NICHOLAS MIRZOEFF

14 March 2025

When we used to read those French theory guys, we used to say, “Politics, before all else, is an intervention in the visible and the sayable.” The police were said to be those who determine that relationship. The French guys should have looked a little further than Paris to the empire that was always unspeakable. “The horror, the horror.”

After a year of genocide in Gaza, seventy-five years of the Nakba, half a millennium of settler slavery, politics is and always was the meeting of the visible and the unspeakable. Unspeakable in that what is visible is so awful as to be beyond ordinary words. Unspeakable in that what is visible is forbidden to be said. Unspeakable in that language cannot contain the ways in which it is undone. So, it must be spoken in extraordinary ways.

What has been sayable about the unspeakable? It has been poets who have found ways to make language do what it should not have to do. Writing about the Holocaust, the poet Anne Michaels put her trust in “the power of language to restore.” That restoration is care, solidarity, and love.

Simple description fails. There is no sentence that can connect the colonizer and the colonized in common discourse. Undoing dissociation means ending ambiguous speaking—the “vocation” in equivocation—even though it feels more “intellectual” to do so.

Poetry works to reconnect the visible and the unspeakable. It crosses the border between inside and outside. It finds ways to make the unspeakable sayable. To create poetry in the moment where words fail us is always resistance.

Everywhere is rubble. The rubble is, and always has been, “words, words, words.” In its density of address to the intersection between the visible and the unspeakable, poetry takes material form. It is rubble, the material ground from which to speak.

The unspeakable takes on new form in the rubble of words created by the genocide in Gaza, even as that word becomes unsayable. Yet it has not been contained within the colony. It never has been.

The German art magazine Texte zur Kunst invented “anti-antisemitism” to describe unqualified and uncritical support for the state of Israel as a settler colonial enterprise in 2020. This dangerous word came from the heart of white liberalism and white Europe. It has nothing at all to do with making Jews safer. It makes the world safe for settler Zionism.

Anti-antisemitism was first deployed to dehumanize Palestinians. It expanded to dehumanize anyone trying to speak for Palestine or against Zionism. Its recursive forms include dehumanizing any Jew that fails to articulate the violence of anti-antisemitism and all of its related violences. The Jew then joins the Palestinian, finally, as the unspeakable.

The declarative sentence fails in the face of such violence. The judicial sentence applies only to those dehumanized. The empire is as it always was “legalized lawlessness.” The overlord, the Übermensch, they have preemptive pardons.

Those outside and behind imperial walls have always known this. It has been known to antifascists within the imperial borders at least since Auden wrote of the defeat of the Spanish revolution in 1937

             “We are left alone with our day, and the time is short, and
             History to the defeated
             May say Alas but cannot help or pardon.”

Settler time is a structure not an event. Today, Palestine is the world. Act accordingly.

This article was first published on To See in The Dark on 14 March 2025 and is re-published in herri with kind permission of the author.