In today’s political landscape, it is not uncommon for us to wonder what equal and fair future we could look forward to as children if we would just follow the rules and behave “sensibly”? Written as a testament to spectacular and insidious forms of state violence and supremacist ideologies, Ghazala Jamil’s “What to do with Political Sadness and Other Essays on Death, Destruction and Hauntology” foregrounds violence, destruction and death as the primary tools for defining the exercise of power.
The book brings together essays such as “Hauntology, or Ghosted Futures,” “Contemplating Death and Politics,” “Obituaries: Death in Media,” “Suicide as Political Protest,” “The Supremacist International,” and “The Violence of ‘Reasonable’ Speech?” With these 19 essays on death, violence, and the decimation of the future, the book refuses to treat the sadness caused by devastation as pathological and offers a refreshingly radical perspective on the misery caused by political unrest.
How do we think about the future?
Drawing on political philosophy and social criticism, Jamil seeks to reflect the ideas that compensate for our limited ability to situate ourselves amidst our intertwined histories and complex geographies. Here Jamil relies on them Hauntology by Jacques Derrida to explain how the present is constantly haunted by futures once promised but never realized. “It was just a matter of crossing logical eras and stages of development to reach those futures,” she writes, “but those futures don’t come.”
She emphasizes that in today’s India, the dream of a secular, pluralistic democracy haunts our increasingly exclusionary polity. To address this problem, she calls on us to think consciously, critically, and creatively about how we can restore, defend, and imagine a future that is socially just, politically vibrant, and ecologically sustainable. For Jamil, the idea of a just and equitable future is important not only for the sake of the future, but also because it means our present is unhinged and does not feel persecuted.
The Supremacist International
What unites the participants in conservatism internationally, from white supremacists to messianic Zionists to Hindu ultranationalists allied with the BJP in India? In other words, what do people who subscribe to conservative ideologies around the world have in common across geographic boundaries? For Jamil, the answer to this question lies in a shared affective grammar of siege, resentment, and exclusion and in what she calls a “circle of mutual instrumentalization”—a vicious circle in which racists trade labor, loyalty, and legitimacy across borders.
She calls this global structure the supremacist international. She argues that this builds on something beyond mere elite conspiracy. The supremacist international, Jamil argues, functions through a mechanism that is easily apparent to the naked eye; In fact, it is sustained by the active participation of ordinary people such as voters, workers, students and supporters. She correctly recognizes a central contradiction in our current social conditions: the poor end up becoming foot soldiers of the rich and enforce a hierarchy that ultimately crushes them too.
Is political sadness personal?
“As a young person,” Jamil writes, “I realized that political events sometimes make you feel like they are personal.” Many of us can relate to this feeling. We are encouraged by socio-political forces to pathologize this pain rather than politicize it – our political sadness has become not only something to be avoided but also corrected, she argues. In this way, the political sadness we feel is interpreted as an individual mental health problem and not seen as a normal response to political unrest.
Image via Maktoob Media
This is further complicated by neoliberal capitalism, which has little patience for sadness. Staying sad, our culture tells us, is unreasonable. Here Jamil assumes that political and personal lifeworlds are only analytically different areas – political interventions in our personal lives are passed on across generations in the form of memories, traumas and legacies. There is hardly anything in the personal sphere, says Jamil, that remains untouched by the state or the preferences of the majority.
What do we do with political sadness?
What then should we do with our political sadness? First, we need to stop thinking of it as a disorder or pathology, says Jamil. For her, sadness is a “profound and ethical response to a disordered world.” According to Jamil, feeling sad in the world we live in today is the only sensible reaction; The challenge before us is to experience our sadness and let it shape our appearance in the world. So political sadness should not be seen as something we have to “get over” but as something we have to try to think with.
Second, we must recognize the structural nature of political sadness and avoid reducing it to a personal failure. There’s now an entire industry dedicated to helping us deal with our sadness – but in the rush to heal individual sadness, Jamil warns, the space to collectively mobilize political sadness is lost. Recognizing political sadness, then, means rejecting induced amnesia and the fantasy of happiness without justice. Political sadness has the potential to truly connect people – admitting your sadness means reopening the possibility of solidarity.
Finally, Jamil leaves us with a 7-point thesis: Mourning is a political act, the future is a site of struggle, linear time is a colonial fiction, ghostly futures are not completely erased, the past is often the architecture of exclusion, the cancellation of futures is a material and political process, and radical hope is fidelity to a future deemed untenable.
Jamil’s book is incredibly relevant to us today. The current political situation in India is undoubtedly the most depressing in a long time. Much of what we see today – Hindutva groups beating up peaceful protesters, police brutally arresting innocent citizens, the government’s complete apathy towards rampant violence – are questions that Jamil convincingly answers in her book. Her elegiac prose, timely arguments, and refreshing originality make for a highly engaging and indeed insightful read.
In this day and age, it is impossible to remain unaffected by the political unrest around the world. Here, Jamil positions sadness as a natural response to political unrest, not as an individual failure or pathology. Her work is a steadfast refusal to give in to popular narratives that downplay political sadness. Jamil’s book not only destigmatizes political sadness – it positions it not only as a legitimate but also an appropriate response to our political circumstances. So sadness is a form of resistance – being politically sad means refusing to believe the lie that everything is okay.
What to Do with Political Sadness And other Essays on Death, Destruction and Hauntology by Ghazala Jamil is published by Simon & Schuster India.
Abhijay Rambabu (he/him) is a sociologist with a strong focus on digital, urban and cultural sociology. He researches and writes on these topics, in addition to his writings on ecology, inequality and critical caste studies.