Appearance of a Djinn
Islam, outside and in psychoanalysis
Perwana Nazif
Throughout most of his childhood, my brother wore prayers around his neck. In an intimate relation to his nonnormative, autistic being, the paper bore inscriptions meant to ward off evil and bring him luck and was folded up and wound tightly by a green cloth. That green cloth was locked to the gold chain making up his ta’wiz (“amulet” or “charm”). I remember white bursting out of the seams of the dulled green cloth worn down by life. I was unsure if this burst was the inverse of the cloth—its insides finally rupturing the stitching—or the prayers themselves that were spilling forth. The inversion, the insides, and the prayers seemed to me, as they do now, the same.
Its place in my life was disorienting. Where was I to place this superstitious pendant that, under the guise of protection, aimed to change my younger brother was. The symbol was tied to, but excluded, from the way I understood Islam, as practiced in a supposedly orthodox way in my home: no talismans, no magic, no mysticism—many lists of negations. Some of these upside-down or backward-written prayers, folded up into small scrolls or squares hidden from sight, were clearly marked for malicious means. They were for warding off malignant djinns, one of the many forms of djinns as I understood them—sometimes as abstract as black marks on the ceilings or walls. How could the malicious djinn and a supposed “curing” djinn my brother wore not get confused? Why could djinns only be seen through acknowledgment of their collective presence—visible effects that confirmed their existence only because they are named as such?
The marginal, unorthodox approach to the djinn as a figure or potential figuration indexed my relation to my brother. At the same time, the djinn solicited a resurgence of a relatively nonorthodox Islamic religious practice. This, however, remained unacknowledged in my family. Uncanniness and ambivalence, even at the level of the function of the djinn itself, manifested in a theological coding of disability specified in neurodiversity. As I grew older, privy to more forms and understandings of djinns outside of my family, I became aware of the djinn’s resistance to definition, which coexisted with an embrace of identification or a gesture of acknowledgment.
The djinn was used to explain any meanings, affects, behaviors, and so forth out of the so-called ordinary. The djinn materialized when, rather than bowing forwards toward the prayer mat, the devotee prayed bending backwards—contorting their body in supplication coded as frightening. The djinn explained when a divorced wife started to hide tiny, inverted prayers on paper wishing ill on her husband’s family. The djinn becomes a hero for the workers in Mati Diop’s Atlantique, in which the djinns possess the young women in a village in Dakar to protest withheld salaries by burning midnight fires in the houses of wealthy bosses. The djinn known as Aïcha Qandisha supposedly cut off the heads of Portuguese soldiers invading Morocco. The djinn presents itself as an essential supplement to human existence as urbanist AbdouMaliq Simone notes, where djinns can be “generative or destructive,” a non-human source of “creativity and fallibility.”
The djinn came to be a signifier to the point of standing in for difference. I may not be able to explain what is otherworldly about the djinn, or even recognize its intentions or actions as benevolent, ambivalent, or vindictive, but I certainly can say when I feel a djinn’s atmospheric presence. Was my brother possessed by the amulet around his neck (a far more ambiguous djinn)? Or was it that my parents, dutifully, at the urge of distant family members, were attempting to exorcise that djinn from him —his atypicality? Or does each correspond to the other? When prompting my brother to say if the coming baby will be a boy or a girl, twins or triplets—or asking for the Megabucks lottery numbers for this week—is this the djinn’s address? Or is it the djinn that breaks into the rational when we unwrap little inverted prayers, hidden under the soil in the pots outside?
“Madness defies unambiguous definition—its only lucidity is its concurrence with civilization”
I think I believe in djinns. Still, I question the application of djinns to certain beings when used to reify “normal” and “able” as givens that continue histories of disenfranchisement and violence. Otherness, even conceptions of so-called madness, dissolves and reconstitutes itself as truth, repeating its inverse endlessly. Such vertiginous oscillations in truth share in madness, both when it’s sutured to “normal” and as a measure against an always constructed normal. Madness defies unambiguous definition—its only lucidity is its concurrence with civilization. As a break in the normative symbolic order, madness opens onto a plurality muddy with ambiguities. Figuring the djinn within this break, then, troubles psychoanalytic theory and practice. Islam becomes a problem for psychoanalysis not so much because of the tension between psyche and soul, but as an extreme marker of non-Western difference.
What, however, can be gained by this description of the djinn, a characterization that tries not to maintain the historical violence of naming “madness” and, thus, “normal”? Perhaps the unnamed, contingent djinn around my brother’s neck, the supposed djinn inside him it suggested, offered a different (hopefully deromanticized) approach to such violent applications—a way to view the categorical Other. Perhaps it didn’t. Djinns appeared, or evidence of their existence appeared, in tandem with events involving people, often family members, exhibiting nonnormative behaviors—categories that are especially the concern of psychoanalysis. The ambivalent meanings ascribed to the djinn make the djinn a vital material-symbolic object that can be read to represent the encounter with difference and impasse. The djinn is the figure, then, through which to understand the way disability or neurodivergence represents a border-defining difference between the West, psychoanalysis, whiteness and its constitutive others.
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Last summer, at the Institut Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine in Normandy, I encountered an unpublished and unfinished piece of writing titled Les Anges by Frantz Fanon. On a now-yellowed typewritten page, he writes of djinns as distinct from angels. Man is created from dust, djinns from fire, and angels perhaps from light. Whatever they are, they are definitely immaterial, according to Fanon’s reading of the Quran. The short piece of writing is not so much about what djinns are as it is about what they are not—a nullification that establishes the more stable position of man and angels, even as it draws a distinction that remains ambivalent. The djinn’s exteriority exists as constitutive, a structuring abject that shares common ground with both the transcendental and material. This appalls me. Fire gives off light, much as it incinerates. Fire’s interior exteriority confuses. The simultaneity of the djinn’s proximate exteriority and inclusion within the material (man and dust) and immaterial (the angelic and light) echoes the structure of the djinn’s collapse with madness.
This construction repeats itself into another collapse of Islam and my relationship to this seemingly unorthodox Islam outside of Islam. Within this confounding nexus of uncanny doublings, the djinn here surfaces difference. This a functional difference operative in meanings, relations, and their respective orderings. The djinn mobilizes a seemingly unorthodox Islam where my relationship to Islam is specified through my relationship to my brother and his being further specified as a relation with neurodivergence. Fanon’s ambivalent nullifications, therefore, are simultaneously conditions of possibility of both the material and immaterial through the djinn. The djinn’s presentation of difference in this structure already embodies the problem of Islam for psychoanalytic thought entangled with, if not articulated through, neurodivergence and madness. Fanon’s construction of the djinn as extimate to materiality and immateriality itself places the djinn both outside of, and level to, psychoanalysis—even extimate to psychoanalysis.
In “Islam after Lacan,” Arab literary scholar Nouri Gana demonstrates “Freud’s quasi-dismissal of Islam” as a “religion that lacks the foundational crime of Oedipal parricide,” which, subsequently, “acted as an enduring license for later European practitioners of psychoanalysis to thrust Islam into complete oblivion.” If this is true, Islam is excluded from and problematizes Freud’s understanding of the intelligibility of Islam in Moses and Monotheism. Thus, according to these readings, Islam is outside of psychoanalysis but this encourages and simultaneously depends on the historical construction of Islam’s obscurity—an obscurity and exteriority I comfortably dwell in. This excluding structure conditions the opacity of Islam, but this opacity is also what legitimates its exterior position. This circular reasoning not only throws Freud’s supposed dismissal into relief, but also surfaces a dependency on Islam as always already other—as outside of Freudian psychoanalysis.
Can we locate the djinn as the enabling site, or symbol even, of this structure and this opacity? If so, the djinn operates on multiple registers in its exteriority—an exteriority within Islam, as it was presented to me growing up, as well as in the exteriority of my brother’s being, and the exteriority of Islam to psychoanalysis. The djinn’s simultaneity of interiority and exteriority in Islam itself, and its functioning from the outside, situates the djinn in an ambiguous area. Again, the question rises of its functionality on all these registers.
For anthropologist Stefania Pandolfo, the translations of psychoanalysis to Islam bear the question of translation conceptually and practically. Pandolfo asks what necessitates a translation of these two registers within a culture where symptoms, cures, and “the stuttering of a repressed desire” are experienced as collective “encounters” with djinns, or the otherworldly. She specifies these experiences within the “invisible” and yet “ontologically real.” Thus, the djinn’s function not only mediates between human life and the dimension outside of life but also realizes the latter within the former. Therefore, the translation of psychoanalysis for Pandolfo must be “a matter of opening psychoanalysis to other possibilities of the unconscious without surrendering a Lacanian psychoanalytic ethical posture of lucidity.”
Working specifically within a Moroccan Islamic context, Pandolfo’s conception of translation necessitates an opening up of psychoanalysis, where “opening” demarcates a rupture or porosity in naming the border or demystifying the supposed exterior and interior of psychoanalysis. The supposed or initial exteriority of Islam to psychoanalysis is premised on a collective subject or analysand, or, to an extent, an a-subject, as well as a realm of the not-visible whose ontological presence has material implications for human life. The djinn’s presence as ontological, therefore, already complicates the initial structuring and contingencies of inside and outside (as well as of visibility and invisibility), buttressed and further complicated by the opening up of psychoanalysis.
In her book Knot of the Soul: Madness, Psychoanalysis, Islam, Pandolfo extends Nicolas Abraham and Mária Török’s definition of psychoanalysis as assuming “a posture open to the transmutation of its own knowledge.” Both psychoanalysis and subjectivity are premised as always-already subject to change, if not constantly actively transforming. More precisely, this posture assumes change at the level of form in knowledge production, even if that form of knowledge production may seem incommensurable with psychoanalysis—such as the djinn. This structural openness, then, requires a nonporous border to the outside of psychoanalysis that also opens to this outside, while maintaining, at least initially, this difference—not only for what psychoanalysis and subjectivity are but also epistemologically. In one sense, the djinn pries this open; in another sense, it is situated inside this always-already infinite openness that eats away at itself while simultaneously expanding from within and without. The djinn becomes a catch-all application for other ways of being that both name that difference but also let these alternative modes of being exist, for the djinn is the condition of possibility.
Extending this open posture in her description of Lacan’s take on “understanding,” Pandolfo necessitates an “openness to alterity, a radical discontinuity of experience.” Psychoanalytic knowledge occupies both Lacan’s “a time for comprehending (le temps de comprendre)” and “the moment of concluding (le moment de conclure),” where comprehending is not exclusive nor privileged in terms of “assimilating it into a preexisting discourse or configuration of the self.” Instead, this openness to discontinuity makes possible a grasping of “different life-worlds,” and “calls for the conceptualization of a discontinuity, incommensurability, and a topological fold that inscribes the ‘affirmative’ dimension of subjectivity in the radical risk of alterity.” Psychoanalysis not only anticipates the outside and is dependent on it, but it must fold the outside in on itself.
“This ethics of openness in both anticipation and dependency comes at a cost: the risk of alterity.”
This ethics of openness in both anticipation and dependency comes at a cost: the risk of alterity. That risk of alterity resides in the ontological and invisible. The risk is precisely the nebulous realm in which questions arise of the various djinns in my family vis-à-vis my brother’s neurodivergence as well as in Islam. What is it about Islam that warrants this otherworldly to the world of psychoanalysis, these other possibilities, that implicates this Lacanian understanding of an openness to alterity? Does this arrive at the limits of psychoanalysis itself? Is this openness not just a matter of comprehension and conclusion? Is it a space-between that operates as exteriority, as difference, even as extimate? What is it to think of this openness as alterity in an in-between space within understanding where the exteriority is included but as exteriority—as in the inclusion of difference? Is this a structural Other, in which it is a category where we can talk about Islam and psychoanalysis in tandem (elephant in the room: race), or is it an anthropological other, a culturally relative other that is always some kind of figuration put in place of the other, where this isn’t necessarily the case and incommensurability ensues? Gana’s reading of the way Tunisian psychoanalyst Fethi Benslama’s psychoanalyzes Islam itself helps to answer these difficult questions.
For Gana, Benslama’s project of psychoanalyzing Islam, in its exteriority and obscurity to psychoanalysis, is dynamically translational rather than applicational. Benslama reads “Islam and psychoanalysis in tandem.” The translation that Benslama employs in reading psychoanalysis and Islam in tandem, if we follow Pandolfo, is already within psychoanalysis. Such mutual translation, however, is not without risk, and this is precisely enabled by the djinn. The djinn recognizes difference. It encounters the limit and absorbs it. But through this “possibility of its own remise en question by the other,” Pandolfo argues, it encounters “other vocabularies of being, alterity, and loss.” Such difference, recognized if not enabled by the djinn, potentiates through different symbolics. In other words, the djinn intervenes in the (re)production of difference and its subsequent meaning-makings and relations. The djinn offers something else to established orders, including our normative symbolic order and utter lucidity or transparency (albeit different from invisibility). It can clarify within its obscurity.
Pandolfo emphasizes this structure of psychoanalysis that is dependent on an outside or limit, but also engulfs that outside or limit, in order for psychoanalysis to “remain capable of producing countervisions and countermoves.” In this sense, I take the djinn to be both an expression of ultimate extimacy that is also a deformalization, an un-grammaring of the extimate. The radical openness that would be inherent in a psychoanalysis, one that functions for Islam, must illuminate or make visible the invisible: “at the limit of the intolerable, [it] makes appear the disquieting shapes of the Thing”––referencing das Ding, one of Lacan’s terms for an object in relation with a desiring subject. Such a psychoanalysis affirms Benslama’s proposition that (Lacanian) psychoanalysis “holds open the promise of worlding psycho-analytic inquiry, reorienting it to the non-Western world,” but what remains is that risk in broaching the limit, affirmed in its maintenance as exterior-to even when absorbed. This would necessitate an exploration of, or even encounter with, the djinn and precisely how and what or whom it renders discernible, if not knowable. As Pandolfo states, “it becomes important then, for an anthropological ethics of listening, and what I call registering, to ponder Benjamin’s reflections on how translation is a practice of alterity, and to keep in mind Lacan’s warning that the other can be ‘reconnu’ (recognized) but never ‘connu’ (known); that difference between recognizing and knowing scans the possibility of encounter.”
Translation is “a practice of alterity” that maintains the impossibility of knowing but allows for recognition, one that conditions that “possibility of encounter” of difference. So, even if the limits are circumscribed and subsequently absorbed, it is a recognition rather than a grasping. Perhaps in this recognition we see a drive, an increasing circumference of Lacan’s topological or interior 8 illustrated as a double loop. One can think of it as the negative of the signifier in terms of intrinsic difference. That intrinsic difference is what drives the project of psychoanalysis, made visible, recognized by my brother’s gestures of hand flapping and rocking his body and acknowledged by the worn amulet in its impossible knowability.
It is within the openness and practice of alterity—perhaps in this case of recognition of the alterity and extreme difference that Islam presents—that the transcendent resides in. Hortense J. Spillers maps the transcendent, in her seminal essay “All the Things You Could Be by Now If Sigmund Freud’s Wife Was Your Mother,” beginning from a memory in church of the Christian-inflected “send go,” which ultimately points towards Islam. I move from the extreme difference of the collapsed djinn that Islam represents—particularly in its gesture toward a different, if any, signifying order—to Spillers’s writings on djinns and related or proximate practices in dealing with djinns by exploring the analogous, but distinct, interior-exterior positioning of blackness to psychoanalysis. While specified differently, the two, Islam and blackness, overlap dimensionally, meeting at a categorical Other face-to-face with what the djinn represents so far as it functions as difference.
If we position Spillers’s project as taking up science historian Evelynn Hammonds’s call in “Black (W)holes and the Geometry of Black Female Sexuality,” we understand the interior-exteriority positioning as a fundamental condition of psychoanalysis of the Black female Other within questions of optics. In her essay, Hammonds contends that “in many ways the Freudian paradigm implicitly depends on the presence of the black female other.” Hammonds appeals for a theorizing of difference beyond empiricism, contextually situated within the production of Black female sexualities as theoretically coded or marked as pathological and deviant. Significantly, Hammonds gestures toward merely beginning within psychoanalysis rather than circumscribing this site of theorizing Black female sexualities exclusively within psychoanalysis.
In other words, Hammonds is calling for methodologies to read and understand this “perceived void,” as in “not-absent-though-not-present black female sexualities” conceptualized through the metaphor of a black hole. This is refigured as a black (w)hole. This way of reading gauges “direct and indirect effects on that which is visible,” particularly “white female sexualities.” White female sexualities are dependent on the voided presence and absence of Black female sexualities (as all-encompassing deviant sexualities) to measure themselves against. Through a circular logic, these pathologized Black female sexualities establish the normative sex-gender precisely by its deviation from this norm. Accordingly, Hammonds maps out two projects, both of which argue “for the development of a complex, relational but not necessarily analogous, conception of racialized sexualities.”
The second and central project of Hammond’s essay is the reclaiming of sexualities by Black feminist theorists, a counternarrative that both reconstitutes “a present black female subjectivity” and offers “an analysis of power relations between white and black women and among different groups of black women.” It is on this grounding that I situate Spillers’s writings on Islam and psychoanalysis. This second project theorizes from or within a void. Hammonds unsettles a typical progression where naming necessarily follows seeing. The metaphor of the black (w)hole is not analogous to the djinn, but gestures toward similar structures in the symbolic. The djinn can be theorized from within a void, and it is through Spillers’s work whereby a bridge can be constructed between the djinn and the metaphor of the black (w)hole—the dimensional overlap of the Black female Other and Islam.
Spillers writes that the exclusion of the “‘race’/culture orbit” was the enabling condition or “enabling postulate” from which Freud spoke. Accordingly, he could neither “‘see’” nor theorize this orbit. Spillers relates this “fundamental interdiction” of the “‘race’ matrix” to the very founding of psychoanalytic theory and practice. Spillers’s formulation of Freud’s inability to “‘see’” the “race matrix” and its “place of elision” as a “vantage point” surfaces the question of the function of visibility and invisibility. This outlines a meeting point with Islam (and its opacity), albeit with different routings, and is framed within the transcendent in Spillers’s “send go” that moves toward Senegalese Islamic practices.
Spillers relates a story from her childhood where she recalls the minister importuning churchgoers to “send go” if they did not go with one of the choirs that were set to perform at a different congregation––“suspecting that several of his members would stay home or do something else that afternoon.” “Send go” is translated as the “mark of substitution, the translated inflections of selves beyond the threshold of the fleshed, natural girl” motioning “toward a theory of the transcendent” in “[a] break toward the potentiality of becoming, or the formation of substitutive identities, consists in going beyond what is given; it is also the exceeding of necessity.” Sending goes toward that elsewhere that is “beyond the threshold” of flesh, beyond visibility, where questions of soul come up within religious or spiritual contexts. It is, therefore, not necessarily surprising that Spillers continues her revisionary reading of psychoanalysis through religion in this transcendental emphasis, where she shifts to Islam in a Senegalese context. The question of why she transitions to Islam from her “send go” story, in the “front pew, left of center,” nonetheless remains, but I would argue it is to meet at a space of the most extreme Other (i.e., the non-Western). It is here I find myself confounded at the meeting point—taking note of overlapping intersections of blackness, neurodivergence, or “madness,” and Islam—while considering race and disability as categories of social difference and how neurological difference and blackness are constructed as pathological.
Spillers ultimately arrives at Islam in her critical comparative reading of Oedipe africain (1964), “by French psychoanalysts who carried out clinical practice and observation in Dakar, Senegal, from 1962—1966,” and Les Structures anthropologiques de la folie en afrique noire (1978) “as a francophone reading from ‘inside’ African culture.” Spillers’s reading explores the commensurabilities and lack thereof between traditional practices, non-Western and Islamic, with psychoanalytic practices. Before her comparative readings, Spillers emphasizes the role of culture, both in Oedipe africain’s stress on the processes of symbolization within both psychoanalytic practice and “the making of human culture” as well as her own distinction between the differences of “cultural ways and means” of diasporic and continental Africans, even amid attempts at flattening vis-à-vis “race.” Spillers’s point on reductive formulations is key, especially in her exploration of a flattening by psychoanalytic practice by way of the exterior structure (flattened into Other or difference) specified as “breaks” in psychoanalysis. It is by exploration of these “breaks” that she contextualizes her reading within a Senegalese Islamic culture by way of the Ortigueses’s psychoanalytic practice in Oedipe africain. She writes that in “attempting to understand the subject in his or her discourse, the Ortigueses address the specificity of illness by way of a number of case studies.” “But in each instance, the doctors,” Spillers elaborates, “are not treating a single individual alone but an ensemble. Even the latter is not limited to the familial nucleus but may include ancestral and religious figures; in some cases, these might be the rab—an otherworldly figure—and the marabout, both of whom are active cultural agents in the Wolof, Lebou, and Serer communities of Senegal.”
Much like what Pandolfo’s work surfaces on the Maghreb, Spillers moves toward the question of the subject of analysis translated in a Muslim culture. Those cultural agents, the rab and the marabout, gesture to Pandolfo’s “invisible realm that is ontologically real.” These are “other possibilities of the unconscious” that are not necessarily anticipated in classical psychoanalysis. It is not just a question of the individual and the “ensemble” or collective (echoed in Spillers’s reading of Alfâ Ibrâhîm Sow’s Les Structures anthropologiques de la folie en afrique noire), but of a different realm of the unconscious that extends into the transcendent or “otherworldly” with a different set of practices (located in cultural agents) to deal with the otherworldly—one not necessarily welcoming to psychoanalysis.
“That intrinsic difference is what drives the project of psychoanalysis, made visible, recognized by my brother’s gestures of hand flapping and rocking his body and acknowledged by the worn amulet in its impossible knowability.”
Pandolfo argues, nevertheless, that psychoanalysis is open to alterity by way of a two-pronged Lacanian understanding (both “a time for comprehending” and “the moment of concluding”)—which may be analogous to Spillers’s characterization of the Ortigueses’s practice as an attempt to “understand the subject in her or her discourse.” What is crucial here is Spillers’s focus on the ancestral and religious figures where “the unseen seen” is “the ‘evidence’ of things not seen,” and the rab is “responsible for certain facets of the subject’s behavior.” It is not just “linguistic difference” here to which Spillers motions, but “differences of religious and ethnic reference” in the Ortigueses’s naming of illness as perceived as the “intervention of the divine.” Crucially, Spillers is pointing to a distinction between the divine or otherworldly route and psychoanalytic route with the former as distinct from the latter. This drives forward the essay to her ultimate argument that the African Oedipus mediates a new symbolic order, as a distinct structure of relations from Freud’s oedipal-as-universal. This linguistic and discursive retrieval occurs for Spillers at the level of myth—representation—and the “non-Traditional” with the encounter with mechanisms of social death (i.e., language). The method through which Spillers routes this is the alterity to psychoanalysis, figured as race, culture, and the divine or otherworldly.
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Can the djinn be an ethics then? Supposedly, djinns eat from the remains of what we, humans, leave behind—exterior remains of the interior. When telling me this, my mother meant food, quite literally bones after meat is polished off, but one can also think of what is left behind of our bodies at the moment we can’t say what happens to the spirit, soul, cognition, or living thing when it transcends bodies, bones, and rotting flesh. If djinns feast on this, ingesting us, one wonders how they are not materially made up of us. We return to Fanon’s unfinished meditation on the makeup of djinns, an amalgam of angels and humans and yet distinct from them. It decenters the human—or, more precisely, the subject. Perhaps that is what it is to name, or not so explicitly name, djinns in cases of neurodivergence or what strays from what we assume as neurotypicality—to name what is a-subject, what does not heed the normative symbolic order, what in fact does not believe in the individual subject that is praised. Where we see blackness is where we see what destabilizes the categories, often in violently applied and entangled ways. Perhaps this space is outside of our symbolic universe and not necessarily so much located in but in a movement toward the real.
Of this beyond worldly, Pandolfo mentions two simultaneous “rhythms or histories”: a temporal and nontemporal, and compares it to psychic time named by Lacan as “ritual”—a topology of the psyche that undoes chronological time—represented as a spiral movement. The commonality rests in Freud’s conception of the Trieb or “the drive,” described as a “heteronomous force” where “the life of humans,” referencing “historical, worldly time,” participates in the eternal, or, following the nafs or souls, the divine. For Pandolfo, this “can be seized only in the lacunas, the distortions, destructions, and transformations it produces, in the way it undoes and hides away the evidence,” all the while noting its ambivalence. The psyche and the soul for Pandolfo then are situated within proximity, but not superimposed. The drive is grasped in the sense of what it undoes, distorts, transforms, empties but not by way of evidence. These effects are hidden away, as Pandolfo describes it.
This structure recalls Hammonds’s black (w)hole metaphor for Black female sexualities where she asks: “How do you deduce the presence of a black hole” astrophysically? “What is it like inside of a black hole?” Using a binary star system to illustrate her point, where the existence of a black hole is determined not optically but by its effects of “energy and distortion” of the visible star in orbit. Hammonds’s call for a different geometry also necessitates making visible—which requires a naming, where visible is translated as articulation and not necessarily optical—what a perceived absence structures, distorts, and establishes or signifies. It is this structure that we do not collapse but instead situate, in parallel, with Pandolfo’s drive, Hammonds’s black (w)hole, Spillers’s otherworldly, and my djinn.