The Baby in the Bag: Mawjūd Lā Yūjad

This essay theorizes mawjūd lā yūjad (), existing unfindable, as the ontological positioning of the Palestinian: hypervisible and unfindable within imperial consciousness and its configured subjects. Mawjud la yujad operates in two registers: In the psychic register of individual encounters, Palestinian suffering activates unconscious defenses, projection, splitting, the manic defense, and attacks on linking, as defensive achievements against the self-knowledge Palestinian existence threatens to produce: I am the monster. I am complicit. I am what I was taught to fight against. In the imperial register, Palestinians must be hypervisible as terrorist, as threat, figures required to justify elimination and feed what Shalhoub Kevorkian names the political fear economy, yet unfindable in the juridical and ethical registers, where existence would generate obligation. The essay develops la’ala’iqiyya- (relationality foreclosure) as a framework for understanding how Empire sustains this structure.