Can the West Speak? (Picturing the Quilting Point in Cambodian and Palestinian Films)

This article explores the unraveling of subjectivity under conditions of imperial and genocidal trauma. It does so by staging encounters between critical race theory, psychoanalytic and post/colonial approaches through a transnational Asian consideration of Cambodian and Palestinian documentary films made by Rithy Panh, Raed Andoni and Kamal Aljafari. In particular I consider the psychical-philosophical dimensions of picturing the unspeakable effects of war and genocide, both in terms of Global South filmmakers and participants, as well as theoretical audiences, especially via the notion of unraveling as it relates to Jacques Lacan’s concept of “the quilting point”, wherein signification is forged. Representations of trauma, particularly genocide, do not suture the spectator to an imaginary world, as per traditional psychoanalytic film theory; rather, they unquilt at its site/sight, leaving the spectator in a psychotic limbo. Finally, this article reworks Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s influential essay, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” by analyzing the political and phantasmatic structures sustaining the west’s silence about Israel’s genocidal campaign in Palestine.