The Ghost Circuit: On Axiomatic Systems of Oppression
i.
Patriarchy in Palestine and Jordan presents itself as a description of reality, and this is precisely its most effective operation: the central axioms from which it derives its conclusions, female incapacity, male guardianship as protection, honor as a regulatory technology of the body, are offered as facts rather than premises. This is expressed through a genealogy so thoroughly naturalized that to question it is to question ‘customs and traditions.’ Oppression posing as ontology and epistemology.
The conclusions that follow are presented as its logic: women cannot transmit citizenship to their children, cannot initiate divorce without forfeiting financial rights, cannot move without male permission, because the premise of their incapacity becomes perceived as inevitability and the law records what follows as self-evident.
To function within this system is to perform in a theatre whose script was written and your role assigned without audition. The concept of suspension of disbelief is useful here, though the theatrical register must be taken seriously: the audience in a theatre knows the fiction is fiction and chooses to defer that knowledge so the performance can proceed. The subjects of axiomatic oppression are engaged in something structurally identical, sustaining a premise they did not author and may privately refuse, because the social and juridical cost of breaking character is prohibitive. But it is in a space created where women know and nonetheless do, that axiomatic oppression finds its most durable hold, its internal coherence becoming its protracted authority.
ii.
These legal structures were not simply inherited from tradition but were actively manufactured. Under British and French mandates, postcolonial juridical regimes were calibrated to consolidate state power through alignment with tribal and patriarchal authority. The premise of female incapacity emerged as a colonial production, statecraft assembled from the intersection of European legal rationality and the strategic cultivation of masculine governance as a technology of order.
This is the genius of the system: it cannot be rebuilt from the outside, only repaired internally plank-by-plank, like Neurath's boat, while remaining afloat. The system absorbs individual resistance by reclassifying the exception through internal adjustment, the founding premise untouched. The show must go on.
In Jordan, the monarchy deploys patriarchy as a stabilizing force; in Palestine, the Authority, subservient to occupation and settler-colonial violence, instrumentalizes it as one of the few domains of governance it retains, compounding gendered subjugation through collective precarity. The state’s management of women’s bodies, marriage, divorce, inheritance, nationality, bodily sovereignty, is not tradition. It is reproduction under conditions of colonial modernity, Sharabi’s neopatriarchy playing out in our daily lives.
The axiomatic system translates its violence into the idiom of protection.
iii.
Yet the system produces internal contradictions, internal counterexamples. Palestinian and Jordanian women do not occupy positions outside the axiomatic structure. They are its obligated agents: subject to Althusserian interpellation, produced by its categories, hailed into being as subjects dependent on it for survival and legibility. To secure fragments of autonomy, women accept earlier marriages to escape natal families, perform religiosity as a shield to protect themselves and younger sisters, leverage education as a delay mechanism to open time within the structure, and cultivate double lives in which public compliance coexists with private practices of contained rebellion. Strategic compliance.
These are not passive concessions but tactical negotiations. In a strict logical sense, they function as counterexamples, demonstrations that the system’s premises do not hold absolutely. Each negotiation provides proof-of-concept that the axiomatic order can be rejected and that its conclusions are not as inevitable as it claims. However, counterexamples introduced from within a closed circuit do not break it. They are, more often than not, absorbed and individualized, the system adjusting elsewhere in its Quinean web of belief: the woman becomes an exception, an aberration, reinforcing proof of the rule’s
necessity. This produces what I have termed obligated agency: a form of action that simultaneously resists and reproduces the structure it inhabits, because no outside position is available, because the structure offers no position from which to refuse it entirely without losing what it provides. This is the operation of closed circuits that have no exit by design.
iv.
The Israeli settler-colonial project operates through a parallel axiomatic denial, the erasure of indigenous Palestinian sovereignty as founding premise, from which ethnic cleansing follows as security, checkpoints as “law and order,” settlement expansion as development, depopulation as inevitability. The occupation,
like patriarchy, presents its violence as the logical outcome of its own premises: Palestinian existence as threat, Palestinian absence as “victory” expressed through “peace.” The closed circuit sustains itself and perpetuates its colonial desires.
Palestinian women face dual oppressions. Fanon’s analysis of colonial psychic fragmentation is instructive here: the colonized subject is not merely externally constrained but internally split, forced to inhabit a self that has been produced by the colonial gaze while remaining irreducible to it. For Palestinian women, the axiomatic systems of patriarchy and settler-colonialism operate in tandem, each naturalizing the other’s premises and demanding a different performance of compliance. Where Hill-Collins’ matrix of domination maps the overlapping systems that claim Palestinian women simultaneously, the axiomatic analysis goes a level deeper: it asks not only which systems converge but how each one internally generates the appearance of its own inevitability. Inhabiting several closed systems simultaneously is a cognitive burden. The subject tracks multiple sets of premises, performs strategic compliance with contradictory demands, and maintains the appearance of identity coherence throughout. This is the psychic toll of compounded axiomatic oppression: chronic self-surveillance, management of visibility, dissimulation. It is the tax the axiomatic system levies. To inhabit several closed systems at once is to sense, from within, that they are closed, that their premises are constructed with their authority contingent on continuous reproduction.
Palestinian resistance enacts this perception structurally. Sumud, steadfastness as practice, operates not merely as persistence but as refusal to accept the occupation’s foundational axiom. The refusal to be unmade exposes the system’s contingency: if erasure were truly inevitable, resistance would be impossible; the fact of resistance demonstrates that inevitability is a claim rather than a fact. What the system presents as conclusion reveals itself as power dressed as logic.
The war is the axiom’s final, desperate attempt to prove itself true through the production of absence. But in the very act of total violence, the circuit reveals its own fragility – we are not yet outside the circuit but we are witnessing its self-destruction.
v.
The closed circuit is not particular to patriarchy, nor to settler-colonialism. It is the structure of domination as such. Every system that produces and maintains hierarchical power operates through the same axiomatic logic: a foundational premise, the incapacity of women, the subhumanity of the colonized, the deviance of the queer body, the criminality of the poor, from which a self-justifying architecture of law, norm, and punishment is derived. The conclusions appear inevitable because the premises are invisible. The violence appears as order because it is encoded as protection, security, tradition, nature. The closed circuit is not a metaphor for how oppression works but its modus operandi.
This is why reform so reliably fails: it operates within the circuit, contesting conclusions while leaving premises intact, producing adjustments the system that by design absorbs. ‘Change’ occurs through laws amended, representation expanded, rhetoric updated, the axiomatic structure remaining undisturbed beneath each concession. This appearance of forward motion, of change, of flexibility, is indicative of its capacity to metabolize challenge without surrendering the foundational premise from which all its violence flows. Once the obligated agent recognizes the machine not as protector but as instrument of death, the internal coherence that sustained compliance dissolves. The tanks, the checkpoints, the laws remain but its symbolic authority dies. What continues is not a closed circuit but a ghost-circuit, running on violence alone, which is the condition under which it becomes visible as what it always was.
What these systems share, across their specificity, is the requirement of invisibility. Patriarchal law must present as protection. Colonial violence must present as development. Racial capitalism must present as meritocracy. Each depends on the suspension of critique at the level of the axiom, on the willingness, enforced through social sanction, legal punishment, and psychic internalization, to not name the premise as premise. The moment the axiom becomes visible as axiom, as a claim rather than a fact, as power rather than nature, the entire framework becomes unstable. While the system is not shattered, it is proven as something that can be shattered, it operates on our suspension of disbelief. If we stop pretending we bring forth the possibility of otherwise.
vi.
This is what the counterexamples perform, across every site where they emerge: not yet transformation, but the withdrawal of the suspension of disbelief. The counterexample is the instrument of what Adorno called negative dialectics, which does not propose a new, better system but uses the system’s own logic to show what that logic cannot contain, the irrefutable existence of the lives it claims to have accounted for.
Transformation cannot be demanded to justify itself in advance, to produce its blueprint before it has occurred, because this demand is itself an absorption mechanism, the system’s final defense. The new form of life scales by existing, in the everyday acts of people who withdraw their suspension of disbelief without announcement, who stop performing the axiom as though it were true. Yurchak’s analysis of late socialism demonstrates this: the Soviet system appeared permanent until it was no more, because the gap between performance and belief widened until the edifice collapsed under the weight of its own unreality. The closed circuit has no exit by design, but exits are not the only way out; sometimes the circuit becomes visible as a circuit, and that visibility, once accumulated, once shared, is what breaks it.
The counterexample, precisely because it is so often individualized and absorbed, cannot propose a better system. But it offers something more fundamental: irrefutable proof that the system operates on compliance rather than truth, that its premises are falsifiable rather than essential, that the axiom is not natural but a claim requiring continuous reproduction by the very subjects it constitutes. Domination is not an inevitability but rather a theorem, one that is continuously being disproven.