Epsteinism and the Politics of Looking

What do all those of us assaulted and abused, primarily women and young girls, but also young men and boys, want to see now that systemic predation is at long last visible? After all the predatory looking, the rendering of bodies into numbers and letters, the nightmares and trauma, what countervisual work can be done to activate a visuality that is not a trap? Let’s not rush past this first moment, there’s a system to bring down. A politics of care begins with visibility, ways of seeing and being seen.

There are archives now, kmown by the proper names Jimmy Savile and Jeffrey Epstein, to investigate the past half-century of neoliberal predation. From this perspective, the “male gaze” diagnosed by John Berger (1972) and Laura Mulvey (1975) was, as it were, the visible part of the iceberg. With the onset of neoliberalism—the Chicago boys were set loose on Chile in 1973—a far greater set of practices was set in motion that went from the ruins of the welfare state to the streets of the privatized city.

Epsteinism

In the wake of the release of his emails, we can finally begin to see Epsteinism, the globalized politics of power as secrecy and violation. Epsteinism expresses the neoliberal politics of a global class of self-styled elites, constructed around mutual interconnections to privilege and access to bodies. It relied on its invisibility, it took pleasure in carrying on in full view while being monitored only with “eyes wide shut.”

This assemblage of assault, trafficking bodies, and violation was not a bug within post Cold War neoliberalism— it’s a feature. More precisely, it’s a war reconfigured against the enemy within, against women’s, children’s, trans and queer bodies. This war was and is imbricated with the war against both Black and visibly subaltern bodies in US cities. Following Argentinian feminist Verónica Gago, such violence constitutes both personal offenses and “political crimes.”

Gago argues that “feminism confronts capital’s most abstract image: finance capital.” Epsteinism was financed by the non-productive fees and revenues derived from tax evasion, off-shore banking, trusts, and other financialized transactions. In an email to the Labour politician, and former UK ambassador to the US, “Lord” Peter Mandelson, Epstein spelled out this dynamic, describing how his network relied on “discretion, trust, handshakes, privacy.” This “privacy” was a dynamic of power rendered invisible to those not part of its network.

Desiring Desire

These invisible or concealed neoliberal practices materialized abstract financial gain by acting out a certain modality of desire as violence on young bodies. In the Epstein files, these bodies are reduced to “P.” The euphemism for “pussy” unconsciously expressed how targeted bodies were an algebraic abstraction in service of that which could not be said and ought not to be acted upon.

The unconscious fantasy within the Don Juanism of Epstein and his infatuated male followers, was a “desire that desires itself” (Shoshana Felman), a desire that is unspeakable (meaning both prohibited and repellent). Insofar as there was unspoken and unacknowledged same-sex desire (Q), it was equally unspeakable to the abusers, a self loathing to be acted out on and across “P” by means of violence. The point P connected the predatory body to other predators—most notably Trump to Epstein—in unspeakable ways, provoking the compulsion to repeat.

The spoken counterpoint to the unspeakable desire to desire is violent homo-and transphobia. It asserts a structural, almost structuralist, quasi-legal doctrine that there are two “biological”—what logic of whose life does this express?—genders and only two. The unspeakable desire for young androgynous bodies, described by Epstein to Mandelson as “fresh, firm and creamy” must be P and only P, never Q. Epstein was claiming to define “freedom.” Mind your Ps and Qs, now.

Reading this transatlantic network of violent desire, the image comes to into my mind of David Sansom, my former geography teacher and abuser, sitting in a Bristol prison, fingernails uncut, hair to his shoulders, still capable of putting fear into the police that failed to make him speak. He turned “no comment” into a form of assault.

Predation in the Ruins of the Welfare State

Little men like Sansom built the history of neoliberalism as one of sustained violence against children, queers, trans people and women. It was teachers, police, football coaches, scout leaders, teachers, priests and other such middling types that found the way to use the decaying institutions of the welfare state as a hunting ground.

In the 1980s, Stuart Hall emphasized that Thatcherism was regressive in its undoing of “welfare state democracy.” As the panopticon with its fantasy of reform yielded to those of punishment, expressed in Mrs Thatcher’s desire to give young offenders a “short sharp shock,” the formerly panoptic institutions were turned over to predators.

None of this would have become public knowledge were it not for the excesses of the malevolent Jimmy Savile. If he has become the figurehead of predation, he was only able to do what he did because so many others were also doing it and because failing institutions enabled it. Savile stalked hospitals, schools and entertainment venues not because he was an innovator but because they were already being used in this way. Such analysis as there was in the labor movement at the time saw sexual assault as a by-product of poverty, missing the institutional framework.

Epsteinism built its network on the privatized ruins of welfare state democracy. Ghislaine Maxwell simply drove the streets of New York and Palm Beach looking for vulnerable young women and girls. Her targets were often those who had passed through what is called “the system” and had been failed by it. Or she looked for those hoping to use conventional good looks to access wealth but without the resources to do so. In the absence of a social safety net, Epsteinism was able to exploit the resulting reserve army of vulnerable bodies.

At work here was a willed and willful counterpoint of targeted surveillance and refusal to perceive what’s not hard to see. Over the past two generations, Savile and Maxwell (to use the two predators as markers for an evolving neoliberal practice) knew who they were looking for, first inside institutions and then on the street. Time and again, those drawn into Epstein and Savile’s networks had already been abused by relatives or people in “the system.” The effects of that experience are and were visible to their predatory gaze.

Unseeing: Dissociation As Art Form

This surveillance had its counterpoint in the unseeing endlessly evoked in the recent excuses from the well-connected in art, business and higher education, who claim that they never saw what was in front of their eyes. Or to use the legal phrase of art: “never witnessed anything improper or illegal.” What would constitute witnessing, if you are determined not to see anything? Can you be a witness if your freedom depends on not seeing what you are doing or what is being done around you?

It turns out that films like The Zone of Interest (2024) were stating the obvious about how power works, not under Nazism but now: the power and pleasure of dominance, of being considered and considering oneself “elite,” whether racially or in terms of wealth, depends on unseeing its costs. As in China Miéville’s 1982 novel The City and the City, unseeing is always willed. To stay safely in your zone, what cannot but be seen must be registered as unseen. This is dissociation as a political art form.

Look at Noam Chomsky who, we are now told, only stayed in two New York residences of Epstein's, as well as on his ranch, in a Paris apartment; he had dinner with him numerous times, took $20K for the absurdly named "Chomsky Linguistic Challenge,” but otherwise hardly knew him--oh, other than Epstein redoing the Chomsky family finances; but other than that, no interactions at all. It’s not that Chomsky is the most guilty in all this. It’s that we expected so much better from him.

Norman Finkelstein, the often-condemned anti-Zionist, is the one figure from higher education who did what he should have done and told Epstein to get lost. That’s not a coincidence. Since October 7th, governments and their elites have engaged in a game of unseeing Gaza. Even when the occupation has finally and belatedly admitted that the figure of 71,000 deaths is accurate, after denying it for years, no expressions of remorse have followed. Hillary Clinton now claims that those seeing genocide in Gaza do so because of “totally made up” videos. Dissociation is both personal and political. The videos that prove the genocide must be unseen, just like being on Epstein’s plane, his island, ranch or townhouse.

Seeing the Unspeakable

This dissociative unseeing isn’t, in fact, hard to see. The BBC journalist Louis Theroux made a documentary with Jimmy Savile called When Louis Met Jimmy (2000). Although he felt something was off, and tried to ask questions about it, Theroux failed to reveal or even be aware of Savile’s abuse. In 2016, Theroux revisited his mistake in another film called Savile. As the film is not available in the US, I only just saw it when I was in the UK. Time and again, various people that worked with and around Savile reassure Theroux that they didn’t “see it” either.

Finally, though, he met with a woman abused by Savile, who had previously been serially abused within her own family. She scornfully demands “how didn’t you see it?” To his demurrals, she shook her head, saying “it’s obvious.”

Predators can “see” their targets. For those targeted, the predators are equally obvious. It’s a hierarchical and violent way of seeing and making unseen. Its very visibility has ensured that it remains unspeakable. The combination of disgust, of efforts to “protect” the targeted (too late to matter, of course), and the euphemistic prurience of the media has served only the predators.

Recognition and Solidarity

The tools with which to counter Epsteinism and its predatory looking are at hand—recognition and solidarity. Solidarity was one of the ways I defined the “right to look” (which I do not have but I give to an other). I think now that I underplayed it. The Gaza encampments and everything that has happened in Minneapolis are instances of what solidarity can do. We need to stay here for a while.

Solidarity has recently been defined by ACT Up chronicler and JVP organizer Sarah Schulman as: “the essential human process of recognizing that other people are real and their experiences matter…. Solidarity is a transformative vision of the real.” This real is that other world that we know to be possible, not the one we are in now.

That interface of the real and recognition creates what Viet Than Nguyen has called “expansive solidarity,” rejecting the traditional “inclusive” solidarity of class or identity for the encounter with an other or others. In this expansive form, “kinship grows between unlikely others in an ever-widening circle.” It builds on what he calls “capacious grief,” a mourning as militancy in the manner also proposed by Jill Casid.

Rather than the colonial gaze, in which “I see myself seeing myself” (Lacan 1977), I would define this expansive way of seeing as: “I see because I have invited an other(s) to see me, and they have invited me to see them, creating a ground on which to see each other.” This mutual seeing is recognition in the form of solidarity.

In turn, recognition has three modalities. Like solidarity, its first sense is legal, as in the recognition of Palestine as a state. Such recognition has become a largely performative gesture in Palestine, given the dense colonization of the West Bank and the establishment of a “yellow line” cutting Gaza in half. The law has not and will not save us. How do we recognize communities when the state is the enemy?

In the second sense, deriving from Aristotle’s anagnorisis, recognition can be understood as “a movement from ignorance to knowledge.” As the British Palestinian writer Isabella Hammad glosses it: “to recognize something is, then, to perceive clearly what on some level you have known all along, but that perhaps you did not want to know.” Doing the work of this difficult recognition is a key part of undoing Epsteinism.

Third, there is sensory recognition, whether in lived experience or in mediated forms. I’ve often quoted Palestinian poet Farrah Joudy:

His couplet resonates anew in the context of Epsteinism, creating a set of paired dynamics with the real: recognition and resistance; dissociation and denial.

Frederic Jameson used to use the semiotic device known as the Greimas square to “to reveal “the inner limits of a given ideological formation.” I’ve adapted the terms above and framed them in the manner of Greimas, only now as if in the rectangular screen of vertical video.

In this rectangle recognition is the implication of resistance along the vertical to the left just as denial is the implication of dissociation on the right. The contradiction in the center of the screen becomes enhanced and intense.

This sketch shows why liberalism will never be able to find a way to counter Epsteinism. The path to recognition and solidarity begins with resistance, the step that liberals cannot take. That’s why their statements end with the targeted, trafficked and violated (I refuse the rhetoric of victimhood) rather than beginning with them. With us. Begin with resistance. See what happens.