“So which of your Lord’s favors do you two deny? You and I are absent, you and I are present and absent. So which of your Lord’s favors do you two deny?”
— Mahmoud Darwish, 2006 [1]
Introduction
Mawjūd lā yūjad (موجود لا يوجد), a framework I began developing from clinical and personal experience first published in 2018, literally means exists unfindable. The Arabic root of the verbs to exist and to find is the same: w-j-d (و-ج-د). In Arabic, existence and findability are one: To exist is to be findable, and to be findable is to exist. English treats these as entirely unrelated: “Exist” derives from Latin existere (”to stand forth”), from the Proto-Indo-European root *steh₂- (”to stand”), with the asterisk marking a reconstructed form, a root hypothesized by linguists but unattested in surviving texts, while “find” traces to Proto-Germanic finþan (”to come upon”), from PIE *pent- (”to tread, go”), two roots with no semantic bridge between them. This is epistemological chasm: When I write mawjūd lā yūjad, the Arabic exposes as violence what English naturalizes as possible, the tearing apart of existence from findability. The phrase “exists unfindable” names causation. The Palestinian does not exist and then, through some separate operation, becomes unfindable. Palestinian existence, as evidence, as testimony, as proof of what Empire cannot acknowledge, produces unfindability.
Unfindablity is maintained through lā-ʿalā’iqiyya (اللاعلائقية), the closest translation to which is relationality foreclosure, but this translation is inadequate. The inadequacy exposes a wound in English itself. The Arabic root ʿ-l-q (ع-ل-ق), from which ʿalāqa (علاقة, relationship) derives, is also the root of the verbs to stick, to adhere, to hang, to attach, to bear weight. Therefore, in Arabic, ʿalaqa is embodied, gravitational, visceral. These are not separate meanings that happen to share a root; they are one unified semantic field. To have ʿalāqa with someone is, at the level of the language itself, as etymological fact, to be hung upon by them, to have them cling to your conscience, to bear their weight. Arabic makes it linguistically impossible to name relation without naming gravity.
English permits what Arabic forecloses. “Relation” derives from Latin referre—to carry back, to refer—naming connection without weight. Moral responsibility must be added to relation; it is not embedded within it. That gap is the aperture through which lā-ʿalā’iqiyya operates. The term names the destruction of the apparatus by which human presence exerts gravitational pull on conscience—a destruction required because Palestinian existence threatens to be found, and in the finding to stick, to cling, to bear weight on conscience and thus demanding accountability. If Palestinian suffering could adhere to conscience, the imperial subject would have to feel what they have done. What cannot stick, what bears no weight, can be dismembered without felt rupture. I offer this term as intervention: a language refusing to let the wound appear natural. [2]
What I just described is the psychic register of Mawjūd la yūjad. In the imperial register, Palestinians must be hypervisible as uncivilized, as terrorist, as threat, figures required to justify the apparatus of elimination, affirm settler superiority, and render annihilation palatable, yet unfindable in the juridical register, without rights, without standing, without recourse, and in the ethical register, where suffering would create obligation. Scholars including Hochberg (2015), Puar (2017), Mbembe (2003), and Shalhoub-Kevorkian (2015, 2019) have illuminated these structural dimensions. What remains undertheorized is the psychic dimension from the perpetrator’s side: how the imperial subject is configured to not find what undeniably exists, and why this configuration intensifies rather than dissolves under evidential pressure.
This article will address the psychic register.
A clarification is essential: Mawjūd lā yūjad does not describe a universal position. The global movement for Palestinian liberation demonstrates that Palestinians are findable by millions—the unprecedented mobilizations, the United Nations (UN) votes, the walkouts when Netanyahu speaks. What this essay theorizes is more specific: unfindability within Empire and its configured subjects, in the spaces where finding could generate political change. The Palestinian child is findable in the streets, in the consciousness of solidarity movements, in the moral imagination of the global South. She remains unfindable in the halls of Congress, in the psychic economy of imperial subjects, in the discourse of mainstream media. This distinction locates mawjūd lā yūjad not as ontological fact but as produced structure, maintained where its maintenance serves power.
Capitol Hill: encountering Mawjūd Lā Yūjad in the imperial core
Our trips to Capitol Hill were part of a campaign by the Palestine-Global Mental Health Network calling on governments to ensure Israel’s compliance with the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. The campaign was meant to be global and we had started implementing in the United States in collaboration with the USA–Palestine Mental Health Network. Palestinian children embody Indigenous futurity, representing the biological and political continuity that fundamentally threatens the settler project’s claim to perpetuity. We had prepared this campaign before October 2023, believing, perhaps naively, that anyone would have empathy for children, that such a campaign could create momentum to halt the violence. We came armed with unbearable statistics: Gaza has the highest number of child amputees per capita (Humanity & Inclusion, 2025); more than one child every hour is being killed; Israel is the only country systematically prosecuting children in military courts; infants born and killed within the same bombardment, never knowing a world without violence, and the list goes on. We thought children, any children, would evoke compassion, that their suffering would penetrate even the marble halls of power. Little did we know that even a live-streamed genocide would not move them.
In January 2025, on one of the visits to Capitol Hill I stood with other seasoned professionals from various fields in the lobby, planning our day of advocacy. We were dressed in a manner that clearly indicated we are here to advocate for Palestine. The space towered above us with its high ceilings and marble floors, a black metal monument rising like an arrow, pointing upward toward some unreachable justice. A quiet crowd gathered in those final days of Biden’s presidency.
A group of guards approached. One guard, short, stocky, radiating anger, projected a voice that filled the hall: “This is your first warning. If you do not disperse, I will arrest all of you!” We shuffled, taken aback by the extent of his anger, looking at each other with quizzical expressions.
Then came the words that would haunt me: “What are you going to do now, pull a baby out of your bag?”
I felt stunned. In that moment, I witnessed the full meaning of mawjūd lā yūjad. For this guard, the Palestinian baby exists (mawjūda [3]), he references her, imagines her, but she cannot be found (lā tūjad) as a baby. She cannot be found as a being who generates taʿalluq (attachment), whose tiny fingers grip her father’s thumb, whose existence creates webs of protective care. He cannot find her as someone who is loved, who has a life, who is like his niece. The Palestinian baby exists for him as a rag doll that could be stuffed in a bag: no life, no form, no breath, no future, just a prop in our supposed manipulation.
As I walked toward the elevator, I passed a young man who, upon seeing me, pushed himself against the wall to create distance from me, stretched both of his arms forward and with the back of his hands shooed me away, a bodily recoil, automatic, unthinking, visceral.
He had no hesitation, no second thought about treating me this way in a “professional” setting like Capitol Hill. He did not question whether such open contempt for a Palestinian woman would be frowned upon. He sees me, so this is not invisibility. It does not even require conscious hatred. That would require finding me as someone worthy of emotion. What I encounter is recoil from something that exists but cannot be found as human. I am mawjūda lā tūjad: present enough to trigger disgust, absent from the category where that disgust would register as inappropriate. Walking between appointments on Capitol Hill, I pass Israeli flags paired with the U.S. flag and signs reading “We Stand With Israel.” Outside some offices, photo displays of Israeli hostages, divided into those released and those still held by Hamas, line the hallway, their faces visible, their names known, their families’ grief recognized. These images exist within the web of ʿalāqa (علاقة-relation): They adhere to viewers’ consciousness, register in their moral imagination, generate the sense of obligations that produce calls for their release. They can be found.
But there are no photos of Palestinian children, no memorials for the many thousands lost, no call to end the siege, the starvation, or even for a ceasefire. This absence reveals the operation of mawjūd lā yūjad, and its causal structure. Palestinian children, however hypervisible in media, cannot generate taʿalluq, the felt pull toward care, the activation of compassion and empathy that the word carries within it. They exist but cannot be found where grief and obligation take hold.
And they cannot be found because their existence constitutes evidence. The Israeli hostage is findable because finding her confirms imperial innocence: We are the protectors, they are the threat. Her image generates taʿalluq, compassion flows, empathy activates, care mobilizes. The Palestinian child is unfindable because finding her would produce the opposite recognition: We supplied the weapons, we signed the authorizations, we are complicit in her death. She is structurally inadmissible. To find her as a child, as a being who generates taʿalluq, whose existence would activate compassion and demand empathic response, would be to find the U.S. government as perpetrator. The photos of Israeli hostages line these halls because they can be metabolized into moral clarity. Photos of Palestinian children cannot appear here because they would metabolize into indictment.
Early in my advocacy days, in congressional appointments, I translated Palestinian life into terms legible to those trained to see us as threats. I pleaded for them to find the humanity of the children. In every meeting, I would repeat: “Israel is the only country in the world that systematically prosecutes children in military courts” (Save the Children, 2024). “Gaza has the highest number of child amputees per capita anywhere in the world” (United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, 2024). “Please help us protect our children. Our children need bread, not bombs.” Before leaving, I would leave a leaflet or flyer with stories of children who were lost, in the hope that this would humanize us.
On one visit, a Democratic staffer ushered us in. We laid out ordinary, urgent asks: lift the siege, reinstate UNRWA, protect hospitals, allow aid. I spoke of the children, knowing she wasn’t listening. The staffer responded with the usual refrain: “What happened on October 7 was horrific, the violence was too much for Israelis to take. Israel has the right to defend itself.” Then, shaking her head side to side, her gaze fixed on the ground, she added: “And the beheaded babies.”
“Too much for the Israelis.” There it was, the differential threshold of findability. October 7 created rupture, a breaking point demanding global response. But seventy-eight years of Palestinian dispossession registers no threshold. Tens of thousands of murdered children in Gaza cannot tear what we were never woven into. We remain in the register of mawjūd lā yūjad, we exist outside the register where suffering accumulates to “enough.”
She clung to fabricated stories of beheaded Israeli babies, stories debunked yet still circulating, imaginary infants generating more taʿalluq than the actual Palestinian children actually dismembered by weapons her government actually supplied. I felt rage flood through me: “We’ve lived through a hundred October sevenths. Why is our right to defend ourselves never on the table?” I blurted out angrily. “The beheaded babies story was walked back by the White House itself — why are we resurrecting it now, if not to keep us unfindable beneath the lie?” I reminded her of the children — taken in the middle of the night, interrogated without a lawyer, without their parents. “What will it take for you to see us as human beings worthy of a life?”
As my colleagues and I were leaving that office, I wondered: Since I, roach that I am, dared speak out, will the exterminators be called immediately? Will I be on some list somewhere? How dare I object to the Empire, challenge the “beheaded baby” narrative, or claim rights to land and country? How dare I, positioned as mawjūda lā tūjad, as one who exists but cannot be found in the web where subjects can make legitimate claims, demand to be seen as human, to have my resistance recognized as anything other than further proof that I belong outside the relational field?
And here the function of mawjūd lā yūjad becomes clear: It must be maintained to protect against recognition of complicity. If I am found—if my people are found as human, as grieving, as deserving of justice—then those who have looked away, funded the bombs, armed the soldiers, must find themselves as complicit. My humanization threatens their innocence. And so lā-ʿalā’iqiyya must hold; its rupture must be prevented at any cost. My calls for bread not bombs, my mourning, my demand that the killing stop—these cannot register as human cries for justice. Within the logic of lā-’alā’iqiyya, they can only be heard as violence against Empire. To mourn is to menace. To demand justice is to attack. To ask that the bombs stop is an act of war against those who cannot afford to see where the bombs are falling, and on whom.
The colonial order has trained me well: I should be grateful for the smallest absence of violence. It is enough that she allowed me to sit next to her, that she maintained professional courtesy, that she did not physically recoil or shoo me away like the young man had done in the hallway. These minimal non-aggressions, letting me occupy space in her office, pretending to listen, become, in the economy of mawjūda lā tūjad, something I should appreciate.
This too is part of the violence: that I have internalized the sense that asking to be found as fully human is asking for the impossible, that I should be thankful for tolerance rather than demanding finding, recognition, and acknowledgment, that not being treated like an insect counts as kindness. The manic defense operates not only on subjects of Empire but on us: We are trained to accept unfindability as natural, to experience lā’alā’iqiyya as our own failing rather than their foreclosure.
Mawjūd Lā Yūjad and lā’alā’iqiyya: the mechanisms of unfindability
I have shared my encounters on Capitol Hill because they demonstrate how mawjūd lā yūjad operates at the psychic register, in the moment of encounter between individual subjects. The guard’s joke, the staffer’s recitation, the young man’s recoil: Each reveals something about how unfindability is actively produced and maintained in real time, in the space between bodies. In this section, I draw on Butler’s theorization of the constitutive outside and melancholic foreclosure, then turn to Klein’s projective identification and Bion’s attacks on linking to demonstrate why Butler’s framework, essential as it is, cannot fully account for what I witnessed.
Butler’s constitutive outside and the limits of melancholic foreclosure
Butler’s (1993) concept of the constitutive outside illuminates what was at stake in the guard’s “joke.” For Butler, identity is formed not merely through what it affirms (I am citizen of the United States, I am civilized, I represent the country that upholds world order and democracy) but through what it must exclude (I am not a terrorist who must be killed to keep the world safe, I am not a threat whose very existence justifies elimination, I am not of color, I am not weak). The repudiated other is foundational to selfhood. In her formulation, “the subject is constituted through the force of exclusion and abjection, one which produces a constitutive outside to the subject, an abjected outside, which is, after all, ‘inside’ the subject as its own founding repudiation” (Butler, 1993, p. 3). The mechanism is crucial: Exclusion casts out unwanted elements and simultaneously produces the very coherence of what remains inside. What Butler calls the “zone of uninhabitability” performs essential work: The exclusion of those positioned as unlivable is what demarcates the boundaries of who counts as subject. (Butler, 1993, p. 3).
Butler’s framework, developed to theorize the heterosexual matrix, shows how the heterosexual subject repudiates the homosexual to secure coherent identity. The homosexual threatens through difference, through representing what the subject must not be. The Palestinian threatens through something more dangerous: evidence. The Palestinian is living, documented, undeniable evidence of Empire’s ongoing violence, of international law’s structural exclusion, of the chasm between stated morality and present practice. The imperial subject must render the Palestinian unfindable because the Palestinian constitutes testimony. The Palestinian threatens through evidence, through proof. To find her is to find oneself guilty of atrocity being committed now, at this moment, with these weapons, in this child’s body.
The Palestinian baby is thus defined through a series of negations constitutive of imperial identity itself: not civilized, not white, not European, not grievable. Her exclusion from the category of the fully human is foundational to Western selfhood. The guard understands himself as civilized, as a protector of order, as morally coherent, precisely through the violent unfindability of Palestinian humanity. To find her as a baby, as a being who generates taʿalluq, whose existence creates a pull toward protective care, would threaten the coherence of the identity formed through her exclusion. But it would threaten more than this. To find her as a baby killed by weapons he helps secure passage for would be to find himself as killer. The Palestinian baby is the evidence that would convict. She is more than the outside that secures imperial identity through difference; she is testimony, proof, indictment. This is why unfindability intensifies under evidential pressure. More documentation, more testimony, more visibility produces deeper foreclosure rather than recognition. The lā’alā’iqiyya’s structure responds to evidence by attacking the capacity to register evidence as evidence.
But what affective form does this exclusion take? Here Butler’s frameworks diverge.
Butler’s work offers two distinct frameworks relevant here. In The Psychic Life of Power (1997), she theorizes foreclosure through melancholic incorporation: What is excluded persists as encrypted loss, shaping the ego from within, returning as the peculiar weight of unacknowledged grief. In Frames of War (2009), she addresses differential recognizability more directly: Certain lives cannot appear within frames as lives that count, their deaths cannot register as losses. The staffer who recited “Israel has the right to defend itself” was unburdened. She showed no weight of unacknowledged loss, no struggle against frames that prevented recognition. She was smooth, practiced, defended. Here Butler’s framework reaches its limit. Evidence of violence does not “haunt,” to use Butler’s language, because of lā’alā’iqiyya—relationality has been severed. Butler’s foreclosure casts out unwanted elements while simultaneously producing the coherence of what remains inside; the excluded exerts pressure, returns, haunts. But mawjūd lā yūjad names a different operation: The Palestinian is not cast into a “zone of uninhabitability” that still shapes the interior. The Palestinian is simply not findable where finding could create acknowledgment.
Klein’s manic defense explains what Butler’s frameworks leave untheorized: the affect of foreclosure. Triumph over, contempt for, and control of the object. I turn to Klein to extend Butler’s insight, to account for the affective texture of constitutive exclusion. Lightness rather than weight. Triumph rather than haunting. Manic purification rather than melancholic incorporation (Butler, 1997). The Palestinian specifically requires this manic operation because Palestinian existence is evidence. The apparatus cannot afford melancholic haunting. Evidence that haunts might eventually be heard. Evidence must be expelled entirely, and the expulsion must feel like victory.
Splitting: the preparation of the psychic field
Before projection can occur, the psychic field must be prepared through what Klein (1946) called splitting. In the paranoid–schizoid position, the infant cannot tolerate ambivalence, cannot hold together the good breast that nourishes and the bad breast that frustrates. The breast is split into idealized good object and persecutory bad object, and these are kept rigidly apart. The infant’s own aggression is similarly split off and located in the bad object, which then becomes persecutory, threatening to return the infant’s own violence.
This primitive operation scales to collective phenomena. What Klein observed in the infant’s relation to the breast illuminates the imperial subject’s relation to the Palestinian. This section traces how mawjūd lā yūjad‘s structure appears in individual encounters between configured subjects. The psychoanalytic framework illuminates the texture of foreclosure, why it produces triumph rather than guilt, why hypervisibility intensifies rather than dissolves unfindability. A forthcoming companion essay, entitled “Named Throughout Found Nowhere: mawjūd lā yūjad and the Autopsy of Abandonment,” addresses how institutions, geopolitics, and international law produce and maintain this structure. What I offer here is phenomenological: Klein and Bion help us see what is happening in the guard’s joke, the staffer’s formula, the young man’s recoil.
For the imperial subject to maintain psychic coherence as civilized, democratic, moral, Empire’s violence must be deposited in the Palestinian, who must be positioned as uncivilized, terrorist, threat. But why the Palestinian specifically? As mentioned earlier, because Palestinian existence is evidence, of ongoing violence, of present crime, of the gap between stated morality and actual practice. This splitting is structurally necessary. Imperial goodness requires Palestinian badness; without it, Palestinian existence would expose imperial guilt. The world divides into those whose suffering matters and those whose suffering confirms their position as threat. Israeli children occupy the good-object position; their suffering can be introjected, can generate protective response, can produce the moral clarity that justifies retaliation. Palestinian children are split off into the bad-object position; their suffering cannot accumulate into “enough” because they have already been located where suffering is expected, natural, deserved, and because their suffering, if registered, would indict.
Splitting prepares the ground for projection. Once the Palestinian has been positioned as bad object, she becomes available as container for what the imperial subject cannot bear in himself. Klein helps us see what this accomplishes: Splitting keeps the imperial subject good and makes the Palestinian bad; evacuation expels guilt so it need not be felt; omnipotent control determines who is threat and who is victim, who is grievable and who is prop.
In the structure I am describing, the Palestinian is positioned as recipient rather than projector. This positioning reflects imperial foreclosure, the return circuit that would allow Palestinian projections to land has been severed. We project constantly: We testify before committees, we offer statistics of our dead, we hold photographs of our children. We say, this violence is yours, this monstrosity is your projection. But these projections cannot find containers in imperial consciousness; they cannot be taken in, processed, returned. The staffer nods, accepts the leaflet, and the words fall into nothing. The testimony evaporates before it arrives. We speak, but there is no apparatus to receive what we offer back. The Palestinian becomes the container for imperial guilt, imperial violence, imperial monstrosity. Lā’alā’iqiyya ensures that she is sealed shut. She holds what was deposited; she cannot return it transformed. She is positioned in a space where she is unrelatable, relationality is foreclosed, her suffering bears no weight. The psychic space of mawjūd lā yūjad is successfully maintained.
Klein’s projective identification and the manic defense
With the psychic field thus prepared, split into good and bad, with Palestinians positioned as available containers, projective identification can accomplish its work. Klein’s (1946) theorization illuminates what Butler’s framework cannot: how exclusion achieves the affect of triumph rather than melancholic weight. Where melancholia takes in, projection expels.
Klein (1946) described projective identification as a primitive defense emerging in the earliest months of life, when the infant, unable to tolerate its own destructive impulses, splits off these “bad” parts of the self and projects them into the mother’s breast, which then becomes persecutory. The mechanism serves two functions: It evacuates the unbearable, and it allows the subject to control what it cannot tolerate by locating it elsewhere. Crucially, in Klein’s schema, the mother who contains the infant’s projections remains part of the self. The relation is distorted, but it persists: “she is not felt to be a separate individual but is felt to be the bad self” (1946/1975, p. 8). The Palestinian occupies a different position. She is made to contain the imperial subject’s bad parts, then sealed off from relation entirely. This is the operation I am naming lā’alā’iqiyya: projection, then foreclosure of the return.
Klein (1940) further theorized the manic defense as a constellation of psychic operations—triumph, contempt, and control—designed to protect against the depressive recognition that would come if projected material returned. Triumph involves “the sadistic gratification of overcoming and humiliating” the object, breaking the circuit of reparation before it can form (p. 132). Contempt serves denial: The subject must deny the impulse to repair because acknowledging injury would generate unbearable guilt. Control completes the constellation: The subject possesses the object’s meaning, determining what it is and what it can demand.
What is expelled in the guard’s joke? His own monstrosity–his complicity in starving children, his participation in the system that buries babies alive. His violence, relocated to her, becomes her manipulation. The joke performs the manic defense in miniature. Triumph: I have the power to joke about dying babies; you do not have the power to make me feel bad. Contempt: The Palestinian baby is a prop, beneath serious consideration. Control: I determine the meaning of Palestinian existence; I make her into what I need her to be. The Palestinian baby, having been made the container for his monstrosity, cannot simultaneously be the injured party requiring his care. She is either vessel for his projections or human deserving recognition—never both. He cannot feel guilt because he has expelled what would generate it into the very figure whose suffering might otherwise occasion reparation; by demonstrating that her existence cannot move him, he ensures that reparation remains structurally impossible. The young man’s recoil in the hallway enacts the same mechanism.
The staffer’s formulation (”October 7 was too much for Israelis”) reveals the differential threshold of findability. Israelis remain within the depressive position’s relational field: Their suffering can accumulate, can reach thresholds that demand response. Palestinian suffering cannot accumulate to “enough” because lā’alā’iqiyya prevents the acknowledgment that would require seeing the injury, which would generate guilt, which would demand reparation. The manic defense forecloses this sequence before it begins. The staffer clung to fabricated stories of beheaded Israeli babies while actual Palestinian children lay dismembered in documented reality. This is splitting operating at collective scale. The photo displays in Capitol Hill hallways (Israeli hostages with faces visible, names known) make this splitting manifest in institutional space: Israeli babies occupy the good-object position, their imagined deaths generating moral horror; Palestinian babies have been positioned where suffering is expected, where grief is structurally impossible: This is lā’alā’iqiyya in the halls of Empire.
This is a structural foreclosure of the conditions under which empathy could operate. One cannot mourn what one has never taken in as loved. Palestinian children exist in statistics, in reports, in the testimonies we offer, but they cannot be found in the internal world where loss registers as loss. For the imperial subject, no amount of external evidence can alter the internal reality in which Palestinians have been positioned. Hind’s recorded voice, her hours of documented terror, the ambulance destroyed when it came for her—none of this can penetrate the manic defense. The internal “Palestinian” has been fixed as persecutory object, and external reality can only be processed in ways that confirm this positioning.
This explains the peculiar stability of imperial indifference. Subjects of Empire encounter Palestinian suffering constantly. The genocide is livestreamed, documented, undeniable. And yet the manic defense converts each encounter into further confirmation of the split. The baby exists to manipulate. The child’s death is regrettable but inevitable. Each act of indifference performs the defense anew, each moment of failed recognition strengthens the structure. The suffering that should generate guilt instead occasions triumph: I am not moved. I remain defended. The projection holds.
Perhaps most devastating: Klein’s framework illuminates what the “identification” in projective identification names. The projector identifies with the object, yes. But the recipient also comes to identify with what has been deposited. Klein (1946) notes that the object into whom bad parts are projected may come to experience themselves through the projection. This is the trap: Through repeated encounters with foreclosure, I have begun to internalize their unfindability of me as my own deficiency. My sense that asking to be found as fully human is asking for the impossible is itself the introjection of their foreclosure: the coming to feel myself as they have made me. The manic defense operates on subjects of Empire and on us alike. We are trained to accept unfindability as natural, to experience lā’alā’iqiyya as our own failing rather than their expulsion.
What Mawjūd Lā Yūjad is not: dissociation and denial
I must distinguish mawjūd lā yūjad from two concepts readers may reach for:
Dissociation describes what the psyche does with its own unbearable experience—the subject walls off, fragments, goes away to survive what cannot be integrated. The operation is reflexive: The self acts upon its own contents. Mawjūd lā yūjad operates projectively. The Palestinian is not absented from consciousness; she is hypervisible, referenced, displayed. The guard did not dissociate from his encounter with us; he was fully present, animated, enraged. The Palestinian baby was explicitly referenced, imagined, made the subject of his joke. The affective quality is diagnostic: Dissociation tends toward numbing, vacancy; the guard’s rage, the laughter at Palestinian starvation, the energetic TikTok mockery carry the signature of the manic defense—triumph, contempt, control. His lightness is achieved evacuation. And dissociative walls, once erected, tend toward stability; mawjūd lā yūjad demands perpetual maintenance. The weekly mockery, the proliferating trophy videos reveal a structure actively sustained against threat of return. Dissociation walls off the past; mawjūd lā yūjad must constantly foreclose the present.
Denial is effortful labor against what presses to be acknowledged; denial can be overwhelmed by evidence. Mawjūd lā yūjad operates at a prior register: foreclosure of knowledge formation itself. The guard does not know Palestinian babies are human and denies it. The mental operation that would produce “this is a baby like my niece” has been attacked before completion. The links connecting “baby” to “Palestinian baby” to “baby who matters” are severed before the thought forms. Evidence illuminates the distinction: Denial can be pressured by accumulation; mawjūd lā yūjad intensifies under evidential pressure. The more images circulate, the more documentation accumulates, the more unfindable in imperial consciousness Palestinians become. The genocide is livestreamed, the testimony overwhelming, and unfindability deepens. Denial carries psychic weight, the strain of maintaining refusal. The staffer’s recitation was smooth, effortless, unbothered. She need not refuse what was never permitted to consolidate as knowledge.
What remains to be theorized is how the linking function itself is attacked. I turn now to Bion.
Bion’s -K and the mechanism of mawjūd lā yūjad
Where Klein theorized projective identification as primarily an intrapsychic defense—the expulsion of unbearable parts of the self—Bion expanded it into an intersubjective communication system that could succeed or fail depending on the receiving object’s response. In his 1959 paper “Attacks on Linking,” Bion writes, “the link between patient and analyst, or infant and breast, is the mechanism of projective identification” (p. 314). The crucial difference is this: For Klein, projective identification evacuates; for Bion, it can serve either communication or evacuation, and which function dominates depends on whether the container can receive, process, and return what is projected. As Abel-Hirsch (2016) notes, Bion distinguished “projective identification for the purpose of communication” versus “projective identification for the purpose of evacuation, the former being experienced as an “invitation,” the latter as “an intrusion into him to which he feels he is passively to submit”“ (p. 220). The mother who receives with reverie enables communicative projective identification; the mother who denies ingress forces it to become purely evacuative.
Bion’s concept of the container-contained relationship illuminates the relational circuit that lā’alā’iqiyya severs. In Bion’s framework, the good-enough container (originally the mother, but later any relational partner) receives what is projected into it and returns it transformed. The mother who practices what Bion calls “reverie”—a receptive state that allows her to receive the infant’s unprocessed emotional experience—transforms these experiences through her own alpha function and gives them back in bearable form. The infant’s terror, projected into the mother, comes back as something thinkable: You are frightened, but you will survive this. Over time, the infant internalizes this containing function, developing its own capacity for alpha function. This return circuit is what constitutes relationality proper—what allows the one who projects to be changed by the encounter, to receive back what they expelled in a form that develops rather than destroys.
Bion’s clinical description illuminates this structure. In “Attacks on Linking,” he describes a mother who “dutifully responded to the infant’s emotional displays” while the response “had in it an element of impatient ‘I don’t know what’s the matter with the child’” (1959, p. 314). This mother who performs concern without taking in, experiencing, and metabolizing the infant’s terror—who offers response while refusing ingress—becomes the prototype for what I am theorizing at civilizational scale. The mother capable of reverie receives the unbearable, experiences it while retaining balance, and returns it transformed. The mother who denies ingress leaves what cannot be borne untransformed.
This communicative dimension is essential for understanding lā-ʿalā’iqiyya. The capacity to project continues constantly; Palestinians are saturated with imperial projections. What is foreclosed is the reciprocal dimension: the capacity of the projected-into object to give back, to transform, to return recognition. Extending Bion’s framework to the colonial context, I theorize the structure as imperial refusal rather than Palestinian incapacity. Palestinians return projection constantly, through testimony, documentation, appeal, the very advocacy I describe undertaking on Capitol Hill. We speak back. We name the projection as projection, insist that what was deposited does not belong to us. But the return cannot land. The imperial subject has attacked their own receiving apparatus, what Bion (1959) describes as “denying ingress” to what is projected back.
This reformulation is crucial. The mother who fails to contain, in Bion’s account, is a mother who “dutifully responds” while refusing actual ingress, who performs concern without taking in. She receives; she does not metabolize. The imperial subject similarly performs engagement. Meetings are taken, statistics are heard, leaflets are accepted. Concerns are verbalized, but the military funding continues and bombs and drones continue to reach the Zionist entity. We are speaking into a structure that has attacked its own ears. This is lā’alā’iqiyya: the amputation of the receiving apparatus that would allow return to land, even as projections flow into Palestinians constantly.
In Bion’s framework, to relate is to receive back from, to be transformed by what one has projected. The contained makes claims on the container; the container’s response develops the contained. This is genuinely intersubjective: Both are transformed by the encounter. What I am theorizing as lā’alā’iqiyya is, in Bionian terms, the amputation of this return circuit. Palestinians can receive imperial projections but cannot return them; they are containers stripped of the containing function. Imperial subjects project into Palestinians but cannot receive back the recognition that would transform them. Palestinians absorb imperial projections but cannot give back the thought: You are the monster you have deposited in me.
These unmetabolizable experiences, what Bion called beta elements, are “not felt to be phenomena, but things in themselves” (p. 6). What transforms beta elements into thinkable thought (what Bion called alpha elements) is the container’s return. The mother receives the infant’s projected terror and gives it back in bearable form: You are frightened, but you will survive. Through what Bion termed alpha function, she processes raw sensory and emotional experience into forms that can be thought, stored, used for dreaming and reflection. Over time, the infant internalizes this capacity.
For the imperial subject, Palestinian suffering arrives as beta elements—raw sense-data that cannot be metabolized because doing so would produce unbearable self-knowledge. The images of dead children, the statistics of starvation, the testimonies of survivors: These register, the subject sees them, even has somatic responses to them. But they cannot become thoughts because the apparatus for transformation has been attacked by lā’alā’iqiyya. They cannot undergo alpha function because the thought that would form is: I am complicit in this. I am the monster.
Bion also theorized what he called -K (minus K): the active destruction of knowledge and meaning. Where K represents the drive to know and understand, what Bion considered as fundamental as love (L) and hate (H), -K operates as an aggressive force that attacks the capacity for understanding before it can form. Bion’s -K must be distinguished carefully from Klein’s manic defense, though they work in concert. The manic defense operates on thoughts that threaten to form—it deploys triumph, contempt, and control to prevent the depressive recognition that would follow if projected material returned. But -K operates at an earlier stage: It attacks what Bion (1959) calls “the embryonic thought which forms a link between sense impressions and consciousness” (p. 315)—the linking function that would allow discrete pieces of information to connect into thought at all.
Extending Bion’s clinical concept to civilizational scale: The imperial subject operating under -K doesn’t simply fail to understand Palestinian humanity; the apparatus of -K actively prevents understanding from forming, destroying the mental links that would connect these bombs to those children to my signature on the weapons bill to I am participating in atrocity. Each link in this chain is severed before the thought can consolidate. This is the destruction of the apparatus that would generate thought.
What Bion adds to Klein, then, is twofold: the understanding that projective identification can sever the return circuit that constitutes genuine relation (what I am calling the perverse container), and that—as I extend his framework—entire systems, media apparatuses, international institutions, political economies, can perform -K at civilizational scale, destroying the mental operations that would transform information into recognition. This is Klein’s projective identification extended through Bion’s framework: the production of mawjūd lā yūjad in individual subjects and in the global systems through which reality is processed—or fails to be processed—into thought.
Beta elements and the psychic mechanism of Mawjūd Lā Yūjad
To understand what is expelled in mawjūd lā yūjad, we must understand what Bion (1962a) recognized about raw experience. Some experiences arrive in a form that cannot yet be thought—only felt as invasive presences that must be expelled. The infant does not experience hunger as “I am hungry” but as something bad inside that attacks. These unmetabolizable experiences—what Bion called beta elements—are evacuated through projection because they cannot be digested or stored.
A clarification is necessary regarding the relationship between beta elements and Klein’s “bad objects.” They are not synonymous. Klein’s bad objects are split off because they are intolerable; they generate persecutory anxiety. Bion’s beta elements are different: They are unthinkable because they have not undergone the transformation that would make them available for thought. Bion (1962a) describes beta elements as “not felt to be phenomena, but things in themselves” (p. 9). They cannot be dreamed, and for Bion, the incapacity to dream is the incapacity to process emotional experience. They cannot be repressed; repression operates on thoughts that have already formed. They cannot be symbolized; they remain concrete, literal, somatically held. They can only be expelled through projective identification or acted out through behavior. This distinction is epistemological as much as affective: Klein addresses what is intolerable; Bion addresses what is unthinkable.
When this transformation fails, through trauma, through the absence of a good-enough container, or through the mechanisms I am describing, raw experience accumulates into a barrier that blocks contact with reality. The person can only evacuate, can only project, can only expel what threatens psychic survival. The imperial subject’s situation differs from Bion’s infant in a crucial respect. The infant lacks a good-enough container; the imperial subject has attacked their own containing function through -K. This is active destruction. The apparatus that would transform Palestinian suffering into recognition has been systematically dismantled.
This framework illuminates the psychic mechanism of mawjūd lā yūjad, revealing it as a structure designed to foreclose knowledge of one’s own criminality through the very mechanisms Klein and Bion describe. For Empire and its subjects, Palestinian suffering generates an overwhelming stream of unmetabolizable truths, in Bion’s language, beta elements. Such truths cannot become thoughts without catastrophic consequences for imperial identity. But what exactly are these unmetabolizable elements? They are the self-implicating knowledge this suffering produces: I am doing this. I am funding this. I am complicit in this. The raw sensory data of suffering (children deliberately starved, infants dying under rubble, amputations performed without anesthesia) generates this knowledge automatically.
This is where Klein’s (1946) projective identification and Bion’s (1962a) beta elements converge in the mechanism of mawjūd lā yūjad. The unbearable beta elements are the imperial subject’s own criminality, which must be expelled through projective identification and prevented from transformation through -K. Palestinian humanity is the evidence that produces the unbearable self-knowledge.
Consider how Israeli soldiers filming themselves wearing Palestinian women’s underwear demonstrate this mechanism. The underwear proves a Palestinian woman exists—intimate garments with her scent, her size, chosen for her body. The soldier perceives her existence clearly; indeed, the violation depends on this perception. What cannot be metabolized—in Bion’s language, what cannot undergo alpha function—is not the Palestinian woman’s humanity but the thought that would follow from acknowledging it: I am a violator. I am committing an act of intimate violence. I have become the very thing I was told I was fighting against. These beta elements—knowledge of one’s own criminality, one’s own ugliness—cannot undergo alpha function because the thought would be unbearable.
So the soldier performs what Klein (1946) describes: projective identification combined with the manic defense. He evacuates his violation through the violation itself—filming, displaying, laughing. The obscene performance is the projective evacuation, expelling self-knowledge before it can become thought. And the manic defense is fully operational: triumph (I have power over her; I can wear her intimate garments and laugh), contempt (she is nothing, her violation is entertainment), control (I determine the meaning of her existence; she is content for my social media, not a person deserving dignity).
The woman becomes mawjūda lā tūjad: She exists (her underwear proves it), yet she cannot be found as someone whose violation registers. Relationality is foreclosed—lā’alā’iqiyya. The soldier’s act declares what Empire has already established: I cannot relate to her as another human who deserves respect and dignity. I can wear these garments without hesitation because she does not register as someone worthy of respect, someone whose intimate violation could conjure disgust in those who watch me perform it. The posting of the video tests and confirms this foreclosure—the soldier knows his audience members will not recoil, because they too operate under the same projective structure, the same manic defense, the same -K that attacks the linking function which would make her violation register as violation.
International audiences scroll past images of starving children, bombed hospitals, mass graves. They see everything. What cannot undergo alpha function is what this seeing would mean if metabolized: My tax dollars fund these bombs. My democracy is committing these atrocities. My silence is participation. I am not defending civilization; I am destroying it. These beta elements must be evacuated—through “complexity,” through “both sides,” through the endless deferral of judgment—because their transformation into genuine thought would shatter imperial identity at its foundation. The manic defense provides the mechanism: triumph (we are the civilized ones, the protectors of democracy), contempt (they are terrorists, human shields, manipulators), control (we determine the narrative, the frames, the meaning of their deaths).
Bion (1962a) recognized that when the capacity to metabolize experience is impaired, unprocessed material accumulates into what he called the beta screen—a barrier that blocks emotional contact with reality. A person may retain rational thought, but this thinking remains severed from emotional significance.
Through Klein’s (1946) framework, we can see this barrier’s function in maintaining mawjūd lā yūjad. The barrier consists of accumulated projections: terrorists, human shields, manipulators, threats. These projections—the imperial subject’s own violence located in Palestinians—form an impermeable screen that prevents Palestinian humanity from registering. And the barrier is maintained through the manic defense: Each projection demonstrates triumph over, contempt for, and control of the object.
This barrier does not simply block feeling; it actively attacks it. In the scenes I have described, this appears as the guard’s rage, the young man’s visceral recoil—each attacking the nascent recognition that would transform Palestinian presence into human encounter.
Israeli comedy shows and TikTok videos mocking Palestinian suffering reveal this mechanism at scale. When comedians perform skits of Palestinians begging for food while audiences laugh, the moment of laughter is the moment Palestinians become unfindable. In that instant of audience mirth, the unthinkable thought—we are laughing at people we are starving—is expelled through the laugh itself. The manic defense is complete: triumph (we laugh while they suffer), contempt (their starvation is comedy), control (we make their agony into our entertainment).
The compulsive nature of this mockery—entire TV shows dedicated to it, endless TikTok trends, new skits weekly—reveals both the mechanism’s fragility and its manic quality. Palestinians keep existing, keep suffering, keep generating evidence of their humanity that threatens to return the projected material. Each performance must demonstrate anew that the projection holds, that the monstrosity remains located in them. This is not melancholic repetition, where the encrypted returns to haunt; this is manic repetition, where successful evacuation must be constantly re-performed.
When soldiers ride dead Palestinian children’s bicycles through rubble—small pink handlebars (Middle East Eye, n.d.)—or post images of themselves with stolen children’s toys (Quds News Network, 2024), they demonstrate the manic defense. The bicycle proves the child existed, had preferences (pink!), loved things. But riding it as amusement makes the child unfindable in imperial consciousness and where la-ala’iqiyya is maintained, through all three mechanisms: triumph (I am alive, playing; she is dead, forgotten), contempt (her beloved toy is my amusement), control (I determine what her bicycle means; it is now my prop, not her treasure).
The violation declares: If you were findable as a child who counts, I couldn’t use your beloved toy for entertainment while you’re dead. And simultaneously: If I were the monster, I couldn’t play like this, I couldn’t laugh like this. My lightness proves the monstrosity is not in me. The act itself expels the thought that would otherwise form: I am playing with a murdered child’s toy.
Normative unconscious processes: how unfindability reproduces itself
Empirical research on bias confirms at the level of measurement what the psychoanalytic framework describes at the level of structure: The capacity to perceive certain others as less pained, less minded, less fully human operates pre-reflectively, before conscious deliberation begins.
Trawalter et al. (2012) demonstrated that participants literally perceive Black individuals as experiencing less pain from identical stimuli: not that they see equivalent pain and dismiss it, but that they perceive less pain. Infrahumanization research (Leyens et al., 2000) reveals differential attribution of “secondary emotions,” uniquely human emotions like hope, nostalgia, remorse, to outgroups. Harris and Fiske’s (2006) neuroimaging research provides the neural signature: When viewing certain dehumanized groups, the medial prefrontal cortex, associated with perceiving others as minded beings, activates less. But this research documents mechanism without explaining targeting. The capacity exists as human possibility. Coloniality determines who falls into these categories (Quijano, 2000; Maldonado-Torres, 2007).
Layton’s (2006, 2020) concept of normative unconscious processes theorizes this transmission: “the psychological consequences of living in a culture many of whose norms serve the dominant ideological purpose of maintaining a power status quo” (2020, p. 68). Crucially, these processes operate through identity formation itself: identities constructed through identification and dis-identification, splitting and projection, in relation to dominant cultural ideals. Lā-’alā’iqiyya is not merely enacted through subjects but is that through which subjects are constituted. The guard’s joke, the staffer’s recitation, the young man’s recoil: These were enactments requiring no deliberate cruelty, the surfacing of what operates continuously beneath conscious awareness.
Yet bias research suggests these effects can be modulated through individuation and perspective-taking. If bias were the complete explanation, Palestinian names, photographs, and testimonies would dissolve unfindability. They do not. This is where lā-’alā’iqiyya becomes necessary to theorize as distinct from bias. Bias is the ground. The mechanisms I have traced—splitting, projective identification, the manic defense, -K—are what activates when bias is insufficient, when Palestinian existence threatens to break through.
Layton (2007) describes how contemporary culture marks vulnerability as shameful, with the capacity to be moved by suffering stigmatized as weakness. This explains why solidarity with Palestinians triggers such violent reaction: To find the Palestinian is to expose one’s own unfitness for the defended, invulnerable selfhood that normative unconscious processes reproduce as ideal. The foreclosure extends from Palestinians to anyone who would establish relationality with them.
Distinguishing mawjūd lā yūjad from adjacent concepts
Mawjūd lā yūjad does not replace existing frameworks—othering, zones of nonbeing, erasure, ungrievability. These operate at different registers: structural, epistemic, phenomenological. Mawjūd lā yūjad operates at the psychic register; it theorizes the mechanisms through which the individual subject is configured to produce unfindability in the moment of encounter. What it adds is a precise account of how unfindability is produced and maintained: splitting, projective identification, the manic defense, -K, attacks on linking. And lā-’alā’iqiyya names what these mechanisms foreclose: the relational field itself, the capacity for ʿalāqa.
The Unthought Subject, the Self-Same, and the Uncanny
Readers may reach for the self-same. Layton (forthcoming), drawing on Stephens, describes the white Western self that can recognize the other yet refuses to be altered by the encounter, the self whose coherence depends on remaining the same in the face of difference. The structure I am describing is not this, and the distinction matters. The self-same presupposes a relational field in which sameness and difference can register at all: an other recognized as a counterpart, against whom the self defends its likeness. So too does the uncanny. I have argued elsewhere that the Palestinian is rendered uncanny, in Freud’s sense, the familiar made strange, simultaneously recognized and denied (Khouri, 2019, 2024). But the uncanny requires recognition in order for strangeness to disturb; something must be known as known for its alien aspect to unsettle. Lā‒ʿalā’iqiyya names the foreclosure of that field itself. The guard’s baby is not a baby held against the image of his niece, her small fingers around her father’s thumb, and found too same, or too strange, to bear. She is a rag doll. There is no defended sameness and no uncanny shudder because there is no recognized counterpart from whom to be same or different. The self-same and the uncanny belong to the register of disturbed recognition, where the other is registered and the trouble is what the registering does to the self. Lā‒ʿalā’iqiyya is prior to that register. No recognition forms, so nothing curdles.
This proximity is closest at one further point. Stephens (2024, p. 469) cites a passage in which relief from aggression finds manic repair in the absent presence of an unthought subject, a formulation traveling from Klein through Eng to her, near the manic defense I have traced. There too the difference holds. For Stephens the manic operation restores a social container by repopulating it; the manic defense I describe restores nothing and forecloses the circuit through which restoration could be claimed at all. Where Stephens theorizes a dissociation two minds can repair, I theorize the amputation of the apparatus by which two minds could meet at all.
Findability versus recognizability
These terms risk being collapsed, as though to find someone is already to recognize them. Findability as I theorize it is not physical or perceptual location. The guard on Capitol Hill conjured the baby in imagination, made her the subject of his joke. Yet she remained unfindable. Findability names presence in consciousness as a being whose existence matters. The guard’s mind contained a prop; it contained no baby. Finding, in this deep sense, establishes the relational field, it creates ʿalāqa. To truly find someone as human is already to be in relation with them.
Recognizability presupposes this field. One can recognize someone and still not acknowledge their suffering, but ʿalāqa exists, there is gravity—a pull that could produce acknowledgment. The possibility remains open. If I recognize you, it means I see your suffering, which I metabolize into alpha elements. I might not feel implicated, but still there is a knowing, in the Bionian sense.
Mawjūd lā yūjad forecloses finding itself. No field forms. Recognizability never becomes a question because the precondition, ʿalāqa, has been severed at the root. This is lā-’alā’iqiyya: the amputation of the capacity for relation altogether.
Zone of nonbeing and genre of the human
Fanon’s (1952) zone of nonbeing maps the structural terrain where colonized peoples are cast below the line of the human (Maldonado-Torres, 2007). Wynter (2003) deepens this analysis: The colonial project produced a specific “genre of the human” from which colonized peoples were categorically excluded. These are structural and epistemic accounts.
Mawjūd lā yūjad operates within this terrain at the psychic register. Fanon theorized how colonized subjects experience the zone of nonbeing; Mawjūd lā yūjad theorizes how the colonizing subject is configured to produce it. The mechanisms—splitting, projective identification, the manic defense, -K—are the psychic operations through which structural exclusion becomes lived reality in each encounter.
Instrumental finding and true finding
Within this framework, a distinction emerges between two modes of finding.
Instrumental finding locates a being within the field of utility. The enslaved African was found as labor, as property. The kafala worker is found as hands that clean. The Palestinian construction worker is found as labor that builds the settlement. Each is located, registered, made use of.
True finding locates a being within the field of humanity—it creates ʿalāqa. To truly find someone is to register them as one whose suffering sticks, whose death tears.
Mawjūd lā yūjad names the structure in which instrumental finding occurs without true finding. The Palestinian worker enters the settlement at dawn, builds its walls, and leaves—instrumentally found, yet this presence does not accumulate into a person in the settler’s consciousness. The Israeli soldier who defaces Palestinian homes while Palestinian workers clean Israeli homes reveals this structure: the same Palestinian instrumentally found (as hands that clean) and simultaneously unfindable (as a being whose home could be desecrated). Presence in the field of utility, absence in the field of humanity.
Othering, erasure, ungrievability
Each of these frameworks illuminates a dimension of colonial violence; mawjūd lā yūjad adds the psychic register to each.
Othering (Butler, 1993; Said, 1978) describes how dominant groups constitute identity through the creation of a constitutive outside. The Palestinian is othered, constituted as terrorist, as demographic threat, but this othering serves elimination rather than identity-formation. The manic defense explains the compulsive repetition: The Palestinian threatens to haunt, and the weekly mockery, the proliferating trophy videos, are the labor of preventing this haunting. Triumph, contempt, control, performed again and again to ward off what presses to return.
Erasure describes the active removal of presence from the historical record. The Armenian genocide demonstrates erasure’s logic: Turkey’s denial apparatus works to erase what happened. This presupposes a prior finding: The Armenians were there, documented, known. The Palestinian faces a different mechanism. The Nakba is documented—by Palestinian historians, Israeli “new historians,” UN records. The Nakba is not hidden. Yet no ʿalāqa formed. There is nothing to erase in the sense of severing connection, because true finding never occurred.
Butler’s (2009) ungrievability reveals how frames of recognition determine whose deaths count as losses. Mawjūd lā yūjad adds the psychic dimension: Palestinians are hypervisible; they appear within frames constantly. Their appearance triggers unfindability. When Ahed Tamimi slapped a soldier who had just shot her cousin, headlines read “Palestinian Teen Arrested for Slapping Soldier”—she appears hypervisibly yet cannot be found as someone with reasons, with grief. Butler’s ungrievable cannot appear within frames; the Palestinian under mawjūd lā yūjad appears constantly yet cannot be found.
Extractive introjection and Lā-’alā’iqiyya
Sheehi and Sheehi (2022) deploy Bollas’s (1987) concept of “extractive introjection” to theorize how dialogue facilitates theft: The settler extracts the Palestinian’s position as aggrieved, their right to anger. Palestinian clinicians describe feeling “empty,” “vacated,” after such encounters.
Lā-’alā’iqiyya operates at a different register: the structural foreclosure of the circuit through which theft could be contested as theft. Extractive introjection describes a transaction, however violent; lā-’alā’iqiyya describes the absence of conditions for transaction—the amputation of exchange as such. The Palestinian who has been extractively introjected can name this violation. Lā-’alā’iqiyya theorizes why this naming cannot land, cannot return as recognition that would transform the one who extracts.
Conclusion: registers of mawjūd lā yūjad
This essay has theorized mawjūd lā yūjad through the psychic register, tracing how individual subjects of Empire are configured to split before projecting, to expel rather than incorporate, to evacuate rather than encrypt. Through Klein’s (1946) framework of splitting, projective identification, and the manic defense, through Bion’s (1962a, 1963) theorization of the container-contained relationship and -K, I have demonstrated how unfindability is produced and maintained at the level of individual encounter, achieving not the weighted haunting of Butler’s (1997) melancholic subject but the triumphant purification of successful projection.
The guard’s joke, the staffer’s formula, the young man’s recoil: Each demonstrates the manic defense in action. Palestinians function not as the melancholic’s encrypted interior but as external containers for imperial violence, monstrosity, and the capacity for recognition that would expose complicity. Lā-’alā’iqiyya names the expulsion of the bonding capacity itself, projected outward and attacked wherever it threatens to return.
Layton’s (2020) concept of normative unconscious processes reveals why this foreclosure reproduces itself so efficiently: It operates through identity formation itself. Imperial subjects do not decide to render Palestinians unfindable; they enact the foreclosure through which they become subjects. To find the Palestinian would require not a change of heart but a reorganization of the psychic economy through which imperial selfhood is constituted.
This essay opens onto five registers it does not enter.
The Institutional Register. Psychoanalysis gave the world the concepts of splitting, projection, and the return of the repressed. Future work asks what it means that the psychoanalytic institution cannot apply those concepts to itself. The International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA) maintained thirty-five years of silence on Palestine, broken only to pathologize Palestinian resistance. Six institutional encounters—including a training institute that silenced a Palestinian candidate across three consecutive sessions before turning its disciplinary machinery against her; a study group that received an Israeli soldier’s account with warmth while the Palestinian in the same room was not addressed; a training analyst who asked his Palestinian patient whether she had experienced genital mutilation—will be read as individual expressions of a structure, not individual failures of decency. The 2026 call for mass resignation from the IPA is its conclusion (Kemp & Pinto, 2023; Kemp, 2011, 2015, 2020).
The Phenomenological Register. This essay theorizes unfindability from the side of the one who cannot find. A companion essay asks what happens to the Palestinian woman who has lived inside that unfindability for decades: how she reorganizes her inner life to survive it, how she learns to carry what was deposited in her and not return it, and at what cost. The concept of the conscripted container—the colonized subject whose inner life has been drafted into imperial service—traces this production across three institutions: a nation, a bureaucracy, and a consulting room. It ends with what it means to stop accommodating, and what that refusal costs and makes possible.
The Political Movement Register. Since October 2023, Palestine solidarity has become one of the largest global movements of our time. Future work does not address the movement as a whole but a specific failure mode within it: formations where Palestinians are publicly centered and championed, yet discover—when they challenge rather than confirm—that the architecture of apparent relation was a hologram. This failure is not incidental. It is the mechanism of lā-ʿalāʾiqiyya operating beneath the mask of its opposite, and it produces a specific damage: not the violence of the enemy, who is recognizable, but the void of the ally who has never actually found you, which makes you lose faith in your own perception. The criminalization of BDS across thirty U.S. states belongs here: If foreclosure were stable, solidarity would not require legal prohibition. The intensity of reaction measures the threat (U.S. House of Representatives, 2024).
The Biological Register. Every register addressed in this book traces unfindability as something imposed on Palestinians from without (Palestine Legal, 2022, 2024). A forthcoming essay argues that deliberate starvation does something more devastating: It inscribes unfindability into the Palestinian body itself. Sustained malnutrition floods the developing brain with cortisol, measurably damaging the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex—the structures through which memory forms, through which a self comes to know itself as a subject with a past and a future. The child who survives does not simply lack opportunity. She lacks the biological instrument through which she would come to find herself. This is Bion’s container made flesh: Starvation attacks the containing function simultaneously at the neurological level, the relational level, and the communal level. It makes unfindability genocidal in a theoretically precise sense—aiming not only at death but at the permanent compromise of the capacity for life.
The Geopolitical Register. The international order does not fail Palestinians. It produces their unfindability as a deliberate structural achievement. A comparative analysis of Rwanda (1994), Ukraine (2022), and Gaza (2023–present) will demonstrate that these are not three different situations producing three different responses but one system producing a graduated hierarchy of findability determined by race, geopolitical interest, and the extraction economy that depends on Palestinian destruction. The psychic operations traced in this essay—splitting, the manic defense, minus-K—operate at civilizational scale through the UN Security Council’s veto architecture, the “human shields” formula, and the fifty-eight standing ovations in the U.S. Congress. The Palestinian exception was not an aberration from which the international order has been struggling to recover. It was the founding condition on which the order was built.
A final note on method. This essay deploys the conceptual apparatus of Klein, Bion, and Butler—a tradition produced within and by the same imperial formation it is here being asked to diagnose. The irony is structural, not incidental. Mawjūd lā yūjad and lā-ʿalāʾiqiyya were not arrived at through this apparatus. They came from Arabic grammar—from a linguistic structure that predates psychoanalysis by centuries and encodes in its roots a theory of existence and relation that no European framework generated independently. The concepts that name the mechanism did not emerge from the tradition that enacts it. That distinction matters. It does not dissolve the irony of using their tools. But it names what is doing the work.
For now, it is enough to name what mawjūd lā yūjad names: the structure by which Empire maintains its coherence through the violent production of Palestinian unfindability. Not invisibility (we have never been invisible), not even dehumanization (which still positions us within a relational hierarchy), but the foreclosure of relationality itself. The baby in the bag exists. She has always existed. The structure that cannot find her is not a failure of perception but a mechanism of protection: Empire’s protection from the unbearable recognition of what it has become.
Notes
[1] The epigraph is Mahmoud Darwish’s voice with the Quranic refrain from Surah Ar-Rahman, where “So which of your Lord’s favors do you two deny?,” which repeats thirty-one times, addressed to humans and jinni, cataloging divine gifts that cannot be denied because they are self-evident. Darwish repurposes this liturgical repetition to pose a different question: not which blessings do you deny, but which existence? His insertion—”You and I are absent, you and I are present and absent”—captures the paradox this essay theorizes. The Palestinian is undeniably present, as self-evident as the blessings enumerated in the surah, yet simultaneously absent, unfindable in the register where presence would generate obligation. Darwish maintains the relational grammar—”you and I”—even while naming its impossibility, insisting on address even when address cannot land. This is mawjūd lā yūjad rendered as lyric: existence that should be as undeniable as the sun and moon the surah invokes, yet somehow denied; presence that speaks, that insists on the “you” who might hear, while knowing that the apparatus of hearing has been foreclosed.
[2] A related but distinct concept appears in Morgan (2026), who proposes strategic scotomisation to describe a cultivated blind spot in which suffering remains “openly discussed, even exhaustively documented,” yet generates no demand upon the witness. Morgan’s formulation, drawing on Bion’s minus-K and Klein’s splitting, illuminates the psychic mechanism by which the bystander preserves innocence against catastrophic knowledge. The distinction from lā-ʿalāʾiqiyya is structural: Where Morgan identifies a defense activated in the presence of suffering—a deliberate excision of implication from an otherwise intact perceptual field—lā-ʿalāʾiqiyya names something prior. It is not a defense against what suffering demands, but the destruction of the relational apparatus by which suffering could produce demand at all. The difference is between refusing a claim and ensuring that no claim can form.
[3] Mawjuda la tujad is the feminine form of the phrase mawjud la yujad.
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