“Everything takes place under a kind of anaesthesia. Objectively dreadful events produce a thin, puny emotional response. Murders are committed like schoolboy pranks. Humiliation and moral decay are accepted like minor incidents. Even death under torture only produces the response ‘Bad Luck.’” 

So wrote German journalist Sebastian Haffner in 1939, reflecting on life during the ascendancy of the Nazi regime. His description rings eerily true today, if in a different, hypernormalized register. The “anaesthesia” he refers to in the passage describes the collective denial and repression brought on by shock—a fathomable reaction to fascist atrocities prodded by visions of racial “purity.” 

Unfathomably, today, nothing shocks us anymore, presumably because we have been anesthetized for far too long. The tragic reality of our present moment is not simply that we are being lied to or kept in the dark; it is far stranger and darker: we know that things are going horribly wrong, but we are not able to do anything about it—at least not in a way that makes the needle move. 

So, life continues; business goes on as usual. People go to work; they shop and scroll and joke and dream. But the knowledge of collapse and decay lurks just beneath the surface of ordinary life. A persistent dissonant chord reverberates as the extraordinary is folded into the ordinary. Knowledge is not repressed or forgotten; it is acknowledged and accommodated. This is the ground for what psychoanalysis calls disavowal.

Nowhere is disavowal clearer today than in our (non-)engagement with Palestine. We are not dealing with rumors, but with relentless streams of evidence: the bombing of hospitals, the calculated starvation that has now led to a “massive famine,” the erasure of entire families from civil registers, and so on. The horror is not hidden from us; it is all there in plain, painful sight. And yet, it takes so much pain, persistence, and proof for the needle to move even slightly. 

This is what makes Gaza the most drastic illustration of disavowal today. If one were to round up what is publicly known about the horrors, there would be no ambiguity whatsoever. People all over the world have also responded—with marches, petitions, boycotts, and other solidarity movements. Heartbreakingly, however, there is the other side: the global political order has mostly looked away as governments issue meaningless statements that sound much like celebrities’ equivocations. Even news channels offer “balanced” or “symmetrical” perspectives where there is no balance or symmetry. The problem is not that we don’t know, but that knowledge seems to have little traction.

We must take care to note that disavowal is not denial. It does not reject reality, but instead, splits knowledge from belief.  We disavow the present because it is simultaneously undeniable and unbearable. The realities before us are too intense to be contained within the ordinary bounds of comprehension. Disavowal becomes a fragile form of endurance, a way of holding the unbearable without turning away, of remaining in proximity to what wounds us even when no adequate response seems possible.

In its original formulation, disavowal says: “I know very well (that there is a genocide in Gaza), but nevertheless…(I don’t believe that there is).” This condition of knowledge without belief (the inverse of belief without knowledge, otherwise known as faith) is absurd, as knowledge is not allowed to sink in fully and influence what one does. For example, one might be presented with evidence that this pair of trousers from Primark was produced by slave laborers in a Chinese prison, but nevertheless one does not really believe in it—or, to be more precise, one cannot bear to believe in it. 

Slovenian theorist Alenka Zupančič’s even more chilling formulation of disavowal goes beyond the decoupling of knowledge and belief: “I know very well, and this is why I can go on ignoring it.” A “therefore” replaces “nevertheless.” In this sense, disavowal is a way of knowing that keeps knowledge itself at bay and enables us to live with contradiction. Knowledge protects us from itself by de-realizing reality. 

In this age of information, knowledge does not galvanize action on its own. We can know the facts, even feel their weight, and yet find ourselves ordering the same products, voting for the same parties—living in ways that we know are implicated in the problems we worry about. The failure here—disavowal—is not simply moral or intellectual. It is structural, psychic, and therefore, collective.

Disavowal is not about pretending or lying. It is not even necessarily cynical. Often, it is more tragic than that, because most people care enough to do their best under far-from-ideal conditions. Part of the horror of the current moment is that even as awareness grows, and good people act in good faith, the worst still happens. 

The Soothing Balm of Ethical Consumerism 

Disavowal is the ground upon which ethical consumerism stands. The promise of ethical consumerism is powerful, if entirely misleading: that we can respond to (and perhaps even mitigate) global crises through better consumption choices. Revolution is too grand and ambitious, but many of us can at least consume “ethically.” There is a kind of sorcery at work here, a magical thinking that says: if (only) I buy the right things, the world will be a better place—or at least slightly less bad.

However, ethical consumption is premised on privilege. To opt for sustainable coffee, fair-trade chocolate, or grass-fed beef is to exercise discretionary freedom in a market brimming with options. Such practices depend on disposable income and access to specialized supply chains—conditions far from universal. The result is that ethical consumption often amplifies inequality: it enables affluent consumers to moralize their consumption practices while excluding those who cannot afford to “shop ethically.” 

Responsibility is individualized, commodified, and ultimately commodious, providing comfort rather than confrontation.

I am not proposing that there is no value in consuming ethically. Of course, some brands truly are better than others, and of course, some certifications matter. Additionally, for many people, ethical consumption truly is part of a sincere effort to live with care and consideration. The logic that drives the promise of a better future via consumption endures because it offers us agency, which seems so scarce today. It allows us to feel like we are doing something, and sometimes this is enough for us to cope.

However, the problem lies in how contemporary neoliberal capitalism positions personal choices as solutions to planetary-scale problems. Politics is shrunken down to preferences, or, in other words, it is aestheticized. This aestheticization enables what might be considered a double or second-degree disavowal. When we consume commodities that stand in for actual ethical or political positions vis-à-vis crisis, we are doubly removed from crisis. 

The option to consume ethically also performs a crucial ideological function: it takes problems that affect us all and turns them into matters of lifestyle. It whispers to us: You don’t need to confront power. You just need to consume better. It enhances the conditions in which disavowal thrives, as it lets us acknowledge that something is wrong—be it child labor, climate change, or settler colonialism—that it will not “go away,” and still carry on, without grappling with our complicity in structures of violence,

BDS and the Power of Collective Refusal

What would it mean for knowledge to matter? Historically, the boycott has served as a mode of collective refusal for ordinary people to disrupt deep-rooted systems of domination by withdrawing their participation from the marketplace. The term originated in the 19th century, when Irish tenant farmers organized a campaign of ostracism against Captain Charles Boycott, a land agent who enforced eviction orders during the Land War of the 1880s. Refusal to trade with Boycott, to harvest his crops, or to serve him in shops and churches, forced him into isolation and bankruptcy. 

Other moments have reinforced the boycott as a powerful tactic of political struggle, from the Montgomery Bus Boycott against Jim Crow segregation in the 1950s to global boycotts and divestment campaigns against South African goods and companies in undermining apartheid in the 1970s and 80s. While sanctions and economic costs mattered, the boycott’s true force lay in the moral isolation it imposed on the apartheid regime, branding it as intolerable in the eyes of the world. The 2005 Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement positions itself directly in this lineage. 

BDS uses collective refusal as a way of confronting entrenched structures of violence, calling on individuals, institutions, and states to withdraw their support from Israeli companies, cultural institutions, and universities complicit in occupation and apartheid. What gives BDS its power is not simply the economic impact of divestment, but the way it reframes global complicity: Israeli occupation is not just happening “somewhere else” but is intimately connected to the supply chains, corporations, and institutions with which ordinary consumers and universities interact daily.

Indeed, the vicious backlash against BDS in Europe and North America—through anti-boycott legislation, accusations of antisemitism, and efforts to delegitimize the campaign—signals precisely how threatening collective refusal can be. Boycotts are dangerous because they transform everyday economic activity into a site of political struggle. They make visible the connections between consumption and systemic violence, thus exposing the political stakes of consumption. They work not by offering an individualized sense of purity but by demanding solidarity through collective action.

In sharp contrast, ethical consumerism presents the act of consumption as the site of moral responsibility, privatizing politics and shifting responsibility from collective struggle to the individual, isolated consumer. It functions less as a tool of transformation and more as a palliative to soothe the consumer’s conscience while leaving the underlying structures intact, and allowing complicity to persist. 

Thus, while ethical consumerism deepens the structure of disavowal, boycotts interrupt it. Boycotts do not offer the comfort of moral purity but insist on the discomfort of complicity. BDS, in particular, is not about consuming differently, but about not consuming at all—about organizing refusal as a collective strategy that names and confronts structures of domination.

The Return of the Repressed and the Radicality of Belief

The circulation of images, testimonies, and footage from Gaza has been vital to global awareness and solidarity. Yet it risks being absorbed into the same attention economy it seeks to resist. In other words, as the horrors become packaged as content, their urgency blurs into ambient noise. 

In psychoanalysis, when something is repressed, it doesn’t disappear—it is pushed out of conscious awareness because it is too painful, shameful, or threatening to the ego or to the shared social order. But repression is never complete. What is banished from awareness continues to act beneath the surface, returning in disguised or distorted forms, such as in dreams, slips of the tongue, compulsions, irrational fears, or social pathologies. These are symptoms—the psyche’s way of expressing what it cannot directly say.

Applied to genocide, this means that even when official narratives attempt to repress or sanitize the horror, it continues to return in the form of trauma, guilt, denial, distorted media discourses, or eruptions of displaced violence elsewhere. The return of the repressed is the persistence of what the world refuses to name: the insistence of truth from beneath the rubble of its disavowal.

The resurgence of fascism, the emboldening of settler-colonial violence, the mobilization of conspiracy and paranoia, etc., are thus not regressions or anomalies, but returns of the repressed. They are symptoms of a liberal order that has forced itself to “move on,” failing to confront its founding violences of empire, racial capitalism, and more broadly, extractive and exploitative modernity. To confront these repressed violences would mean allowing them into full view as the very foundations of modern life, and not merely as past errors or isolated crises. It would require naming empire, racial capitalism, and colonial extraction as living structures that sustain our comfort and institutions, and staying with the unease this recognition brings.

To integrate them into our collective unconscious would mean reordering how we speak, teach, remember, and desire—so that exploitation and dispossession are no longer treated as exceptions, but as integral to our shared story. Such integration would not bring moral closure; it would transform what we imagine to be possible. A society that has metabolized its repressed violence could no longer sustain the fantasy of innocent progress. It might finally begin to act from a place of implication, opening the ground for solidarity rooted in responsibility, rather than guilt.

The unspeakable violence in Gaza today is not unprecedented, but the global reaction to it is. The inability of institutions to speak clearly, the public’s oscillation between knowledge and disbelief, and the failure of liberalism to locate its own complicity mark a profound symbolic crisis. 

Still, as psychoanalysis reminds us, the return of the repressed also presents us with an opportunity. What we are unable to say finds expression elsewhere, such as in art and protest. The question is not just how do we resist disavowal?, but rather: how do we build forms of relation that sustain belief? What are the intellectual, aesthetic, political, and communal spaces that can work through the unbearable knowledge of the present without collapsing into cynicism or denial?

Here, we must not think of belief as sentiment, but as structure. To believe, in this sense, is to allow knowledge to matter, to move. Belief is not opposed to critique, but is the precondition for critique to matter. Without belief, critique becomes interpassive and politically impotent. 

Ultimately, we are not just fighting injustice. We are fighting derealization, the erosion of our capacity to register reality as such. Gaza forces this point with urgency. To look away is no longer possible. To shop our way out is no longer tenable. What remains is refusal, solidarity, and the difficult work of building forms of relation that can hold belief in the face of unbearable knowledge. 

We already have many examples of what we can do. Recently, students at MG University in Kottayam, Kerala, turned Onam celebrations into a platform for solidarity with Palestine. Port workers in India—through the Water Transport Workers Federation—refused to unload military cargo bound for Israel, staging a tangible act of solidarity amid state repression. These and other gestures are not symbolic extras; they are psychic and political ruptures that disrupt the soothing fantasy that we can know, but (choose) not to believe. They transform mourning into demand and visibilize discomfort. Instead of outsourcing outrage to brands and hashtags, solidarity becomes embodied, situated, and collective. 

Reclaiming belief means treating solidarity not as an optional performance but as a necessity. To boycott, to strike, to protest, to refuse: each act interrupts the circuits of disavowal and turns mourning into action. Belief, here, is not naïve hope but the radical insistence that the world can still be otherwise—and that Gaza demands we act as if it must.