This offering challenges the premise that "hell is other people" by proposing instead that hell is in fact us. This is not offered as condemnation, but as a radical recognition of our inescapable interrelational existence and the collective response-ability this entails. Drawing on Emmanuel Levinas's ethics of infinite responsibility to the Other, I argue that locating evil or brutality in discrete individuals constitutes what critical disability theorist Shelley Tremain terms “structural gaslighting,” a systematic obscuring of how oppression operates through collective complicity rather than individual pathology. Through the lenses of critical disability theory and Karen Barad's agential realism, this presentation examines vulnerability and interdependence not as individual failings but as universal conditions that dominant systems such as psychology erase through myths of independence and objectivity. Inequality is perpetuated when our fundamental intertwinement is denied. We face a funhouse mirror of individualistic thinking that distorts relational reality, producing a loss of collective hope and the ability to respond meaningfully. Building on Frantz Fanon's analyses of colonial violence as systemic and embodied trauma, I situate "hell is us" within the ongoing legacies of coloniality that implicate both oppressors and oppressed in co-produced structures of brutality. Fanon's insistence on revolutionary resistance as reclaiming agency nuances the call for courage through vulnerability, emphasizing that agency emerges amid, not despite, violent histories of domination. His concept of “epidermalization” aligns with Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s embodied intersubjectivity, illustrating how colonial and ableist oppressions are co-constituted in lived bodies and collective psychic wounds. When Jocelynn Rojo Caranza feared losing her parents to ICE, when children starve in Gaza, when disabled people face eugenic policies, these are manifestations of our collective failure to acknowledge our shared embodied intersubjectivity. Hell is made by us, lived by us, and lives inside of us, THIS is the hope for transformation. Following Barad's intra-action, acknowledging "hell is us" renders visible our collective agency to reshape oppressive structures, including those that constitute us. I call for what Tremain describes as a "conceptual revolution": moving beyond the cowardice of objectivity and individuality run rampant in our global political sphere toward the courage of vulnerability and radical collective responsibility. By centering disabled peoples’ epistemologies of resistance and Fanon’s decolonial praxis, we cultivate the relational harvest Gwendolyn Brooks imagines, forms of relationality that honor our interdependence and open possibilities for justice and liberation.

As Thomas Teo notes, in No Exit Jean-Paul Sartre wrote that “hell is other people.” If true—and I think it is—then it follows that each of us is other people’s hell. Add the Socratic dictum “Know thyself,” and with traditional dialectical thinking we can arrive at something like this: (a) Thesis: Self-reflecting on the ways in which we’re each hell to others improves our ability to relate constructively, and (b) Antithesis: Self-reflecting on the ways in which we’re each hell to others does not improve our ability to relate to constructively. Rather than seek a synthesis, I illustrate my take on Adorno’s negative dialectics by discussing how I have been hell to others and how I—and they—cope with my nonrelational relationality, with all its contradictions, and to what effects.

“Hell is other people”, says Sartre; an inevitable conclusion, yet incomplete. If Hell is other people, then so is whatever we mean by Heaven. The dialectics of relationality must hold this contradiction, even when, as Adorno noted, we are driven to resolve it. In this presentation, we evoke this tension through a clinical vignette where a patient simultaneously experiences the allure of new freedoms and the perils of isolation. This account highlights how such tensions can be difficult to see from within a synthetic dialectics allergic to the vague. The Enlightenment episteme, in general, holds the uncertain or contradictory as negative epistemic conditions. Yet, there are whole registers of experience existing only in fugitive modalities. William James lamented psychology’s failure to account for these ‘vague’ constituents of mental life. For him, even our clearest thoughts are escorted and suffused by a ‘halo or penumbra’ of felt relations, whose sociocultural connections and liminal complexity are occluded by psychologists’ proclivity for nominals. Like James, we find in metaphor a refuge for holding the vague and contradictory. More specifically, we foreground reverie as an unfocused and subjunctive mode of inhabiting a metaphor at its most diffuse, a mimetic practice modality that permits tentative and sensitive passage into the latent ‘negative space’ of the speculative (Gadamer). We illustrate this through a clinical case, showing how reverie contained the negative dialectics of the named and the vague, and of psychotherapist-patient relationality, bringing into view, through the penumbral halo of the daydream, a patient’s latent suicidality.

It is not disputed that people become hell to other people, but the theoretically more challenging problem is the circumstance under which people become hellish to other people. Such an analysis requires a theory of subjectivity that is not limited to internal mental life or relationality but includes the entanglement of society, history, and culture, with interpersonal realities and personal idiosyncrasies and tendencies. From this point of view, it is recognizable that human beings’ hellishness is not a necessary or natural outcome. Hellishness is not an inevitable human trait or an interpersonal given but requires an examination of the material and ideological conditions, ranging from confined physical spaces as in Sartre’s play, insufficient (perceived) resources for making a living to ideological constructions and justifications. Hellishness as one of the many possibilities that humans exercise in their intentions, actions, and relations must be understood on the background of fantasies and facticities. Democratic conditions, solely understood as majority rule, without accounting for minority rights, do not prevent the creation of hellish circumstances, and even more, democratic (post)neoliberal capitalism exacerbates a hellishness through increasing inequality and destruction of nature. The argument of the entanglement of (inter)subjectivity does not suggest dismissing the idea that some people may be more prone to be hell to others, but to reconstruct particular and unique constellations of this social and societal nexus. Examples from American politics and suggestions on how to reduce the conditions for the possibilities of hellishness are provided.