Avgi Saketopoulou, Just Say Genocide: The Problem of Truth Sadism, The Battleground, November 28, 2024.
For The Battleground, psychoanalyst Avgi Saketopoulou describes her experience with the Sigmund Freud Museum in Vienna, which first invited her for an interview, and then canceled it when she described Israel’s war in Gaza as “genocide.” Why, she asks, does this happen? Why do institutions invite voices of solidarity with Palestine only to then shut them down? For her, this politics of invitation/disinvitation is a symptom of an attempt to deal with the growing cracks and contradictions in the institution’s own narrative about Israel/Palestine by allowing others to bring them up—instead of seriously addressing them oneself—and then rebuking or excluding them with all the power of the institution. For people in solidarity with Palestine, this raises the question of what critical cooperation with such institutions might look like without playing this game of institutional self-assurance.