This talk will revisit the Albert Memmi’s proposal in The Colonizer and the Colonized (1950) that the psychic life of the settler-colonist can be usefully interpreted and allegorized as the ‘usurper’s role,’ understood, following Racine’s tragedy Britannicus, in terms of a libidinal mechanism whereby ‘disquiet and resulting thirst for justification require the usurper to extol himself to the skies and to drive the usurped below the ground at the same time.
Nero, the typical model of a usurper, is thus brought to persecute Britannicus savagely and to pursue him. But the more he hurts him, the more he coincides with the atrocious role he has chosen for himself.’ Before Memmi made it into a pivotal element of his portrait of the colonizer, in 1946 the film critic and theorist André Bazin had used the expression ‘Nero complex’ to refer to ‘the pleasure experienced at the sight of urban destruction.’ Keeping in mind the criticisms that were levied by Frantz Fanon at Memmi, as well as at Octave Mannoni, for downplaying the significance of colonialism as a system of political-economic violence, I want to explore what it might mean to revisit the Nero Complex as a name not just for a pathology of subjectivation but for the psychic life of state power. I will bring Memmi’s formulations into critical dialogue with contemporary psychoanalytically informed analyses of colonial domination, including Abdaljawad Omar’s analysis of the ‘shock without awe,’ which anatomize Israeli military violence against the Palestinians (and now the Lebanese), while also tracing the connections between the thesis of a colonial ‘Nero Complex’ and the analyses of what Deleuze and Guattari called fascism’s ‘line of pure destruction and abolition.’
Alberto Toscano teaches at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. He is the author of Fanaticism, Terms of Disorder and Late Fascism, and co-editor of Georges Bataille, Critical Essays. He is the series editor of Seagull Essays and the Italian List for Seagull Books, and a contributing writer for In These Times.