critical tests. The ‘Toffler test’—modernising governments’ industrial era institutions and practices. The ‘Wilson test’—tackling outdated methods. And the ‘Vaizey test’—reorganising government and public policy around outcomes.   The digitisation of government’s historical configuration presents a major impediment to progress. It makes the public sector harder to redesign and integrate around citizens, cross-cutting policies, better policy outcomes, and improved administration. The failure to modernise governments’ internal capabilities, data, structures, processes, policies, and operations undermines their ability to anticipate, react, and respond in more timely, appropriate, and effective ways to an increasingly challenging and volatile world. As a former UK Permanent Secretary, Jonathan Slater, recently commented, ‘Whitehall’s remoteness from the public and frontline results in policymaking which is fundamentally inadequate to address the challenges we face’. [35]   The threat   Technology itself is not inherently good or bad, but neither is it neutral, as historian Melvin Kranzberg reminded us. [36]  A relentless focus on the positive applications of technology is essential to protect and advance democracy. However, the absence of guiding democratic principles for the design, development, and implementation of technology leaves many digital government programmes serving less altruistic short-term goals. [37]   This democratic deficit has economic and societal ramifications that reach well beyond governments’ domestic political programmes. When former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev declared Russia to be on ‘the path of democracy and not of empire’, [38]  followed by the dissolution of the USSR in the late 1980s and early 1990s, it seemed as if the citizen centred freedoms and practices of the West had triumphed. For a moment in time an opportunity existed to reforge a global democratic renaissance, to reaffirm technology as a force for good, rooted unashamedly in the principles of liberty, justice, and the rule of law proclaimed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.   However, as with Russia’s own subsequent retreat into autocracy and militarism, many democratic governments have chosen a very different path. At their worst, they mirror the behavioural traits of technology corporations and authoritarian regimes. They deploy often unproven technologies that automate inequality and undermine human rights and the exercise of justice in the pursuit of their own political goals. Many of the artificial intelligence governance principles belatedly being implemented by governments and businesses, for example, make no mention of human rights. [39]   These failings need an urgent fix: the number of countries in the world with full democracies remains low, at just 14.4% in 2022. [40] Most people live in flawed democracies, or hybrid or authoritarian regimes. The latter represents the largest group: 36.9% of the world’s population endures the diktats of a privileged, and often brutal, controlling elite. Across the categories assessed by The Economist Intelligence Unit —electoral process and pluralism, functioning of government, political participation, political culture, and civil liberties—technology can play an essential beneficial role in re-asserting and protecting fundamental democratic rights, rather than accelerating their demise.   The opportunity   Today   Since the late 1990s, technology has been used to streamline citizens’ transactional interactions with government, from obtaining a new passport, to completing self-assessment tax returns, or making an appointment with a GP. Yet policymaking is little changed, and neither are governments’ associated structures, practices, and administration.   Citizens’ digital experiences of the public sector mimic the siloed, organisation-centric processes and forms that preceded them. Inside government, Ministers and officials lack timely access to basic information and insight about how their department is performing, what’s going well, what’s broken, what citizens think, or insight into the impact of their policies, short- and long-term, across departments and national, regional, and local government.   To paraphrase computer programmer Melvin Conway, any organisation that designs a system will produce a design that mirrors the organisation’s existing structure. [41]  In large-scale, siloed organisations like government, digital initiatives reflect and reinforce existing hierarchies and silos. It’s the opposite of what’s required: as Conway also noted, ‘flexibility of organization is important to effective design. Ways must be found to reward design managers for keeping their organizations lean and flexible’. [42]  Yet governments are well behind the curve in using technology to provide such flexibility, despite the long-known benefits of networked forms of organisation:   Networks are ‘lighter on their feet’ than hierarchies. […] [they involve] discrete exchanges [not] by administrative fiat, but through networks of individuals engaged in reciprocal, preferential, mutually supportive actions […] the parties to a network agree to forego the right to pursue their own interests at the expense of others. [43] Tomorrow   The UK government recognised over two decades ago that:   Many of the biggest challenges facing Government do not fit easily into traditional Whitehall structures […] [We need] a comprehensive package of measures to improve and modernise the way we handle cross-cutting issues […] the role of leadership; improving the way policy is formulated and implemented; the need for new skills; budgetary arrangements, and the role of external audit and scrutiny. [44]   Technology can help governments transition from their industrial era policy boundaries and rigid operational and financial hierarchies towards more effective, networked, and collaborative ways of working. Doing so will help officials work beyond ‘the boundaries of their agencies to accomplish the broad mission, rather than simply managing the more narrow activities within their agency’s walls’. [45]  It will improve the way policy is developed and informed, and provide more joined-up approaches to complex issues like intergenerational poverty and homelessness.   These changes will also have implications for administrative law. Departmental and process boundaries, funding, and accountability are often stipulated in legislation, including the naming of departmental Secretaries of State in Acts of Parliament. Redesigning policymaking and public administration around outcomes will require changes to existing processes, oversight, and accountability. Funding models will need major reform so that resources flow more effectively to where they have maximum beneficial impact instead of perpetuating silo organisational structures and processes.   Making it happen   To reset digital government onto a better track will require political vision and affirmative action on multiple fronts, including: Leadership   Technology’s strategic role in helping renew democracy and our public institutions needs to be understood at the most senior political and official levels. Governments will need to break the habit of handing digital political portfolios to junior, transitory politicians who lack the insight or experience to exploit technology as a tool of strategic improvement. If governments are serious about modernising the public sector, they need a Cabinet-level politician with the authority to deliver improvements across government’s policy and structural silos.   The political challenge of harnessing technology to reinvigorate democratic values and institutions is significant. David Freud, a former Minister for Welfare Reform, accurately pinpointed why digital programmes frequently fail: ‘We’ve been looking at this as a technology issue. It is much more than that, [it’s] a major cultural change in the relationship between the state and the people it needs to support’. [46]   Capabilities   To improve their capabilities, governments need to ditch the tactical, low-level ‘digital training’ of the past [47]  and move to education programmes [48] built around improved citizen engagement and the transformation of policymaking and policy outcomes, including the organisational structures, administrative processes, funding, and technology needed for their delivery. Similarly, technology leaders should have access to education programmes that develop their understanding of democratic principles, policymaking, and legislative processes to inform and guide their work.   Governments need to adopt more systems thinking to better understand how different policies, organisations, and processes interact with and influence each other. [49] For transformation to succeed, politicians and senior officials will need to work in more collaborative, participative, and outcome-based ways. This has major implications for Ministers and Secretaries of State: their portfolios will increasingly focus on cross-cutting issues rather than current departmental structures and need to be supported by updated processes for citizen engagement, policymaking, legislation, resourcing, and funding.   Open government   Governments need to open up their policy and administrative silos—and their associated systems, data, and processes—to liberate citizens from the experiences that William Beveridge, pioneer of the UK’s welfare state, criticised as long ago as 1941. He found that seven different government departments were involved in providing cash benefits. [50]  This was not only inefficient and costly but also created a dehumanising, demeaning, and fragmented experience for benefit claimants.   Similar citizen experiences still abound today. Duplicated functions and processes operate in hundreds of places, both within and between departments and across local, regional, and national administration. They frustrate public sector employees too, who find themselves caught in a web of contradictory policies, funding, processes, systems, and structures. An open government mandate will provide opportunities for modernisation and innovation inside and outside of the public sector.   However, an open government initiative that delivers solely at a technical level will not in itself encourage citizen participation and improve transparency and trust:   Technology does not drive anything. It creates new possibilities for collecting and analyzing data, mashing ideas and reaching people, but people still need to be moved to engage and find practical pathways to act. [51]   Governments should encourage a nationwide open architecture to support and inform systems thinking, and to provide opportunities for improved collaboration, evidence, and research into social and economic issues and better policymaking. This open architecture will let civil society and others add significant value, helping get important things done by letting people take the initiative, with government responding ‘in the here and now’. [52] Identity   For many of our interactions with government, proof of who we are is irrelevant, such as when we access online welfare or tax guidance. Other interactions, however, require a high level of assurance that we are who we claim to be and that the information we provide is accurate. High levels of assurance are needed not just for citizens and businesses, but public sector employees too.   Instead of emulating the state-dominant identity systems of authoritarian regimes, our governments need to create democratic exemplars that are citizen centred, private, and secure. The Estonian government, for example, lets citizens see when public officials have accessed their personal information, helping provide transparency and build trust. [53]   Good identity design protects and enhances democratic rights. It preserves citizens’ anonymity and pseudonymity, and lets them prove something about themselves, such as being ‘Over 18’ or their right to work, without disclosing unnecessary information or facilitating state monitoring and surveillance. David Birch, a digital finance and identity expert, points out that ‘we need a digital identity infrastructure that supports our transition to a new economy, not one that stutters along digitising the relics of the post-industrial revolution’. [54]   To protect and enshrine democratic principles, identity needs to be developed around the citizen and not the state. Government initiatives must adhere to high standards of privacy and security, tapping into initiatives such as the Decentralised Identity Foundation (DIF) [55]  and Solid, [56] together with ICAO digital travel credentials [57]  and ISO mobile driving licences. [58]   Personal data   Personal data safeguarded in departmental silos is often blamed for preventing governments from taking a holistic view of citizens and their circumstances to design and deliver integrated policies and processes that better meet their needs: ‘Currently, the information that government holds is scattered across disparate systems and saved in a variety of formats, making it difficult for policy makers to find what they need when they need it’. [59]   From a citizen’s perspective, we want more effective policies and better outcomes, but we don’t want officials and governments accessing and misusing our personal data. We need to improve public administration through smarter information management without invading citizens’ right to a private life or risking an increase in fraud. But transitioning public administration from a departmental responsibility to a government-wide one risks creating insecure and invasive approaches to our personal data, and the creeping extension of the state into citizens’ private lives.   In 2013, the UK Government’s Technology code of practice  stated that ‘Users should have access to, and control over, their own personal data’. [60]  Although the policy commitment has yet to be delivered, the principle remains sound. And effective regulation and technical and legal enforcement must accompany these rights. Just as Open Banking lets consumers manage their financial information across multiple organisations today, [61]  tomorrow citizens should be able to manage their information and experiences across public, private, and voluntary sectors, creating ‘new forms of citizen and state co-operation and dialogue for the 21st century’. [62]   Reduce and remove transactional interactions   Governments should question why so many paper-era interactions are still needed in the digital age. What prevents public administration operating without online forms? How can technology deliver better outcomes by working across silo organisational structures, processes, and data? And how can governments design better and less dehumanising and fragmented experiences for citizens?   As governments make better use of data and involve citizens and businesses directly in its curation and maintenance, they will be able to reduce or even remove many of their existing transactional interactions, and become more efficient and effective in the process.   Algorithmic injustice and the rule of law   Governments need to prevent the misuse of technology products and services across both private and public sectors. They also need to guard against replacing the prevailing New Public Management transactional ‘user/service’ mindset with the equally problematic pathologies of New Public Analytics (NPA), with their data-driven, automated injustice:   For those in positions of vulnerability who lack the skills, competences and ready internet access, and whose encounters with the state are now mediated primarily via digital systems rather than frontline human officers, their experience of the state has become increasingly and shamefully Kafkaesque, dehumanising and unjust. However, the capacity of these systems to function automatically and at scale enables the collective violation of the rights of affected individuals, including the presumption of innocence, producing serious injustice at scale […] there is an urgent and serious need for lawyers and legal scholars to work with policymakers and technical experts in order to ensure that systematic, practical and effective constitutional safeguards are in place . [63]   Digital government initiatives need immutable constitutional safeguards, public oversight, and design principles founded on the rule of law, human rights, privacy, and security—to defend and protect democratic values and ensure positive social and human outcomes. Although some promising work has taken place with algorithmic transparency in government, [64]  mandatory transparency is required of all algorithms with social and economic impacts, including those hyped as ‘artificial intelligence’. Routine algorithmic audits and impact assessments during the design, development, and deployment of new systems will help check for bias and regulatory compliance. [65]   Conclusion   The ambitious ideals of digital government will not be delivered until politicians and political parties weave the democratising potential of technology into the fabric of their thinking, their public consultations, their manifesto promises, and their policies, using it as an immutable force for good. As the US initiative to advance technology for democracy observes:   The first wave of the digital revolution promised that new technologies would support democracy and human rights. The second saw an authoritarian counterrevolution. Now, the United States and other democracies are working together to ensure that the third wave of the digital revolution leads to a technological ecosystem characterised  by resilience, integrity, openness, trust and security, and that reinforces democratic principles and human rights. [66]     Our governments need a radical rethink and reset of their digital initiatives if this third wave of digital revolution is to succeed. They need to commit to the open, participative, collaborative, and cross-cutting uses of technology to deliver fundamental and much-needed improvements to democracy and the relationship between citizens and the state.   The upsides of doing so are clear: technology can protect and improve democratic processes and institutions; make policymaking and public administration more accessible, more collaborative, more transparent, more accountable, and more effective; and deliver better, more just, and more enduring social and economic outcomes.   After three decades of unfulfilled promises, digital government stands at the crossroads: for the health of democracy and our democratic future, it’s clear which road it needs to take. Jerry Fishenden   Dr Jerry Fishenden FIET FRSA is a technologist, writer, and composer, with a career that spans both public and private sectors. Former roles include National Technology Officer at Microsoft UK; Senior Executive, Business Systems at the City of London’s financial regulator; Network Planning Officer of the House of Commons; and IT Director in the NHS. Jerry was the Specialist Adviser to two House of Commons Committee inquiries into digital government, and advises governments, businesses, and other organisations on the effective design and implementation of technology. His latest book, Fracture: The collision between technology and democracy—and how we fix it (2023), explores technological opportunities and challenges for the future of democracy and our democratic institutions. [1]  House of Commons Committee of Public Accounts, ‘Challenges in implementing digital change’ ( House of Commons, 10 December 2021) < https://committees.parliament.uk/publications/8146/documents/83439/default/ > accessed 1 July 2023. [2]  Jerry Fishenden, ‘Remembering government direct - the first interactive green paper’ ( New Technology Observations from the UK , 20 March 2019) < https://ntouk.wordpress.com/2019/03/20/remembering-government-direct-the-first-interactive-green-paper/ > accessed 1 July 2023. [3]  ‘The Government IT Strategy: Annex E’ ( Central IT Unit, Cabinet Office, June 1996) < https://ntouk.files.wordpress.com/2020/06/uk-government-it-strategy-1996-from-the-ntouk-digital-archives.pdf > a ccessed  1 June 2023. [4]  ‘Electronic Government’ ( Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology , February 1998). < https://www.parliament.uk/globalassets/documents/post/pn110.pdf > a ccessed 1 June 2023. [5]  ‘In the service of democracy. A consultation paper on a policy for electronic democracy’ ( HM Government / UK Online , 15 July 2002)  < https://ntouk.files.wordpress.com/2020/07/e-democracy.pdf >   a ccessed 1 June 2023. [6]  Creative Research, ‘e-Democracy. 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[11]  Heather Brooke, ‘States haven’t stopped spying on their citizens, post-Snowden-they’ve just got sneakier’ The Guardian (London, 6 June 2023)   < https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jun/06/edward-snowden-state-surveillance-uk-online-safety-bill > a ccessed 1 August 2023. [12]  Ross Anderson and Sam Gilbert, ‘The Online Safety Bill. Policy Brief’ ( University of Cambridge and Bennett Institute for Public Policy , October 2022)  < https://www.bennettinstitute.cam.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Policy-Brief-Online-Safety-Bill.pdf > a ccessed 1 May 2023. [13]  Ed Pilkington, ‘Digital dystopia: how algorithms punish the poor’ The Guardian (London, 14 October 2019)  < https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/oct/14/automating-poverty-algorithms-punish-poor > a ccessed 1 June 2023. [14]  ‘India’s high-tech governance risks leaving behind its poorest citizens’ The Economist (London, 16 October 2021)  < https://www.economist.com/asia/2021/10/16/indias-high-tech-governance-risks-leaving-behind-its-poorest-citizens > a ccessed 1 August 2023. [15]  Jean M Twenge, ‘Increases in Depression, Self‐Harm, and Suicide Among U.S. Adolescents After 2012 and Links to Technology Use: Possible Mechanisms’ 2020 2(1) Psychiatric Research & Clinical Practice 19-25. [16]  Thomas Carothers, ‘Why Technology Hasn’t Delivered More Democracy’ ( Carnegie Endowment for International Peace , 3 June 2015)  < https://carnegieendowment.org/2015/06/03/why-technology-hasn-t-delivered-more-democracy-pub-60305 > a ccessed 1 January 2023. [17]  Yasmeen Serhan, ‘Half of the World’s Democracies Are in Retreat. Here’s What to Expect in 2023’ Time (New York, 21 December 2022) < https://time.com/6242188/global-democracy-report-2022/ > a ccessed 1 March 2023. [18]  ‘China’s digital dictatorship’ The Economist (London, 17 December 2016) < https://www.economist.com/leaders/2016/12/17/chinas-digital-dictatorship > accessed 1 April 2023. [19]  ‘Iran’s cyberwar goes global’ The Economist (London, 14 September 2022) < https://www.economist.com/middle-east-and-africa/2022/09/14/irans-cyberwar-goes-global > accessed 1 June 2023. [20]  ‘North Korea’s hackers are after intel, not just crypto’ The Economist (London, 7 July 2023) < https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2023/07/07/north-koreas-hackers-are-after-intel-not-just-crypto > accessed 1 August 2023. [21]  ‘ Russia is trying to build its own great firewall ’ The Economist (London, 19 February 2022) < https://www.economist.com/business/russia-is-trying-to-build-its-own-great-firewall/21807706 > a ccessed 1 June 2023. 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