Besiege your siege with madness: transcendence and liberation
Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society June 11, 2026 Reem Abu Hweij
In the context of the ongoing genocide in Gaza and Zionist settler-colonial oppression in Palestine, this essay argues that the Palestinian condition demands a total rupture with the oppressor's logic, termed liberation madness. This is not pathological madness but a conscious, world-making refusal of dominant reason—the imperial episteme that equates reality with Western domination and renders Palestinian life disposable. Drawing on trauma theory, decolonial psychoanalysis, and liberation theology, the author traces how Palestinians, subjected to systemic generational violence, undergo a forced evolution in perception and purpose. Surviving chronic collective trauma becomes a crucible for transcendence, where death becomes a portal to moral clarity and ontological rebellion. Liberation madness emerges as a sacred alignment with love and a reclamation of the collective "We," resisting nihilistic despair and neoliberal co-optation.