Mick Hartley

Kind of Amia Srinivasan to take up mine and @Docstockk's critique of Judith Butler in the LRB, even if it is only to find ourselves once again diagnosed by our betters (that is to say, the elite class whose New Clothes are looking rather threadbare these days):

"For Stock and… pic.twitter.com/7W8coDvgAg

— Nina Power (@Nina_Power_) December 22, 2025

“”For Stock and Power are correct about this much: psychoanalysis does not presume that we in general know our own minds.”

There’s more to Srinivasan’s LRB article than her patronising dismissal of Nina Power and Kathleen Stock. Here’s how it starts:

The unconscious​ is back. Why now? Certainly it ruptured into consciousness in the days and months following 7 October 2023, when the Israeli death machine let loose on Gaza, accelerating into a genocide of the Palestinian people.

Ah yes. The genocide of the Palestinian people.

Denials of the reality of genocide mask a deeper, libidinal investment in its perpetration. In June 2024, the right-wing politician Moshe Feiglin took to Israeli television to invoke Hitler:

“As Hitler … once said, ‘I cannot live in this world if there is one Jew left in it.’ We will not be able to live in this land if one Islamo-Nazi is left in Gaza, and if we do not go back to Gaza and turn it into Hebrew Gaza.”

Moshe Feiglin – assuming this is a genuine quote – is a far-right Israeli politician, and of course by no means representative of Israeli opinion. But Srinivasan happily implies that somehow this is the deeper unconscious wish of all Israelis, thus neatly allowing her to complete the Israelis-as-the-new-Nazis point she’s so keen to make. That’s how it works with our intellectual “elite class”.