From Lundi matin #479, 10/06/2025
In the rubble of Gaza, a white patch for a white coat…
Safiya means “pure” in Arabic, as in the image of the world that remains “pure” when only the shadows of of the shadows of humans remain.
A man walks alone on the ruins of Gaza. Around him, no hospital rubble, no buried bodies, no lingering ghosts are discernible. There is only the idea of a greyness that brings the earth back to the earth through the hubris that makes the elevation and the urge to destroy it necessary. A white patch lost in an abstraction of rubble, the silence of corpses on which it feeds. The abstract has the power to devour the anonymous bodies that suffered to facilitate its construction, until they dissolve into the senselessness of a variation, that of the same colour, the same drama: the ashen waves carry the ochre of the world to the soot of its ruin.
A white patch for a white coat that obstructs the tanks’ progress. An imperturbable white coat that replaces the eye with shrouds, small and tied together, through ancestral gestures that glorify care before mourning, and mourning before language that attempts to name the world. The gestures mourn the breaking of their time, forgetting themselves before even knowing how to spell it, despite the destiny of their burial.
History always betrays the faceless silhouettes that war throws into its bowels, but the image, which reigns with its economy over our rigid ways of designating identities, which also remains driven by this duty to eliminate what may remain of the defeated face in victorious memories, this image sometimes still knows how to escape the catastrophe that is brewing within it, when it survives with an aura triumphant over all the productivisms that attempt to instrumentalise it until it dissipates.
The image of this man has no face, but its aura overcomes the commercial division of representation so that this white shadow bears all the faces of the dead, the dead without identity who know nothing of the state, the border, or the modern language that imposes its stigmata on the earth, its accounting of corpses—a corpse is always all the corpses in the world. The shadow with its dead swirls before us, pointing out our path of ruins amid its turmoil. It is the silhouette that precedes us to absorb the history of the defeated, whom we will try to bury with their bodies far from our memories — but the spectres resist, they haunt us, because they melt away under the assurance of our certainties, the otherness of what their power takes away without a cry.
The man no longer belongs to himself. He turns his back on fate to deny the flagrancy of exposure. His silhouette draws a margin, a negative of the world where we can still bury the idea of a dream: silence imposes itself on those who can hear a scream of the voiceless that structures the multiplication of possible worlds.
It is not only Palestine that stands beneath this man, it is also humanity broken under the bombs of modernity. An image without faces to carry away what we cannot see, what we cannot feel, of the corpses rotting under useless gauze, an image chipped away by grey and sand, bone and flesh between our fears, and which irrevocably carries the destroyed innocence of a childhood that the man who walked alone on the ruins, where we abandoned him, could not heal.
The ashes float between memories of an era of human conquests by humans, and blend into a cybernetics that strips the identity of its movement, colonises it with fixity so that an economy of designations is petrified within it — through maps and images, through their value and their virtualities. Beneath the rubble, is there still a land without territory? What can we still stammer about the presence of the ashes that trace shifting and uncertain contours there? What can we guess about ourselves beneath these ashes that are heading for our ruins without us ever being able to contain them?
The image seeks to take revenge on the image. It resists its adoration: its devouring of the world, eternally repeated. The self-devouring image exposes other bodies to feed on itself, it puts on a show to pollute the apathy of Western words, words of this legal language that colonises bodies and their space, without expressing regret for our cowardice, the colourful unity of uniqueness, the imperturbable compassion that should precede, precede and destroy, politics in order to rebuild it far from its normative language. But the dream resists the night, and from this dream that capsizes and capsizes what attempts to establish itself within it, an inaudible force designates the means of escaping designations, assignments to the sign of the body, the map or identity. The dream is the target, but it has no form. How, then, can a formless form be destroyed? How can the formless be imprisoned in its defeated identity? Defeat in order to break free from the world, where the dream breaks free from norms, and with defeat dissolves what language imposes on the dream of fixity in a blurring of boundaries — boundaries that always begin as the boundaries of an authoritarian language that turns knowledge into a straitjacket. Defeated, the dream resists and no longer knows anything of a fixed state, of two states that oppose each other. The dream turns away to return to its movement without state, without any state of permanence, a dialectic that seeks the next dialectic, a flow piercing everything that holds it back.
Seized by torpor, the shadow of citizenship turns away from the shadow of the image. It resists resistance, it resists the dream, desperately wanting the fixity of its state, an exclusive dignity limited to its power of enunciation. This shadow does not want to hear the silence of the white shadow that bends the image of its world until it tears. It wants, through adoration, the next image, autophagic, always faceless, without spectres, without history, without the defeated of history. A multiplicity of identical images so that this shadow of citizenship can acquiesce, grant a soothing authority to that which imposes its identity, and relentlessly forget that the meaning of the dead remains that of return, in this spiral of return that always seeks deviations and deviances to draw identity into its divergence.
However the man is now only in the image, under the shadow of the tortures his body undergoes in a prison and in his silences. The man becomes the suffering that composes his abstraction. Beneath the skin of citizenship lies the human wound: the image that resists itself, despite the rough edges of its possible meanings; it remains purer than any citizen could ever be, granting the dream a free field of deviations and deviances, a return to the multiplicity of ways of affirming human dignity without any norms. Before the shattering of its crystal, it forms a moment of diffraction that resists the dishonour of our fixations. What is a man of life in the midst of death, what is a man who cares for others amid the bombs, if not existence that speaks of a totality without conditions of fragmentation, and which removes from the language of the image its power to freeze humanity in this single territory stirred up by identical words? In this empire of the image that has become senseless, this image, that of Dr Hussam Idris Abu Safiya, withdraws itself through its resistant aura to the language, to make of the margins a narrative of the unspeakable.
K.
The white shadow
From Lundi matin #479, 10/06/2025
In the rubble of Gaza, a white patch for a white coat…
Safiya means “pure” in Arabic, as in the image of the world that remains “pure” when only the shadows of of the shadows of humans remain.
A man walks alone on the ruins of Gaza. Around him, no hospital rubble, no buried bodies, no lingering ghosts are discernible. There is only the idea of a greyness that brings the earth back to the earth through the hubris that makes the elevation and the urge to destroy it necessary. A white patch lost in an abstraction of rubble, the silence of corpses on which it feeds. The abstract has the power to devour the anonymous bodies that suffered to facilitate its construction, until they dissolve into the senselessness of a variation, that of the same colour, the same drama: the ashen waves carry the ochre of the world to the soot of its ruin.
A white patch for a white coat that obstructs the tanks’ progress. An imperturbable white coat that replaces the eye with shrouds, small and tied together, through ancestral gestures that glorify care before mourning, and mourning before language that attempts to name the world. The gestures mourn the breaking of their time, forgetting themselves before even knowing how to spell it, despite the destiny of their burial.
History always betrays the faceless silhouettes that war throws into its bowels, but the image, which reigns with its economy over our rigid ways of designating identities, which also remains driven by this duty to eliminate what may remain of the defeated face in victorious memories, this image sometimes still knows how to escape the catastrophe that is brewing within it, when it survives with an aura triumphant over all the productivisms that attempt to instrumentalise it until it dissipates.
The image of this man has no face, but its aura overcomes the commercial division of representation so that this white shadow bears all the faces of the dead, the dead without identity who know nothing of the state, the border, or the modern language that imposes its stigmata on the earth, its accounting of corpses—a corpse is always all the corpses in the world. The shadow with its dead swirls before us, pointing out our path of ruins amid its turmoil. It is the silhouette that precedes us to absorb the history of the defeated, whom we will try to bury with their bodies far from our memories — but the spectres resist, they haunt us, because they melt away under the assurance of our certainties, the otherness of what their power takes away without a cry.
The man no longer belongs to himself. He turns his back on fate to deny the flagrancy of exposure. His silhouette draws a margin, a negative of the world where we can still bury the idea of a dream: silence imposes itself on those who can hear a scream of the voiceless that structures the multiplication of possible worlds.
It is not only Palestine that stands beneath this man, it is also humanity broken under the bombs of modernity. An image without faces to carry away what we cannot see, what we cannot feel, of the corpses rotting under useless gauze, an image chipped away by grey and sand, bone and flesh between our fears, and which irrevocably carries the destroyed innocence of a childhood that the man who walked alone on the ruins, where we abandoned him, could not heal.
The ashes float between memories of an era of human conquests by humans, and blend into a cybernetics that strips the identity of its movement, colonises it with fixity so that an economy of designations is petrified within it — through maps and images, through their value and their virtualities. Beneath the rubble, is there still a land without territory? What can we still stammer about the presence of the ashes that trace shifting and uncertain contours there? What can we guess about ourselves beneath these ashes that are heading for our ruins without us ever being able to contain them?
The image seeks to take revenge on the image. It resists its adoration: its devouring of the world, eternally repeated. The self-devouring image exposes other bodies to feed on itself, it puts on a show to pollute the apathy of Western words, words of this legal language that colonises bodies and their space, without expressing regret for our cowardice, the colourful unity of uniqueness, the imperturbable compassion that should precede, precede and destroy, politics in order to rebuild it far from its normative language. But the dream resists the night, and from this dream that capsizes and capsizes what attempts to establish itself within it, an inaudible force designates the means of escaping designations, assignments to the sign of the body, the map or identity. The dream is the target, but it has no form. How, then, can a formless form be destroyed? How can the formless be imprisoned in its defeated identity? Defeat in order to break free from the world, where the dream breaks free from norms, and with defeat dissolves what language imposes on the dream of fixity in a blurring of boundaries — boundaries that always begin as the boundaries of an authoritarian language that turns knowledge into a straitjacket. Defeated, the dream resists and no longer knows anything of a fixed state, of two states that oppose each other. The dream turns away to return to its movement without state, without any state of permanence, a dialectic that seeks the next dialectic, a flow piercing everything that holds it back.
Seized by torpor, the shadow of citizenship turns away from the shadow of the image. It resists resistance, it resists the dream, desperately wanting the fixity of its state, an exclusive dignity limited to its power of enunciation. This shadow does not want to hear the silence of the white shadow that bends the image of its world until it tears. It wants, through adoration, the next image, autophagic, always faceless, without spectres, without history, without the defeated of history. A multiplicity of identical images so that this shadow of citizenship can acquiesce, grant a soothing authority to that which imposes its identity, and relentlessly forget that the meaning of the dead remains that of return, in this spiral of return that always seeks deviations and deviances to draw identity into its divergence.
However the man is now only in the image, under the shadow of the tortures his body undergoes in a prison and in his silences. The man becomes the suffering that composes his abstraction. Beneath the skin of citizenship lies the human wound: the image that resists itself, despite the rough edges of its possible meanings; it remains purer than any citizen could ever be, granting the dream a free field of deviations and deviances, a return to the multiplicity of ways of affirming human dignity without any norms. Before the shattering of its crystal, it forms a moment of diffraction that resists the dishonour of our fixations. What is a man of life in the midst of death, what is a man who cares for others amid the bombs, if not existence that speaks of a totality without conditions of fragmentation, and which removes from the language of the image its power to freeze humanity in this single territory stirred up by identical words? In this empire of the image that has become senseless, this image, that of Dr Hussam Idris Abu Safiya, withdraws itself through its resistant aura to the language, to make of the margins a narrative of the unspeakable.
K.