ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the link between protest movements and potential emergence of lasting intersubjective change. In particular, it traces the connections between ruthlessness, rupture and the decolonization of consciousness. In the argument that follows, I will assume that material change in social environments is deeply implicated in psychological change; this is a substantive part of decolonization. Decolonizing consciousness might be scaffolded in some ways by changing material conditions, but requires more than this to unseat prejudice long in the making: it is a project of decoloniality. My focus will be on the forms this demand for a change in consciousness might take. In particular, the chapter will describe the internal disjunctions and the ruptures in consciousness that interrupt familiar ways of being and ready the ground for new awareness. I will argue that protest movements offer a way of penetrating into dissociated and alienated states that form an initial bulwark against change. Disruption of this, always accompanied by pain, lends itself to waking, and psychoanalytic theory has a contribution to make in understanding the process.
