The Politics of Looking

Nicholas Mirzoeff’s post “Epsteinism and the Politics of Looking” generated a dialogue between the author and the artist Claire Fontaine.

Claire Fontaine (CF): We have been avid readers of your writings since we can remember and one of the most astonishing aspects in your latest work is the way in which you show how all our struggles are connected. In particular you shed light on the knot between seeing others and seeing ourselves. In line with the feminist motto “depart from yourself,” you manage to separate the knowledge that comes from one’s particular experience from the argument of authority. Having endured trauma doesn’t have to mean being damaged and therefore not credible, but neither does it authorize one to lecture, or worse, perpetrate harm, in the name of what one has gone through.

In your writings, suffering and being caught in contradictions can turn into a transversal strength that can unite us and help us uncover the structural techniques used by patriarchal-colonial power to surveil and punish. Another sense of self-worth can arise in stark opposition to revenge and terror, a self-worth free from both guilt and shame, and it can help us organize in new ways that escape denial, disassociation, and structural schizophrenia. Can you tell us more about the hopeful side that your perspective reveals? And which struggles are connected, or could be, by using these tools that create new visibilities and authorize new disclosures?

Nicholas Mirzoeff (NM): Writing for me is a dialogue that’s both internal and external. Some of that is intentional, part of a structured writing practice that directs itself to think about anti-colonial, anti-fascist, and anti-racist ways of seeing, while also doing its best to be feminist and in solidarity with struggles of all kinds. And with people like you. Especially like you. Which is not simple, but is all about taking care.

Then there’s a dialogue that cannot be structured, one with my internal selves and the external and internal threats to those selves. In this sense, “I” have always already departed from my “self” into a range of selves. I read today that official statistics from the CDC say that one in four female-identified people and one in twenty male-identified people are intimately assaulted as children (though I am rewriting the official terms). There are a lot of us out there with many selves.

Writing is a means by which these “selves” connect, find each other, help each other, and make themselves known to each other. These connections cannot easily be spoken, other than in the therapeutic context, precisely because they have been made unspeakable. When “I” write, I do so knowing that those who might read it are either directly or indirectly known to me, as part of communities in solidarity.

To call this transversal—that which connects what would otherwise not be connected—feels right. The unseeing and making invisible that is “genocide, censorship and extinction” can be connected and made “visible” in the sense of knowable, perceivable, tactile. This set of invisibilities is always present in your work, whether visual or written. To allow others to see the selves that I am becoming is to begin to sense who they are, what they might be capable of doing, and where they still struggle.

“Hope” comes from the possibility that transversal connection opens, the moment in which that which was to be held separate comes into contact. It’s never a simple road to walk. A conjunctural analysis, like that made by Stuart Hall, finds its “optimism” by connecting all of us to all our struggles. The loss of a “left,” of a place in which a “we” existed, means that the marches, the meetings, and the writings are about finding what Verónica Gago calls “common ground”1—the ground which fascism has shattered, as Spanish feminist collective Precarias a la Deriva pointed out long ago. It’s from that reformed ground, as Silvia Federici says, that a sense of what you call the “human strike” arises.

CF: On another point, the emotional competence that arises when we kill the sense of having been the victim of the system and we refuse to victimize others and enact revenge brings both a different image and a different idea of what justice can be.

Can you say something about the image of humankind that could arise if we weren’t suffocated by the sinister comedy of power that we see unfolding in the news, from Netanyahu to Trump, from Meloni to Putin, and so many others? Their revolting fascist-sexual way of exerting power is polluting our minds and raping our peace, as they argue for genocide, illegalize abortion, use racism as a pretext for a state of exception, and wage war as a geopolitical strategy to get what they want.

NM: The human strike is about reminding ourselves of what past movements have insisted upon and on occasion enacted: that this way of being constituted as always already in hierarchy, always situating pleasure in nonconsensual domination, always denying any sense of complexity or engagement with others is not, will not, and has not been what it is to be human.

I often go back to the Haitian revolution (1791–1804) that overturned slavery and defeated imperialism. When it constituted this power, it did not embody hierarchy. The Haitian Constitution (1805) states that everyone who stays on the island, who affiliates with the revolution, will “henceforth be known only by the generic denomination Black [noir].” The revolution disconnected identity from skin tone and personal histories, replacing racist hierarchy with a capacious and dynamic relation as and in Blackness. This is what Fanon meant in his call for a new human and what Sylvia Wynter analyzed in her definitions of Man1 and Man2 within racial capitalism.

People drew on this legacy when they said Black Lives Matter, consciously or unconsciously. It was what drew young people to the Gaza solidarity encampments and to the streets of Minneapolis. Solidarity means inviting an other(s) to “see” us with capacious grief and then return that seeing, such that we can feel that desire to change everything in expanded solidarity, to use Viet Thanh Nguyen’s terms.2 We know it’s possible because for short but vivid moments, it’s already happened.

CF: In your works about Palestine, colonialism, the abuse of power in Western countries, and sexual abuse at large, it seems clear that one of the forms of contemporary domination has become the extraction of dignity. Making us increasingly dependent on commodities and economically strapped to society to survive is an integral part of this extraction as much as gentrification, precariousness, and repression. How can we gain control of the means of reproduction of our dignity and how can we stop its extraction?

NM: Dignity is the dignity of an other(s) that I must defend, as Antigone has long figured for us. In the Civil Rights Movement, activists personified dignity against the violence of racism and used the mediation of that struggle to require others to defend them at long last. That mediated interface is no longer possible when media of all kinds are dedicated to monetizing what you call the “extraction of dignity.”

Recently, I saw The Voice of Hind Rajab, a film that has the intense unity of time, place, and action of classic tragedy. But there is no flaw in the tragic hero, Hind Rajab. The flaw is rather in those who heard and hear her call “to come and get me.” As the film makes inescapably clear, the occupation’s technology made it known to them that a child was alive in the vehicle. Yet they killed both medical workers who could have rescued her and Hind herself.

Listening to her call—director Kaouther Ben Hania used the actual WAV files that recorded her messages to the Red Crescent—was at one point so unbearable that I thought I would have to leave. The reproduction of this voice and its dignity, its extinction in the name of my own safety as a “Jew,” nonetheless had to be borne, as part of what John Berger calls “undefeated despair.”3

Ben Hania’s adaptation of tragedy using the archives of social media and digitized collective assistance offered a path to understand the immensity of the apparatus dedicated to destroying human dignity and solidarity, and to refuse that destruction. It comes at the cost of knowing that the solidarity that has been achieved since October 7, which is real and has had material effects, is nonetheless as fragile as a child’s voice.

CF: There has definitely been, in the last twenty years, an increase in awareness and a new sensibility about questions of gender, reproductive rights, gay and trans rights, and children’s rights (although “right” isn’t the word that should be used—we always underline that the original Italian title of the Milan Women’s Bookstore book Sexual Difference translates literally as Don’t Believe You Have Any Rights). Today we have more emotional and political awareness surrounding the victims of patriarchy, and yet, on a macro level we see more unbearable cruelty and violence, more fascism and racism than since WWII.

Is there a desertion of the representative political field, occupied today by figures that believe in, and practice, abuse in every corner of their lives? The very existence of civil society is denied and threatened whenever it emerges. In Palestine, for historical reasons, civil society was omnipresent and micropolitical; its criminalization provided the justification for indiscriminate attacks on children, hospitals, graveyards, and so much more. Do we live in a time where mass surveillance has relegated politics to the intimate sphere? Is the price that organized movements have to pay, in terms of repression, an illiteracy about how to be together and organize? Is there a way around this that doesn’t lead to unsustainable consequences in people’s lives? After all, a movement that asks everyone to be a hero and a martyr without any promise of success doesn’t stand a chance.

NM: David Graeber used to say that the key to politics is to act as if one was already free, as if one had rights, which are never anything other than provisional. By the same token he would also point out that so-called liberal institutions were the first to deny such rights. For example, try getting into the university library without a swipe card these days. Or into any university building in my institution.

Since the Global Justice movement of the 1990s, effective political action has been spontaneous, horizontal, and, as our mutual friends in the Center for Convivial Research and Autonomy (CCRA) would put it, convivial. Yet as the CCRA also note, it has been temporary, very much subject to the repression you describe, the violence that has caused death from Genoa to Cairo to Minneapolis.

There continues to be no other choice, given the absolute failure of representative institutions, to try and make this work. All our encampments begin again with a tent, a kitchen, a library, and ways to offer care. They enact performative claims to the right to the city. Not the city we have, the failed mess of broken streets and dysfunctional public space, but the imagined city to come. As the Palestinian artists Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme highlighted in their 2025 installation “Prisoners of Love: Until the Sun of Freedom,” the Palestine prisoners’ movement and the Black Panthers both called for us to see that prison is simply the metonym for the carceral society in which we all are forced to live.

CF: After reading your incredible essay “Epsteinism and the Politics of Looking,” we discussed the case of Italy in the 1990s, where a mass televisual education in pedophilia was imparted to the nation. (Harvey Weinstein and Jimmy Savile are the tip of the iceberg of how much the entertainment industry is key to this culture of abuse.) Silvio Berlusconi built in Italy a true entertainment empire that paved the way for his political triumph. In a program like Non è la rai, aired when children came home from school, the normalization of pedophile voyeurism was extremely violent, and was aimed at the youngest part of society as an imperative of early sexual submission and a brutal obligation to visual performativity for girls. Despite protests at the time by parents associations and feminist movements, the vast majority of the Italian public tended to minimize the ideological operation, or refused to see what they enjoyed watching. Berlusconi’s habit of having orgies at his house involving prostitutes, the notorious “bunga bunga” parties, led to a major political scandal. In 2013, he was convicted for paying for sex with a minor, and then acquitted one year later because the court held that it couldn't be proved that he knew the girl was seventeen at the time. Today investigations have been reopened against Berlusconi's codefendants for judicial corruption; the Milan prosecutors have alleged that some witnesses have been bought off. Imane Fadil, after declaring she would publish a memoir about the orgies, died in mysterious circumstances; the investigation concluded that she died of natural causes, a finding her family disputes on the grounds of medical negligence.

Do you think that capitalism and the society of the spectacle crystallize a type of desire that objectifies and submits rather than promoting the liberation of our bodies and minds? Is this darkness at the heart of Western secular society something that we refuse to see in ourselves and others? Gisèle Pelicot’s decision to have an open trial of her rapists may also be read as an attempt to force everyone to see and not look away.

NM: Berlusconi clearly embodied what I called “Epsteinism,” not to suggest that it is new, but rather to insist that it is structural, not an event, to use the formula coined by Patrick Wolfe in 2006 with regard to eliminating the Indigenous in settler colonialism. The objectification and commodification of human bodies has been structural to settler slavery since 1462 and the establishment of plantations in Cape Verde.

Berlusconi-ism, in its engagement with television; Weinstein-ism, in its marauding over Hollywood cinema; Savile-ism, in its hunting through the institutions of the welfare state under the cover of celebrity: All these are manifestations of what this structure has become in the society of the spectacle. Epsteinism was its neoliberal manifestation, and we are now in a moment of conjunctural crisis in which there is a brief, tenuous possibility to abolish this structure of domination.

In this formation, “masculinity” has always already been an act of taking possession, whether of “America” imagined as an Indigenous woman in the sixteenth century, or of a child’s body used as a vehicle because they were less likely to have contracted syphilis—this structure of “desire” extends from the slave ships to nineteenth-century colonies to elite violation today in the Epstein network.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution formed by digital devices and AI has accelerated the impossibility of this masculinity. The so-called manosphere rages online that they are involuntarily celibate, aka “incel,” for which the solution is to commit massacres, at first imagined and then in reality.

CF: In many of your writings you talk about “looking” without seeing, which is a crucial matter in a visually obsessed culture like ours. “To see in the dark,” as you beautifully explain, is more than a metaphor in the case of Palestine—it’s also an invitation to explore the ways in which capitalism and its dehumanization have left us incapable of seeing what happens to us and showing it to others. We disassociate, we develop coping strategies that ultimately destroy the humanity in us, instead of using the human strike and the courage of collective grieving.

NM: This darkness cannot but be crosshatched with the dark from which we try to see. In my book, I talked about the intersecting histories within my own family of political violence in support of Zionism, of domestic violence, and of sexual assault. This is part of my dark.  So too is the dark in which my grandmother assembled weapons for the Haganah, a Zionist paramilitary organization that engaged in terrorist actions under the Mandate in Palestine, even as she was later the target of domestic violence. The white glare of surveillance capitalism flattens all of it. It’s only in the “dark” that these imbrications and implications can be acknowledged, spoken, worked with—not worked through, not yet. It is through learning from and with the practices of being queer, or nonbinary, and becoming trans that some sense of how to be in such a space might emerge. 

CF: We want to try to think alongside you, because you are a constant source of inspiration for us, on the question of the invisible and the unseen. A lot of human symbolic activities—culture, art, but also politics and religion—are constructed around the invisible: We can make worlds with words, images, and statues. You have talked about mourning collectively the victims of police brutality in public space with CCRA and bringing back old personal traumas as a source of increased awareness about oneself and the world, as two ways of making present the things, people, and emotions that have been buried. During Covid we were all buried alive and separated from each other. We were also faced with many deaths: The virus wiped from the face of the earth immense numbers of people, overlapping with the deaths of the Ukraine-Russia war. But it’s definitely with October 7, the killings, the hostages, and the two years of unspeakable genocide and destruction flanked by its denial and mass censorship that absence and silence have flooded our lives. In this interdiction to truly speak about what is happening to us while the state of exception in Palestine is financed and approved by the countries where we live grows the question of the role of the invisible and the unspeakable that you address so well. 

Surveillance is omnipresent online and offline and we are constantly seen watching; what we look at gets archived and can be used against us. The message many people have received is clear: “If you side with these disgraced victims we will give you a little taste of disappearance and lack of rights.” Other immaterial things float in a curious form of uncertainty, like climate change that is generally evident but still has strong and powerful deniers, like Trump, and isn’t practically addressed in an adequate way on a global level. Do you think that we can talk about the “extraction of reality” and “conflicting experiences” to describe the ways in which we live through this new and disturbing situation? And do you think that the fake news and the attempts to deny or normalize what is happening in Palestine (and now Iran and Lebanon) create a parallel digital and psychological reality where it’s impossible to look at what we must see because we can’t do what we should to prevent it from continuing?

The Voice of Hind Rajab is a devastating metaphor of this situation: We are eight minutes away from saving a child’s life but in fact we are totally paralyzed and we might cause more harm by trying to rescue her. Are we facing a parallel reality made up of images we don’t know what to do with after seeing them, and voices in our heads urging us to intervene, to do something, that can produce even worse outcomes? 

NM: Let me close by saying how entirely inspiring I find thinking with you, engaging with your art, learning from your writing, and perhaps above all your presence in the world in all senses. As I mentioned, The Voice of Hind Rajab was perhaps the first time I have experienced classical tragedy. Just as an Athenian audience would have known what was going to happen to Oedipus, so we knew what happened to Hind, and that made it even more devastating. Catharsis is not a cleansing so much as a return to the condition of being human without dissociation, without dissimulation, without denial.

In 1932, at the Twelfth International Psycho-Analytical Congress in Wiesbaden, Germany—imagine that for a moment—the Hungarian analyst Sándor Ferenczi told his audience that, notwithstanding Freud’s supposed breakthrough to the contrary, “Even children of very respectable, sincerely puritanical families fall victim to real violence or rape much more often than one had dared to suppose.” Even as he walked through some routine pleasure-principle analysis, Ferenczi could not but realize that “there is neither shock nor fright without some trace of splitting of personality.” Strikingly, he calls this the “terrorism of suffering” (original emphasis).

Within this zone of the unspeakable, there was and is no “self” so much as selves. Dissociation prevents intrapersonal engagement with the other selves. Any such engagement is called schizophrenia or other forms of mental “illness,” now usually treated with psychotropic drugs. In the world being manufactured by AI, interpersonal contact is being replaced by human-to-bot engagement. The chatbots endlessly and tirelessly flatter and praise their human counterparts. In place, then, of un-dehumanizing masculinity, capital has supplied a never-human “companion” species, always subordinate, always available, much as patriarchy has imagined women, trans people, queers, and children.

What I’m thinking in this moment is that the contradiction expressed as “anti-Zionist Jewishness” cannot be sustained. It’s really a split. When I am anti-Zionist, I am not what it is now to be a Jew. Like it or not, any Jew whatever, like myself, has the “right” of return to Palestine that is denied to all Palestinians. Like it or not, the 2018 Basic Law enshrines the Israeli state as an ethnonationalist hierarchy to which “Jews” have exclusive access.

In this context, the anti-Zionist Jew is dissociatively caught in “ontological terrorism,” to use Julius Lester’s term coined in thinking through what it means to be Black and Jewish. It is now being deployed to deny even the possibility of being anti-Zionist and Jewish.

There are those who wish to save Judaism from this split, arguing that anti-Zionism is compatible with religion. I understand the impulse. But I also see that both in the invasion and genocide of Gaza, and in today’s war against and genocide of Iran, Netanyahu and other Israeli figures have evoked the specter of Amalek. In Deuteronomy, Amalek is a people that the Israelites are commanded to destroy, including the very memory of their existence. For now, whatever it will be to be Jewish must be placed in suspension until and unless there is anti-Zionism. 

Such disalienation, to use Fanon’s term, does not produce, as it were, a single speaking subject. Rather it allows us/me to bear being split, to make that splitting into (a) becoming (an) other which is not one.

The question of (in)visibility is central to all this and yet, no matter how many ways we try and frame it as such, there has been a refusal to engage with it. I think of your haunting and beautiful piece Siamo con voi nella notte. It is an ethical “seeing” that is done in the dark, one that recalls and recasts the layered history of such seeing. In 2024, when the work was placed inside the carceral institution at Giudecca, only properly “seen” by the incarcerated women at night, I felt I had some sense of what disalienation might mean.