¹Department of Women's Studies, Queen's University, Kington, Ontario, Canada

Correspondence: Dr Dina Georgis, Department of Women's Studies, Queen's University, Kington, Ontario, Canada K7L 3N6. E-mail: georgis@queensu.ca

Abstract

This paper examines the psychic topography of identities of belonging for their sustainability in a plural world. By drawing on Freud's Moses and Monotheism, I will think about how collective identities are symbolic reconstructions of traumatic pasts and therefore foreclose their hybrid or cosmopolitan origins. While such insight demands a politic of generosity that considers the psychic "necessities" of stable racial identities, it also demands that we be aware of how the psychic mechanisms of survival, and the narratives and the ontologies they produce, might no longer serve their communities, or the communities with which they come into contact, well. Dissatisfied with Edward Said's postmodern/postcolonial response to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict in Freud and the Non-European, this paper offers a viewpoint that imagines political responses from the affective site of human loss and injury.