I
IJ
A JOURNAL OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 2009 EDITOR: Joan Copjec SPECIAL ISSUE: Joan Copjec Sigi J6ttkandt ASSOCIATE EDITORS: Nathan Gorelick Lydia R. Kerr ART DIRECTION & LAYOUT: Lydia R. Kerr EDITORIAL COMMITIEE: Kevin Arnold Ian Logan Megan MacDonald Phil Campanile Minna Niemi Ryan Crawford Pete DeGabriel Keiko Ogata Alex Deng Sol Pelaez Amanda Duncan Matt Pieknik Matt Rigilano Sara Eddleman Stephen Elin Steven Ruszczycky Andrew Serweta Kyle Fetter Michael Stanish Richard Garner Joel Goldbach Guy Witzel Nathan Gorelick Tyler Williams Ryan Anthony Hatch Hiroki Yoshikuni Lydia R. Kerr Steve Zultanski FACULTY ADVISORS: Tim Dean Graham Hammill Steven Miller
isbn
issn 1087 0830 978-0 9799539 2 7
UMBR(a) is published with the help of grants from the following organizations and individuals at The State University of New York at Buffalo: The Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis & Culture The Graduate Student Association The Department of English The Group for the Discussion of the Freudian Field The Poetics Program The Department of Comparative Literature he editors thank Juliet Flower MacCannell for transla tion assistance throughout. Special thanks to Editions Verdier for permission to publish a chapter from: Christian Jambet, La grande resurrection d'AlamOt (Editions Verdier, 1990) and to Editions de L'Herne for granting permission to publish a chapter from Christian Jambet, Le cache et /'apparent (L'Herne, 2003). Fethi Benslama retains the copyright of his essays. Editorial and subscription inquiries may be sent to: UMBR(a) The Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis & Culture SUNY IBuffalo, North Campus 408 Clemens Hall Buffalo, NY 14260-4610 alethosphere.org psychoanalysis.buffalo.edu
INTRODUCTION: ISLAM & THE EXOTIC SCIENCE
joan copjec
DYING FOR JUSTICE
fethi benslama
5 13
OF A RENUNCIATION OF THE FATHER
25
FIVE YEARS OF PSYCHOANALYSIS IN CAIRO
35
PSYCHOANALYSIS, ISLAM, & THE OTHER OF LIBERALISM
43
"SOUL CHOKING": MALADIES OF THE SOUL, ISLAM, & THE ETHICS OF PSYCHOANALYSIS
71
fethi benslama
moustapha safouan
joseph a. massad
stefania pandolfo
FANATICISM AS FANTASY: NOTES ON ISLAM, PSYCHOANALYSIS, & POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY
105
THE DEATH OF EPIPHANY
125
alberto toscano
christian jambet THE PARADOXICAL ONE
christian jambet
139
THE CENSORSHIP OF INTERIORITY
165
DIALOGUES FETHI BENSLAMA & THE TRANSLATION OF THE IMPOSSIBLE IN ISLAM & PSYCHOANALYSIS
188
REVIEWS
193
joan copjec
nathan gorelick
w
U Z w
CJ
0 il
-0: 0 0 c
cD 0
--,
Cf)
CJ
� W I � 06
�
5
,Cf)
9/1 1 dramatically reconfigured the world map, thrusting into relief the whole ubiquitous, populous, discontinuous, pressing matter of Islam. The vertiginous suddenness of this focus shift calls to mind, for a variety of reasons, a scene from the Cold War fil m , Kiss Me Deadly (Robert Aldrich , 1 955), in which the consumerist, self-absorbed M i ke Hammer is abruptly brought face to face with the limits of his imagination and with his own insignificance in a larger world to which he had until now remained oblivious. Noticing the radiation burn on Hammer's arm and realizing all at once the depth of its owner's shallowness, Pat M urphy, a detective friend , flanked by government agents, addresses Hammer as if he were a child: " Now listen, M i ke. I am going to pronounce three little words. They're harmless words. Just letters scrambled together, but their mean ing is very important. Try to understand what they mean : Manhattan Project. Los Alamos. Trinity. " For many of us, 9/1 1 happened l i ke that, only the words pronounced as ash fell over the Financial District, turning it into a modern-day Pompeii, were not, as we imagined them , Eng lish , the scrambled letters of our own destructive ambitions, but Arabic: Jihad. Shahada . Dar a/-Harb. Words in a foreign tongue that had in that first moment little to no meaning other than the destructive ambitions of the Other. Such an analogy would no doubt attest to the insinuation into our thinking of Samuel H untington 's notorious prediction that the "clash of ideologies" which
Umbr(a) 5
had defined the Cold War would surrender to a "clash of civi lizations" between "the West and the Rest. "1 In the words of Bernard Lewis, whom Huntington quotes, this latest clash wou ld be precipitated by "the perhaps irrational but surely historic reaction of an ancient rival [Arab- Islamic civilization] against our Judeo-Christian heritage, our secular present, and the world-wide expansion of both. "2 The most glaring, first-order problem with this "ancient rivalry" thesis is its wholesale neglect of the historical porosity of the two supposedly self-enclosed civil izations. This neglect is responsible for allowing the Islamic world to be defined as our perpetual Outside. Against this background, one reads Steven Wasserstrom's admirable Religion after Religion with a great deal of interest and relief.3 The book gives an account of the intel lectual exchanges of three relig ious scholars: the J udaist, Gershom Scholem; the comparativist, Mircea El iade; and the Islamicist, Henry Corbin, who were members of the Eranos group that met in Ascona, Switzerland to debate rel igious questions every August from 1 949 to 1 978, or from the beginning of the Cold War until the Iranian Revolution ushered i n a new program of " I slam icization" that would function as an efficient antidote to "Westoxification" and spread swiftly throughout the Arab-Islamic world.4 What fascinates us most about Wasserstrom 's account is the apparent permeabil ity of the borders between the relig ions, which is evidenced by the conceptual sharing and borrowings that cause the divid ing lines among the three monotheistic religions and the civilizations they represented not to disappear, but to slacken and zig-zag . Wasserstrom isolates a number of concepts around which the Eranos debates turned , elevating one in particular, Ergriffenheit, to paradigmatic status. Ergriffenheit, a term in vogue in phi losophical circles in the 1 920s and '30s, refers to a primal experience of being "gripped" or "seized" by an emotion and see-sawed between being descri ptive of religious experience and deSignating hypnotiC captivation by a strong, political leader. This concept surfaces, among other places, in Levinas's early work, On Escape (1 935), where it appears as the experience of being "riveted" to someth ing that is as inalienable from the subject as it is impenetrable to him. I n this context the Ur-concept of the Eranos meetings verges on the psychoanalytic concept of anxiety.s Wasserstrom does not mention Levinas, however, nor does he elaborate the differences between the religious and pOlitical trajectories of the term , for his theoretical investments lie elsewhere. Thus, although we learn from him that the varieties of rel ig ious experience represented at the Eranos meetings each found in Jung's notions of archetype and imago something to respond to, something intrinsic to its particu lar experience, we do not learn very much about the differences among them. It is anecdotally interesting to discover that Corbin's theorization of Persian Islamic angelology had a profound influence on Scholem's well-known essay on "Walter Benjamin and his Angel," but this information raises questions about the differences between the Persian Fravarti and the angels of Kabbalah - to say noth ing of the Christian angels for which St. Paul famously had a kind of contempt. The title, Religion after Religion, discloses the book's true investment, its major thesis that while the three relig ious scholars on whom it focuses privi leged mystical traditions of thought, which they used to bolster their arg uments that the rel igious experience is irreducible to any other, their notions of relig ious experience all ended up sounding suspiciously individualistic and secu lar. The three monotheistic religions fel l prey in the hands of these thinkers to an antinomian ism that transforms them into a phenomenon less
Umbr(a) 6
II\TROOUCTION
traditional than modern or, to put it more bluntly, less religious than post-religious. This thesis is mounted and supported by copious references and argument, but one historical coincidence, however briefly mentioned , seems affectively charged , as if it were being enlisted to serve as the capstone of the entire argumentative structure. For three decades one of the most prominent of the Eranos scholars, Corbin, divided his time between Paris and Tehran , l iving and teaching in both places each year; in October 1 978, however, he died, effectively bringing the Eranos discussions to a halt. Coincidentally, Corbin's death took place just weeks before Ayatollah Khomeini (who had also traveled back and forth between the two capitals during this same period) returned from his Paris exile to Tehran in order to head the I ranian Revolution.6 These two men, both "champions of the I ranian soul" (in Wasserstrom's words) , obviously had radically different ideas about what constituted that soul . But Wasserstrom goes beyond this observation of their difference to treat the death of the one and the triumphant return of the other as a happenstance with symbolic import: as figuring the historical eclipse of the Cold War era (in which the Eranos discussions were allowed to flourish) and the dawning of a new era in which a more authentic religious expression would assert itself. In his words, "the Iranian Revolution was an implicit repudiation of [Corbin 's] idiosyncratic version of I ranian tradition in the name of an authentic indigenous religiosity. "? So, while the attention paid to the Eranos discussions promises a respite from the "clash of civilizations" thesis, it ends by lending some credence to it insofar as Wasserstrom characterizes the discussions as time-locked , as a mere product of the Cold War period that held, while they lasted , the inevitable clash at bay. With Wasserstrom's conclusion we cannot agree, for what it fails adequately to credit is how thoroughly Corbin'S "non-indigenous" version informs the tradition itself, reaching back to its beginnings and including, for example, Sohravardi, martyred in 1 1 9 1 for the heretical claim that God 's creation is not an accomplished deed , but a perpetual ly recurring event that continues to i ntroduce new prophets into the world . Not all martyrs of the Islamic cause are, it seems, on the same side. What Corbin 's work exposes better than anyone else's is an internal split that runs throughout the "Oriental tradition," a split so deep as to throw into question any claim regarding the Iranian Revolution's ability to cancel or heal it. The charge of inauthenticity is premised not only on a time-locked claim (that the Eranos scholars were constrained by their historical moment to think religious experience in secular terms), but also by a land-locked one: the deep-seated differences between Western ideas and i ndigenous thinking were bound to flare up again when the ideolog ical struggle (capitalism/communism), fought entirely on the astro-turf of the Western notion of un iversalism, finally ended. By these two premises is Corbin condemned ; despite the fact that he spent the majority of his life photograph ing, cataloguing, translating the works of early Islamic philosophy and writing volumes of stud ies on them, he is unable to shake the adjectives, modern and European, that qualify his thinking , reduce it to site-specific conditions. The philosopher responsible for introdUCing Heidegger into French thought, Corbin also avowed that Heidegger's work provided him with an essential key to understanding Islamic philosophy, a claim that would seem to confirm the accusation that h is was an ahistoricist misappropriation of that philosophy. Yet what his avowal shou ld bring home is the fact that the Greeks to whom Heidegger wanted to return in order to restore philosophy to its proper destiny were unavailable in any direct, uncontaminated way. Nothing that remains of them is untouched by the Syriac, Arabic, and Persian translations by which they were preserved and transformed in ways that are irrevocably lost to us. For this reason the fact that Corbin 's copy of Being and Time contained notes hand-written in Arabic in the margins is not as peculiar as some think.
Umor(a) 7
Our purpose in isolating these moments, the Eranos years and the long period of the eighth and ninth centuries when Greek thought was transposed into these languages and absorbed by Muslim culture, is not to try to homogenize Oriental and Occidental thought and culture. The fact that the activity of philosophy did not have an institutional status in the M uslim world, as it did in Medieval Europe, is, of course, a difference of great Significance and redounds on the respective philosophies themselves. That the temporality of the Qur'an, nonlinear and non narrative, is un like that of the Bible clearly has repercussions that need to be assessed, as does the fact that Islam is without a notion of origi nal sin and thus of the cul pability of the body or the flesh.8 A myriad of d ifferences beyond these arbitrarily chosen examples could be cited . The point is that despite these differences, Oriental and Occidental thought and culture have been entang led throughout history. Regarding the questions raised by the current conflicts troubling our relations with various parts of the Islamic world, the premise of this special issue is that psychoanalysis offers a unique, powerful and even necessary approach. We antici pate that certain historicists and culturalists will protest that the discourse of psychoanalysis is entirely inappropriate to this task, that its categories for analyzing or rendering transparent the "Arab mind" cannot be transported to foreign soil and that the bid to do so is just another example of the West's ambition to Occidentalize the world , to market its franchise world wide. This supposes, first, that the task psychoanalysis sets itself is indeed one of objectification - of the Arab or any other mind; which it is not. The history of psychoanalysis is not without episodes in which its fundamental concepts were distorted in some way or bowdlerized by their forced association with a program of mental hyg iene that tended to SU bstantialize processes such that the mechanism of repreSSion, for example, was invariably translated into the unpsychoanalytic idea of a "repressed person" or, worse, a "repressed people" in need of cure. In the U . S . , especially during the Cold War and the decade leading up to it, among professionals and in Hollywood , an expurgated , unplague-like Freud came into being. Critics of universalism almost surely have something like this Cold War version of Freud in mind when they stigmatize his science with localizing adjectives and caution that its transmission to the Islamic world seeks to assimilate that world into the Western fold. To contest these charges - which, aimed at a straw science, miss their mark - we wil l propose for a different adjective, one that will help less to qualify than to de-qualify or de-regionalize it; psychoanalysis is, we suggest, an exotic science. In physics the existence of an exotic force accounts for the phenomenon in which objects that are close are pushed slightly away from each other. Psychoanalysis is that science devoted to studying the exotic force that operates in the su bject to push her from herself, opening a margin of separation between her and parts of herself she wil l never be able to assimilate. The existence of this force is an unsimple fact with ramifying consequences for the conception of the subject and her relations with others. Only a few of these can be mentioned here. First, the exotic nature of the subject renders her resistant to objectification; because the margin of separation cannot be liquidated , she can become limpid neither to herself nor to others. At the same time this otherness is not absolute, for the subject's self-distance, her self-prolongation is the ground of her encounter with others, the incitement to find outside herself, in others, a mirror that will reflect back not an image with which she can identify, but one that will formalize and thus lessen the anguish of her uncertain identity. psychoanalysis
Umor(a)
8
INTRODUCTION
Psychoanalysis refuses to rest content with historical reminders of the porosity of the divisions between Occidental and Oriental cultures, for the simple recourse to the fact of cultural "hybridity" has the effect of underestimating the force of the cu ltural attachments by which subjects are, precisely, "gri pped" and thus fails even to formulate the problem that needs to be addressed in dealing with the question of cross-cultural encounters. Nor do these historical reminders stop to problematize the nature of this phenomenon of cultural Ergriffenheit, of the su bject's "interpellation , " let us say (a bit against the grain), by her culture. This problematic is the domain of psychoanalysis, its unique and indispensable contribution. Proposing that the experience of " being seized" by one's culture has an exotic effect, psychoanalysis recasts the debate regarding the viability of Western values and judgments and the role they ought or ought not to play in territories outside their own, which has left un iversalists, on the one side, and relativists, on the other, dead-locked . To state it in a (too) summary way, against the universal ists, who believe that certain values have managed to shake off the soil of particularity in which they sprouted in order to assert themselves abstractly, as universals, psychoanalysis maintains that we do not really know what values we hold or why we hold them . Our task is thus not to d ivest them of their particularity, but to create particular forms in wh ich they can be recognized , by ourselves and by others. This entails not a process of making concrete what is abstract, but of making visible a darkness that penetrates us, thereby transforming/ displacing our culturally-inherited values. Against the relativists, who assume that everything that comes from outside is a threatening intrusion , psychoanalysis maintains that some intrusions are salutary and necessary for cu ltural and individual survival. Because psychoanalysis developed as a critique of many li beral Western notions, the accusation that it seeks to export these very notions hardly makes sense. In this context, the notion of freedom is often cited as an impOSition to be rejected . To oppose the liberal Western notion of freedom is one thing, but to oppose freedom is simply self-defeating. The expressed perplexity of Spinoza, "why are [people] proud of their enslavement? Why do they fight 'for' their bondage as if it were their freedom?" is not pecul iar to him; it is a perplexity tout court. 9 That there is a capacity of the subject to extract himself or herself from situations that are intolerable is amply verified in the East and in the West. It is especially sign ificant in this context that Foucault saw in the I ranian Revolution an opportunity to theorize this capacity, wh ile problematizing the Western notion of freedom. Yet the fact that this capacity is so readily surrendered suggests that there is a relation between it and the experience of bondage that needs to be examined. What is peculiar about M i ke Hammer's deliverance from his self-absorption is that it awakens him to a world that is itself shrunken and self-enclosed . Notice that he recognizes immediately the strange words he is made to listen to; they tell him nothing he does not already know. This world has reached some ultimate limit, has nowhere else to go and noth ing left to do but burn in its own fire, to "go fission , " in the words of the fi lmmakers. The way out of this impasse, the impasse of empty universalism, is not a retreat into self enclosed indigenous experiences and loyalties, but a more subtle conception of the exotic. On this ground Islam and psychoanalysis may be able once again to encounter each other in a way that is productive.
Umbr(a)
9
* * *
$2 (Spring 2009), special issue on " Islam and Psychoanalysis, " ed . Sigi Jbttkandt and Joan Copjec is available on-line at www. lineofbeauty.org
Umbr(a) 10
INTRODUCTION
1.
SamuelP. Huntington, "The Clash of Civiliza tions?," Foreign Affairs (Summer 1 993), 22-49 .
2.
Bernard Lewis, "The Roots of Muslim Rage," The Atlantic Monthly, vol . 266 (Sept. 1 990), 60.
3.
Steven M . Wasserstrom, Religion after Religion (Princeton: Princeton U niversity Press, 1 999).
4.
The term "Westoxification" was coined by the Marxist Islamic activist, Ali SharTatT, who sought, like other activists, to lay claim to an I ranian cultural identity which had been alien ated by contact with Western power and ideas. SharTatT, who died in 1 977 before the Iranian Revolution, had a very strong influ ence on stu dents and intellectuals who partici pated in the revolution.
5.
Wasserstrom, 3 1 -2, 1 22, 1 52-3. The experi ence of " being riveted" is analyzed by Levinas in On Escape, trans. Bettina Bergo (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003) .
6.
Wasserstrom, 1 0.
7.
I bid., 1 81 .
8.
differences is extensive, but useful sources include Remi Brague, The Legend of the Middle Ages: Philosophical Ex plorations of Medieval Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, trans. Lydia G . Cochrane (Chica go and London: U niversity of Chicago Press, 2009), for the d ifferent spaces occupied by philosophers in each society; Scott L. Mont gomery, Science in Translation: Movements of Knowledge through Cultures and Time (Chica go and London: U niversity of Chicago Press, 2000), for a thorough d iscussion of the his torical sequence of translations of Greek texts. While "Islam" is an infrequent referent in psy-
choanalytic texts written by Western analysts, it is i nteresting to note that Norman O. Brown did have an abiding fascination with the sub ject; see, for example, h is "The Apocalypse of Islam," Social Text, no. 8 (Winter 1 983- 1 984), which exami nes the tem porality of the Qur'an. 9.
This is Deleuze's paraphrase of Spinoza's po sition; see Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans. Robert Hurley (San Fran cisco: City Lights Books, 1 988), 1 0.
The literature on these
Urnbr(a)
"1 1
Cd
E
Cd CJ) C
Q) D
My title, "dying for justice" [agonie pour fa justice] , is an expression I borrowed from an article by Ernst H . Kantorowicz entitled "Pro Patria Mori in Medieval Political Thought. "1 The quotation comes close to the end of the text, where the author evokes the moment when, around the thirteenth century, a mutation occurs in the West in its relation to war and death: the Western Christian world moves from the holy war of the Crusades toward a secularization that touches upon the essential point indicated by the preposition "for" in the expression "to die for the fatherland . " The "for" effectively condenses in itself the what for and the for whom , the cause and the end - in short, the whole order that needs to provide a reason for the war, to justify it, and to make it appear just. Let us note that in French the word "juste" combines at least two aspects of meaning: one referring to justice, the other relating to conformity to a rule and/or to reality. In the first case, the opposite of "just" is "unjust" ; in the second case, it is "false" and "erroneous . " These two meanings have converged only in contemporary times, when justice has come to designate conformity to the positive rule of law. There are languages, such as Arabic, in which these two courses of Signification are designated by different words: '' 'ad l'' or "insiif" for justice as moral value, and "yahih" or "haq" for the conformity to rule, to reality, or to truth.
Umbr(a) 13
I was interested in this article by Kantorowicz because for several years I have been trying to understand the recent change in the Muslim world in its relation to war and death, a change that made possible on a grand scale what we call "suicide attacks, " according to Farhad Khosrokhavar's expression , motivated by a mass "martyropathy. "2 More precisely, I have been trying to identify the mechanisms in the order of discourse which authorized the development at a certain moment of the type of act designated by the expression "suicide attack." Let us emphasize that this expression is quite problematic i nsofar as, on the one hand, we are tal king about people who kill themselves not only to put an end to their own lives, but also to take the lives of others in an act of war. The goal of "auto-cide" is "hetero-cide." On the other hand , they are convinced that they do not die but remain alive beyond physical and apparent death. Perhaps a name like "auto-hetero-putting-to-death" would be more precise even if it is more complicated. "Putting to death" signifies here the will to stage a destruction turned Simu ltaneously against the self and the other. I have come to this research because, although the causes often invoked to explain the recourse to "suicide attacks" (namely, situations of oppression and humil iation) are not false, they appear to me to be insufficient, and not only with regard to comparable historical situations. For example, the colon ial regime in Algeria practiced a fierce oppression that caused tens of thousands of deaths, instituted the humiliation of the natives over a long period of time, and during the end of its rule util ized torture in a systematic manner. Nevertheless, in spite of the d isproportionate forces, the armed branch of the FLN never had recourse to such "suicide attacks" even if numerous random bombings were committed at its instigation . The same applies when Islam is invoked as the theological corpus authorizing these acts. The fight for Algerian liberation was also conducted in the name of Islam, but this name did not allow "suicide attacks." It is a fact that, in general, the liberation movements in the Muslim world during the first half of the twentieth century did not practice this form of attack. Even if the theological corpus of Islam contains passages that make it possible to justify the recourse to "suicide attacks, " we must ask why it was only roughly in the last two decades that these attacks have become possi ble and frequent outside zones of open confl icts. I have thus gradually been led to hypothesize a historical change in this civilization's relation to death and war, and to an attempt to grasp its new configuration in the medium of discourse where we often find the trace and trauma of such changes. The relevance of the article by Kantorowicz lies in the fact that he follows a similar path in a different context, and shows us the linguistic operations at work at the time of a historical change, operations whose pivot is precisely the question of the "just." The article begins by evoking the pastoral letter that Cardinal M ercier, the primate of Belgium, addressed to his flock on Christmas, 1 91 4, when Belgium was occupied by the German army. The letter bore the title Patriotism and Endurance and establ ished links between " Fatherland" and "religion" which appeared unacceptable to some of his colleagues at the Sacra College, such as Cardinal Billot in France, who was as much a patriot as Cardinal Mercier. In his letter, Mercier undertakes a response to the question he was asked , namely: whether or not the soldier who fell in service to a "just cause" was a martyr? He first responds that the soldier who dies in battle is not a martyr since he d ies with his weapons in his hands, while the martyr gives himself u p to his executioners without resistance. With this, Mercier recalls Christian theology's strict pOSition concerning the status of the martyr. Let us remark here that this is not the view
Urnbr(a)
14
BENS'-.AMA
of Islamic theology in accordance with the text of the Qur'an itself: the soldier fal len in combat is a martyr designated by the term "chahid . " Having recalled this doctrinal point, Card inal Mericer nevertheless introduces a "but": But if you ask me what I think of the eternal salvation of a brave man, who consciously gives his l ife to defend the honor of his country and to avenge violated Justice, I do not hesitate to reply that there is no doubt whatever that Christ crowns military valor, and that death christian ly accepted assures to the soldier the salvation of his sou l . . . . The soldier who dies to save his brothers, to protect the hearths and the altars of his country, fulfills the highest form of 10ve . . . . We are justified in hoping for them the immortal crown which encircles the foreheads of the elect. For such is the virtue of an act of perfect love that, of itself alone, it wipes out a whole life of sin. Of a sinner instantly it makes a saint. (Quoted in Kantorowicz, 472) A few months later, Cardinal B i llot formu lates the following objection : "To say that the mere fact of dying consciously for the just cause of the Fatherland 'suffices to assure salvation ' means to substitute the Fatherland for GOd . . . , to forget what is God , what is sin, what is divine forgiveness" (quoted in Kantorowicz, 473) . Reading this introduction to Kantorowicz's article, I was struck by the fact that this divergence between the two cardinals at the beginning of the last century resembles in certain aspects the debate that still takes place today among Muslim theologians concerning the question of whether or not those who perpetrate "suicide attacks" could be considered under the name "chahid." It is useless to dwell on the importance of this disputatio , since the issue concerns, on the general level, the theo-Iegal and moral justification of "auto_hetero_putting_to_death" as an act of just war, and on the individual level it concerns its consequences: either paradise or hell for the candidate. In the case of Cardinals Mercier and Billot, the debate already contains the whole movement that will unfold in the West (wh ich will be explained by Kantorowicz), resulting in the transition from holy war to its secularization. In fact, Cardinal Mercier'S position consists of passin g from the Church to the Fatherlan d and conferring on the soldier who died for the one the same value and status as on the one who died for the other - that is, the status of martyr, the remission of whose sins implies salvation and saintliness. For Cardinal Billot, even if the Fatherland is a "just cause," it is not sufficient to g uarantee the salvation of the soldier who d ied for it, and he renounces this substitution of Fatherland for God . But, t o tell the truth , this substitution is not· t h e only sign ificant moment in the process of secularization. For Cardinal Mercier introduced a sign ifier that did not exist in theological language before the change when he wrote: "[the soldier] who consciously gives his life to defend the honor of his country and to avenge violated Justice . . . " (472) . This sign ifier is "Justice," capitalized in the text, which will subvert the meaning of both dying "for" and justice. In fact, in Christian theology, the sold ier who embarks on a Christian war - as in the case of the Crusades - goes off to war "for the love of God and his brothers,"
Umbr(a) 15
a love that has the value of Caritas. It is charity and not justice that justifies and sanctifies war and death .
"I depart to die for the love of my God and my brother" - such is the internal watchword of the Christian
soldier according to the Church. I ndeed , what Kantorowicz shows in this text is that the passage from the Church to the State accomplished the move of Western humanity from the "just as holiness" to the "just as j ustice." This passage starts when the king becomes h imself the saint, the carrier of justice. From then on, the anguish of death suffered by his subjects for justice is suffered on behalf of the sovereign and his kingdom. Thus, the kingdom of heaven is replaced by the earthly kingdom , that is, the territory. And , as Kantorowicz remarks, in Jeanne d'Arc's cry, "Those who wage war against the holy realm of France, wage war against King Jesus," we have already passed from Church to State (484). But there is an even more important element of th is move: at the same time as the displacement of God by the Fatherland and of holiness by justice occurs, a "transference" (and this is the author's word) of the same emotional values and "moral emotions" also takes place (491 , 487) . Th is expression, "moral emotions," has arrested me for a long time. To what do these "moral emotions" refer? According to our author - and we are approaching here the thesis of Kantorowicz's mag isterial book The King's Two Bodies, published a few years later - they reside in what he calls "corporatism." That is, what is transferred is the body.3 We move from the Church as the mystical body of Christ, the tortured and sacrificed body that has known the agony of death , to the body of the State by way of the body of the sovereign. He shows through a number of examples how the State effectively becomes a political body, or, if you will, that the body of the State is merely a laicized Corpus Christi. I quote: " Death for the fatherland now is viewed in a truly religious perspective; it appears as a sacrifice for the corpus mysticum of the state which is no less a real ity than the corpus mysticum of the church" (487). Shortly after this, he adds: "Humanism had its effects, but the quasi-religious aspects of death for the fatherland clearly derived from the Christian faith, the forces of which now were activated in the service of the secular corpus mysticum of the state" (487 -488). In other words, what did not change in this movement from holiness to justice is the need for there to be a tortured body, for someone's (or One's) sacrificed body, the body of those who died for. . . , in order to constitute the body of the human community. This is where the transference of moral emotions would reside. The j ust person can move from holiness to justice; he nevertheless remains anchored in death or, more precisely, in "dying for" (pro . . . mort) . " I die for us," " I die for you," " I die for the other," "The other died for me" - beyond all possi ble variations, such is the formula of the moral emotion at the root of community and its sharing. We encounter here a traversal of the impossible, since death is the absolute l imit of sharing. It is impossible to substitute someone's death for the death of another. The other, in dying for me, at most only defers my death, or the reverse. The proper, what is mine, "mine-ness" in general , consists of this limit. Moreover, this is the Freudian point of view: the death drive is appropriating and not only destructive. We are reminded of Uh land 's popular poem cited by Freud in "Thoughts for the Times on War and Death": " I had a comrade [ . . . J A bullet flew toward us, / Is it for me or is it for yoU?"4 "You" or "1," this is the roll of the d ice of death, its real that separates, while " I for you " and "You for me" is love, the sacrifice and community of a "we," the fantasy of a libid inal amplification of the self. This would be the hyper-paradox of community: death as the absolute limit of sharing becomes the place of sharing. The
Umbr(a) 16
BEI\:SLAMA
moral emotion would be that we share what cannot be shared. What does this mean from a psychoanalytic point of view? Simply put: we place at the heart of our lives a dead person. In the Freudian myth, this is called "the dead father," the spring of symbolic identifications. The consequences I have drawn from my reading of this stunning text by Kantorowicz have helped me greatly to move forward with the difficult question of "auto-hetero-putting-to-death" as an act of "just" war for those who wage it and those who support it. In order to summarize succinctly the previous developments, I would say that the historical mutation that occurred in the West corresponds to a double modification with regard to what is "just" in the language and the guardian institutions of the community: the Fatherland for the Church and justice for sanctity, along with the transference of the same corporatist moral emotion. To put it differently, the same signifier refers to new signifieds while carrying the same religious affect of one body for all . We know what such a change cost Europe in the First and Second World Wars. * * *
Examining the testaments of candidates for "auto-hetero-putting-to-death" in the Muslim world, I was first struck to find in their discourse a justification of their acts that mixes Fatherland and religion, sanctity and justice a justification that their families resumed elsewhere in the same terms after the act. Although this mixture in itself already subverts what is understood in the theological tradition by "holy war," deSignated by the term "jihad , " the most decisive change still lies elsewhere. Until the 1 980s, the lexicon of jihad contained two principal terms: that of "mujahid" from the same root as "jihad , " which means warrior; and that of "chahid" which corresponds to "martyr." Let me recal l in general terms that the Arabic language, the language of the Qur'an and the l iturgy, is based on consonant roots that are decl ined with vowels to generate words. With six vowels and three or four consonants, we have at our d isposal hundreds of potential combinations which are not all exploited since language use and syntactic forms establish what is acceptable or not at a given moment. For example, with the root "j.h . d , " among other possible words, we can generate "juhd" (effort), "jihad" (holy war) , and even "mujahid" (warrior, since mu is a prefix that indicates an agent) . In general , the image used for the functioning of the language is that of a body formed by consonants and animated by vowels. These considerations are important for understanding the rest of this analysis, mostly for the important point of the emergence of a new signifier that subverts the discourse of war and death in this context. While the "mujahid" is a combatant in the register of the warrior, a soldier in the service of the holy cause, the "chahid" whose exact translation is " martyr" belongs to another register. It comes from the root "ch . h .d" which refers to the fact of observation, of being present at and being a witness to something . This root produces "chBhid" (witness), "machhad" (scene, spectacle), "muchahid" (spectator), "chahada" (witnessing and attestation), as well as "chahTd" (the martyr) . It is as if the testimonial fact could take the path of speech or that of sacrifice. But this sacrificial potential of the attestation to the truth alone does not make comprehensible the present recourse to the already mentioned "suicide attacks. " We can find the same link in the Greco-Latin context, since the term "martyr" (borrowed from ecclesiastic Latin) comes
Umbr(a)
17
from the Greek "marturos," which means "witness." Hence, for Christian authors the martyr is the one "who attests to the truth with his sacrifice."s Therefore, on this level , there is no Islamic specificity. In the Qur'anic text, "chahid" refers to the Muslim fallen on the battlefield , which confers on him an extraordinary status mentioned in several Suras among which the most expl icit is the following: " Do not believe that those who are killed wh ile fighting on the path of God are dead; their recompense is pardon by their Lord , and gardens with streams of running water where they will abide for ever" (3: 1 35-6) .6 To put it differently, the "chahid" is only dead in appearance; he survives, receiving nou rishment just like earthly nourishment but of a paradisiacal nature. There is a strange passage in the Qur'an which says: "Do not say that those who are killed in the way of God are dead, for indeed they are al ive, even though you are not aware" (2: 1 54). In a certain sense, the martyr would be the site in the unconscious of the absence of the representation of death. It would represent the immortal in each of us. And, we shou ld add , the child who never dies. It is clear that in Islamic discourse the two terms "mujahid" and "chahid" do not coincide until the 1 980s. The "mujahid" is not necessarily a martyr; and the martyr ("chahid") is not necessarily a warrior ("mujahid") . The "mujahid," by going to war, is certainly ready for sacrifice. He can become "chahid" if he is killed, but becoming a martyr is not the intended goal: he wants to fight and survive. Besides, the verb "ch . h.d" can only be conjugated in the passive form , which relates it to the unknown ['ustushhida] . No willful act corresponds to the "chahid ," which is accidental and unforeseeable. This is why the term "chahid" can be used for someone who dies in an accidental manner, outside battle, particularly when he is young, and especially if he is a child. In short, if the subject "mujahid" is active, the subject "chahid" is passive. But around the middle of the 1 980s an important event took place, an event in the order of discourse in the Arabic language, to which neither political sociology nor the usual analyses paid attention - and I would say that one needs to lend it an analytic ear to detect it: it is the invention of a new term that did not exist before and did not have any currency during the fourteen centuries of the history of Islam . We are dealing with the creation of a word that is certainly consistent with potentialities of the Arabic language I descri bed above, but this word was unheard of in the usage of the language up to this point. Based on the root "ch . h .d," the term "istichhadi" will be forged, a term constructed in such a way that it corresponds in the canons of the language to what is cal led "the urgent demand for something ." It is a question of the substantive by which the one who carries out the "suicide attack will be designated ." To put it d ifferently, what is invented through this name is the "candidate for martyrdom" [fa demandeur de martyre]. There is here a historical turning point which transforms the world of meaning of "chahid" from the order of the passive su bject, suffering his fate accidentally, to that of an agent in quest of death, under the mode of wanting to kil l and be killed at the same time. We understand why experts of terrorism cannot take into consideration such an invention or mention it only in passing as a secondary fact. The concept of "demand" does not have the same significance that we confer on it in psychoanalysis, namely that it is through the demand that the hold of the Other over the subject constitutes itself. By making possible in the world of discourse and in the Arabic
Umbr(a)
18
BENSLAIVA
language the urgent demand for martyrdom, a "niche" of deadly address opens up toward which certain subjects will orient themselves. But who opened up this "niche"? How does it become actually attractive? Words such as "kamikaze" or "suicide attacks," with all the horror that they possess, have obscured this event in the language through which the desire of the Other announces itself as the desire to see the subject kill itself while kill ing others. This explains, in my opinion, how at a given moment the demand for martyrdom could spread like a plague and martyr cand idates could appear everywhere, even there where there is no front, no war, no situation of oppression. We know that the first so-called "kamikaze" attacks claimed in the name of Islam appeared with Hezbol lah in 1 983 during the Israeli occupation of south Lebanon. The word " kami kaze" appeared with reference to the massacre at Lod Airport in Tel-Aviv carried out by members of the Japanese Red Army on May 30, 1 972. Two of the three terrorists ki lled themselves with their grenades . One might think that this act inspired Hezbollah. At the same time, however, the word and the self-destructive/destructive act concealed the most important fact, without which we wou ld not comprehend the expansion of the phenomenon, namely that Hezbol lah was not merely a laboratory where dreadful human bombs were prepared using a technique that would spread all over the Middle East; it was also an ideological laboratory where the infernal discursive machine I am descri bing here was invented . In order to grasp what d rives th is invention , we have to provide here a few historical facts concerning the creation of Hezbollah. Hezbol lah - "the party of God" in Arabic - was founded in J une 1 982 , and it is a Shi ite Lebanese political and religious movement with the military branch from which it began at its disposal . It was created in reaction to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Sh ia Islam is a minority branch of Islam that, nevertheless, brings together fifteen to twenty percent of M uslims in contrast to the Sunnis, who represent the orthodox majority. This conflict corresponds to a major h istorical fact at the beginnings of Islam . It is a result of a bloody civi l war over the succession of its founder. After the death of Mohammed , one group of Muslims thoug ht that sovereignty and power should remain within his family. The fi rst who ought to inherit it was the prophet's cousin, Ali, who was at the same time his son-in-law, the husband of his daughter. Another group of Muslims believed that, without the instructions of a will directing this, succession should be decided by a conference of M uslims and not necessari ly by the l ineage of the prophet. Th is disagreement led to a civil war marked by the assassination of Ali and the torture of his son , Hussei n . When I say torture, I refer to the fact that the body of H ussein, the prophet's grandson's body, was dismembered . It appears to me that th is dismembering of Hussein 's body, considering the position that it will occupy in the history of Shiite Islam, is not alien to the explosion of these "kamikazes' " bodies themselves. H ussein's body was, in fact, ripped apart and dispersed by his enemies. Hussein's torture constitutes the originary sacrificial scene, the foundation of Shiism. It gave rise to stories in every tradition of Islam as wel l as to impressive rites of commemoration in Shi ism during which the believers infl ict acts of auto-flagel lation on themselves in remembrance of this torture and as a sign of repentance; they attest to the intense sentiment of g u i lt inherited by the followers.
Umbr(a) -; 9
The story that leads up to the torture as well as the story of the torture itself was of great interpretive stabi lity in Shiism until the Iranian Revolution . U ntil 1 979 that is, for fourteen centuries - this story had almost always been the same. In general terms, the following are its principal components: Hussein , in his fight to reclaim sovereignty, which is supposed to return to the lineage of the prophet, receives from the inhabitants of an important city at the time, called Koufa, 1 70 kilometers from Baghdad , the assurance that they are h is all ies. When he leaves with a few supporters to meet them, he encounters along the way his enemies who greatly outnumber him; a ferocious and unfair battle thus ensues. The inhabitants of the city do not come to Hussein 's aid as they had promised . He is massacred. The symbolic core of Shiism constitutes itself out of this torture and the shamefu l desertion by the inhabitants of Koufa, whom the Shiites even today consider to be the descendants and heirs of the crime. They did not ki ll him directly, but they contributed to h is murder through their defection . After Hussein 's massacre, the inhabitants of Koufa respond by waging what will be called "wars of repentance" which, as the name suggests, were wars of revenge and expiation. We can find all this in the commemoration of the battle of Karbala, in the rituals and spirituality of Shiism. Thus this faith is marked by a certain dolefulness that in some way resembles what we find in Christianity, and for good reason , since we are dealing with the killing of the son whose father was also killed. There is, then , at the heart of Shiism a whole genealogy of martyrs, which will, moreover, continue since many of Hussein 's descendants will come to know a trag ic fate. But it is Hussein who wil l occupy a predominant position in the martyrological institution, since he will be named "the prince of martyrs." His sacrifice will eclipse that of his father, which remains an important point for the rest of my argument. Until the I ranian Revolution, the sacrificial story of Hussein is organized by the classical schema as I have just described it: Hussein is a warrior ("mujahid") killed at Karbala by his enemies and becomes a martyr ("chahld"). The faithful gather around the memory of his torture as a community of the guilty. His martyrdom is considered to be inimitable. But with the Iranian Revolution a new figure of the Shiite revolutionary emerges, and with it a new reading of the scene of Hussein's torture. This read ing will provoke a decisive change, of which one of the consequences will be to open the d iscursive "niche" of the "suicide attacks. " It is based on an interpretation proposed by an Iranian intellectual , close to Khomeini, named Ali SharTatT (1 933-1 977). We are deal ing here with a thinker who played a very im portant role (he was the translator of Franz Fanon; he held a doctorate in sociology from the Sorbonne; he had so much influence that the Shah 's secret service assassinated him) in theorizing the encounter between Islam and Marxism. He was the inventor of what he hi mse l f called "red Shiism" (red like the blood of the martyrs and like the emblem of the proletarian revolution). The new interpretation of the sacrificial scene of Hussein that he will propose relates to the following points: 1 . H ussein is not only a warrior ("mujahid") who met a death he did not wish for; rather he chose to go toward it with full knowledge of what he was doing . He knew that he was going to die, and he was there in the determination to overcome himself for the cause. Therefore, he is not only a "warrior-martyr" but a "martyr-martyr. " It is in this sense that he was a "candidate for martyrdom" ("istishhadi"). 2 . The Shiites are not only col lectively guilty, as heir to the community of Koufa, of having abandoned Hussein to his death , as the traditional interpretation has it. They are also individual ly and
Umor(a) 20
BEI\:SLAMA
subjectively guilty. We witness here something like a privatization of a collective sacrificial neurosis, similar to what Freud described in the case of obsessional neurosis with regard to religion. 3. This individualization or privatization implies that the revolutionary Shiite su bject is no longer merely the one who communes with others in guilt; now he must identify totally with H ussein, i mitating his demand for martyrdom. He is no longer simply a member of the community remembering the event, but a making present of the consciousness of this event. To put it differently, we are not deal ing with the commemoration of Hussein's sacrifice but with its reproduction. It is not remembered but repeated . The subject must repeat it for himself as if he were Hussein. Hezbol lah capitalized on this new interpretation of the sacrificial scene by Ali SharTatT. It is, therefore, not only a matter of an organization that invented the practice of "suicide attacks" and wh ich conditions some of its members to "auto-hetero-putting-to-death ," which is possible - but also and above all a laboratory in which a new signifying agency was put to work to reopen the trapdoor of the orig inary sacrificial scene. Who is unable to see the enormous significance of th is modification which alters the relation of the Shi ite subject to Hussein as an ideal ? No longer inaccessible, the ideal is henceforth what he must become. H ussein becomes the place of an incitement to come to him in voluntary death. The ideal calls on the " I" to absorb itself in Him, and this is what leads to self-sacrifice. Each candidate for an attack makes H ussein's torn body emerge from his own body, and not only as a martyr of the faith but also as a revolutionary. From now on, the moral emotion of the tortured body circulates between God and the revolution, and the candidate for the attack incarnates the circulation of the corpus mysticum from one to the other. I propose here the following hypothesis: through the new sign ifier "istchhiidi," by taking on himself the absolute sacrifice that founds the community, H ussein no longer guarantees in this culture the guard ian function of the dead father. We could even say that he no longer med iates (to mediate means to make the thing non-mediate) or, in a Lacanian idiom, he does not "bar the Other," which opens the confrontation with the Ideal Father. I remind you that, in psychoanalysis, the dead Father is an inaccessible point of orig in, the anchoring point of the symbolic that tempers the demands of the Ideal Father, who is a menacing , cruel , persecuting figure demand ing sacrifice. We encounter here a modification of what Freud called the "cultural superego," a notion that has remained insufficiently elaborated, although it would be worth reconsidering in order to th ink in particular these periods of change d uring which the obligation to give your body to the community becomes so pressing that the sacrificing and the sacrificed are confounded in an interminable bloodshed , as if the blockage offered by symbol ic substitution at the moment of foundational violence were no longer efficient. What happens, then, is that the role of the so-called intercessor (chiifi ') is conferred on the martyr candidate in this new order of the signifier. We encounter this name in the testaments of those who carry out these attacks and address themselves to their mothers (primarily), to their fathers, and to their brothers, tel ling them that " I leave to intercede for you." Similarly, in the d iscourse of the families, the son receives the title of the intercessor. Moreover, the authorities of Hezbollah make this into a criterion for authorizing a candidate to become a martyr. T his is what Sayed Hussein Nasrallah , the head of Hezbol lah (one of
Umbr(a)
2�
whose sons also committed self-sacrifice) , says about h is encounter with a candidate: "I asked from him one single thing - and this is in fact the only condition that I impose formally to facilitate the arrival of the candidate for martyrdom on the field - to obtain with the others his intercession." So what is this intercession? The term (chafi ') comes from an Arabic root wh ich means "amnesty" and "pardon." The title of intercessor is accorded to someone who can intervene to obtain pardon for another before a sovereign or before God when the intercessor is a holy man. It is, therefore, a function of the third who lightens the debt and the guilt of a su bject, averting his sanctions. It cannot turn a "candidate for martyrdom" into an intercessor, if the one before whom he appears were not a menacing figure capable of reprisals, and if these young men were not sons who send themselves to their death in order to circumvent the terror of the Ideal Father. Thus, in the current situation of Islam, just as once in the West, the h istorical mutation of the relation to war and death is a correlative of a modification of ideals, which cannot be grasped without the new orders of the signifier that emerge in the world of discourse. The shift from one term to another, the emergence of one word in an age-old system, accompanies new forms of putting to death . To die for the fatherland, for God , for the revolution: people certainly do not die only for words, but nor do they die without them, that is to say, without what comes " before" the cause that is accurately represented by the preposition "pour" in French and "pro" in Latin. What comes before the cause wants to orient death , trace a trajectory of meaning for it, give it a site, a destination, a place. In short, it wants to refer death , which amounts to giving it a name. For this name, people ki l l , kill themselves, and kill each other, as if the worst would be a death for noth ing . Translated by Roland Vegso
BENSLAMA
1.
Ernst H . Kantorowicz, "Pro Patria Mori in Medi The American Histori cal Review, No. 56, Issue 3 (April 1 95 1 ) , 472492 . Su bsequent references wi ll appear paren thetically within the text. eval Political Thought , "
2.
Farhad Khosrokhavar, Les nouveax Martyrs d'Allah (Paris: Flammarion, 2002).
3.
Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princ eton: Princeton University Press, 1 957).
4.
Sigmund Freud , "Thoughts for the Times on War and Death ," in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed . and trans. James Strachey et al . (London : Hogarth Press, 1 953-1 974), 1 4:291 .
5.
Le Robert, Dictionnaire historique de la langue fram;aise, ed . Alain Rey (Paris: D ictionnaire Le Robert, 1 995), 2 : 1 1 98.
6.
AI-Qur'an: A Contemporary Translation by Ahmed Ali (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1 993). [Unless otherwise indicated , all references to the Qur' an throughout this issue of Umbr(a) draw from this translation; refer ences appear parenthetically after each quota tion and include the sura num ber and verse. In the present instance, the Ali translation dif fers slightly from the author's; i n the former, the text includes no reference to those killed while fighting on the path of God - Ed.]
A
CI w I
� LC
cD
E
cD
UJ C
Q) W D I � � -f�
0 Z
0
t(
U Z :=J Z W [I
0
I.
Would Islam have attempted to produce, i n the interior of its spiritual edifice, a reduction of the nostalgia for the father and a renunciation of his figure in order to constitute a faith in God? I pose this q uestion as a result of research that has led me to an exploration of the texts and symbolic constructions of the Islamic religion in relation to the hypotheses of psychoanalysis.1 At first sight, this formu lation appears to contradict Freud 's consistent thesis, which locates, as the root of gods and religious formations, a Sehnsucht nach dem Vater.2 But does psychoanalytic research on culture have to content itself with the application of the Freudian interpretation with iconic fidel ity when the facts complicate such an extension of the resources of individual psychology to collective life? This is especially the case since, in his arguments on monotheism, Freud has left aside the example of Islam . Mentioning it only briefly, under the heading of "Difficu lties" in Moses and Monotheism , Freud proposes an interpretation of Islam's spiritual system around the question of the father, an interpretation which proves to be very problematic upon a detailed examination .3
Umbr(a) 25
Let us recall Freud's evocation of, and extensive commentary on, Leonardo Da Vinci 's beautiful expression, "He who appeals to authority when there is a difference of opinion works with his memory rather than his reason. "4 He proposes the hypothesis that one of the sources of the freedom to which Leonardo's work testifies with regard to his times resides in the fact that he had "learnt in the first years of his life to do without his father" (1 23) . Thus he did not need to rely, throughout his entire life, on the transfiguration of the father into God i n order to conduct his audacious research, even going so far that he distanced himself from "the position from which the Christian believer surveys the world" (1 25). Freud , nevertheless, does not turn D a Vinci into a faithless person, as he emphasizes that "there i s n o lack of passages where he expresses his admiration for the Creator, the ultimate cause of all these noble secrets" (1 24). At the same time, he also points out that the renunciation of the father had opened up a space of "play" and "gap" for his imagination (these are Freud 's words), which leads the mind to turn nature into the place of its own research. Freud concludes his study by attributing this character trait of Da Vinci's to the fact that he mentions, in his Milanese manuscri pts, having adopted the M uslim religion . The point here is neither to pretend that the spiritual edifice of Islam does without the question of the father, nor to attribute to it a capacity for freedom whose limits have been demonstrated by its actual history, a history which follows the example of all religions and all dogmatic constructions. Rather, the hypothesis that I wish to propose consists of exposing a conjunction through which it appears that the founder of Islam (in the sixth century) - having seen the treatment that J udaism and particularly Christianity reserved for the relation between God and the father - attempted an overcom ing which led it to produce an un bearable imperative comparable to that of the Christian love of one's neighbor, a commandment whose sublimity rendered it unbearable for the human psyche. In sum, the radical separation of the father from God would have an "anti-psychological" character that returns as a demand for man to hold on to the impossible. But would it not be at this limit that a symbolic order contains the possibility of a spiritual l iberty capable of engendering moments and works of SUblimation in civil ization? I nversely, we could also ask ourselves whether the assignation to the impossible, under certain historical conditions - namely, when the hermeneutic forces are absent - does not lead to a wh irlwind of desperation? II.
The figure of the father does not enter i nto the dogmatiC constructions of Islam. From the very beginning, the Qur'an takes special care to distance the reference to God from the representation of paternity, even in a metaphorical or allusive sense. The proclamations of the unicity of God radically banish every notion of d ivine generation or birth. In the sura called "Pure Faith ," d ivine nature is proclaimed in the fol lowing abrupt terms: "Say 'He is God the One the most unique, God the immanently indispensable. He has begotten no one, and is begotten of none. There is no one comparable to H i m '" (1 1 2 : 1 -4). Commentators present this passage as a refutation of the God-Father of Christianity. The word "plenitude, " which used to be the title of this sura, aims at excepting God from the order of sex and generation. It is a translation of the term "Qamad , " which designates what is fu ll and complete, and therefore "im penetrable." The latter meaning has prevailed in a number of translations.5 In fact, divine
Umbr(a) 26
BENSLAlv1A
completeness formally opposes itself to the open nature of the h uman - open because sexual, sexual because split, since sex is the "Farj , " which is gap, i nterstice, hole.6 Certain versions of the myth of creation turn sex into the inaugural element of the formation of the human being: "What God first created in man," writes AI Qortubi, "was his sex [FaIJ] ' He says: 'this is my deposit, I entrust you with it, ' since sex is a deposit [Amanatum] ."7 The word "deposit" here assumes the meaning of an inestimable object that marks the extraordinary dignity of the human . The Arabic term comes from the same root as the Hebrew Amen. It designates a primary "yes" or "let it be" and it is the correlative of the reception of the originary lack in human conformation . But this amenity constitutes, at the same time, tM source of the central ethical problem of man , which the Qur'an indicates in the fol lowing terms: "We had offered the Trust (of divine responsibilities) to the heavens, the earth , the mountains, but they refrained from bearing the burden and were frightened of it; but man took it on himself. He is a faith less ignoramus" (33:72). Thus, the orig inary "yes" to the sexual contains a singular presumption . Other versions of this myth also exist that represent the primitive body of man as a body full of holes, del ivered to demonic circulation through its orifices: "When God created man from clay, while waiting for God to breathe a soul into him, Satan mocked h i m by playfully penetrating h i m through his mouth and leaving him through his anus, and then the reverse. He used the other orifices i n the same manner: the ears, the nose, etc. "8 Obviously, this fragment stages the irony of the d rive which is consubstantial with the topology of the hole as orig inary sexual ity, and it would belong to the soul or psyche to try to circumvent it by covering it through its three fundamental functions: perception, imagination , and understanding by reason . All the treatises on the psyche, l i ke Avicenna's De Anima , move within this paradigm, regardless of the philosoph ical sophistication they achieve over time.s Sex appears as the blind spot (one of the metaphors for sex in Arabic) of the encounter with the psyche. The separation is, therefore, radical . On the one hand, God is outside sex, outside generation. On the other hand, human ity, formed around the hole, is on the verge of an abyss that is itself the mark of human ity's transcendence. Humanity uses imagination and reason to reduce its dangers and to establish legal sexual enjoymen t
(Nikah) .
The whole s pirituality of I s lam will hold tight to this separation . I t proposes
that there where there is God , there is neither paternity, nor maternity, nor engendering, nor sexual relation . No metaphor can transgress this impossibility. I n h is translation of the Qur'an, Jacques Berque reconciled the passage on "Pure Faith" cited above with one of the first definitions of the One god in Parmenides' Poem . M arcel Conche's translation of fragment eight effectively shows a troubling proximity with the verse in question: " being un engendered, it is also imperishable, whole, unique, immovable, and without end. Nor was it ever; nor wil l it be; it is now, whol ly together, continuous." 1o Conche's commentary indicates to what degree the completeness of this "un-engendered" One god establishes the idea of a god radically d ifferent from all existing beings, a god who is "being" from which one cannot su btract, to which one cannot add . Being fully saturated, he is the impossible. Whatever the results of the research on the Greek sources of the Qur'an might turn out to be, which might one day allow us to clarify the exact nature of transmissions and translations, the fact remains
Umbr(a) 27
that the last monotheistic religion, born i n the sixth century, immediately presents itself as an objection to the theology of d ivine paternity, thereby installing a genealogical desert between man and God. This has multiple consequences on all levels. First, on the level of historical development, we recall Hegel's thesis which attributes the rapidity with which Islam becomes a "un iversal empire" to the elevated degree of "the abstraction of its principle" and "the highest i ntuition of the One" in its consciousness . 1 1 On the level of philosophy, Christian Jambet has demonstrated how th is content of faith leads to the birth of an ontology that establ ishes an equation between God and being, between the One and the identity of the rea/.12 Concerning the question of the subject, our research has barely begun to glimpse certain implications of the faith in one God who is being and real. Under these circumstances, upon which I cannot linger, cutting short the possibil ity of adoptive patern ity that existed for the Arabs before Islam, the Qur'an excludes even the founder of Islam from the status of the father: " M uhammad is not the father of any man among you" (33:40). If the prophetic mediation does not assume paternal attributes, it is because the first Muslim is i mmediately placed i n the position of a son and an orphan : one of the very first apostrophes God addresses to the prophet is that by which he calls him "orphan . " Thus, God's relation to man does not pass through the mediation of a paternal prophet. Paternity will never be, as it is in Judaism, at the center of an alliance with Yahweh as the God of fathers. In general, the sacralization of the father does not exist i n Islam, neither at the moment of the foundation of the new religion, nor in the exegetic h istory of its transmission. Moreover, the father is an object of a distantiation, of an insistent critique to which the Qur'anic text itself testifies. First, we encounter only a few rare occurrences (on seven occasions) where the Qur'an evokes favorably what it calls "the first fathers" [aI-aM a/- 'awwalin] . Several commentators have noted judiciously that the Qur'an and the word of the prophet (hadith) do not use the term "father" i n the singular but always in the plural , as if there had not been The Father as a principle or essence. This primarily concerns Abraham , and secondarily Ishmael , Isaac, and Jacob, whose evocations as "fathers" are put in the mouth of a Bibl ical personage rather than as direct nominations. In the great majority of cases, the plural "fathers" refers us back to negative facts, figures, or judgments. The fathers are i n error, i n unreason ; they succumb to temptation ; they are idolatrous and forgetful ; they are questioned , denounced, called on to believe in the one God , and sometimes they are forg iven for their fau lts. Besides, Abraham, who is the central figure of paternity for Islam , is presented as the very example of the foundation of monotheism through a disobedience to the father, since Abraham will refuse the polytheistic cu lt of his father Terah , and he will leave it in order to accomplish a spiritual migration. This assumes the sense of a l iberation from the law of the father, from his clan and his customs, in such a way that the spirit of monotheism for Islam resorts to an exile through which the son encounters the One outside the father. Nevertheless, even Abraham , whose renunciation of the sacrifice of the son is commemorated every year by Muslims, is not exempt from the errancy attached to the figure of the father. For the Qur'anic text presents a version of Abraham's temptation to sacrifice one of his sons (without determining whether
Umor(a) 28
BENSLA�A
it is Isaac or Ishmael) that is d ifferent from the one in J udaism and Christianity, i nscribing itself in the perspective that has just been described , and thereby turning the error of the father i nto a major spiritual resource. In fact, in the Qur'anic version of this episode, Abraham does not decide to sacrifice his son by a premed itated act. Neither is it God who suggests or orders him to make the sacrifice. The father's sacrificial desire is localized i n the dream, and it is under the effect of his dream that Abraham addresses his son in these terms: "'0 my son , I dreamt that I was sacrificing you . ' " The text thus stages a son submitting to his father's desire: " ' Father, do as you are commanded"'; then , a father preparing to commit infanticide: "When they submitted to the will of God, and (Abraham) laid (his son) down prostrate on his temple" ; then, God i nterrupting the act at the last minute: "'0 Abraham! You bel ieved your dream ! ' " (37 : 1 02-1 05) . 1 3 We can hear in God's cry, which halts t h e i nfanticide, a d isapproval o f Abraham's adherence to the images of h is dream . Relying on this i nterpellation , Ibn Arabi, one of the greatest spiritual figures of Islam (from the thirteenth century), proposed a very elaborate theory of interpretation of the d ream and the sacrifice, which gives us the possibility to think in a decisive manner the spiritual roots of the question of the father in the Islam ic version of monotheism . Ibn Arabi effectively shows that God's d isapproval cannot have any other meani ng than the failure of Abraham's interpretation of his own dream . It is because the father commits the error of not interpreting his dream that he comes to the point of wanting to kill his son and that God intercedes to substitute a ram . 1 4 The sacrifice, therefore, would have the function of making up for a missing interpretation by the father. But what is the cause of the father's failed i nterpretation? Ibn Arabi puts forth the fol lowing expl ication : "The ch ild is the essence of his generator. When Abraham saw in a dream that he sacrificed his son, i n fact the dream was about sacrificing h imself. "15 Thus, if we consider that essence ('Ayn) contains all the possibilities of being, as Ibn Arabi states, we u nderstand that Abraham evaded the i nterpretation of his dream in order to subtract himself from the l i mitations of his omnipotence. The father's dream to kill his son hides the desire to sacrifice the generative essence with which it remained confused. According to Ibn Arabi, to sacrifice essence is to accept "the odor of existence" (Ra'ihatou a/- WujOd), or to put it better, to consent to the determination of essence in one place (HuIO�. Ceasing to occupy all possible places - this wou ld be the becoming of the father. There is father only as existing (MawjOd), since the generator results from the essence which is being, the One, God h imself. We can draw three consequences. First, the concept of essence is the equivalent of enjoyment in the sense of absolute enjoyment. Second , interpretation would have the function of bring ing to existence what the dream h ides in its manifest content, namely, that desire is the desire to step outside of essence. Finally, what we call "father" is an existing thing that d ifferentiates itself from the generator, the creator (kh8.lq), or being. In this regard , the father is a procreator who cannot coincide with God , the creator, except in the fantasy of the omnipotence of the father. I bn Arabi writes: "The dream is about an i maginative presence that Abraham did not interpret. It was, in reality, a ram that appeared in the d ream in the form of Abraham 's son . Also, God redeemed the son of Abraham 's fantasy (Wahm) by the grand sacrifice of the ram , which was the divine i nterpretation of the dream of which Abraham was not conscious (La Yach' ur)." 1 6
Umbr(a) 29
In sum, the fantasy of i nfanticide by the father d issimulates the desire to kill the father of omnipotence, but since the father misses its interpretation, it is God who reestabl ishes it by the substitution of the ram. We should note here that I bn Arabi proposes a theory very close to the Freudian interpretation of the sacrificial animal that Jacques Lacan recapitulates when he emphasizes that the ram is a figure of the father of absolute enjoymentY The process of the father's failure would then be the fol lowing: the father desires to be essence, i nsofar as he remains confused with the son, but when he seeks separation, he misrecogn izes its symbolic significance and wants to show off by inflicting the real murder on the son . Following Ibn Arabi, Islam thinks the father from God and not the other way around. The latter appears as a God who makes up for the father's i maginary misappropriation of alterity through the reestablishment of a hermeneutics of the dream that brings about the emergence of the m issing symbol in reality. It is in th is sense that he is creator and procreator of the son , in contrast to the omnipotence of his procreator father. For Ibn Arabi, the procreator father is, according to its primordial nature, an animal. More precisely, from the perspective of the logic of procreation, the father of man is the animal. This is why, lacking an interpretation, the sacrifice al lows the separation of this orig in, that is to say, the advent of the odor of existence by the immolation of the animal. This development might allow us to respond to the question posed by I bn Arabi at the very beg i nning of h is text: "How can the bleating of the ram and human speech be the same?"18 We can now make the fol lowing shortcut: it is in death that the voice of the ram becomes speech. It is by the i nterpretation of sacrifice that murderous desire can be reoriented .
III.
As we stated at the beginning, this inquiry into the father was initiated by one of Freud's rare reflections, penned in Moses and Monotheism, about Islam. He writes: "The recapture of the single great primal father brought the Arabs an extraordinary exaltation of their self-confidence, which led to great worldly successes but exhausted itself in them. Allah showed h imself far more grateful to his chosen people than Yahweh did to h is. But the i nternal development of the new relig ion soon came to a stop, perhaps because it lacked the depth which had been caused in the Jewish case by the murder of the founder of their religion."1 9 I w i l l not revisit here the details of the d iscussion that I have in itiated with this proposition;20 I will merely underl ine that the preceding developments seem to contradict the hypothesis of "the recapture [Wiedergewinnung] of the single great primal father [UlVater] . " Rather, the separation between a creator God and a procreator father (between the latter, in opposition to the figure of the father of absolute enjoyment, and the former, in the position of a hermeneutic God who is g uarantor of the failed symbolic function of the father) indicates that Islam thinks spirituality from a divinity that withdraws itself from the i mag inary father of the orig in. If Islam is real ly a religion of the son, it is because the son is saved from his own father, who does not succeed in separating h imself from an animal-father whose dream is a portent. Certainly, the dream also contains the desire of freeing itself from animal desire. From this point of view, it condenses two
Umbr(a) 30
BEI'\SLAMA
desires: one from the side of the animal, the other from the side of a terrible l i beration, since it consists of cutting the flesh of the son . The God of Islam appears as a critique of the father, as an interpretation of his desire, i n order to elevate the son. God consents to the murder of the ani mal in the father; moreover, he proposes the murder of the father of enjoyment by symbolizing h i m with the ram , which is then not a substitute for the son, as is often said , but for the father. With the sacrifice of the an imal, the father gains access to the symbolic truth of his desire. He suppresses h imself as origi n . I am thi n king here of Hegel 's expression: "for the child, the parents are the origin that suppresses itself. "21 From this perspective, the being of the symbol is neither on the side of the father, nor on the side of the son , even if it saves the latter from the cruelty of the former. It is the capacity for transposition between image, word, and thing that the ram can be the animal and the primitive father, the symbol and the bleed ing thing, the dream (of Abraham) and its (divine) interpretation . What I call here transposition , I b n Arabi tried to turn into a theory of the creativity of forms as an i ntrinsic property of being or of God . While the latter is conscious of the multiple forms that it can assume in all things, man has only a restricted consciousness of trans-formations. He writes: "We cannot even see our own spiritual form ."22 It is in this sense that Abraham, though a prophet, does not see the spiritual form of the father and he must pass through so many metabolas. The fundamental reason for Ibn Arabi is the following: "Because God is never unconscious (bi la Ch 'ur) of anything, while the subject is necessarily unconscious of such a thing in relation with such other."23 Also, the h u man subject is always surprised to see the transposition of things into other things, including h imself. Such is a brief account of I bn Arabi's theory of the father, which radically separates the father from God, who is then thought as an energy of the transposition of forms to which man does not have ful l access since there is a n unconscious. I bn Arabi's u nconscious is not t h e Freud ian unconscious, even i f it often comes close to it. It is the condition of the spiritual vei ling and unveiling of the multiple forms of man .
IV.
Ibn Arabi did not invent this theory from nothing. He deduced it from the Qur'anic text and from the discourse oft h e founder of Islam. The hypothesis that I have previously proposed is that the founder of Islam i nherits a genealogical situation exposed in Genesis, where it appears that Abraham's fi liation by Ishmael is the fruit of Hagar's natural impregnation, whi le, with Isaac, God must i ntervene in procreation since Sarah is older than seventy.24 The same operation wi ll be repeated with Mary in order to engender Jesus. The real father for Islam is, therefore, Abraham, while the creator God remains distant from procreation. I n Judaism and Ch ristianity, God is simultaneously creator and procreator, since Abraham and Joseph are symbolic fathers. This genealog ical positioning in the first writing of the father of monotheism explains, i n my opinion, that the God o f Islam is not a father. Curiously, comparative stud ies o f monotheism have never revealed this essential feature. The other major fact of the biblical story is that Abraham sends his son Ishmael and his mother back i nto the desert, exposing them to death , from which only d ivine i ntervention saves them . The figure of the father is thus marked with in Islam by the question of abandonment, which redoubles the temptation of the sacrifice of the son , even though the Qur'anic text stages a reconciliation
Umbr(a) 3 '1
between Ishmael and his father at the time of the reconstruction of the temple of Mecca. It appears to me that this situation has led the founder of Islam to renounce the idealization of the father in order to immed iately disengage the concept of a God who is being, the source of a separated and separating symbolic function , from the father and from the son. If the God of Islam reestablishes the paternal metaphor in the sense that it reintroduces the missing interpretation between the father and the son in place of the narcissistic violence of the former, it escapes the ontology of the father, not only because it is forbidden to call it "father, " but because it is impossible to properly name it. In fact, Allah is not a name l i ke Yahweh or Jesus. It is the contraction in the Arabic language of the indefinite article AI and lIah, which means god . Allah means "Thegod . " Th is is why Joseph Chelhod writes in his Les structures du sacra chez les Arabes: " If the Jews ended up giving to their God a name which is not a name (Yahwe, the one who is) , the Arabs have practically left their God without a name. "25 The negative theology that has constituted itself within Islam since the ninth century (with the founding of the Mu 'tazi/a movement) founds itself on this impossibility of naming God that is to say, on the fact that language does not have access to the essence of being and went so far as considering the Qur'anic text as a metaphoric tissue which is not the work of a direct revelation of God , as Islamic dogma stipulates, but of a divine inspiration written by human hands. Translated by Roland Vagso
Urnbr(a)
32
BENSLAMA
1.
Fethi Benslama, La psychanalyse a I'apreuve de I'islam (Paris: Aubier, 2002).
2.
Translated as "longing for the father" in Sig mund Freud , Totem and Taboo, in The Stan dard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (hereafter S. E.), ed . and trans. James Strachey et al. (London : Hogarth Press, 1 953- 1 974), 1 3: 1 48.
1 3. Translation modified .
3.
Freud , Moses and Monotheism, S. E. 23:92 . See also, a d iscussion of Freud's formu lation in Benslama, La Psychana/yse, 1 1 5- 1 20.
1 4. I bn Arabi, La sagesse des propMtes, trans. Ti tus Burckhardt (Paris: Albin M ichel , 1 955), 6773 .
4.
Freud , Leonardo Da Vinci and A Memory of His Childhood, S. E. 1 1 : 1 22 . Subsequent referenc es will appear parenthetically within the text.
1 5 . I b i d . , 67.
5.
For example, in the translation by Denise Mas son , Coran (Paris: Gal limard , 1 967).
6.
Fethi Benslama, " Le sexe absolu," Cahiers In tersignes 2 (1 99 1 ), 1 05-1 24.
7.
AI-Qortubi, AI-jama ' fi 'ahkam al-qur'an, Vol . 1 6 (Cairo: Editions AI-Kutub AI-masryya, 1 954) , 254.
8.
Ibn Ayyas AI- Hanan, Bada 'i' az-zuhOr fi wqa 'i' ad-duhOr (Tun is: Editions du Manar, no date), 38-3 9 .
9.
Avicenna, De anima (Oxford : Oxford U niversity Press, 1 959) .
1 0. Parmen ide, L e Poeme: Fragments, Trans. M . Conche (Paris: PUF, 1 996) , 1 27. 1 1 . G.w. F. Hegel , La raison dans I'histoire, trans. Kostas Papaioannu (Paris: 1 0/1 8 , 1 965), 293. [A rendering of the French translation of Hegel's text has been provided here in or der to preserve the author's original meaning. The corresponding passage may be found in
Eng lish in Georg W. F. Hegel , The Philosophy of History, trans. J . Sibree (Amherst, NY: Pro metheus Books, 1 991 ), 355-360 - Ed.] 1 2 . Christian Jambet, The Act of Being: The Phi losophy of Revelation in Mulla Sadra , trans. Jeff Fort (New York: Zone Books, 2006) .
1 6. I b i d . , 87-88. 1 7. Jacques Lacan , The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Con cepts of Psychoanalysis, ed . Jacques-Alain M i l ler, trans . Alan Sheridan (New York: w.w. Norton & Co. , 1 998), 1 58- 1 59. 1 8 . I bn Arabi, La sagesse, 85 . 1 9 . Freud, Moses and Monotheism , 92 . 20. Benslama, La psychanalyse, 1 1 5-1 20.
21 . See especially paragraphs
456-457 i n G . w. F.
Hegel, Phenomenology o f Spirit, trans. A . V. M i l ler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1 977) , 273-274.
22. Ibn Arabi, La sagesse , 92. 23. I b i d . , 97. 24. Benslama, La psychanalyse, 1 39-1 47 . 25. Joseph Chelhod, Les structures du sacra chez les Arabes (Paris: M aisonneuve & Larose, 1 964), 7 .
Un:br(a)
33
0
c
aJ :=J
[[ Q « CD (j)
0 Z
(J) (J) --
2J
aJ
..
Q aJ
+-
(j) :=J
0
E
« z
« 0 I
� (J) D.-
LL
0
(J) [[
U5 >-
For five years I practiced psychoanalysis in Cairo: from the beginning of 1 954 to the end of 1 958. My patients were teachers, students, psychologists, doctors, lawyers, journalists, and artists - i n short, people already imbued with the idea of science. They were mostly Muslim, but a large number of them were Copts (Egyptian Christians) . The whole of the cUltivated class from which these patients were recruited probably comprised less than 1 0 percent of the population . The rest lived mainly in the countryside, and I imagine they had their own therapeutic methods; they did not address themselves to psychoanalysis, any more than requests for an analysis come from B reton fishermen or shepherds of the southwest in France. Of course, the fact that the great majority of the population continues to l ive outside the contemporary world, if not seemingly outside time, calls for an explanation . I will return to this, but for the present, I wou ld l i ke to emphasize that the fact itself of requesting an analysis, be it in Cairo or in Paris, impl ies that the candidate admits the existence of a part of h imself that escapes his knowledge. He admits this to the point of imagin ing the existence of a subject - God, or eventually the "specialist" - who knows or can know about this part. But a feel ing of the real ity of the unconscious, in the sense of realizing an autonomous order of
w
Umbr(a) 35
truth - which is truth only by dint of hiding itself from knowledge - is gained only with the completion of , an analysis. In short, analysis beg ins with the admission of the unconscious (/ insu, the un known) and aims at attaining this realization (but one might just as wel l speak of a point of escape) , which Lacan pinpointed in his formula of the fal l of the subject supposed to know. This axiom of analysis goes beyond religious differences. Moreover, I see no difference between my patients from Cairo or Alexandria and those from Paris or Strasbourg, with respect to the problem of meaning in the unconscious, or of defense mechanisms against unconscious desires, or with respect to the eminently fantasmatic character of these desires. The only particularity that I recall is the prevalence of the mechanism of identification with an idealized person in patients with an obsessional structure (as many Copts as Muslims) as a defense against the threat of castration . During these five years of work in Nasser's Egypt I was able to measure, i n all its depth , Freud 's claim that the threat of castration is the bedrock on which analysis is broken or can be broken , insofar as the subject prefers his phallo-narcissism to his desire. Indeed, we are dealing here with a mechanism we can describe as a "voluntary servitude. " This subjection , on which the absolute power of the monarch rests and which La Boatie interrogated as insoluble enigma, appears on the contrary to the analyst as a position that I would call natural with respect to the libidinal economy. What calls for a distinguishing historical explanation is rather the appearance of reg imes that constrain the power of the monarch and hold him responsible to those he governs. Now, we know that the ancient states that arose in the Middle East at the dawn of history were despotic, theocratic states that drew their legitimacy from religion . Even though it had no basis in the Qur'an or in the sayings of the Prophet, the Islamic state (I will return to this later) was, indeed , constructed on that model, more than on the model of the Sassan ide or Byzantine. It is therefore not surprising that, despite the zeal and creativity with wh ich they translated and assimilated the phi losophical heritage of the Greeks, the Arabs overly-satisfied , no doubt, with their regimes since they were on the ascendant - did not think to translate Aristotle's writings on politics or Justinian 's Institutiones. Their political writings, despite their abundance, exhibit a depressing poverty: the Arabs limited themselves to describing, to their heart's content, the qualities and virtues with which the cal iph must arm h imself in order to govern his subjects well and gain their voluntary obedience. This had to do with a political culture marked by the kind of idealizing madness, from which the ego draws a narcissistic gain, that Freud described in his Group Psychology. Of course, with its Ubuesque tang, absolute power has its comic side, which lends itself to satire, but things remain at the level of witty words. We know that, through its relations with the unconscious, the mot d'esprit makes you laugh, but between laughter and action falls the sword of the despot. Another striking phenomenon in my Cairo patients, especial ly the Muslim ones, was the frequency with which they suffered from a "hopeless love." Here, it was also a matter of the effect of a culture that was not political but erotic, and that goes way back. I refer to the trad ition of so-called virginal love that certain authors consider to be one of the sources from which courtly love orig inates, and that constituted one of the major themes of pre-Islamic Arab poetry. The most famous example of it is "madjnoon Lai/a" ("Crazy for Laila") explicitly evoked by Aragon in his Le Fou d'Elsa (Crazy for Elsa) . In this poetry, it is a question of singing - of enjoying the privation of a love forbidden by social impossi bilities. These impossibilities were linked to intertribal marriage laws. Doubtless the forms of social life in Egypt were entirely different then , but the laws in Egypt from a half century ago regard ing the separation of the sexes were sti ll strong
Umbr(a) 36
SAf=-OUAI\
enough to create apparently insurmountable differences (even without the add itional problem of class and the prerogative famil ies accorded themselves in the choice of their future sons-in-law), of which the subject did not fail to make use. His desire finds itself thus reduced to its simplest expression - an appeal for the impossible - while his narcissism finds itself exalted by dint of the affirmation , desirer that he is, of h is worthiness as desirable. Th is stems only from h is identification with the phal lic image. Thus, once again, we are dealing with a cultural cond ition that particularly favors what Lacan calls "the trumpery [fraudulence] of transference" but which is no less rooted in the passion for being that appears to be most widely shared among humans. I n reviewing my male and female patients who were situated on the hysterical slope of neurosis, I cannot help recalling what Freud says in a letter to Fliess on the subject of the " pre-historic Other, that none arrives to equal" and to whose account the hysteriC chalks up everything that happens to her. I would say that it is starting from a partial identification with th is Other, that is, one that does not exhaust the possibility of objectal investment, that the hysteric happily places herself in the position of the belle ame (beautiful soul), denouncing the cowardice or weakness of men , not to mention their hypocrisy. ' We have never found a family structure solid enough to resist the power of a hysteric to transform family life i nto a hel l. A col league working i n Cairo, Dr. Hussein Abdelkader, explained to me that today one observes a greater frequency of perversions in hysterical women . I thi n k that it is a matter here of a contamination by men . I ndeed, it is the stronger sex that is, as Lacan remarked , the weaker sex with respect to perversion. Presently in Egypt, barriers between the sexes have become practically non-existent. Mixed classrooms exist; women work in all the domains once restricted to men: administration, banks, media, and so on. Even d ifferences of class have been reduced to the difference in income. To this is added the fact that, according to a certain fatwa (a decree coming down from a rel ig ious authority, in this case certain faquins or jurists who without question fashioned it to satisfy the caprices of cal iphs), a form of marriage called a "marriage of jou issance" exists. In such a marriage, a man and a woman each need only declare their choice of the other before a witness in order for the marriage to be a done deal and sexual relations to be permitted (ha/a� - even if it means that they may divorce with the same ease. One can imagine the vogue that this formula has had in a country where the cost of living, the modesty of income levels, and the crisis in housing have rendered the project of marriage practically unreal izable for the vast majority of young people. Barriers between the sexes having thus been largely d ismantled, a woman need only project the image of the unequal Other onto her partner - by means of a mechan ism comparable to that of hypnosiS - to place herself in the service of his perverse importunities.2 One will argue that it is unlikely for Islam not to have had consequences for the i nflection of neurosis, if only because this relig ion interferes in the determination of family structures by preaching polygamy. I would reply to this remark by asking the reader to take into account the difference between the laws of religion and those of custom that, alone in the long run , have the power to prevail over divine commandments. It is true that, without dictating it, Islam authorizes polygamy. That does not stop a M uslim girl , belonging to the middle class (not to mention the upper class) , from being unable to accept g iving her hand to an already married man. It is thus not surprising that I treated analysands (male and female) who came from monogamous families.
Urnbr(a) 37
The question remains: how is it that the g reat majority has remained outside the contemporary expansion of scientific cu lture? Is it not the case that Islam played a decisive role here? I will respond that it played absolutely no role. The fact is that Islam did not prevent, but on the contrary, provoked the miracle that one language, Arabic - which was, after all, a language of the desert even if it was not without admirable poetry - became in the space of a century a language rich enough to open itself to the scientific and philosoph ical heritage of the Greeks. It did not block the split i n Muslim thinkers between (ashab-al-rasy) conservatives and (ashab al-hadith) innovators, any more than it stymied the development of an authentically critical thinking, in the sense of a thought that takes its distance from the narcissistic complaisance so characteristic of human collectivities. Better yet, it not only tolerated but sharpened the appearance of a thought that can, without exaggeration, be described as revolutionary, especially in the areas of theological reflection and mystic contemplation. I n truth, we find treatises on the soul in Arabic works that evoke the Freudian division among the parts of the personality: id, ego, and superego. Closer to our time, Islam has not prevented the enduring success enjoyed by Freud's works - most notably his masterpiece, The Interpretation of Dreams, which I translated into Arabic d uring my stay in Egypt and which continues to be disseminated in Cairo, as in Beirut and other Arab capitals. The response to our question is instead located in the policies/pol itics of the ancient Middle Eastern states where writing is concerned. Let me explain. We know that the launching of city-states i n the Greek world led , in the fourth century B . C . E . , to a critique of the technology of writing, which stripped it of its sacred character. In return , the appearance at the dawn of history of the ancient states in the M iddle East was characterized by the deployment of writing for the aims of prestige, power, and exploitation that was responsible for the tendency to consider writing the site of truth, that is, to sacralize it.3 This practice consists of teaching the g rammar of the venerated, if not sacred , language in school, to the exclusion of the vulgate or everyday language, so that those young children g ifted enough to become writers are raised with a love of this language, the only one they know how to write. The result of this policy - which aims not only at preventing the objects of faith from becoming objects of thought, but still more at immuring the people in the unique belief from which absolute power draws its legitimacy - is that Arab writers have never played so minimal a role in the political h istory of their country. Nor can we find a single Arab writer whose name became constitutive for national identity, such as Pushkin was for the Russians, not to mention Goethe, Hugo, or Shakespeare. I n short, writers have become, l i ke the scribes of yesteryear, an elite without any contact with the people, who in turn find themselves isolated from the whole field of culture'and critical thought. One will tell you that, at any rate, thi n king is not a preoccupation of the people. An argument that, without implying the existence of professional thinkers, is perhaps just, but beside the point. It is true that the people, whatever the meaning of this word might be, do not read Darwin , Marx, or Freud . But at least they find themselves concerned with new beliefs, promoted by all sorts of popularizers not to mention the media: that man descends from the apes, that economics is everything, or stil l more, that sex is, and so on. Let us add here ideas, such as those of proletarian revolution and the constitutional separation of powers,
Umbr(a) 38
SAFOUAN
that become the compelling ideas on which the social edifice rests, without anyone's having to read Marx, Montesquieu, or Locke. Love is blind. Love of language is no less so. You will not fail to hear one of our scribes proclaim that vulgar language is made for the needs of daily life and not for literary creation - an argument that misrecognizes that creativity does not consist in reproducing the language of the street, but in exploiting the creative potential inherent in all human language. Topping it all off is the insistence that the language of the Our'an, Arabic, is in fact a sacred language, as if God had chosen His prophet because he spoke Arabic, and not Arabic because it happened to be the language of his prophet, and as if He had not previously spoken Hebrew with Abraham and Moses. Since ridicule does not kill, I will end my commentary with the argument that only (nawhl) grammatical Arabic unites the Arab world, while it is obvious that the Arab countries have simply become the theater where international confl icts are played out. The present situation nonetheless turns tragiC when our scri bes ward off, with as much energy as their despots, this simple invitation: that everyday Arabic and the few masterpieces it has inspired be taught in school not in the place of Our'anic Arabic, but alongside it. Everyone operates as if they knew that the adoption of a humanistic linguistic pri nciple, which had incalculable effects i n the history of SCience, religion, and pol itics in Europe, wou l d mean the end of a world with which they are, w i l l i n g ly or not, in solidarity. The unconscious, it, does not speak the language people learn in school, but, as Dante said , the one they learn at their mother's breast and from their nurses. It is therefore not surprising that analysts confirm as a group that they are in favor of this principle. After all, is it not in the nature of the analytiC process to cause the downfall of the basis of a fraternity that goes beyond the miseries of difference?4 Translated by Juliet Flower MacCannell
1.
See Freud 's case history of "Dora," Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychologi cal Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey et al. (London: Hogarth Press, 1 953-1 974), 7:3-1 22.
2.
This analytic interpretation is inspired by a woman who belonged to a wealthy fami ly of important import/export merchants, and who came to consult me in Paris. In her relationship with her lover, she had fal len i nto a masochistic position that correlated exactly to the latter's sadism.
3.
For more details o n this matter, see Mousta pha Safouan , Why are the Arabs Not Free?: The Politics of Writing (Cambridge, MA: Wiley Blackwel l, 2007) . The augmented French translation appears under the title, Pourquoi Ie monde arabe n 'est pas libre: Politique de I'ecriture et terrorisme religieux (Paris: Ed itions Denoel , 2008).
4.
See the final chapter of Moustapha Safouan , Speech o r Death?: Language a s a Social Or der: A Psychoanalytic Study, trans. Martin Thom (New York: Palgrave, 2003).
Umbr(a)
40
•
-
.
•
. e
Umbr(a) 4 1
2 2- CJ
::; � Cf) <:C
- IT
-w
Cf) m Cf) �
2:J LL
D C\J (J) (J)
cD
E
-
C\J .L Q il (J)
0
- -,
�O
CJ) W CL I � 06
One of the difficulties i n analyzing what Islam has come to mean and to refer to since the nineteenth century is the absence of agreement on what Islam actually is. Does Islam name a religion , a geographical site, a communal identity; is it a concept, a technical term, a sign, or a taxonomy? The lack of clarity on whether it could be all these things at the same time is compounded by the fact that Islam has acquired referents and significations it did not formerly possess. European Orientalists and M uslim and Arab thinkers have begun to use " Islam" in n umerous ways while seemingly convinced that it possesses an immediate intelligibility that requires no specification or defin ition. " Islam," for these thinkers, is not only the name the Qur'an attri butes to the din (often (mis)translated as "religion , " though there is some disagreement about this) that entails a faith [iman] in God d isseminated by the Prophet M uhammad , but can also refer to the h istory of Muslim states and empires, the different bodies of philosophical, theolog ical, jurisprudential, medical, literary, and scientific works, as well as to culinary, sexual, social, economic, religious, ritualistic, scholarly, agricultural, and urban practices engaged in by M uslims from the seventh to the nineteenth century and beyond, as well as much, much more. What kinds of modernist projects, intellectual endeavors and critiques, types of politics, forms of political life, spirituality, and economic and cultural practices do the new meanings and referents of Islam enable and what kinds do they disable?
Umbr(a)
43
Some of the new meanings and referents of Islam had a significant impact on political and social thought as well as on national and i nternational politics in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and may have even more of an impact in the twenty-first. The implication of these meanings for politics and society results from their transformation of Islam into a "culture" and a "civilization" or a "cultural tradition , '" a "system, "2 a "manhaj" (way of l ife, method) ,3 a "programme, "4 an ethics, a code of public conduct, a gendered sartorial code, a set of banking principles, a type of governance. Moreover, " Islam" has also come to be deployed as a metonym: fiqh (problematically rendered "jurisprudence") and kalam ("theology, " again , problematically) - which were traditionally sciences established b y M uslim thinkers - o r Shari'ah ("sacred law" , also problematical ly) - a term loaded with different connotations and trajectories, often referring to a body of opinions and interpretations - come to be conceived as constituent parts of " Islam," for which it can metonymically substitute.5 While the easiest transformation to identify is the one that makes Islam over into a "culture" and a "civilization," g iven the centrality of this meaning among Orientalist thinkers and their Muslim and Arab counterparts since the nineteenth century, the production of Islam's many other new meanings and referents may not be as clear. Yet a history of the multiplication of the meanings of Islam is necessary for understanding what Islam has become i n today's world, both in those parts of the world where peoples as well as political and social forces claim to u phold one kind of Islam or another, and in those parts of the world where peoples as wel l as political and social forces see " Islam" as "other," whether or not they "oppose" it. I ndeed, the current ongoing war is itself not only part of the productive process of endowing Islam with new meanings and referents, but also part of the related process of controlling the slippage of the term toward specific and particu lar meanings and referents and away from others. In this way, "Islam" is being opposed to certain antonyms ("the West," "liberalism," "individualism, " "democracy," or "freedom") and decidedly not to others ("oppression ," "dictatorship," or "injustice"). Two central religious and intellectual strands emerged in the nineteenth century among Arab, Muslim, and European Orientalist thinkers who argued for the compatibility or i ncompatibility of " Islam" with Western modernity and progress. The word - or, more precisely, the name - " Islam" itself began to conjure up immediate comprehension and significance in ways assumed to have always been the case. This project of rethinking (about) " Islam" in new ways, while often passing itself off as a return to old or original ways of thinking, was situated in the political context of the rise of European imperial thought and territorial expansion as well as in the corresponding decline of Ottoman political and imperial power. Yet the " Islam" to which these European and non-European thinkers referred was a more expansive concept, encompassing phenomena that had h itherto been seen as extraneous to it. I ndeed , " Islam" had never been the catch-all term the nineteenth century would make of it, but was, rather, something more specific, more particular. Another of the more interesting aspects of post-nineteenth century uses of the term " Islam" is not just its accretion of referents, nor that the accreted meanings were deployed by different thinkers or different intellectual or political trends, but that they were employed differently by each thinker and each trend. European Orientalists, Arab secularists (Muslim and Christian), pious (and later Islamist) thi n kers, post-colonial states defining themselves as " M uslim" or "Islamic," and their "Western" and "secular"
Umbr(a)
44
MASSAD
opponents - all seem to use the term " Islam" in a variety of ways to refer to a whole range of things. The productive multiplication of referents that Islam would begin to acquire would u ltimately destabilize whatever meaning it had had before or even after this transformation, in that in modern writing about Islam it is not always clear which referent it has i n a g iven text. Rather, it often seems that all of them are in play interchangeably in the same text, as wel l as across texts, thus rendering " Islam" a catachresis that always stands in for the wrong referent. Psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic thi n kers working more recently on the object called " Islam" have been active participants in this process of multiplying significations, referents, and antonyms with l ittle self-questioning or analysis of what they are doing. Historically, psychoanalysis did not take " Islam" as an object of study, as a concern , or as a problem. Except for Freud's passing comments in Moses and Monotheism about "the founding of the Mohammedan religion" seeming to be "an abbreviated repetition of the Jewish one, of which it emerged as an imitation," little was written on the topic.6 Indeed , psychoanalytic studies on religion have been remarkable for the absence of any mention of Islam. This includes, for example, the early study by Erich Fromm on the topic, which makes no mention at all of Islam, while attending to Christianity, J udaism, "Buddhism, " and " Hinduism."? I n addition to Arab clinical psychoanalysts trained i n France and the United Kingdom, who began to practice and teach in Egyptian u niversities during the 1 930s and after and to translate works of Freud and other psychoanalysts, 8 Arab intellectuals showed an early interest in psychoanalytic knowledge, especially in studies of the unconscious.9 Yet those who employed a psychoanalytic method were not interested in applying it to the Our'an, or the biography of the Prophet, or " I slam" tout court,10 but used it rather for cultural analyses that took as their subjects secular historical figures such as the medieval poet Abu Nuwas , 1 1 or modern Arabic literature (especially novels),12 or the "group neurosis" said to affl ict contemporary Arab intellectuals working on the question of culture and modernity.13 The Moroccan i ntellectual Abdelkebir Khatibi once noted in this regard that "in short, one could say that Islam is an empty space in the theory of psychoanalysis."14 While psychoanalytic works, especially those of Freud , were translated into Arabic and engaged with seriously by Arab intellectuals from across the Arab world, those works of Freud's that dealt with religion and civilization (The Future of an lfIusion, Civilization and Its Discontents, and Moses and Monotheism) , as their Arabic translator Jurj Tarabishi states, were latecomers to the Arabic library on account of the very topics they discuss.15 Tarabishi , in his 1 974 introduction to the Arabic translation of The Future of an Illusion, does add that Freud's Western readers had also fai led to appreciate the importance of these works because of the topics they engaged. More recently, however, there have emerged a number of psychoanalytic attempts to evaluate critically not only Islam as religion, its scriptures, and theological tradition, but also contemporary Islamist movements, often conflated with/as " Islam." Arab psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic thinkers - including M oustapha Safouan (Egyptian), Fethi Benslama (Tunisian), Adnan Houbballah (Lebanese), Khatibi (Moroccan), and Tarabishi (Syrian), to name the most prominent, who are without exception male and living in France, and whose psychoanalytic writings (except for Tarabishi, who is the only one writing in Arabic and who writes on Arab intellectuals and Arabic l iterature)16 are mostly written in French and focus on " Islam" - started to write on the linkage between Islam and psychoanalysis in the context of the rise
Umbr(a)
45
of Islam isms, the phenomenon of which seems to have triggered their interventions . 1 7 Khatibi is the first to have broached the subject, initial ly in a text he wrote in 1 984 (and published i n 1 988) on the Prophetic Message.1 8 He later revisited his article and its conclusions from a more expl icitly psychoanalytic angle in a 1 987 lecture at a colloquium organized by h imself and Benslama on "The question of psychoanalysis in the area around raux abords de] Islam," held at the College international de philosophie in May 1 987 . Khatibi's paper, as wel l as the other colloquium papers, were publ ished in 1 99 1 in the first issue of the journal Cahiers /ntersignes, edited by Benslama. One of Khatibi's more i nteresting pOints has to do with the Prophet's "sacrifice" of his "signature" on the Qur'an as book to God. Th is sacrifice, Khati bi claims, is the condition of Mohammed 's becoming a prophet.19 Khatibi has nothing to say about contemporary Islamisms or Islamists in these texts.20 The approach of the other writers, however, as we will see, is characterized by a perception on their part that "Islamism" is a "return of the repressed , " of someth ing that should, according to these thin kers, have disappeared long ago. Benslama, for example, states explicitly: "This generation [of Arab and M uslim intellectuals], which opened its eyes at the end of colonialism and the beginning of the establishment of the nation-state, thought that it had fin ished with religion, that it would never again be a question in the organization of society [cite] ."2 1 Algerian anthropologist and psychoanalytic thinker Malek Chebel, who also lives in France and writes in French, states without equivocation that Islam ism, as "theological awakening," constitutes the "return of the repressed and what is repressed is always related to childhood and what Islam is experiencing at the moment is a return to the period of childhood . "22 Houbballah speaks of Islam's "waking up" to face possible dangers.23 What is not thought in these propositions, though, is the possibility that the return of the repressed is a feature of these thinkers' own anxiety and not only, or necessarily, that of other Muslims or Islamists. This "return" reopens the scene of the trauma, for these thinkers, of the persistence of Islam as not only "religion" in the l ife of Arabs and M uslims; and this causes some of our psychoanalytic thinkers "embarrassment" and "shame" before their European counterparts and, more importantly, before their Europeanized selves.24 Indeed , much of their writing on this question d isplays a deep narcissistic injury suffered by these writers, who as Arabs and Muslims, as Europeanized Arabs and M uslims who grew u p in modernizing times and sought Europeanization as the telos of modernity, now found themselves inhabiting an era in which the project of Europeanization had failed as a result of the "return" of Islam in the form of Islamisms. The most ambitious of these thinkers, in terms of dedication, serious attention to detail , depth of thinking, and passion, is Fethi Benslama. Given the importance of his analYSiS, I will address his work in more detail than that of the others in an attempt to examine the intellectual and psychic mechanisms at work in his thinking on this interesting but uninterrogated conj unction of a reified psychoanalysis and a reified Islam. Benslama's book, La psychanalyse a I'epreuve de I'Islam, published in 2002 , is perhaps the most serious engagement with one possible relationshi p that a certain psychoanalysis could have with a certain " Islam," namely, one in which this psychoanalysis is put (or puts itself) to the test of this " Islam," in which it stands before the test or crisis of Islam . Benslama proceeds as if he were writing a corollary to Freud 's Moses and Monotheism along the lines of Muhammad and Monotheism . This is, in fact, his second attempt to do so. His first book to deal with "Islam , " La nuit brisee [The Shattered Night], published in 1 988, was less explicitly presented as such a project. La psychana/yse a I'epreuve de I'is/am is a more profound
Umbr(a) 46
MASSAD
second attempt, a repetition, at an engagement with that very same project, and intensifies Benslama's dependence on Moses and Monotheism as the main psychoanalytic and Freudian scripture guiding his
project.
One of the more brilliant achievements of Benslama's book is his exploration of the role of Abraham and I shmael as the grandfather and father of the Arabs, coupled with his argument that the Qur'an , following the Torah, imposed th e figure of non-Arab Ishmael (whose mother is the Egyptian Hagar and whose father is the Hebrew Abraham) on Arab lineage a l ineage which was never resisted by post-Islam Arabs, even though neither Abraham nor Ishmael had any presence in their cosmological lore prior to the Qur' anic moment. (Here, Benslama seems to ignore the fact that in contrast to pagan Arab tribes, for Jewish Arab tribes, perhaps not considered Arabs by him, Ishmael and Abraham were indeed present.) Unlike Freud 's Moses, who is exposed contra the Jewish scriptural and theological tradition as an Egyptian outsider to his chosen people, Benslama's Ishmael , who is not the main prophet of the M uhammadan call , is not revealed to be non-Arab, since his non-Arab lineage is clear enough in the Qur'an and in Islamic theology. Rather, what Benslama aims to do is consider this non-Arabness in relation to the question of identity and maternalism in order to argue that Hagar is "repressed" in " Islam" and Islamic theology in favor of Sarah without much deviation from the Judaic story. To some extent, Benslama's discussion corresponds to Edward Said's important reading of Freud's Moses as an anti-nationalist call that rejects essentialism and group homogeneity as necessary founding myths. " I n other words," Said concludes his d iscussion of Freud's Moses, "identity cannot be thought or worked through itself alone; it cannot constitute or even imagine itself without that radical originary break or flaw which will not be repressed , because Moses was Egyptian, and therefore always outside the identity inside which so many have stood and suffered and later, perhaps, even triumphed. "25 But Benslama, in contrast, wants to read the repression of Hagar as informing "Islam's" views of women and the figure of the mother more generally: "Islam was born from the stranger at the origins of monotheism, and this stranger remained a stranger in Islam" (1 7 1 ). Benslama does not limit himself to a d iscussion of paternity and maternity, the question of origins in the Our'an, and subsequent theological exegesis, but brings h is conclusions to bear on the contemporary situation. It is clear throughout the text that the entire archeological project Benslama is engaged in is an attem pt to respond to the claims put forth by many contemporary Islam isms and their enemies about " Islam" and Islamic origins. It is in the context of discussing contemporary Islamisms, however, that Benslama's book shows less engagement with psychoanalytic thought and concepts and moves to l iberal critiques concerned with the individual , freedom of thought, tolerance, and the separation of the theological and the political from each other. Definitional/y, Benslama is aware that " Islam" is m u ltiple and that it is always already " I slams, " yet at key moments in his narrative these m u ltiple " Islams" converge into one which is conflated with a singular "Islam ism, " as both an utterable name and one that should only be used under erasure [sous rature]. My concern is the ideolog ical context of these slippages, conscious and unconscious, and the political philosophy and psychic processes that inform them. While he does not define Islam in his book,
Umbr(a)
47
Benslama provides two meanings in a later article on the subject, in which he claims that the word Islam "has been fixed by a theological connotation i nto 'an abandonment to God' [un abandon a Dieu] ," and that its etymology designates this act as "having been saved after abandoning itself."26 The latter, in fact, may be one possible connotation of the word , though not necessarily its immediate one, since the most common meaning of Islam in Arabic is "deliverance [of one's self] to God , " and not "abandonment," or the more common Orientalist translation as "submission to God , " which Benslama problematically cites as the "theological" mean ing of the word in " Islam , " even while mentioning its other meaning(s) of " being saved ," but curiously not its meaning of "deliverance. "27 While he claims that it is only Islamists who want to render the meaning of Islam as "submission, " he participates, if ambivalently, in the same project with his endorsement of the Orientalist meaning of Islam as submission when he insists that "the Islam ism of groups and institutions today is [ . . ] submission [soumission] to the relig ion of submission. "28 The word for submission in Arabic, however, is khudu ', a word that has no etymological or other connection to the word Islam. .
Benslama is certainly not alone in his problematic translations. The question of translation and language is essential for psychoanalytic thinkers in general. The major thesis of Safouan regarding what he constantly refers to as Arab " backwardness" is that it is a problem of language. Like Benslama, but with less erudition, Safouan often seems to confound Arabic and Latin etymologies in ways that exoticize modern Arabic, as he does, for example, in his d iscussion of the difference between the Latin-based word "sovereignty" and its Arabic equivalent siyada .29 Safouan objects that the Arabic word, siyada, "unlike sovereignty, " means mastership, "whereas its true meaning, at least according to Carl Schmitt's definition, is the ' right to take decisions in the last resort. ' The translation leaves us only with the primitive, dual relation of master and slave, whereas what is at stake is a political conception of decision. " 30 Safouan , however, seems not to know the Latin meaning of the term sovereignty, which comes from "over above, " in Latin "super anus," nor that the traditional English use of the term, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is "sovereign lord , " and "one who has supremacy or rank above, or authority over, others; a superior; a ruler, governor, lord , or master (of persons, etc.)" and that "sovereignty" means "supremacy or pre-eminence in respect of excellence or efficacy." It remains u nclear whether Safouan would consider the original Latin meaning of sovereignty, and the later English one, as "primitive" or if only its Arabic rendering is SO.31 The answer Safouan discovers in addressing his own question, "Why are the Arabs not free?" is found in what he considers to be the division between literary and vernacu lar (spoken) Arabic: the former is a "sacred" language and slated for the use of elites, while the latter is the language of the masses. Safouan reifies the two uses of Arabic as completely separate and even splits them into two languages , showing utter unfami liarity with their actual imbrication i n o n e another. He is under t h e impression that l iterary Arabic today is the same Arabic of the Qur'an when in fact it is as different from the latter as are the contemporary vernaculars. While contemporary educated Arabic speakers have the ability to read texts from the seventh to the eighteenth century with varying degrees of difficulty Oust as contemporary educated English speakers are able to read Marlowe, Chaucer, and Shakespeare with varying degrees of d ifficulty), it would be next to impossible for seventh century Arabic readers to read contemporary l iterary Arabic (since the script itself has changed). much less comprehend it, given the changes in syntax,
Umbr(a)
48
MASSAD
structure, and vocabulary. This reification of modern l iterary Arabic as fossilized in the language of the Qur'an is not unique to Safouan, but is a common Orientalist claim that has no substantiation i n fact. I ndeed, neither contemporary l iterary nor spoken Arabic could exist i ndependently of one another; so integrated are they in their very syntax, structure, and vocabulary that any attempt to disentangle them would require a project of social engineering of the sort that Safouan attributes to the Pharaohs, whom he claims first instituted the division between the l iterary and the spoken in order to rule the masses unhindered . Yet it is he who calls for such a project, namely that the state institutionalize the split he thi n ks already exists between l iterary and vernacular Arabic and that it teach the vernacular in its schools as a precond ition for democracy.32 This view of l iterary Arabic, which also equates it with Latin, harkens back to Orientalist assessments and to debates among Arab intellectuals in the colonial times of the 1 9305 and 1 9405.33 Safouan , however, presents it not only as a sane rational fact, but also as one that, if denied by any Arab, would expose an anti-democratic position : " It is often thought and said that Arabic is one language, but i n fact the distance between classical Arabic and the Arabic of Egypt, the Gulf States and North Africa is analogous to the relation between Latin and the Romance languages Italian , Spanish, and French . The failure, or rather the refusal , to acknowledge these differences is the refusal to allow the uneducated a ful l say in their future. "34 Since cultures achieve modernization through language, Safouan wonders: "Who could imagine the destiny of Europe if Latin had remained the language of l iterature, science, philosophy, and theology?"35 But one need not spend much time imagining, since Safouan offers the Arab world as the answer. Benslama, like Safouan, locates the "crisis" in Islam in language: "it does not have to do only with a lack of modernity, as is often said, but rather with a modernity that has ignored its subject, one that had to do with a progressivist ideology, in which had to be included the i mperative of economic and technical development without taking into account the work of culture . . . or, if you will, a modernization without the l inguistic foundations that constitute the work of civilization, " something both Christianity and Judaism, in contrast, had obviously done.36 It is clear that the two meanings of Islam Benslama posits are not the only ones he employs in La psychana/yse a /'epreuve de I'is/am. While Benslama explains at the outset that the many "Islams" he posits are diverse, various, and sometimes unconnected , even though they may all hide "behind" the singular name " I slam" (23), he soon abandons this multiplicity in favor of a Singular Islam whose signifieds and referents remain multiple but unspecified even as they are presented consciously and ideologically as singular. It is rarely made clear, for example, when he uses the term Is/am, whether he is referring to all Islamist movements and individuals or j ust some of them; whether Is/am refers to the history of Islamic theology from the seventh century to the present, or to the h istory or present of states that call themselves Islamist, or even those that call themselves " M uslim"; whether it refers to the Qur'an, the Hadith, the Sunnah, or all com bined , and so on and so forth. While Benslama sees the attempt to homogenize I slams into Islam as not only an Islamist project but also as a "superficial" European attempt to deal with the rise of many "Islam ist" movements in different geographic and social contexts, their reduction by a European political sociology to one Islam, Benslama declares, is nothing short of " resistance to the intelligibility of Islam" on the part of Islamologists, a resistance that, he maintains, also applies to European psychoanalysts (24). It is remarkable that Benslama would insist u pon such "intelligibility" even as he
Umbria)
49
insists upon the proliferations and i ncommensurables of " Islam 's" invocations; that he would call u pon this intelligibility under the heading of a "resistance" to it by others, thus situating intelligibility negatively, through its failure to reg ister, while making, it would appear, the intelligi ble uniquely available to h i m.37 Leaving this aside for now, Benslama's astute understanding of the multiplicity of Islams as signifiers - whose signifieds, however, remain obscure in Benslama's own text - falls by the wayside through his constant invoking of " Islam" in the singular as a subject with a self that expresses itself and whose meaning is readily intelligible. Benslama speaks of the "actuality of Islam" (26) that imposes itself on him, of "the tradition of Islam" (27) within which people grow up, and how he had "realized Ue m 'apercevais] simply that, in the majority of cases [he consulted] , Islam was always the effect and the cause of subjective and trans-individual structures" (27). I n these telling slippages (and there are many more), what is most i nteresting is that the perception of the singularity of Islam and its effect on M uslims belongs not to Benslama alone, but is shared by many (though not all) Islamist thinkers. I ndeed , Benslama identifies the reaction of many Islamists and Muslims to Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses as occurring within the singular world of Islam. He states that the "shock in the case of Islam came from where we did not expect it, from l iterary fiction that put on stage the truth of origins as a trick" (43). I n doing so, Benslama follows a l iberal secular tradition, which often seems to recogn ize the Islam of some Islamists as the one " Islam," even though he is well aware (and curiously adds a footnote to the Arabic translation of his book clarifying this point) that what is at stake in contemporary debates is the "meaning of Islam , " and what is unfolding is indeed "a war of the name," or a nominalist war.38 I n his book, however, and despite his noted vigilance, Benslama opts not only to analyze the terms of this war between the different protagonists, but, and herein lies the contradiction, also to join in as a party to the war. In this light, the battle over the Islamist notion of Islam (which Benslama and many secularists often oppose as the one Islam) is, as many Islamists correctly claim, between those who want to u phold " Islam" and those who want to uphold anti-"Islam . " I n fact, Benslama ambivalently posits this singular " Islam, " whose meaning, as we have seen , he often shares with many Islamists and Orientalists, as the other (or is it the Other?) of li beralism.39 He does not do so explicitly, but his invocation of freedom," "tolerance," and "individualism" as the values or key ingredients, absent from the one Islam but necessary to the Islam he wishes for, structures his polemic against Islamists. Moreover, his insistence that Islam be transformed from a din into the Christian and secular l iberal notion of "religion" ("La religion musulmane")40 as well as his attack on Islamists who, unlike him, regard " Islam not only as a religion" (25), commits him to a hegemonic form of liberal epistemology whose aim is the assimilation of the world in its own image 4 1 To make his point unequivocal , he titles his recent pamphlet Declaration d'insoumission, that is, "declaration of rebel l ion" or more precisely of "insubmission , " to "the religion of submission. "42 But if Islam for Benslama means submission, then his declaration is essentially and consciously a "declaration of u n Islam , " or, to be more precise, a "declaration of anti-Islam"! "
.
-
But there is an important ambivalence in Benslama's project. While this Islam seems, according to him, to be opposed to the individual freedoms of writers of the caliber of Rushdie, he also criticizes European Islamologists for not recognizing that another Islam (whose referents again remain multiple - the Qur'an , Islamic theology, Islamic "culture," and so on) upholds individualism. Benslama insists that " Islam rather deploys one of the extremely powerful dimensions of individuality, a d imension of great conceptual
Umbr(a) 50
MASSAD
abundance. This dimension could not have developed without being compatible with the reality of the culture. This is indeed a culture of i ndividuality, but one that is essentially governed by an identification with God" (302). Benslama is very critical of those Western psychoanalytical pronouncements on Islam and M uslim cultures that represent it as the obliterating of the individual, and which see the Western achievement that gave birth to the individual as the ultimate achievement of civilization tout court. He declares that those who insist that an alleged absence of ind ividualism in Islam prevents Muslims from being accessible to psychoanalysis are simply "ignorant," adding: "I will not cite anyone's name so as not to privilege those who are in the order of ignorance and carelessness" (302). Benslama's ambivalence here is not necessarily and only a conscious one, but more likely the effect of an ideological comm itment that imagines d ifferent audiences differently. The reference to multiple Islams might be said to be an ideological position (the position of political correctness?), and/or an expression of a wish , while the references to one singular Islam in the many slips seem to betray what Benslama actually fears to be the case. This could indicate his own unconscious resistance to the claim (his own claim) that there are many Islams, or h is conscious recognition that his claim is a mere wish and not an acknowledgement of observable reality, and that what he does notice or "realize," as he tells us, is that there actually exists only one Islam and therefore that this Islam must be opposed (hated?) for not pluralizing itself as it must and should. I n this regard, he announces at the outset of the book that the origins of his own interest in writing on Islam emerged in the early 1 980s (elsewhere, he would tell us that his interest started in the mid 1 980s}43 or "in a critical historical situation marked by a fanatical surge," as a decision to explore "the gap between a terminable Islam and an interminable one" (20) . While Benslama cautions us (and perhaps h imself) to use a new vocabulary and to adjust to a new epistemology wherein we (he) must "hear Islams when we say Islam," it would seem that he often remains deaf to his own warning (76). Perhaps, then, the singularity of actual Islam is itself the scene of the trauma that one cannot but revisit and whose claims one (or Benslama) is compelled to repeat at the very same moment and in the very same text where he insists that he, and we, must resist. La Psychana/yse repeats many of the same scenes (and discussions) in the biography of the Prophet M uhammad that Benslama had conjured up in La nuit brisee. It remains unclear if this act of repetition is merely a self-repetition that revisits his first (inaugural?) text (child?) on "Islam" or a revisiting of the Prophetic scenes themselves as the site of trauma that compels repetition. I ndeed, one of the main scenes of La nuit brisee, repeated i n Psychana/yse - the one in which Khadija, the Prophet's wife, reassures Muhammad that the angel Gabriel who had appeared to him was i ndeed an angel and not a demon - is a scene Benslama borrows, and therefore revisits, from the inaugural article by Khatibi, the very first psychoanalytic visit to that scene.44 La Psychana/yse surely is a repetition with a twist. It is a more comprehensive, more elaborated second attempt by Benslama at producing a psychoanalytic reading of "Islam." As Benslama's youngest child (and . as we know. books which carry the names of their authors are always reproductively connected to them, just as children carry the name of the father), La Psychana/yse seems more privileged and more celebrated by critics, just as the younger male child in the Torah is always more privileged - Abel, Isaac, Jacob, and others. It is unclear if an unconscious wish on the part of Benslama is at work here, one of preferrin g , once again as God and Abraham did, Isaac to Ishmael.
Umbr(a) 5 1
Before I indulge i n further speculations, let me cite Benslama's own statement of his task in his important book: "to translate the Islamic orig in in the language of Freudian deconstruction [ . . . J Translation is not application or annexation, but through a signifying displacement, conveys the very texture of a tradition in its language and its images, in order to g ive access to what is un knowingly thought, inside it [a son insu]" (31 9) . I am u npersuaded by this assertion, mostly because translation of "Islamic" texts into European languages often seems to mean retrieval of dictionary meanings of words and their etymology without much attention to the intellectual context and historicity of the uses and significations of words and how they change over time - the "links" that Mohammad Arkoun has juxtaposed as " Ianguage-history thought"45 - something all contemporary interpretative exercises of the texts of the past must attend to in order to avoid projecting contemporary meanings and values onto them. It is clear that Benslama is concerned that translation can be a form of annexation. But he wants to insist that translation in this case gives access to the unconscious of the tradition ("B son insu"). Wh ile this may be so, it does not do away with his initial concern. Translation in this case is not "annexation" but assimilation, in that Benslama's "Freudian deconstruction , " whether it uncovers an " Islam" that is individualist or anti-individualist, can only do so in relation to a modern l iberal European value that Benslama posits as universal , namely, "individualism." This assimilationist move is presented as useful for psychoanalysis and as useful psychoanalytically to the extent to which it secures "the intelligibility of the logic of repression, which subtends the foundation of a symbolic organization" (31 9). There is some tension in this assimilationist project, however. On occaSion, like the Orientalists, Benslama insists on not translating Arabic words, including the one for God, "Allah," into its French equivalent, "Dieu, " when translating an Islamist text from Arabic, but he seems invested in exoticizing it as the specific and exclusive proper name of the Muslim God, when in fact it is the name that Arab Christians had used for their God before M uhammad and stil l use after him (59). On another occasion, he insists on using the Arabic word "awra , " whose etymology he provides, without translating it into the French (and English) " pudendum" (which has similar etymological origins), which would render its equivalent meaning to h is French readers (1 97).46 Ultimately, however, Benslama wants to present his Islam as assimilable to the liberal notion of the individual , even if it is so with a d ifference. It is possible here that Benslama is engaged in deploying this Islamic individualism as a way of paSSing his Islam off as European, and that this passing off is indeed a form of resistance to Orientalist liberal accounts of Islam as lacking in individualism , while simu ltaneously condemnatory of Islamist resistance to this passing off, which he brands as pathological or as suffering from some form of "group delirium" [delire collectifj (49). I n another related but earlier text, he makes a policy recommendation for Arab pedagogy by cautioning that if Arabs were to fail to "introduce Kant's Critique of Pure Reason into their educational curricula, they would be committing a horrendous error. "47 Benslama is engaged in a project of simultaneously othering the Islam of the Islamists and identifying his own wished-for Islam with Europeanness. In this vein, he is partly mimicking Freud who, in Moses and Monotheism, insists on assimilating European Jews by declaring that they are not "Asiatics of a foreign race, as their enemies maintain , but composed for the most part of remnants of the Mediterranean peoples and heirs of the Mediterranean civilization."46 Said wondered about Freud's move: "Could it be, perhaps, that the shadow of anti-Semitism spreading so ominously over his world i n the last decade of h is life caused h i m protectively to huddle the J ews inside, so to speak, the sheltering realm of the
Umbr(a) 52
MASSJ\O
European?"49 Unlike Freud, Benslama, it seems, is caught between the Scylla of Orientalist hostil ity to all Islams and the Charybdis of his own hostility to the one (Islamist) Islam , which leads him to the (in)decision of identification and othering simu ltaneously. Herein l ies the importance of the d iscourse of scientism and rationalism - with which Benslama identifies modernity, the West, and psychoanalysis - to which he opposes Islam ism (in the singular, despite his own assertions that it is a plural phenomenon) and the one Islam (24-25). He consecrates a series of binaries to make this opposition clear: "This line does not only pass between those who are tolerant and those who are fanatical , between rationalists and believers, between the logic of science and the logic of faith, but also between the position that thinks it can find the truth of origi n in the texts of tradition - and this position thinks that this could be done through rational procedures armed with the valid d iscourse of the historical method - and the position that considers these same texts as a fiction or as a legend" (36). I n this regard , it is perplexing that Benslama discusses some Islamists' attempts to make the Qur'anic text correspond to scientific knowledge as a sort of neurosis or, more precisely, as " interpretative delirium" [delire interpretatifj, and not part of their rationalization of the Qur'an (70). He adds that "examining these [Islamist] documents leaves one with the impression of an immense interpretative delirium, ushered in from a destruction anxiety [angoisse de destruction] and constituting an attempt to repair from the outside that which has collapsed on the inside" (70). This is ironic, g iven Benslama's commitment to rationalism and the fact that he chose the non-ironically named "Association of Arab Rationalists," of which he is a member, to publish the Arabic translation of his book.50 Benslama's use of these taxonomies of rationalism and irrationalism , science and faith, knowledge and ignorance, is in fact shared by many Islamist thinkers. If the Islamist thinker, Sayyid Qutb, referred to his contemporary M uslims and non-Muslims as still living i n a n age of ignorance (echoing t h e Qur'an's description o f t h e pre-Revelation period), Benslama, aside from using post-Enlightenment descriptions of "darkness" and "obscurantism" to characterize Islamists, insists that M uslim men of religion live "in great ignorance. "51 The opposition of science to religion, and the correlate characterization of psychoanalysis as a "science" that is opposed by Islam as "religion , " is shared among many of Benslama's psychoanalytic colleagues, including Tarabishi , Safouan, and more recently, Houbballah. Safouan, for example, offers two theories to explain the nature of the relationshi p between " Islam" and science. On the one hand, he contends that "the Arabs" were open to learning from foreign science and building on it when they were in power, but upon losing power, they henceforth refused to learn from a science that came from colonial powers.52 On the other hand, he offers an analysis that does not fully cohere with the first, namely that it was the Turks who destroyed science in " Islamic civilization ."53 He also asserts that "Islam was the victim of the nations it invaded, because they themselves were the victims of political regimes and administrative apparatuses whose sole purpose was to ensure the state's domination over all the aspects of life. "54 Yet Safouan makes a sweeping and disconcerting generalization that i n the contemporary period, "the West has accomplished great things on account of this separation [between religion and science], while the Islamic world has produced nothing as a resu lt of their generalization of the idea that scientific d iscourse is the product of infidels and therefore should not be adopted ."55 The angry and contemptuous tone of this last quotation may be due to the fact that the text is in Arabic, which renders it a private address to Arab Islamist audiences, an auto-critique, to which most Europeans would not have access.
Umbr(a)
53
Safouan contends that, unlike the church in Christianity, the church in Islam is the State, specifical ly in the form of a dictatorial monarchy that eliminates the possibility of civil society. This produces in many Muslims and Islamists an "excessive normopathology" of conformity to practicing religious rituals.56 Safouan refuses essentialist arguments that privilege Christianity's alleged openness to science and democracy over Islam's. Yet, his materialist analysis leads to the same conclusion, namely, that whether Islam or the Arabs are essentially hostile to science or democracy, or have become thus on account of socioeconomic reasons and foreign invasions, they are today hostile to them , which accounts for their state of unfreedom. Houbballah, to take another example, is concerned with the relations among science, religion, and psychoanalysis (a theme around which he and other psychoanalysts convened the third international conference of Arab psychoanalysts i n Beirut in 2007), as well as with the "inhospitable" reception that psychoanalysis is said to have received in "Arab intellectual circles. "57 Houbballah is most interested in the lack of democracy in Arab countries, to which he credits this inhospitality to psychoanalysis, as the latter cannot be "imagined" to exist in a repressive country, for "psychoanalysis is the acting out of one's freedom of thought."5B Houbballah insists that democracy "has failed to conquer Arab thought. The concept of the individual is eclipsed before el raUya , the community, where the power of the shepherd, 'the caliph,' is i mposed by divine order, an order to which all the people cannot but be subjected [etre soumis]. "59 What is remarkable here is Houbballah's understanding that the concepts of the individual and democracy are European concepts, while ra 'iwah ("el raiiya") which means "subjects" in Arabic, as in "the king's subjects," becomes an Islamic concept! How ra 'iwah becomes essentialized as an Islamic concept that cannot be conquered by democracy and that must ecl i pse the individual is key to understanding Houbballah 's approach , which insists that "the subject of science has not made an entrance into Arab culture. "6o Houbballah, who uses " Islam" in all the same ways Benslama uses it, without specification, argues in his opening address to the third international conference of Arab psychoanalysts that " I slam in the Ottoman period remained removed from these scientific developments [that had unfolded in Europe] , and social revolutions (the French Revolution) on account o f geographic l i mitations. Now, however, a s the gates have loosened and opened wide, Islam no longer has a choice but to confront the scientific wave of postmodernity. In my opinion, the violence exploding everywhere constitutes a primitive phenomenon as a first defensive reaction which will have to be followed later by an intellectual wave that can absorb modernity and interact with it. "61 The question he poses is "Why did Islam experience modernity as a danger?"62 The answer he offers is that Arabs/Muslims (who are used interchangeably in the very title of his essay) have not been "subjected to two surgeries since the emergence of Islam, namely, the separation of religion from authority, for there did not occur a revolution like the French Revolution, and the separation of religion from science. "63 Here, the reification of psychoanalysis as a science and the elision of the i mportant debates within psychoanalysis about its own sCientificity, let alone Freud's own overdetermined and ambivalent relationship to science, are never acknowledged or referenced by any of these thinkers. Perhaps Benslama's (as well as Safouan's and Houbballah's) resistance to, or anxiety about, the possibility of many psychoanalyses
Umbr(a) 54
rather than one true psychoanalysis parallels h is anxiety about the one Islam and the many. Still, these thinkers differ among themselves in certain respects regarding the nature of the relationship between "Islam" and science. This opposition, which they consecrate, however, is not new b ut continues a tradition inaugurated by Orientalist Ernest Ranan's infamous debate with Jamal ai-Din ai-Afghani in the nineteenth century about this very question, wherein Islam and the Arabs were castigated as "hostile to science" - a debate which none of these thinkers cites or seems to be familiar with. 64 Benslama has a major concern with the liberal notion of tolerance, which he fi nds lacking in the one Islam propagated by the Islamists (all of them?), but which he seems to think is in abundance in European rationalism and secularism (all of it?). Here Benslama's commitment to liberalism is also a commitment to the Freudian equation of individualism with phylogenetic and ontogenetic maturity - to which Freud opposes group solidarity and organicism as primitive and regressive - and a commitment to Freud's consideration of tolerance as the highest achievement of liberal politics - which is essentially synonymous with the highest degree of civilization . Freud's accounts of these questions, as Wendy Brown has shown, can be read in two different directions, both as the way men overcome primitive asociality through forms of social life free from strife in a social contractarian manner (Civilization and Its Discontents and Totem and Taboo) , and as the overcoming of primitive solidarity and organicism in the achievement of civi lized individuality (Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego). In contrast, liberal notions insist that civilized individualist l iberal tolerance, as Brown put it, "is only available to l iberal subjects and liberal orders and constitute the supremacy of both over dangerous alternatives. They also establish organicist orders as a natural limit of l iberal tolerance, as intolerable in consequence of their own intolerance. "65 Thus, while Benslama chastises the one Islam and Islamists (always seen as deploying one singular mean ing and interpretation of the one Islam) for lacking any rationalism or tolerance (denying them any tolerance on the grounds of their own alleged intolerance), he extends tolerance to the individualist Islam he rescues from (all?) the Islamists and from the Orientalists as one that features this i mportant civilized value. I n this sense, his l iberal val ues d iffer little from the general understanding liberalism has of societies that insist on different forms of sociality and which it thus considers other. As Brown maintains, "[o]rganicist orders are not only radically other to l iberalism but betoken the 'enemy within' civilization and the enemy to civil ization. Most dangerous of all would be transnational formations imagined as organicist from a liberal perspective, which link the two - J udaism in the nineteenth century, communism in the twentieth , and today, of course, Islam."66 Here the historic links between liberal anti-Semitism and Orientalism and liberal anti-communism are shown to inhabit the very same politics of identity and othering. I should note, however, that Judaism, having emerged after World War Two within the l iberal Western dyad identified as "Judeo-Christian" civilization - replaCing the earlier pre-war formulation, which Freud referred to as "our-present day white Christian civilization"67 - now mostly escapes such descriptions, except for those Judaisms that resist their inclusion i n this l iberal order. Indeed, Benslama h imself is impl icitly so impressed with the Jewish achievement of Western l iberalism (that is, Jews having reached Western l iberal individual maturity), which he would have M uslims emulate, that he exaggerates the scientific achievement of Jews by endowing Christian thinkers with Jewish identities. In his rush to demonstrate his defense of the Europeanized and therefore liberal, mature, and Enlightened "Jews" against a fantasized pri mitive obscurantist Arab anti-Jewishness that would explain what he sees as an
Umbr(a) 55
"Arab" or "Muslim" rejection of psychoanalysis as the "Jewish science" (a European notion which in fact has l ittle resonance among Arab or M uslim thinkers), Benslama responds thus: " I feel some shame when I find myself having to draw attention to the fact that he who thinks l i ke this must also deny the theory of g ravity or the theory of relativity, which were both the resu lt of the work of Jewish scientists, Newton a n d Einstein. "6B It seems Benslama is not only unfamiliar with the fact that Newton was Christian (perhaps Newton 's first name " Isaac" led to Benslama's confusion?), but also with the latter's major exegetical contributions to Christian theology. H is exaggeration of Jewish achievements and Arab failures recalls his preference for Isaac over Ishmael noted earlier. In reading Benslama, one gets the general sense that psychoanalytic studies of Islamists (seen in their entirety as upholding the one illiberal Islam) replicate ego psychology's method of looking for neurotic mechanisms in the childhood of a person to explain his or her inability to accept authority and respond to the call of normativity. Islamist and M uslim resistance to Western secular and l iberal (read Christian) normativity is seen as psychic resistance to maturity and adult authority, as a rebellion against normativity. Like American imperialism, a l iberal civilizational psychoanalysis of the sort Benslama promotes seeks to bring recalcitrant and sick elements back into society and nurse them back to good health. Jacques Oerrida worried about what Freud once termed the "foreign policy" of psychoanalysis, and complained about the silence or equivocation of psychoanalysis, as institution, on the question of torture and violence in the "rest of the world," which he feared was a form of complicity. Oerrida maintained that: Psychoanalysis may serve as a condu it for these new forms of violence ["invisible abuses, ones more d ifficult to detect - whether in Europe or beyond its borders - and perhaps in some sense newer"]; alternatively, it may constitute an i rreplaceable means for deciphering them, and hence a prerequisite of their denunciation in specific terms a necessary precondition, then, of a struggle and a transformation. Inasmuch, indeed , as psychoanalysis does not analyze, does not denounce, does not struggle, does not transform (and does not transform itself for these purposes), surely it is in danger of becoming nothing more than a perverse and sophisticated appropriation of violence, or at best merely a new weapon in the symbolic arsenal.69 Psychoanalytic interventions, however, in the form of translation in the direct or indirect service of power might also be accomplices of abuse and violence. Benslama does not seem to share Oerrida's concern about certain forms of psychoanalysis and the way they approach an object they name " Islam . " He fortifies himself behind the liberal language of individualism, freedom, and h uman rights. But as Oerrida maintains, these are not psychoanalytic concepts: "Shelter is taken behind a language with no psychoanalytical nature . . . What is an ' i ndividual' ? What is a ' legitimate freedom' from a psychoanalytical poi n t of v iew?"70 Benslama's answer might very well be more "translation. " Two trends are juxtaposed i n Benslama's text, condemnation o f a static Islamic theology, which he sees as "fossilized by centuries of immobility" (43), and a break with Islamic origins (ushered i n by modern ity via colonialism) which brought about the one Islam i n reaction to this break. Based on his
Umbr(a) 56
MASSAD
research, Benslama diagnoses the situation today as follows: "What has happened in Islam in the last twenty-odd years emerges from this conjuncture; it proceeds from a break which cuts through its h istory and opens inside it another possibility of history" (31 7). The findings he arrives at while researching "the transformation of the figure of the father and of the paternal function" in a Tunis suburb in the mid 1 980s were sufficient for him to recognize that there was a "deeper" and "more longstanding" dis-ease [malaise] affl icting " Islamic civilization ," and not merely one suburb.71 It is unclear if this is the result of Benslama's or his Tunisian subjects' symbolic conflation of the father and the paternal function with Islam as one and the same. This is significant because Benslama argues, correctly, that unlike in Christianity, in " Islam" God has no paternal role at all to play; indeed , such a role is explicitly repudiated in the Qur'an. Benslama blames Arab and Muslim intellectuals and the political elite for the d is-ease from which Islam seems to suffer: "an elite that did not know how to translate the modern to the public, nor how to deploy the interpretative and political possibilities to moderate the public's excesses" (31 7-1 8). His conclusion that, in the Arab world, "modernity was nothing but a simulacrum of the modern" (31 8) betrays a belief that "modernity" in the West is a fact, rather than an interpretation. [again, seen as a single phenomenon] does not Even though Benslama insists that sum up Islam [but which Islam?]" (31 9),72 he maintains that analyzing the destructive effects of the break [cesure] should not serve an essential ist process, which would in turn ignore the contemporary historical and material forces that have led Islam to "be out of joint" (31 9). The work of culture, he continues, has difficulty thinking through this "deracination" of M uslims from their own history in their encounter with a simulacrum of modernity. It is "this transgression, without words, that has determined here the task of the psychoanalyst" (3 1 9). Yet at the end of the book, and after he presents the reasons why Islamism should be read under erasure, we are reminded that "one cannot exonerate Islam of this ideology, " of Islam ism (31 8)! This tension between the one Islam and the many informs Benslama's d iscussion throughout. There is, however, a resolution to this tension. Believing that the only way out of the one Islam is the way into liberal secularism, Benslama has more recently co-founded "The Association of the Manifesto of Freedoms" and is signatory to (author of?) its founding declaration.73 It is noteworthy that the vocabulary that i nforms the declaration , including the alleged "totalitarian" nature of Islamism, is borrowed wholesale from American cold-war anti-communism. The declaration affirms that its members who are "holders of the values of secularism and of sharing a common world [ . . . ] [are] linked by our own individual histories, and in d ifferent ways, to Islam" which the declaration defines "as a place where many of the dangers of a globalized world crystallize: identitarian fascism and a totalitarian hold, civil and colonial wars, despotisms and dictatorships, inequality and injustice, self hatred and hatred of others, amidst political, religious, and economic extremes. "74 Islamists (all of them?) are said to constitute "forces of destruction" that must be opposed through democracy and the institution of the political, which cannot be i mposed militarily but must "target the internal structures of Islam [but, which one?] and modify its relations to its geopolitical borders. "7s While a Singular Islam (which seems to be the only state in which " Islam" can exist at present, according to Benslama's reading) is being singled out in the declaration for this transformation, the signatories insist that they will fight and resist what they call "totalitarian Islamism."76 This cold-war language is sometimes ironically compounded with Christian anti-Judaism, wherein the "loving" and "forgiving" God of Christianity has always been compared to the "angry" and "vengeful" God of J udaism.
Umbr(a) 57
Benslama (unconsciously?) adopts the same description. What Islamists offer to the "subjected" Muslims of today, he tells us, is noth ing short of "a vengeful and rewarding God [un Dieu vengeur et remunerateur] . "77 The latter term "remunerateur, " mainly a business term , implies further that Islam's God is "profitable" in a financial sense, suggesting more connections to anti-Semitic notions of Jews and money. Ironical ly, not all isiamists oppose psychoanalysis, and some of them are in fact open to iUs Unlike Benslama's full scale rejection of Islam as Islamism (both seen as singular, as signifiers and signifieds), Ahmad al-Sayyid 'Ali Ramadan , an Egyptian professor of psychology teaching in Saudi Arabia, is not only tolerant of Freudian psychoanalysis but offers an Islamist assessment of the "positive" and "negative" aspects of it from an " Islamic" perspective. After reviewing and commenting on the oeuvre of Freud and the psychoanalytic method , as well as the history of Western critiques of psychoanalysis and the h istory of its practice in Egypt, Ramadan concludes with a list of the "positive" contributions of psychoanalysis, including Freud's concept of the "unconscious," the method of "free association ," "releasing the patient's anxieties, " "giving confidence [to the patient] , " "bringing unconscious struggles to the surface of consciousness," "reducing the resistance" of the patient, the d iscovery of the Oedi pus complex, and more.79 Ramadan takes psychoanalysis so seriously that he compares it to the Our'anic notions of the psyche and shows where they converge and diverge.so My point here is not only to cite the openness of Ramadan to Freudian psychoanalysis, but also to show that Benslama seems not only intolerant of the "intolerance" of Islamism(s), but also of its tolerance. Benslama, then, l i ke some of the Islamists he decries, but certainly not like others who do not exist in his epistemological framework, wants to fix the many Islams he identifies in one form. For him the only tolerable Islam is a liberal form of Islam that upholds all the liberal values of European maturity and is intolerant of the Islam of the Islamists whose values are said to oppose liberal values even when they do not. This seems to be the Islam that is " intelligible" to him but not to others. He also wants to fix the meaning of Islamism as one that upholds the illiberal Islam, which he cannot tolerate. In Benslama's work, psychoanalysis becomes a hand maiden of European liberalism and demonstrates neither i nternal ambivalence nor ambivalence toward its projected other. On the contrary, the certainty with which "Islam" is christened the other of liberal ism and the West aligns it with the figure of the primitive and the pre-oedi pal child in the cosmology of Freudian psychoanalysis. Benslama is not alone in effecting this transformation but is rather part of a large group of European and Arab thinkers who are insistent on these representations. While he has brilliantly analyzed the figures of Abraham and Ishmael in the Our'an and, along with Hagar, in the Islamic theological tradition (neither Hagar nor Sarah are in fact mentioned in the Our'an at all), when he deals with contemporary Islamists his psychoanalytic insights are transformed into i nvocations of liberalism. Showing an ongoing concern with the horrors that are comm itted " i n the name of Islam , " Benslama
is much less worried about the greater horrors that are committed in the name of anti-lslam.s1 In fact, as I have shown earlier, he is an ambivalent participant in the d iscourse of anti-Islam as his consciously chosen title Declaration d'insoumission clearly illustrates. But the problem of the name could be more complicated than I h ave h itherto allowed . I n the context of writing on the Prophetic Message, Khatibi investigates the reasons for his decision to write on it, and cites his brother's name, Muhammad, his father's name, Ahmad
Umbr(a)
58
MASSAD
(one of the names by which the Prophet is also known), and his own name, Abdelkebir (as he was born on the day of a/- 'Id a/-Kabir, the major M uslim feast of Abraham's sacrifice of his son), as reasons that might have led him to write on these themes.82 I n contrast, Benslama, instead of reading h is own name into h is desire to work on psychoanalysis and Islam, shifts the blame onto "Islam." He tells us that "it is because Islam began to concern itself with us that I decided to be concerned with it" (1 7). Reading h is name into this equation , wh ich Benslama h imself does not do (though he is remarkably playful in his books when dealing with words, names, their Arabic etymologies and three-letter roots, and their relationshi p to the unconscious), produces an interesting psychoanalytic i nterpretation of his d iscoveries. Benslama - or "bin Salamah" as his name is written in Arabic, as two separate words, meaning "son of Salamah" (not unlike the formulations of English last names, such as Johnson, which means "son of John," or more relevantly "Christianson" and "Christopherson") - shares his patronym with Islam, since both are based on the three-letter radical s-I-m . Salamah means peacefulness and safety, which Benslama recognizes as two of the meanings of Islam.83 In this sense, one might consider that Benslama speaks also in the name of Salamah , his patronym , the name of the symbolic father who imposes the law and who says no (Lacan 's "Ie nom/non du pare"), which is also the name of Islam, but he speaks in its/his name to produce a declaration against it/him, against his own name and his own "father, " Salamah-Islam. His entire project is in fact to fight this Islam ("pour combattre partout"),84 the one Islam, the Islamist Islam, indeed, to kill it and replace it with a kinder, gentler father who does not lay down the law, namely, a liberal Islam, which Benslama spends considerable time wishing into existence. This contingent reading of Benslama's name and his relationsh ip to " Islam" would address the Oedipal rebellion (insoumission) that he stages against Islam as the symbolic father who regulates desire and this mig ht be read in relation to Benslama's ongoing and impressive attempts to rescue Hagar, the (grand)mother of the Arabs, from " Islam 's" marginalization of her. Benslama's political and geographical location in France, like others of h is cohort, seems to account consciously for his liberal commitments; it certainly explains his sense of "shame" for belonging to a group of M uslims with a questionable relationship to psychoanalysis, and h is ambivalent rejection of his own patronym and , more generally, his pate rnal lineage, in favor of a European (French) l iberal psychoanalysis. It also contextualizes the kinds of critiques with which he wants to engage and in which he wants to insert his own. He h imself pauses to assert that the issuing of his declaration " here in France, on this European continent that is being reorganized, obligates us especially and in many ways. Primarily, by the opportunity of being in a democratic space that wonders about its future and appeals to a democracy to come."85 This unwavering commitment to the l iberal values of individualism, freedom, tolerance, and separation of the theological from the political,86 begins increasingly to function l i ke religious doctrine for those intellectuals who uphold them, and , insofar as they do, can be likened to obsessional neurosis, just as religion was by Freud. I n this light, and as Freud described followers of religions, devout followers of liberal doctrine " are safeguarded in a high degree against the risk of certain neurotic illnesses; their acceptance of the universal neurosis spares them the task of constructing a personal one. "87 Arab and Muslim intellectual migrants to Europe, in the geographical and/or political sense, who are converted to liberal doctrine have the added and d ifficult task of self-othering , of repudiating Islam as not only "religion," in order to i ntegrate a version of it i nto the liberal Christian and secular notion of only a "religion , " which would make it tolerable to devout liberals.
Umbr(a) 59
This liberal identity and the mechanisms through which it produces its others are taken as un interrogable referents in Benslama's work and that of others like him. This constitutes a serious limitation of Benslama's oeuvre generally and can be productively read in a psychoanalytic way. Indeed, this might be useful for psychoanalysis at present, namely to study the processes through which the liberal self is constituted by Europeans and by M uslim and non-Muslim intellectual migrants from non-European postcolonies. A more curious psychoanalysis would perhaps do well to undertake a study of the group psychology of liberal and secular th inkers more generally on the question of "Islam" in order to uncover the unconscious processes and mechanisms at play in the formation of their liberal ego, which in turn privileges this l iberal reading of something they insist on othering as " Islam." I n the meantime, the important question Benslama and Khatibi posed i n the call for papers for their inaugural 1 987 colloquium on psychoanalysis and Islam - namely, "from which foundations and in relation to which specific problems can psychoanalysis enter i nto a relationship with this other civilization without doing so in the mode of a cultural psychology or a pure transposition that would reproduce the avatars of colonial thought with regards to the matter of the psychic being?" - is still in search of an answer and thus remains an open challenge.88
Male
Fe m a l e
Baby
Umbr(a)
60
Mother
and Baby
Nude Male
N u d e Fe male
Landscape
MASSI\D
A shorter version of this paper was presented as a keynote address on November 29, 2008 at the conference, " Psychoanalysis, Fascism, and Fundamentalism," sponsored by the London Freud M useum, M iddlesex University, and the French Societe Internationale d ' Histoire de la Psychiatrie et de la Psychanalyse. U nfortunately, I could not deliver the keynote in person because the British embassy delayed my British visa while checking my fingerprints. Professor Glenn Bowman graciously read the address on my behalf. I was able to join in by telephone at the end of the session to answer audience questions. I thank Julia Borossa for inviting me to participate. I also thank Joan Copjec for i nviting me to contribute to this issue of Umbr(a), since her invitation led me to begi n this project. I a m most g rateful t o Talal Asad, Lecia Rosenthal , and Neville Hoad for their critical and engaged reading of earlier versions of this paper. 1.
See G.E. Von Grunebaum, Islam: Essays in the Nature and Growth of a Cultural Tradition (Lon don : Routledge & Kegan Pau l , Ltd . , 1 955).
2.
D. S. Margoliouth referred to Islam as a "sys tem," in his Mohammedanism (London: Wil l iams and Norgate, 1 896), 42 .
3.
Sayyid Qutb uses the term "manhaj" through out his writings, especially in AI-Islam wa Mushkilat a/-Hadarah [Islam and the Problems of Civilization] (Cairo: Dar al-Shuruq , 2005), as does Mahmud M uhammd Shakir in his Risa/ah fi ai-Tariq ila Thaqafatina [A Letter on the Path to Our Culture] (Cairo: M u 'assassat al-Risalah , 1 992).
4.
On the use of "programme," see M uham mad Asad, Islam at the Crossroads (Lahore: Arafat Publications, 1 947), 5, 1 4, 1 52 , inter alia . The book was first published i n 1 934.
5.
Dale F. Eickelman and James Piscatori have written perceptively about the "systematiza tion" of Islam and its "objectification" and how the l atte r " reco n fig ures the symbolic p roduc tion of M uslim politics." For them, however, Islam denotes a " relig ion" and not multiple referents. See Dale F. Eickelman and James Piscatori , Muslim Politics (Princeton: Princeton Un iversity Press, 1 996), 38.
6.
Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psy chological Works of Sigmund Freud (hereaf ter S.E.), ed. and trans. James Strachey et al. (London : Hogarth Press, 1 953-1 974), 23:92.
7.
Erich Fromm, Psychoanalysis and Religion (New Haven : Yale U niversity Press, 1 950).
8.
On the history of Egyptian psychoanalysts, see Hussein Abel Kader, "La psych analyse en Egypt entre un passe ambitieux et un future incertain , " in La Celibataire, No. 8 (Printemps 2004), 61 -73. On the h istory of psychoanaly sis in Morocco and the involvement of French psychoanalysts during French colonial rule and beyond , see Jalil Bennan i , Psychanalyse en terre d'islam: introduction a la psychanal yse au Maghreb (Strasbourg: E ditions Arcanes, 2008), first published in 1 996 by Ed itions Le Fennec in Casablanca.
9.
See Salamah Musa's early book AI- 'Aql a/-Ba tin wa Maknunat al-Nafs [[he Unconscious and the Sou l 's Innermost Thoughts] (Cairo: Dar al Hilal, 1 928), and his later book 'Aq/i wa 'Aqluk [My M ind/Reason and You rs] (Cairo: Salamah M usa Lil-Nashr, 1 947) .
1 0. I n h is 1 968 biography o f t h e Prophet, French Orientalist Maxime Rodinson does employ the notion of the unconscious to explain some of
Umbr(a)
61
the Prophet's experiences, but does not do so in any strict psychoanalytic sense. See Max ime Rodinson, Muhammad, Prophet of Islam (London: Tauris Parke Paperbacks, 2002), 77. 1 1 . See Muhammad AI-Nuwayhi , Nafsiyyat Abu Nuwas [The Psychology of Abu Nuwas] (Cairo: Dar al-Fikr, 1 970), first published in 1 953, and 'Abbas Mahmud and AI-'Aqqad , Abu Nuwas, aI-Hasan Bin Hani', Dirasah fi a/-Tahlil a/-Naf sani wa al-Naqd a/-Tarikhi [A Study in Psycho analysis and H istorical Criticism] (Cairo: Kitab al-Hilal, 1 960), first published in 1 953. For a critical take on the psychoanalytic study as ap pl ied to Abu Nuwas, see Husayn Muruwwah, Dirasat Naqdiyyah, fi Du ' a/-Manhaj a/-Waqi'i [Critical Studies, in the Light of the Realist Method] (Beirut: Maktabat al-Ma'arif, 1 965). For a detailed discussion of these studies, see Joseph Massad , Desiring Arabs (Chicago: Uni versity of Ch icago Press, 2007), 84-92. 1 2 . See Juri Tarabishi, 'Uqdat Udib fi a/ Riwayah a/ 'Arabiyyah [The Oedipus Complex i n the Arabic Novel] (Beirut: Dar al-Tali'ah, 1 982), AI-Rujulah wa Aydiyulujiyyat al-Rujulah fi al Riwayah a/- 'Arabiyyah [Manliness and the Ide ology of Manliness in the Arabic Novel] (Beirut: Dar al-Tali 'ah, 1 983), and Untha Didd a/-Unut hah, Dirasah fi Adab Nawal a/-Sa 'dawi [A Fe male against Femininity, A Study of the Fiction of Nawal al-Sa'dawij (Beirut: Dar AI-Tali'ah, 1 984). 1 3. See Juri Tarabishi, AI Muthaqaffun al- 'Arab wa a/ Turath, a/ Tahlil a/-Nafsi /i- 'Usab Jama'i [Arab I ntellectuals and Heritage: Psychoanalysis of a Group Neurosis] (London: Riyad al-Rayyis 1iI Nashr, 1 991 ). 1 4 . Abdelkebir Khatibi, "Frontieres," in Cahiers In tersignes, No. 1 (Spring 1 990), 1 5.
Umbr(a)
62
1 5 . Jurj Tarabish i , "Taqdim," in Sighmund Fruyd, Mustaqbal Wahm , trans. Juri Tarabishi (Bei rut: Dar al-Tali'ah, 1 974), 5. Tarabishi had also translated Moses and Monotheism from the French in 1 973 as well as Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents in 1 977. See Sighmund Fruyd, Musa wa al- Tawhid, trans. Juri Tarabi shi (Beirut: Dar al-Tali'ah, 1 973), and Sighmund Fruyd, Qa/aq fi al-Hadarah, trans. Jurj Tarabishi (Beirut: Dar al-Tali'ah, 1 977). 1 6. Tarabishi, more recently, started to write on "Islam , " and occasionally punctuates his texts with psychoanalytic references, as he does in Hartaqat 2 : 'an al- 'I/maniyyah ka-Ishka/iyyah Islamiyyah-Islamiyyah [Hereticisms 2 : On Secularism as a M uslim-Muslim Problematic] (Beirut: Dar al-Saqi, 2 008). There, he refer ences Freud 's Moses and Monotheism and Totem and Taboo , speaks of the "return of the repressed" in addressing Shiite-Sunni sectari anism in post-US invasion Iraq, and claims to differ from Freud in considering Christianity and Shiite Islam as "son-religions" rather than "father-religions," as Freud " had interpreted the emergence of monotheistic religions from his illusory scheme of parricide, " which Freud, according to Tarabish i , correctly applied to Judaism but which does not apply to "Chris tianity and Shiite Islam . " See Hartaqat 2, 1 1 , 1 5, 1 7n. This is an odd assertion of difference with Freud on the part of Tarabishi , as Freud was quite clear at the end of Moses and Mono theism that "Christianity, having arisen out of a father-religion, became a son-religion" (S.E. 23: 1 36). 1 7. I ndeed, Benslama recognizes this clearly, by excepting h imself as having shown interest i n "Islam" earlier than h is colleagues. He states that his i nitial interest in "Islam" had started due to an encounter with Pierre Fedida after
MASSAD
which he published his first book dealing with psychoanalysis and Islam in 1 988 "when Islam had not constituted yet a sharp problem in the international public sphere, nor a question for psychoanalytic research"; in Fethi Benslama, "Une recherche psychanalytique sur l ' lslam , " in a special issue o f La Celibataire, entitled " La psychanalyse et Ie monde arabe," No. 8 (Print emps 2004), 77. On Benslama's first book on the subject, see Fethi Benslama, La nuit brisee (Paris: E ditions Ramsay, 1 988). This is an in teresting assertion since the more usual dating of the international interest in "Islam" as " Is lamism" coincides with the Iranian Revolution of 1 978/1 979. 1 8. Abdelkebir Khatibi, "Du message prophetique (argument), " in Par-Dessus I'epaule (Paris: Au bier, 1 988). He writes on page 1 35 that he had written the text in 1 984. 1 9 . Khatibi, "Frontieres, " 1 7. 20. There are also others writing on psychoana lytic themes like the Egyptian Karim J beili who is based in Canada and whose book Le psy chisme des Orientaux, differences et dechiru res (Montreal: Liber, 2006) consists of a series of contemplations that rely on strong identi tarian essentialisms of what an "Oriental" and "Occidental" are, what their psyches consist of, and how, in pointing this out, Jbeili is simply attending to their particularities and not neces sarily engag ing in reification. 21 . Benslama, La psychanalyse a I'epreuve de l'ls/am (Paris: Flammari o n , 2002), 1 7 . [At the time of this publication, an English translation of Benslama's book is forthcoming; all transla tions appearing here are thus the author's own , while pagination refers to the 2002 French edi tion. All subsequent references will appear par-
enthetically within the text Ed .] It is notewor thy that the latter part of this sentence "that it would never again be a question in the organi zation of society" is dropped, without explana tion, from the Arabic translation of the book. See Fathi Bin Salamah, AI-Islam wa al-Tahlil al-Nafsi, trans. Dr. Raja' Bin Sal amah (Beirut: Dar al-Saqi and Rabitat al-'Aqlaniyyin al- 'Arab, 2008), 29. 22. See the interview of al-M u 'ti Qabbal with Malek Chebel, "ai-Islam wa Sahwat al-Tufulah" [Islam and the Awakening of childhood] in AI Tahlil al-Nafsi wa al-Thaqafah al- 'Arabiyyah-al Islamiyyah [Psychoanalysis and Arab-Islamic Culture] (Damascus: Dar al-Bidayat, 2008), 77. 23 . He describes it thus in a dialogue with Mou stapha Safouan in M ustafa Safwan and 'Adnan Hubbu Allah , Ishka/iyyat a/-Mujtama' ai-Arabi, Qira 'ah min Manzur a/-Tahlil a/-Nafsi [The Prob lematics of Arab Society: A Reading from a Psychoanalytic Perspective] , with an introduc tion by Adunis (Beirut: AI-Markaz al-Thaqafi al Arabi, 2008), 96. 24. In response to a question about the (alleged) rejection of psychoanalysis in Arab-Islamic so cieties on account of it being "foreign," Malek Chebel states that "this statement reveals an actuality that can cause embarrassment." See al-M u'ti Qabbal 's interview with Malek Chebel, "ai-Islam wa Sahwat al-Tufulah , " 78. In con trast, Moustapha Safouan feels pain not on account of the return of Islam, but by what he believes to be the absence of democratic thinking in the Arab world manifested by his mistaken presumption that Alexis de Toc queville's Democracy in America has not been, but should be, translated into Arabic g iven its pedagogical importance for a people lacking democracy: "it is a painful proof of our back-
Umbr(a) 63
wardness that [Alexis de Tocqueville's Democ racy in America] is still not translated i nto Ara bic," in Moustapha Safouan, Why Are the Ar abs Not Free?: The Politics of Writing (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2007), 60. Leaving aside what the translation of this book into Arabic could mean or not mean, the book had in fact been translated and publ ished in 1 984 (23 years be fore Safouan felt the pain and expressed it in a 2007 book) by Amin Mursi Qandil, edited by M uhsin Mahdi, and published by Dar Kitabi in Cairo and again by 'Alam al-Kutub in Cairo in 1 991 under the title and exact translation al Dimuqratiwah fi Amrika. 25. Edward W. Said, Freud and the Non-European (London : Verso, 2003), 54. 26. Benslama, "Une recherche psychanalytique sur I ' islam , " 79. He also enumerates many of the possible meanings of Islam except that of "deliverance" in Feth i Benslama, Declaration d'insoumission: a I'usage des musulmans et de ceux qui ne Ie sont pas (Paris: Flammarion , 2004), 28-29. 27. Benslama, La nuit brisee, 1 76. 28. Benslama, Declaration d'insoumission, 24. 29. See Safouan, Why Are the Arabs Not Free?, 65. 30. I bid. 3 1 . See the entry on "Sovereignty" in the Oxford English Dictionary. 32 . Safouan elaborates on these views in a dia logue with 'Adnan H u bbu Allah in "AI-Tahlil al Nafsi wa al-Mujtama' al-'Arabi" [Psychoanaly sis and Arab Society], in Mustafa Safwan and
Umbr(a)
64
'Adnan Hubbu Allah , Ishkaliwat al-Mujtama ' ai-Arabi, 1 37-1 38. 33. On this debate, see Yasir Suleiman, The Arabic Language and National Identity: A study in Ide ology (Washington, DC: Georgetown Univer sity Press, 2003). 34. Safouan, Why Are the Arabs Not Free?, 1 0. 35. Ibid., 49. 36. Benslama, Declaration d'insoumission, 76-77. 37. I thank Lecia Rosenthal for raising this point. 38. Fathi Bin Salamah, AI-Islam wa a/-Tahlil a/-Naf si, 36n. 39. See page 45 of La psychanalyse on his liberal defense of personal freedom and the individ ual. 40. Benslama, La psychanalyse, 24. 41 . I should note here that Benslama is aware that the word din in Arabic means "debt" and that the logic of its meaning is different from that of religion but still thinks that it is the word through which the Qur'an "designates the equivalent or the similar term which we call in Christi anity ' religion . ' " See Benslama, Declaration d'insoumission, 26n. On how the universal def inition of "religion" originated in early modern Christianity, see Talal Asad, ''The Construction of Religion as an Anthropological Category," in Talal Asad , Genealogies of Religion: Disciplines and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1 983), 27-54. 42 . See ibid.
MASSAD
43 . Benslama, "Une recherche psychanalytique sur I ' islam ," 77 . 44. Abdelkebir Khatibi, "Du message prophetique (argument) , " 83-84. Benslama does cite the ar ticle for Khatibi's views on the question of the Prophet's literacy or illiteracy and on the im portance of Khadija to the question of revela tion, but does not cite h i m for introducing him to this i mportant scene, which is not one of the more standard stories about the beginn ing of revelation and is not usually included in mod ern narratives of the Prophet's biography, even though Khadija's relationshi p to the beginning of revelation is extensively discussed in such biographies. See Benslama, La nuit brisee , 44, 1 40-1 41 , 1 43. On the absence of the story from the Prophet's modern biographies, see for example Safi aI-Rahman Mubarakfuri 's cel ebrated AI-Rahiq a/-Makhtum: Bahth fi a/-Sirah a/-Nabawiwah 'ala Sahibiha Afdal aI-Salah wa aI-Salam [The Sealed Nectar] (Riyad: Maktabat Dar aI-Salam, 1 995). I thank Ahmad Atif Ah mad for sharing with me some of his extensive knowledge of the classical and contemporary biographies of the Prophet. 45. Muhammad Arkun, Tarikhiwat a/-Fikr aI-Ara bi a/-Islami [The H istoricity of Arab Islamic Thought] (Casablanca: AI-Markaz al-Thaqafi al-'Arabi, 1 998) , 1 6. 46. He uses it again in Declaration d'insoumission , 35. 47. "Shajarat aI-Islam, al-Tahlil al-Nafsi , AI-Hu wiyyah" [[he Tree of Islam , Psychoanalysis, Identity], interview conducted by H usayn al Qubaysi with Fethi Benslama, in AI-Tahlil a/ Nafsi wa a/-Thaqafah a/- 'Arabiwah-a/-Islami wah [Psychoanalysis and Arab-Islamic Cul ture] (Damascus: Dar al-Bidayat, 2008), 1 5.
48. Freud , Moses and Monotheism , 9 1 . 49 . Said, Freud and the Non European, 40. 50. See Fathi Bin Salamah, AI-Islam wa a/-Tahlil a/ Nafsi. George Tarabishi is one of the main founders of this Association . 51 . "Shajarat aI-Islam , al-Tahlil al-Nafsi, AI-Huwi yyah ," 1 8. 52 . Mustafa Safouan, " Pratique analytique dans Ie monde arabe: incidences et d ifficultes," La Ce libataire, No. 8 (Printemps 2004), 1 5. 53 . I bid. , 1 6. 54. Safouan , Why Are the Arabs Not Free ?, 43. 55. Safwan in a d ialogue with 'Adnan Hubbu Allah in "AI-Tahlil al-Nafsi wa al-Mujtama' al-'Arabi" [Psychoanalysis and Arab Society], in M ustafa Safwan and 'Adnan Hubbu Allah , Ishkaliwat a/ Mujtama ' aI Arabi, 1 1 7. -
56. Safouan , Why Are the Arabs not Free?, 1 4. 57. For the proceedings and papers of the con ference, see AI- 'IIm wa aI-Din wa a/-Tahlil a/ Nafsi, A 'mal a/ Mu'tamar a/-Dawli al-Thalith IiI-Muhallilin a/-Nafsiwin a/- 'Arab, Beirut 1 7- 1 9 May, 200 7 [SCience, religion, and psychoanal ysis: The proceedings of the third international conference for Arab psychoanalysts] (Beirut: Dar al-Farabi , 2008) in Arabic and French . When I refer to this volume, I will indicate if I am quoting from the Arabic text, which has its own set of pagination, or the French text, which also has its own separate set of pagina tion. On Arab intellectuals' alleged inhospitable response to psychoanalysis, see Houbballah's introduction to M ustafa Safwan and 'Adnan
Umbr(a)
65
Hubbu Allah, Ishkaliyyat al-Mujtama ' ai-Arabi, 8. He also d iscusses this at length in Adnan Houbballah, " La psychanalyse et Ie monde arabe," in La Celibataire, No. 8 (Printemps 2004), 1 9-28. Before his recent concern with Islam and science, Houbballah had written a semi-autobiographical study of the Lebanese civil war where many of his recent concerns were not present. See Adnan Houbballah , Le virus de la violence, la guerre civile est en cha cun de nous (Paris: Albin M ichel , 1 996). H is book was translated into Arabic as Jurlhumat al 'Unf, al-Harb al-Ahliwah fi Samim kull Minna (Beirut: Dar al-Tali'ah, 1 998). 58. Houbballah, " La psychanalyse, " 20. 59. I bid. , 22. 60. Ibid., 28. 61 . 'Adnan Hubbu Allah, "ai- ' 1 1 m wa ai-Din fi rna ba'd al-Hadathah" [Science and religion in postmodernity] , in AI- 'lIm wa aI-Din wa al-Tahlil al-Nafsi, A 'mal al-Mu 'tamar, 1 5 of the Arabic pagination . It is curious that the paragraph from which this quote is taken is not included in the French version of the speech contained in the same volume (see 1 6 of the French pagi nation). 62 . 'Ad nan Hubbu Allah, "Limadha takhallafa al 'Arab Ian al-' l I m al-Mu'asir: 'Amaliyyatan Ji rahiyyatan lam Yakhda' lahuma al-M uslimun" [Why Have Arabs Remained Delayed from Contemporary Science: Two Surgeries to Which Muslims Have Not Been Subjected], in AI- 'lIm wa aI-Din wa al-Tahlil al-Nafsi, A 'mal al Mu 'tamar, 67 of the Arabic pagination. 63 . Ibid., 73.
Umbr(a)
66
64. On this important debate, see Massad, Desir ing Arabs, 1 1 -1 6. 65 . Wendy Brown, "Subjects of Tolerance," in Hent De Vries and Lawrence E. Sullivan , Political Theologies: Public Religions in a Post-Secular World (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006), 303. 66. Ibid . , 31 0. 67. Freud , The Future of an Illusion, S. E. 21 :20. 68. "Shajarat ai-Islam, al-Tahlil al-Nafsi, AI-Huwi yyah, " 1 4. He returns to this theme later when he speaks of "the traditional anti-Judaism in the Arab world," and of "the anti-Judaism that has existed since the origins of Islam , " in Benslama, Declaration d'insoumission, 3 8 , 4 0 . In the context o f d iscussing the Palestin ian-Israeli conflict, he shows concern only about the Islamist "religious readings" of the origins of the "conflict" but not of the Juda ization of the Zionist colonial endeavor since the beg innings of Zionism. While clearly criti cal of the policies of Israeli governments, he only praises those Palestinians who are will ing to "compromise" by recognizing Israel by calling them "democrats, " without noting that they are wi lling to recognize an Israel that is racist and undemocratic by law, granting legal privileges and rights to its Jewish citizens that it denies to non-Jewish citizens. It is curious that Benslama considers the democratic posi tion on the part of Palestinians as the position of "non-violence" while he deems the position of violent resistance to a violent occupation undemocratic. See ibid . , 44. On Zionism and Israel, see Joseph Massad, The Persistence of the Palestinian Question, Essays on Zion ism and the Palestinians (London: Routledge, 2006). I should note here that the earliest text
MASSAD
that accuses psychoanalysis of Zionist sym pathies was written by an Egyptian Christian psychiatrist who had championed Freud in the 1 930s and repudiated him in 1 970. See Dr. Sa bri Jirjis, al-Turath al-Yahudi al-Suhyuni wa al Fikr al-Fruydi: adwa' 'ala al-usul al-Suhyuniwah /i-fikr Sighmund Fruyd [Zionist Jewish Culture and Freudian Thought: Shedding Light on the Zionist Origins of the Thought of Sigmund Freud] (Cairo: 'Alam al-Kutub, 1 970). Egyptian psychoanalyst Hussein Abdel Kader explains that Jirjis's repudiation of Freud was part of a dispute he had had with M ustafa Zaywar, the doyen of Egyptian psychoanalysts, who was the real target of his attack, "and not Freud . " See Hussein Abel Kader, "La psych analyse en Egypt," 65. I ncidentally, Zaywar edited and in troduced Safouan 's 1 958 translation of Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams into Arabic. For the most recent edition of the translation pub l ished under the auspices of the Arab Center for Psychological and Psychoanalytic Research (ACPPR) headed by Adnan Houbballah , see Sighmund Fruyd, Tafsir al-Ahlam, trans. M us tafa Safwan (Beirut: Dar an Farabi and ACPPR, 2003). 'Abd al-Mun'im AI-Hifni retranslated the book in 1 995 in a new edition with a respectful yet critical discussion of Safwan 's translation , and republished it with a new introduction in 2004. See Sighmund Fruyd, Tafsir al-Ahlam, trans. Abd al-Mun'im AI-Hifni (Cairo: M aktabat Madbuli, 2 004). 69. Jacques Derrida, "Geopsychoanalysis: ' . . . and the rest of the world, ' American Imago, 48:2 (Summer 1 99 1 ) , 21 1 . "
70. Ibid., 2 1 5. 71 . Benslama, "Une recherche psychanalytique sur I ' islam, " 76.
72. Bracketed commentaries are those of the au thor and do not appear in Benslama's text. [Ed .] 73. Jurj Tarabishi is also a signatory to the mani festo, but not Safouan or Houbballah. See http://ww. manifeste.org/signatures.php3?id_ article=1 &alpha=T. Tarabishi was also con sulted on the translation of Benslama's La Psychanalyse into Arabic. See the translator's introduction in Benslama, AI-Islam wa al-Tahlil al-Nafsi, 1 8. 74. "Declaration de fondation de l 'Association d u M an ifeste d e s libertes," in Fethi Benslama, De claration d'insoumission, 91 -92 . 75. Ibid., 92. 76. Ibid., 93. 77. Benslama, Declaration d'insoumission, 48-49. 78. For an Islamist misapprehension of Freud 's
theories and their dismissal as " pornographic" in nature, see Sa'd ai-Din Sayyid Salih, Nazari wat al-Tahlil al-Nafsi 'ind Fruyd fi Mizan aI-Islam [Freud's Theory of Psychoanalysis [weighed] on the scales of Islam] (Jiddah, Saudi Arabia: Maktabat al-Sahabah, 1 993). The association of Freud 's thought with Zionism and J ewish ness in this book is hardly an Islamist innova tion. As cited earlier in the endnotes, it was a Christian Egyptian psychiatrist who had first elaborated on these themes. 79. Ahmad al-Sayyid 'Ali Ramadan, AI-Islam wa al- Tahlil al-Nafsi 'ind Fruyd [Islam and Freud's Psychoanalysis] (ai-Mansura, Egypt: Maktabat al-Iman, 2000), 227-228.
80. Ibid . , 269-327.
Umbr(a)
67
81 . Benslama, Declaration d'insoumission, 69. 82 . Khatibi, "Du message prophetique (argu ment)," 88-89. 83. Benslama, La nuit brisee, 1 76 . 84. Benslama, Declaration d'insoumission, 9 3 . 85 . Ibid., 59-60. 86. After this paper was presented at the "Psycho analysis, Fascism, and Fundamentalism" con ference, Elisabeth Roudinesco stood u p and declared that Fethi Benslama was her friend, proceeded to give an extensive list of his other friends, including Jacques Derrida and Eti enne Bali bar, and insisted that Benslama was not a "neoliberal" as the paper supposedly claimed, when in fact no such claim had been advanced . She demanded in conclusion that I should inform the audience of whether I "sup port terrorism or not." Roudinesco is a sig natory to Benslama's Manifesto of Freedom, which, interestingly, she did not mention in her comments. See http://ww. manifeste.org/sig natures. php3?id_article=1 &alpha=R. 87. Freud , The Future of an Illusion, 44. 88. Khatibi, "Argument," Cahiers Intersignes, No. 1 (Spring 1 990) 1 1 .
Umbr(a)
68
Figure 32.4 Group members' allitudes toward each olher creale a Ihree-dimenslonal
group space within which each can be IOcaled. The relationships 01 lhe
members 01 a typical small group in this space often lake on a spiral shape
•
corresponding 10 !he " soclal pyramids" 01 "Iarge organizalions.
Dominant
Submissive
Umbr(a)
69
Der Mensch als ]ndustriepalast SAUE�OFF
Q
o D C CO Q _ CO c
cEQ il
175
I : TH E POLITICS & ETH ICS OF PSYCHOANALYSIS
"EN TERRE
o 'ISLAM"
Le fou fait peur car iI nous renvole a nous memes. I I nous renvoie de maniere exacerbee ce que nous meme vivons comme souffrance . . . Moi, Ie fou me fait avancer, Ie fou me fait reflechir, Ie fou est mon maitre. [The mad frig hten us because they m irror ourselves. They bear witness, in extreme form, to what we, too, experience as suffering. The mad person helps me grow, makes me think, is my teacher.] - M. Fouad Benchekroun, psychoanalyst' I said that al-nafs is the yeast, it is the fertile land that Shaytan cultivates . . . He cultivates desires, cravings and longings, and with them blasting and bombs. From the moment of their manifestation they make an impression in the nafs, leave a mark, and set it ablaze. - The l mam
Umbr(a)
71
[ . . . ] Ce que nous decrivons com me ce lieu central, cette exteriorite intime, cette extimite, qui est la Chose [ . . . ] - Jacques Lacan2 J u ly 2008. An evening meeting in Rabat, at the office of a psychoanalyst, interlocutor and friend of many years. The waiting room fi lled during the day, people waiting , in pain, delusional, old and new patients, alone or with their families, speaking Arabic, French, comparing experiences, offering or asking for advice, reading magazines as they wait. Now, the last patient having left, the waiting area has become a seminar room. Windows closed, sti ll too much noise from the street, the air conditioner on. Sitting in a circle, the members of an informal seminar on "psychosis and psychoanalysis" that has been meeting in this office for ten years, and in which I have been an i ntermittent participant, a seminar that has now reached a critical impasse. The quandary is whether the group should dissolve (the host is calling for a pause of reflection, an interruption, a symptomatic registering of crisis) or instead file the paperwork to charter a new psychoanalytic association , taking on an active institutional role, both at the level of a psycho-political intervention in the ever-growing zones of social abandonment in the Moroccan cities, particularly with the youth, and at the level of curricular initiatives in the medical schools. Three main questions circulated in the room, born of a troubled pondering on the responsibility of psychoanalysts at this time in history, and in the specific context of Morocco, the M iddle East, and the Islamic world. The first question can be glossed as follows: What is the responsibility of psychoanalysts and psychiatrists in a society deeply fractured and internally hollowed by ever growing inequalities and material and symbolic dispossessions, and by state violence and abuses carried on from colonial times well into the postcolonial present, which are implicitly encouraged by the political and econom ic requirements of an uneq ual global order? The first National Survey of Mental Health sharply indicated that forms of despair had taken hold of large sectors of the population , and manifested themselves in psychopathological symptoms, hieroglyphics of pain that were also political inscriptions.3 Most of all, this despair showed in the unusually high rate of major depression across age and gender groups (26% of the total population). Independent of methodological questions concerning the reliability of the statistics produced by the Survey, the publication of the report had the effect of a catastrophiC awakening. The initiator of this group had been on the board of the survey and had advocated the publication of the report (out of a commitment to the truth that might be produced by a d isclos u re of nu m be rs) , but, in a different sort of sym ptomatic disclosure, the survey was withdrawn from the public eye following heated reactions in the press. The image of the nation portrayed in the looking g lass of the Survey was too hard to bear. The second question had to do with the collective realization of psychoanalysis' growing marginality, and this precisely at a time when attempts were being made to institutionalize its public voice in Morocco
PANDOLFO
and the Middle East.4 This is how the discomfort in the room can be rendered, spoken in the specificity of particular voices: How to bring psychoanalytic knowledge, ethics and practice to the fore, in a situation in which there was just a handful of trained analysts, little public interest, real ly, outside of the francophone elite, and no resources that might enable young psychiatrists to undertake a personal analysis or a clinical supervision. Was "the transmission of psychoanalysis"5 in this context (as the inter-generational and inter cultural passing on of a debt, or a gift) possible, or meaningful, at all? What were the historical forms, and the available sites, in today's Morocco, for what Lacan had called an active listening? The third question had to do with a positioning vis-a-vis what was felt as an interpellation from the field of Islam, the Islamic movements, and the sea change that this induced . For the seminar members, all of whom were confronted on a daily basis with patients who spoke their pain within frames inspired by Islamic vocabularies, the problem was: how to relate to the interpellation of Islam in a way that rejected a perceived general turn towards the diagnostic use of psychoanalytic concepts as a (political) mode of intervention into the socio-political field, and refused to participate in the construction of " Islam" as an Other, opening instead a space of critique and self-questioning. What, they were asking, was the responsibility of a psychoanalytic ethic and practice in a context in which questions were raised, all the way to the level of the symptom , in the terms of another tradition, a tradition which, in a complex sense, was also the psychoanalyst's own; in vocabularies that could find no equivalent in translation, and more and more in theological terms? The seminar had started as a space where a small group of therapists presented difficulties and impasses in their clinical work, and read together on the issue of psychosis. It was also a space where some reflected on the persisting and overwhelming presence of healing practices that addressed illness as a manifestation of the harmful agency of demonic entities. The presence of those practices, dubbed "traditional therapies" in psychological circles - often a co-presence, since the afflicted pursued several therapeutic approaches at once - had been for psychoanalysts an interpellation that called for a reply, one that often, particularly in the context of Moroccan psychiatry, came in the form of an ambivalent rejection. 6 But there were exceptions. One of the seminar members, a Lacanian psychoanalyst, used to tel l of how, u pon his return to Morocco from training in France, feeling the i nadequacy of an analytic practice of the u nconscious in the face of the organization of the symbolic at home, he embarked on a journey to visit sanctuaries known for healing the mad . These places are marked as burial sites of saintly figures, where the sick and their families seek healing through the release that wou ld come in dreams. I n his reckoning, sanctuaries were Iieux de parole in the Lacanian sense, sites where being could come to the fore in the "revelation of speech, " in the vision, and in the ear of Death: "J'ai ecoute dans les sanctuaires; j'ai acoute a peu pres ce que j'ecoute dans mon cabinet. Moi, je fais Ie mort. Eux, ils parlent au mort. " "I listened in the sanctuaries; what I heard is approximately what I hear in my office. As an analyst, I play dead; whereas instead they talk to the dead. " The question of religion was an uncomfortable and central one for the group, as i n general among secular intellectuals. In recent years it had supplanted the problem of "trad itional therapies" (the magical
Umbr(a)
73
cures of the jinns) as a source of anxiety related to an intimate strangeness of the "home." But while "traditional therapies," however widespread, were marginalized and excl uded i n the institutional life of the postcolonial state, assigned to the position of an intractable irrational residue that could never claim the place of an i nterlocutor on an equal footing, the growth of Islamic movements had changed the terms of the re lati on s h i p, occupying the public space, and directly challenging the authority of secular psychological sciences, and , indirectly, psychoanalysis. " Religion," and " I slam" in particular, had emerged as a problem for psychoanalysis, in Morocco as in other parts of the M iddle East. This was at once an internal response to the spiritual-political revolution brought about by the Revival, and a chapter in the larger international context of the "war on terror." (It should be noted that i nternational psychoanalytic associations, particularly French based , have been i nvolved in recent years i n what could be described as a novel "civilizing m ission" i n the M iddle East, one that is aimed at promoting a secular and cosmopolitan subject, immunized from the fascination of religion and the risks of theocracy.7 French Cultural Centers sponsored lectures, conferences, and seminars "en terre d'lslam, " and local analysts and psychotherapists were called in to participate; including the members of this group.) Psychoanalysis was being summoned as a pedagogical rampart to counter the growth of Islamic movements, and Islamic selves, in the age of pol itical religion (or to promote at least what were seen as more tolerant, critical, and open forms of Islamic practice) .8 It is impossible to raise the question of psychoanalysis and Islam today, of the commensurabi lity or possible translation of concepts and practices, in philosophical or theological terms, without registering the political charge of the field within which the question has emerged, and without posing, at the same time, the problem of psychoanalysis' reflection on its own politics. A recent work by Moustapha Safouan had been for this g roup a source of inspiration.9 For in it Safouan suggested that the responsibility of Arab psychoanalysts today is the political one of addressing the subjugation of being, working against the terror of States and of empire, colonial and post-colonial , which through their regimes of domination and perverse organization of enjoyment disable the work of desire for the subject, and cripple the possibility of action, thinking, and critique, falsifying the very nature of speech as intersubjective engagement. ("The profound fear of the people, a fear of the Leviathan which is our State, a fear that goes back thousands of years, and that is the most malignant vice of the souL . . [a fear] that has corrupted the very function of speech !'parole] in our societies.")10 Continuing a line of thought begun in some of his earlier writings, Safouan argues that voluntary servitude and the disabling of parole are unrelated to Islam understood as the revealed message of the Qur'an. They have to do with the instrumentalization of that message by worldly state apparatuses. Oppression is the illegitimate rule of worldly sovereigns, who put their own person in the place of God, a place no human being can ever occupy as such: "God is by definition the being for whom Lacan's assertion applies that every identification is an identification with a signifier."" There is much i n Safouan's l i n e o f argum ent that I s h o u l d l i ke to contest: from hi s discussion of vernacular language as an epiphany of the people, to his unproblematic espousal of the concept of democracy, and what is hard not to read as the voice of a conflicted Eurocentrism; from his idea of a necessary disjunction of the theological and the political in Islam , to his telescoping of history, which conflates realities as incommensurable as the ninth-century Umayyad empire and the colonial and postcolonial M iddle Eastern states.
Umbr(a)
74
Here, however, I want to follow the trace of h is thinking on the responsibility of psychoanalysis - the sense i n which this addresses the questions raised at that evening meeting i n Rabat. In the last chapter of Pourquoi Ie monde arabe n 'est pas Iibre, 1 2 which takes the risk of writing against the grain of much psychoanalytic i n k on contemporary Islam, Safouan discusses the questions raised by the M uslim Brothers in Egypt, and by Hamas and H izbuHah in Palestine and Lebanon. He suggests that, however complicated and fraught any assessment of the terrain might be, it would be an error to comprehend these realities as anti-democratic formations, becoming deaf to the fact that these movements are attempts at a re-symbolization, at moving against the subjugation of the subject. They reinstitute forms of sociality withi n which a novel circulation of desire may become possible, with the emergence of a parole that may "interrupt" the tyranny of the state, and not just re-inscribe the subjugation of being. If there is a responsibility of psychoanalysis at this time in history, it is that of a political critique, and of the exigency of a particular stance, which Lacan named ethical - the pursuit of lucidity (detromper, un-luring) and of a movement across the limit that he pondered through the figure of tragedy. It is the responsibility to remain m indful of the "pole of desire," and not work, as Lacan put it, in the "service of goods," in their moral or perverse configuration (be they those of democracy or the universal value of human rights, or their perverse reversal in the enjoyment of the tyrant and those who exist in his shadow; or even the "Good" of psychoanalysis itself), refusing to become a discourse of comfortable complacency, and "the guarantor of the bourgeois dream."13 And i nasmuch as, for Lacan , remaining mindful of the pole of desire is also, necessarily, a matter of encountering the l imit, risking to venture beyond the pleasure principle, where an angle of visibility can be attained from the l iving contemplation of one's own d isappearance, one could say (as Lacan knew weH) that a psychoanalytic ethic necessarily encounters the limit of any psychoanalytic institution that has not subjected itself to a radical critique, in the realization of its historical contingency. Safouan 's intervention runs counter to discussions, often originating in France, which relate the question of contemporary Islam to a debate on religion and violence vis-a.-vis what is understood as a crisis of the symbolic i n late modernity, a crisis that psychoanalysts locate in the "new psychic economies" centered on narcissism. This is understood as a generalized regime of (deadly) enjoyment in the context of globalization, where the paradigm of addiction captures the new limit-forms of the subject. In this call , at issue is the vanishing of a subject i n an excess of proximity with the impossible Thing, origi n and termination of the drives, in a world in which the i mmediacy of jouissance annihilates the circulation of desire,1 4 and unleashes the destructive work of the death drive, no longer kept at bay by the symbolic detours of the pleasure principle. (This is, however, not the only possible reading of the "new psychic economies" in the wake of the Lacanian thought of the Thing and the death drive. In the second part of this paper I implicitly engage approaches of primary narcissism and melancholy, which have attempted to think the question differently, and in a close engagement with the Lacanian idea of the emergence of form at the limit of destruction.)15 When applied to the specific realities and history of M iddle Eastern societies, the picture is further qualified in terms of the traumas of a "failed" modernity and a "savage modernization" that have rendered the subject vulnerable to the fascination of authoritarian projects of religion and ethno-nationalism, and to an even worse threat of destruction: the suicidal propensity of the system as such . 1 6
Umbr(a)
75
This perspective is conceptually elaborated , as well as politically exemplified, in Psychoanalysis and the Challenge of Islam, where the Islamic revival is discussed by Fethi Benslama as a "torment of the Origin," in a psycho-political plea based on an impoverished and instrumental reading of the complex realities of contemporary Islamic rel igious practices and thought. The "torment of the Origin" explicitly invokes the "torment of the grave" ['adab al-qabr] in Qur'anic eschatology, and might be understood in the double sense of the torment of reckoning to which the soul is subjected immediately after death, and the agony of the M uslim subject, who is today tormented by the Islamic Thing (ding). The Islamic Thing in Benslama's reading is the murderous superego of a tradition, when this tradition aspires to be fused to its Origin in a literal "return"; it is also an autodafe of the symbolic, engendering collective psychosis and self-destruction. The problem for Benslama is not Islam or religious subjectivity per se, except perhaps in what he sees as their failure.17 The problem is the Islamic revival, which he traces in the writings of the Egyptians Hassan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb, as the call for a literal "return" to the Islam of the Qur'an and the Prophet. Such a "return , " he claims, is delusional - psychotic and hallUCinatory, in the psychopatholog ical sense of the term . Psychosis is registered by a "political incest," which "abrogates" the Origin in the delusional form of a return to revelation: "The delusional return g ives itself as a journey backwards in time, all the way to a re-invagination where metaphor retreats, prior to the form of the origin. The return here is not traction, but re-traction into the formless, where the function of the Imaginary collapses, making the Origin appear as raw flesh , as a collective organ , a mouth open on a bottomless political anguish. "1 8 I n this psychotic folding of time, intersubjectivity dissolves, and in its stead appears the hallucination of a primitive body, a non-symbolic corporeality, as organic resurgence of the collectivity glued to the Origin. It is a body tormented by violence, Benslama says, the violence of a Deus Absconditus, who has abandoned his creatures and lost all transcendence, becoming the agent of destruction, and sucking the l ife-world i nto the crater of the Origin. Evil , and the question of hatred, are no longer associated with the problematic of aggression. Hatred, Benslama says, should in the context of Islam ism be located at a more fundamental level, as a hatred of being, a hatred of l ife itself, including one's own. This is why, for Benslama, suicide bombing is the ultimate real ization of this logic of annihilation; it is the system blowing itself Up.19 I n the end , the question of psychoanalysis' reflection on its politics translates in Benslama's text into a specific political position, one that participates actively in the ideological apparatus of the "war on terror" as well as in the d iscursive construction of its object.20 This is authorized by a diagnostic act that dwells un-reflexive of the capture of the analyst in the scene of the phantasm. It is a political position colored by the glimmering horror of an emergent Thing: " Tel un dormeur artificiel/ement mis en sommeil, I'lslam se reveilait en sursaut et devisageait Ie monde un un etat somnambulique. " ["Like a person who had been artificially put to sleep, Islam was waking abruptly, and disfiguring the world in its sleep-walking state."]21 The Islamic revival is registered in the shadowy semblance of a monstrous awakening. It seems that, for Benslama, political Islam has become the psychoanalytic Thing.
Umbr(a)
76
Yet this reading should not be extended to the field of psychoanalysis in general, when it comes to the question of Islam. For the members of the Rabat seminar, the interpellation of rel igious faith is a call for reflection on something that implicates them directly, in their clinical practice, as an authentic engagement with the problematic of theological reasoning in the field of subjectivity. In their discussions, this reflection is central for registering the experience of madness, in the transference and in analytic theory (see the quotation in an epigraph of this text), as well as for cultivating an ethical attitude in which one risks one's concepts, and oneself, in the opening to other traditions - welcoming , in the process, the transmutations of psychoanalytic knowledge.22 In a sense that is, I suggest, consistent with the inspiration of Lacanian thinking and practice, I see psychoanalysis as one - but not the only possible - discourse, one developed at the marg ins of European modernity, from the debris of minor or obliterated traditions, and in the form of a counter-move.23 Freud and Lacan's concerns with the questions of being, destruction, madness, and death are not solely psychoanalysis' lot. If we take the psychoanalytic tradition as a critical opening to these questions, we see how it would encounter other vocabularies of being, alterity, and loss. At the same time, a psychoanalysis open to these questions is also one open (as Freud was) to the possibility of its own "putting into question" by the other, by the event of encounter; when the encounter touches as well at the l imit of the intolerable, and makes appear the disquieting shapes of the Thing. Only in this way can psychoanalysis remain capable of producing counter-visions and counter-moves. It is from this perspective that I offer an analytic description of the therapeutic practice of a Moroccan I mam, not a traditional healer, indeed also not a Sufi , but an active member in the local Islamic revival in the ful l sense of this tradition's reassertion of a style of theological reason ing and ethical practice. It is an anthropological description, based on conversations we have had over several years. It may offer, as a reply ·to Benslama, the elements of a d ifferent reading of (and a different relation to) a set of practices that seek not a "return to the origin," much less a delusional one, but instead aim at addressing the predicament of feeling and thinking in a context of social , political, and spiritual crisis, and which do so through a confrontation with human vulnerability and unreason, through a concrete ethical engagement in the world, and through the task of critique. In my commentary in marg i n of the Imam 's discourse (halfway between the style of lessons and that of healing) I attempt to show how in the specificity of his practice he instantiates a mode of bearing witness that is at once personal and collective, acting at the level of the singular body, and of the unbearable pain of the community. This double movement testifies, I suggest, to a re-politicization of thinking, where the lament of the personal voice recapitulates and addresses the pain of a collectivity.24 (At a time when the atomistic individuation and instrumentality of suffering invalidate the possibility of any simple reference to the concept of trauma,25 the Imam's reflections on destruction and melancholy can offer an angle from which to engage anew with the question of trauma in psychoanalysis. This is what I implicitly attempt to do in this text, within the limits of ethnography's "resistance" of the real , which necessarily d isturbs the work of theory: rereading Freud and Lacan on the question of ethics and the death drive, as I also listen, on its own terms, to the discourse of the I mam.)
Umbr(a)
77
The I mam reflects on the nature of a drive to destruction , and on the question of evil (through the Islamic figuration of Shaytan [Satan]) as a heterogeneity and a struggle ever present within the community, a struggle which, fundamentally, is also internal to the nafs [the soul/selfj itself. His sermons and therapeutic interventions are aimed at a trans-figuration , at the possible "repossession" of what, reaching to classical Islamic theories of the passions, the soul , and the heart, the Imam names an "affirmative imagination" [suwaran ijabiwa] . I n his d iscussion of anger, melancholy, and pain, he postulates a political and ethical work of the imagination, one that is capable of generating "action" in the mode of a traumatic becoming. It is a way of re-positioning the relationship to the Thing, of becoming capable of engaging anew in an agonistic of desire, in the surroundings of the experience of trauma and unbearable pai n, of "tasting" it, and of dwelling around its borders; an encircling of the Thing, as Lacan would say.26 II.
THE BATTLEFI ELD OF THE NAFS That is why when we ask what is beyond the barrier erected by the structure of the world of the good - where is the point on which this world of the good turns, as we wait for it to drag us to our destruction - our question has a meaning that you would do well to remember has a terrifying relevance today. - Jacques Lacan27
What follows points to the need of a sustained theoretical reflection on the instantiation of subjectivity in contemporary Islam - for it is in the field of theological argumentation and spiritual practice that questions of being, destruction, truth , madness, and ethics are today raised in the M uslim world; and if one cares to l isten, it is there that some core preoccupations of a psychoanalytic approach, in the Freud ian and Lacanian legacy, are today being addressed. B ut opening up to this possibility requires admitting a modern subject whose freedom and finitude, responsi bility and praxis are articulated in relation to God , on a transcendental axis where the soullself m ust be trained and equipped, in this world, to become the addressee of divine discourse; and who simultaneously, on a different but interrelated plane, is ethically active in relation to others in a community.28 This is a possibility a priori excluded in much psychoanalytic writing about Islam , where the subject of psychoanalysis is posed as necessarily secular; a presupposition that runs contrary to Lacan's own thought. {In the words of Adnan Houbballah, for instance: "How to discern between divine knowledge and the knowledge of the u nconscious, as long as the nafs , the psyche, has not been subjectivized, secularized?")29 My conversations with the Imam (I wil call him just this) started in 2003, at first in the company of a young psychiatrist, who had questions that found no answers at the hospital. The three of us sat in the reception room of the unfinished concrete building where the Imam lived with his family in one of Rabat's largest and poorest informal housing neighborhoods. Sometimes he invited us into his study, a small room on the roof, full of books, and with a narro w mattress on the floor. Some of his key theological references
Umbr(a) 78
PANDOLFO
were there, The Resuscitation of Religious Sciences, of AI-Ghaza/i, and the Commentary of Ibn Kathir. It is there that he isolated himself to read, and that he received his patients. Several of the conversations were recorded (he did not mind and actually encouraged recording, because, as he once told me, when he answered our questions he developed his knowledge in novel argumentations, and liked to keep a record of this, as well as of the Friday sermons he gave at the mosque in the neighborhood). Over the months and years, when I returned to see him alone (the psychiatrist had been transferred to a city in the South), our relationship changed somewhat. While I remained a scholarly interlocutor, he also introduced me to his family and to his life as a spiritual guide in the community, at the mosque, and in his counseling of young people. I met his mother and father, who lived with him in the family home, his wife and their five daughters, and noticed the way his mother took an interest in his sermons, and how she smiled at her son 's attachment to a Dell laptop. The computer gave him access to a vast archive of texts in the religious sciences - Hadith, Fiqh, and Qur'anic commentary - that, when the topic was relevant, he would pass on to me on a USB drive. It is in on that same laptop that we downloaded the conversations we had from my digital recorder. Sometimes a visiting patient would interrupt our talking; or a friend, or relative would come and sit with us, and participate in the conversation. He was close to his daughters, and to his wife. Even closer perhaps after a long illness that almost claimed his life, an infection of the heart that caused him to have a risky open heart operation, for which he had to request financial help from his friends and his community, and toward which he put all the savings he had accumulated to begin a small business. His illness, and his operation, became a recurrent theme in our conversations, one from which he drew examples as a trial of pain, and put him at risk of despair. He did not see his ilness as an initiation through loss, as many healers in Morocco and elsewhere see the origin of their charismatic gift. In line with his teachings and with the way he attempted to lead his life, his ilness was for him a reminder of his vulnerability and a trial of patience, where the strength of his faith and his conviction, al-iman and al-yaqTn, were both tested, and which provided a point of attachment during the hardest moments, in order to return to life. For him, his ilness was an allegory of other collective trials that pOignantly characterized the daily life of people in his community: extreme poverty, lack of work, lack of services, lack of the most basic forms of state-provided health care, and the fact of dispossession - feeling disheartened, giving in to despair and melancholy, seeking refuge in the annihilation of drugs, and in suicide. The I mam practices a renewed form of Qur'an ic healing and spiritual-political practice known as 'ilaj shar'T [divinely sanctioned healing] .30 As this has been variously formulated in the contemporary Muslim world, at issue is the turn to true Islamic healing and virtues, paired with the condemnation or exclusion of what is circumscribed as un-Islamic practice. I n Morocco, a configuration of indigenous healing practices aimed at controlling, defeating, or appeasing harmful spirits ['ilaj al-jinn, the cures of the Jinn] is today subject to a theological critique as part of a larger move towards Islamic eth ics and justice, and away from
Umbr(a)
79
what, drawing on a classical register of Islamic theology and moral reasoning, is understood as heresy [kufr] or idolatry [a/-shirk]. The "cures of the jinn" (the old "traditional therapies") are cures of de-possession , staging a scene where the jinn comes to presence and speaks through the body of the sick. The role of the healer is to bring the jinn to presence, struggle to obtain its name, and make a pact with it, meeting its desire through an exchange often sealed by a sacrifice.31 In this complex scene the world of j inns parallels that of humans, and healing is made possible by the healer's seeking the intercession of "su ltan al-jinn" [the King of the J inns] , and meeting the desire of the jinn. From the perspective of Islam these cures are a form of idolatry [shirk] , and as such they are heretical, for they contest the oneness of God . The Qur'anic cures [i/aj shar' ij often address similar afflictions. They do not deny the presence of the jinn Oinns are mentioned in the Qur'an}, but avoid all forms of i ntercourse or negotiation with them, and consider those who i nsist on practicing the cures of the jinn as "false healers," magicians who work in the service of Shaytan . The difference is both fundamental and subtle, for the Qur'anic cures, while practicing a similar form of de-possession, are eth ically and theologically based on the submission to the sovereignty of God, and on the notion of jihad a/-nafs [the struggle of the soul/self]. While the vernacular cures see harm as an agency external to the subject, the Qur'anic cures locate Shaytan (the figuration of evil) within the desiring nafs, as a heterogeneity than can never be resolved.32 I n the conversations we had about the theological-ethical framework of his therapeutic intervention, the I mam made an explicit connection between his active investment in 'i/aj shar' T [divinely sanctioned healing] , understood as a renewed instantiation of the practice of faith, and a larger effort towards a political critique of the condition of the self/soul in a state of material and spiritual dispossession, of subjugation by an oppressive state apparatus, and of utter hopelessness, at the limit of despairing l ife and trust in God . As I listen to our recordings once again , the vocabu lary of disablement and affliction speaks eloquently for itself: a/-nakba, affl iction , catastrophe; a/-ya 's, despair, a/-d Tq, oppression, choking; a/-zulm, oppression/ i njustice (in a theological sense); a/-ka 'aba, melancholy, grief, depression; a/-bitaJa, inactivity; a/-'ub OSiyya , g loom; a/-tasha'um, hopelessness, pessimism; ajaza, spiritual or physical crippling; and more. Such are the terms that punctuate our conversations. The I mam spoke insistently in terms of a q uestion, one that gave i mpetus to his work and shaped every aspect of his life. The question concerned the possibility of ethical existence in the vicinity of trauma and madness, and in the shadow of spiritual dispossession. He asked it at the intimate level of his encounters with the sick and the afflicted (musiib, marTd), from a place at the l i m it of l ife and the law, a realm "in between the two deaths" (Lacan). H is was a political and yet intimate calling which , the Imam once told me, was the reason why he chose to embrace the l ife of a religious scholar and healer, g iving up his career as a student of law at the U niversity of Rabat. I bring his question up for debate (in the specific terms of the Imam's formulation as this reaches backward and forward within a complex tradition), by tracing through h is words a reflection on subjugation and destruction that is taking place, on its own terms, in the field of contemporary Islam . In his seminar on Ethics, Lacan addressed a problematic that may be read as related, if from a d ifferent place, and as engag ing a specifically European tradition of thinking destruction and creation in between two world wars,
Umbr(a) 80
one that culminated in Freud 's "scandalous" formulation of the death d rive. At the empty center of Lacan 's seminar is the chasm of the Thing, at once source and termination of desire, site of horrific visions and primordial projections, and of the ultimate alterity of death. Lacan called the Thing (das ding) "an original division of the experience of reality, " "the first outside" and the first object, originally lost and impossible to retrieve, an "intimate stranger," "hostile on occasions," an "extimacy," an externality, an unbearability at the core of intimacy, a crater that is also an original inscription "around which the entire trajectory of the subject is oriented [ . . . ] in relation to the world of its desires."33 The Thing, which occupies in Lacan's reading the place which in Aristotelian philosophy was assigned to the Good and the arbitrary rule of the gods, is also, as Lacan tells us, the term by which Meister Eckhart referred to the Sou l, and which, as "causa pathomenon," wellspring of human passions, points to the fact of destruction, and to "the radical question of evil" as such. Such a Thing, says Lacan , cannot be mastered or dialecticized ; it can only be encircled. In our conversations, the Imam pondered the agency of destruction through a reflection on evil that is internal to the way the problem is posed in (contemporary) I slamic tradition , as this tradition is brought to apprehend the painful conundrums of contem porary life. He addressed a condition in which being is threatened with extinction, paralyzed, and in turn manifests itself in " petrified forms of pain" engraved in the human soul.34 He called this condition, at once singular and collective, "tadyTq al-naf' [a choking of the soul] . Later in our conversations, he discussed its phenomenology as a destructive work of the imagination, in the encounter with an unbearable real. *
*
*
Upon our first meetings the I mam made it clear that he embraced the practice of healing and the persona of the healer differently than it was often understood in Morocco. While healing had traditionally been associated with a charismatic authority, the authority he claimed for h imself was that of a scholar and a religious guide, a murshid: "The person who aspires to be a healer [al-mu'aliil, if he wants to cure - must be a person who is entrusted with a religious task. A healer must be a learned scholar of the Qur'an and of the Hadith, or he or she must be a spiritual guide [murshid], capable of giving religious advice. " Spiritual counseling is a political act, which in Arabic is also called al-nasiha, a style of critique at once spiritual and political , which does not separate the two, but instead practices their reciprocal entanglement as an ethics and aesthetics of the self. (It can "proclaim" an entire political order heretical, refusing to partiCipate in it, as part of a struggle for the redefinition of the relationship of the order of God and the order of the world.)35 The spiritual counselor is also an exemp lar, the incarnation of an example, an image or idea, bearing witness to a l ife on the path of God; an always imperfect witness of an always imperfect l ife, fraught with strugg les and pain, failures and attachments, but one that attests,36 in its very struggles, to the moral and existential capacity to embrace l ife, as the I mam often said , in an "affirmative" way, and to transform hardship and the experience of alienation and madness into a spiritual trial for the ethical l ife of the soul . This is why the work t h e I mam performed o n h imself is important: t h e way he came t o inhabit his vulnerability, and the fact of accepting, as he repeatedly stated, the reality of contingency and finitude,
Umbr(a)
81
the fact that one's l ife is i n the last instance beyond one's mastery and control; a realization that does not relieve human beings from taking responsibility for transforming their l ives (he cited the Qur' an , 1 3 : 1 1 : "Verily God does not change the state of a people til l they change themselves. ")37 Every loss, calamity, illness, small or big, testifies to the omnipotence of God, and as such summons the afflicted to bear witness to their faith al mu 'min musab, the I mam repeated, citing a Had ith , "the faithful is vulnerable to suffering." -
The work he performed on himself was one of learning to overcome his "fear" (of the jinn, of human abuse, of terror, of violence) by surrendering to the fear of God (in the sense of taqwa, the fear/ respect that also protects), and by seeing h imself, in the phrase of AI-Ghazali, from the point of view of the grave.3S Submission to the sovereignty and mercy of God , as an awareness of one's finitude, and a deep knowledge - in this intimate sense - of what he calls the sharTa are the grounds for the Imam's recourse to what he calls his "experience" [al-tajriba] , and his ability to recognize the singularity of situations, the way in which , in some cases, life can be once again embraced by the afflicted. In his practice as a healer, the Imam attended to those who addressed themselves to him or were brought by their famil ies because of severe psychopathological symptoms. In some cases it was their first attempt at a cure; but most often they arrived at h is door after a long therapeutic quest across healers and sanctuaries for the mad, visits to psychiatrists, and in some cases after a hospitalization. He l istened, asked questions (always including in his address the family members who had come with the sick, for he saw sickness as a knot in a larger history of obliterated connections), proposed a cure that consisted of herbal remedies that he prepared himself and Qur'anic recitations, the practice of ruqya (literal ly "spiritual elevation"), in which specific passages of the Qur' an bearing an effective relation with the person 's condition are read to the sick. In some cases Qur'anic recitation led to a direct struggle with the jinn (al-$Br, strugg le, ann ihilation), and included the temporary unconsciousness of the person, whose corpse-like body became the stage for the manifestation of a demonic presence. It was a struggle fought with the sole force of the recited Qur'an, where all forms of relation or negotiation with the jinn, other than through the affective and terrifying impact of the divine word itself, were foreclosed . The Qur'anic utterance opened an eschatological space, a Time of the End, and the voice of the healer materialized a prophetic intervention . I n the Imam 's words: If the healer has firm trust in God, sustains himself by God , he is devoid of all fear, he is not afraid of the jinn or of anything other than God. He places his confidence in the Qur'an, because the Qur'an is a miracle [mujiza] , a miracle that transcends all human reason, and that descended on the Prophet. That miracle is overpowering for both the human being and the jinn, it has a force to subdue, to vanquish. For the Qur'an has a potent effect on the jinn [athr 'ala al-jinn] , terrifies him [iukhiyyifuh] , throws him in a state of fright, this is inevitable. At the outset, in the I mam's analytic description, the work of the healer is that of a political-spiritual diagnOSis. The space of the cure addresses an affliction which is singular, but which is also a symptom that speaks of a collective conditio," and a history: healing, and the sickness itself, are a kind of bearing witness. The illness, the madness, decries the hypocrisy of a social l ife devoid of care and equity, the
Umbr(a)
82
PI\NDOLFO
violence of the state, and the rule of injustice and corruption . It is a de-forming mirror that "reveals" a state of terror that has broken the subject. The event of madness is treated by the Imam as a traumatic awakening of the collectivity as a whole. Illness is not an individual condition, even though it affects a person in a singular way. It summons the collectivity in the mode of what Lacan calls a "tuche, " an encounter with the real. The event of madness in the discourse of the I mam, if read within a Lacan ian vocabulary, is a wake-up call , but not just a cal l from the world outside, the accident, the i l lness, even though it is that as well ; it awakens the collectivity, and the subject, to something "more real than our waking ,"39 to "the other real ity" that is beyond the dream.4o What becomes manifest, says the Imam, are the agency of evi l and the reality of destruction (Shaytan , the Qur'anic figuration of the problem of evil), which work simultaneously at the level of the oppressive structures of the "Pharaonic" state,41 and in the intimate struggles and intractable heterogeneities of the human soullself [al-nafs]. The opening gesture is hence one of critique, which here takes the form of a proclamation of heresy [takf/r]. The event of madness is also the disclosure of a system of terror, i njustice and abuse. The I mam describes and contrasts two opposed forms of sovereignty, i n what is at once a "med ical" and a politico-spiritual diagnosis. On the one hand , there is the just sovereignty of God , to which human beings must submit, and i n which they find agency and deliverance. On the other, there is the unjust tyranny of the Jinn - and Shaytan behind the jinn (and the forms of government that resemble its rule), which subjugates and enslaves those who fall under its power by reducing them to a state of moral impairment. Through his d iscussion of sorcery [sihr] as a prime cause of madness, the I mam describes a SOCiety at the edge of heresy, calling for the urgent need of spiritual renewal - echoing in this sense central questions and themes raised within the contemporary Islamic revival, from Sayyid Qutb to the Moroccan Sheikh Abdessalam Yassine. The entrapment he describes as the sovereignty of the Jinn/Shaytan is i ndeed of a very different nature from that found in the (vernacular) spirit de-possession cures. The operation of magic [sihr] is both that of "false healing"and of the J inn itself. The world of the Jinn mirrors the world of false healing, and it engages in commerce with it, as in the image of jinns who bring " information" to the false healer. Eventually, the two together subjugate the subject and cause him to doubt the truth of revelation. I n h i s words: When the healer has had the better o f the jinn, the person has in fact fallen prey to the Sultan of the Jinn, who is now in command [ya'mur] and can now count on that human (ins) as his subject, because that person is lost to the way of God [dalij. That person is now a property of the jinn, and whenever the jinn wants him or her; the jinn can find him or her. "
II
I n the discourse of the Imam, the Jinn is a materialization of the risk of kufr: untruth, ingratitude, contestation of the Oneness of God ("Shaytan is ever ungrateful [kafDr] to his Lord," Qur'an 1 7:28-29).42 The scene is set of a world of i njustice and abuse, predicated on falSity, which is at once a description of theological failing, the risk of eternal damnation, and of political corruption in the mundane, historical world. The image of the jinns who bring "information" to the "false healer" is remi niscent of the mukhabarat the infamous secret police, and its routine recourse to torture and assassination, in the secret basements of police stations. (Echoes can be heard here of the actual real ity of torture and secret detention experienced by many youth associated with the Islamic movement in recent years.) -
Umbr(a) 83
Untruth [kadhib] , injustice [zulm] , and oppression are the characteristics of the world of the jinn: they are also d ispositions located in the human soul . The prime cause of sorcery [sihr] , and hence madness, argues the Imam , is al-ikral [coercion] , the absence of justice, the impossibility of an equ itable recourse by the oppressed, as well as the condition of intimate terror and intimidation in which the person is thrown by that state of coercion: " Human beings exist in justice [adami wajOdi al- ad�. And justice is violated by way of coercion [ikral] . " The second cause of sorcery, and hence madness, is the envy [al-hasad] generated by the desire to possess: the delusion of commodities. In Lacanian terms the event of madness "shows." It reveals in an anamorphosis the apparatus of power and the violence of the state by disclosing the sovereignty of the Jinn. Violence is manifest in the picture through the visibility of the illness. The event of madness awakens us to a deception , exposing something that was to remain covered, and enabling a different, "eccentric" angle of vision, one that is proper to dreams. The showing happens at the level of the "stain," which necessarily eludes the field of ocular vision and bears witness to the annihilation of the subject. The event of madness in the d iscourse of the I mam occupies in this sense the position of the skull in Lacan's famous reading of Holbein's painting The Ambassadors, where the insignia of wealth , power, and science are shown as reflected , from a certain angle, in the skull at the feet of the Ambassadors an anamorphic ghost pointing to the ruin of the whole. What "shows" in the discourse of the Imam is the anamorphic ghost of the Jinn. From its eccentric angle, madness makes visible the regime of the Jinn, the metamorphosis of the Jinn as Shaytan and of the nafs [sou l] as the site of a struggle. -
The event of madness, in other words, "shows" the obverse of the subjugation of the subject i n the everyday unfolding of social l ife - a waking l ife that the Imam describes as a slumber of the soul . (At that level, Safouan says, parole can no longer engage, because the cond itions for engagement are absent. Or symbolic engagement is impossible because "the respect of such a contract would imply that the subject submits to becoming nothing more than a worthless cog in service to a machine which does not hide its intention to exploit or exclude her. ")43 Sometimes, as Piera Aulagnier and others have written, reflecting on their clinical work with psychotic patients, madness is the only path open for the subject, and " people said to be crazy, in the ordinary sense of the term, show us what was necessary to do in order to survive."44 *
*
*
In the discourse of the Imam the heterogeneity of evil is clearly at work in a double movement between the collective register of what might be called a "prophetic d iagnosis" (anamorphic visibility) concerning the state of subjugation of the society as a whole,4s and the battlefield of the nafs, where the longings and passions are inspired by, engage with , and are transformed into the destructive force of Shaytan. I cite the Imam: I said that a/-nafs is the yeast, the fertile land that Shaytan cultivates and tils; but he does not cultivate grapes, figs, and pomegranates! He cultivates desires, cravings and longings [shawqan] and with them blasting and bombs. From the moment of their manifestation they make an impression in the nafs, leave a mark, and set it ablaze. [ . . . ] The origin, the
Umbr(a)
84
cause, is Shaytan, he instigates and terrorizes the nafs; but the nafs is the great enjoiner of evil [al-nafs al-'ammara bi ai-sO'], it commands evil and calamity. It is not an external demon that strikes the person, but an internal enemy, a capacity for evi l that is at once internal and external to the soul/self. Behind the work of the jinn there is Shaytan , who is not independent of God, but is h imself internal to God's creation and volition . Evil, in this configuration, and in the understanding of the Imam, is not a negative force, but an ongoing ontological challenge. Unlike animals and plants, humans have the responsibil ity of choice, they are the site of a struggle, and can choose to follow God or Shaytan: the never-ending risk of evil , nested in the human soul , in the cravings and desires of the nafs, marks the space of their specific freedom. It is in this sense that the Qur'an repeatedly says that Shaytan only has power over those who choose to fol low his way: '" I had no authority over you except to call you ; and you responded to my call. So blame me not, but blame yourselves'" ( 1 4:22).46 According to Ali SharTatT's re-reading of the d ialectic of man and Shaytan, the human is a two dimensional creature, composed of God (spirit) and clay, and needs both elements. Shaytan is not opposed to God as evi l is opposed to good; it is included in God's volition, and opposed to the spiritual/divine part of human beings. The element of destruction is ever present, and is necessary for the human life-form, and for the possibility of freedom: "within man, Satan wages war against God, and man is their battlefield. [ . . ] This constant striving and struggle takes place i n man's h idden being, until finally he chooses one of the poles as the determinant for his destiny. "47 .
What is important to g rasp in this duality, and in the notion of struggle itself, is that the Imam is speaking of a positive challenge, the challenge of a radical heterogeneity that sets the rhythm and pulsation of a form of l ife - a form of life engaged with the risk of destruction. Evi l in this sense is a revealing element, which at once d is-figures the status quo, providing an always-precarious (anamorphic) angle of visibility, and sets a flow of subjectivity in movement, in the punctuation of an ethical life. (This resonates, for me, yet beyond the possibility of translation, with Lacan s treatment of evil and the death drive in his Ethics seminar, where ethics is the precarious movement of a being-at-risk, suspension in a zone between two deaths and two modalities of destruction, one leading towards the termination of desire, and the other to submission to the law as a "service of goods, " to Antigone s assumed martyrdom or Creon s re-enforcement of the law of the state.)48 For the I mam, it is only when the struggle subsides, when the nafs, and the heart, become inert, and are turned into stone, that ethical being ceases to exist, and all "activity" stops. This is what happens in acute melancholy [a/-ka 'aba: sorrow, grief, depression, gloom, melancholy], the condition the Imam calls "tadyiq a/-nafs," "soul choking." In a different context, pondering what to do, how to think, with and after the butchery of World War One, Freud resorted to the notion of a primary destructive drive and its radical heterogeneity. His thought on ambivalence - its ineluctability - and on the intimate enemy which is the death drive, can be read as an engagement with these questions. In his 1 9 1 5 essay on war and death, Freud had identified a hetero aggressive propensity of the drives in a murderous displacement of self-destruction, and in the failure to
Umbr(a)
85
think (subjectivize) one 's own death as a radical exteriority. But in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) and Civilization and its Discontents (1930) he elaborated this as a radical ambivalence of life and death that manifests itself in the form of a struggle - a "battle of giants. " The "battle" takes place beyond the economic rule of the pleasure principle, in an intermediate zone between the possibility of regeneration and the elasticity of the drive, in its fatal push toward inertia and death. In this sense, ambivalence, and the struggle itself, can be seen as the circuitous paths of life against itself, in the radical heterogeneity of a risk and a certainty, which Freud saw as a return to the inorganic state, beyond the subject and beyond life - a radical exteriority that is always lurking and comes to be exposed in trauma. For Freud, and in a different sense for the Imam, the space of the struggle in the vision of death defines at once the possibility and the risk of subjectivity. The death drive is an existential, political, and ontological lesion at the heart of life, 49 which takes on the connotation of the theological concept of evil. It is in this sense that "takflr, " at once internal and external to the sou l/self, can reclaim a space of l ife in the surroundings of destruction. There, on that border, a folding of the inside and the outside, of the soul with its intimate enemy, of the personal and the collective, is found jihad a/-nafs, a central figure of the agonistics of the soul : "spiritual effort, or exercise," but also "jihad , " in the sense of war. To understand the struggle of jihad a/-nats solely in the sense of the refinement, or the perfectibility, of the soul reduces the stakes of what for the I mam is an actual struggle, fraught with danger, and with the never resolved risk of an inassimilable loss.50 Ethical being is precisely that i ntimate struggle, with a heterogeneity that can never be resolved, and with a violence that is forever lurking.51 (Antigone, Lacan tells us, was cold as stone, "inhuman, " because living, she was already dead. It is in her lament that she comes to life, in the vision of death, and having crossed the limit of Ate; in her lament, her desire, "visible" and "audible, " moves us, the chorus - we who are caught in the slumber of the soul - to tears. It is not that she finds a voice in the proximity of death, or that she sings in her autodafe, but that in crossing the limit and looking back to her life from the place of the tomb, from the living contemplation of her disappearance, she is able to enter the site of a struggle. In its midst a certain listening becomes possible.) Inhabiting such a struggle-at-the-limit i n his practice with patients, and in a daily confrontation with what he described as the risk of the two related limits of kufr and madness [humq] , the Imam dwelled in a space from where, like a funambulist, he was able to negotiate the d ifferential boundaries of the diagnosis, theological and medical, and listen for the vibrations of being: "when the jinn speaks through the tongue of the affl icted." For as long as he could register the "activity" of a jinn, there was a space of l ife that could be reclaimed i n the midst and at the limit of destruction . While on one hand he offered an understanding of a/-humq, madness, as an u ltimate inert state, fundamentally irreversible, and impossible to treat - because it is the last vestige of the destructive work of the jinn who has in the end damaged the brain, on the other he was able to address innumerable intermediate conditions in which the jinn could be heard , in which, as he put it, "keykhallef a/-jinn ," the jinn could be felt moving, "working," in a process of destruction that the I mam could still seize as a form of Iife.52
Umbr(a)
86
I I I . SO UL CHOKI N G , PAI N , & TH E I MAG I NATION We should perhaps conceive of pain as a field, which , in the realm of existence, opens precisely onto that limit where it is impossible for a being to move, to escape. - Jacques Lacan53 Death cannot be understood by those who do not understand l ife, and life can only be understood through knowing the true nature of the spirit itself. - AI-Ghazali54 Wel l aware of the double-edged resonance of the concept of amrad nafsiwa ("spiritual afflictions," a term that translates, in other contexts, as psychological and mental i l lnesses), the I mam argues that the "maladies of the soul " are not located in the body but are often manifested as or lie at the origin of physical illnesses. Amrad nafsiwa are of demonic origin , but beyond the vernacular representation of harm in terms of jinns (as in the vernacular cures) they have to do in a fundamental way with the d ialectics of the nafs and the work of the I maginative facu lty in relation to the trial of faith in the experience of despair, in the encounter with pain, in the manifestation of the desiring self, and in the intimate struggle with harm . This has to do with what, drawing from a classical tradition of med ical-theological thinking (in a Platonic and neo-Platonist legacy), the I mam calls the "three powers," "faculties," or "drives" that animate and endanger human l ife. The three forces/drives [quwwa] are that of anger [quwwa a/-ghadabiwa], sexual desire [quwwa a/-shahwaniwa] , and the i ntellect [quwwa a/-'aqliwa]. Of the three, the intellect attempts to regulate the other two but hardly succeeds because the key question, the I mam stresses, is not reason but faith. The Imam points to the passion of anger [a/-ghadab] , and the sentiment of grief [a/- ka 'aba] as prime causes of i l lness - a malady of the soul that also affects the body, and that can lead to madness, melancholy, or suicide. B ut while other classical Arab medical thinkers regard anger solely as a bodily affect that causes an imbalance i n the circulation of blood all the way to the brain, the Imam followed AI-Ghazali in understanding anger as a passion of the soul that is both in the body and not, and whose imbalance is due to heedlessness of God and blind attachment to worldly possessions and pride, a delusion of mastery, in fact, and of the autonomy of the wil1 .55 Excessive anger and despair in the face of adversities are ultimately related . he says. to a failure to commit one's trust i n God (a/- yaq fn. the certainty of faith). and to inhabit one's vulnerability as a remembrance of death and God. (For AI-Ghazali however. as well as for the I mam, anger cannot and should not be extirpated in human beings: it is ethically necessary to engender the virtues of courage and fortitude.) I cite the Imam:
Umbr(a)
87
La taghdab! Restrain from anger! It is anger and g rief [a/- ka 'aba] that are the first cause of i l lness for the soul/self [a/-nafs]. The Prophet only became angry when the hudOd allahi [God's boundaries] were violated . Hence the foundation, the root of everything , is faith and the certainty of faith [al- iman wa al- yaq Tn] . If the foundation is strong we call it in our sharra "a/- yaq Tn, " conviction, trust. When something happens, i n the world, i n your l ife, a calamity, a loss, you do not become angry. Faith and trust can contain the drive of anger. Our trust in God tel ls us: this is the power of God radar allahl] . And my own volition is from God: "iradati min allah . " He goes on t o reflect on why people today are incapable of experiencing the ground of faith. What is happening today, in Morocco and other parts of the Muslim world, he says, is similar to what happens to "people in the West" : "They want to be whatever they wish, but life, our l ife span, is decided by God . They end up clashing with the real [a/- waqr in other words, they dwell in illusion]. They are h it by real ity and in the end become sick. They are overwhelmed by grief or despair. " -
The I mam 's psycho-somatic a n d spiritual-physiological approach stresses at once the desiring soul 's risk of straying (a/ da/a/ : from the path of God, and from ethical existence) i n the context of contemporary l ife, the reality of exclusion [a/-hirman] , dispossession and g rief, the temptation of evil (Shaytan) as a struggle internal to the nafs, and the affective impact of the Imagination, of "images, " on the heart. I n contrast to the privileged status of a/-'aql [the intellect] in Western thought, in the I mam reading the heart [a/-qalb] is the critical site. The heart is at once the center of feeling and the faculty of the Imagination [tasawwur, takhayyu�, the metaphysical place of faith and connectedness with the d ivine and the organ that oversees the circulation of blood in the body. Affects first experienced , induced and imaged by the nafs, the desiring soul , are transmitted to the heart. The heart receives those images and visions [suwaran], and their "impression" or engraving sets the spiritual-existential tone in the person, which in turn produces bodily effects by impacting the circulation of blood and the organs. In the Imam 's analytic descri ption of this complex set of connections and relations, faith and imag i nation play a fundamental role. -
When the Drive of Anger comes to dominate the body [musaipra fT a/-jism] , in the heart and i n the flow the circulation of blood speeds up, becomes faster and faster in the veins and the arteries [awd�l of the person, and that human being comes out of normal, customary l ife [ yakhruj a/-ins an 'an ma '/Ofi, comes out of the traced path], exits the real world [a/ waqi], and this causes crimes to happen, or rebellion, or sin; the crimes may be theft, robberies, killings, illicit sex, or gathering of wealth through falsity and usurpation. Faith [a/-iman] is the basis, when associated with conviction [a/-yaq Tn]. Yet there can only be faith , trust in God, if there is activity in the sense of humanly shared eth ical action [a/ 'ama�, which is sorely lacking i n a com m u n ity m i ned by social ex clusi on , i nj us t ic e , and by a form of death- i n - l ife. Or, in a related sense, faith and the authenticity of ethical action are inaccessible in a community where the intimate proximity of Islamic ideals has been lost, where there is no equity and where the power of commodities and the lure of consumption make vanish the call for the values of reciprocal help and support, the sense of j ustice, and the remembrance of death in daily l ife as the foundation of ethical action. In such a world, says the Imam ,
Umbr(a)
88
the heart that receives the affects and visions of the nafs, i n its worldly desires, as well as in its incurable sadness and grief, is all too often no longer the heart of a M uslim.56 It is thus that the nafs becomes prey to the whispering and the terror of Shaytan , and sends its harmful imaginings to the heart - visions of dissolution and destruction, of irretrievable loss. The heart is affected, and participates in destruction, until the self begins choking , all sense of life vanishes, and the person g ives into destruction and self annihilation: "What is the cause of suicide [a/-intihar]? It is from the choking of the nafs [tadyTq al-nafs] . And what is the cause of choking? It is Shaytan . Shaytan whispers in the ears of the person, 'You will die, death is your only perspective, ' and the human being chokes." TadyTq al-nafs, the oppression , or choking of the soul, is the result of an unbearable pain that paralyzes and sculpts in the soul and in the heart, as if i n stone, images of destruction that shut the door to all possibility of imagining a horizon, erecting the h igh walls of a claustrophobic space. The Imam describes how Shaytan , the principle of harm at once internal and external to the human soul , "oppresses and terrorizes the nafs" [ashaytan yastafTzu a/-nafs], and "the nafs sends images of destruction , burning images, evi l images, to the heart" [suwaran sa/biyyatan, qab ihatan]: Hence the nafs sends to the heart negative and hopeless images of the future, and the heart forms an image of l ife [a world-view, a gestalt] as life-burned (haym mudrama) l ife-destroyed , and starts imagining that nothing good can happen in the future, only oppression and d isaster are foretold, that all there is pain and torture (a/-'adhab), poverty and exclusion, d ispossession and destitution (hirman). Only that will be. And so that person Unsan] l ives a burning moment, God protect us from Harm [from rising Shaytan] . [ . .] And these images that the nafs receives in the form of a devil ish whisper, [a/ waswas] , colonize and murder the heart, which in truth is not the heart of a Muslim. For if faith is present in the heart, the person thinks/remembers those images only if they are affirmative images [suwaran ijabiyya]; if the heart is deserted by faith, the person accepts those images, welcomes them, and they set it ablaze. And choking, the oppression of the soul [tadyTq], instills terror in that person [tayTq b-/-insan]. And he can no longer aspire to something that might bring renewal , something affirmative, other than his own dying, and thinks incessantly of the way in which to bring about the limit of death . This is suicide. .
The maddening insinuations of Shaytan to the nafs de-realizes the self, which loses its sense of g rounding and connectedness to other beings, entering into delusion or sinking into a cadaveric loneliness that carries the presentment and the odor of death . The "whisper" seizes control of the nafs and murders the heart, in the double sense of causing it to lose trust in God in an experience of despair (exiting Islam and entering kufr), and becoming mad ("the whisper," al-waswas, is a Qur'anic figu re of madness). The hallucination and multiplication of loss in the feeling of melancholy is for the Imam the theological risk of despair, at the threshold of both kufr and madness, when life takes the form [the Imam says the "image"] of a fatal concatenation of spectral losses sinking into each other and entering a space of radical doubt, epistemological quicksand, where the impossibility of trusting the other intersects with the a palimpsest of betrayals and spiritual murders. Eventually this leads to the annihilation of the soul, in this world and the
Umbr(a) 89
other. Soul choking describes a world of l iving death , where the proximity with death is such that there is no longer a relation, "death" can no longer be "imag ined ."s7 In this configuration the imagination itself becomes an agent of destruction, in a soul-snatching that doubles the "torture" [a/- 'adhab - his word] of the real where dispossession , destitution, inj usti ce and exclusion seem to be all the subject has ever known. It is a real where engagement can only be "falsified " (Safouan) , and where televised images of destruction and the routine instrumentalization of suffering, pain as spectacle, on an i nternational and local scale, snatch even the possibility of recognizing an authentic expression of pai n , rendering the demon ic circulation of images the sole theater where the nafs may dwell , a theater of "falsity. " In the logic of the Imam's description, i n this sense, the imagination turns into an agent of destruction because it is itself captured, snatched, by an i nvasion of media images, images of a desire haunted by the commodity, by the sense of failure and impossibility, because its capacity for ethical work is disabled ; and because, in the larger sense of the nafs' worldly desire, the access to the enjoyment of the g lobal and idealized commodities can only be experienced as a maddening lack, in the hallucinatory apparition of a fetish and its alienating effects on the soul .
The soul/self registers those realities, bears witness to them in its pai n , i n the "impression" they make on the heart, but that registering does not lead to forms of engagement, to "thinking , " to eth ical and political action [a/- 'ama�. Pain is internalized as a wound, incorporated as despair, and the imagination reinforces the subjugation of the subject, which manifests itself as a death drive.s8 The imagination, in fact - and this is a point to ponder also in relation to psychoanalysis - is the specific channel by which subjugation conquers the heart: "The nafs sends to the heart negative and hopeless images of the future, and the heart forms an image of l ife as life-burned, life-destroyed ." There is no protective shield, no counter-movement, no possibility of renewal . The I mam is speaking of an i nfraction , an invasion: the choking "instil ls terror i n the person," freezes the person in place, defining a zone where, in Lacan 's phrase, being can no longer move, cannot escape, cannot avoid the paralyzing impact; a zone in the shadow of death where the self exists only in a trajectory of annihilation. (This is a theory of trauma, if the concept can be reclaimed in a different way, in dialogue with Freud 's line of inquiry, and with Abraham and Torok's notion of the building and transmission of a "crypt.")S9 Soul choking is the Imam's depiction of such acute melancholy, a melancholy described by some of the youth with whom I discussed this questioneD in terms of another figure of despair: a/-qanat, the melancholy-boredom , loss of all hope, which empties the self, and "sends it off" into nothingness. We say of a person qnat - he or she fell into despair. A human being, when he falls into despair, all doors are shut for him, he can no longer see or distinguish anything, and abandons h imself to drugs. Lhag wahed J-hadd, he has reached a Limit. His head is full; he sees only one th ing, hanging himself; his rOh, his soul-spirit, doesn 't stay in place, is no longer there, he sent it off with the drugs . . .And as for what is on his mind, only one thing : death. This is a description of the vanishing of desire and the surrender of struggle. For "struggle" Uihad a/-nafs] , in this vision of l ife and the sou l , attests to the presence and activity of an ethical subject.
Umbria)
90
I n the trad ition from which the I mam is speaking, which for him is greatly indebted to AI-Ghazali, the I magination [tasawwur] is the faculty that mediates the knowledge of the sou l i n the world of sensible qualities. It is perhaps useful to recall that I magination here is not the faculty of representation, defining the contours of the world-as-a-picture, where the subject is (geometrically) constructed to occupy the position of a viewer, of a point of perspective.61 In the understanding of the I mam the soul/self (in its different dimensions as al-nafs, al-rOh , and al-qalb, desiring soul , spiritual soul, and heart) is shaped by the "impressions" (al-athar [if plural, then athar] , traces), the "imprints," of images. The soul is etched at the level of its capture, its propensity to delusion , its relation to cravings and desires instigated by Shaytan; but the faculty of I magination, in the effective way it impresses the soul and the heart, is also the medium of knowledge and transformation, opening to the possibility of ethical existence. Through an extension of the bodily senses, what might be called , fol lowing AI-Ghazali , an "analogical" sensorium, the Imagination can enable a vicarious experience of aspects and dimensions of the world, visible and invisible, which lie beyond the immediate reach of the soul/nafs. The role of the imag inative faculty in apprehending the experience of death (approximating its "tasting") , and in the pursuit of witnessing the divine in d reams and other modalities of unveiling is pivotal for the possibility of an ethical life. Yet the same imaginative facu lty can also accelerate the demise of the soul/self, on a slope to delusion and annihilation , and away from the truth of revelation. Deprived of its grounding in faith, guarantee of reality and truth, the imag ination spins out of bounds, and hallucinates (rather than apprehends or "tastes") the reality of loss and death. (It is perhaps for this reason that in oral poetry the imagination is referred to as "shaytany," my shaytan, in its capacity to hallucinate presence in burning loss.) Somewhat differently from the classical or Gnostic theosophy of 'aJam al- mithaJ [the imaginal world], the Imam approaches the imagination with the pragmatiC understanding of a healer and a spiritual guide, listening to the singularity of pain - its u nbearabi lity, without normalizing its violence or its risk, and attempting to provide an anchor, and some spiritual tools, for those locked in the grips of despair. I nspired by AI-Ghazal i, Qutb, and the Moroccan Shaykh Yassine, his reformist vision re-politicizes the question of despair, and is less interested in the Gnostic or ecstatic aspects of the pursuit of witnessing through imag ination and u nveiling. I nstead, the I mam is concretely concerned with addressing the pain of h is community, and initiating a process through which the nafs might find grounding in faith once again and connect to a collectivity, and in the same turn , become capable of responding to a divine address. It is in this sense that the Imam stresses the concept of an affirmative i magination, "affirmative images" [suwaran ijabiyya] , "fortifying resemblances" [shabah muqaww i] , which he opposes in h is work with the youth to the destructive impact of the images of oppression and choking [shabah al-dTq], images of despair [shabah al- ya �] , and to the picture of a world in which there can be no activity but only pain [al- 'alam]: "The Messenger of God opposes despair, opposes g rief. I s lam op poses gloom [a/- 'ub asiwa] , struggles against sadness. Today many Muslims, turning their faces in a petrified sadness, are pervaded by gloom. " Beyond this struggle o f images (where the spiritual guide fights on behalf o f the melancholic soul with the spear of affirmative images) , is the concern with enabling once again al- ama/, the possibility of
Umbr(a) 9 1
ethical action - activity, work, movement, and the fact of having a job, an active role in society, which , the I mam says, is the condition of possi bility of faith: Iman bidOni ama/ /a yumkin , he says; "it is impossible to have faith without work. " "Activity, " work, is the opposite of a/-bitaJa [inactivity, idleness, and in a concrete sense "joblessness"] ; it conveys lack of all value, and the fact of being i nert. I n his pragmatic reference to the "affirmative" force of the imagination and its relation with a/ ama/, activity in the world, the I mam echoes the voice of traditional I slamic values in the pursuit of daily life, as well as Qutb's reflection on "al ijiibiyya, " the ethical responsibility of the person to hold an "affirmative orientation" to life as part of the "obligation to bear practical witness to Islam. "62 Yet fulfilling this obligation under conditions of hardship, such as those that characterize life in his neighborhood, as in many similar locations in Morocco and the M uslim world, cannot be taken for granted. This is a point that for the Imam raises the question of the limits of eth ical action in a society where the conditions for material subsistence and a life of the soul are not met, a society characterized by what Sheykh Abdelasam Yassine called "spiritual murder" [tadbih al-ma'nawiJ .63 I n the midst of our discussion of imagination and the passions, the I mam cites a much debated Had ith: "Kada a/-faqr an yakDn kufran, " poverty leads t o kufr, i t is close t o being kufr." Because, he adds, " poverty causes exhaustion and hardship, disaster and ruin" [ya'ni an yakun taba'n, wa shaqa 'n, wa khusran]. In the words of Farid Esak, "[y]ou cannot truly submit to God if you are under the yoke of hunger. Such submission is a form of coercion ." The subjugation and annihilation of being is an ethical , but also a political question.54 For the I mam the two questions are related . Traumatic becoming is a form of awakening, not a consolation philosophy. For the Imam, a faq Th a/-nafs who deals with the medical-spiritual afflictions at the limits of l ife, with madness and maddening grief, prior to the possibility of reinstating ethical action and bearing practical witness to faith , it is necessary to guide the nafs to reposition its relation to the experience of pain, and to the " infraction" that caused the soul to choke. It is a question of transforming pain: from a harbinger of destruction to an exercise for thinki ng/remembering, an exercise where the bodily imagination plays a pivotal role. To address this point I will turn to AI-Ghazali . Discussing t h e ethical importance of t h e frequent remembrance o f death in everyday l ife, a s a practice of "vision" that "un-lures" the nafs from heedlessness and loosen its greedy attachment to this world, AI-Ghazali stresses that knowledge of death from the point of view of the living can only be indirect. While the task of the remembrance of death is to make an "impression" u pon a person's contentment in the world, and to "touch and break the heart," this can only be achieved in the form of a meditation on pain, by the intermediary of the faculty of the imagination, because pain is always, necessarily, singular, because it breaks me, and I cannot objectify it ("I have anguish, but I am pain").65 For AI-Ghazali pain is a breakage, an intrusion, an infraction , and as such has a concrete, literal affin ity with death. For this reason, if we are to remember death, we must become capable of inhabiting, and tasting our pain. (I n the language of psychoanalysis, as such untranslatable to this context, one can note that pain is beyond the pleasure principle and opens onto the field of the ReaL) AI-Ghazal i invites his readers to meditate on the death of their loved ones, because the emotional bond with them impresses the pain of their passing in my soul : feeling the pain of their loss, I can come
Umbr(a)
92
PANDOLFO
to app roxim ate the feeling of "my" death . And yet "my" sou l and "my" death are not mine, for pain [a/ 'alam] , in its very i ntractabi lity, is an imaginal bond of attachment; it touches me, cannot be displaced, but en ables what AI-Ghazali calls "an analogical relation" [al qiyas] It bears witness to something else, opens a connection, establishes a tie. In this paradoxical sense, and by the intermediary of the imagination, pain is relational: it "bears witness, " it is shahid, in the modality of a gift, a debt, a traumatic transmission . I feel/know (my)self by feeling/knowing the pain of the other through "my" pain.66 (This relationship, i n a Lacanian sense, takes place i n the real, beyond the reach of the symbolic.) -
.
AI-Ghazali invites his readers to meditate on how the departed have "made widows of their wives and orphans of their children , " how they used to go hither and thither, while now their joints have rotted away; how they used to speak, while now worms have devoured their tongues, how they used to laugh, while now dust has consumed their teeth . This meditation takes place through a skilled use of vivid visual images: the visualization of (my) body rotting, of the living present "turned ," or metamorphosized, into the temporality of the grave. The task is indeed pedagogical , but call ing this meditation pedagogy reduces its intractability, its traumatic force. For AI-Ghazali it is clear that imagining death means to become capable of undergoing its trauma, the u nbearable pain of separation, "for it is separation itself which causes pain . "67 A bit later in this text AI-Ghazali expl icates the relationship of pain and death, in the context of "tasting" [al dhawq]. Pain affects the riih, the spiritual sou l , just as death does. Hence pain and death share a common quality in the way the riih is affected by the violent infraction, and are related analogically. He invites people to meditate on their lives and on the way pain, through its concrete impact on the riih , connects t o t h e soul 's experience of death. Know, too, that the extreme pain of death pangs is known in its ful lness only to those who have tasted it. The man who has not tasted it may only come to know it [ya'rifuha] by analogy [al-qiyas - via the imag ination] with the pains which he actually experienced, or by analogy with the pains that can be envisaged through reasoning [istidlat - via the imagination], by analogy with the violent states [shiddat] of other people during their death agonies. Concerning the analogy that bears witness for him [yashhadu lahu], and allows him to see, this is as follows: No limb from which the riih [soul/spirit] is absent can feel pain. When , however, the rOh is present, then the facu lty which perceives pain is the riih. Whenever the extremities suffer some injury or burn the effect makes its way to the spirit, which will feel pain ('alam) in proportion to the amount that reaches it. The sensation disperses through the blood, the flesh, and the remaining extremities, so that only a certain part of it reaches the spirit itself.68 AI-Ghazali g ives the example of a person pricked by a thorn, the pain felt, and the way in which the bodily pain is received by the riih. This pain , he says, if we meditate on it, can move us to begin to "taste" another pain, not directly accessible to us, the pain of death pangs. If I inhabit my pain , the pain of the thorn , of the limb, or of the loss of a friend , if I do not flee from it, I can - the soul can - reach through the imagination a partial experience of the tasting of death. This can be only approximate, for it takes place from within the space of the living. When death comes, by contrast, the riih is assailed directly and entirely, the infraction
Umbr(a) 93
is total: "The pain felt d uring the throws of death, however, assails the spirit directly, and engulfs every one of its fractions. The dying man feels h imself pulled and jerked from every artery, nerve, part and joint, from the root of every hair and the bottom layer of his skin from head to foot." For AI-Ghazali as wel l as, in a more pragmatic sense, for the Imam, who is concerned with addressing the theological-medical affliction of sou l choking [tadyiq al-nafs], the point is that inhabiting pain in this second sense, bearing witness to pain without s u cc um b i n g to it, can engender an opening of the sou l. Pain, in this sense, crosses a limit, beyond the paralysis of being, the impossibility of movement (Lacan); it transforms. Such an opening onto death as a way of "seeing" and "tasting" is a different modality of melancholy from the closing up of the horizon, the generalization of the death drive in the affl iction of soul choking. Inhabiting pain through the bodily imag ination, connecting to others in that space, is both unbearable and expansive. And yet the two modalities are contiguous, like the topological reversal in the inside-out structure of a glove (Lacan). The unbearable remains; can never be overcome. And the bereavement of acute melancholy always risks choking the soul , and making being inert. We should not forget the risk: the I mam never does; the two related risks, in his read ing and in his clinical practice, of al-kufr and al-humq, heresy and madness. The question should resonate for us, as it did for Lacan: What does it mean for psychoanalysis not to forget that risk?
Umbr(a) 94
I would like to thank the Imam, faqih al-nafs, Fouad Benchekroun, Luca d' isanto, M ohammed Ham doun i Alami, Khashayar Beigi, Jeremy K. Soh, Da vid Marriott, Charles Hirschkind, Saba Mahmood , Pete Skafish, Sam era Esmeir, Talal Asad, Vincent Crapanzano, and Joan Copjec.
Association I ntrenationale Lacanienne, "Les trois monotheismes, ce qu' ils ont aujourd ' h u i e n commun, " C o l l oqu e Fes, 5 - 8 May 2005. 5.
There is an important growth of activities relat ed to the attempt to establish the presence of a psychoanalytic voice in Morocco, in terms of the transmission of knowledge through semi nars and conferences, as wel l as analytic train ing (in collaboration with number of French and international analysts, the Association Lacani enne I nternationale, and with the sponsoring of the Service Culturel of the French Embassy). The most visible is the Societe Psychanalyt ique Marocaine, created by psychoanalyst Jalil Bennani in 2001 , and the older Association Ma rocaine de Psychotherapie. See Jalil Bennani, "Histoire d ' u ne transmission, la psychanalyse au Maroc, " Prologues 33 (Spring 2005); Jal i l Bennani, L a psychanalyse a u pays des saints (Casablanca: Le Fennec, 1 996), reprinted with new title: La psychanalyse en terre d'lslam .
6.
For a discussion of the predicament, and unheimlich status of "Ies therapies tradition nelles" in postcolonial Morocco, see my "The Thin Line of M odernity: Reflections on some Moroccan Debates on Subjectivity," in Ques tions of Modernity, ed. Timothy M itchell (Min neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000) . Psychoanalysts "comprehended" t h e symbolic efficacy of these cures in terms of suggestion and a one-to-one correspondence with hys teria, and rejected them as alienating for the subject.
monde arabe et islamique," Colloque d e Bei
7.
rut, 2004; " La psyche (An-nafs) dans la CUl ture arabe et son rapport a la psychanalyse," Colloque Beirut, May 20-23, 2004, which was also the founding event of the "Congres inter national des psychanalystes de langue arabe";
In a related sense, see Saba Mahmood, "Secu larism, Hermeneutics and Empire: The Politics of Islamic Reformation , " Public Culture 1 8:2 (2006) , 323-347.
8.
The Fes Conference, " Les trois monotheismes,
1.
M . Fouad Benchekroun, Radio T. Marocaine, August 5, 2008, "Arene generation: La psy chiatrie entre tradition et modernisme," round table with members of patients associations, a psychoanalyst, a religiously m inded physician, and an I mam, legal scholar and healer.
2.
Jacques Lacan, Le Seminaire livre VII: L'ethique de la psychanalyse (Paris: Seuil, 1 986), 1 67. "[ . . . ] what we describe as that central place, that intimate exteriority, that extimacy, which is the Thing [ . . . ]" The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1 9591 960, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter (New York: w.w. Norton & Company, 1 992), 1 39 ; translation modified.
3.
Enquete Nationale: Prevalence des troubles mentaux dans la population generale, M i nistere de la Sante Mentale et des Maladies Degener atives, Rabat, Morocco. Realized in 2005 over the national territory u nder the auspices of the M inistry of Health , with the M I N I diagnostic in terview in vernacular Arabic translation .
4.
Association Lacanienne I nternationale, " La psychanalyse et Ie monde arabe," Colloque Paris, November 2002; Association Lacani enne I nternationale, "La psychanayse dans Ie
Umbr(a) 95
9.
ce qu'its ont aujourd'hui en commun" - orga n ized by the I nternational Lacanian Association with Ibn Rushd , St. Thomas and Maimon ides in the analytic platform as landmark figures of a kind of critical reason that no longer existed in today's Islam - is symptomatic of this con cern .
of addictions, see Psychanalyse de I'informe: Depersonnalisations, addictions, traumatismes (Paris; Aubier, 2003); Massimo Reealeati , CIi nica del vuoto: Anoressie, dipendenze, psicosi (Milano: Franco Angeli , 2002); Jacques Has soun , La cruaute melancholique (Paris: Aubier, 1 995).
Moustapha Safouan , Pourquoi Ie monde arabe n 'est pas fibre: Politique de I'ecriture et terror isme religieux (Paris: Denoel, 2008; my transla tion). In 1 995 the members of this group or ganized a symposium entitled, "Du Droit a la Parole," where Moustapha Safouan had pre sented the base argument of what was later to become his book on the question of "voluntary servitude" in the Arab world.
1 6. This line of thinking , in a different context, has been developed by Fahrad Khosrokhavar in his works on martyrdom and suicide in I ran. See Les nouveau martyrs d'Allah (Paris: Flammar ion , 2002), and L'lslamisme et la mort (PariS: L' Harmattan, 1 995) . Khosrokhavar's diagnostic reading of what he describes as "martyropa thy" during the Iran-Iraq war and in later-year Iran is predicated on the assumption of a "failed" and "oneiric modernity" that cannot lead to the realization of the Subject, and en traps the un-realized subject in a self-destruc tive fantasy that can only find violent fulfillment in death. I would argue that the space in wh ich Khosrokhavar and Benslama are intervening is continuous in terms of their participation in a specific post-9/1 1 paradigm.
1 0. Ibid., 72. 1 1 . Ibid., 1 55. 1 2. Chapter 7, "La fraude de l' Etat Islamique et Ie terrorisme," 1 47-1 62. The section is missing i n t h e English version o f t h e book. 1 3. "To make oneself the guarantor that the sub ject might in some way be able to find happi ness even in analysis is a form of fraud. There is no reason why we should make ourselves the g uarantors of the bourgeois dream." Lacan , Ethics, 303. 1 4. See, for instance, Charles Melman, L'homme sans gravite: Juir a tout prix (Paris: Gallimard , 2005); and Charles Melman and Jean-Pierre Lebru n , La nouvelle economie psyehique (Par is: Editions Eras, 2009). 1 5. See, for instance, Sylvie Le Poulichet, L'art du danger: De la detresse a la creation (Paris: Eco nomica, 1 996); more specifically on the clinic
Umbr(a)
96
1 7 . Already in La nuit brisee (Paris: Ramsey, 1 988), Benslama seized the artiCUlation of subjectiv ity in Islam as both specific to the Qur'anic context (as the subject of Revelation) and in dialogue with the Freudian Lacanian subject of desire (via Kierkegaard), and the concept of pa role. Along those lines Benslama discusses, in the second part of La Psychanalyse a I'epreuve de I 'Islam , how in Islamic tradition the radical alterity of God guarantees the spaltung of the subject. But that is precisely the configu ration of the M uslim subject he sees as collapsing in the Revival. 1 8. Benslama, La psychanalyse, 53. The concep tual imagery Benslama deploys in his text is
uncannily resonant with the hallucinatory cor poreality he attributes to Islamist d iscourse. It would be useful to re-read some of the ex amples he provides in the book in light of a more n uanced understanding of the body, the organs, the heart and the soul in the Islamic medical trad ition. Benslama is not interested , determined, as he is, to find evidence of the fascist organicism he has been postulating from the outset. [At the time of this publica tion , an English translation of Benslama's book is forthcoming; all translations appearing here are thus the author's own , while pagination re fers to the 2002 French edition - Ed.] 1 9 . It should be noted that Benslama's argument
relies on a certain reading of Lacan 's Ethics a reading that I question in this paper. I n interpreting "suicide bombing" a s the realiza tion of the autodafe of the Symbolic, and , in general , in his treatment of the Orig in, of evi l and destruction, Benslama overlooks the con ceptual context and the ironic use of the con cept of evil (and destruction) i n Lacan's discus sion of ethics. Lacan introduces the question of evil as a necessary radical heterogeneity, a revealing element (an anamorphosis) vis-a vis the d iscourse on the good . He turns to the theology of evil to highlig ht the originality of Freud 's gesture of moving "beyond" the Aris totelian tradition of the good and the utilitar ian tradition of an economy of good/s, what he calls the "service of goods." That beyond is the death drive, understood, at one level, as the theological problem of evi l . Lacan's move, however, should not be understood as a phi losophy of the negativity of being and of the Origin - as instead Benslama appears to read it. In the second part of this paper I attempt to show a d ifferent heterogeneity of evi l (the Islamic figuration of Shaytan) in the d iscourse of the I mam , as an ongoing ontological chal-
lenge - one that opens a space of l ife, as the always-precarious possibility of a vulnerable being. Thanks to Luca D' isanto for helping me clarify this point . 20. I n On Suicide Bombing (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), Talal Asad d issects the construction of the object "terrorism" and "suicide bombing" in the ever growing field of terrorism studies in the U.S., from the idea of "just war" versus terrorist action to the hypos tatization of an Islamic "culture of death" with its modern logics of j ihad . Asad's is an acute analysis of the (paranoid) imaginary of terror ism and the horror the suicide bomber triggers in "us" (the "us" i nterpolated by the pre-sym bolic encounter with horror as experienced by the Western liberal subject), as structured by the u nthinkable contiguity and irreducible du ality of compassion and cruelty, h umanism and destruction. 21 . Benslama, La psychanalyse, 27. 22. See, for instance, the reflection of N icolas Abra ham and Maria Torok on this point in L'Ecorce et Ie Noyau (Paris: Flammarion, 1 987) , trans lated into Engl ish as The Shell and the Kernel, ed. Nicholas T. Rand (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1 994); and Nicolas Abraham, Rhythmes: De I'oeuvre de la traduction et de la psychanalyse (Paris: Flammarion, 1 999). For Abraham and Torok, the capacity to assume a posture open to the transmutations of its own knowledge is defining of psychoanalysis (and s ubjectivity) as such .
23 . One need only think of Freud 's acknowl edged debt to Aristotle (in the interpretation of dreams, and for the notion of the mnesic trace) as well his debt to as to the Neo-Platonist tra dition of the imagination and the phantasm.
Umbr(a) 9 7
See, for instance, Giorgio Agamben , Stanze: La parola e if fantasma nella cultura occidentale (Torino: Einaudi, 1 977). I use the term "coun termove" in the sense of Walter Benjamin. See, for instance, "On the Concept of H istory, " in Selected Writings, Volume 4 : 1 938- 1940, trans. E. Jophcott et al . (Cambridge: Harvard Un iver sity Press, 2003). 24. C. Nadia Seremetakis calls this "anti phonic witnessing" in The Last Word: Women, Death, and Divination in Inner Mani (Chicago: U niver sity of Chicago Press, 1 99 1 ); see also Allen Feldman , "Memory Theaters, Virtual Witness ing and the Trauma aesthetic," in Biography, 2 7 : 1 (2004), 1 63-202; and Stefania Pandolfo, "Testimony in Counterpoint: Psychiatric Frag ments in the Aftermath of Culture," in Qui Parle 1 7 : 1 (2008) , 63-1 23. 25. Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman , The Em pire of Trauma: An Inquiry into the Condition of Victim h ood, trans. Rachel Gomme (Princeton: Princeton U niversity Press, 2009). 26. " [I]t being u nderstood that, to a certain extent, a work of art always involves encircling the Thing" ["d 'une certaine fac;:on il s'agit toujours pour une oeuvre d ' art de cerner la Chose"] , i n Lacan , Ethics, 1 41 .
to actions rather than pure intentions. It is a locus of responsibility and a space for trans formation [ . . . ] The Other is encountered at two levels : at the level of an intersubjectivity with other h uman beings in h istory, and at the level of a transcendental intersubjectivity in relation ship to God. Hence the 'existential axis' is fun damentally entangled with the transcendental axis. The d ivine element is always present and never suspended. The ethical claim is made in conversation with the past, the divine, and the present. It is always in relation to a tradition . Heteronymous self - heteronymous subjec tivity is being 'abd, servant, to God" (228 ff). 29. Adnan Houbballah , "La psych analyse et Ie monde Arabe," i n La Celibataire, no. 8 (Spring 2004); "Cette doctrine [psychoanaly sis], lorsqu'elle se refere a la d ivision du su jet - Ie ' parletre' - risque de se hurter a la croyance religieuse en I'etre, d 'entrer en ri valite avec la religion elle meme. Car la religion conserve I'exclusivite de toutes les interpreta tions des mythes, tabous et interdits sociaux. Elle produ it du sens et n ' accepte aucun i ntrus dans son domaine. Comment faire la part des choses entre Ie savoir d ivin et Ie savoir de I ' inconscient, tant que a/-nafs, la psyche, n'a as pas ete subjectivee, laicisee?" See also "Ar gumentaire." On this point, Benslama's posi tion is significantly different.
27. I bid, 232. 28. Ebrahim M oosa gives a rigorous defin ition of the subject in his book on AI-Ghazali , one that i nterfaces with some of my considerations here, and from which I borrow my wording. See AI Ghazali and the Poetics of Imagination (Chapel Hill: U niversity of North Carolina Press, 2005) : "To comprehend the eth ical subject is to grasp how the self/soul becomes the address ee of divine discourse [ . . . ] The self is related
Umbr(a) 98
30. Literally "sharia healing"; but here the term sharia should not be understood solely in the sense of law, and fiqh/jurisprudence, but more precisely as being on the way of God. There is, however, an engagement with the law. 3 1 . Stefania Pandolfo, " Rapt de la voix, " Awal: Revue de I'Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences, no. 1 5 (1 997), 31 -50.
32 . Pa ral lel to Qur'anic healing is the rise of a
scholarly field of Islamic psychology rilm a/ nafs aI-islam I literally, Islamic science of the nafs) that directly engages with Western psy chological theories by selectively re-inscribing them within an Islamic vision of human l ife, knowledge and truth , as empowered by God. Qira'at ff 'ilm al-nafs al-islam l, vol . 2., 'ilm al nafs shakhsiyya . Mahir Saqa Amini, Beirut. -
33 . Lacan , L'ethique de la psychanalyse, 65 (my translation). 3 4. Ibid. , 74. 35. On al-nasiha , see Sheikh Abdesalam Yass ine, al-minhaj al-nabawy [The Method of the Prophet] , 1 989; and Talal Asad , Genealogies of Religion, Chapter 6 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Un iversity Press, 1 993). 36. The symbolic position of the Imam can be de scribed by the concept of "faq Th al-nafs" (AI Ghazali), the sage who understands and can guide the soul and must live as an exemplar. AI-fiqh is usually translated as jurisprudence, but it literally means understanding . See AI Ghazali, Discipling the Soul, Kitab Riyadat al nafs, trans. T.J. Winter (Cambridge, UK: The Islamic Texts Society, 1 995), 36. Exemplarity is intimately related to the work of the I magi na tion; see Moosa, 79.
think of Walter Benjamin's concept of "divine violence" as defining a space for the life of the sou l . 3 8 . "The dead man sits u p and hears the footsteps of those who are present at his funeral, but none addresses h i m save his tomb who says: [ . ] Did you not fear me and my narrowness, and my corruption, terror, and worms?" AI Ghazali, The Remembrance of Death and the Afterlife, in The Revival of the Religious Scienc es, trans. T.J . Winter (Cambridge, UK: Islamic Texts Society, 1 989), 1 35. In his ethnography of sermons and listening-with-the-heart in the Egyptian Islamic Revival (sabwa islamiyya), Charles Hirschkind develops the temporality, and ethics, of an eschatological "seeing with dead eyes" in the everyday. See The Ethical Soundscape (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006) . See also, Stefania Pandolfo, "The Burning: Finitude and the Politico-Theological I magination of Illegal Migration," in Anthropo logical Theory, no. 7 (2007), 329-363. . .
39. D.S. Marriott, "Only Sleeping," in Hoodoo Voo doo (Exeter: Shearsman's Books, 2008), 1 1 . 40. Jacques Lacan, Les quatres concepts fon damentaux de la psycanalyse (PariS: Seuil, 1 973), 59. What wakes us up, Lacan says, "is the Trieb, the drive" ["ce qui nous reveile c 'est I'autre realite cachee derriere Ie manque de ce qui tient lieu de representation c 'est Ie Trieb, nous dit Freud'1-
37. This is the question of God 's omnipotence and "voluntarism" vis-a-vis the space of human autonomy and agency. Contrary to a common psychoanalytic read i n g , h ere G o d 's omnipo tence opens the space of h uman agency. See Jonathan Brockopp, "Taking Life and Saving Life," in Islamic Ethics of Ufe, ed. Jonathan Brockopp (Columbia: University of South Car olina Press, 2003). In a different sense, we may
41 . The association of Pharaoh with the oppres sion and violence of worldly power is found in the Qur'an: "So Moses said to his people: ' Re member the favours of God when he saved you from the people of Pharaoh who afflicted you with torture and atrocities'" (1 4:6; translation modified). The figure of the Pharaonic state (as
Umbr(a)
99
an allegory of modern oppressive regimes) is recurrent i n the writings of Sayyid Qutb , and i n Morocco, Shaykh Abdesalam Yassine. 42. According to Toshihiko Izutsu , the semantic configuration of the concept of kufr cannot be reduced to a simple notion of disbelief; kufr is rooted in basic human dispositions, and the position of faith can never be a g iven , but is an open ethical work - a work which in its unfolding repeatedly encounters the risk and possibility of kufr. See Ethico-Re/igious Con cepts in the Qur'an (Montreal: McG i l l Queen University Press, 2002). [[he translation of the Qur'an is here modified - Ed.] 43. " I n a number of psychotic anamneses one is struck by the doubling effect social real ity has come to enact. Rejection, mutilation, hatred , dispossession, all these situations characteris tic of the predicament of psychosis, are found enacted in real and concrete life - and not just fantasized - in the way society, the group, the state, relate to the person . From the moment that the ' I ' discovers the world beyond the family, at the moment the subject looks to the world for a sign that would grant her citizenshi p [droit de cite] amongst her peers, s h e can on ly find there a verdict that denies her this right, and that offers no more than an unaccept able contract." Piera Aulagnier, La violence de I'interpretation (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1 975), 192. 44. Francoise Davoine and Jean-Max Gaudillere, History Beyond Trauma, trans. Susan Fairfield (New York: Other Press, 2004), xxii . 45. The term is from Shaykh Abdessalam Yass ine s al-minhaj al-nabawy (The Method of the Prophet). '
Umbr(a)
1 CX)
46. In a scene of al-Sira, the account of the exem plary l ife of the Prophet Muhammad , Shaytan is presented as debating God 's reasons for having created him in ful l awareness that he would incite humans to harm and destruction . I n another chapter, the story is told of the child Muhammed being visited by two angels, who slit his bosom and his heart, washed his inter nal organs, opened the heart, and extracted from it a black pebble. See Mahamoud Hus sein , AI-Sira, vol . 1 (Paris: Grasset, 2005). The black pebble in the human heart marks the unending risk of destruction. In the Moroccan popular imagination it is reckoned as a "black dot" [nuqta khela, suda] , which is seen at the source of both destruction and madness. The "black dot," in the understanding of the I mam, is related to the melancholy humor. 47. Ali SharTatT, On the Sociology of Islam, trans. Hamid Algar (M izan Press: 2000) , " Insan wa Is lam , " 78, 74. I would l i ke to acknowledge here the important exchange I had with Khashayar Beigi on this point, and for this paper in gen eral. 48. Lacan, Ethics, 243-290. 49. On the notion of the friend/enemy knot as l ife against itself, see Massimo Recalcati, SUlI'odio (Milano: Mondadori, 2004); and Mikkel Borch Jakobsen, The Emotional Tie: Psychoanalysis, Mimesis, and Affect, trans. Douglas Brick et al . (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1 993). 50. I n this sense, at least in my reading, the exege sis and practice of the Imam cannot be entirely translated into an Aristotelian eth ics of the vir tues in the sense of Alasdair Macintyre, unless the virtues are not themselves understood as vulnerable sites of struggle; see, for instance, Macintyre's discussion of the accidental pos-
sibility that a virtue may lead to evi l, implying the autonomy of the virtues, in After Virtue (South Bend: U niversity of Notre Dame Press, 1 984) 200-201 . The relation of the existential and transcendental axis in the instantiation of the ethical subject is fraught with danger, with an endless state of trial (a/-mihna, a/-fitna), the trial of evil and pain as inassimilable residues. I therefore read the Imam's understanding of jihad al-nafs with Lacan 's moving "beyond" of the Aristotelian ethics of the good, and to ward an ethics of the vulnerable struggle, a kind of wrestling, with an intimate exteriority: an "extimite." See, in a related sense, Judith Butler's "Critique, Coercion, and Sacred Life in Benjamin's 'Critique of Violence, ' " in Political Theologies: Public Religions in a Post-Secular World, ed. Hent de Vries (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006).
destructiveness itself as a reclaimable form of l ife. For instance, Sylvie Le Poulichet, L'art du danger.
,
51 . I n A Season in Mecca: Narrative of a Pilgrimage (trans. Pascale Ghazaleh [New York: Hill and Wang, 2006]), Abdellah Hammoudi reflects on the ever-present fact of violence, as rehearsed in the collective performance and i ntimate ex perience of the pilgrimage: "Qur'anic exegesis and the stories of the prophets amply express this: Satan is part of each of us, another self, a double whom is vitally i mportant to keep in check. He is the 'I' who leads to evil . Perma nent, salutary violence must therefore neutral ize this double, overcome him, and exact his respect. At the same time, we must accept the harsh real ity of his presence. Never annihilat ed, this intimate enemy is always at the ready. We had the means to defend ourselves from Satan . But it was i m possible to ki l l him" (241 ; translation modified) .
52 . Here, the i nsight of some contemporary psy choanalysts working on psychosis and ad diction is relevant, as an attempt to address
53 . Lacan , Ethics, 60 ; translation modified.
54. AI-Ghazali, The Remembrance of Dea th the Afterlife, 1 26.
and
55. AI-Ghazali, Disciplining the Soul. On anger as concerning the body, see M. AI-Razi , Tibb al rul)ani. See also Ibn Qayyim AI-Jawziyya, AI Tibb al-Nabawi, trans. Medicine of the Prophet by Penelope Johnstone (Cambridge, UK: The Islamic Texts Society, 1 998). 56. Note that when the Imam speaks of "the heart of a Muslim" he does not treat " Muslim" as an identity or a "religion," which would then be followed by the qualified "faithful . " It is an ac tive position vis-a.-vis God and the community, and the heart who is incapable of taking that position is no longer Muslim. 57. This point is made by David Marriott in an altogether different context (yet not foreign to the concern of the Imam), in a reading of Fanon's relation to death and political struggle vis-a.-vis the problematic of subjugation and (media) haunting. See "Ice Cold ," in Haunted Life: Visual Culture and Black Modernity (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2007). See also Achille M bembe's "Out of the World," in On The Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 200 1). 5 8 . Abraham and Torok rethink melancholia and the intergenerational transmission of trauma in terms of the two movements of "incorpora tion" and " introjection ." These describe two positions, or modalities, of the subject in its relation to the object two different kinds of -
Umbr(a)
1 01
melancholies. I ncorporation succumbs to it, in trojection is a transformative inscription in the psychic space of the subject of trauma. The question remains of whether the two principles can be separated in actual l ife; their limen, al ways blurred, is here also the site of a struggle. See L't3corce et Ie noyau. 59. I bid., "Deu i l ou melancolie: I ntrojecter, Incor porer. " 6 0 . See Pandolfo, "The Burning." 61 . I n this Islamic tradition of the i mage, Panof sky's historicization of perspective and Lacan's visual rethinking of the Imaginary as a space of effectiveness and capture are part of the as sumptions at the outset. See Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, trans. Christo pher S. Wood (New York: Zone Books, 1 993). 62 . Sayyid Outb, Kha � 'is al- ta$Bwwur aI-Islam T, Chapter 7, al-ijabiyya (Cairo: Dar al-Kutub al 'Arab iyyah , 1 965); translated into English as Basic Principles of Islamic Worldview, Chap ter 7, "Positive Orientation ," trans. Rami David (North Haledon, NJ: Islamic Publications I nter national, 2005) . "He is required to bear prac tical witness to this relig ion - not witness of the tongue or even witness of the heart - with every act he undertakes. It is practical witness of this type that confirms the existence of real , visible and palpable faith" (1 72-1 73). 63. I n a lecture/sermon in Spring 2007, comment ing on the material and spiritual dispossession of the Moroccan youth, the subjugation of the state and its violence, the lack of religious advice, and the temptation of suicide. Video on the web site of the association of AI-'adl wa al-i/Jassan. 64. There is an important debate on the ques tion of poverty and oppression in Islam . Even
Umbr(a) 1 02
leaving aside the issue of jihad in relation to oppression (wh ich is unquestionably one of the dimensions in the approach of the Imam, where at least this is understood as "jihad against poverty"), one can find a multiplicity of readings and responses to the hadith the Imam quotes; see Farid Esack, "Our'an , Liberation, and Pluralism : An Islamic Perspective on In terreligious solidarity against oppression, " in Liberating Faith: Religious Voices for Justice, ed. Roger S. Gottlieb (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003). Esack stresses that there is a requirement of socio-economic justice which is beyond all possible ethical adjustments. 65. "There is no metaphor here, creation of mean ing, but instead analogy, direct transfer from one register to another [ . . . ] It is as if, u nder the effect of pain, the body transforms into the psyche, and psyche into the body. Ordinary language can guide us here: pain awakens, and sometimes wakes us up. [ . . . J By strokes of entanglement, vibrations and successive waves, pain progressively invades the entire landscape, until geography is destroyed , and an unknown one is revealed. I have anguish, but I am pain" (J .-B. Pontalis, Entre Ie reve et la douleur [Paris: Gallimard , 1 977] , 261 ; my translation). 66. What I am saying h ere is, however, entirely based on a reading of AI-Ghazali , for whom pain is both intractably singular, and relational i n the field of Imagination. Wittgenstein's dis cussion of pain, in the Tractatus and the Philo sophical lnvestigations, as well as, in anthro pology, Veena Das and Talal Asad's d iscussion of the agentive and relational quality of pai n , explore related questions. See Veena Das, Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); and Talal Asad, "Thinking about
PANDOLFO
Agency and Pain, " i n Formations of the Secu lar: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003) .
67. AI-GhazaJi , 1 24; "There is no distinction to be drawn between his being taken from these things and these things being taken from him, for it is the separation itself which causes pain [ . . ] This is why the remembrance of death is not separate from the space of actual l ife, of de struction, violence and war. See, for instance, the film The Blood of my Brother: A Story of Death in Iraq, dir. Andrew Berends (2005) , on mourning in today's Iraq in the context ofthe war.
68. AI-GhazaJi, The Remembrance of Death and the Afterlife, 3 8 Translation modified from Arabic original. Kitab dhikr al-mawt wa-ma ba aahu. Book XL of loya 'ulOm al-dTn, (Dar al kutub al-'ilmiyya, Beirut), 490. .
.
Umbr(a) 1 03
- )2 I
::5 CL () O - CJ)
Z O O �
o c cD u CI)
o
-l-
o t CD D
CJ) I W CL
� � O <{ z U - - � >- �
(j) O � CL Z 0<5
Lt u5 :2 <{ w Z - <{ U o
� I
Z� Lt CJ) CL
What is it to treat a culture, to diagnose a religion? What protocols of explanation, identification and prescription are implicated in formulating and answering questions of the kind : "What went wrong with Islam?" This is not an innocent question, one among many, and the reasons for its ideological ubiquity are not difficult to glean . But what are the stakes when the one who asks such a question is not an Orientalist h istorian, or an imperial pundit, but a psychoanalyst, or at least someone d rawing analytical insight and speculative authority from Freud or Lacan? I wish to explore here some of the parameters of intelligibility of questions relating to the putative maladies, impasses, or discontents of Islam (and of religion "in general"), as posed in psychoanalytic terms - terms which I hope to show are instructively entang led with the history ofthe political and philosophical "formatting" of Islam i n Europe. Hopeful ly, such an exercise m ig ht not j ust serve as a critique of the conditions of possibility for diagnostic d iscourses on psychoanalysis and religion in general and Islam i n particular, but as an investigation into something l i ke the political u nconscious of psychoanalysis itself as a secular science and a secular clinic. More precisely, I want to inquire how and why - i n ways that are not necessarily faithful to the prescriptions and precautions of Freud or Lacan - a certain normative political notion of secularizationO(here not a synonym for atheism) has found its way into psychoanalytically inspired treatments of Islam, the Arab
Umbr(a)
1 05
world, or the M iddl � �ast. I n other words, h �w a certain dislocated, maladaptive, voided subject has been more or less surre ptltlo � sly re � de red normative a � d congr�ent with the institutions and ideals of the liberal . . - or, In AI ln Bad lou ,s arl nce, capltalo-parllamentarlan democratic - state. My starting point lies in the � . p � . trope of p �ychlc sub�lsslon, of subjection to the One, which psychologically marks out the subject of Islam as a fanatic or a fatalist (or perhaps a debauched despot). It is by contrast to something like a fanatical submission to the One, an excessive monotheism, that a form of "Judeo Christian" subjectivity might be regarded as normative within psychoanalysis. Or, more precisely, the " Islamic subj ect" may be perceived as having m issed or failed its secularization - the attenuation of the One which is effected by specifically cultic mediations (the Trin ity, the neighbor, and so on) which then carry over a d issipated religious content into a disenchanted social sphere. I want to interrogate the protocols for handling concepts of civilization, culture, and religion (and their often ideological hybrids) within psychoanalysis, partly to consider the anti political timelessness that is ascribed to these terms, especially when they are marked out as somehow pre-secular. Finally, I want to consider under what terms psychoanalytic and philosophical discourses are capable of articulating the relation between politics, religion , and subjectivity without merely replicating or underwriting the very fantasies that pern iciously structure our political and ideological space. *
*
*
I n his book The Jew, The Arab: A History of the Enemy, Gil Anidjar provocatively declares that just as Montesquieu invented Oriental Despotism, so Hegel invented the Muslims.' Kant's remarks on the iconoclastic religions of sublimity in the Critique of Judgment had asymmetrically brought together "the Jews" and " Islam , " the former, as Anidjar notes, as an ethnos more than a religion, the latter almost as a religion without subjects. By contrast, Hegel's conceptual placement of " Mahometans" in the Philosophy of History and Philosophy of Religion can be seen to inaugurate the perception of Islam as a politicized religion characterized by a particular type of subjectivity, which is precisely the subjectivity of fanaticism [Fanatismus]. Before reviewing the parameters of this concept, it is worth parrying a possible objection: did not the Lumieres, and specifically Voltaire, author of the play Le fanatisme , ou Mahomet Ie prophete, inaugurate the figure of the fanatic? On one level , if we take fanaticism as the antithesis of toleration, as the subject's habitation by a violent and monomaniacal religious unreason, this is true. But the concept of fanaticism forged by Voltaire is not religiously specified. That is why Mohammed - who is not himself a fanatic in the play, but the sexualized impostor and lucid manipulator of the human procl ivity to fanaticism and superstition - can serve as the substitutable avatar for Voltaire's Catholic enemies closer to home, a function that Islam as a whole can be seen to serve in a number of tracts from the period. The claim that Hegel philosophically invented M uslims as the bearers of a distinct type of "fanatical" subjectivity can thus be articulated with the idea that Hegel's conception of Fanatismus is in many respects discontinuous from Voltaire's fanatisme - and, we could add , Kant's Schwarmerei. Possibly the most important shift in the passage of the idea of fanaticism from its Enlightenment figure, as violently intolerant religious consciousness, to its Hegelian fo �mulation --:- a passage �hich . . does retain some key elements such as a certain notion of the secular circumscription of the religiOUS, for instance - is the fact that in Hegel fanaticism is articulated in terms of a mode, albeit a destructive
Umbr(a)
1 06
one, of universality, and not merely as the arbitrary and unreasonable imposition of one particular set of beliefs and practices. Islamic religion and Muslim subjectivity accordingly appear in Hegel's writings as the carriers of a un iversal claim which bears certain im portant analogies with the forms of pOlitical subjectivity that characterize the historical and political phenomenology of European Spirit. Tellingly, in The Philosophy of History, Hegel refers to Islam as "the Revolution of the East. "2 The content of this revolution is depicted in fiercely, or indeed excessively, universal ist terms - a theme which is not absent, i n a vulgar and combative guise, from contemporary paladins of the "clash of civilizations."3 Islam "destroyed all particularity and dependence, and perfectly cleared u p and purified the soul and disposition; making the abstract One the absolute object of attention and devotion , and to the same extent, pure subjective consciousness - the Knowledge of this One alone - the only aim of reality; making the Unconditioned the condition of existence."4 I n such passages, which could of course also be regarded as apotheoses of the Orientalist treatment of Islam as a doctrinal and cultural monolith, Hegel accords to Islam a spiritual and conceptual dignity that is rare among European philosophers. Instead of burying it in the lascivious ornamentation of "oriental despotism ," Hegel, in what may be termed a meta-religious register, depicts it as a high-point of abstract thought. The "Oriental principle," as he calls it, commands the destruction of worldly particularity and its spiritual elevation to the One, "the one infi nite sublime Power beyond all the multiplicity of the world" - whence Hegel 's characterization of Islam, i n the wake of Kant's reflections on its iconoclasm, as "the relig ion of sUblimity."s In terms of the philosophical typology of religions - a practice which, as we shall see, is Significant for evaluating the psychoanalytic approach to Islam - it is of interest that the Hegel of The Philosophy of History presents the move from Judaism to Islam as a dialectical one, albeit a dialectical move which, by generating an abstract worship of the One, ends up generating a sterile impasse. Whence this dead end of Geist? The dislocation of God from the possession of a people is depicted by Hegel as engendering a universalizing personality, freed from ethno-national particularity.6 But Islam, if one may put it this way, takes universalism too far. I n Islam, "subjectivity has [ . . . ] worship for the sole occupation of its activity, combined with the design to subjugate secu lar existence to the One. [ . . . ] Subjectivity is here living and unlimited - an energy which enters into secular l ife with a purely negative purpose, and busies itself and interferes with the world, only in such a way as shall promote pure adoration of the One."7 The One, juxtaposed to all particularity, absorbs (and absolves) a voided subjectivity in what could be regarded as a process of the ful l symbolization of the real and the concomitant disastrous real ization of the symbolic. The subject of Islam, in this Hegelian image, is a subject without qualities or predicates. The metaphorical political consequences that Hegel draws from this are not without interest: rather than permitting a mediation of freedom within a d ifferentiated social bond, Islam's politics of the One - which could also be revisited in terms of Badiou's concept of a "passion for the real" - entails that its only way to hold the faithful together is through the abstract tie of the One, which enjoins a constant expansion driven by a generic "energy. "8 Th i s d ep icti o n of Islam as a rel igion of the One permits Hegel to rearticulate, rather than to repeat, the standard tropes of European Orientalism. It is because of its purely abstract universality that Islam is basically expansionist and that its belligerent subjects can express such heroism; it is because of the insubstantial, "inorganic" character of its social compact that it easily slips into degeneration, and that its subjects can sink into such dissolute sensuality and corporeality when the passion for the One inevitably flags.
Umbr(a)
1 07
Hegel thus encapsulates Islam within the idea of fanaticism: "Abstraction swayed the minds of the M ahometans. Their object was, to establish an abstract worship, and they strugg led for its accomplishment with the greatest enthusiasm . This enthusiasm was Fanaticism, that is, an enthusiasm for something abstract - for an abstract thought which sustains a negative position towards the established order of things. It is the essence of fanaticism to bear only a desolating destructive relation to the concrete. "9 The reason for this depiction of Islam as an inherently "fanatical" religion is of course that the singular or concrete form of subjectivity, qua freedom, is absent - a freedom paradigmatically identified with the "consummate rel igion" of Christianity and its sublation in the modern state-form . This might, of course, be regarded as an "insensitive schematization" based on the idea of a uniform Islam understood through the prism of an "absolute and systematic d ifference" from a Christian West.'o As noted , Hegel does indeed bear an interesting, if complex, affinity with these Orientalist tropes. But the philosophical capture of Islam is not based sans phrase on the idea of the opposition between the "rational, developed , h umane, superior" Christian West and the "aberrant, undeveloped, inferior" Islamic Orient." Rather, the Oriental fanaticism of the Revol ution of the East is in many respects isomorphic to the fanaticism of the Revolution in and of the West. If we turn to the 1 824 Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion , the view of Islam as the dead end of an excessive universality, and as a fanatical religion of destruction for and by the One, is complicated by crossing over - in terms of the crucial notion of abstraction from the d ialectic of relig ions to the political field. In a very significant passage, we are presented with the abstractive fanaticism of Islam as isomorphic to the abstract egalitarianism of the French Terror: -
In the Islamic doctrine there is merely the fear of God: God is to be venerated as the One, and one cannot advance beyond this abstraction. Islam is therefore the rel igion of formalism, a perfect formalism that allows nothing to take shape in opposition to it. Or again in the French Revol ution , l iberty and equality were affirmed in such a way that all spirituality, all laws, all talents, all living relations had to disappear before this abstraction, and the public order and constitution had to come from elsewhere and be forcibly asserted against this abstraction. For those who hold fast to the abstraction cannot allow anything determinate to emerge, since this would be the emergence of something particular and distinct in contrast with this abstraction.'2 These lines could, of course, be taken as the matrix of the normatively l i beral tradition of thought which, under the umbrella of the concept of "political religion, " casts a dark light on the seemingly de-differentiating universalism that affects all projects which seek to subject social mediations to the unity of an abstract principle (God or Equality) . Unsurprisingly, Hegel cannot be so easily enlisted. From the standpoint of Hegel 's philosophy of history, and of h is understanding of the French Revolution in particular, we can indeed speak of a "necessary and leg itimate fanaticism," whose destructive and abstractive powers may q ualify it as a "modernizing agent."'3 But what of fanaticism g rasped synchronically, in the context of the modern state? In the Philosophy of Right, fanaticism no longer appears as a necessary if truculent moment in the historical vicissitudes of Spirit, but - now
Umbr(a)
1 08
arg uab ly much closer to the thematic of toleration which motivated Voltaire's handling of the concept - it is featu red as the pathological retention of a right over absolute truth and rationality that would tru m p that of th e state. As Renzo Llorente has elucidated, even though religion and the state share the same content, an d reli gio n can accordingly serve as the factor that integrates citizens into the state, their form differs. Where the state provides a knowledge fou nded on a determinate and differentiated form of rationality, th ereby emb odying the Absolute in a concrete u niversality that does not suppress but rather articulates parti cul arities in their freedom and relative autonomy, the content of religious consciousness appears "in the form o f feeling, representational thought, and faith ."14 It is when the inwardness of religious doctrine seeks to trespass i nto the domain of objective law, and the state's monopoly over it, when "the communities whose doctrine remains at the level of representational thought assume a negative attitude towards the state," and their " polemical piety" (Hegel 's term) brings them into confrontation with the state that the problem of fanaticism rears its head. Fanaticism here denotes the attempt by a religious community to "impart objectivity to their (representationally conceived) doctrine in defiance of the state."15 In holding fast to religious consciousness against the objectivity of the state, fanaticism "repudiates all political institutions and legal order as restrictive limitations [Shranken] on the inner emotions and as i ncommensurate with the infinity of these."lS lt is a "hatred of law, of legally determined right. "17 Religion opposes law and the state to the extent that, qua fanaticism, it seeks to impose - that is, to lend objectivity to - the self-sufficiency of a merely representational thought. As Llorente notes, this kind of fanaticism "necessarily wills abstract representations, all particularizations proving incompatible with the essential indeterminacy of representational thought. "ls Fanaticism here signals the repudiation of the state and its determinate articulation of society through law, that is, through a rational cogn ition or knowledge of differences which does not subsume individuality under an abstract Absolute. I n imposing the "formalism" of its " unconditional subjectivity, " it directly contravenes the precondition of the modern state, which i nvolves the latter's su periority with respect to particular religious doctrines and communities. In other words, it contravenes Hegel 's u n ique understanding of secular modernity. What is unique about Hegel's juxtaposition between fanaticism and the secular foundation of the modern state is the fact that this is not simply the question of immunizing society against the strife created by religious particularisms (as in Voltaire's Treatise on Toleration, for example). It instead involves a philosophical conflict between universalities which enter into rivalry once religious consciousness refuses its proper, and subordinate, place. We can now isolate a number of elements from Hegel's formulation of fanaticism which will be of use in the remainder of our d iscussion. To begin with, fanaticism identifies a politics of the One, of the Absolute as an undifferentiated principle of action, which makes it at once abstractive and destructive. Its subjective and affective dimension is that of an "enthusiasm for the abstract."19 A certain dialectical dignity may be ascribed to fanaticism as a moment in the development of Spirit (as in the French Terror). However, in the modern state, where the objectivity of law and the differentiation of SOCiety surpass and subsume religious consciousness in a secular polity, fanaticism (in the guise of " polemical piety") appears as a pathology of both the fanatical subject and the fanatical religious community. To the extent that this kind of fanaticism is a challenge to the state, it is correct to note that "religious fanaticism is necessarily
Umbr(a)
1 09
political in nature - indeed, is by definition a kind of political fanaticism. "20 Echoing the resilient trope of Islam as a thoroughly political , and consequently expansionist, religion, Hegel's discussion of fanaticism in the philosophies of history and religion suggests that a religion of the One cannot but be a politics of the One. Accordingly, to make the connection to Hegel 's remarks in the Philosophy of Right, such fanaticism is a negation of the modern politics of a d ifferentiated state based on the subsumption of religious doctrine and subjectivity to a law that al lows for concrete unity-in-difference. The task of the state is thus also to educate religious subjects and communities into the rational cogn ition and recognition of the objectivity of the law and the limits of faith. *
*
*
Though by no means deriving from Hegel's positioning of Islam and fanaticism in the context of the adventures of Spirit and the apparatus of the state, contemporary attempts to delve into Islamic political subjectivities (and, symptomatically, political psychologies) can be usefully related to the complex of ideas that Hegel delineates under the rubric of fanaticism. To take a particularly pertinent case, Bruno Etienne's writings on the suicidal and apocalyptic strains of Islam ism hone in on fanaticism as the key subjective determinant of new and aberrant figures of militant politics. Relying on previous explorations of the concept by Norman Cohn and Dominique Colas, Etienne also regards fanaticism as the subreption of the proper boundary between religion and politics, as "a slippage from the religious to the political field ."21 The fanatic, subject to a transcendent and otherworldly demand, is the antagonist of civil society. As a paranoiac, he repudiates all alterity, and can only affirm his own unconditional belief in a seemingly unattainable transcendence through profanation (a pathologically enjoyable form of iconoclasm which u ndermines the notion of a " religion of sublimity").22 As Etienne writes: "To exclude alterity by carrying out purifying murders nevertheless implies that one feels attacked from all sides. This paranoiac closure stems from the fact that every ideal of the ego is confused with an ideal imag inary Islamic 'we' in absolute Unity, the Tawhfd: the Oneness of God induces the oneness of the 'Umma, and thus the fusion into the One" (22).23 It is this fusional ideal which for Etienne characterizes the contemporary political modalities of fanaticism in the Muslim world. As he notes, invoking an Arabic term with a serendipitous homophony with our theme: FANA [ . J means extinction in the One. [ . . J Fanatics are thus all those who constitute the house (Mfthl Bayt), the temple of U n icity. [ . J The fanatic is truth and this truth is one: it animates, agitates and arms him. He doesn't have to search for it in doubt, to construct it, to discover the true, to travel. He enjoys without delay or relay an i mmediate certainty, which inhabits and possesses him entirely, propelling him forward. Violently. Gathered together, fanatics believe that they are the only organized servants of the All-True, of the One whose instru ments they are; they hate those who ignore this and they want the world to bend to the law of the One who bends the universe to its necessity. (95) . .
.
.
.
This abstract fury for the One seems to echo Hegel's phenomenology of the (Islamic) fanatic. But Etienne is not content with reproducing the classical image of fanaticism as the political religion of the One. He
Umbr(a)
1 10
thinks that a psychoanalytic explanation is in order, and enlists to this end the concept of the death-drive, as the psychoanalytic translation and explanation of the theolog ical concept of Fana, but more specifically of the passage of fanaticism to the (terrorist) act: "The death-drive results from a su rfeit of energ ies freed by the failure of the containing capacities of representations. The surfeit of excitations leads to a rupture: the actor or agent, as Bourdieu would say, is emptied of his own desires. He is then the object of a movement of unbinding whose outlet is a war neurosis" (85).24 There are i nteresting affin ities between the overall schema u nderlying this pOint and Fethi Benslama's view - in the context, it must be said, of a far richer and analytically more serious work - that psychoanalysis should perceive the emergence of radical Islamism in terms of the "caesura of the subject of tradition and the unleashing of forces of destruction of civil ization that directly follow from it. "25 Though Etienne's enlisting of the notion of death-drive is too cursory to require much scrutiny, it is of interest that he places it at the crossroads between a speculative energetics (the "surfeit of excitations") and an idea of "representation" which oscillates symptomatically between the i magi nary and the symbolic. The theme that representations (or mediation tout court) function as a form of civilizing containment that the fanatic undermines is a staple of those discourses that regard fanaticism as the at once anti- and hyper pol itical counterpart of the modern subject.26 It is important in this respect that the religious fanaticism diagnosed by Hegel in the Philosophy of Right was upbraided for being a form of representational thought - or, we could hazard, an imaginary politics of devotion at odds with the integration of politics and religion within the objective rationality of the state (such that m ediatio n and re presentation are, for Hegel, not synonymous). By juxtaposing energetic excess and representational containment, Etienne grounds the analysis of political-religious i nsurgency, violence and terrorism in the classic figure of the fanatic. This figure is characterized by a destructive and fusional passion, and is to be understood by its negations (of the difference between religious dogma and civil society, the sacred and the secular, the self and the other, so on and so forth) and not by a sui generis relationshi p to a certain symbolic and i maginary repertoire. In this respect, it might be fruitful to consider Slavoj Z izek's treatment of religious pol itics i n terms of perversion as an antidote to the "tradition of fanaticism" which regards political-religious extremism simply i n the mode of its destructive anti-representational drive. I n his recent How to Read Lacan, Z izek, produces a commentary on Lacan's remark in Four Fundamental Concepts that " it is the subject who determines himself as object, i n his encounter with the d ivision of subjectivity" in l ight of the letter to Ayaan H i rsi Ali by Bouyeri, the killer of the Dutch director Theo van Gogh.27 Behind the arch i-fanatical declaration by Bouyeri - "No d iscussions, no demonstrations, no petitions: only DEATH will separate the Truth from the Lies" - Z izek sees at work the pervert's tactic of displacing division upon the Other: "The pervert claims direct access to some figure of the big Other (from God or history to the desire of his partner), so that, dispelling all the ambiguity of language, he is able to act directly as the instrument of the big Other's will. "28 This is to be taken i n two asymmetrical senses: Bouyeri becomes an undivided subject (an agent of God's wrath) by displacing d ivision onto his nemesis, Hirsi Ali , "inconsistent with herself, lacking the courage of her own beliefs , " and onto God, who sanctions the absolute separation between the True and the False. 29 This is why Z izek can use this g ri m vignette to lend credence to the suggestion that the "fundamentalist" (along with the "li beral cynic'1 is on the side of knowledge, whi le the m i litant atheist stands on the side
Umbr(a)
111
of belief.30 It is worth under� coring the possible use of the paradigm of perversion against the tradition of fanaticism. The virtue of Zizek's Lacanian suggestion is that it does not treat the violent repudiation of "secular" standards of justification as the resu lt of a pure negation of limits and constraints for the sake of an annihilation into the One. Rather than the abyss of interiority, Bouyeri presents the unsettling case of an exteriorized zealotry, where division is not undone by fusion , but, on the one hand, through the stigmatization of a divided other and, on the other hand, through the submission to a dividing Other. The pervert's presupposition that his acts directly implement the d ivine will also means that he need not be troubled by the kind of psychosis that is so often and so easily ascribed to the "fanatic." The fact that the denial of d ivision is in its own way mediated by the Other militates against the hypothesis of fusional fanaticism. In addition, the externalization of the pervert's knowledge also means that the common view of the fanatic as absorbed by his conviction (which is why his " normal" l ife causes such consternation) is untenable. * * *
While the paradigm of fanaticism, and of the psychic forms that allegedly accompany it ("enthusiasm for something abstract"), is entangled with the h istory of the philosophical and Orientalist reception of Islam - let us not forget that Hegel christened Arabia das Reich des Fanatismus -: it is also, despite its recent geopolitical fortunes, rather generic in its application. Indeed , in the philosophes ' campaigns against fanaticism, the Islamic world could even serve as the tolerant foi l for a denunciation of Europe's internecine relig ious strife. More recently, however, "Atlantic" discourse on Islam has joined a long-term concern with the Arab and Muslim "mind" with the constant reiteration of secularism as the key stake of the current religious and political crisis. It is this laborious political resu lt of the history of Christendom that can allegedly explain both the civilizational subalternity of the Islamic world and its supposed "rage." In Bernard Lewis's by now notorious terms: "This is no less than a clash of civilizations - the perhaps irrational but surely historic reaction of an ancient rival against our Judeo-Christian heritage, our secular present, and the worldwide expansion of both . "31 The posited continuity between "our" "Judeo-Christian" heritage and "our" secular present is of interest if we are to think of the imbrication of historical-cum civilizational narratives, d isquisitions on theology and accounts of political subjectivation which pertain to the discussion of psychoanalysis "and" Islam. The question, to borrow the terms from a recent heated debate about the extension, depth, and coherence of the hypothesis about a Judeo-Christian (or "Western") secular heritage could be posed as follows: Is there a psychic Sonderweg [special path] which accompanies the secular Sonderweg of the Christian West, such that psychoanalysis would be compelled both to recognise its interiority to such a Sonderweg and its differential (or even normative) relationship to the "Islamic subject"?32 Were the answer affirmative, psychoanalysis mig ht fin d itself invidiously burdened with the function of midwife of secularism - as an i nstitution that takes the parameters of acculturation (and of pathology, anomaly and d islocation) provided by Western Christendom and its secular inheritance as somehow normative. I want to explore this question of the dangers of secularizing the psychoanalytic subject, and of turning psychoanalysis into a secular clinic, so as to turn to a discussion of the distinction between secularism and atheism as they might relate to the politics of psychoanalysis. Or, to consider how the secular, besides being a political doctrine, as well as "an ontology and an epistemology" might also make certain claims on the psyche.33
Umbr(a)
1 12
Z izek's recent essay on Benslama's La psychanalyse a I'epreuve de I'/slam, "A Glance i nto the of Islam, " is a good p lace to start.34 I n his several forays i nto materialist theology and Pau line es hiv Arc m ilita ncy, Z izek, far more than the l i kes of Badiou for instance, has been mounting a trenchant rearticulation an d defence of what, following Ernst Bloch , we may cal l the atheism in Christianity and the Christianity in atheism.3s In his polemical excavations of the non-perverse core of Christianity - of Christianity as the cipher for an ethico-political subjectivity founded on the inexistence of the Other - Z izek has strived to produce a theory of the political subject couched in terms of a singular universality. In a number of texts, above all The Puppet and the Dwarf, this has taken the form of investigating the intricate d ialectic between Christianity and J udaism , Law and Love, and extracting a materialist, acosmic kernel from theology and su bjectivation . But where, if anywhere, does " Islam" fit i n all this?36 As Z izek h imself notes in "A Glance," Islam poses a "problem" for the teleologically-inclined historian of relig ions due to its bothersome anachronism - it emerged after Christianity, the "religion to end all relig ions" - but also due to its "misplaced" character.37 Islam occupies the geographical area between the Christian West and the Orient, and it impedes (much to the chagrin of Levi-Strauss, for instance) the happy fusion of the two "halves" of human civilization. Z izek proceeds to accompany Benslama's excavation of the "archive" or the "obscene secret mythical support" of Islam, which locates it - rather predictably - in the symbolic and epistemological role allotted to the veiled Muslim woman (such that "the ultimate function of the veil is precis� ly to sustain that there is something, the substantial Thing, behind the veil").38 It is worth noting about Zizek's recent interest in Islam that he has yet been unable or unwi ll i ng to articulate the kind of philosophical (as opposed to merely ideological or sociological) encounter which he has staged with Judaism and Christianity. As it stands, what we have here is not a dialectical confrontation between Islam and the acosmic, psychoanalytic materialism advocated by Z izek, but rather a mere antithesis that gives rise to formal comparisons and does not affect our picture of singular universality in any lasting manner. Typically, where Islam is called upon, it is qua politicizing ethos or concrete form of antagonism, and not as a matrix for potentially emancipatory forms of subjectivation. This mere antithesis - whereby Islam is not the precursor of the (Christian) matrix of (singular) universality but another universality (which notoriously turns both J udaism and Christianity into its un knowing precursors as the subordinate "religions of the Book") - stems from the anachronism that Z izek himself indicates at the start of his review essay on Benslama's book. As we already saw with Hegel , Islam is in a sense out of sequence: an anomalous and excessive universalism which ignores the ability of Trin itarian Christianity and its state to integrate - which is to say differentiate i nto appropriate spheres - the political and the religious, thereby shutting down the path for the secularization of political authority and social power. In Hegel , as in Z izek, this absence of secularization (or conversely, this fanaticism of the One) is also linked to the suggestion that the singular or concrete form of subjectivity, qua freedom, is absent from Islam. Such a vision of Islam as the abstract universalism of the One does turn into the non-dialectical counterpart of a "Christian" atheism of singular universality, all of whose tropes, d u ly inventoried by Z izek for the sake of an ethics and politics of the act and the exception (sacrifice, incarnation, a split, impotent God , the theology of the Trinity), seem absent from the ideational repertOire of Islam. At this point, Z izek
Umbr(a)
1 13
m ight indeed agree with the Italian judge, who, faced with the protest of a Finnish mother who wished to have the crucifix removed from public classrooms, descri bed it as a "symbol of secularism. " To be more precise, the legacy in Zizek of Hegel's treatment of Islam as the religion of fanatical universalism is to confuse the methodolog ical atheism of psychoanalysis with the normative narrative of secularization, which stipulates that without passing through a set of specifically Christian theological, historical, and psychic figures (Trinity, incarnation, absurd faith, and so on), the subject cannot attain its modernity, configured herein as its barred , dislocated and voided status. But for all of its avowed atheist aims, not properly d istinguishing a refusal of transcendent agency and cosmic holism from the historico-philosophical epic of a Christian Sonderweg risks consigning psychoanalytic discourse on religion to a parochial and culturalist defense of "our" Western legacy, and eventually to nonsensical demands that " M uslims" go through their own Reformation, or the l i ke. The result of such a secular strategy and teleology is almost invariably "to enclose the Other in religion all the better to expel him from politics"39 - turn ing social strugg les and geopolitical strategies into matters of a vaguely defined culture and even more vaguely defined mentalities, which no quantity of psychoanalytic sophistication can really sunder from the colonial tradition of inquiry into the native's "mind . " The idea of transforming psychoanalysis into a secular clinic aimed at diagnosing the fantasmatic impasses that prevent "Arabs" or " Muslims" from becoming the properly pathological subjects of modernity rather than "fanatics" stuck between crum bling tradition and fear of "Westoxification, " a temptation which is present, for instance, in Benslama's otherwise important and searching book, leaves itself open to the accusation that psychoanalysis might constitute yet another stage in that cunning of Christianity which has often taken the name of "secularism." As Anidjar has written, Christianity [ . . ] actively disenchanted its own world by d ivid ing itself into private and public, politics and economics, indeed , religious and secular. And Christianity turned against itself in a complex and ambivalent series of parallel movements, continuous gestures and rituals, reformist and counterreformist, or revolutionary and not-so-revol utionary upheavals and reversals while slowly coming to name that to which it u ltimately claimed to oppose itself: "religion . " M u nchausen-like, it attempted to liberate itself, to extricate itself from its own cond itions: it judged itself no longer Christian, no longer "religious." Christianity (that is, to clarify this one last time, Western Christendom) judged and named itself, reincarnated itself, as "secular. "40 .
Christianity i nvented the d istinction between religious and secular, and thus it made religion. It made religion the problem - rather than itself. And it made it i nto an object of criticism that needed to be no less than transcended. 41 Taking such a Christian secularism as both h istorically and psychically normative hampers psychoanalysis in a number of ways. In a d isastrous amphiboly, it ethnicizes and culturalizes the unconscious by presuming that one can gain insight into the psychic disturbances and political difficulties of individual "Muslims" by postulating fantasies that take place at the level of the religious text itself. This "textual ism" - which presumes that something pertinent can be directly gleaned from a theological text about social
Umbr(a)
1 14
practices and individual blockages - is of course one of the primary tropes of the Orientalism explored and d issected by Edward Said . But it also neglects the fact that - aside from being intensely variable for biographical, political and conjunctural reasons - the relation between individual and group psychology is never a question of expression or emanation (of the kind that mar d iscourses on the "Arab mind" and the like). As M laden Dolar has perspicuously indicated , in Freud the unconscious is neither individual nor collective - an individual unconscious depends on a social structure, whereas a collective unconscious wou ld demand a defined collectivity, a community to which it would pertain, but no such pre-given community exists. The unconscious "takes place" precisely between the two, in the very establ ishment of the ties between an individual (becoming a subject) and a group to which S/he would belong. Strictly speaking there is no individual or collective unconscious; it intervenes at the link between the two. 42 But neither " Islam" nor "Christian ity, " especially not in today's uneven and conflicted capitalist world, constitute "social structures," and it would seem entirely spurious to fancy that one can draw political lessons from treating them as such. That they still provide copious fantasmatic material is not in doubt, but taking their unity and consistency as g iven and then proceeding to i nvestigate the vicissitudes of (political) subjectivation on the basis of their theological and textual traditions is devoid of any clinical or scientific basis, and can only add to the deeply ideological and analytically barren resurgent civilizational discourses that have accompanied our recent geopolitical conflicts. I n this historical and political context, it would be far more useful , rather than treating theological narratives as immediately present in the personal and political unconscious, to consider the power and impact of specifically political fantasies. This is the immense value of Alain G rosrichard's The Sultan 's Court, a book which demonstrates that psychoanalysis, instead of prolonging the fallacies of civilizational or culturalist thought, can enact a profoundly d ialectical and historically astute critique of the fantasies that structure our political discourse. In Grosrichard 's work, the relation between texts (for example, M ontesqu ieu and the tales of travellers to the Orient) and fantasy, as wel l as the inscription of "cultural" alterity with in the unconscious, never takes a fallacious expressive form, of the kind that would allow one to turn to the Qur'an to grasp the fantasies of contemporary Muslims in a discourse devoid of d ialectic and mired in analogical reasoning, which would permit, for example, speculations about political authority in the Muslim world based on theses about the forms of paternity in Islamic theology. In Grosrichard , it is the manner in which the fantasy of the Other's (anti-) politics structures our own, in which the beliefs in their beliefs allow us to believe that we don 't believe, which is key. Fantasies of cultural contradictions rather than the psychic expressiveness of theology or culture are the object of a psychoanalytically-informed critique of ideology. Here, it is worth quoting at length Dolar's acute interpretation of Grosrichard's study, The fantasy, useless as a tool to explain its object, can shed l ight u pon its producers and adherents. It projects on to the screen of this distant Other our own impasses and practices in dealing with power, and stages them.43 [ ] The subject who is pinned to this fantasy does not have either to believe or to renounce him-herself; one can delegate one's belief and one's renunciation to others: the despot's no less phantasmic subjects. [ . ] • • •
. .
Umbr(a) 1 1 5
This is the handy and comfortable aspect of this fantasy: as a European subject, I don 't have to pawn my own belief and offer any sacrifice; others do it for me; the fantasy takes care of it. I believe that they believe. One can believe by proxy - it is enough that one extends one's belief only to someone who is supposed to "really" believe. "The subject supposed to enjoy" is thus complementary to a "subject supposed to believe" ; the one relies on the other. So we do not naively believe in the despot's enjoyment, all the panoply of the serag l io, and so on; it is enough that we believe that somewhere, i n some distant Asian land, there are people who are naive enough to believe. An immediate belief in the Other and its enjoyment would probably entail psychosis, so this delegated belief can maintain my subjectivity, and at the same time it enables the bel ief to bypass censorship and retain practical effectiveness. My unconscious belief is preserved by being delegated ; it is repressed by the mediation of a proxy. So the phantasmic mechanism can trap the subject by enabling him or her to retain freedom, disbelief and autonomy, in sharp contrast with Asian slavery and blind subjection.44 Taking Dolar's argument further, we could suggest that, especially when it attem pts to delve into the tang led web of politics, culture, and religion, a psychoanalytic critique operating with the category of fantasy must work with the principle that a (political or religious) fantasy is always a fantasy of the other's beliefs, and indeed about the other's fantasies. What is more, as the adventures of Oriental Despotism reveal , the very idea of the other's unified culture or religion is itself a fantasy which allows us to entertain the belief that our "own" position is consistent and u nified - in the case explored by Grosrichard , the position of a liberal polity entirely purged of slavery and blind subjection . This is not to say that the Other is a kind of screen, behind which lies some kind of noumenal kernel (what Muslims really think) , but that the study of political fantasies reveals the way in which (non-)relations with others structure our own frag ile identifications. Not a dialogue between civilizations, but the fantasy of the other's self-enclosed civi lization allows us (and them) the false security of belonging to one civilization ourselves. This is especially so, when this civilization is the one which regards itself, as in the recent craze for Judeo-Christian atheism or secularism, as being unique in having transcended the organicist constraints of "traditional" civilizations, cultures, or religions, and of truly being the culture that one has rather than the culture whereby one is had, to borrow a distinction from Wendy Brown. A relational-political model of fantasy, of the kind proposed by Grosrichard and Dolar, can serve a potent critical function, whereas an expressive-civilizational model, which would entertain our fantasy that we can have insight into the other's collective political u nconscious through a study of theological texts or myths, does not - indeed it risks generating proxies which merely g i ve succour to self-satisfied political fantasies of autonomy and liberality. It is such a relational-political model which Said hints at in Freud and the Non-European, where he writes of "Freud's profound exemplification of the i nsight that even for the most definable, the most identifiable, the most stubborn communal identity - for h i m , this was the Jewish identity there are inherent limits that prevent it from being ful ly i ncorporated into one, and only one, Identity. "45 -
Umbr(a)
1 16
It was in fact Said himself who proposed a defense of a human ist secularism which did not leave it open to the possessive secularizing philosophies of history which are so prone to pontificate about "our" (Christian) leg acy of atheism, toleration, liberalism, and so on. Said referred to Vico's verumlfactum principle, "the secula r notion that the historical world is made by men and women, and not by God, and that it can be un derstood rationally according to the principle formulated by Vico in New Science, that we can really know on ly w hat we make or, to put it differently, we can know things according to the way they were made."46 Agai nst Anidjar's suggestion that secularism translates into the cunning of a "Christian im perialism, "47 it is important to defend the idea, crucial to Freudian psychoanalysis, of secularism as a kind of methodological atheism - a praxical , materialist and naturalist inquiry into transindividual behaviour and psychic structure which, to paraphrase Althusser, would strive not to tell itself stories. Against the comforts of cultural ist discourse, which would more or less surreptitiously advocate for the superiority of one set of fantasies or myths over another, Freud's depiction of the religious illusions that respond to human "helplessness" and constitute the process of human civi lization , takes a salutary distance from the Christian concept of religion attacked by Anidjar, and from the apologetic narrative of Christian secularization that undergirds it. Rather than the question of proper distance or d ifferentiation which dominates much of the d iscourse of secularism, and which is often an ill-disguised way of raising l iberalism to the status of an eternal truth and exalting its current territories to the status of "lands of freedom, " Freud's (both radical and disenchanted) Enlightenment perspective centers on the possibility of emancipating humanity from illusion - not merely giving it its proper social place, or worse, denouncing the illusions of others to better justify our own . In this regard, whatever other problems it may raise, Freud 's generic use of the category of religion (q u ite distinct from the one which allows Lacan to acerbically designate Christianity as the "true religion" in Le Triomphe de la re/igion)4B has the great value of breaking with the prejudicial parochialism of the culturalist discourse about religion, which always implies a choice about which religion is better, more emancipated, more civilized . M uch less "respectful" of religion, Freud's generic approach also shows a salutary indifference to the specific forms that religion (or indeed illusion more broadly) takes. When he writes, in a short text from 1 907, that "one might venture to regard obsessional neurosis as a pathological counterpart of the formation of a religion , and to describe that neurosis as an individual religiosity and religion as a universal obsessional neurosis, "49 Freud, showing his fidelity to a radical and materialist Enlightenment, is shifting the register to an anthropological d iscourse about the structures of belief. Such a methodolog ical atheism is not devoid of a certain meta-political d iscourse, embodied in Freud 's sympathy for a "dictatorship of reason, " for the slow, "geological" progress of the (scientific) intellect as a social force.5o But more importantly for our purposes, unlike a psychoanalytically-inflected theory of secularism or "Christian atheism," it is not generative of further political fantasies, i l l usions of autonomy, or cultural superiority. The slow, patient struggle against "universal obsessional neurosis" is free of the dubious religious-cultural partisanship of those who believe that certain i ll usions have an emancipatory function which makes them superior to others. When it comes to matters of religion, the traditions of Kantianism and German Idealism run the risk of wedding psychoanalysis to a constricting narrative that turns every one of its concepts merely into a secularized variant of Christian theology. Freud 's far greater closeness to the intransigent reductivism of eighteenth-century materialism, his alleg iance to the Radical Enlightenment, makes him a far surer and less biased guide in tackling the relation between psychic and rel ig ious l ife without propping
Umbr(a)
117
u p m yths and fantasies, and smug g ling the "consolation of religion" u nder the guise of unbelief. If the methodology of psychoanalysis is atheistic and scientific, it cannot allow itself to serve as the vehicle for the interminable "secularizing" of Christianity, or for the depoliticizing study of cultural-religious fantasies supposedly expressed by individuals in "distant lands. " Believing by proxy - believing in t he other's belief, in his fanaticism - is no substitute for the laborious struggle against our illusions.
Umbr(a) 1 1 8
1.
Gil Anidjar, The Jew, The Arab: A History of the Enemy (Stanford : Stanford University Press, 2003), 1 33.
2.
G. w. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History (New York: Dover, 1 956), 356.
3.
Consider, for instance, what may be regarded as the Ur-text of this virulent strain of Orientalism, Bernard Lewis's "The Roots of Muslim Rage," in The Atlantic Monthly, vol . 266, no. 3 (Sept. 1 990), 47-60. http://www. theatlantic.com/past/issues/90sep/rage. htm (Part 1 ) and http://ww.theatlantic.com/past/ issues/90sep/rage2.htm (Part 2). Subsequent references will appear as Part 1 and Part 2 .
4.
Hegel, The Philosophy of History, 356.
5.
Hegel, Philosophy of Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1 97 1 ) , 44.
6. The ascription of particularity to Judaism, and the concomitant view of Christianity as the differentiated u niversality that sublates J ewish particularism and Islamic fanaticism , would of course deserve a d iscussion in its own right, which l ies beyond the confines of this paper. See Yirmiyahu Yovel, Dark Riddle: Hegel, Nietzsche, and the Jews (London: Polity, 1 998) and Andrew Benjamin, " Particularity and Exceptions: On Jews and Animals," South Atlantic Quarterly, 1 07 : 1 (2008): 7 1 -87.
[For Alain Bad iou's concept of the " passion for the real" see "The Passion for the Real and the M ontage of Semblance" and Alberto Toscano's comment in The Century, trans. Alberto Toscano (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007) - Ed .] 9.
Hegel, The Philosophy of History, 358.
1 0. Edward W. Said , Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1 994), 68, 300. 1 1 . Ibid., 300. 1 2 . Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, vol. II: The Consummate Religion (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1 985), 21 8. I n The Philosophy o f History, we already have a link between Robespierre's la liberta et la terreur and what Hegel sees as la religion et la terreur (358). 1 3. Renzo Llorente, " Hegel's Conception of Fanaticism , " Auslegung, a Journal of Philosophy, 20:2 (1 995), 83-99. On Hegel's relationship to the French revolution, see Domenico Losurdo, "Liberalism, Conservatism, the French Revolution, and Classic German Philosophy," in Hegel and the Freedom of the Modern (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004).
7.
Hegel, The Philosophy of History, 356-7.
1 4. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1 99 1 ) , 293; emphasis in original .
8.
I b i d . Th is
1 5 . Llorente, 87-88.
t ro pe is present, in vu lgarized form , in the above mentioned article by Bernard Lewis. There, he singles out Islam as the only religion that can rival Christianity for "its worldwide distribution , its continuing vitality, [and] its universalist aspirations" (Part 1 ) .
1 6. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, 293. 1 7. I bid., 279n . ; emphasis in original.
Umbr(a)
1 19
1 8.
Llorente, 92.
1 9. Ian Almond, The New Orientalists: Postmodern Representations of Islam from Foucault to Baudrilard (London: I . B . Tauris, 2007), 1 87 . 2 0 . Llorente, 96. 2 1 . Bruno Etienne, Les combattants suicidaires (Paris: l 'Aube, 2005), 87. Subsequent references will appear parenthetically within the text. 22. g ee, for example, the following passage by Etienne: "The passage to the act is [for the fanatic] the enjoyment of an iconoclastic violation" (96). 23. This is fol lowed by a rather convoluted foray into cultural-psychoanalytic speculation: "one of the possible ways out (of the external conflict between the collective ego-ideal and that of the individual ego in case of tension and g u i lt in the face of allogenous colonial hegemony), besides delirium, is the staging of the heroic death of the archaic ideal-ego. One finds the selfsame mechanism i n so-called altruistic suicides and probably in many martyrs throughout history. In effect, if we apply the theory of the death drive, the latter subtly puts into play the l ife drive by proposing an eternal l ife and libidinal satisfaction, the granting of these virgins for all , eternity . . . " (Etienne, 29-30) . 2 4 . See a perspicuous critique o f this approach in Talal Asad , On Suicide Bombing (New York: Columbia, 2007), 5 1 -3. 25. Fethi Benslama, La psychanalyse a I'epreuve de !'Islam (Paris: Aubier, 2002), 1 2. [At the time of this publication, an English translation of Benslama's book is forthcoming; all translations
appearing here are thus the author's own , while pagination refers to the 2002 French edition Ed.] 26. It dominates, for example, Dominique Colas's Civil Society and Fanaticism: Conjoined Histories, trans. Amy Jacobs (Stanford : Stanford U niversity Press, 1 997), where fanaticism is portrayed as a profaning refusal of symbolization, an "acting out" against symbolization, as well as a form of paranoia and psychosis. Incidentally, Colas notes the semantic spil lover between fanaticism and fantasy: "even before the appearance of fanatique, a pseudo-Greek double, phantastique, has been used by Calvin for the Anabaptists as the equivalent of the Latin fanaticus. There was in fact a kind of indistinct competition between the two French terms, phantastique (occurring first in the texts) and fanatique, and between the two spellings, ph and f-, with the latter grad ually taking over" (1 2).
27. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques Alain Miller; trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: WW. Norton & Co., 1 998), 1 85. Hirsi Ali is a Somalian Dutch feminist and politician who wrote the screenplay for Submission (August 2004), a short film by director Theo Van Gogh, which criticized women 's treatment u nder Our' anic law. The title of the film is a translation into Eng l ish of the word " Islam." The fi lm was controversial; a few months after its release, on November 2, 2004, the director was killed by Mohammad Bouyeri. The killer left a letter, addressed to Hirsi, on the dead body of Van Gogh. [A very brief note on the same letter can be found in Slavoj Z izek, "The Ambiguity of the Utopian Gaze," in Umbr(a): Utopia (2008) , 51 63 and 60-61 Ed.]
28. M ohammad Bouyeri, letter to Ayaan H irsi Ali , http ://www. m i l itantislammon itor. org/ articlel id/31 2 . , How to Read Lacan (London: Granta Books, 2006), 1 1 6. This might also prove a more fruitful avenue for the consideration of the question of authority, psychic and political, in psychoanalytically-informed treatments of Islam. Etienne, for instance, predicates the upsurge of fanaticized energies on a withdrawal of paternal authority ("Sans peres ni reperes, les groupes de pairs creent des repaires, " 1 00). It is not clear how this fares in light of the denunciation of excess of authority voiced by the l i kes of Moustapha Safouan . 29. Z izek, How to Read Lacan, 1 1 0.
30. Ibid., 1 1 7. 31 . Lewis, "The Roots," Part 2. 32. See Anidjar, "The Stilborn God: A review in three parts," in The Immanent Frame, http://www. ssrc.org/blogs/immanenCframe/2007/1 2/26/ a-review-in-three-parts/, and the reply by Mark Lilla, "Our H istorical Sonderweg," in The Immanent Frame, http://www.ssrc.org/blogsl i m manenCframe/2008/0 1 /04/our- h i storical sonderweg/. 33. Talal Asad , Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford : Stanford University Press, 2003), 21 . 34. See Safouan, Why Are the Arabs Not Free ?: The Politics of Writing (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell , 2007) . Th ough at a first glance germane to the issues i nvolved in this paper, Safouan's intriguing d iscussion of the obstacles against secular "dualism" in the Arab world, by his own admission (44) , have l ittle to do with the question of Islam. What is at stake are the
prerogatives of modern despotism : "between the king's mortal body and his office, which was permanent; between the One who governs and h is subjects; between the people and its representative councils; finally, between the individuals of whom the group is composed and the real subject of rights and obligation who was a 'fictitious person'" (22) . And secularism - in an innovative suggestion, which we cannot investigate here - becomes a matter not so much of the separation of "Church" and "State" in the model of the European "Great Separation, " but of "a complete break with [ . . . ] traditional forms of education and transm ission" (40). 35. For a more sustained engagement and critique of this position, see Lorenzo Chiesa and Alberto Toscano, "Agape and the Anonymous Religion of Atheism," Ange/aki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 1 2: 1 (2007), 1 1 3- 1 26. 36. For a brief discussion of the (Hegelian) image of Islam in Z izek, see Almond, The New Orientalists. For Z izek's own retort to accusations of Christian Eurocentrism, see the pOintedly titled "I Plead Guilty - But Where's the Judgment?� " and his reply to William David Hart's "Slavoj Zizek and the Imperial/Colonial Model of Religion" - both in Nepantla, 3:3 (2002), 553-83. Also see Hart's rejoinder, "Can a Judgment be Read?" in Nepantla , 4: 1 (2003), 1 9 1 -4. 37. Slavoj Z izek, "A G lance I nto the Archives of Islam," Lacan Dot Com. http://ww. lacan. com/zizarchives.htm 38. Ibid.
39. Fran�ois Burgat, L islamisme a I heure d'AI Qaida (Paris: La Decouverte, 2005), 1 91 . '
'
Umbr(a) 1 2 1
40. Gil Anidjar, Semites (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), 45; emphasis in original. 41 . Ibid., 47; emphasis in orig inal. 42 . Mladen Dolar, "Freud and the Political, " Unbound, 4 : 1 5 (2008) , 2 5 . For a contrasting position, which sees in Freud's group psychology "a colonial historiography of the emergence of the modern ind ividualized man out of organicism (the primitive tribalist) , " see Wendy Brown , Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 1 68. 43 . Dolar, " Introduction: The Su bject Supposed to Enjoy," in Alain Grosrichard , The Sultan 's Court: European Fantasies of the East, trans. Liz Heron (London: Verso, 1 998) , xiv. 44. I bid. , xxiii-iv. 45 . Said, Freud and the Non-European (London: Verso, 2003), 53-4. 46. Said , Humanism and Democratic Criticism (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2004), 1 1 . 47. Anidjar, Semites, 52. 48. See Chiesa and Toscano, 1 1 8. 49. Sigmund Freud , "Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices" (1 907), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (hereafter S. E.), ed . and trans. James Strachey et al. (London: Hogarth Press, 1 953-1 974), 9 : 1 26-7. 50. On the "dictatorship of reason," see Dolar, "Freud and the Political , " 20. On the geological
progress of the intellect against illusion, see Freud , The Future of an Illusion, S.E. 2 1 ; "Are we not all at fault, in basing our j udgments on periods of time that are too short? We should make the geologists our pattern" (55).
�
I 00w LL
0 I
+-
Q) .D
E
-
m � c
m
+-
U)
-�
..c u
�
0 w I �
Discussions concerning the nature of "being" are fairly commonplace. The real has many names: Idea, atoms, the void, God, nature. Philosophy provides us with a wide range of variants. Appearance, perceptible forms, has less prestige, and today it is the relationship between the real and appearance that has been deprived of intellectual focus, obliterated, rejected, foreclosed. Whether we consider the ancient belief in a hidden truth to be vital stil l or privilege shallow signs, what is absent is the question of the beautiful revelation, in the presence of a body, a landscape, or a painting, of the infinite effects of a power offered and refused . We no longer ask for appearance to be apparition or for an immanent real to be associated with any appearance. Yet, this has not always been the case. Once, forms were perceived as epiphanies. The gaze deciphered them spontaneously. No meaning was assigned to them but rather the power that multiplies meaning, disturbs it, transfigures it. This was the world of the work of art. No doubt it was intimately associated with a theology that rejected the d isappearance of the uncreated in the created. This Platonic aesthetic, although overshadowed by late modernity, is not exhausted , but it has considerably altered the definitions of what it causes to appear, as it has that which causes it to appear.
UmbrIa)
1 25
The fil m Ten by the Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami is a good example of th is aesthetic of the Idea, conceived according to the terms of the present moment. For this to be possible, the following conditions must be met: there must be an image in which light is corporeal and spiritual, a scene that conveys the essential or hidden meaning, a questioning of the messianic schema of hist ory These are necessary conditions. To them must be added the following, which is absolutely essential if the fil m is to be contemporary: The messianic figure, reconciling the h idden and the apparent, the light of the created and the night of the uncreated, must be improbable, lost, forsaken , or hopeless. All of these conditions are satisfied in Ten. I have in m ind a woman 's body bent beneath the weight of destiny, fol lowing the long too long - pathway of prayer, an epi phany of desperate expectation . I n the final scene of this su btle fi lm, a woman, about whom we know only that she is awaiting an answer from the man she wants to marry, tells her well-meaning friend that he has broken it off. And fol lowing the banal words of condolence offered, her only, but shocking, reply is to unveil her shaved head . Beneath this unbearable sign of mourning, which alone authorizes the abandonment of the veil , her face is transformed . And the abandoned woman utters these simple words: "I would prefer it if he were here." .
Who is it that she would prefer were there? Her unreliable fiance? The h idden imam, the one every Shiite awaits, the messianic figure hoped for in the despair and infinite mourning of his departure? The man for whom the woman , who has lost everything and who is not very pious, wil l pray at the grave? As it ends, the film leaves us devoid of any response. For the response is that he is a man of flesh and the perfect man, and that apparition has ceased to be - twice - the real has fled and its apparition has dissolved, epiphany is dead. And without it there is no salvation for this woman with her shaved head , or for contemporary Iran, or for those watching the film. This cinema, entirely devoted to the most profound rehabilitation of the link between apparition and reality, between the uncreated that will be and present creation , this cinema of spiritual sensibility, makes me think of another film, no less admirable, but situated in the very different space of Christian messianism: Julien Duvivier's The Sinners. Here, too, the perfect man must save a creature of l ight from a closed , infernal world. In this case he assumes the features of a young electrician (Serge Reggiani), who, across an apocalyptic landscape, battered by torrential rains, searches for a woman whose angelic face converts the inmates of a reform school to their own angelic nature. Unable to recall the words of a conventional prayer, these lost women improvise their own, one made of their own words. In a punitive world that extends to the limits of the sensible world, Duvivier's film makes present, reveals, all the terror and beauty that may be forthcoming: guilty flesh, criminal desire, the purity of the creative i magination (an obvious reference to Peter Ibbetson), love and unlikely salvation. To these films we should add Hitchcock's inimitable Vertigo, all of them signs of the intrepid endurance of an art that reveals the destiny of epiphany. Vertigo: a woman's face, a body and its fetishes, the g ray suit and tightly wound bun of hair, they all collude to unhinge the dumbstruck hero. Of course, it is not inconsequential that the face belongs to Kim Novak, a face that makes it impossible to determine if she is a bitch or an angel, the most vulgar or the most celestial of apparitions. James Stewart's eyes (and all we really see of h i m are his eyes) recognize the body beneath its new appearance, entirely foreign to the woman he loved, as if the real remained, imperious, within two contradictory presences, in which it trembles. We are present at the death of this apparition, through the awkwardness and longing of the man who so desired it, and we are contemporaries of that death', the death of epiphany.
Umbr(a)
1 26
JAMBET
The face compels no respect from the perceiver. Rather, the presence of the other, that odious double of myself, ordinarily provokes the most extreme violence. Through the lengthy discipline of custom, we have managed to refrain from striking, from humiliating that afflicting face, which withholds its desire but orders us to forget, for its own benefit, something we would glad ly accomplish. Fortunately, morality has nothing to say about the face of others. When it is possessed of d ignity, it changes the raw material of the soul into a thing of beauty. Morality teaches that we conduct ourselves wisely rather than submit to a rule that would hold for all reasonable beings, for it does not arise from the conformity of our reason to itself but from the love, so essential and yet so rare, we feel for the lost dignity of our body and our freedom. It therefore encounters its limits in the inherent corruption for which universal legislation is no more than a popular nostrum . When morality demands to take precedence, it masks the i nfinitely richer experience of apparitions, through which we are invited to determine our loss or our salvation. We no longer turn our gaze toward the l iving world, the d iscrete space of epiphanies. Civilization begi ns when we see, directly, in all its splendor, the manifestation of the uncreated in the created , the apparition of the divine dawn beneath the features and in the static movement of a woman's face, in which the world 's flowering is condensed . Courtesy, and its parade of joys and pains, is worth infinitely more than any so-called law, respect for which would burst forth from the contemplation of a face. It is this the Orient understood, substituting the aesthetic of epiphany for the tedium of ethical precepts, or, rather, forging an ethics born of aesthetics itself. This too is the supreme function of art. As long as art existed , it lived to compose the beautiful and the sublime. Ever since Kant, we have claimed that the work of art engenders the sentiment of beauty, the subjective agreement of our faculties of understanding . Each of us, in the presence of a beautiful work of art, is said to be able to experience this agreement, without however expressing it as a concept. But the most powerful works of art do not comply with doctrines of this sort. They provoke us, invite us to make judgments that do not involve taste but understanding. And those judgments are ours alone, because the apparition opens the door to our singular world, encourages us to visit the space of our own substance. This is the lesson of Proust: beauty pleases singularly as a concept. The apparition allows us to see that this world we are is an infinity of worlds, containing an infinity of organisms, demons and marvels, palaces and abject ghouls, which are also worlds. And the infinity of those spaces terrifies us. Apparitions terrify or exalt, they possess the power of the infinite, the freedom that discovers its revelators in the imag ination and the senses. This is the sentiment of the sublime, as the fugitive passerby is sublime - "fugitive, because a queen," wrote Proust. Classical beauty is an exercise in the sublime, but it was Romantic art that made epiphany commonplace. With the setting of the Romantic sun, the q uestion arose concerning the death of epiphany, as if it did not already contain the sign of its own d isappearance within itself. Because today we have, to use Hegel 's overly precise expression, entered the time of the death of art, summarized in the recol lection of display, we worry about the transhistorical l ife of epiphanies, which resist that death, and which would justify those two great elements missing from modernity - love of the real and beauty. Epiphany requires appearance, nothing more than appearance. But nothing less, either. A surface, as l impid as the heartbreaking movement of Rachmaninov's fourth concerto, where the soul folds in upon
Umbr(a)
1 27
itself before the calm and trembling presence of death. The d isheveled hair in Sentimental Education restores an impossible life to visibility, brings lost beauty back to life, appears. Destiny has completed its work, time has concluded , but in the severed lock that is offered , subsists everything that might have been, if the epoch hadn't been one of betrayed revolutions, failed loves, and the prose of the modern world. Flaubert was the great novelist of the sunset of epiphanies. They are ablaze in Carthage but fade in Frederic's fragile and mediocre hands. Baudelaire, in one of his condemned poems, "Les B ijoux, " brings together incarnation and manifestation . This catholic, unromantic, poem assumes that God is made of flesh, and the flesh of woman in the moment of love, the moment when the body vanquishes the soul . Passion and resurrection of the body. Through his genius, this incarnation symbolizes through apparition . Apparition decrees that the uncreated that manifests itself not be confused , in complete union, with the corporeal mirror in which it is made visible. The woman's body is that of the whore, the most appropriate symbol of God 's sublime debasement; it is the body of splendor, the rose that reflects beauties that lie beyond the visible. Epiphany flows "before my eyes clairvoyant and serene, " and undoes the contemplation it makes possible. The Orient, as understood by Islamic thought, was the place of the rising sun, which Suhrawardi called ishraq, oriental illumination, corresponding to the sun of being when it rose, which he compared to the West of shadows. The West is the substance of bodies "charged with n ight and death, " opaque blocks of real nonbeing. On the surface of the body, of its recalcitrant matter, the l ight of archangels is reflected , from which the light of souls arises. Thus, the dead body is transmuted into a m irror, animated by the lights of the uncreated. Aesthetic religion is the contemplation of forms, which do not simply govern the body but are its angels, and g u ide the contemplative's eye far from exi le. This is sufficient to split the universe into two opposite regions, night and day, and for the work of art, fulfi lled in the growth and flowering of the body, to bear witness to war. In the apparition, there is nothing calm or peaceful , unless there is agreement between matter and spirit, between the density and the capricious and unfettered nonchalance of epiphany. Matter. Today, we can say it is that which chains the body to the prose of the world, and strips it of any reflection wherein we might find an opportunity to escape ourselves, to recognize our exile i n the shameful habits we pick up from the most controlled pleasures, from the playful mastery of powers, made more intense through our acquiescence, and through the peace they procure. Separation, the l ig ht of desire when it strays, the instantaneous perception of a face from beyond during an accidental encounter, the backstreets of love, these are what might yet show us the provenance of beauty's forms. Splendor is humble and sovereign , it wants only a rose, a woman , no matter which , contingent, to present the absolute that suddenly condenses in them and empties us, as if our factitious unity, that of the body of death coiled in its mortal conviction, were to s i n k l i ke sand in an hourg lass. The Earth is populated with epiphanies, no "thing" is a thing. Heidegger asked the question "what is a thing?" And he taught us that it is not an object subject to simple noetic seizure, it does not attest to its presence on the profane horizon of utility. We are too joined to this regime of the useful because we no longer see "some thing" detach itself from the spatial and temporal order. Heidegger, while fully doing
Umbr(a)
1 28
JAMBET
justice to Kant's extraordinary philosophical gesture, and the inexhaustible pages of his Transcendental Aesthetic, nonetheless pointed out the blindspot that was the source of the d ifficulty. Kant's genius was to demonstrate that "space is i ntuition." But who is this subject to whom we assign space as a pure intuition? Is it sufficient that it is "a human subject whose being is insufficiently determined"?' Departing from Heidegger but fol lowing a pathway he cleared, we are oriented by the conviction th at such a subject, establishing the intu ition that is space, is apparition itself, the indissoluble unity of uncreated appearing and its manifestation within the limits of a world, of a monad of existence. The moment of eternity illustrated by the solitary tree, the tortured vine root, requires an askesis of the gaze. To understand epiphany, we wou ld have to suspend any alteration of sight, anything that causes it to drift toward other things and envelop them all in a single un iversal world - it is necessary to escape the world. I know what this Baudelerian and Barresian "anywhere out of this world" suggests in the way of non-sense, sordid utopias, and lunar beyonds. The true meaning of that "anywhere" is here below, here and now, when its essential , infinite, power is released, its implacable metamorphosis, which leads it to the self, to its highest degree of uncreated reality. Things are not of the world, they form an indefinite series of highly singular substances, incomprehensible to the understanding that fixes them, as they move and are guided toward their root "in the heavens," which is the heaven of the arts. This is what Suhrawardi was trying to say when he claimed that every real ity has an angel, was the manifestation of an angel, air, water, fol iage, earth or sky. A woman's face, her furtive body concentrate all the things of the world when they are no longer things but apparitions. What is a woman? One who allows Woman not to exist but to reveal herself, not in fantasy but in creative and truthful i magination. Imagination is not what a vain people believes. It does not produce images freed of all intell ig ible constraint. It is the power of limitation , separation, of determination of the infinite in the finite. Tragedy lies in the confl ict exposed within this finite apparition, whose real sense is the infinite that it reveals, and whose imaged sense will be its sensible form, with which we nourish our fascination and our belief. Epiphany par excellence, woman , fortunately, doesn't dictate any laws. She is triumphant, worthy of herself, which is to say, unworthy, a figure of treason and revelation , conjointly preceding any duty and succeeding any worldly legislation. She is both epiphany and body of death. Outside this axiom, in which Occident and Orient meet and clash, there is no truth of desire, other than the possible, which , as Bataille said, must be left to those who love it. She raises her hand to the horizon of intermediary worlds, to the horror and happiness of the uncreated. Earth is populated with epiphanies. Starting from the core of apparition, every perceptible body suddenly metamorphoses into epiphany. The manifestation of the body in the mirror is intensive joy, qualitative power, and terror as well . The h idden source of the apparition is the essence of the uncreated, which envies its own expansion. It prevents stasis, presence. Epiphany is infinite expectation, aleatory expectation - the contingency of the street corner, the opening door, the faithful thing of l ittle i mportance. Expectation that doesn't expect anything, Blanchot said. Epiphany doesn't respond. Such is the Orient: the unanswered question. Epiphany is order arising from the essence of the uncreated , and the transgression of order, the conjunction of two voices when the manifestation of the u ncreated is released from its own un ity to free the power, the infinite freedom of the unnamable essence.
Umbr(a) 1 29
In what is, essentially, a novel of epiphanies, Our Lady of the Flowers by Jean Genet, we read : "One of them, when questioned by a detective on the boulevard : 'Who are you? ' ' I ' m a Thrilling Thing. "'2 The face is terror, it doesn 't command respect, doesn't echo the law. The face defeats the gaze that tries to grasp it by multiplying the cliches. Thus Albertine, who " reminded me of a cake on the top of which a place has been kept for a morsel of blue sky."3 The essence of the face can be grasped through the game of creative i magination that leafs through and col lects the layers. Gazes intersect - that of the epiphany, that of the contem plative - and behind those perceptual apparatuses reside two celestial continents, two Orients, one revealing itself to the other in misunderstanding, which is the higher understanding. Two sites of desire that fail to come together; like those "traveling skies"4 they pass one another, rub shoulders, but never meet. The certainty of the encounter is the imaginary of epiphany, relentlessly threatened by the terror of the misconceived . The real of epiphany is always that through which "everything was lost." But this loss is the jubilation of the epiphany, which requires the greatest spiritual strength. Terror and peace, the too intense presence of the body must be understood. Whenever there is movement, it becomes that fleeing light our hopes lack and which establishes hope. When it vibrates and remains, or when it rests "in loving calm," the eternal moment is without hope. Psychology, that scourge of the modern age, has tried to domesticate signs, the jumble of lost or incomplete forms where desire is tabulated , the desire whose provenance is the u ncreated . Desire is never m istaken, it knows that beneath the adorable name "fetish ," l i ke those na·ive offerings made by the humble to the idols that satisfy them , there is a trace of the absolute, the complicated curve of a shoulder, the heartbreaking, willowy arm, the blue-veined hands that fail to harmonize with the rest, because of which the rest is nothing but the unlikely sum of what it finds unacceptable. The small swift hands, the perfect shoulder, the body free of corruption , hair that reflects the azure sky when it is night, the vanished sun, and the night itself still illuminated by distant stars. To name apparitions as so many d ivine names, those that are revealed, except for one, and it is the one we don't read that we unveil along the orb of a hip, at the moment the eye closes. Especially to love the impossible color of skin, which is never a primary color, never an identifiable hue, never blended with artifice, but incomplete symphony. Weight of eyelids over the blue and gray eyes of the actress who makes life worthy of the luminous stage of the semblant, how can we ignore you, before whom we lower the gaze that you lash to its suffering. For psychology semblance is a curse. Better that it prefer the truth, the stoic lesson of loving only what depends on us. It claims that we are subject to death, that we love fate, and prefer l ucid sorrow to unruly joy. But fate is epiphany, and its train of errors and falsehoods, those higher truths. This would be victory at the moment of conclusion, when the perishable body g ives way to the soul , the true body, the soul that will have ceased to endure the aston ishing innovation of days. Not the insignificance of presence but the unfortunate peace, that endless tribulation wherein sensibility metamorphoses into true intelligence, when the body that reflects the l ight from within dictates the only reasons to live - desire and war. Happiness is not the opposite of sadness, as ethics taught; it is sadness, and sadness remains happiness, so mingled are they that all the lessons of the masters are shattered. Epiphany is the promise that will not be kept. It is, wrote Claudel , not happiness but that which comes in
Umbr(a)
1 30
JAMB8
its pl ace. The division of midnight answers the division of m idday, the star-filled night and its parade of saintlin ess. But Claudel knew better than others the irreplaceable virtue of what substitutes for happiness, th e uniq ue viaticum . Epiphany is the apparition of terror, for beauty is ignored at the very point at which it appears, e, it overflows itself, and at the boundaries of the body there are flames not visible to the naked siv pan ex eye an d which make the sun of the good so dangerous. Emanations that correct the reassuring circle, events so numerous they pass us by, those minutes of a woman , separating her from us and uniting us to her. Such is redemption. Not acknowledging respect but reconciliation and the simultaneous loss of the absolute. The generosity and admiration and astonishment with which Descartes, the knight of good conduct, began to speak of the passions, all assume epiphany, the union of two opposites in aston ishment, of two i l l-reconciled enemies, redemption and terror. Descartes wanted to conjure the exces s of astonishment and heal the Princess of Bohemia by offering her the remedy for terror known as conversation. Passion became Italian theater, the only one, it is true, we are able to love, in which the combinatory of desire has taken leave of madness. But epiphany, bursting forth haphazardly in our lives, does not spare us. It requires some other space, the deranged boulevard on which to disappear. The intimacy we have i n this world derives from our senses. We see, we taste the world we don't really confront, because it is not an object for us, as long as we remain pure subjects of contemplation. The world is primarily the union of the perceiving subject and perceived bodies. If we intensify the perception of the world and the perceived world, we arrive at the threshold of active imagination, when our senses have more strength and less matter, when nothing restricts the forms of our sensibility. True imagination is a higher sensibility, not the fantasy that composes pale reflections of colors and physical forms. Epiphany takes place in this more intense world. It is not immaterial but turns its very form into spiritual matter, and that is why its features are unique. At the bottommost rung of sensibility, in the profane and habitual u niverse, a body is always lessened by its participation in the species. We see an individual reality, which reminds us of the universal abstract, the rational animal , the featherless biped. We fail to establish the singularity that would be the true intelligible reality, free of the silhouette we have available to us. We make use of it, which is why the image becomes common , interchangeable, generic.s But when we support imag ination in its agreement with true intelligence, we accede to the sensible of the unique. The indefinable oneness of an existence i lluminates the spirit, which communicates to the senses this perception of the uncreated, of the generative hearth from which the l ight of the existent draws its power. Thus, epiphany is made visible in subtle flesh, it reaches our senses and concentrates them in the intimate secret of our act of existence, in the physical and spiritual knot of our faculties and our weaknesses. Epiphany speaks to our secret, it is our secret revealed . And this secret is the uncreated that we ceaselessly create, prophets of the word deposited within us. Such is the rose that rises from the m iniature, Venus being born for Botticell i , into a vision whose miracle is less the purity of her face than the twinned, contrary movement of the gaze and the excessively slender neck. With her disconcerting, serenely unsettled gaze, Venus contemplates nothing of what we
Umbr(a)
1 31
are, no object of the environing world. She dreams with open eyes, or sees before her what is with in her; with intelligence she contemplates her secret, which the Platonist cal ls Idea and which is now epiphanized in her objectless gaze, an otherworldly gaze, existing only in the soul of the world; a gaze in which our own secret is measured , the joyful sorrow of the singular love in which we abandon our animal tunic. She sees the beloved within, the point toward which the motions that u rge us toward being are directed. Thanks to Ruzbihan Baq/i of Shiraz, the virtuoso who preceded Hafez in the art of condemnation , in the practice of love that strives to support condemnation and loss before divine law and the reasonable customs of mankind, we learn to recognize weakness and strength in epiphany. It restores to our l ife the interior drama of the uncreated , which is the drama of love, and therein lies its strength. It does so through the unexpected interplay of fissures, l i ke a crazed wal l , a frozen lake that cracks beneath our steps, a fau lt in the rock; it doesn't change the forms of the play of love through the harmonious curves of geometry but by the inveterate succession of catastrophes that no intelligible function i ntegrates. Such is its fragi lity. Epiphany is the non-sense of the uncreated . The real is in its essence eternal dramaturgy; it wants to be known, it wants its own infinite desire, it is will and power. This assumes some other than the self, for whom it becomes manifest, and the perceptible reality of epiphanies presents itself to the gaze of this other, ourselves, in the guise of love, so that an answer may be g iven to the infinite desire of the u ncreated real. Creation, the universe of forms, has no foundation other than this initial lack of the real in the face of its own plen itude, which justifies the expansion of beauty and majesty. But the uncreated wishes to be loved only by the uncreated , to preserve its shaky unity. That a gaze originating in the other might come to rest on its manifestation , and jealousy, a jealousy as i nfinite as its power, might provoke its retreat. Therefore, epiphany is the simultaneous presence and erasure of the uncreated . The drama of the real , unable to realize the union of the lover and the beloved, is reflected in the dramaturgy of human love. And the reverse is true: any disturbance of love in the approach of epiphany is a symbol of the disturbance of u ncreated unity. For this reason , there is one and only one love, and it is not possible to u njoin, through the force of law, the mortal love of a woman from the immortal love that probes the uncreated . This lesson , Ruzbihan's lesson, lends its solemnity to the deadly and indifferent episodes of love affairs, as it did to the art of the novel, which was, for Orient and Occident alike, their recital . For the wound to heal , epiphany must be perceived by a gaze that becomes the very gaze of the uncreated, it demands a metamorphosis of the subject in the fugitive unity of lover and beloved, in the moment of epiphanic joy, before the tempest of separation. The subject of the vision becomes the lover of divine sovereignty. Just as he serves God , he submits to the desire of woman, whose sovereignty is expressed as much by the shocking debasement of behavior as in the intolerable caprice of apparition and disappearance. The primordial pact concluded between man and God in response to the question "Am I not your Lord?" is not a contract, in the way a perverse contract can be, but a foundation of existence. God appears to the one who answers "Yes" to the question of recogn izance posed by the uncreated. To see the uncreated appear in the created assumes submission to the uncreated that appears. This logic of man 's creation, as the holy book of Islam thematizes, serves as a model. Thus, the final dereliction of the Blue Angel does not prosaically illustrate the bourgeois theme of the woman and the patsy, but the destruction of self that
Umbr(a)
1 32
JAMBtl-
is th e only escape from the drama of the uncreated, for it is the uncreated itself that is annihilated in the suffering and brilliance of crazed laughter. Ruzbihan clearly situates the lover in the "in-between" between separation and union, "and there is no place where I can flee to or fi nd refuge or cry." Knowledge of absence through absence itself, absence manifest at the moment of the most intense presence: the "there is," donation, like a manifestation of withdrawal. A woman needn't be far away for her to hollow out the void of separation , but she must be there at the desired moment. The inevitable misfortune arises from the fact that the uncreated is reflected in the mirror of the woman 's body and that it is i m possi ble for the subject of the vision to distinguish the carnal mirror from the fugitive epiphany. The mirror breaks. The subject cannot support the flight of epiphany, which dissolves, just as the image disappears from the m irror's broken fragments. He cannot know that other m irrors, an infinite number, reflect the beauty of the uncreated. Divine jealousy overpowers h i m , becoming its own obsession, and epiphany proclaims that it was the unique, the manifestation of the unique, when the body's dark mirror falls into ruin, intolerable ruin of love, the remainder we do not know what to do with, memory, letters, instruments of pleasure, l i ke the empty bottles that confront our drunkenness. He is left with signs whose only meaning is the pillage of his heart. During this trial, the subject prepares to become the witness of contemplation, which in Arabic also means a martyr - he is the martyr of being. The uncreated watches in him. It sees and what it sees is disaster, where it exists through its own tragedy, where the unique suffers eternally from the unique. Thus, Ruzbihan 's central axiom is verified: it is in the book of human love that we must learn to read the rule of divine love. "Oh! That young, tender, m ischievous, charming, l ively, impulsive, heretic!" The gaze of epiphany is "a wink filtering through the eyelids," which loses consciousness at the moment of its illumination, prelude to the swooning of the heart of the witness. Naturally there is a union, which Ruzbihan assigns to the lover's state of perfection. B ut union is not the calm repose of disposition, of testimony. The un created wishes to remain h idden, protected by seventy thousand veils, and its withdrawal is immediately reflected in the repulsiveness, the h ideous experience of an epiphany that is changed into a demon . The horrific then bursts forth . Horror is consubstantial with the experience of epiphany. It is less a question of the disappointing behavior of the beloved than of the very root of love. The u ncreated repudiates itself. It falsifies the game, breaks the pact by which it gave in to sight. It lies. This repudiation is also its negation, through which it withdraws through its own revelation to the unknowable point where it no longer wishes to be known other than by itself. In the mirror of epiphany, this is expressed in the varied features of the denial of love. Henry Corbin interprets this pure negativity in the language of Jacob Boehme: the abyss of d ivine wrath . At the center of the epiphanic form is a domineering violence, referred to by the Arabic a/-qahr: sovereignty, anarchic aggression, despotic power, the saber's sweep during a raid. The witness places his neck upon the leather block of the condemned ; epiphany is invited to the damnation, here below and in the beyond. There are words, in Ruzbihan , that allow us to grasp what he means by becoming "the player of the strange": "I myself, without myself, am the lover of myself. I continuously contemplate myself, without
Umbr(a)
1 33
myself, in the mirror that is the existence of the beloved. So, then, who am I?" We can abandon to their fate those who will classify this as narcissism, who are aware, from the beginning , that in this affair of mirrors and apparitions, there is nothing other than the mirage of the self, and the enticements of the imaginary. They speak from the point of the modern world, the one that invites epiphany to die a natural death , to return to the dusty universe of the ancient world. They are only too right, for our world is especially characterized by this death, by the ban on any vision of the uncreated , because the uncreated is no longer. At best, woman is the definitive embodiment of the generalized prostitution that the perfected atheism of the modern world sacralizes in the form of u niversal commodities. Psychology takes responsibility for theorizing this collapse, and for alerting us to narcissism, the resistance reality can not bear. Ruzbihan is certainly not modern. Who says " 1 , " the uncreated itself, the ultimate subjectivity from which every revelation, that is, every imagination and every sensibility springs, the source of things? The imagination is truthful , for the one who imagines is not primarily the witness. I mag ination falls upon him, grabs hold and occupies him with its forms, which are the epiphanies of the uncreated . It embodies the intelligible, extracts its portrait. The uncreated is the lover of itself in the lover's unstable "ego, " in the interplay of the mirror that binds him to the beloved. "Without me," for the uncreated subject is other than the self; it escapes any constancy in its oneness. It is infinite, which does not mean total, unless totality is itself the infinite, forms repeatedly overflowing their source. Human love is d ivine love itself, to the extent of veridical imagination, and the witness in turn experiences this void of the self, this loss of self hollowed out by the delectable apparition. When the beloved appears, it is without me that I am myself, who loves me, which is to say, who loves that other truth of myself, far from the d ialectic that nonetheless does not fai l to get involved. Soon there will be a me and a you , me and her, and the struggle for recognition. Ruzbihan grasped the moment before this struggle, this split. The coincidence of subjective unity and distress, of presence and a nothingness without resurrection. Not the process of a passion that overcomes itself through resurrection but the passion of the subject when it is nothing but the torment of the self. The love that precedes the history of mastery and servitude, where mastery is so complete, enjoyment so perfect that they at once become loss. This great tribute to the self should be read as apprehension of the primordial abyss. "The man who behaves as a master will never be one," wrote Kojiwe. The lover's desquamated ego does not behave as a master, and as for the beloved, epiphany prevents her mastery from entering the game of recognition ; this is the moment of u nity, the moment of separation, of the irrational void. To express the approach of the eternal fiancee, Ruzbihan can find no other Qur'anic verse, no other phrase than the fol lowing: "There is not one among you who will not reach it [hell] . Your Lord has made this incumbent on Himself' (1 9 : 7 1 ) . Epiphany, the lover's personal lord decides nothing other than his hel l . Here, any economy o f narcissism or the death drive would be laughable. God is hel l . Such was t h e truth of woman, of epiphany, and it is this hell we wish to know nothing more about.6 The modern age destroys epiphany, suppresses the phenomenon, the apparition. There is no trace of the uncreated in the immanence of the object, for the advent of the bartered body has consecrated the death of the u ncreated. It is not so much a question of the death of God as the death of the uncreated .
Umbr(a)
1 34
The death of God is an event situated in the logic of i ncarnation, passion, and resurrection. It enables ap parition to preserve its theophanic power by turning its mastery into fecund servitude, or unconditional obscenity. The death of God culminates in the dead God 's assumption in the "rags" of Madame Edwarda. It is the moment prior to absolute knowledge: "Madame Edwarda went on ahead of me, raised up into the very clouds . . . The room 's noisy unheeding of her happiness, of the measured gravity of her step, was royal consecration and triumphal holiday: death itself was guest at the feast, was there in what whorehouse nudity terms the pig-sticker's stab."7 The scene of absolute knowledge in Georges Sataille's story takes place in the vicinity of the Porte Saint-Denis in Paris. It responds to another reference to the "very beautiful and very pointless Porte Saint-Denis," the one that appears in Nadja. Breton is the traveler who crosses Paris until he reaches the archway, where the anxiety of the improbable encounter with the apparition arises. I wou ld like to make palpable the divergence between apprehension and its u niversal signification : Breton is an heir of Ruzbihan. He makes the Porte Saint-Denis the m irror on which the image is deposited; he is haunted by epiphany, by woman, whose body signifies nothing other than the unlikely mirror of the icon. The disreputable quarter is a place of apparition , situated in a world of semblances. Breton stil l belongs t o the time of epiphany, whereas Bataille is n o longer familiar with apparition, but the embodiment of the absolute, the coincidence of the corporal substrate and the icon, by which no icon floats above dark matter any longer but alone, matter made spirit, spirit entirely made flesh: "She was entirely black, simply there, as distressing as an emptiness, a hole."8 Anxiety isn 't not encountering epiphany but being absolute knowledge itself, which is self- knowledge in the void, now complete, of any form. "Without suspecting it for an instant, I ' knew' that a period of suffering was beginning." Death reigns in the whore who is God . The Porte Saint-Denis is no longer the space of vision but the place of Calvary. Thus, the woman of the Occident is substituted for the woman of the Orient, the whore for epiphany, the God on the cross for the God "they did not crucify. "
In the presence of epiphany, destruction and immortality were simultaneous events; now, in the face of incarnation, there is no further buffeting between annihilation of the ego and immortality through annihilation itself. Presence is no longer that of the revealed uncreated but the immanence of the dead God : " It was as though I were borne aloft in a flight of headless and unbodied angels shaped from the broad swooping of wings, but it was simpler than that. I became u nhappy and felt painful ly forsaken, as one is in the presence of GOD."9 Epiphany swoons and dies with the triumph of a ful ly real ized messianism, the only full real ization that Christianism supports. The theology that insisted on the distinction between the two dimensions of the revealed, the d ivine nature of the uncreated and the feminine nature of epiphany, necessarily succumbs to the theology in which these two natures are u nited in the body of the whore. Thus Woman doesn't exist, to borrow Lacan's well-known proposition, which precisely matches the equating of God and the whore. We would need to evoke the varied i nverse epiphanies found in Bataille's heroines, with their incarnate names, such as Dirty in Blue of Noon. These are radical negations of epiphany. But this criminal trial, in the sense of the court scene that concludes with the pronunciation of a death sentence, is not the final moment. The final death of epiphanies is fulfi lled, unrelievedly, when messianism itself races toward "The Waste Land . "'0 In place of passion, the brothel, the door open to the
Umbr(a)
i 35
night, there is the neutral place, the em pty bar when the last g lass is raised. I n place of Ophelia and her kingdom of visions, we find the derisive double of the bartender, depriving Hamlet's renascent Platonist of his own words. In the poem that ushers in the twentieth century, to which that other program of our nostalgic nothingness for Christ, Apollinaire's "Zone," exactly corresponds, we read: HURRY U P PLEASE ITS TI M E H URRY U P PLEASE ITS TIM E Goonight Bill. Goonight Lou . Goonight May. Goonight. Ta tao Goonight. Goon ight. Good night, lad ies, good night, sweet ladies, good night, good night." I n Eliot's l ines we can read the melancholy of the present. Now begins the impossible mourning of epiphany; there is nothing to prevent the futile imag inary. For epiphany, the fruit of veracious imagination, suppressed the imbecil ity of the imaginary. It paralyzed the imaginary circumscribing the face of the beloved woman. There was no fantasy surrounding this unique apparition. Now love understands what it is that breaks upon the real event of i ntegral immanence, the empty glass abandoned on the corner of the bar: all the events that make up the body of the woman, and time, and the incorporeals attached to that body, are no longer events of the soul that loves but signs of the death of the uncreated. The whore is now without sin, indifferent, deprived of any relationship to the uncreated, to the originary freedom of the real . "Icy waters" replace the "ocean of lights," far from the sou l 's true ambience. The beloved ceases to be the generative core of the world . The subject is no longer shipped off to epiphany's exquisite prison. The world of semblance yields to the imaginary world, where the one who loves is no longer a body and soul arranged within an order that escapes them, but where the alley of love awaits the dawn of street sweepers. The time of exchange has come. The new man is no longer the man of incarnation and passion, any more than he is the man of Platonic Eros. He is a monad of nonexistence. How can we compare the transhistorical force of apparitions to the injunction of the present when the only question that would free us, the messianic question that Kiarostami 's film asks - Where are you? - is stifled in our throat? Translated by Robert Bononno
Umbr(a)
1 36
JAMBET
The ess ay translated here was published originally as " M ort des epiphanies," i n Christian J ambet, Le cache et / 'apparent (Paris: Editions de I ' Herne, 2003), 1 81 -205. 1 . Martin Heidegger, What Is a Thing?, trans. W. B. Barton, Jr. and Vera Deutsch (Chicago: Regn ery Publishers, 1 968). 2.
Jean Genet, Our Lady of the Flowers, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Grove Press, 1 994), 1 1 2.
3.
Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrief (New York: Random House, 1 934), 643.
4.
Ibid.
5.
To escape the abstract generality of the spe cies, "the portrait painter confers or confirms being, along that edge where it partakes of the abyss of matter. He is committed to ontologi cal testimony, even when he is unaware that he is fulfi lling that great task" (Yves Bonnefoy, "Remarques sur Ie portrait, " in Dessin Couleur et Lumiere [Paris: M ercure de France, 1 995] , 25).
8.
Ibid., 231 .
9.
Ibid., 229.
1 0. The title of "The Waste Land" has been a sub ject of d iscussion. T.S. Eliot helps clarify the meaning by referring readers to one of his sources, From Ritual to Romance, Jessie L. Weston's book on the Grail legend. This ref erence would lead us to understand that un cultivated land, earth on which nothing g rows, devastated earth is "waste" in the sense that it is no longer fertile, that it no longer bears the signs of incarnation, sin, and redemption. The end of the Christian era. I am inclined to ac cept this interpretation in light of the fol lowing l ines by Eliot on Baudelaire, '''La vraie civilisa tion, ' he wrote, 'n 'est pas dans Ie gaz, ni dans la vapeur, ni dans les tables tournantes. Elle est dans la diminution des traces du pecha origi nel. ' It is not quite clear exactly what diminution here implies, but the tendency of his thought is clear, and the message is still accepted by but few, " in Selected Essays: 1 9 1 7- 1 932 (London : Faber and Faber, 1 932), 378.
,
6.
Baqli, Ruzbihan ibn Abi al-Nasr, Le Jasmin des fideles d'amour, ed . Henry Corbin and Moh. Mo'in (Tehran/Paris: Bibliotheque iranienne 8 , 1 958). For more complete coverage o f Ruzbi han's epiphanic visions, see his "spiritual jour nal , " in The Unveiling of Secrets: Diary of a Sufi Master, trans. Carl W. Ernst (Chapel H i l l , NC: Parvardigar Press, 1 997).
7.
I n The Batail/e Reader, ed. Fred Botting and Scott Wilson (London: Blackwell Publishing, 1 997), 230.
1 1 . T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land, ed . M ichael North (New York: W. W. Norton & Co. , 2001 ), 1 0.
w �
Z lS
O E � -m. c cD
o
[I W I r-
I : TH E N ECESSI1Y OF N EO-PLATONISM The event o f t h e Great Resurrection is the culmination o f history; i t fulfills, in the eyes of the Nizari Ismaili, the destiny of man in both supernatural time and the time of nations. B ut this perfection is also a l iberation . The appearance of the Resurrector releases his faithful from the obligations of the law i n order that they may experience an entirely spiritual existence, which is the truth of the paradisiacal state. It would be, in our view, inexact to perceive this liberation as exhausting itself in the simple disappearance of constraints. Perhaps we would be gravely mistaken in opposing the qiyamat [resurrection] period to the shan-at period, as if the one would be content to efface the bonds that the other had imposed. Certainly, a liberty is substituted for a constraint. But this l iberty is not exhausted in the power to do what had been forbidden. It projects those who adopt it into another space and confronts them with another logic, another theology. The resurrection is the experience of l i berty, not simply because it effaces the law, but because it manifests the d ivine essence. The Ismaili of AlamOt experienced the power of their l i berty in the contemplation of the divine unity, finally stripped of its sails. Their joy, their
Umbr(a) 1 39
exaltation, and ultimately, the new obligations imposed u pon them by their completely new existence this whole set of behaviors and feelings belongs to the greatly varied history of the forms of liberty. It is important that these feelings, this elation, the weight of the fallen chains, the rectified body which abandons the ritual gestures of obedience, this set of features in which one of the rare and beautiful moments of liberty is recognized - it is important that all of this was experienced in the encounter with the One. -
The unity which , in being contemplated , liberated the men gathered together in this confined community was primarily concentrated in the figure of the Lord of the Resurrection. But, beneath this face, the feeling of li berty really depended upon the presentation of divine unity. This is why we are u nable to truly comprehend the messianic act in which this manifestation took place without seeking recourse to its metaphysical conditions of possibility or, more precisely, to the ontology that is implicitly staged by such an event. Thus, we must now ask ourselves what the divine essence must be and how it must be thought in order that the sudden emergence of its unity in the shape of man, or of a man, may be intelligible. This interrogation is all the more legitimate given that the Ismaili thinkers themselves d id not fai l t o expressly found t h e messianic act o f t h e resurrection upon a theology and cosmology which formed an impressive metaphysical edifice. It is rare to see such a close correspondence between a rigorous philosophy and a historical experience of liberty. Ismaili philosophy underwent many successive developments, and it is not our intention to summarize or even evoke them here. It suffices for us to question two of the most prominent theoreticians and show how, not without differences, they bring us closer to the real u pon which the experience of AlamOt can be founded. These two metaphysicians are thinking on the horizon of neo-Platonism. There is, on the one hand, AbO Ya'qOb al-Sijistani (who, following the Persian pronunciation, we will call Sejestanl) and on the other, Nasiroddin TOsi. The first is a da ';, which is to say, a Fatimid missionary. The second is a witness to the fal l of AlamOt. They are situated, respectively, at the beginning and at the end of this history. Despite their profound lexical or doctrinal differences, they are connected, and their choice here is justified - for the purposes of understanding an event that Sejestani never knew of, and that Nasiroddin commented on as a fait accompli - by a common passion for the ontological foundation of the particulars of their faith. I would l i ke to draw the reader's attention to this fact, which I find essential : if there is any moment in the history of Ismailism that strongly resembles the proclamation of the Great Resurrection, it is certainly the e n d o f t h e third/ninth century. As we briefly recalled in our i ntroduction , those we called al-qaramita, the Qarmatians, were awaiting the return of the imam Mohammad b. Isma'il. They made themselves feared through their tremendous military incursions, and made themselves hated by the majority of the M uslim world when they removed the B lack Stone from Ka' ba. And yet, it is in the intellectual milieu of the Qarmatians that Sejestani's master, Mohammad b. Ahmad al-Nasafi, composed his Kitab al-Mahsul.' He completely reformed Ismail i theology by introducing the neo-Platonism which became the henceforth
Umbr(a)
1 40
JAMBEr
obligatory frame for the metaphysical thought of Ismail ism. It stri kes me as highly suggestive, then , to see this time as combining an exigent quest for the Day of Resurrection and the abolition of the law, a tragic experience of liberation, and the adoption of a neo-Platonism that makes possible an intense meditation on the One. Sejestani's treatises, saved from the disaster in which h is master's works perished , are the most proximate to this tragic experience of the Oarmatians, even if Sejestani is, for his part, a da'f faithfu l to the Fatimid branch. His treatises are not far, in their existential tone, from the pages of Nasiroddin TOsi, which are tributaries of the experience of AlamOt. They express, in effect, a similar concern for the messianic act and for its causes lying in the ontological structure itself. It is no less suggestive to note, in these two cases, the following philosophical fact: in order to problematize a messianic event, whether it be a fervent premonition or already experienced, it is necessary to interrogate the nature of the One, the nature of the procession of existents [existants] , and also to interpret the messianic event according to the laws of engendering the multiple from the One. Why was this theoretical schema so necessary? It seems to us that there are two simple enough reasons for this. First and foremost, the neo Platonic schema of the One and the multiple permits the One to be situated beyond any connection with the multiple wherein it would be totalized or counted as one. The One is thought beyond the unified totality of its emanations in the multiple. On the other hand, freed from any link with the totality of the existent [existant] , and situated beyond Being [/'etre], the One can signify pure spontaneity, a liberty with no foundation other than itself. In this way, the sudden messianic appearance of the Resurrector will be founded i n the creative l iberty of the originary One; thus, i n the necessary reign of the existent, the non Being that results from the excess of the One will be able to mark out its trail of light. But, conversely, this creative spontaneity will also explain the creation of the existent, the ordained and hierarchized formation of universes. Just as much as with the unjustified l i berty, the One will be able to justify the procession of the intelligible and sensible, and the gradation of the spiritual and bodily worlds. Avoiding dualism, all while thinking the d uality between the One and the order of Being which it i nterrupts; conceiving , on the other hand, of the unity of order and creative spontaneity - all while preserving the dualist sentiment - without which the experience of messianic liberty was impossible: this is what neo Platonic thought offered to the Ismail i. The key t o such a theologico-political structure is the concept of th e imperative, or command (a/ amn. By borrowing it from the lexicon of the Our'an in order to i ntroduce it into the neo-Platonic schema, the Ismail i thinkers made more than a simple theoretical modification, and constructed something better than a philosophical and religious syncretism. It is thanks to the concept of the i mperative that the free spontaneity of the One founds the messianic appearance, and it is thanks to the concept of the command that universes can be founded i n this same primord ial divine unity. Command and imperative, an imperative whose underside is the command itself, such will be the concept that we will have to situate. The Ismai l i conception o f a n unsayable liberty, which is t o say a real l iberty, depends u pon it. I t is within t h e imperative that the u nsayable is knotted to the real .
UmbrIa)
1 41
The Great Resurrection of AlamOt was the historical experience of this imperative. Human liberty was experienced as the expression of the originative Unstauratrice] spontaneity and unconditioned l iberty of God. The abolition of legalitarian religion, the culmination of h istory, the superexistence [surexistence] at the heart of a living commun ity in a state of spiritual resurrection , the extinguishment of ancient obligations and d ivisions, and the sole duty to recogn ize the exigency of divinization, the proof of an event wherein the infinite becomes accessible and is made into the very sou l of life: such are the facets of a freedom that is quite strange for us. The Ismaili experience of l i berty is not the d iscovery of the autonomy of consciousness or the political rights of the individual . It is the feeling of a different and powerful idea: liberty is not a moment of Being , and it is even less a piece in the game of the existent. Liberty is not an attribute, but rather a subjective affirmation without foundation. Liberty is not a multiple effect of the One, but it can be nothing but the One, d isconnected from whatever network of constraints it engenders or by which, on the contrary, it wou ld come to be seized. Liberty is the experience of this non-Being of the One, through which the One inscribes itself in the universe of both Being and beings U'etant] as pure alterity. But, in order to support such a schema of l iberty and the One with in the thinking of the imperative, the Ismail i needed a religious vision of the world. The experience of liberty is not made possible here by the distance man would impose on God . On the contrary, it is identified with the manifestation of the divine essence, with the imperious condition that the divine essence be beyond Being. The l iberty of the men in the experience of AlamOt was this revelation - taken seriously - that the first real, the foundation of all reality, is not itself a reality. The foundation rests on no foundation. Indeed, this is what is proper to foundation when considered in its essence. But that it eludes its own status, that it frees itself from itself, from what remains in it of an originary g round, or from a point that is attributable to some reality - this is the radical gesture of Ismaili thought. The presence of the Lord of the Resurrection demonstrates the infinite void of the deity. That which the Platonic sage contemplates in the ecstasy to which he was unable to lead his companions in ancient slavery is, here, what a communitarian l ife would like to make into a permanent exercise. That which scintillates beyond all naming will have, for the time being, to await the great day of the communitarian ideal in order to be named. The Ismailians' experience is indissolu bly linked to the religious vision of the world , because this vision alone permitted them to encounter the One beyond Being. Thus, it is not in spite of God but in combat with the u nnamable unity of divinity, with the unsayable of divine liberty, that the Ismailism of AlamOt offers us the spectacle of a superhuman attempt at l iberation. In order to be unburdened of the ordinary constraints in the subjugated town, the Ismaili community identified its way of l ife with the expression of the d ivine imperative and the infinite liberty of the principle. By bringing themselves closer to God rather than breaking away from Him, they attempted to overcome the law of this God , which, in any case, said nothing that was not desired by God, who in the form of the Resurrector was henceforth made more manifest than He had ever been under the aegis of the law. Let us ask ourselves what kind of face this God must have had that they wanted to be so near to, to the point of deciphering it in the h uman person, naming themselves "muqarraban, " "Those Brought Near" [RapprocMs]?
Umbr(a)
1 42
It is in order to respond to this question that neo-Platonic thought became necessary very early on for the Ismaili. This was not a chance philosophical dressing-up, the kind of coating that some scholar would put on a pre-constituted theology, but rather a restrictive schema without which this theology would not have been able to clearly think through the messianic event and its consequences for subjective l ife. Without this schema, there is no subject, no proof of liberty. Only a neo-Platonic conception of the One, structured around the powers of the imperative, could allow the Ismai l i to free God from all attachments to Being as well as beings, and to think him in the dimension of the infinite. But, conversely, this neo-Platonic schema can overturn itself and become the complete order of reality. Humanity can then be thought of as the man ifestation of, and privileged receptacle for, the imperative. It can devote itself to a fate other than one of submission to some supreme being: the exemplarity of creative spontaneity and primord ial divine origination. I n consequence, h umanity would have to pay the price that this liberty carries with it: another type of submission, no longer to Being or some figure of beings, but to the order originated by the pure act with which it had identified itself, thereby turning the spontaneous l iberty it had d iscovered into an infinite obligation. It is this movement of liberty transforming into its opposite at the very moment of its appearance, and this movement of an obligation identified with l iberty at the moment of its imposition, which we will now attempt to understand .
I I : AN EXAM I NATION OF KASHF AL-MAHJOB Abu Ya'qub IshBq b. Ahmad al S ij istani, o r al-Sijzi, i s one of th e most im portant Fati m i d Ismaili authors. H e l ived during the middle o f t h e fourth/tenth century. According to S . M . Stern, he must have run t h e jazTra, or mission territory, of Khorasan , fol lowing the death of his master al-Nasati, after having been i n charge of the Ismaili organization in Rayy (where the da 'Ts of Mosul and Baghdad were under his command).2 He was, without a doubt, still alive in 360/970.3 -
The work of this high-ranking dignitary cannot be overestimated, and his study "is absolutely indispensable, because he is our principle source for the Ismaili philosophical doctrines of the fourth/ fifth century."4 We do not intend, however, to examine him as a historical source. Through the fol lowing reading of one of his treatises, The Unveiling of Hidden Things [Le Devoilement des choses cachees],5 we hope simply to highlight the metaphysical approach that was born out of the fusion of Ismaili theology and neo-Platonism. We also hope to demonstrate the co n c ept ual edifice it constructed , emphasize the ontology that supported it, and situate the central role played by the imperative in this ontology - or, more precisely, henology. I ndeed, the metaphysics of the creative imperative during the time of Alamut retained the power it had acquired during the inaugural phase in which Sejestani played a foundational role. Of course, we will see mod ifi cations and i nflections, but we can on ly judge them on the basis of the completely radical henology that we shall now try to present. We are proceeding according to a guided reading of the Unveiling, but not without mentioning Abu Ya'qub's other texts when it seems necessary, and not without lamenting the absence of a collected study on such a crucial author. The Unveiling of Hidden Things is composed of seven chapters, which are i n turn divided i nto seven "investigations." The first chapter is entirely devoted to showing the true nature of God, or rather,
Umbr(a)
1 43
to demonstrating that he has no nature, that he possesses no Being, and that he does not belong to the domain of existents with whose Being he does not identify. The second chapter, " I n memory of the primordial creation," is on the topic of the I ntelligence, which is the primordial originated [/'instaure primordia� . The third chapter deals with the second creation - the un iversal Soul - whose constitutive members are human sou ls. As log ic would dictate in this procession , after the Soul comes the third creation, Nature, whose examination occupies the fourth chapter. The fifth chapter is not about a distinct stage of creation , but it explores the world of species, which is internal to Nature, the world of the "nativities," the world of the three kingdoms (mineral, vegetable, and animal), as wel l as the laws governing the relations between these species and the individuals that comprise them; it is an elementary treatise on physics. The sixth chapter concerns the fifth creation - the prophecy - and the cycles of the prophetic mission . It concludes with an important meditation on the special function of J esus, the son of M ary. This meditation transitions into chapter seven, "in memory of the sixth creation ," which deals with the resurrection and its authentic meaning. This resurrection supposes a Resurrector who completes the last cycle of the supernatural history of human ity. This is not the topic of only the last chapter for, in truth, its veiled presence supports all of the theses that touch upon the resurrection. If Sejestani is able do without a completely deployed I mamology here, it is because he will have questioned it in the exegesis of Jesus' role, since the function of the prophet Jesus is defined by the esoteric m eaning of the resurrection . This outline leaves nothing to surprise. At first Sight, it is composed of three unequal parts: a first chapter dedicated to the unity of the Creator and the unsayable principle of all reality. Four chapters, then , explain the procession of the expressions of the imperative, which is to say the divine word, the I ntelligence, the Soul, and Nature. Finally, two chapters speak of the prophet and the resurrection, which is to say that they speak about the exoteric (religious law, apparent reality) and the esoteric (role and effects of the I mamate). I n truth, three implied structures allow us to discover the i ntrinsic order here. a) A first structure clearly isolates the first chapter, dedicated to the principle, from the six other chapters, which are all devoted to one aspect or another of creation. The total number of chapters, seven, is homologous with the seven cosmic cycles, the seven imams of each cycle, and so on. But the number six is no less charged with meaning. It is, Sejestani tells us, a perfect number: " From this we are led to understand that the six periods (of the cycle of prophecy), from the age of Adam to that of Mohammad, each in its own time, produce the spiritual Forms, the perfection of the Call (da 'wat) of each period's prophet, and the perfect proportion given to h is message by the Qa 'im , without which the component parts (of each period) exceed the n umber six."6 The procession of the six creations - the I ntelligence, the Sou l , Nature, the natural species, the prophet, and the imam - is, thus, isomorphic with the succession of the cycles corresponding to the six major prophets - Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and Mohammad - and thus with the history "in heaven, " which determi nes the Earthly history of humanity. This homologation, governed by the number six, repeats itself as follows: the six days of creation , the six energies (movement and rest, matter and form, space and time), the six sides of a volume in space, the
Umbr(a)
1 44
JAMBET
six parts of man (two hands, two feet, the back and the stomach). J ust as the seventh part of man is the head in which all of creation is summed up, so too must the first chapter bear upon the One who governs the body of creation and makes it live "unto the imperative." ,
b) But we can still d iscover a second structure, this time organized as a function of the preeminence Im of the amate, which isolates and emphasizes the figure of the Messiah and the theory of resurrection. In fact, while still preserving the unique position of the principle, it is possible to read the first six chapters as the exposition of the procession, from the One beyond Being up to the prophet and the Imam. There is an obvious continuity at the heart of this set formed by the exposition of the principle and its expressions, while the seventh chapter reveals the meaning of this set, the destination of the procession, the u niversal conversion of Being which is on ly made possible by the efforts of man . The generative source of universal eschatology is the periect man, for whom the act of being is merged with his resurrection. This eschatology responds to God's cal l to his creation , and it transmutes the whole u niverse into a periect mirror of the One. Sejestani's book is thus a bipolar one wherein, depending on the point of view, either the first or the last chapter gives meaning to everything, l i ke two poles reflecting one another. c) Finally, the third structure. There is nothing strange in the fact that a rupture is produced following the long-awaited procession of the I ntelligence, the Soul, and Nature. We are no longer talking about one or another of the immaterial hypostases, but rather two integrated figures, who are indeed external existents but ones who, in order to live, need to become flesh in this physical world: the prophet and the Imam. Indeed, we must remember the similarity that our author has pointed out, in the Book of Springs [Livre des sources] , between the Christian cross and the profession of faith in Islam.7 Let us recall what Sejestani emphasizes there: a structure with four terms, four "supports of unity." The two "spiritual prototypes," the I ntelligence and Soul {aslan�, and the two "foundations on Earth, " the prophet and the imam (asasan�. They are divided up thusly: the imam is l i kened to the foot of the cross, while the piece of wood extending from it is like the I ntelligence; the left arm of the cross is homologous with the Soul, and the right arm with the prophet. These four terms exhaust the invisible and visible, celestial and Earthly, principles. In his prologue, AbO Ya'qOb insists upon the intention that guides him: it is a matter of refuting "the masters of perdition" who "liken the Creator to the created ."s They believe that they are able to speak of the unknowable, of divine i pseity, and think they can define its essence by enumerating its attributes. They attribute an essence to God . Such is the association they make between the Creator and the creature: community in the possession of an essence. But the true attitude consists, on the contrary, in stripping God of all essence. The only legitimate knowledge [savo;r] rests upon this fully assumed unknowing [inconnaissance]. Knowledge, henceforth, concerns the h ierarchized degrees of creation, the angels, men, the resurrection, the totality of universes, and the infinite richness of the existent. But the condition of such a science is precisely the unscience [inscience] of that which does not figure as an object of knowledge the principle. The pretention to know God in the way one knows a thing has the correlate impact of a neg ligence in the exploration of worlds, of numbers, and of beings. Sejestani's Ismail ism is, all told, the experience of a non-knowledge [non-savo;r] and the production of a multiplicity of knowledges -
Umbr(a)
1 45
[savoirs] . Non-knowledge is the foundation of knowledges, just as the One is the originator of existents. I n accordance with these necessary and leg itimate knowledges, Sejestani g ives men the eth ical duty "to become consu bstantial with gnosis," "as the movement of the fire is inseparable from the fire itself. "9
I I I : TH E PROBLEM OF DIVI N E ESSENCE The tawhid is an attestation , the recognition of what exactly the unity of the Creator consists in. We must, consequently, understand what the One is, not as one number among others, but in that which absolutely separates it from the chain of numbers. Our analysis will excise everything from the One that contradicts its power. To this end, we m ust remove from it the property whereby existents posses an essence. The technical term, which Islamic philosophy will trivialize when it comes to designating essence, is a/-dhat. So, for Avicenna, "it is the term that best renders the general idea of what a thing is, in a profound and intimate manner, but without considering it from a particular point of view. "10 The word a/ dhBt in Avicenna's work wil l gradually take on the clear meaning and univocal usage that it will retain in the subsequent history of Islamic philosophy. But it will never be the sole designation for the essential Being of a g iven reality - all the more reason why it is not yet in its standard usage with Sejestani. In order to say that essence is excluded from the Creator, he makes use of the notion of reity [reite] , or thing ness [choseite] (tchizi in PerSian). The concept of thing ness for him is, first of all, strictly equivalent to that of essence: thingness names essence, but in a slightly different manner than the word a/-dhBt. The latter term puts the accent on the innermost center of a thing, on what the thing under consideration truly is. Essence (a/-dhBt) is the response to the question "what is existent?" (in Greek: ti to on). It is what Aristotle calls the ti esti, as the determination of ouisa. This is why when one speaks of essence, one is inevitably led to enumerate certain attributes, to explore properties, to verify d ifferences. This is also why a theory of essences leads to a theory of genres, of species, and of individuals, since essence is never defined any more precisely than as taking part in a certain order, due to inclusion in a collection. A theory of essences opens outward to conclude in a doctrine of classification. Of course, Sejestani refuses the proposition that God, conceived in his extraessential unity, possesses attributes, that he is subjected to an order, and that he would be the supreme term of classification. The Persian word tchizi, l i ke the Arabic word a/-dhBt, names essence quite well. But let us be carried onward by the semantic charge of the word thingness. What is a thing? It is an eXistent, but not j ust any existent. It is the existent conceived as an object. It is what one can hold, man i pulate, or contemplate. It is the existent, such as it is placed in the universe according to a certain configuration. To say that God has no thingness is to affirm that nothing in him can be made graspable, manipulable, or observable in the manner of a stone, a statue, or some other thing . Which , consequently, is to say that God has no objectivity, that he is not an object, and that he can only be a subject. Rather than inSisting u pon essentiality, the very concrete term thingness insists upon
Umbr(a)
1 46
JAMBET
th e petrificat ion of Being. The thing succumbs to a certai n configuration, which is a limitation on it and a determin atio n though which the spontaneity of the real is debased , until it is l ifted u p in beings. Essence, conceived as thingness, is the character of that which is apt to constitute itself in the real in the mode of "the thing . " Henry Corbin wrote in a note in the Book of Springs : " It will concern particularly the shay'iya (tchizi in Persian, literally, reity) , an abstraction derived from shay' (thing, res) which, precisely because it results from an operation of abstraction, presupposes the operation of the Intelligence."" Thingness is infinitely concrete, since it always falls under something that it is possible to grasp, and it is infi nitely abstract, when understood as the essence of the thing. It becomes a pure abstraction of the mind which will define what characterizes the beings that one might encounter in the world of creatures. Knowledge determines the reity of the thing, it isolates this essence on the one hand, and leaves the fact-of-Being [fait-d'etre], the esse, as a remainder on the other. The residual thingness, then, indicates this fact-of-Being rather than participation i n an order, which is the determination at the heart of a classification. Thingness is not simply the source of possession, intimate to this reality being conceived , the unified source of qualifications and modes, a permanence solidly contained within a hierarchy, an antic mastery. It is, rather, the fact of being some thing, the fact of being presented in Being as an effectuation of the esse. The thing, qua thing , is distinguished from the other-than-self not primarily by its characteristics or attributes, but by its singular position , its sturdy configuration. It has a certain shape, it enters i nto the universe through the fracture caused by its act of presence. This is why reity, thingness, is just as much the act of existing as it is essence. It is the passage from the one to the other. By denying that God possesses a reity we are led to remove essence from him, but we also remove the act of being and presence. Even if the Ismaili lexicon sometimes represents the One in terms of a philosophy of presence, the radicality of Ismaili thought excludes the possibility that God is the presence of himself. Every time Sejestani says simply tchiz, the thing, he also intends al-wojOd, which in Arabic means existence or the act of being. Thingness is this act of being some thing, of undergoing the passage i nto the existence, within the Being proper to the thing, of some i ntelligible essence. Reity is the fact-of-Being , essence as the effectuation of the esse, joined with an existere. It is ousia as much as it is to de ti, as well as as ti esti. The thing , the particular exemplification of esse, is thus indissociable from the existent; it is indissolubly knotted to its act of being.'2 Sejestani barely differentiates here between essence and the concrete existent since it is not important to d istinguish that which exists from its essence, but rather to carefully d iscern the solid knot of Being and the existent - which constitutes the thing and its thing ness - from that which is no thing and possess no thingness. This poses a lexical problem for Sejestani. To designate the One, the focal point, separated from all things and deprived of all thingness, irreducible to Being, Sejestani finds nothing better than the same Arabo-Persian term dhBt, by which the tradition will later designate essence! Henry Corbin thus translates it by "the in-itself" [/'en-sol]. We m ust hear here the real of the One, itself i rreducible to any res, to any reality. We will learn, in the explication of the concept of I ntel ligence, that this is nothing other than reality, which is to say, the first originated Being. Ismail i thinkers thus d ifferentiate between the real ahd reality, a difference that is designated by the terms dhBt and tchizi in the first chapter of the Unveiling.
Umbr(a) 1 47
Only the One "is separated from all of the things by which we designate that which is created. "13 Let us remark once again that the term tchfzf has this i mportant connotation: to-be-a-thing, which is to have limits. Yet the notion of the l imit comes from sensible knowledge. The existent is first presented in the physical form of its surfaces, of its sides. Let us not neglect this aspect of Sejestani's apophatic reasoning: God is not a thing , he has no limit, because he is not subject to bodiliness - understood not simply as the fact of being a body, but more generally as the fact of being figurable.14 The real is the infinite. At a time when the cosmos is a closed-off world, where the idea of an infin ite actually existing in the universe seems to be a contradictory representation , it is within the One that the infin ite - which is not the indefinite - finds its abode. The One is pure infin ity, without foundation or reason , and this is why it posseses no thingnesss that could deprive it of this i nfin itude. I n the same movement, the thought of the One repudiates both thingness and the membership of the divine names and their attributes in the essential reality of the Originator. To situate God beyond Being is to exalt him over and above his own names. Conversely, to free the divine real from the determi nations in which its own attri butes would imprison it is to d ifferentiate it from everything that can be presented as a being, or even as the essence of the existent. Shahrastani summarizes this reasoning extremely well when he writes that the primitive Ismaili said of God: "We say that He is neither an existent, nor a non-existent, He is neither knowin g , nor ignorant, He is neither powerful , nor powerless. And the same goes for all attributes. For, truly affirming [an attribute of God] would mean that He and the other existents share the modality that we would say belongs to H i m , which is assim ilationism."15 I n a slightly d ifferent style, this is also what we read in the Brothers of Purity: God is the originator of existence, no existent precedes him in Being, but the outpouring of his generosity causes all reality to be. That is to say, the real of the One consists entirely in this generosity and infinite power of effusion, which is the Ismail i form of freedom. God sets the supreme l imit at the top of the hierarchy of existents (which implies that divine unity is outside of all limits, and that it, itself, is not the initial limit). God is the real of pure origination and he is constituted entirely by his imperative, which brings into Being both the Pen and the Well-Preserved Tablet (the Intelligence and the Soul) - corresponding, respectively, to the Throne and the Korsi.16 It is therefore equivalent to say that the One is radically distinguished from everything that can ever come into Being or, on the contrary, that it is entirely indistinct. It is even through its own indistinction that it exceeds the universe of the existents. That it is beyond any naming is understood in two ways: the One, the divine real , does not l ie in the names that it receives, and on the other hand, no name is capable of receiving it. The One is rebellious to all signs, it is un localizable: by the eminence of its condition and the force of its domination, it surpasses everything that marks the network of causes upon which the creatural world depends. Reality, for its part, is always marked or d istinguished by names, while the One is exalted beyond distinction itself. When we designate the One by particular namings, we are incapable of conceiving its superexistence. The name of the One is the name of the indistinct.1 7 This is why the authentic attestation of the U n ique is the negation of attributes, whereas the affirmation of attributes is the renouncement of the tawhid.1 8
Umbr(a) 1 48
JAMBET
The orig in of such a negative theology is not a mystery: it has to do with neo-Platon ic phi losophy. But what philosophy, and what sort of neo-Platonism, are we dealing with here? In order to res po n d to this question , it would be necessary to establ ish an exact history of the transmission of Hellenic schemas to Ismailism - yet this is precisely where we are left to conjectures. Nevertheless, we are not left entirely in doubt. I will formulate the fol lowing hypothesis: the neo-Platonism which irrigated Ismaili theology such as it will have been reformed by al-Nasafl and Abu Ya'qub Sejestani - is of Plotinian allegiance. It doubtlessly benefited from the dissemination , more or less contemporary with the reform in question , of the so-called Theology of Aristotle and other texts coming from the Enneads. We know that the Theology is a highly coherent montage, made u p of Plotinian treatises assembled by Porphyry in the order of the final Enneads. Is Porphyry also responsible for the original assembly of the Theology? Was it i n itially tran s lated into Syriac, then from Syriac into Arabic, u ltimately to be revised by the philosopher al-Kindi?19 This work has always played a decisive role in the formation of the metaphysical systems of falsafa, notably i n imposing or confirming the schema o f a procession of the Intelligence, t h e Sou l , and Nature, starting from the One. And yet, indeed , this is also the schema adopted by our Ismaili "reformers" in the fourth/tenth century. Two critical revisions of the Theology exist: a shorter ten-chapter version, and a longer fourteen chapter version, known to the West i n its Latin translation . I n a well-known article, M r. S. Pines - working from fragments published by the Russian scholar Borisov - demonstrated the proximity of this longer version to the theses of Ismailism. Ismaili theology situated the originating function of the Word , or d ivine imperative, between the One and its emanations (the Intelligence and the Soul). Pines found this same pairing of the One and the imperative in Borisov's fragments. The Word plays a decisive role there in the engendering of the I ntelligence. But this vocabulary of origination and the Word, of the imperative and the sovereign speech of God, is not Plotinian . It intrudes on the Plotinian schema in order to accentuate that which concerns the liberty of the principle, and to incline the whole ontological schema towards the meaning of this liberty. If it is accepted that this is found in one of the versions of the Theology, then it must necessarily be concluded that this is due to a mutual influence of Arab Plotinism - transmitted under the name of Aristotle - and Ismail i theology. On the one hand, this confirms that the Ismaili adoption of the doctrine of the One has its origin i n the spread of Plotinism. On the other hand , it must also be supposed that this adoption was not simply passive, but that it led in turn to considerable modifications in the image and doctrine formed out of a procession of the Intelligence and the Soul - beginning with the fact, which was fundamentally new for Hellenic thought, of the Word or imperative.20 Could it be suggested, fol lowing Pines, that the long version of Aristotle's Theology was itself a work heavily determ ined by the theolog ical reform of rad ical S h i ' ite thought? Starting from a Plotin ian vulgate attributed to Aristotle, could the long version, or its Arabic equivalent, have been rewritten? Could the role of the Word have been emphasized in a general movement of thought in which Ismailism played, to say the least, a stimulating role? I n other words, if Ismailism received the definitive structures of its theology from Plotinism between the third/ninth and fourth/tenth centuries, is it not this reformed Ismail ism which, in return - by virtue of mutual contributions, through exchanges we have no trace of
the fruit of
Umbr(a)
1 49
except for just a few conclusive effects in a few texts - could have filtered the Plotonian contribution and determined its appearance according to its own ends? With Nasir-e Khosraw, we see that the Greek sages are called upon to found the authentic doctrine of the One, and to be in harmony with the Ismai l i tawhid.
IV: PROCESS ION & GENESIS
Thingness is the fact of substances, it is the distinctive feature of existents. They come into Being i n the natural world through the effect of a genesis. Sejestani carefully distinguishes between procession, which only applies to eternally originated beings (the I ntelligence, the Soul), and genesis, which is the process of engendering existents that are composed of matter and form. But it must be remarked that the Greek concept of proodos (procession) is itself transformed. Properly speaking, the Intell igence does not proceed from the One, but is originated by the unsayable and free act of the Word , that is to say, the imperative. The Soul , in turn, is originated by the mediation of the I ntelligence. There is a procession of the Soul starting with I ntell igence because a mediation exists between them , but it is only through a convenience of language that we say there is a procession of their pairing. Nothing could be effused from the One other than the imperative, the originating act itself. As for genesis (the Greek genesis), its equivalent in Arabic is certainly the term a/-tawlid. Sejestani performs an audacious exegesis of the Qur'anic verse which denies that God had a son or that he himself had been engendered (a verse which is a refutation of Christian dogma). By transposing this refusal of the tawlld and genesis onto the level of ontological speculation , Sejestani demonstrates that the One could not belong to the universe of substances, where everything derives from a genesis. Furthermore, because it is not originated - being itself the originator - the One escapes the two types of engendering that are possible for the existent. "It follows that Being and essence are excluded from it as well": tchiz and tchizi, the fact of being and essentiality, the characteristic of existing things, the thing understood as the act of existing and thingness, or even as essence.21 Let us ponder the significance of this exclusion, of this Ismai l i refusal : the One is not, and we must remove from it that which institutes beings in their Being . Is this to say that the One is not real? Not in the least. The One is real because it is not. Or, better put: it is the real by virtue of that which deprives it of essence and existence. We will see that everything which exists is a moment of the intelligible or an expression of the I ntelligence, which encompasses the totality of realities, the perfect and complete set of essences. These multiple Beings are unified by the I ntelligence, which is itself originated by the real of the One - in this case, the originated One (and no longer the originating One) . B ut this One, which achieves the primordial origination of the Intelligence, is not. Being begins there where the first originated thing surges forth i nto Being. In this way, to surge forth into Being and to surge forth as Being are one and the same origination. Out of the One - which is nothing, and does not exist - Being itself comes to be in the form of the u niversal reality of beings, that is to say, Being and its intelligible manifestation i n the Intelligence. This whole of reality is every thing, all beings, but it is also the place where Being exits from the unsayable, where it was in no way in supply of itself, where it was not in potential. Being comes to be in the very movement wherein beings are originated by the One which is not.
Umbr(a)
1 50
JAMBET
Th e One is prior to Being. But it is, just as well , totally immanent in the Being it orig inates. If it ded the i ntelligible Being of that which it first originated , then it would be "another" Being. The scen n tra On e is not another Being, it is not the Being of beings which would be other than the beings whose Being it is [if n 'est pas I'etre de I'etant qui serait autre que /'etant dont if est I'etre] . The One is other than the Being of b eing s. Thus, it is not localizable with respect to Being or beings, but the One is rather the unbound force of that which is not bound by Being, within the originated which depends upon its non-existent origination [ins taura tion non-etante] . Its result is necessity, its root is liberty. Universal reality, the i ntelligible universe, therefore depends upon the inexistence of the One. It is because of this inexistence - not sutured by the One, but liberated i n Being by the inexistence of the One. Totality is always a deterioration , a weaker expression of the liberty of the One, a manifestation in which the One, succumbing to Being i n order to effuse it, constrains itself to the translation of the unsayable, that is, the universal . But the ordered set of the multiple moments of the I ntelligence (of real ity) is unified by that which resists all unification , by that which only allows itself to say "one" with the immediate stipulation of not existing, of not being seized by the register of Being. This must be insisted upon : the One is the foundation of reality, but if it is ontologically prior to Being, and if it mod ifies all Being with its originative liberty, then it is not present to the beings that it originates. Just as it does not transcend beings, neither is it the quiet presence of Being or the sCintillating origin of everything. Being alone is capable of residing, of lying near itself, in the presence-to-self of that which is. In the One, there is not enough Being for a presence to take place. Intellig ible universal reality depends on the absence of any place, on the absence of the One, of that which is able to hear itself: it depends on the One as absence, the absent One, the absence of the One. But in every hypothesis, the absence of the One is not merely the other side of its presence. For the Ismaili, this void at the heart of Being, which supports the eternal origination , is more real than the reality that it originates. Their ontology, it seems to me, borrows the instruments necessary for thinking the opposition between the real and Being from Plotinism. It is within the mutual play of these two poles that the fate of man and the necessity of the messianic event is going to have to be thought. It would therefore not be fitting to compare the reality of the intelligible - which is the most eminent there is, which includes within itself everything that can lay claim to reality - and the real of the One. This real is not more eminently real than the I ntelligence. Intelligible reality is, on the contrary, reality par excellence, the unique reality, the unifying sum of all realities. I n this way it is real, absolutely real , Being. Conversely, the One is not absolutely real , it is even more so not the absolute of the real : it affirms the real, through which the absolutely real is originated. This real, prior to reality, is that through which reality is endowed with its necessity at the moment it is originated in Being. I n the origination of reality, the One which is not bestows the mark of " it is so" u pon that which is. It is the cause of existentiation , not i n such a manner that Being anticipates what comes to exist, but in that the existence originated by the One derives from the non-Being of the One. This existence nullifies the unsayable by passing to the act.
Umbr(a)
1 51
This origination is the real of the One. This real is independence, it is liberty on two accounts. The One is free in itself, and it is l iberty in the act of orig ination. It is free in the real that constitutes it and in the operation actualized by this real, for there is no ontological difference between its real and the originating operation. The One is the l iberty of Being, a l iberty which is real because it does not exist, because it does not proceed from the One in the manner of that which exists. Liberty does not proceed from the One, but it is the One i nsofar as it is pure origination . Everything that will proceed from this liberty will come into its own proper necessity of Being, and will freely express the One of superessential and superexistent liberty. In order for this originary liberty to constitute the One, several degrees at the very heart of unity must be carefully d istinguished from one another. Thus, we turn here to the neo-Platonic gradation of the pure One, the One which is, and the multiple-One. This gradation corresponds to the first three hypotheses of Plato's Parmenides. It is clearly present in Ismaili thought, as is borne witness to in the text we would now like to analyze: it is a short chapter of Uniting the Two Wisdoms [Livre reunissant /es deux sagesses], a text by the great philosopher Nasir-e Khosraw.22 As in the rest of the book, Nasir-e Khosraw wishes to show the convergence between Qur'anic ontology and the legacy of Greek wisdom . He places the question of the One under the authority of Pythagoras, the "master of the arithmeticians." Pythagoras held, essentially, that the formation of the world is subject to numbers. The numerical hierarchy g ives the law of the sequences proper to existents.23 This Pythagorean reference is both classical and important. I n truth , it signifies that Platonism is the true ontology, since it is certainly the doctrine of the One and the multiple elaborated by Platonism that we find attributed to Pythagoras here. But it is not unimportant that it is attributed to a mathematician , to the mathematician par excellence. Nasir-e Khosraw probably intends to establish a homology between existents and numbers: not insofar as n u mbers are the hidden essences of things - this is certain ly the case, and we can find numbers, in order, at the heart of the g radual realities of universes - but primari ly insofar as Being best expresses itself in mathematical language. The truth of Being is a matter for the matheme.24 Let us examine, first and foremost, the cardinal thesis of Nasir-e Khosraw: "The origination of the universe in Being comes from the One."25 Origination here is ibtida '. It is not the act which engenders Being and bestows u pon it a presentation i n beings, but rather the fact of the u niverse's being originated, being produced in existence. It is the universe's essential property of possessing Being , or of having come into Being. The universe ('a/am) owes this property to the One. Thus, the One is - prior to Being - the g iver of Being and the cause of the existent. It is precisely to justify this point that the Platonic schema m ust make use of the numerical chain. The orig i nation o f the universe in Being is t h e eduction o f the m u ltiple starting from t h e One, because
universal reality is characterized as such primarily by the way it is put into the multiple (mutakaththar): in this reality, matter represents pure i nconsistency, while the limit resu lts from the way the forms submit the inconsistency of this indefinitely divisible matter to unity. M u ltiplicities are the points of tangency between the One and the pure multiple. But if it is true that the universe avoids slipping i nto inconsistency due to the incidence of the One in the form of each species and each individual, then it is no less true that this formal
Umbr(a)
1 52
JAMBE:i
un ity is a determination , or even a limitation. In a first sense, consequently, the One causes the universe to pass into existence because it determines the forms, where each form is an expression of the One that p uts a limit on the i nconsistent proliferation of the material multiple. The forms are hierarchized, and this h ierarchy finds its reason in the n umerical order of the expressions of the One .
Conversely, it will be no less true that the One existenciates [existencie] the world, u niversal reality insofar as it is universal, which is to say insofar as it rightfully exceeds all limits. Certainly, the universe is physically closed. It closes up the space contained in the sphere of spheres. But it is mathematically indefinite, l i ke the numerical chain . At this precise point, we are confronted with a problem whose solution I do not see as being simple or u nivocal: does it suffice to say that ancient and medieval physics did not accept the infinite in actuality, that they always respected a certain image of the "closed world, " in order to prohi bit the infinite from exercising its power within the models that authorize the representation of p hysical realities?26 Or, put differently: does it suffice to recall that ancient mathematics does not accept the idea of an infinite numerical set i n actuality, and does not define the number by the infinite, i n order to then conclude that the ontology relying on a theory of numbers misrecogn ized the power of the infi nite? Certain distinctions should, without a doubt, be respected. On the one hand, it is accurate to say that each number is a limit, that the One is that which determines, and that the number is the finishing stitch on the proliferation of the multiple. It is not the zero that engenders the series of numbers, but the one. The number, therefore, is not conceived of as beg inning with the term designating the empty set, but always as the reflection of a certain plentitude. It would not, however, be completely accurate to understand the One simply in the role of a limit. We must consider that the One situated at the origin of the multiple chain suffers from an internal scission . It does not stop assuming the function of a limit at all levels of n umerical concatenation, a finishing stitch put on the multiple, but it also engenders the multiple as multiple. It is indeed the One that is responsible for the fact that the chain is interminable, that numbers can always be engendered, u p to the very point of the inconSistency of matter. This rebellious inconsistency within form is itself the ultimate effect of the power of the One. Nowhere is this power exercised with more mastery than at the heart of the inconsistent multiple, where, nevertheless, no trace of the One is any longer discernable. The One is the infinite power of engendering the multiple, which is given adequate representation and expression only in inconsistency and the void. How can it be denied that there is something in this ontological perspective that exceeds the strict defin ition of the One as limit, as u n ifying One? How can it not be seen, consequently, that there is something l i ke a theory of the zero in the Platonic tradition of the One, which is ignorant of itself? In our opinion, Nasir-e Khosraw is thinking through the two functions of the One that are thus paradoxically linked; he is trying to think them together, by h ierarchizing three concepts of the One that uphold, respectively, i nconsistency, the power to engender, and the power to unify. The paradoxical nature of the One manifests itself, first of all, in the asymmetry of relations between the One and the numbers. In Nasir-e Khosraw, this asymmetry is expressed in the vocabulary of liberty. This shows its importance for us. The One is "lacking" [en manque] no number, it is "sufficient," it is free. If the numbers did not exist, this would in no way prevent the One from existing, whereas no number
Umbr(a)
1 53
would have come into Being if the One did not exist.27 The i nfinite power of the One is compensated by the inexistence of the pure m u ltiple, or rather, the identity between non-Being and the pure m u ltiple. The two poles toward which the existent tends - themselves external to the system of Being - are thus nothingness through the excess of the One (the One is not a number, it is not linked to the chain) and nothingness through the inconsistency of the pure multiple (the numbers linked by the chain are not the One) . Stil l , the word "nothingness" is deceptive. This double polarity is that of the Creator and the universe, of originative liberty and orig inated multiplicity. Origination, then, will be the eduction of realities in Being, through which the two positions of absolute solitude will be abandoned: the One outside of the numbers, the numbers outside of the One this is u nification, or the formation of the chain. The One is conceivable in its non-connection with the chain of numbers. On the other hand, the inconsistency that dooms the multiple to non-Being is the material of unifying origination: the chain of numbers is actually engendered and the world really exists. Therefore, a new concept must be supposed in the One: that of the One connected to the numbers. Nasir-e Khosraw - citing someone he calls Pythagoras - says that this One is the cause of the numbers. The universe is numbered , and it is a substance which is indefinitely divisible into parts (mutajaz�. This d ivisibility is the implication of the multiple in the One. Consequently, the numbered universe's eduction in Being is the production of the multiple by the One (1 46). Let us return to the question of the nature of the One. That it is not a number "like the others," that it is not even a number, caught i n the regime of Being and beings - this is what is attested to i n its orig inary position: if one imagines another origi n prior to the One, it must still be thought of as the One. On the other hand, the One cannot be divided and cannot be weakened in the way that numbers can be divided . This indivisibility of the One into d iverse parts is the condition of its real power. It engenders a divisible multipl icity because it is itself indivisible. I n another way, this shows that it is not l i n ked to the chain it engenders, and that it is not connected to the numbers, all of which nevertheless express, to some degree, the power of the One. Nasir-e Khosraw does not say, then, that the One is, or even that it posseses a Being which is superior to all representation. He tells us that the One only holds up in the real, that it is the real: qa ' im ast (1 4-1 5). The One is not existent (mawjOd), it is not existence (wojOd), but it is subsistent (qu' im) - or more rigorously, it persists outside of the unreal and affirms itself as the pure real. The universe of Being does not begin with the One, which is real, but from the One, whose infinite power subsists outside of Being in such a way that Being will express it in the infinitely divisible effusion of the multiple. The two concepts of the One that have already been elucidated are, respectively, the concept of the real free from any connections (whose only representation is i n inconsistent matter), and the concept of the One connected to the numbers (whose representation is the un iversal chain of numbers concentrated in the unifying One). This duality is expressed by Nasir-e Khosraw in the fol lowing pair of concepts: there is unity (wahadat) and the One (wahid). In Persian, this pair is: yeki, yeki-ye mutakaththar, which corresponds exactly to the One and the multiple-One (1 47).
Umbr(a)
1 54
JAMBET
Let us consider the second concept of the One, that of the One connected to the multiple chain of n u mbers . We can no longer think it i ndependently from this chai n . There is no subsistence outside of the re lati on to that which it unifies and engenders. The One does not possess any real . It is, then, no longer the real. To present this connection between the One and the multiple to his reader, Nasir-e Khosraw is constrained by his philosophical tradition to make use of a very questionable model: the pair formed by essence and its manifestation . U nity, according to this concept of the One, is henceforth connected to the multiple-One. Un ity, thus, is by way of the multiple-One, just as the multiple-One is by way of unity: they need each other as black needs the essence of blackness, as soft needs the essence of softness. No softness without its manifestation in that which is soft, no blackness outside that which is black; but conversely, nothing is soft but by participation in the essence of softness. The multiple-One is the universal participation in unity. This is the universe of unified reality, because it is the universe of participation. The chosen model has the advantage, at least, of making us understand how participation, the major difficulty of Platonism, only finds a solution on the level of the multiple-One (1 47). The ful l procession is set forth in the fol lowing way: real unity, the One or multiple-unity, multiplicity, and the multiple. Nasir-e Khosraw calls origination (ibda ) the eduction of the m ultiple in Being, through the mediation of multiplicity. The origin of this origination is the mobdi', the originator, the One who is the cause of the multiple-One (1 5). The result of the primordial origination is the first Being (hast-e awwa�. This does not translate to: the first being [etant). It is rather a matter of that which is originarily produced i n Being, o f that which i s , in the same movement, t h e i ntegral s u m o f beings, and the Being o f beings: hast. In its turn , this fi rst originated Being, the I ntelligence, engenders the universal Soul. The Intelligence is the dyad, since it is the One which is - the One manifested in Being - connected to Being. But prior to this multiple-One or One which is, we find the originator, the One of the origination. Thus, to conclude, the various concepts of the One are declined in the fol lowing manner: First of all, there is the One in its pure real (yekf-ye mahd), superior to unity itself. Nasir-e Khosraw opposes this real of the One to the unity connected to the multiple. But in the very interior of the non connected One, he distinguishes more delicately still between the real of the One and the u nity of the One. The pure One and u nity thus constitute two d istinct concepts, to which origination and primordial origination thereby correspond. Origination is no longer the connection to the m u ltiple, but the engendering of the One that will be connected to the multiple, and from which the multiple-One will proceed. Therefore, there is a third concept of the One: the One of origination. The pure One is the originator of unity, which excludes the possibility that it could engender the chain of multiples or unify it. It is the real in its pure independence. U nity, originated by the pure One, engenders the One connected to the multiple (but which is not itself the multiple-One). Finally, the One connected to the m u ltiple engenders the multiple-One, which is to say the dyad . The dyad (the universal Intell igence) engenders the Three (the universal Soul), which engenders the Four (the universal Matter). We are saying here that the One is not itself the multiple-One, although it is the originated One. On this point, Nasir-e Khosraw's text is not clear. On the one hand , it certainly asserts the anteriority of the One and its superiority - even though it is the origin of numbers - with respect to the chain that truly
Umbr(a)
1 55
begins with the two, the dyad of the I ntelligence. But on the other hand, one could defend the thesis that this chain includes the first originated term , the superior l imit of origination, which can only be the One connected to the numbers. It is in this sense that the One which is already sees duality appear within itself (1 48-1 49). But let us remember the essential point, which is the tripartition of the concepts of the One. The pure One, absolutely real and non-connected , is ahad in Arabic. Unity, or origination, is wahdat, and the One that enters into connection is wahid. Origination expresses the paradoxical nature of the One: it unifies the multiple, but it is rebellious to any connection to the multiple; it imposes the One upon the pure multiple, but it is beyond any unification and it liberates the infinite power of the real within each determined form. Reality becomes coherent through this origination, but it is also the superior power through which the right of the real - the unsettling inconsistency of origination - can establish itself at the heart of this same reality. U nity (wahdat) divides the One (ahad) by the One (wahid), all while ensuring the origination of the mu ltiple-One. Beyond the One there is the real One, the pure One, which is the subject of no procession, the factor of no determination , but is the unsayable liberty itself. This deduction can help clarify the following reading of Sejestani's first chapter. This chapter is presented , at its base, as a commentary on the first hypothesis of the Parmenides: what will there be of the One, if the One is One? Let us recall the consequences that the Platonic d ialogue draws from the examination of this hypothesis. If the One must be One, it will not be a whole, it will be figureless, it will be nowhere, it will not be su bject to movement (neither immobile nor moved), it will be neither identical to itself nor d ifferent from itself, neither similar nor dissimilar, neither equal nor unequal ; it will not be within time; in short, it will in no way participate i n Being and it will be absolutely u nsayable.28 These consequences are presented extremely precisely in investigations II to VI I : the absence of figure and the exclusion of totality are demonstrated , in the second investigation, through to the negation of the limit.29 The fourth investigation excludes place, the fifth forbids time, and the sixth refutes Being. The seventh investigation demonstrates that the negation of all attributes must redouble the negation of this negation: the Creator is non-existent (a non-thing) and not non-existent, and so on. Sejestani holds the line separating the agnosticism (ta ' til) that removes any real from God (and which hypostasizes it in that figure, which is stil l the nothingness of all things) from the assimilation ism (tashbih) that confuses God with one existing real ity or another. Indeed, we find here the Platonic approach which desires that the One be neither identical nor non-identical with itself. The third investigation plays a special role. It first deduces that the One possesses no attributes, by virtue of not being a substantial Being. Sejestani does not renounce the classical problem of divine attributes and their relationship with divine essence. Divine attributes do indeed exist, but in order that they might exist they must express the qualification of created Being. And yet this created Being, immediately originated by the principle, is none other than the Intell igence, or first substance. Thus, he is permitted to speak about divine attributes and to say that they exist, on the condition that he makes them the predicates of the first manifestation of the principle in Being. But this leads us to shift the emphasis of the problem of the relationshi p between d ivine essence and its attributes. The problem loses all meaning on
Umbr(a)
1 56
the level of the One, but it gains all of its meaning on the level of primord ially originated Being. The key to this theoretical procedure is indeed the concept of origination. The principle, the One as the su bject of origination, is al-mobdi' in Arabic - the originator. This is th e only suitable name, for it does not designate any particular essence of the One, but rather the operative power of which this One is eternally the agent. The originator of Being possesses no form that could be known . It is highly significant that Ismail i thought tightly conjoins these two themes which would seem t o a priori exclude o n e another: the originator is d istinguished from all existents and from Being itself because the originator is free of any form. But on the other hand, insofar as it is free from possessing a form and deprived of all essence, the originator can concentrate its real into the pure g iving of forms, into the originative operation. This is the manner in which Nasir-e Khosraw reasons: everything that is known, all reality, possesses a certain form, since knowledge is defined by the representation of forms in the soul (tasawwOr-e nafs). An existing reality that would possess no form would be unknowable, yet form - Being - and reality are intimately bound together. This shows that reality requires a giver of forms, a "conformator" (musawwir) that will itself be free of any form. I n effect, if the conformator itself possessed a form, it in turn would need a conformator, and so on, ad infinitum. If it is necessary for an ultimate conformator to exist, then it must be deprived of form and unknowable. The first cause of all real formations is rebellious to knowledge. 30 The primordial One is thus quite without essence, without form , without thingness. Confirmation of this does not derive from the negative approach, an apophatic approach to the One. It is not only in its unsayable solitude that the One repels form and d istinction; it is also in its originative activity. Essentially, we are understanding the One here as the originator. If it is without form, then it is certainly necessary that its operation, origination (ibda '), should have no connection with originated reality. No connection, no community of essence, is produced between what is formed and knowable and the conformator itself, between the multiple-One and the pure One. I ndeed, this is why we previously d istinguished three different concepts of the One. The pure One insists in its real, outside of all thingness; this solitude expresses itself in the unity which is capable of originating the universe of forms, outside of any connection. And the connected One will, in turn , express this primordial origination of Being through the pure One, which is paradoxically free of any link to that which it originates. In this way, the pure One has no other property than this totally free operation of origination, from which follows the existentiation of forms. It is inferred from this that the primordial origination of reality takes place without mediation (miyanji). Only the realities already originated in Being (the Soul , the I ntelligence, and the Body) are linked and engendered by the mediation of one another. By being, properly speaking, nothing, the real of the One cannot be submitted to this generative law. Origination is not the procession or emanation of realities, with the one fol lowing from the others, and all fol lowing from the first reality of the universal I ntelligence. Origination is the surging forth of real ity though the immediate operation of the real of the One; it is the imperative which causes Being to surge forth as the atemporal event of itself.31 The originator is recognized through the I ntelligence because it is the effect of its origination, and because the attestation of the unique is, for the I ntelligence, the attestation of primordial origination . This
Umbr(a)
1 57
origination is what causes the u niversal reality to be, insofar as it will express the One. On this topic, let us cite a long note by Henry Corbin: Never lose sight of the fact that the Mobdf', the principle, the originator of Being, is not the First Being. It remains super-Being, hyperousios, beyond Being and non-Being, or rather, beyond non-Being and non non-Being . . . The First Being is essentially the made to-be [fait-etre] (hast kardeh) . The Mobdf' cannot be a being; it is the to-make-to-be [faire etre] (hast kardan). Hence, the first being [etant] is the first I ntelligence, the primordial originated, protoktistos, the first of the Cherubim. That which the philosophers call a/ haqq a/-awwal would therefore be on the level of this first Being. The double negativity produces a metaphysical gap that must be accounted for if one confronts the cosmogonic schema of the philosophers and that of the Ismaili Theosophs.32 We were saying earlier that primord ial origination is not procession . In truth, the difference between them will be accentuated by the theoreticians of the reformed Ismailism of AlamOt, due to the exaltation of the functions of the divine i mperative. But in Sejestani, things are less clear. I nsofar as it is the to make-to-be, the principle is not d istinguished from the imperative and from origination because it is the One, the generative center of all existents, and it is so directly, without mediation, or rather through the mediation of the two su bstances of the I ntel ligence and the Soul . We could say that t h i s prin cip l e is on the one hand imparticipable, and on the other hand that it is the i mperative or divine speech typifying this i mparticipability. Origination, meanwhile, is the monad izing activity that gives its infinite power to the I ntelligence. As Proclus writes, i n commenting on the analogy between the Good and the sun in the Republic: " For as we refer the sensible m ultitude to a monad uncoordinated with sensibles, and we think that through this monad the multitude of sensibles derives its existence, so it is necessary to refer the intelligible multitude to another cause which is not connumerated with intelligibles, and from which they are alloted their Being and their divine existence."33 V: TH E LOG I CAL TI M E O F TH E ATTESTATION OF TH E O N E
"The orig inative principle is what [the I ntelligence] knows through its very act o f being, in such a manner that the knowledge it possesses - through the very act of its Being - of the principle that originates it is the knowledge of the ipseity of that principle. Thus, it is not the case that there is neither existent ipseity, nor inexistent ipseity, outside of that which is revealed [to the Intelligence] through its very act of being."34 Let us come back to the structure of logical time implied by this text. What is it that constitutes the i pseity of the One, its effective real? It is not, we know, some essence which would belong to it, independently of all of the other essences. In order for the One to adopt an i pseity, an act must take place. The effect of the act constituting the i pseity of the One is to impose the One u pon the real , and to make the One into this real prior to all reality, through which that same reality will be brought into existence. The effect of the intelligible act, which turns out to be the i pseity of the One, is indeed to consecrate the ontological priority of the One. But this act is not the doing of the One. It is an act of knowledge, or better
Umbr(a) 1 58
put, of authentic attestation, and consequently it can only fol low from the truth operation wh ich constitutes th e B eing of the first I ntelligence. And yet, this I ntelligence is rightful ly u nderstood as subsequent to the On e, since it effuses the One without mediation. I nsofar as it is absolutely unsayable and deprived of i pseity (in the way in which it is deprived of all essence), the One is this real which by no means accedes to Being, even by way of the truth. It possesses n othing that could identify it. In order to accede to the truth of its unsayable ipseity - that is, in order that it be accessible to un knowing [inconnaissance]35 - within the completely negative approach which determines, at the very least, the truth of its real, it is necessary for the act of the Intelligence's cognition to take place. This act is itself paradoxical, since it does not recognize the positive essence of the One (which possesses no essence at al l), but it experiences the extraessential real of the One. Thus, when it is recognized as truth, the real of the One is always-already the effect of an act, as a very first determination . It might seem to be a vicious circle: the One would proceed from the I ntelligence, which would proceed from the One. But this circle cannot be closed. The One, beyond its own truth, forbids such a closure. The figure representing the truth, as in the case of the great thinkers of Hellenic neo-Platonism, will very appropriately be the spiral. Originated from the point of the u nsayable by the pure act which effuses the real of the One, the first Intell igence is converted to the One though an act of knowing which truly posits the ipseity of the One. But between the pure unsayable and the real One that is henceforth establ ished, between the pure One and the real u nity of this One, there is a distance which is itself unsayable: the distance that separates that which refuses any act from that which is already seized by an act in its very refusal, which is nevertheless established even if only as a pure constituting. The One is known as constituting; it is participated in as imparticipable. Here we have well in hand the illustration of the paradoxical nature of the One. The One must be real so that the I ntelligence may proceed from it, but it is from the I ntelligence that the One receives the attestation of its unsayable truth . This dehiscence of the One, which is the operation of its primordial origination, is immediately originated. The act by which the I ntelligence knows the unsayable in no way plugs u p this division, but on the contrary it expresses it and reproduces its mirror i mage. This reproductive structure "in mirror image" is essential to Ismail ism. Let us retain , for the moment, that what is being thought here will never be the quiet presence of Being, but rather the anticipatory division of the One. This mirroring effect cannot, in our: opinion, be interpreted i n any other way than the following: the whole of intelligible reality affirms the real of the One and manifests its own particular exigency of the paradoxical One. As for the One, it always anticipates that attestation u pon which it nevertheless logically depends. This is why it is able to see the d ivision we are d iscussing as anticipating its unitude; it is submitted to the power of the two. The One owes the naming of its truth to an intellective operation, which is the fact of the first Intelligence, the first to effuse the One. Simply to say the One is to be situated "downstream from the One," as if the paradoxical One were scanning the real and marking reality with its touch , when this reality begins to be deployed on the level of the universal Intell igence, and only there. Conversely, the emergence of all real ity provokes - at the moment of its coming into Being - this
Umbr(a)
1 59
touch of the real, which it will then attest to in its own act of existing. The touch of an inconceivable and unverifiable real, "beyond" all naming, upstream or downstream from itself. Naming will always be inadequate to the One, because it is naming. Naming always comes belatedly [apres coup]. But with the One, we can j ust as well say that all naming is adequate, because it is its own naming . The One only exists, then, to the extent that it is named by the first Intell igence, and the naming adheres to the form of concrete reality wherein the One's scansion comes to leave its mark. Thus, it certainly seems to us that Sejestani, and the whole of Ismaili thought along with him, makes a clear distinction between the real and reality; this distinction will be taken u p again with vigor by Nasiroddin TOsi and the theologians of AlamOt. The real is typified by the paradoxical One, whereas reality is organized on the level of the Being and non-Being that structure the forms of the existent in accordance with the first I ntelligence, from which the hierarchy of universes will proceed. The real is purely causative; it causes intelligible reality to exist. Reality receives this touch of the real from the One, which will have two i nterdependent and contradictory effects: on the one hand, the unity that engenders order and coherence, the pyramid of the species, the regularity of cosmic movements, and the numbers that determine all things, from personal destiny to the cycles of prophecy; on the other hand, the One-effect [/'effet d'Un] that creates the event of the resurrection, that exceeds any numerical chain and subjects the coherence of reality to the experience of a real l iberty - in other words, it transfers reality unto the imperative. Translated by Michael Stanish
a n a l c h e m i c a l e csta sy i n r e m e m b r a nce o f t h e Three M a g i
Umbr(a)
1 60
,JAMBET
Thi s t ext is a translation of the chapter, "L' u n paradoxal, " from Christian Jambet, L a grande resurrection d'Alamut (Paris: Editions Verdier, 1 990) , 1 39 1 73 . 1.
Through h is missionary effort, the da'i AbO ' Abdallah Mohammad b. Ahmad al-Nasati (or al-Nakhshabij, a native of Bazda, a village near Nasaf, earned the adherence of important dig nitaries of the Samanid state, in Transoxiana, and even emir Nasr b. Ahmad . But after Nasr b. Ahmad 's death, the Ismail i mission was per secuted and al-Nasati perished in the catastro phe (33 1 /942 or 332/943). His Kitab al-Mahsul was criticized by another Ismaili dignitary, AbO Hatim al-Razi, in his Kitab al-Islah. AbO Ya'qOb Sejestani defended his master al-Nasati in the Kitab al-Nusra. We are aware of this controver sy than ks to the critical appraisal of it drawn up by the great theoretician and Fatimid dig nitary Hamid ai-Din al-Kirmani (d . 4 1 0/1 0 1 9) i n h i s Kitab al-Riyad ( i n which he often takes al Razi's side). Let us note, as others have, that Nasati would have asserted that Adam provid ed not a shan"'at, the rules of human behavior, but rather an esoteric knowledge ('ilm). I n this way, Adam would be the origin of the line of prophets, an origin which would become con fused with the contribution of a purely spiritual religion. The end of the historical succession of prophets in the figure of the Resurrector, abolishing the positive religion of Mohammad , would correspond with this. These antinomian tendencies converge with those of those of the Qarmatians, and are certainly in keeping with the exasperated expectations of Mohammad b. Isma'jJ 's return. This is the same thinker who seems to upset the balance of zahir and b8.tin for the sake of spiritual religion, and who thinks within the element of messianic wait ing - who is responsible for the neo-Platonic recasting of Ismail i theology. See Wladimir
Ivanow, "An Early Controversy in Ismailism , " Studies in Early Persian Ismailism (Bombay: Ismaili SOCiety, 1 955), 1 1 5 ff. (particularly 1 451 47); S. M . Stern, "Abu Hatim al-Razi on Per sian Religion , " Studies in Early Ismailism (Jeru salem: Magnes Press, 1 983) , 3 1 f. , "The Early Isma'ili M issionaries in North-West Persia and in Khurasan and Transoxiana, " Studies, 2 1 9 f. , and "Isma'i!is and Qarmatians," Studies, 297; Wi lferd Madelung, "Isma' iliyya", Encyclopedia of Islam, second edition, Book I I I , 2 1 2, and Re ligious Trends in Early Islamic Iran (New York: Persian Heritage Foundation , 1 988), 97 ft; Kitab a/-Riyad, p. 1 76 ft. 2.
Stern, Studies, 221 .
3.
See the list of his works in Wladimir Ivanow, A Guide to Ismaili Literature (London: The Royal Asiatic Society, 1 933), 33 35.
4.
S. M . Stern , art. "AbO Ya' kOb al-Sidjzi," Ency clopedia of Islam , second edition, Book I , 1 65 .
5.
Kashf al-Mahjub, Persian text published with an introduction by H. Corbin, Tehran-Paris, 1 949; Le Devoilement des choses cachees, translated from the Persian and introduced by H. Corbin (Lagrasse: Verdier, 1 988).
6.
Kitab al-Yanabi' , section 1 55 of Le Livre des sources, thirty-fourth source, in Henry Corbin, Trilogie ismaelienne (Paris: Adrien M aison neuve, 1 961 ), 1 03.
7.
KitBb al Yanabi' , sections 1 47-1 48 of Livre des Sources, thirty-second source, in Corbin, Tri logie, 1 00 f.
8.
Devoilement, 29 (Kashf, 2).
9.
Ibid. (Kashf, 3) .
Umbr(a)
1 61
1 0. A. M. Goichon, Lexique de la langue philoso
phique d'lbn Sfna, 1 34. On the topic of the subtle play between al-dhBt, essence, and al-jawhar, substance - as well as its conse quences for Hirabi, to whom Avicenna owes so much - see R. Arnaldez, " L' Ame et Ie Monde dans Ie systeme philosophique de Farabi, " Studia Islamica XLI I I , 59. 1 1 . Corbin, Trilogie, 47. 1 2 . See Devoilement, 3 4 f. (Kashf, 4 f.). The con cept by which we designate this fact that God absents h imself from Being is that which names its originary spontaneity: it wi ll be the Originator. 1 3. I bid., 33 (Kashf, 4). 1 4. One wou ld need to say corporality [corporali tel, following an expression proposed by Guy Lardreau. Sensibility, which causes us to ac cede to bodi ly existents, thereby allows us to have a proper grasp of Being and the being. Sensibility unveils the general nature of the existent, thingness, to us: i n order to be, one must be a face, a figure. This is true for bod ies, but also for spiritual forms. Sensibility does not mislead us when it makes us i nterpret exis tence in terms of figurability or corp orality. That which possesses neither figure nor lim it does not exist - and we know the problem that the existence of the indeterminate bodily sub stance will pose for Descartes. For the concept of corporality, see G. Lardreau, " La philosophie de Porphyre et la question de I ' interpretation," in Porphyre, L'Antre des Nymphes dans I'Odys see (Lagrasse: Verdier, 1 989), 2 1 . 1 5. Shahrastani, Livre des religions et des sects, Tome I, trans. D . Gimaret and G . Monnot (Lou vain : Peeters Publishers, 1 986), 555 .
Umbr(a)
1 62
1 6. AI-Risa/at al-jami'a, ed. M. Ghaleb,
24 f.
1 7 . We find this important analysis of the indistinc tion of the One in the Yemeni da'i 'Ali Muh. I bn al-Walid (d . 6 1 2/1 21 5). See Taj al- 'Aqa 'id, 26. 1 8. Ibid., 28, 30. 1 9. The question is controversial. The work of F. W. Zimmermann seems to show the uselessness of a Syriac transition. See "The Origins of The So-Called Theology of Aristotle, " in Pseudo Aristotle in the Middle Ages (London: Warburg Institute Surveys and Texts XI, 1 98 1 ) , 1 1 0-240. 20. See S. Pines, "La longue recension de la Theologie d ' Aristote dans ses rapports avec la doctrine ismaelienne," Revue des Etudes Isla miques (1 954) , 8-20. 2 1 . Devoilement, 34 (Kashf, 4).
22. Nasir-e Khosraw, Kitab-e jami' al-Hikmatain (Le livre reunissant les deux sagesses), "Andar sharh-e yekf," 1 45 ft. of the Persian text (Teh ran : Department d ' l ranologie de I ' lnstitut Fran co-I ranien / Paris: A. Maisonneuve, 1 953). See also the " Etude preliminaire" by Henry Corbin, 1 1 4. 23 . I bi d . , 1 45. 24. What this Platonic gesture entails is entirely elucidated by Alain Badiou in Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (New York: Continuum, 2007). See also, by the same author, Number and Numbers, trans. Robin Mackay (Malden , MA: Polity Press, 2008). It seems to us that these two books, beyond the Cantorian cut that Badiou exalts, wish to meditate on the situa tion of the One in a transhistorical perspective. This meditation has the vocation of profoundly
JAMBET
modifying reflection on Being as Being, and of authorizing a "step beyond" [pas au-de/a] Hei degger. Our return to Ismaili liberty cou ld, in the same manner, be read as the beginning of a discussion with the legacy of German ontol ogy, and in particular with the d ialogue origi nated by Heidegger with Schelling; a dialogue for which one must today, perhaps, substitute others - one that would be placed u nder the sign of a Cartesian gesture, and another that would radically challenge Heidegger's histori cization of Platonism. 25. Nasir-e Khosraw, Kitab-e jami' al-Hikmatain, 1 45, I. 9. 26. Alexandre Koyre's theses are complex. On the one hand, the Galilean cut is radical . On the other hand , it is prepared by a discursive network wherein the neo-Platonism of the re naissance plays a major role. Touching upon the question of the infinite and its figuration in liberty, it seems to me that the cut of mod ern science, in order to be indisputably foun dational, does not exclude other continuities, and that the history of Platonism is not that of an ancient ontology, or at least not excl usively ancient. 27. Nasir-e Khosraw, Kitab-e jami' al-Hikmatain, 1 2-1 8. This is the ninth hypothesis in Par menides (1 651h). Subsequent references will appear parenthetically within the text.
32 . Corbin, Trilogie ismaelienne, 1 9, n 1 9. 33 . Proclus, The Platonic Theology, Vol . 1 , Books 1 -3 , trans. Thomas Taylor (EI Paso: Selene
Books, 1 985), 1 25; translation modified. 34.
Kitab al-Yanabi' , section 22 of Le livre des sources, fourth source, in Corbin, Trilogie, 34.
35. On this point, we connect the "approach of the impersonal" and the "figures of i nsignificance" proposed by P. Stanislas Breton in Rien ou quelque chose [Nothing or Something] (Paris: Flammarion , 1 987). A confrontation between our authors, inspired by Plotinus but dedicated to rediscovering the auto-exceeding move ment of neo-Platonism with Proclus and above all Damascius, would impose itself here. I n this way, the concept of the contraction of the intel ligible, and above all the thought of the One as dual in Damascius, have a direct relation with that which is being thought on the part of our Ismailians. See Damascius, Des premier prin cipes, trans. M .C. Galperine (Lagrasse: Verdier, 1 988), 306-307 and the introduction by M.C. Galperine, 33. What is at play is nothing less, as Guy Lardreau writes, than "this monster for trivial classifications: a negative philosophy as the thought of pure affirmation , " in Annuaire philosophique 1987- 1988, ed. Franc;:ois Wahl (Paris: Seuil, 37).
28. Parmenides, 1 37c-1 42a. 29.
Devoilement,
35-45
(Kashf, 5-1 5).
30. Nasir-e Khosraw, Zad a/-Musafirin , ed . M . Ba zlurrahman (Berlin: Kaviani Press, 1 922), 346. 31 . Ibid., 344.
Umbr(a) 1 63
u Q)
cr
0 --
cr w � Z
-0: 0 u c
Cd 0
II
0
� I U) cr --
0
U) Z W
U w
I �
I ranian films are an exotic experience for audiences accustomed to Hollywood dominated cinema. Not j ust for obvious reasons, but because the obvious - the foreign locations, customs, and people, everything we actually see on screen is produced by a different distribution of the visible and the i nvisible and an alien logic of the look. One of the most spectacular heralds of Iran's 1 978-1 979 Islamic Revolution was the torching of spectacle. Movie theaters - i n one horrific case, with the audience still in it - were set on fire and incinerated by fundamentalists. Fittingly, in this respect, Khomein i spoke, in his first public appearance as I ran 's new leader, not only of his intent to restore the authority of the mullahs and to purge the country of all foreign influences, Eastern as well as Western ; he also broached the question of cinema directly. As might be expected, he vehemently denounced the cinema of that "vil e traitor, " the ousted Shah , as "a center of vice,"
but he refrained from banning cinema outright as a wicked modern invention.' For, Khomeini recog nized immediately the value of cinema, the possibilities for mobilizing it in the service of his grand scheme to reeducate the people in the ways of Islam. Post-revol utionary I ran witnessed , then, not the tabooing, but the flourishing of a heavily subsidized and officially promoted cinema, though one
Umbr(a)
1 65
strictly regulated by the M inistry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, which explicitly forbade the smallest signs of foreign i nfluence - such as the wearing of ties, the smoking of cigarettes, and the dri nking of alcohol, and so on - and, more importantly and more g lobally, any infraction of the Islamic system of hejab. In its strictest sense, hejab is a veil or cloth covering used to obscure women from the sight of men to whom they are not related; in the widest sense, it is the entire "system of modesty" that demands the concealment of even the contour of a woman 's body, which is always in danger of being revealed by her gestures and movements. Indeed , hejab seems to be motivated by the belief that there is something about women that can never be covered up enough, that surreptitiously bares itself even beneath her clothing. Thus, the precautionary task of veil ing is buttressed by architectural design and rigid social protocols that further protect women from exposing themselves and men from being exposed to the sight of them. The impact of hejab regulations on cinema was massive.2 For, it was not just the figure and movement of the woman that required veiling, but also the look directed at her. Strictures against the eros of the unrelated meant that not even religiously sanctioned forms of erotic engagement between men and women could be represented , since fi lming made women vu lnerable to the extradiegetic look of the director, crew, and, of course, the audience. Thus, the look of desire around which Hollywood dominated cinema is plotted had to be forsaken, along with the well-establ ished system of relaying that look through an alternating pattern of shots and counter-shots and the telling i nsertion of psychological ly motivated close-ups. Besides restricting narrative situations and tabooing the most common style of editing, the system of modesty also obliged any filmmaker committed to maintaining a modicum of realism to shoot outdoors. Although, in real l ife, I ranian women need not and do not wear headscarves at home, in cinematic interiors they were forced to don them because of the presence, once again , of the extradiegetic look which exposed them to the view of unrelated men. But incongruous images of headscarves in scenes of family intimacy were more than unrealistic; they were oftentimes risible, and fi lmmakers thus tended to avoid domestic scenes as much as possible. U ltimately, then, it was i nteriority that was the most significant cinematic casualty of hejab. Iranian cinema came to be composed only of exterior shots, whether i n t h e form of actual spatial exteriors - t h e improbable abundance o f rural landscapes and city streets, hallmarks of Iranian cinema - or in the form of virtual exteriors - interior domestic spaces in which women remained veiled and secluded from desire, outside the reach of any affectionate or passionate caress. The challenge facing all I ranian fi lmmakers, then, is to make credible and compelling films under this condition , namely: the censorship of interiority, the taboo of intimacy. Revelations of American torture of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib brought to l ight an abusive reaction to the Islamic system of modesty. It turns out that The Arab Mind, a book first published i n 1 973 and reprinted on ly a few months prior t o the U . S . invasion o f Iraq, got into the hands of pro-war Washington conservatives and became, in the words of one academic, "the Bible of the neo-cons on Arab behavior. " Of sp e c ia l i nterest to these conservatives was a chapter on "Arabs and Sex," which argued that "the segregation of the sexes, the veiling of women . . . and all the other minute rules that govern and restrict contact between men and women, have the effect of making sex a prime mental preoccupation in the Arab world."3 It was this sort of speculation that was responsible for planting in the heads of calculating conservatives the idea that shame would be the most effective device for breaking down Iraqi prisoners psychologically. According to a report i n The New Yorker, two themes emerged as "talking points" in the
Umbr(a)
1 66
COPJEC
discussions of the strategists: (1 ) "Arabs only understand force, " and (2) "the biggest weakness of Arabs is shame and humiliation ." I n brief, shaming was chosen as the method of torture precisely because the torturers believed that Arab culture made the prisoners particularly vulnerable to it. This belief was nourished on the banquet of that crude and - one would have thought - thoroughly discredited sociological division of the world into "guilt cultures" and "shame cultures." The distinction classifies guilt as an affect characteristic of advanced cultures, whose members have graduated to the stage where they possess an internal principle of morality, and shame as a "primitive" affect characteristic of cultures forced to rely, for want of such a principle, on the approving or disapproving gaze of other people to monitor morality. I will focal ize my criticisms by offering my own curt and contrary thesis: The affects of shame and guilt are improperly used to define kinds of cultures; what they define, rather; are different relations to one 's culture. I use culture here to refer to the form of l ife we i nherit at birth (not our biological birth, but our birth i nto language), all those things - family, race, ethnicity, sex - we do not choose, but which choose us, the entire past that precedes us and marks our belatedness. The manner in which we assume this inheritance, and the way we understand what it means to keep faith with it, are, I will argue, what distinguish shame from g u i lt. Distancing herself from the dubious correlation of affects with stages of cultural and moral development, Eve Sedgwick offers an alternative to the neoconservative view of shame as she reflects on her own experience of it in the aftermath of another violent confrontation between America and Islam, the attack of September 1 1 . Sedgwick tel ls us that she was suddenly overcome by shame whenever she happened , post-9/1 1 , to catch a glimpse of the void that occupied the site where the Twin Towers once stood.4 This example is striking in its uncommonness, for the circumstances that give rise to her shame are not the sort one usually associates with it. This is, however, Sedgwick's point: shame is not occasioned , as is usually thought, by prohibition or repression, by a look of condemnation or d isapproval. It is a response, rather, to a rupturing of the comforting circuit of recogn ition and social exchange that ordinarily defines us. The absence of the Towers - the demol ition of the edifices that stood as icol1s of the reinforced invulnerabi l ity of the U.S. and as landmarks by which New Yorkers used to orient themselves in the city - signal the point of a rupture. Witnessing their absence, Sedgwick experiences a loss of familiar coordinates, a fundamental disorientation. It is in this context that she describes the blush of shame as the "betraying blazon of a ruptured narcissistic circuit. "5 Shame always resu lts from a sneak attack, an upsetting of expectations that wounds ego identity. Yet what is odd is that this wound is not accompanied by a simple feeling of isolation, of being separated from society. This is the second important point. Sedgwick describes the paradox of shame as a simultaneous movement "toward [ . . . ] individuation" and "toward uncontrollable relationality," or social contagion.6 That is, alongside the feeling of a d isconcerting and often searing self-awareness, shame is marked by a kind of group sentiment, a feeling of solidarity with others. I n an effort to i nterpret this often-remarked paradox, Sedgwick insists that the shame she felt after 9/1 1 was not for herself, but for the missing Towers. That is, she i nterprets her social sElntiment as a feeling of shame for or on behalf of something other than herself. But this is a mistake, for it g ives shame an object, here: the destroyed Towers. Strictly speaking, however, the syntagm "shame for" is a
Umbr(a) 1 67
solecism ; one feels shame neither for oneself nor for others. Shame is intransitive; it has no object in the ordinary sense. To experience it is to experience oneself as subject, not as a degraded or despised object. I am not ashamed of myself, I am the shame I feel. Giorgio Agamben makes this point clearly when he deSignates shame as the "proper emotive tonality of subjectivity" and as "the fundamental sentiment of being a subject. "7 And , indeed, Sedgwick herself points in this direction when she describes shame as the sentiment that "attaches to and sharpens the sense of who one is, " noting - and this is a crucial qualifier - that this sentiment of self also consists of a feeling of not being "integrated" with who we are.B l n shame one encounters one's self outside the self, engaged in society. Let us put aside for the moment this inquiry into how we in the U.S. understand or misunderstand shame and look at it from the other side. Turning back to the Islamic system of modesty, let us take a closer look at the fil ms of Abbas Kiarostami, one of the most important and best known directors to make films under this system. What gives the neoconservative association of shame and hejab its legs, of course, is the fact that both involve veiling. In the modesty system, as with shame, a curtain is always drawn, looks averted, heads bowed. On first approach, it would seem that no director is more in tune with the hejab system than Kiarostami, for his is a cinema of respectful reserve and restraint. This reserve is expressed most emblematically in his preference for what can be described as "discreet" long-shots. Especially in moments of dramatic i ntimacy - a skittish suitor's approach to the girl he loves, the meeting between a man who impersonates another and the man he impersonates - Kiarostami's camera tends to hold back, to separate itself from the action by inserting a distance between itself and the scene and refusing to venture forward into the private space of the characters. So marked is the tactfulness of his camera that Kiarostami sometimes seems a reluctant filmmaker. I n l ight of this overall filming strategy, one sequence from The Wind Will Carry Us (1 999) stands out as an aberration. Its protagonist, Behzad , a documentary fil mmaker, has traveled to the Kurd ish village of Siah Darreh with his crew to film the ceremony of scarification stil l practiced by mourn ing villagers after someone from the village dies. In the sequence in question, Behzad , biding his time as he awaits the imminent death of M rs. M alek, the village's oldest inhabitant, amuses himself by attempting to purchase some fresh milk from Zeynab, a young village girl and the fiancee of a gravedigger he has befriended . Hamid Dabashi, author of a book on I ranian cinema and normally a great admirer of Kiarostami, excoriates the director for the utter shamelessness of this sequence in which, in Dabashi 's view, an I ranian woman's privacy and dignity are raped by a boorish I ranian man, whose crime is all the more offensive for being paraded before the eyes of the world.9 This is what Dabashi sees: Behzad descending into a h idden, underground space, penetrating the darkness that protects a shy, unsophisticated village girl from violation, and aggressively trying to expose her, despite her obvious resistance, to the light of his lamp, his incautious look, his lies, and his sexual seduction. ANXIETY
& TH E " I N EXPRESSI BLE FLAVOR OF TH E ABSOLUTE"
Dabashi's disdain for Behzad is heavily informed by h is assessment of the protagonist as merely a Tehrani interloper adrift in rural I ran. This reading of Behzad 's puzzled and sometimes combative disorientation -
UmbrIa)
1 68
COPJEC
a disorientation he shares with many of Kiarostami 's protagonists, who are almost all screen doubles of the director - is a common one: geographically and culturally displaced, the modern urban sophisticate finds himself at a loss amidst rural peoples and traditions. One is obliged to note, however, that it is as much the peri-urban character of these rural areas as their pristine primitiveness, notably i n decline, which catches Kiarostami's eye. Cell phone reception may not always be good in the villages, but new telecommunications systems are already being installed and the sight of random television antennae and satellite dishes atop thatched roofs assure us that no one in this part of the world need miss a simulcast soccer game. Regarding the traditional ceremony of scarification, for example, we learn in the film that it has been retrofitted, turned some time ago into a means of advancing oneself on the professional ladder. Whenever a relative of one of the bosses dies, the workers compete for the distinction of being the most loyal mourner, exhibiting their self-scarred faces and bodies in hopes of impressing their bosses and being rewarded with a raise or promotion. Incipient capitalism is here in bed with traditional culture, exploiting rather than eliminating it. This abbreviation of the distance between Behzad and the villagers does not exonerate his insensitive behavior, but it does suggest that we need to look elsewhere for a more accurate explanation of his disorientation, which goes deeper than the narrative alibi implies. Like other Kiarostami protagonists, Behzad behaves, I will argue, less like a rootless or deterritorialized modern man than l i ke one who has been uprooted from his modern un rootedness to experience himself as riveted to a culture, a land, an ethnicity that remains inscrutable and that he tries to understand, without much success, by engaging in a quasi-ethnographic exploration of them. That modernity melted everything solid into air is an exaggerated claim, but it was expected that it would at least soften all that had once been solid to the consistency of clay, to render everything, including the subject, infin itely pliable. Contrary to expectations, however, supposedly mal leable modern man found himself stuck to something; something tore him away from the free-flowing current of modern life. It is as if a drain hole were inexplicably opened in the modern world, lending our fleeting "temporal existence [ . . . ] the inexpressible flavor of the absolute" and giving rise to "an acute feeling of being held fast."'o That this riveting or reterritorialization is a confounding fact of modern l ife and no mere theoretical abstraction is evidenced most emphatically in all the stubborn outbreaks of national, ethnic, racial, and religious loyalties at a moment when such loyalties were expected to be dissolved by the deterritorializing thrust of g lobal capitalism. We know that modernity was founded on a definitive break with the authority of our ancestors, who were no longer conceived as the ground for our actions or beliefs. Yet the undermining of their authority confronted us with another difficulty; it is as if in rendering our ancestors fallible we had transformed the past from the repository of their already accomplished deeds and discovered truths into a kind of holding cell of all that was un actualized and unthought. Suddenly it was the desire of our ancestors and thus the virtual past, the past that had never come to pass or had not yet been completed, that weighed d isturbingly on us. The theorization of this unfinished past was focused i n the West around the concept of anxiety." If it seemed necessary to come to terms theoretically with anxiety - as it did to Kierkegaard, Freud, and Heidegger, among others - this is because this affect bore witness to an altered relation to a past now conceived as incompletely actualized. The assumption that modern man would become pliable (to market forces or even the force of his own wil l) rested on the belief that the break with the authoritative past placed
Umbr(a)
1 69
a zero in the denominator of our foundations, rooted us in, or attached us to - precisely nothing. But anxiety, the affect that arises in moments when radical breaks in the continuity of existence occur, bel ies this assumption; subjects find themselves, rather, to be "not without roots," which is significantly different from feeling rooted in the past, to a race or ethnicity that is transparent to us. For what is affirmed in the experience of being riveted is nothing that can be objectified or personalized as one's own.12 It is, rather, the experience of being attached to a "prehistoric Other that it is impossible to forget, " even if - in being without attributes - it offers us nothing to remember.13 It has been observed that anXiety often overtakes revolutionaries immediately after revolutions, and seems not to free but to paralyze the hand that would draft a new constitution. What accounts for this curious phenomenon? While many psychoanalysts were insisting that anxiety was an affective response to loss or abandonment, Freud reasoned that this cou ld not be so, since the proper response to loss would be mourning, not anxiety. Like Freud, the philosophers mentioned maintained that anxiety is not dependent on any actual condition , albeit one of loss, but rather on "a condition that is not." Kierkegaard offers a clarifying illustration of the difference: The feeling of anxiety is not captured, he says, by the complaint, " My God, my God , why hast thou forsaken me?" but rather by the entreaty, "What you are going to do, do quickly!"14 Anxiety is not the experience of a loss that has taken place; it is the experience of some impending event, the antiCipation of something that, whi le connected to what precedes us, has not yet happened. It is the looming of the unknown, the awakening of a possibility whose contours are indiscernible. In other words, the break instituted by modernity did not render the past total ly dead to us. It did not abandon us to a solitary present divorced from the past, but handed us over to a present that felt overpopulated - not, as is usually said, because of the increasing density of cities or our bombardment by an increasing number of new stimuli, but because we seemed to be parasitized by an excess that refused to disclose itself to us. Anxiety is the feeling of being stuck to an excess that we can neither separate ourselves from nor lay claim to, of being tied to a past that, not having happened, cannot be shed . Our implication i n the past thus took on a d ifferent complexion. For, while formerly a subject's ties to h er past were rigidly binding, they were experienced as external, as of the order of Simple constraint. One had to submit to a destiny one did not elect and often experienced as u njust. But one could - like Job or the heroes and heroines of classical tragedies - rai l against one's destiny, curse one's fate. With modernity this is no longer possible. The "God of destiny" is now dead and we no longer inherit the debts of our ancestors, but become that debt. We are unable to distance ourselves sufficiently from the desire of our ancestors to curse the fate it hands us, but must, as Lacan put it, "bear as jouissance the injustice that horrifies US."1S Jouissance - roughly equ ivalent to Freud 's l ibido - names our capacity to put ourselves forward and determine our destiny. Yet unlike libido, it characterizes this capacity as something we cannot possess and thus as horrifying : a m o n st ro us otherness that is not at our disposal , but must rather be suffered. If we think once more of the revolutionary whose hand is paralyzed by anxiety, we will see how closely Lacan 's account hews to Freud 's account of anxiety. If, stricken by anxiety, my hand goes on strike, refuses to write, this is because it has become saturated with libido, g ripped by jouissance. My
Umbr(a)
1 70
COPJEC
hand behaves, Freud explains, like a maid who, having begun a love affair with her master, refuses to continue doing her household chores.16 I n the moment of anxiety, one loses one's taste for ord inary, routinized life; cooking, cleaning, all practical i nterests; it is this automatic way of l ife that is paralyzed by anxiety. This analogy is, however, as Freud h imself says, "rather absurd , " insofar as it fails to account for the real situation of the maid , who, while torn away from her mundane duties, is now bound to a terrible, inscrutable master: her own l ibido, or potentiality. Elsewhere, Freud will dispense with the analogy and define anxiety more straightforwardly as fear of one 's own Iibido Y As with Melville's Bartleby - the scrivener who goes on strike, refuses to write - we are struck by the i nvoluted refusal, "I would prefer not to, " the preference or clinamen , the flash of potentiality that wi ll not u nfold itself, but that manifests itself only as a tension-filled paralysis. Kiarostami's protagonists exhibit a paralysis of this kind, one occasioned by their inability to comprehend the desire of their ancestors and thus their own place in the very culture to which they nevertheless maintain a feeling of anonymous belonging. One of the primary locations in The Wind Wil Carry Us is a cemetery to which Behzad continuously repairs to pick up a stronger cell phone signal and where Youssef, a gravedigger, contin uously digs, remaining thus underground and invisible throughout most of the film. We surmise that the purpose of his efforts is u ltimately the instal lation of a telecommunications tower, but since Mrs. Malek is on the verge of death, the digging simultaneously hints at preparations for her funeral. That a burial ground would become the site of telecommunications efforts bespeaks an anXiety attendant upon the loss of any clear signals issuing from a past that remains inscrutable. Eventually, the earth beneath which he d igs caves in on Youssef, who has to be dug out. But the unsteadiness of the ground is not unique to this film; it is a constant in Kiarostami's work, where the salient characteristic of the earth is its unsteadiness: it is always caving in, buckling , quaking .18 The ground in all his films seems ungrounded, hollowed out - or more precisely, catacombed. While earthquakes are a d ifficult geographical fact of life in Iran , Kiarostami's continuous reference to this datum in h is films turns it into a fact of another order; no longer just an u ncompromising truth of the terrain, it becomes a cultural fact the meaning of which cannot be unearthed. Like the past buried in it, the g round turns out in Kiarostami's world to be active and shifting, an unsettled affair. It is as if the past itself were under construction in his films. In The Wind Will Carry Us, it is not only Youssef who remains invisible to us throughout the fi lm; several characters - eleven by Kiarostami 's count - remain out of frame and thus u nseen. Asked by an interviewer what these curiously insistent visual absences signified , Kiarostami replied that the film is about "beings without being."19 In Where Is the Friend's House? (1 986), "being without being" - that is, being that is not, but which, remaining unrealized, perplexes characters by affixing itself to them - assumes the form of a notebook which a young schoolboy is certain is not his own, though it appears in all particulars exactly like h is. He spends the majority of the film trying unsuccessfully to return it, mysteriously deciding i n the end not to give it back to its ostensible owner. Effectively, the notebook has no exclusive owner but becomes the bond between the two students. I n Taste of Cherry (1 997), the anxiety-provoking element fails to take the form of a putative object and instead infuses the film with a perplexing textual opacity. The film follows a middle-aged man , Mr. Badii, who has no discernible reason for discontent (far from it) and yet spends the entire film trying to find an accomplice to his suicide, one who will promise to cover h i m
Umbr(a) 1 7 1
with twenty shovels-ful l of dirt and double-check to make sure he is really and truly dead . From this we suspect that M r. 8ad i i is bothered by a fear of being buried alive. It is as if he were trying not simply to kill himself, but to extinguish some surplus of self that does not respond to his wishes and thus impresses him as capable of surviving even his death. Speaking i n an i nterview about Taste of Cherry, Kiarostami offered this comment: "The choice of death is the only prerogative possible [ . . . ] because everything in our l ives has been imposed by birth [ . . . ] our parents, our home, our nationality, our build, the color of our skin , our culture."2o Though M r. Badii has no personal complaint, the thick presence of militia, the oppressive evidence of poverty, and the dust of industrialization visible in the urban perimeter through which he drives suggest choking. His suicide is thus readable as an attempt to escape the suffocation brought on by a world where one's identity is laid down by authorities who leave no room for freedom, no chance to choose what form one's life will take. And yet, if that which is imposed on us by birth is as enigmatic as Kiarostami 's fi lms tell us it is, then the rigidity of a l ife laid out by law must be read as a means of dodging a more primary experience, that of anxiety, which is stirred in us by an encounter with our capacity to break from this rigidity.21 What M r. Badii cannot abide is being riveted to the inscrutable desire of his ancestors, imposed on him by his birth into a culture that appears radically heterocl ite. It is the incom prehensibility of "unrealized being ," of his own potentiality, which suffocates him. He seeks through suicide to escape not the actual restrictions his culture imposes, but the overcrowded space in which he finds himself bound to its unreadable imperative. TH E AFFECTIVE TONALl1Y OF CAPITALISM
My reason for l ingering so long on anxiety is this: shame only becomes comprehensible in relation to anxiety. Fundamental to both shame and anXiety is the sense of being able neither to i ntegrate nor to divorce oneself from a strangeness that is "closer to [oneself] than [one's] jugular vein. "22 So similar are these affects that Levinas, in his early work On Escape, d ifferentiates them only by the tiny hiccup of hope that is present in anxiety and dashed in shame. Like others, including Freud and Lacan, Levinas characterizes anxiety as a kind of state of emergency, a signal or imperative to flee, to escape the alarming strangeness that grips us. It is only when this imperative faces the impossibility of success that anxiety turns dejected ly to shame. But where Levinas takes it for granted that it is the hope of flight that fades i n shame, I w i l l argue that what d isappears is the imperative of flight. While many Lacanians claim that anxiety is an exceptional affect (much like respect for the moral law in Kant), Lacan h imself called it the only affect. I prefer to merge the two by approaching anxiety as the stem cell of affects, which is transformed in situ, in different social theaters, to produce guilt and shame. The society of others serves a civilizing function not, as is usually said , because it tames primitive animal instincts, but because it colonizes our savage, inhuman jouissance. U nable to tolerate being alone with this inhuman partner, we find in the company of others, in society, some means of mollifying the anxious sense of our estrangement from ourselves. This point prepares us to approach again the distinction I made at the outset between shame and guilt as two different relations to our culture, or as we can now say, two ways of distancing ourselves from the stifling sense of foreignness imparted to us by our own culture.
Umbr(a)
1 72
COPJEC
The unctuous aggressiveness exh i bited by Behzad toward Zeynab is only one episode of his generally insensitive behavior. As he hangs around Siah Darreh waiting for M rs. Malek to die, he occupies himself not only with bothering Zeynab, but also with trying to take photographs of villagers who cover their faces and command him to put his camera away. The film clearly indicts him for his rudeness and indiscretion, but in what precisely do his crimes consist, and why do the villagers not want their pictures taken? If every subject as alien to herself lacks a proper image of who she is, why is Behzad's attempt to offer the villagers photographs of themselves counted as an act of rudeness or malice, rather than one of kindness? One of the villagers in Life and No thing More seems to respond directly to this question when he complains to Farhad, the fi lm-director protagonist of that fi lm, that the images of the villagers captured by his camera make the villagers appear "worse than they are. " I t is not the taking of photographs per se, but these particular photographs that are the problem. Behzad and Farhad travel to the villages to document, to archive phenomena on the verge of d isappearing. Their mission is to capture a world in the process of being lost, people about to die or presumed to be buried in rubble, ritual practices and ways of l ife on the edge of extinction. The imminence of loss, of death , licenses the rudeness of the photographers, justifying in their minds their indiscreet attempts to snatch from loss - from transitory, fleeting l ife - something lasting, i mages that can be stored in the memory banks of their culture. But it is not merely the race against time that powers their rudeness, for these nosy arch ivists believe they confront an additional obstacle in the villagers themselves, who refuse, they assume, to disclose to them the i nformation they seek to record. In other words, what these diegetic fil m directors disregard while making their images is the jouissance of the villagers that renders them incomprehensible to themselves. These colonizing directors want to pry from the villagers secrets that are not theirs to d isclose and thus to claim for the light, for the order of the visible, every dark, h idden thing. Is Behzad 's obscene rudeness not of the same sort as that made scandalously evident in the Abu Ghraib photographs? The problem is not simply that the photographers in each case invaded the privacy of those whom they photographed ; it consists, rather, in the same obscene denial that there is any obscene, any off-screen , that cannot be exposed to a persistent, prying eye. The u ltimate crime of both series of photographs, the source of their malicious abjuration of respect, is their assumption that the photographed subjects have no privacy to invade. This is the bottom line, the point on which I am insisting: privacy cannot be invaded, cannot be penetrated, either by the subject or by others. At the dawn of the twentieth century, Nietzsche expressed his scorn for that century's characteristic and misguided belief that it was possible to see through everything .23 He protested the lack of reverence and discretion that fueled his contemporaries' tactless preoccupation with d isclosing and unmasking everything. "Nothing is so nauseating in [ . . . ] the believers in 'modern ideas, '" he scoffed , "as their lack of shame, their complaisant impudence of eye and hand with which they touch, lick, and finger everything ."24 This frenzied desire to cast aside every veil , penetrate every surface, transgress every barrier standing between us and the real thing lying behind it installed in the modern world a new sort of " beyondness, " a new untouchable, one that is in principle there for the grasping, even if i n actuality it is always out of reach. This secularized sacred, which inspires a new, modern desire for transgression , does not originate in a belief in the existence of another world, but in the belief that what we want in this world always lies just behind some roadblock preventing our access to it.
Umbr(a)
1 73
This new "beyondness" is held in p lace by a definable structure, that of guilt, which must be understood not in its limited , psychological sense, but in the sense I proposed above: a specific form of relation to one's own culture. Agamben offers in passing a broader defin ition of gui lt in line with our own; in Homo Sacer, he defines "the cipher of this capture of l ife in law" (that is, the cipher of biopolitics) as "guilt (not in the technical sense [ . . . ] but in the originary sense that indicates a being-in-debt in culpa esse), which is to say, precisely the condition of being included through an exclusion , of being in relation to something from which one is excluded or which one cannot fully assume. "25 It is the phrase "being i n relation to someth ing one cannot [ . . . ] assume" that first catches our attention, because it happens to be the one Levinas uses to describe anxiety and shame, the complex feeling of being riveted to an inalienable and opaque surplus of being. Agamben sets Levinas's phrase alongside an apposite one of his own , "being in relation to someth ing from which one is excluded . " The latter phrase absorbs and slightly alters the former and thereby defines guilt as a transformation of anxiety. Like anxiety, the feeling of guilt consists in a feeling of being unable to coincide with oneself by integrating the troubling surplus of being; in guilt, however, this inability is no longer experienced as being stuck to an inalienable alienness, but as an inability to close the d istance that separates us from something that excludes us. How does this transformation come about? How does one become excluded from a part of oneself with which one cannot quite catch up, rather than attached to what one cannot assu me? We find our answer in the Freudian theory of guilt, in the paradox of the superego (which punishes obedience with guilt) that is inextricable from the paradox of ego and cultural ideals (which we are simultaneously enjoined to l ive up to and forbidden to attain). Faced with the unbearable opaqueness we are to ourselves, with the u nassumable excess that sticks to us, we unburden ourselves by allowing the ideals set up by society to become blueprints for our identity and action and to thereby provide us with some clarity. Through cultural ideals, the question of what it means to belong to a culture is silenced and replaced by mesmerizing cultural goals that gather awestruck subjects. But because every ideal is sustained by a prohibition against attaining it, we are always in debt to them, always in arrears to our ego and cultural ideals, which insert us into our culture precisely by excluding us from its inner sanctum. The very prohi bition/exclusion that binds us to these ideals also invites transgression . What is forbidden lures us with its unattainability - if only we could summon the courage to d isobey, the fortitude to step over the l ine. In short, ideals are the source of that secularized sacred deplored by Nietzsche, the just-beyond reach that ignores the impenetrability of one's own as well as others' self-opacity. What was hidden and paralyzing is now tantalizingly close and u rges transgression. The Ego and the Id presents an argument about g u i lt profoundly tributary to this one. There, Freud writes that "reflection [ . . . ] shows us that no external vicissitudes can be experienced or undergone by the id, except by way of the ego, which is the representative of the external world to the id. Nevertheless it is not possible to speak of direct inheritance in the ego . It is here that the gulf between an actual individual and the concept of a species becomes evident. "26 I understand this "no direct inheritance in the ego" as sanction to treat cultural inheritance as l ibido or jouissance excited by the brush with ancestral desire. This inheritance can only lead to anxiety, however, and so must go through the external world, through society, if it is to be accessed or unfolded in some way. The meandering route of inheritance leaves its mark in the fact that the subject is never completely absorbed into her culture, but is always slightly misaligned with it.
Umbr(a)
1 74
COPJt:C
We have yet to see what this means for shame, but for guilt we can now see that it entails a drive to attain what can never be fully acquired and a sense of exclusion from some sacred core of being. With regard to the question of photographic images that is raised in Kiarostami 's films, we can now add the following: if these images make their subjects look worse than they are, this is because the photographs taken by these diegetic filmmakers hold the order of appearances in disdain . For them, appearances are always only a nuisance standing in the way of truth; they lack the dignity of the true. In The Wind Will Carry Us, the fault lies not only with Behzad, but also with the villagers who scar themselves to attract the attention of their bosses. These villagers seem to have bought into the capitalist belief that there is nothing that is not ripe for exposure. They, too, have begun to acquire that immodest, capitalist taste for what C.S. Lewis referred to as a "very cheap [form of] frankness. "27 In this light, the Islamic system of modesty - with its volatile disdain for the modern passion for exposing everything, its loud protestations and rigid protections against the "touching, licking, and fingering" of everything - would seem to offer an important antidote to the g lobal immodesty fashioned by Western capitalism. The system of modesty undeniably targets a worthy enemy, but the question before us is whether it adopts effective measures against its target, whether it succeeds or fails to protect the subject's modesty. With this question in mind, we return to the fresh milk sequence in The Wind Wil Carry Us to determine if it deserves the tongue lashing Dabashi gives it.
SCEN ES OF SHAM E As Behzad descends i nto the subterranean chamber, the catacomb, where he will catch u p with Zeynab, we are invited to wonder, "What sort of place is this?" One need not know anything about villages in Northern I ran to know that not even here do people milk cows in pitch black underground caves. This is no ordinary or actual location , no touristic glimpse of some of Iran's exotic landscape; it is rather an example of "visionary geography," a liminal space defined in Islamic philosophy as the place from which new forms emerge.28 After Behzad crosses the threshold, the screen goes black for several long seconds, as if to mark the absolute separation of this from the other spaces in the film. Holding on the black screen for an uncomfortably long time, Kiarostami also allows the depth of the blinding darkness in which Zeynab remains enshrouded to sink in. From the bright sunlight outside, we pass into a place so luminous that nothing stands out against it; a place fil led with a light so i ntense that nothing i n it is distinguishable from anything else, a place of pure exposure, of dazzling blackness. While the screen is still black, the voice of Behzad inquires, "Is there anyone here?" Answerable in the negative, this question is more profound than it might first seem. For there is in fact no one here in this darkness, no " I , " only the m ilking of a cow, the gerundive form of the action Zeynab is performing substantivized, lacking any subjective support. In Being and Nothingness, Sartre descri bes a scene that is in many points similar to this one in The Wind Will Carry Us. A voyeur, crouched before a keyhole, peers through it intently. At this point, there is nothing but this pure act of looking, peering through a keyhole, the act that totally absorbs the voyeur.29 The voyeur himself is not present. He is precipitated out from his act as a subject only at the point when a sudden rustling of leaves startles him and fi lls him with shame. The voyeur appears only as the experience
Umbr(a)
1 75
of shame, as shame-full i n the precise sense. It is only when he senses his being looked at by the "gaze" of an indeterminate other that the voyeur acquires a sentiment of self. The sentiment of self and the experience of shame are synonymous. The scenes from Kiarostami and Sartre are similar, then , in that in each the gerundive form of an act - milking a cow, peering through a keyhole - indicates the absence of a subject, whose emergence will be marked only later by the arousal of shame. The apparent d issimilarity between the two acts may make my analogy sound tenuous, however, and so I wil l address this d ifficulty by focusing first on the scene of peering through a keyhole. What does Sartre say about it? Surprisingly little. In fact, he seems remarkably intent on refraining from drawing too much attention to the act in which h is Peeping Tom is engaged when i nterrupted by the gaze. This polite inattention is partly explained by the fact that Sartre does not want to distract from his point that he is not speaking of shame in the "civic" sense, as he says. By this he seems to mean that sense in which, having already entered polite society and learned its rules, one is disgraced by being caught breaking one of them. Sartre is concerned , rather, with a more fundamental sense of shame as that feeling that attends the i nsertion of the subject into society, his sudden immersion in a world of others. This insertion into the social precedes all measure and every rule by which a subject might find himself judged . It is not, therefore, the nature of his act, the fact that it is one of lascivious looking, that causes the voyeur shame, but the fact that the gaze makes him suddenly aware of the presence of others as such . There can be no denying, however, that there is something more going on in Sartre's refusal to utter a peep about this peeping. Plainly, he is sanitizing the scene, scrubbing it clean of sex. Less discreet, Lacan returns to the scene precisely to highlight the presence of sex in it. It is not by chance, he unblinkingly observes, that shame catches the voyeur in a moment of desire. He does not reject Sartre's argument that the gaze of the Other does not judge the act of the voyeur as socially unacceptable, nor try to stop it by prohibiting it. But to deny the censoriousness of the gaze is not to deny any relation between it and desire. Lacan's point is just that: rather than condemn or prohibit, the gaze enflames desire; shame is a sexual "conflagration ."30 Excising sex, Sartre produces a chaste reading of the shame scenario, which he turns into a bathetic drama wherein an abstract and sovereign act of looking is forced to confront its anchorage in the vulnerability of its bodily foundations. The rustling of leaves functions as a kind of index finger that picks out the voyeur, rendering him painful ly conspicuous, a body too much in a scene where he thought h imself bodiless and u nobserved. The emperor of seeing is suddenly brought down , reduced to the dead weight of his body, h is body as object. Sartre trades the censoring function that is usually ascribed to the gaze for an alternative function: limitation. In h is i nterpretation, what the gaze exposes is the subject's fin itude; it reminds us that others as such set limits on our freedom, impede our actions and get i n the way of our plans. The body exposed by shame is thus nothing more than a figure for this limitation of my freedom; it is a body that can be hurt by others, that remains ever vulnerable to all that is external to and opposes it. From this point we can begin to measure the consequences of Lacan 's opposition to Sartre's sanitization of the scene, which is stated in the fol lowing counter insistence: " It is not the annihilating subject, correlative of the world of objectivity, who feels himself surprised, but the subject sustaining
Umbr(a)
1 76
COPJEC
himself i n a function of desire. "31 If it is not the subject who experiences his freedom as limited by oth ers who experiences shame, then neither is the body at stake in this experience the stupid, delimited object Sartre imagines. One problem with the latter's reading is that it fails to capture the squirminess of shame, which is more clearly evoked in Kiarostami's sequence by the camera's exposure of the cow's udders as they are being milked by Zeynab. It is not the body as figure of limitation, but the body as figure of one's nakedness that is exposed by shame. The nakedness of the body is not, however, a simple function of its being unclothed. As is attested in Kiarostami 's scene and by the obsessive fears that, at its extreme, haunt the hejab system - which visualizes in the clicking of a woman 's heels the place where her legs join her body, and in the cadences of her voice the softness of her skin - one can remain naked beneath yards of cloth ing. As we will see, the dialectic of shame eschews simple opposition (naked/clothed or exposed/ concealed). For now, we can say that the body's nakedness is a function of its sexualization. Sexualized , the body is vulnerable not, as i n Sartre's version of the story, to other subjects, but to the savage otherness of its own li bido. The sexualized body is one whose boundaries have already been breached, one that has suffered an irreparable and constitutive hurt. Lacan's reintroduction of sexuality into the Sartrean account of shame paves the way for us to reconnect shame to anxiety, while reexamining Levinas's argument about their relation and the question of cultural inheritance they raise. Although Levinas does not explicitly conceive the surplus that rivets the subject as libido , his argument does broach the question of racial inheritance, and sexual pleasure does emerge in his discussion at the point at which shame is introduced .32 Levinas' argument is that, while pleasure promises escape from anxiety, shame testifies to the inadequacy of sexual pleasure, which proves incapable of delivering on this promise. Earlier I left hanging the question of the validity of this argument about shame's d isappointment. I return to it now by taking a look at one more scene of shame made famous by its theorization: I refer to the scene Agamben introduces in Remnants of Auschwitz to flesh out Levinas' theory of shame. Originally recounted by Robert Antelme, the scene concerns a student from Bologna who is arbitrarily picked out of a line of students by an S.S. officer and thereby marked for execution.33 Remarkably, the unfortunate student does not question his selection nor persist in looking over his shoulder in hopes of discovering that it was someone other than he who had been selected. No, the pink flush of his cheeks signs his recognition that it is he who has been designated and that he will not try to escape this fact. The dead certainty that accompan ies anxiety sticks, too, we see, to shame. This common sense of certainty may in part be what leads Levinas to nearly conflate the two affects, with the small distinction that shame is certainty more emphatic because more fatal istic. Not only do I know beyond doubt that I am that, that which rivets me; I also know that there is no escape from that. That is that. The reddening of the Italian student's face would seem to blurt out an "I am here," a reSigned surrender to the fate handed him by the S.S. officer. But is that really the end of it? Does the sudden surging up of the question of pleasure in Levinas's discussion of shame not betray a disavowed recognition that some difference is being overlooked? Is Levinas not guilty, in short, of the same error as Sartre, of de-eroticizing shame? The heat and g low that suffuses the face of the one shamed telegraphs this eroticization and their error. On the elementary level of description there is a common distinction between anxiety and shame that we must now consider. While anxiety manifests itself in an impulse to flee, shame is manifested in
Umbr(a)
1 77
an impulse to hide. Levinas's argument depends on our reading this transformation of the impulse as necessitated by the defeat of its first manifestation: because flight is hopeless, all I can do is try to hide. But this is not the proper way to read this transformation , which depends, rather, on an alteration of my relation to that which anxiety desires to escape. To test this hypothesis, we need to take a closer look at the relation between exposure and concealment, which may be said to substitute for the anxious relation between paralysis and flight. Although the relation is usually assumed to be sequential - exposure coming first, followed by the defensive attempt to conceal - the pink cheeks of the student from Bologna raise questions about this assumption . As much as his blush broadcasts his presence, it also seems like the lowering of a shade to shutter or shield him from view. It is as if in his very exposure, his very visibility, he were announcing his disappearance from view, his retreat. If blushing, the most common visual manifestation of shame, is critical to understanding it, this is because this affect has a special relation to sight, to the gaze, in contrast to guilt, in which the relation to the voice is what matters. Even when it is a sound that occasions shame, the experience of it is one of being looked at, submitted to a gaze. This is how it happens that the question of shame intersects the question of the image in Kiarostami 's cinema. What shame seeks is the same thing Kiarostami, as filmmaker, wants to create: an image that is capable of capturing the reflection of what has no image. Be attentive, for here is where the detour through anxiety repays its costs. Those who dispense with this detour are precisely those who end up regarding shame as a passive suffering of exposure to a look against which only a pathetic defense is available: cowering beneath covers. Exactly what does the gaze expose? This is a question about which there is far too little reflection. It is easy to accept the description offered above - shame erupts in response to a rupturing of the circuit of communication-recognition - as supplying the fol lowing answer: the gaze exposes a different, less flattering image of ourselves than we previously held. But this is clearly a mistake, for what the gaze makes visible is that very thing that has no image, that unassumable, opaque surplus of self that anxiety wants to be rid of. In shame, however, the inalienable alienness that attaches itself to me no longer threatens me with its suffocating over-presence, but comes to define the intimate distance that constitutes my sense of interiority, my sense of myself as subject. I have from the start been trying to define shame as a sense of self. It might be helpful at this point to turn this strategy around by defining the experience of self through shame. Philosophers have taught us that the self, or su bject, can never be experienced as a coincidence of the self with itself, but is experienced rather as the gap or void that forever separates me from myself. The void left by the destruction of the Twi n Towers would thus conveniently serve to represent Sedgwick's feeling of shame as a feeling of self. But while this account is not altogether incorrect, it is anemic. We look to psychoanalysis, then , for a more robust account of the same experience, and begin to locate it in the proposition that the subject's inability to coincide with herself stems from the fact that (her) l ibido or jouissance appears more l i ke something that attaches itself to her than something she is. The various affects of anxiety, guilt, and shame make plain a further inadequacy of the bald philosophical assertion that the subject experiences herself as void. For not every - but only one particular - experience of the gap separating me from myself offers an experience of self. In anxiety, the gap is felt as an overwhelming and paralyzing opacity; i n gu i lt, a s a n exclusion from myself. H o w can the experience of m y non-transparency t o myself be anything but a negative one, as these two - of pending annihilation or continuous failure - are? How can the gaze
UmbrIa)
1 78
COPJEC
that causes shame expose, make visible, the jouissance I cannot assume without making me transparent to myself? What is the experience of self to which shame holds the key? Imag ine a young girl sitting contentedly at a soda fountain with her pol ite, well-to-do friends, sipping a milkshake as she looks distractedly into the m irror behind the counter. Suddenly the image of her mother, who has just ambled into the drugstore, appears in the mirror. It is a ridiculous image of a preposterously festooned mother; seeing it, the daughter burns with shame.34 If shame is the experience not of some object (and the girl does not therefore feel shame for her mother or for herself), but is rather the feeling of self, how is this truth exempl ified in the scene? Why does the appearance of the mother's image cause shame? It is unlikely that the reflection in the mirror would have caused shame if it had been that of a stranger or an acquaintance to whom the girl was ind ifferent. It matters that there is a strong bond of love connecting the daughter to the mother; without this there would be no shame. Something about the daughter that is normally hidden is exposed in the scene, but it is not that this silly woman is her mother, nor is it that she is more l i ke her mother than her fine manners and tastes have so far let on . What shame exposes is her love for her mother - though to state it this way is not yet to capture the feeling precisely. The daughter's love for her mother has been fully evident before this event, to others and to the daughter herself, just as the interest of Sartre's voyeur in what is happening on the other side of the keyhole is evident. But these experiences of love and intense curiosity are, up to the moment the gaze appears, consumed by the objects on which they are lavished and the actions they entail . The moment of shame arrives when the subject who loves or peers intently through the keyhole makes herself visible to herself and others as a subject, as the one who loves, is curious, desires. The subject sees herself as desiring, as actively submitting to the passion of her attachments. It matters less what incident occasions the feeling or what else the su bject is doing at the time; what matters is that, at the moment the gaze appears, the subject experiences herself as engaged in active submission to some passion. To put this in terms of the proposal I made regarding the psychoanalytic invigoration of philosophy, this experience of self as subject is the same one philosophy describes, an experience of the void that prevents me from coinciding with myself, understood now as an encounter with jouissance. I n contrast to the feeling of being parasited by a crushing presence or punishing superego, however, this feeling is one of enjoying one 's jouissance. It may at first seem surprising that the experience of oneself as subject is not one of " pure activity," but one of "passivity," or the assumption of a "feminine attitude" (to use Freud's terms), but this is the description of the experience of self that shame makes available. One of the finest i l lustrations of this psycho-philosophical point is found in Joan Riviere's justly famous case study.3s The unnamed patient is a woman who constantly battles anxiety. Curiously, this does not manifest itself as performance anxiety; a political activist with a strong intellect and oratorical skills, she frequently delivers public lectures. Her problem is a post-performance anxiety that befallS her after these speeches, which she deals with through "compulsive ogling" and flirting with men from the audience and through the fantasmatic production of scenarios in which she submits herself sexually to black men while plotting against them. Riviere contends that the woman's anxiety is aroused by a fear that she will be caught i n possession of something (the phallus) that is not rightly hers (but has been stolen
Umbr(a)
1 79
from her father) and that her defense strategy is to pretend not to have it by concealing her possession of it. We know that anxiety is caused by a surplus that one feels is not rig h tly one's own ; but that surplus possesses the subject, not the other way around. It is obvious that this woman wants desperately to make an appearance, to exhibit herself on the public stage in order to escape the oblivion anxiety threatens, but her public speech-making seems inadequate to the task. The reason? Alienating herself in her professional role, she d isappears i nto it; there is no remainder, no subject left over. She thus resorts to a different strategy: making herself visible in shameful scenes of degradation or the performance of demeaning tasks. That these are not scenes of simple passivity is evident in her plots to turn these men over to justice or to escape them. It is quite apparent that she is pulling the strings in these scenarios, actively passive within them. A num ber of other questions spring from this; let us return to the fresh milk sequence (readable alongside the other scenes of shame we have looked at) and approach them from there. A simple village girl and a minor character i n the narrative, Zeynab moves about her world without any particular self awareness, absorbed by everyday chores. I n the intimate grotto-like space in which the scene is set, however - a space associated with burial, u nforgettable ancestors, and the pressure of their desire on her - she is foregrounded , drawn out of herself. It is not Behzad 's impertinent look that d isturbs her; she is relatively indifferent to him and his bad manners. What interrupts her complacency, her full absorption in the world, is the erotic poem by Forugh Farrokhzad that Behzad reads to her as part of his bungled attempt at seduction. From the interior of the poem , the gaze emerges and is even explicitly mentioned: "the earth/ screeching to a halt,! something u nknown watching you and mel beyond this window."36 Visibly fascinated by this poem, the red-robed Zeynab is not entirely exposed (for this would render her simply passive), but rather exposes herself (an active passivity) as desiring. It is important to reemphasize this distinction to prevent shame from being reduced , as it too often is, to a retiring shyness, even though some have correctly observed that this affect often manifests itself as a "bold [ . . . ] candor, " in candid acknowledgments of the l i bidinal i nvestments that ravish and surpriseY Another point not to be missed, once again, is that this feeling of subm ission to one's own jouissance (which appears to us as something that attaches itself to us) is not a solipsistic experience, but only arises in connection with an investment of one's jouissance (its attachment to objects) in a way that allows Zeynab to appear without losing herself in her appearance. How to appear without disappearing into our appearance? This is final ly the question we must answer. Think of the extreme poles of shame scenarios. On the one hand, the first horrified sight of the death camps by liberating armies, which was said to have aroused shame and thus to have forced witnesses to look away. On the other, "actions of love and extravagant generosity, " in response to which Nietzsche once said, "nothing is more advisable than to take a stick and give any eyewitnesses a sound thrashing ."3 8 Why do we avert our gaze and feel shame in response to the inhumanly awful and the exquisitely beautiful? The first answer l i kely to be offered must be d iscarded, for shame involves no taboo against looking or touching. To d istinguish this affect from g u i lt requires us to refuse taboo - which is uttered from a beyond in order to protect a beyond - any say i n the matter. Declaring something untouchable, out of bounds, taboo not only creates a beyond, a sacred zone set apart from us; it also incites, as we noted, a counter imperative to transgress the boundaries excluding us from that sacred place, to touch, finger, penetrate
Umbr(a)
1 80
COPJcC
;
with ou r loo k all it would withhold from us. Stil l , we cannot deny that shame often betrays itself in an The averted look is not, however, a sign of obedience to a stricture against looking, but of ' averted look. . of a new opportunity to look: inward. It is as if our attention were directed not to a parallel, ance ar pe ap he t but to an oblique one slightly detached from visibility - the space of a self into wh ich space, t den tran scen draw from the scene that engages us. This simultaneous relation between exposure and with uld co we be formulated. to needs now nt alme ce n co In contrast to guilt, which introduces through prohibition a d ivision between the sensible world and that transcends it, shame operates without recourse to prohibition, ideals, or a heterogeneous one al an ide realm outside the sensible; it operates, in other words, entirely within the sensible realm of vision, introducing there - within the visible - a division or slight separation of the visible and invisible. One could describe the experience of shame, in sum, as that of Witnessing oneself hiding , as the sense that one has ducked behind one's appearance. Between the appearance and what remains invisible no i nterdiction intervenes; nothing is prohibited from appearing. It is a question , rather, of an appearance that permits something to disappea r. What is it that thus permits me to d isappear? What allows me to camouflage myself behind my visibility? That very thing that has dominated the scene while avoiding analysis up until now: the gaze. Sartre brings it into focus and makes a breakthrough in conceptualizing it. The gaze, he says, cannot be matched to an actual pair of eyes; it is not locatable in a person. The gaze has no bearer, belongs to no one. If, feeling a gaze rest u pon me, I scan the subway car to try to pin it on some suspicious-looking person , the experience of the gaze will evaporate at each point on which my accusation alights. There is a fantasmatic dimension of the gaze that suggests it cannot be contained within an intersubjective dialectic. But, in the end, Sartre does not follow up on this suggestion and thus the a-personal dimension of the gaze serves in his account merely to enhance the power of the Other by effacing h is limits. The fact that I cannot attach it to the actual eyes of an objectified other g ives the gaze all the more power to objectify and limit me. This is a point Val Lewton , the legendary producer of horror fi lms, well u nderstood: do not show the horrible thing directly embodied in a person , for this will only have the effect of attenuating the threat.
Lacan reads the fantasmatic dimension of the gaze d ifferently. There is no warrant, he argues, for Sartre's placement of the gaze exclusively on the side of an adversarial other. Detached from every observer, it is detached , too, from the voyeur and not only from the Other. It is as if, through participation in the social or public field, the voyeur were lent a gaze by which he is permitted to see h imself appear. The gaze l ends the subject the exteriority or detachment necessary to look back and see the one thing he was unable to see: his own appearance. What this recurvant gaze sees, however, is not merely the subject's emergent image, but the detachment that permits it to emerge. My image is my disguise, my veil; it enables me to appear in public while preserving my privacy. I n a gesture of sleazy flattery, Behzad tries to establish some silly points of coincidence between Zeynab and Forugh, the leading Persian poet of the twentieth century. There is absolutely no sign, however, that Zeynab is interested in being like the poet. What i nterests Zeynab is dissimulation (the possibility of which is opened by the poem), the possibility of being able to present herself in public while remaining concealed .
Umbr(a)
1 81
Unlike anxiety, shame is not a signal to take action; it does not cry out for cover. It accompanies an action taken; it is the feeling of having found cover in the folds of one's appearance. Not "I am here," but "I lie here disguised." An 5.5. officer may order me to step forward and I may obey by presenting myself before him. But to experience shame in doing so is to stand a l ittle to the side of one's appearance and to remain there, undetected . M ake no mistake: I can h ave no shame or shield apart from my appearance, for my interiority or self-intimacy is not a primitive condition but the recurvant effect of a certain form of publicity. If one takes anxiety as the subject's primitive condition, one sees that the "gaze of the Other" the gaze I borrow from the Other, from the space of the Other - does serve to limit, not my freedom, but my devouring, limitless l ibido. This is not inconsistent with my earlier point that the gaze enflames desire. The paradox of libido uncovered by Freud is that some limitation or obstacle is necessary, not to prevent it from spilling over into public space, but to "raise its tide," to reduce it to the measure of desire. Limitless, l i bido can only be felt as a danger to my publicity, to my emergence into appearance. The gaze is, however, a factor of limitation, it frames l ibido by objectifying it slightly, setting it at a minimum d istance from me. Through contact with the external world, I meet with an obstacle. The gaze registers this obstacle by sending my look, like a shuttlecock, back toward me; it sees me as part of the world, but does not censor or judge. In fact it acts as a prophylactic to protect us against any all-seeing Censor. The point is often made that censorship does not merely negate but is also productive. Without the Hays code, for example, no one would ever have known the " Lubitsch Touch , " just as without hejab regulations, Iranian cinema might not have blossomed as it did. This flat dictum has never seemed satisfying to me. It is not simply censorship that produces great works of art, just as it is not every obstacle that raises the tide of libido. We know from our d iscussion of ego and social ideals that that there are some obstacles that can never be overcome because acts of transgression only fortify them. For censorship to be productive there must be some recogn ition that the Censor has a blind spot and thus some positive belief that the order of appearances is neither fully transparent to the Censor's or any other look, nor simply a realm of illusion and distortion and thus an inappropriate vehicle for the truth . The gaze looks back at me not only at that point where my look encounters its l imit, but also where it encounters a fissure in the world or in the Censor's eyeball . I look at the place where the Twin Towers once stood or i nto the eyes of an 5.5. officer and I encounter not just an obstacle to my look, but this fissure, this blind spot of the Other, from which point no destiny can be foreseen, not m ine, not anyone's. For even if this moment marks the hour of my death, it is the accident of this death that shame highlights. My destiny finds harbor i n my appearance and remains undisclosed, even to me. A final point about the fresh milk sequence in Kiarostami's film. While I have attended only to the diegetic unfolding of shame i n it, it is clear that a sense of shame pervades not only the diegetic situation, but also the audience's relation to this situation. Extremely d iscomfiting , the scene does not allow us to sit unobserved in the darkness of the auditorium, but forces us to experience our own uneasy, hidden presence on the scene. A gaze looks out from the screen and i nvites us to feel shame. The final quarrel I have with Dabashi 's outraged response to the sequence is that it declines Kiarostami's invitation ; it refuses shame by instead expressing shame for or on behalf of Zeynab, as if to distance Dabashi from the
Umbr(a)
1 82
·
COPJEC
experience itself. I repeat my initial proposition: there is no such thing as "shame for. " There is only shame, the experience of submitting to the gaze oneself. There are no spectators or witnesses to shame; one is always interior to the experience of it. Yet there is no denying that the gaze wounds; it severs the subject from herself and causes her to submit to an experience whose disturbing complexity is not adequately captured by the terms "pleasure" or "enjoyment. " What happens, however, when one resists and tries through an alternative view of shame to defend oneself against the experience of it? In this case the gaze will be perceived, as in Sartre, as coming from without, from an annihilating other, and as fal ling on some poor others who are made to feel shame. From a safe distance, unaffected by its wounding, I will experience shame only secondhand, on behalf of these others. This is not, I would argue, a scenario of contagious sociality, but of a false, self-protective chivalry. I have placed this d iscussion of shame as a provocation at the point of conflict between Islam and the West. One of the most heated and defining debates of that conflict centers on the forced wearing of the veil and the hejab system general ly, which are met with violent condemnation in the West. The debate has thus far been too narrowly framed and ought to be broadened , I suggest, on the basis of a proper ontological understanding of shame. This understand ing will raise serious challenges to both sides of the argument. The recurrent image in The Wind Will Carry Us of Behzad running about, trying to pick up a better signal for his mobile phone, brings to mind the historic debates over wiretapping i n the u . s . During these debates, it was argued that privacy was not localizable in a delimited space that might then be ruled out of reach to the State, but was rather attached to the subject and remained inviolable no matter where a citizen might be, in public or in private space. This argument exemplifies the ideology of freedom on the basis of which the West opposes the hejab system and regards itself as superior to the Islamic world and its doctrine of submission . Yet the belief that the subject has property in the self, property privately held, is clearly untenable in the face of shame, which counts on publicity to dispossess the subject of that which it can never assume as property. On the other hand, the chivalry of the I slamic State can only strike one as a defensive posture, and raises the question whether the State's interpretation of submission is as radical as it needs to be or simply an avoidance of its deepest implications. In any case, we owe this entire speculation to the modesty system's strict regulation of cinema, which, by obliging filmmakers to film mainly exterior spaces, set Kiarostami the task of demonstrating that interiority is not only compatible with, but dependent u pon, the existence of an all-exterior world.
Umbr(a)
1 83
1.
2.
Imam Khomeini, "Address at Bihisht-i Zahra," in Islam and Revolution: Writings and Declara tions of Imam Khomeini, trans. Hamid Algar (Berkeley: Mizan Press, 1 98 1 ) , 254-60. This speech, delivered on February 2, 1 979, at a cemetery outside Tehran where martyrs of the Islamic Revolution were buried, took place the day after Khomein i arrived in Tehran from his exile in Paris. The regulations aimed at "Islamicizing" I ra nian cinema were ratified, and the M i nistry of Culture and Islamic Guidance instituted them in February 1 983. Hamid Naficy provides the most comprehensive and cogent analysis of the impact of these regulations on Iranian films; I rely heavily on his account. See, in particular, his "Veiled Vision/Powerful Presences: Women in Post-Revolutionary I ranian Cinema," in Life and Art: The New Iranian Cinema, ed. Rose Issa and Sheila Whitaker (London : N FT and BFI , 1 999).
3. The source of my information about the rela tion between Raphael Patai's The Arab Mind and the strategy of "shaming" adopted by the U .S. at Abu Ghraib is Seymour M. Hersh, "The Gray Zone: How a secret Pentagon program came to Abu Ghraib," New Yorker, May 24, 2004, 38. All quotations in this paragraph are from Hersh's essay. 4.
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Af fect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003).
5.
I bid . ,
6.
Ibid., 37. On this paradox, see also Stanley Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say?: A Book of Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1 976): "Shame [ . . . ] is the most isolating
Umbr(a)
41 .
1 84
of feelings," but also "the most primitive of so cial responses, " the "simultaneous d iscovery of the isolation of the individual; his presence to himself, but simultaneously to others" (286). References to this paradox are widespread and not limited to these exemp lary instances. 7.
Giorgio Agamben , Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone Books, 1 999), 1 1 0, 1 07.
8.
Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, 37.
9.
Hamid Dabashi's otherwise h ighly informative Close-Up: Iranian Cinema Past, Present and Future (London: Verso, 200 1 ) explodes in its final chapter into an unfair (to my mind) rant against The Wind Wil Carry Us .
1 0. Emmanuel Levinas, On Escape, trans. Bettina Bergo (Stanford : Stanford U niversity Press, 2003), 52. For further d iscussion of Levinas and shame, see my " M ay '68, the Emotional Month, " in Lacan: The Silent Partners , ed . Slavoj Z izek (London: Verso, 2006), 90-1 1 4. 1 1 . My implication is that we should also look to Islamic philosophy for a theory of the "unfin ished past." See, for example, Henry Corbin's " Prologue" to his study of Islamic philosophy in Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth: From Mazdean Iran to Shi'ite Iran, trans. N ancy Pearson (Princeton: Princeton U niversity Press, 1 977): "Our authors suggest that if our past were really what we believe it to be, that is, completed and closed, it would not be the grounds of such vehement discussions. They suggest that all our acts of understanding are so many recommencements, re iterations of events still unconcluQed" (xv).
COPJEC
1 2 . Rudi Visker, in Truth and Singularity: Taking Foucault into Phenomenology (Dordrect: Klu wer Academic Publishers, 1 999), adopts this same phrase in conformity with Lacan's defini tion of anxiety as "not without object. " Arriv ing at shame through anxiety, Visker offers a theory of the former similar to my own , even though he does not focus on the question of jouissance. The idea of a paradoxical, rootless root can be traced backed to Heidegger's d is cussion of imagination in his Kantbook. 1 3 . Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanaly sis, 1959- 1 960, ed. Jacques-Alain M i ller, trans. Dennis Porter (New York: W.W. Norton & Com pany, 1 992), 71 . 1 4. S0ren Kierkegaard , The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Orienting Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin (Princ eton: Princeton U niversity Press, 1 980), 1 55.
ter has started a love-affair with her" (89-90). 1 7. Ibid., 84. 1 8. Jean-Luc Nancy notes the instability of the earth i n Kiarostami's films in his excellent study, The Evidence of Film: Abbas Kiarostami, trans. Christine I rizarry and Verena Andermatt Conley (Brussels: Yves Gevaert, 200 1 ) . 1 9. David Sterritt, "Taste of Kiarostami" (interview with Abbas Kiarostami), http://archive.sens esofc i n ema. com/contents/00/9/ki arostam i . html. 20. M ichel Ciment and Stephane Goudet, ClUne approche existentialiste de la vie" (interview with Abbas Kiarostami), Positif 442 (December, 1 997), 85; also cited in Stephane Goudet, " Le Gout de la cerise . . . et la saveur de la mure," L'Avant Scene 471 (April 1 998), 1 . 21 . See Lacan, Ethics.
1 5 . Jacques Lacan, Le Seminaire de Jacques Lacan, Livre VIII: Le transfert, ed. Jacques Alain M i l ler (Paris: Seuil, 1 99 1 ) , 1 55. 1 6. Sigmund Freud, Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety, in The Standard Edition of the Com plete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (hereafter S. E.), ed . and trans. James Strachey et al . (London: Hogarth Press, 1 953-1 974), 20:77 -1 7 4. "Analysis shows that when activi ties like [ . . . J writing [ . . . J are subjected to neu rotic inhibitions it is because [ . . . ] the fingers [ . . . J have become too strongly eroticized. It
22. Our'an, 50: 1 6. For a faSCinating d iscussion of the way Ibn 'Arabi interprets this notion, see Henry Corbin, Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination and the SUfism of Ibn 'Arab I, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1 969). 23. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1 989), 2 1 3. 24. Ibid.
has been discovered as a general fact that
the ego-function of an organ is i mpaired if its erotogenicity - its sexual significance - is i ncreased. It behaves, if I may be allowed a rather absurd analogy, like a maid-servant who refuses to go on cooking because her mas-
25. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roaz en (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1 998), 26-27.
Umbr(a)
1 85
26. Freud, The Ego and the Id, S.E. 1 9:38; my emphasis. in C ar l D . Schneider, Shame, Expo sure, and Privacy (New York: W.W. Norton &
27 . Quoted
Company, 1 977), 38. 28. See Corbin, Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth for a discussion of this idea in medieval Islamic philosophy. Being and Nothingness: An Essay in Phenomenological Ontology, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press, 1 956), 369.
2 9 . Jean- Pau l Sartre,
30. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Con cept of Psycho Analysis, ed. Jacques-Alain M i l ler, trans. Alain Sheridan (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1 998), 1 82 . 31 . Ibid . , 84-85; m y emphasis. 32 . Again , see my "May '68: the Emotional Month." 33. Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 1 03-1 04. 34.
a description of a scene from the film Stella Dallas (King Vidor, 1 937) .
This is obviously
3 5 . Joan Riviere, "Womanliness as a Masquer ade," in Formations of Fantasy, ed. Victor Bur gi n , James Donald, and Cora Kaplan (London: Routledge, 1 986), 37. All subsequent quota tions in this paragraph are to be found on page 37 of Riviere 's essay. 36. I have used the poem by Ahmad cited in Mehrnaz than Rosenbaum,
Umbr(a)
1 86
translation of Forugh 's Karimi-Hakkak, which is Saeed-Vafa and Jona Abbas Kiarostami (Urba-
na: U n i versity of I l l inois Press, 2 003), 33-34 .
37. Havelock Ellis, quoted in Schneider, Shame, Exposure, and Privacy, 60. 38. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 50.
Umbr(a)
1 87
U) w =:J
U
FETH I BEN SLAMA & TH E TRANSLATIO N OF TH E IMPOSSI BLE I N ISLAM & PSYCHOANALYSIS - Nathan Gorelick
As evidenced by a number of contri butions to the present issue of Umbr(a) , La psychanalyse a I'epreuve de l'lslam has elicited a multitude of critical reactions since its 2002 publication , many of which circulate, however implicitly or inadvertently, around one, perhaps unanswerable, question: What is Fethi Benslama doing?1 The first and longest chapter of his book is quite clearly an attempted political intervention into the social and cultural crisis preci pitated by the relatively recent global emergence of Islamist activism, especially in North Africa and the M iddle East. Benslama arg ues here, and with enduring relevance despite the few years separating us from the event of the book's initial publication, that we cannot hope to appreciate the dynamics of this increasingly powerful set of d iscourses without attention to the economy of enjoyment through which its ideologies are propagated - without, that is, attention to the methods by which Islam ist ideology attempts to treat a new set of collective disturbances whose prevalence throughout the so called Islamic world indicates an upheaval in the order of the signifier and an attendant terror before a suddenly untethered jouissance. Subsequent chapters provide - in various forms and with reference to a number of historical, theological , literary and philosophical objects - an exegetical re-reading of the foundational narratives of modern monotheism; a metapsychological analysis of the Islamic unconscious and the "historical truth" to which it bears witness; an exploration of the ways in which Islamic philosophy seems to resonate with some key axioms of the Freudian discovery; a series of meditations on the
Umbr(a)
1 88
DIALOGUES
positively ontological problem of sexual difference and the place of the feminine in both ancient and modern Islamic thought; and , to an extent, a critique of Western chauvinism and the quotidian peculiarities of ethnocentric misrepresentation. These d isparate, diverse and often competing threads of analytic concern may perhaps be consolidated within a larger question , itself occasioned by the appearance of Robert Bononno's thoughtful English rendition of this difficult text, namely: the question of translation . How, Benslama asks, can psychoanalysis - whose decidedly European and essentially modern orig ins seem to have grounded it, since its inception, in a certain "beyond" of I slamic intellectual h istory - be brought to bear u pon this other, often antagonized or antagonistic, monotheism? How might a Freudian intervention illuminate the mechanisms of repression at work within this onto-theological tradition - a tradition whose position relative to the recent history of the West in many ways resembles what Freud called the "other scene," prior to its articulation as the u nconscious, shrouded in darkness, marked off as a kind of forbidden zone against which the tremendous intellectual , pOlitical and moral energ ies of the European enlightenment continue to define themselves? How will psychoanalysis survive the translation to another language, another history, another symbolic order whose structure may or may not accommodate its meddling guest's eccentricities without a good amount of spirited resistance? This last question may best characterize the stakes of 8enslama's argument, since it suggests that the task of the translator involves more than the simple, if uncomfortable, interposition of one field of knowledge onto another. As Benslama himself asserts, and as the double-entendre of the book's original French title (lost, alas, in translation) suggests, to stage the encounter of psychoanalysis and Islam will require an openness
to the inevitabi lity that, once the dust settles, neither psychoanalysis nor Islam will be the same; the work of translation is a bidirectional effort through which both psychoanalysis and Islam will be forced to confront the distinct challenges that each poses to the other, without any real g uarantee that either wil l succeed in setting itself aright with respect to its opponent. Given the ethical and political exigencies of the contemporary cross-cultural confrontation between East and West, the precarious footing on which this difficult, perhaps impossible, mediating project rests cannot be understated . Too aggressive an insistence upon the founding axioms of psychoanalysis risks reducing the i ntricacies of Islam , its internal d ivisions and h istorical specificities, to an easily manageable and thus essentialist narrative, as if the complexity of the problem could be distilled into material for another case history, appropriated as yet another trophy to which psychoanalysis may refer as evidence of its universal applicability; too proud an adherence to the framework of analysis risks, in other words, its unfortunate mutation into one more d iscourse within the canon of modern ethnocentrism. At the same time, however, too much timid hospitality toward the other that is Islam will resemble the simpering position of the hyper-tolerant multiculturalist, who listens pOlitely and accommodates difference with d ubious ease since any truly meaningfu l or transformative encounter with the otherness of the other was always, actually, completely out of the question. Both hazards, of course, engender much the same result: the further immunization of psychoanalysis and Islam from the positive contaminating effects that each may entail for the other. The fai lure of this project, once initiated, will therefore denote much more than a mere m issed encounter; it may inadvertently contribute to the further ossification of, on the one hand, an ignorant and self-satisfied Western chauvinism and, on the other, an increasingly pervasive, dangerous and
Umbr(a)
1 89
theologically-grounded xenophobia operating under the banner of " Islam ism. " We need hardly be reminded of the profound representational and material violence to which either tendency, and their basic incommensurabi lity, give rise. We might here recall Freud's late contention, in "Analysis Terminable and Interminable, " that psychoanalysis is one of three "impossible" professions,2 and this for at least two reasons: first, because the transferential relationship through which the progress of the analysis moves is always working toward its own undoing, toward the analysand's realization that there is no "subject supposed to know"; the condition of possibil ity without which no analytic work would be feasible is the very object against which that work opposes itself. Second, the task of the analyst is intrinsically impossible because the zero-point of absolute truth toward which the analysand's energies are directed will never appear in its ful l presence; something always remains, some trace in the form of the symptom, the dream, the fantasy. Benslama's work bears u pon both of these impossibilities, not least because the conceptual problem of the impossible serves as a constant refrai n within his work. In the first place, the challenge of Islam demands that the ear of the analyst be capable of attuning itself to unexpected dimensions of human experience, modes of subject-formation , and orders of what Freud called "historical truth ." From the outset, this unfamiliar material asks, by its very nature, for an intervention on the level of an analysis, while also i mplying, precisely because of the acuteness of its novelty within the analytic scene, that the "subject supposed to know" must admittedly know very l ittle indeed. As to the second order of impossibility the vanishing point beyond which lies the end of analysis - Benslama's book positions itself from the outset as a mere prolegomenon to any future
UmbrIa)
1 90
metapsychology, as a series of provocations, partial interrogations, exploratory critical adventures and constructions. In short, Psychoanalysis and the Challenge of Islam only attempts to inaugurate the analytic relationship, to suspend the impulse toward solutions and to establish the terms of this absolutely vital confrontation within a rubric that both resists closure and at least attempts to evade complicity with the reductive and violent manifestations of either one of its objects of concern. A generous (and perhaps responsible) reading of this text - one that recognizes this dynamics of the impossi ble inhering within its venturous balancing-act - must therefore suspend the impulse to pass final judgment upon the question of just how successfully Benslama has managed to maneuver through this critical , cultural, historical, theoretical , theological, ethical , aesthetic, political and anthropological minefield. Otherwise, the reader may fixate upon only those elements of Benslama's exploration that appear at first blush to be contradictory or insufficient, and will dismiss his work - as Joseph A. Massad has done in a most exemplary fashion - as a presumptuous exercise in Western liberalism, as a project of disciplinary, universal ist and therapeutic assimilationism, as a modern European avatar of American cultural imperial ism.3 Such vituperative criticism may follow from the assumption that Benslama's critical idiom is decidedly European; the two primary discourses here employed, those of psychoanalysis and deconstruction , do, after all , continue to resonate with the authoritative voices of their (supposedly) French and German intellectual forebears.4 But Benslama's work, both here and elsewhere, compellingly demonstrates that it is just this assumption to which we must commit our g reatest theoretical energies; he and others (most notably, perhaps, his principle interlocutors Freud and
DlAL.OGUES
Derrida, as well as Christian Jambet and Edward Said) have shown time and again that the dichotomy through which the Islamic philosophical tradition and its European "counterpart" are held in total distinction provides an analytic lens that is by no means sufficient. The effect of an encounter between psychoanalysis and Islam jeopardizes, through the very d iscomfort to which it gives rise, the self-assured identities of either party, causing the cultural and historical terms through which they have both been rendered intelligible, to themselves and to each other, to tremble with disquieting intensity. Contrary to Massad's conclusion, then , it seems difficult to imagine a more radical interruption of the ideology of Western li beralism, even and especially if the language with which Benslama levels his critique of Islamist ideolog ies and reconstructs the historical foundations of Islam is steeped in the discourse of European critical thought. I ndeed, one can scarcely imagine the enduring critical importance of psychoanalysis without this fidelity to the inconsistent, the difficult, the contrad ictory and the u ncertain. Such, after all , is the problem of the impossi ble, and it is a problem toward which the considerable majority of Benslama's book is directed. The more immediate approachability of his thoughts for our present time of war and death may tempt readers to excise these explicitly political concerns from the larger body of the text, but to do so is to promote a profound misapprehension of the stakes and direction of his work. Inasmuch as Islamist activism concerns, for Benslama, a false rearticulation of the originary myth of Islam, it is this last problem to which he dedicates tremendous critical effort and through which the radical importance of a psychoanalytic reading comes into ful l view. We need only be reminded here that the trajectory of desire is, for psychoanalysis, always a quest for an origin - and
that this quest finds its limit, moreover, only in death, since the lost object toward which the subject of desire orients h imself never really existed in the first place. The whole of Lacan 's thought impresses this upon us. For psychoanalysis, then , the repetition of the failure to actualize that primordially lost origin is an essential symptom, since it pOints to a foundational truth whose privileged position within the subject's u nconscious resides precisely in its obstinate resistance to the logic of the signifier - in its refusal, that is, to reveal itself under the harsh light of reason or within the field of the representable. What Benslama's intervention thus brings to a larger consideration of the problem of Islam is a critical attunement to the unsaid and the unsayable, a sensibility to the foreclosed , forgotten or repressed elements of Islam's founding narrative, and a consideration of the ways in which these unacknowledged, intransigent kernels of the real continue to d isturb the symbolic logic governing its modern-day institutions. The quest for the invisible origins of monotheism is not, of course, without precedent within the discourse of psychoanalysis, and Benslama is entirely right to find within Freud 's astoundingly brief treatment of Islam in Moses and Monotheism not a critical deficit, but rather a provocation - an injunction either to consider or to displace Freud's suggestion that Islam's origins comprise only "an abbreviated repetition" of a primordial blueprint forever engraved in human history by J udaism's originary violence.5 This is why the task of translation is far more than a transpOSition of one system of thought onto the cultural terrain of another, and why Benslama does not hesitate to take Freud at his word when the latter admits that his expertise is "insufficient to complete the enqu i ry" into the history of religion.6 The radicalism of Freud 's thought does not, in other words, dissuade Benslama from finding for his predecessor a definitive place within a shared intellectual heritage whose general position toward
Umbr(a)
1 91
Islam has been, i n the best of times, unjustifiably dismissive. But it is all the more important, for just that reason , to acknowledge and assume the challenge Freud installed, if only parenthetically, within his final work. Let us return, finally, to the enigmatic question with which we began this brief consideration : What is Fethi Benslama doing? His writing certainly poses a challenge to what is called Islam, particularly i n its recent engagement with a politics of representation that has become thoroughly i nvested i n an i ncreasingly g lobalized economy of jouissance. It is absolutely essential , though, that we tend to the vital distinction withi n t h e discourse of psychoanalysis between , o n t h e o n e hand, a n intervention on t h e level o f the imaginary and , on the other, one that assumes as its object of concern that which will not reveal itself within the representational field of which it is nonetheless constitutive. Attention to this distinction indicates that Massad and others have j udged Benslama's work by remaining, more or less, on the apparent surface of the text - within the field of the imaginary. From this position , their censure may be entirely justified, though it cannot approach the more profound i mportance of Benslama's intervention . Psychoanalysis and the Challenge of Islam does not raise its explicitly pol itical protestations by simply demanding that Islam rearticulate itself within the equally violent accommodationist discourse of Euro-American modernity. Instead, Benslama's text instantiates a refusal to accept any narrative that would claim a purchase on the originary truth of human being, and i l lustrates, at the same time and with profound acumen, that even the very logic in which h is work is engaged - the logic of the u nconscious - may encounter its own limit in the form of a challenge, a test, a resistance or a refusal whose name, with all that it implies, is Islam.
Umbr(a)
1 92
1.
The writing of this essay was occasioned by the forthcoming publication of Robert Bononno's English translation of Benslama 's book, Psychoanalysis and the Challenge of Islam (Minneapolis: University of M innesota Press, 2 009).
2.
Sigmund Freud , "Analysis Terminable and I nterminable," in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (hereafter S.E.), ed. and trans. James Strachey et al. (London: Hogarth Press, 1 9531 974), 23:248. It is perhaps not insignificant, considering the positively international and intercultural terms of Benslama's intervention, that the other two impossible professions, "in which one can be sure beforehand of achieving unsatisfying results [ . . . J are education and government. "
3.
See "Psychoanalysis, Islam and the Other of Liberalism" in this issue of Umbr(a), 43-68.
4.
"Benslama's deconstruction , ' " ' Freudian according to Massad, "whether i t uncovers an ' Islam ' that is individualist or anti individualist, can only do so in relation to a modern li beral European value that Benslama pOSits as universal , namely, ' individualism. ' " Massad finds i n Benslama's work a "certainty with which ' I slam' is christened the other of liberalism and the West," which "aligns it with the figure of the primitive and the pre-oedipal child in the cosmology of Freud ian psychoanalysis." See ibid. , 52, 58.
5.
Sigmund Freud , Moses and Monotheism, S.E. 23:92 .
6.
I bid.
ACT OF STATE: A PHOTOGRAPHED HISTORY OF THE OCCUPATION, 1 96 7-200 7 Ariella Azoulay (Tel Aviv: Etgar, 2008) , 6 1 2 p p . Act of State was published as a post-exhibition book for an exhibition by the same name, curated by Ariella Azoulay. The exhibition was held in Tel Aviv in June 2007, the date of the 40th anniversary of Israel 's "temporary" occupation of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank and was shown later in Ferrara in September 2008. The book and the exhibition that preceded it include hundreds of photographs taken mostly by Israeli photographers during the occupation between 1 967 and 2007. The pictures and their accompanying texts are organized in two parallel columns, a time line and thematic lines that interrupt it. The accompanying text, written by Azou lay, is not a regular curator's text. It goes beyond the "accepted" format of a separate forward that serves to "caption" each and every photograph . Mostly it is a non-theoretical, narrative text that m ixes facts, questions, and reflections by a method of what Azoulay calls " Political Imagination . "
The book as a whole gives an enormous amount of information about the history of the occupation and the routine, day-to-day l ife of the Palestinians under it. This information unfolds in a unique way, based on the theory of the gaze that Azoulay developed i n her book, The Civil Contract of Photography:1 the intent is "to glean more and more details from the photographs and respond to the people photographed, whose constant presence demands us to act upon our minimal civil duty and political i magination and not to abandon them to the vast horror in which eve rything i n them is etched in that low resolution that says, 'I can't look at this' or 'We can do nothing'" (26).
Umbr(a)
1 93
CONTIN U I1Y Azoulay does not surrender to the urgent rhythm of "wars" or "operations" that simu late a short term reality and a present (however horrific) that will end in a ceasefire. Instead she shows how an unbearable reality of long-term oppression is created and constructed when "emergency claims" are checked and left unheeded. This reality was created slowly, but from the beginning motifs cou ld be seen that would pave the way to the impoverished existence and invisibility of Palestin ians, which would be brought to the brink of catastrophe. These motifs - such as the endless waits that would have to be endured in order to cross checkpoints on the way to work; the demolitions and mi litary break-ins of Palestinian homes; arrests without indictment, referred to as "administrative detentions"; harassment by Jewish colonialists; the shackling of hands and blindfolding during arrests; detention camps; separation fences; wounded children; bereaved mothers - all accumulate in the book and constitute a thematic thread that runs parallel to the time line. The whole of Act of State is constructed in a way that refuses to surrender to Israeli visual consciousness. Azoulay does not place a large number of photographs around dates of the two I ntifadas (the Palestinian uprisings of 1 987 and 2000), for example, nor around various Israeli "operations, " alongside a few representative images of routine l ife in between . She presents, rather, a steady continuum of photographs that descri be the relentless advance of the oppression. This continuum relies not only on images of horror, but also on a gaze that exposes the unbearable routine, which Israelis consider "reasonable." This routine has a face, a temporality, concrete practices. The photograph of a house demolition in Imwas (Yoseph Ohman , 1 967; 57), for example, dating from 1 967, sabotages the immediate, laconic explanation which the common Israeli
Umbr(a)
1 94
spectator gives himself, that this house is the home of a terrorist or of someone who has built it illegally, by failing to secure the necessary (though , i n fact, impossible t o obtain) construction permits. This photograph, depicting a house demolished during the expUlsion of an entire village fated to become refugees, is d isplayed alongside other photographs of house demolitions in 1 983 and 1 988; it thus emphasizes the way in which the dispossession of Palestinian homes has been part of Israel i policy since the dawn of the Occupation. The strong feeling of continuity in the book is created by at least two parallel modes: one "fills in holes" - i n images that reflect the continuity of oppression year after year, photograph after photograph , of a daily routine that becomes more and more catastrophic as it deepens its hold over those who are submitted to it. The second mode "breaks" the time line by means of a thematic line. This line serves to remind us, for example, that house demolitions did not begin as a reaction to the First I ntifada, but preceded it. This practice of demolition has been present in the very infrastructure of the occupation since the Palestinian transfer in 1 948, through 1 967, and u p t o this very day. The theme l ine, then , undermines the usual h istorical narrative that defines Israeli actions mostly as a response to the "sudden escalation" of violence by Palestinians, which must be stopped.
SPEAKER Still, with Ohman 's picture of I mwas, the reader - accustomed to reading "exhibition catalogs" - expects to find a q uasi-transparent text stating what is most obvious in the image, a caption-like description such as "Bulldozer demolishing house in I mwas." Contrary to this expectation, however, Azoulay opens the photograph to questions and directs our gaze towards a blurred figure nearly disappearing among the trees behind it - "Who
REVIEVS
- Yosef Ohman, 1 967 On the way east, Imwas
Umbr(a)
1 95
is the man on the right, watching this bulldozer demolish a house? Does he hope that the pause in the demolition will make the driver or his superiors reconsider their action and stop it?" (57). Th is diversion of attention away from the action itself enables us to turn our gaze towards the blurred presence of a witness that becomes part of the destruction procedure. The reader/spectator is not permitted to remain complacent and removed from what is taking place in the photograph . The i nformation Azoulay provides is not encyclopedic i nformation; her arch ive is both public and personal , an open archive. After viewing this photograph, for example, I ran a search on I mwas; it turns out that the village is one of three in the vicin ity of Latrun - Imwas, Valou, and Seit N u ba - which was a part of Israel after the war of 1 948. In 1 967, using the "opportunity" created by the war, the State expelled the villagers from their homes and destroyed all three villages. I realized how intensely charged every image and word in Act of State is when I moved onto the next page (Yosef Ohman / On the way east, 1 967; 59) and saw a photograph of a refugee family from I mwas, slowly making its way through the pastoral h i l ls. Even without any detailed information about the situation , one is arrested by Azoulay's words: " Perhaps at this point they have yet been spared the knowledge that their Imwas home has been demolished . Even if they had been g iven more time to pack, they could still not have taken more of their belongings with them. Only a donkey, a sheep, some blankets to survive the nights, a few objects bundled in a large sheet, and much love in order to survive the expu lsion with four girls and a baby. " Th is text is very brief, its tone telling-pensive, nearly laconic, its restraint reinforcing the intensity of the emotion it contains. Alongside the previous and fol lowing blocs of text, it slows the reading and transition from photograph to photograph. And the gaze that seals itself
Umbr(a)
1 96
against seeing, the experience-in-itself of being overwhelmed by images or helplessness, slowly relents as the information gathered by the gaze of the curator-author accumulates. On the top of the double-page that deals with home demolitions (56), two photographs break the time line. One of them is Rachel Hirsch's picture "Salata refugee camp, Nablus," 1 983 (56): three children and a woman (their mother?) are seen on the roof of a building overlooking the skyline of a Salata refugee camp in Nablus. In her accompanying text, Azoulay leads us again beyond the conspicuous desolation and the family smiling into the camera: "The same barrels used here to demarcate a children 's playground served the army at the time to seal houses. They were filled with concrete and placed in l ines to form a blocking wall" (56). The technical information about the barrels scattered across the roof accumulates in a manner different from the detachment with which we are accustomed to hearing about the "technical" practices of the Occupation, or - as is usually the case - the way in which we do not hear about them at all. The answer to the question that Azoulay took the trouble to ask is now situated as a part of the human condition depicted in the photograph : the seemingly simple q uestion, "What are the barrels doing there? Why are they fi lled with gravel and concrete?" makes visible an aspect of the lives of those seated there, who look rather relaxed and not as if their situation invited such a blatant question . And the answer reveals some part of the routine of the erection and demolition of Palestinian houses, of ongoing and renewed refugee l ife. The play of children is no longer separated from practices of m i l itary occupation, and th e refugee cam p is no longer something u n imaginable, an alien space that could be referred to in sanitized terms such as "target bank," as it often is in the Israeli press and media. Through the textual " littering" of the artistic and the archivist-historical fields, Azoulay
REVIE'vVS
t 1 ,
- Rachel Hirsch, 1 983 Salata refugee camp, N ablus
Umbr(a)
1 97
achieves a unique combination of text and i mage that joins the anonymous figures in the photograph and the reader-viewer in an active encounter. The speaker's act stems from the realization that "[t]he sense of an enonce - a photograph, in this case - can neve r;. e found in the photograph itself, but is always caught in an infinite regression of enonces where a new one is required to express the sense of the previous one. "2 The "sense" then must be "littered" with statements, even when these attempt to appear neutral. Here, freed of the belief that the meaning of the photograph is self evident to its viewer, Azoulay exposes numerous layers of the visible in a voice that reveals its inconclusiveness. D U RATION
Two photographs of a shepherd boy engender a d iscussion of another dimension that exists in the book - the dimension of duration. In slightly different photographs (Dorit HershkovitzlTyassir Checkpoint, 2006; 330 and 588) one can see a 1 4year old boy sitting on the ground, blindfolded with a rag, his hands restrained . From the details of the accompany text, one learns about the paradoxical situation of the boy who grazes h is sheep daily: he has crossed a border the existence of which he was unaware, for in their defense strategy, the outpost commanders set new borders every day in order to prevent monitoring by the locals. The pages between the first appearance of the photograph of the shepherd in the thematic line and the second appearance in the time line enable one to sense the length of time that passes as the boy sits nearly dehydrcited, hands shackled, unaware of what he has done wrong. We experience this duration as the time of our own reading, which projects across hundreds of photographs describing people waiting: in l ines at checkpoint for hours on end , in pre-dawn hours daily (whenever crossings into Israel happen to
Umbr(a)
1 98
be open); in administrative detention without indictment or due process of law, sometimes for years, or next to a detention faci lity without knowing where one's son or husband are; waiting for physicians from various aid organizations to arrive at besieged villages. Palestinian time, which is not regarded by the Israeli regime as a respectable resource, permeates photographs throughout the book, reflecting this nerve-racking routine of daily life, and receiving here a rare kind of visibility. Act of State confronts the Israeli concept of the occupation. It does this not only through the hundreds of photographs it assembles, not only through its unique manner of "captioning" and its " littered" curatorial text, but also through the combination and structure of its material, which emphasize, among other i mportant issues, the continuity of the oppression and the specific temporality of the catastrophic reality of millions of people without rights. The book offers its readers/spectators the possibil ity of inserting themselves into the chain of enonces of acts of State. If one can imagine a future in which it will be possible to process past crimes in a museum or in a kind of constitutional court of j ustice such as in South Africa for example - Act of State certainly builds the path towards it in its sharp resolution of seeing, in its multiple ways of telling. - Adi Sorek Translated by Tal Haran
1.
Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography (New York: Zone Books, 2008).
2.
I bid., following Deleuze, 51 6 .
REVIEWS
THE ODD ONE IN: ON COMED Y Alenka Zupancic (Cambridge: M IT Press, 2008) , 240 pp. The Kantian philosoph ical system, a s is wel l known, hinges u pon the d ivision between (natural) phenomena and (rational) noumena, and upon the u nbridgeable chasm forever separating the two. Human species belong to nature as finite beings, but at the same time they are only free as rational beings, and the rational order wi ll admit of absolutely no exception to this state of affairs. It is here, just where Kant's system concludes and at the point upon which it most i nsists, that Alenka Zupancic's book on comedy (and psychoanalysis), The Odd One In, begins. Thus, the philosopher to whom she refers in her opening pages is, quite rightly, not Kant, but h is successor Hegel, who, "among classical philosophers [ . . . ] valued comedy and the comic spirit most highly" (1 3). Hegel, of course, never kept unbroken what Kant left intact. In his Phenomenology of Spirit, comedy appears only after Spirit is achieved: our consciousness reaches reason via self consciousness, and reason materializes itself into the (natural) world as its Spirit. Spirit could be a community's master discourse - its habits, morals or ideologies - but at the same time, since it is its own reason materialized, consciousness can also reappropriate it or proclaim its illusory character. I n Zupancic's words, "consciousness comes to know that it is itself the source and the d rive of that Absolute Spirit which, from a certain point on, appears to it as its unattainable Beyond , its Other" (1 5). At this stage of consciousness, we may assume a distance from Spirit and freely criticize its authority, but it is precisely after the Spirit is revealed to be merely a product of our consciousness that comedy becomes an issue. According to Zupancic, we live in an age of
"bio-morality," the fundamental axiom of which �tates, "a person who feels good (and is happy) IS a good person ; a person who feels bad is a bad person" (5). We all know now that the Other does not exist, and that nothing is infi nite, universal , or transcendental, but this knowledge of our fin itude and the Other's incompleteness, as such, has acquired an imperative status: we must be satisfied with ou � �initude, which has now come to occupy the posItIon of the Master-Signifier in human l ife. Although the (Kantian) "metaphysics of infinity, and of transcendence" might be undermined by our consciousness's SUblation into Spirit, we are also witnessing the rise of what Zupancic calls a "metaphysics of finitude in which , often with a distinctively pathetic ring to it, fi nitude appears as our (contemporary) great narrative [ . . . ] : You ' re only human! Give yourself a break! Nobody's perfect!" (48). Comedy is thus conceived, generally speaking, as the subversion of the metaphYSiCS of infinity by this new metaphysics of fin itude. For example, a buffoonish baron who presumptuously claims his superiority as an aristocrat slips on a banana peel and falls into a puddle of mud again and again; the baron 's aristocratic ideal is reduced to a base physical reality, and the failure of his ideal superiority makes us laugh : "the individual , the concrete, the contingent, and the subjective are opposing and undermining the universal, the necessary, the substantial (as their other)" (27). According to this general conception , comedy levels off the universal - gods, morals, state institutions, universal ideas - with concrete phenomena: no matter what symbolic significance he has, the baron "is also a man," who is subject to the same pathetically finite order as the rest of us (30). This version of comedy thus fundamentally disallows any access to the transcendental . Yet Hegel 's Phenomenology provides us with a different notion of comedy. Because it is precisely after the section on "Spirit" that comedy comes into
Umbr(a)
1 99
view, comedy is something that only happens after the subject has become conscious of the function of Spirit, at which point transcendental authority is undermined. The metaphysics of fin itude has its own dialectical significance, but it is never enough in itself since it also transforms human finitude i nto a Master-Signifier, into a new idea of universality. Accordingly, the metaphysics of fin itude must be followed by what Zupancic calls the "physics of the infinite," which she holds to be "the true comic spirit" (50). While comedy, as the physics of the infinite, might abolish older ideas of metaphysical universality, the point is that comedy generates its own universality, and gives it a concrete materiality. Far from annuling universality by material reality, comedy lets its own universality work, without at the same time losing its universal status in the very work itself. In other words, "comedy is the universal at work" (27; emphasis in original). This concrete universal is succinctly demonstrated by the "comedy-joke" with which Zupancic concludes her book, a joke "from the arsenal of the old Yugoslav Bosnian jokes about Mujo and Haso": Haso is describing to M ujo his adventures in the Sahara. - I'm walking through the desert. Nothing but sand around me, not a l iving soul , absolutely nothing . . . . The s u n burning i n the sky, and m y throat burning with thirst. Suddenly a lion appears in front of me. What to do, where to hide? - I climb a tree . . . - Wait a minute, Mujo, you 've just told me that there was noth ing around but sand, so where did the tree come from? - My dear Haso, you don't ask such questions when a l i o n appears! Yo u run away and climb the first tree. (21 7) I n this joke, M ujo's idea of the tree, which is merely the product of a certain ideology, makes us laugh not because it is undermined by physical reality, but
Umbr(a) 200
rather because it is real ized with all its universality, which does not allow of any exception - the tree is always there for us to climb. The most common view of comedy states that the reduction of one's ideal into reality is funny, and yields laughter. According to Zupancic's arg ument, however, it is precisely the ideal's sudden incarnation, with all its universal functions intact, that makes comedy possible. In this sense, we might say that in an age dominated by the metaphYSiCS of finitude, comedy (and, following the terms of Zupancic's argument, psychoanalysis) still takes the u niversal, the infinite, the Absolute, or the Other seriously. Insofar as the physics of the infinite itself risks establishing yet another metaphysiCS (and here we may note the frequency with which psychoanalysis is accused of phallo- or phallogocentrism), the task of both comedy and psychoanalysis is twofold. On the one hand, they must materialize the Absolute at the level of phenomenality because consciousness already knows its purely i l lusory character and fundamental incompleteness. At the same time, however, comedy and psychoanalysis must create their own Absolute; otherwise, the lack in the Absolute as such would become a new Master Signifier. In both comedy and psychoanalysis, the Absolute is neither forgotten nor restored ; we do not have to believe in the tree in the middle of the desert, which is impossible, but we must nevertheless remember that the impossible really happens. I n other words, comedy and psychoanalysis both thrive on the point of this double injunction; but it is precisely because of th is doubleness that their tasks appear to be unattainable. I n our age of " bio-moral ity, " the Absolute or
the Other is revealed to be split and incomplete, and the split Other as such has become our new grand narrative. Yet, Zupancic argues, "this is by no means the whole comic story" (1 22). Comedy is indeed triggered by the knowledge that the
REVIEWS
Absolute or the Other is not at all perfect, but this split of which we have just become conscious also betrays "a singular connection and unity, " which is quite different from the perfection and completeness of the Other that we had originally assumed (1 22). The split names the relationship between the terms that the split itself d ivides, and comedy plays u pon j ust this ambiguous unity, this "short circuit" both dividing and uniting the Other. The short circuit, however, is not located between the finite and the infin ite, or between the split and the whole; fol lowing the logic of the object a, Zupancic argues that it produces the two sides of the relationsh ip, which are thereby linked in their separation: it is "an intersection which is generative of both sides that overlap in it" (2 1 4). It is not a point at which the transcendent, which has been inaccessible from the finite, intrudes into the finite, but rather it is the moment at which the finite as such fails to complete itself or to become metaphysical in its completion; this failure paradoxically and oddly binds the finite together. When this short circuit takes place in comedy and makes us laugh, it appears d istinctly unrealistic - like H aso's tree in the middle of the Sahara. And yet, we cannot help noticing that there is "something very real in comedy's supposedly unrealistic insistence on the indestructible, on something that persists, keeps reasserting itself and won't go away, l ike a tic that goes on even though its 'owner' is already dead" (49). The short circuit appears as something mechanical or indestructible; for, when the Absolute or the metaphysical (whether finitude or infinity) fails to become itself, or to complete itself, what becomes manifest i n comedy is not "how" such a metaphysical Absol ute affects us, but the "fact that it does so, and that it does so all the time" (1 95; emphasiS in original). Comedy, that is, repeatedly highlights the fact of the Absolute's functioning "in all its oddity, " and not an individual 's experience
of it (1 95) . In comedy, the crack in the Absolute's finitude also assumes the form of a link, which " can occaSionally strike us as mechanical" (1 1 8): here, finally, the comic Absolute appears with its full function. This explains why (mechanical) repetition can yield laughter or, more generally, surprise; when the comic Absolute appears, we are surprised not by its absence or malfunctioning but by the very fact of its functioning. If there is such a thing as the lack in the Other, we can encounter it only when and where the Other surprises us with all its essential Otherness and Absol uteness, with all its functions in perfect working order. What is repeated in comedy and makes us laugh is the Other's function ing as such ; therefore, "in comedy we are usually surprised by things and events that we, at least roughly, expect" (21 0), such as the tree one climbs when chased by a lion. Thus comedy's surprising discontinu ity paradoxically consists in its continuity, and this discontinuity is "the very stuff of comic continuity" (1 37). Zupancic refers to Lacan's example of repetition in Seminar XI, in which the child desires to hear the same story again and again with a consistency in the details of its telling. The child demands the textual sameness of the telling, which is in fact impossible, but it is not the failure in the repetition of the same that the child wants to see. In the repetition, the Sameness or the Oneness of the story is undermined and revealed to be imperfect, but nevertheless something is realized : it is precisely through the imperfection that the One generates its surprising unity, which the young subject wants to see again and again . What Kant has left intact is thus made to work; the short circuit between noumena and phenomena may be impossible, but the impossible really happens. Zupancic's The Odd One In bri l liantly shows that it is precisely u pon this impossible i ntersection that comedy exuberates. - Hiroki Yoshikun i
Umbr(a)
20 1
DESIRING ARABS Joseph A. Massad (Chicago: U niversity of Chicago 2006) , 472 pp.
Press,
TERRORIST ASSEMBLAGES: HOMONATlONALlSM IN QUEER TIMES Jasbir K. Puar (Durham : Duke U niversity Press, 2007) , 368 pp . Joseph A. Massad is a reluctant follower. While Edward Said advanced a vigorous critique of Orientalism, he was perhaps willfully blind to issues of gender and sexuality. A grateful inheritor of that tradition , Massad returns to Orientalism to explore questions of gender and sexuality in Desiring Arabs. H is project is two-fold : he both creates an "arch ive" and interrogates the pressures and circumstances under which other archives are constituted. He is careful to anticipate his critics, rejecting nativisms of all persuasions. I ndeed , he writes against a "Western nativism" which has as its telos the civilizing mission of an evolutionary progress culminating in the Western subject position (42). Seeing sexual desire and modernity in Arabic literature solely through this lens denies his title half its meaning: Arabs are the objects of desire, not desiring subjects. Massad is most fluent and engaging when reading literature, and fiction functions as a fertile space for desire in his reading. He not only situates texts in context for an English-speaking audience, translating many of h is Arabic sources, but he also offers readings within the context of "contact zones," to use Mary Louise Pratt's term. Lenses turn on one another, affecting both how "societies" view one another, and in turn themselves. Massad peels back discourses that are in turn competing and complicit in their power
Umbr(a) 202
dimensions. He is careful with h is task, aware of the self-discursive truth claims of the "archive" as well as the necessity to perform the "work" of the arch ive. It is in detailing the historic shifts in the critical and popular reception of such writers as the medieval poet, Abu Nawas, that the reader "feels" the weight of the work, the accumulation necessary for the archival project. Yet in other places Massad appears wearied by such detail, as when iterating the ways in which modern scholars have appropriated Abu Nawas' work in order to read the sexual practices of Arabs and Muslims throughout history. Abu Nawas' poetry then becomes a cipher for "civilizational anxiety" and seditious practices. And while non-Arabic readers looking for queer theory may find the level of detail and sources unwieldy, this text marks a probing intervention in Arabic literary studies. It is at the intersection of both the nation state and masculinity in crisis that Massad's text meets Jasbir K. Puar's Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. What both books bring to recent scholarship is an indictment of what Massad terms "The Gay International" and Puar labels the "queer white patriarchy" (a borrowed term). Massad assails "The Gay International" for its self-styled savior complex: imposing a prescriptive and condescending "homosexuality" that demands Arabs unquestioningly fol low its circumscribed behaviors. If you are not the right kind of homosexual, according to these gay crusaders, then you must be oppressed. Massad counters this do-good human rights discourse with not a small amount of irony: "While the premodern West attacked the world of Islam's alleged sexual l icentiousness , t h e modern West attacks its alleged repreSSion of sexual freedoms" (37; emphasis in original). This combination of willful violence and a self-proclaimed "speCialist" status also
REVIEWS
disturbs Puar, who critiques the U.S.'s "sexual exceptionalism," a position that leads to what she terms "homonationalism " : the "coming out of American empire" (2). Where Massad's work is intent on subverting a linear telos (writ Western and hegemonic), Puar offers Deleuzian "assemblage" as a way of engaging with current discourses on nationalism, terrorism, and un belonging. She frames her project in terms of a "regulatory queerness" and the ascendancy of whiteness, which brings about as yet un-dissected assemblages of race, gender, class, nation, and religion. Puar explodes previously accepted versions of what it means to live in the U.S., through timely discussions of Abu Ghraib, the turban , queer activism, South Park, the decriminalization of sodomy, and biopolitics. Unfortunately she fails to un pack many of her terms, leaving the reader floundering in a sea of signifiers, struck by both how fast and how often terms pop up and are then dropped . It is as if she were making intricate installations out of fascinating ideas, setting them aloft and letting them hover without subjecting them to the kind of critical interrogation required for sustained flight. These books together compose a good beginning for the unpacking of Western hegemonic discourses; but at the same time the central notion of "queerness" is ill-defined in each. Both texts suffer from terminology that remains u nclarified. Massad 's third chapter, "Re-Orienting Desire: The Gay International and the Arab World," speaks to Puar's work on this issue. Massad connects the un iversalizing tendency of "gay rights" and the "prevail ing U.S. discourse on human rights" (which has global designs) to white western feminism and its "missionary task" (1 601 61 ). Puar also dedicates space to interrogating those American feminists who would purport to "save" Muslim women. This is a welcome gesture
in gender stud ies post-9/1 1 and is not stressed nearly enough . The "Gay International" then acts as a self-appointed missionary movement, headed mostly by Western white males, whose problematic and imperialist discourse "produces homosexuals" according to Western definitions, where they do not necessarily exist in actuality (1 63). Massad 's point holds: the Gay International serves to "write" the discourse, "transcribe" the stories, find native informants, and when there are none to be had, replace the informant with a non-Arab voice - the ubiquitous " instant expert." Furthermore, the Gay International seeks sites of pleasure in the Arab world, and thus must make a "space" of what it calls "freedom" and "act" there accordingly. This is the "re-orienting" desire on the part of the Gay International: the hegemonic gaze/ gays i nsist(s) on both conforming to defin itions set by another (which would appear to be the oppOSite of a queer agenda, itself an oxymoron) and then "saving" those who cannot conform, and condemning those who are not "out enough" in the public space. Massad 's focus is decidedly male centered, and while sexuality and desire are posited as flexible categories, gender remains fixed in the work i n a way that does not seem problematic for him. That is, he proceeds as if we all know what we are talking about when we say (with or without scare quotes) male and female, or gay, homosexual, penetrated , penetrative, normal, deviant, masculine, heteronormative, same-sex contact, effeminate men, homosexual encounter, the sexual desires and practices of Arabs, sapphist. Notably, his use of many "male feminists" takes place in the absence of any theoretical j ustification of the category. Both Massad and Puar provide footnotes alerting us to what they leave out. Massad offers,
Umbr(a)
203
for example: "Because most of this l iterature deals with male homosexuality, my comments are l i kewise concerned primarily with that issue" (1 63 , n . 7) . One wonders what " most" means here, in terms of the exclusion of female desire. Does the literature not exist, or does it not interest M assad ? Puar scatters the term "queer" about l i ke so much birdseed , and does not convinci ngly define it, resulting in a male same-sex focus with token forays into a discourse on lesbians. Her defense of terminology: " I use the terms 'gay' and ' l esbian' in conjunction with 'queer' to demarcate i mportant differences in positionality, yet I also want to suggest that some queers are implicated i n homonormative spaces and practices. " This seems straightforward enough. She continues: " I n the rest of the text I use 'gay' as shorthand to include lesbians; I use the term 'homosexual ' when it is an appropriate differentiation of subject positioning from heterosexual; and I use the acronym LGBTIQ (lesbian , gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, queer) to signal organizing , activist, and other collective contexts; this acronym , however, does not include two-spirit identity, among other formations." We cannot expect single terms to perform all the work we want or need them to, and so she notes "the inadequacy of all of these terms" as well as the fact that the "attempt to mediate this tension is precisely symptomatic" of the problem of specificity (Puar 230, fn. 9). Perhaps this is queer acting itself out, always toeing a margin that is one step beyond the discourse itself, refusing fixity. But this, too, seems too easy. There is a difference between terminology that refuses specificity, and terminology that is allowed to stand for whatever the reader brings to it at any g iven moment. Making an intervention in queer theory requires that one situate oneself somewhere in terms of previous debates, whether or not one intends to stake one's claims there. So if for both writers, q ueer means male, as does gay, then it is only masculinities that
Umbr(a) 204
seem to be in cnsls. Puar identifies "terrorist masculinities" that h inge on inadequate bodies: "failed and perverse, these emasculated bodies always have femininity as their reference point of malfunction, and are metonymically tied to all sorts of pathologies of the mind and body homosexuality, incest, pedophi l ia, madness, and disease" (xx iii). Both queerness and pathologized masculinities (do these terms col lapse into each other?) seem to turn on the female body. Puar's analysis looks for queer in the U.S. - the site of a sexually "exceptional discourse." Like Orientalism's desire for defin ition and a timeless Arab and Muslim world , Puar contends that the lens of the Gay I nternational (and she cites Massad's term in her book) is the locking mechanism of the gaze: the brown male in the U.S. can be either terrorist (queer) or not gay. So the brown male in the " M uslim world" is not gay i n the "right" way, and must be at turns liberated , fixed, and stabilized in his sexuality. Massad's Gay I nternational is at the forefront of what Puar cal ls "homonationalism . " This is where a gay hegemonic discourse does the bidding of the nation-state, in order to exert a proper patriotic stance after 9/1 1 . Certain homosexuals then become sanctioned citizens by virtue of disseminating a nationalist (conservative) U.S. agenda across the world, all in the name of liberal human rights discourses and a particu larly harmful m issionary position. Since the war on terror writes "narratives of exception" it then requires "incorporation of some, though not all or most, homosexual subjects" (Puar 3-4). Through a combination of "fantasy" and "suspension" the U . S . nation-state forges ahead. The "script" for the U.S. war on terror produ ces the terrorist as "a queer, non national, perversely racialized other" (Puar 37). Queer becomes white, and non-white can only be heterosexual, which narrates an impossible space for the non-white queer. This sets u p Puar's " M uslim or gay binary."
REVIEWS
Both Desiring Arabs and Terrorist Assemblages offer exciting and crucial i nterventions into the discourses of queer theory and the current monolingu istic and monocultural pathologies at root in much of the noise that rep laces d iscussion and debate i n the U .S. Terminology issues persist in both works, which cannot be set aside for larger arguments as they are integral to the claims. Massad 's book wou ld benefit from more expl icit i nvestigation of what is at stake in the rise of the Gay I nternational . His conclusion to the chapter on the Gay I nternational is chilling: its "m issionary achievement" may result in a "straight" planet (1 90; emphasis i n original). He ends on a hopeful note, however, willing his archive to post spaces of description and desire that emerge and are not "subject" to Western discourse. Puar's writi � g performs her politics: "Queer times requl re . even queerer modalities of thought, analYSIS, creativity, and expression i n order to elaborate u pon nationalist, patriotic, and terrorist formations and their imbricated forms of racial ized perverse sexualities and gender dysphorias" (204) . Both texts are innovative sites for l ingering questions: questions that make us as readers reflect on t�o comfortable subject positions, citizenships, media consumption, and reading practices. - Megan MacDonald
WHY ARE THE ARABS NOT FREE?: THE POLITICS OF WRITING Moustapha Safouan
(Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell , 2007) , 1 06 pp .
Why Are the Arabs Not Free?: The Politics of Writing, by Moustapha Safouan is an important, unsettling book. It provides both an understanding of the roots of chronic despotism in the Arab world and a framework for analyzing the factors that motivate and sustain it. In an attempt to uncover the ground of M iddle Eastern despotism, Safouan turns our attention away from the wealth (oi l) and poverty (water) characteristic of this land and i nstead redi rects our gaze to another, perhaps far more form idable, barrier to democracy - namely, the political suppression of vernacular Arabic. Although "Western States [ . . . ] were the first to [ . . . ] commit [ . . . ] flagrant acts of injustice on the individual and collective levels, in their colonialist enterprises" (30), Safouan regards the problems of the Arab world as mostly unrelated to Western influence and the tensions stemming from it. I n another move that breaks with conventional wisdom and thus fortifies this work of great courage and intelligence, Safouan rebuts the charge that Islam is to blame for the malaise of the Arab world because, as Why Are the Arabs Not Free? demonstrates, religion as such is not antithetical to progress. Classical Arabic (which Safouan considers a dead language) - the medium of p � b � ic communication and education and the offiCial language of the Arab world - is very d ifferent from the language spoken on the streets. But this difference is more than one of mere accent or dialect: in extreme cases, Arabs from neighboring towns may have difficulty understanding each other. Safouan examines the complex interactions between the two forms of Arabic that coexist in everyday l ife alld focuses on the polit �cal � nd . religious changes wrought by thiS situation.
Umbr(a)
205
Because the sense of self is deeply tied to one's mother tongue and the mother tongue of most Arabs is not classical Arabic (the only acceptable language in the majority of contexts), the institutional divide between classical Arabic and the demotic produces a profound cut within the Arab sense of self. In response to this division, Safouan calls for recognition of the legitimacy of Arabic vernaculars - though he does not promote a d isavowal of classical Arabic. Although Safouan's proposal replacing (but not abandoning) classical Arabic with demotic - is both well-argued and worthy of the type of debate that one hopes will follow, I would not be at all surprised if his book is censored. The tremendous prestige classical Arabic enjoys among both Arabs and the Muslim world i n general (God spoke classical Arabic) simply cannot be ignored , nor can the standard by which knowledge of the grammatical language is generally considered a prerequisite for all truly devout Muslims. And whi le I applaud Safouan 's project, I am nevertheless certain that the Arab public currently "exists" in a state of relative apathy, a mere shadow on account of the fact that " [n]o Middle East ruler will ever accept the teaching of the vernacular Arabic in school as a language just as 'grammatical ' as classical Arabic. Children with l iterary talents end up constituting a class whose members are li n ked together by a linguistic narcissism , as were the scribes" (93). The natural thought processes of these children are, of course, suppressed from an early age, their l i bidinal energies directed towards attaining vertical mobility and entrance into high culture. -
The language question raised by Safouan is inextricably linked to the possibility of a democratizing potential within the vernacu lar itself. Recall that, in Europe, Luther's Protestant Reformation and the Renaissance set in motion a linguistic movement away from Latin and towards the vernacular. As Latin was desacralized, popular
UmbrIa)
206
loyalty began to shift from Rome to the developing nation-states, thus displacing the political status of the Church. According to Safouan , the formation of guilds, spread of commerce, and humanist education must be traced back to the innovation provided by the "vulgar" tongue. "The thirteenth century," Safouan writes, "witnessed this new phenomenon: the replacement of the bishop and the priest by the teacher as a commentator on doctrines and texts, authorized by an independent institution" (42). And adds in regret: " [t]hings took a different course in our part of the world" (42). I n the Arab world, political fences are also linguistic ones. Because the majority of people consider the Qur'an the word of God, the agency that u ltimately determines exact contextual usage (God) is "unconscious." Writing in a liturgical language (with no native speakers) is not only directly associated with the rise of the Islamic empire, but also with those claims to d ivine truths advanced by the imaginary Islamic "Church" that has held a monopoly over direct access to the literary heritage of the Arabic community by anointing itself the protector and arbiter of the language. By admitting de-classicized Arabic into domains formerly reserved for the privileged few, classical Arabic may very wel l follow the same path as Latin, threatening (we can only hope) the political i nterests of the rulers, along with their phony reign, the breakdown of l iterary barriers and , u ltimately, the democratization of desire and autonomy that will fol low from a fortified bond between the spoken and written forms of the language. Although Arabs have kept their mother tongue alive in both home and community life, they are raised to regard it as second fiddle to classical Arabic and consider it unworthy of being either taught or written. Failing to realize that it is not their language that is inferior but the state of subordination that produces this mental stagnation, Arabs are taught to reckon their mother tongue a
RBlIf:WS
denatured form of the original, a form insoluble to proper thought. As Safouan makes clear, this is not a linguistic, but a social and political problem. This subordination was further aggravated by the attempt of pan-Arab ism to elevate classical Arabic to the position of a supra-regional language. As the chief element i n forging (in all senses of the word!) the Arab nation - a project aimed at producing a unified mythical past - classical Arabic did not contribute to a national rebirth, but instead led to a rapid m iscarriage that today finds itself in a state of menopause. Although pan-Arabism, or, as I would like to refer to it, Pharaonic-Mesapotamism , did not real ize its socialist aspirations of "unity, l iberation, and socialism, " this bankrupt ideology's conceptualization of lingu istic unity succeed ed in mandating classical Arabic as the chief fetish language of the whole Arab world. Its use in vacuous political propaganda den ied plural ity, eliminated all that had the potential to either question or undermine the political authority or legitimacy of pan-Arabism, and produced a depersonalized sense of existence for those it supposedly represented . By that time, the catholicized Muslim clerical establishment had , unfortunately, lost hold of the public and missed an opportune moment for the nationalization of the colloquial. With the aid of anti-demoticist secular elites, the continual reinforcement of imperial Arabic, the language of liturgy and administration, became the central political project in forging Arab unity - one nation, one language, knotted together by fantasies of an idealized past. The successes of pan-Arabism are to be found in its promotion of a linguistically homogeneous society (this is a misnomer) without speakers that guarantees the continuity of a Hegelian class system in which classical Arabic, a marker of supernatural prestige, is used by a minority class of educated elites and an even smaller number of ruling elites. At the time, any attention to everyday idiom was considered a conspiratorial scheme of the imperialist Other to undermine Arab unity. The irony, of course, is that
some of the colonial powers did, in fact, encourage the locals to codify the vernacular. An additional problem noted by Safouan is the very absence, or poverty, of those terms commonly associated with pOlitics in the Arabic language. Let me illustrate this with an example: There is no word in Arabic for "pol itics," as it is understood in its English sense. The word siassa , now used as a synonym for " politics," initially meant whipping stray camels into line. Safouan's final chapter, "The Fraud of the Islamic State, " indicates that such words as "government" or "State" are wholly absent from the Our'an and that the word "republic" Uumhuuriya] was first translated into Arabic by the French of Napoleon. It seems to me that recogn ition of demotic Arabic as a language in itself, free of any dependence on classical Arabic, would amount to a much-needed confidence in embracing a new Arabic identity. Arabs should recal l that the orphan Prophet spoke i n the language of the common folk and delivered an anti-aristocratic, communitarian message in his mother tongue (Oureishi Arabic) i n order to subvert the supposed difference between authority and audience. If he had suffered from an inferiority complex, he would have chosen to deliver the message in Hebrew, the language of h is ancestors, or Aramaic, the lingua franca of his time. Arabs should also recal l that, as Safouan points out, succession, or Caliphate, does not extend beyond M ohammad , he who brought absolute closure to monotheism. Any entity that anoints itself successor to Mohammad - be it a person or a State - betrays the teachings of the Our'an and is, strictly speaking, " blasphemous. " We must bear in mind the events that unfolded after Mohammad 's d eath: a Babylon ian form of Islam reinforced slavery; aristocracy became the system of governance; and Islam 's authentic message was mutilated , becoming l ittle more than a tribal, dynastic contest in which the competitors sought to construct the greatest temples of "worShip" to
Umbr(a)
207
a false g lory and rob all and sundry in pursuit of accumulating the greatest treasuries. From that day forward, the Our'an was used by the Sultans to exploit and enslave their subjects. When love is absent from one's mother tongue, so too is desire. It is this linguistic exile from the mother tongue that led the great, contemporary Arabic poet Oabbani to entitle one of his poems "When will they announce the death of the Arabs?" The international irrelevance of "the Arabs" finds expression in the following couplet: "Half of our people are without tongues, what's the use of a people without tongues? The old word is dead , the old books are dead , our speech with holes like worn out shoes is dead." And it is further underlined by the closing stanza of another poem by Oabbani : o long l ived one, We vow never to seek a share of your rule. o long l ived one, We vow never even as to look at your throne, o long l ived one, Go on lashing, as many of the people as you wish And killing as many of your subjects as you wish, And fuck as many of your slave girls as you wish, We only have one wish: Spare us the words, and spare us the letters.
Safouan's Why Are the Arabs Not Free? constitutes a deeply d isturbing challenge to the Arab world, a challenge that, though it will be deeply unpopular, nevertheless warrants a profound respect for its analytic inSight and penetrating cultural analysis. Its difficult reception should not, however, temper the force of its add ress because
Umbr(a)
208
none but those who are addressed by Safouan - that is, the Arabs themselves - are capable of bringing democracy to their societies, and this demand can only be met once the state adopts an accessible language, open to all, as the official language of education and administration . This will, no doubt, lead to neurotic transitions, symptoms at least partially attributable to our " linguistic narcissism" and the shattered hopes generated by one hundred years of humiliating experiences. The responsibilities of progressive, secular i ntellectuals in the Arab world are not so much to "speak truth to power" because, as Safouan points out, rulers do not l isten in that part of the world (today, this applies to the world i n general); but instead to disentangle themselves from this very narcissism and beg in writing in a l iving language so that ideas become accessible to all, thus providing the condition of possibility for the destruction of the authoritarian regimes of Egypt and Saudi Arabia, as wel l as the foreign protectorates of Jordan and I raq. According to the Our'an, Safouan writes, "the distinctive mark of Islam is that it is a religion which did not institutionalize itself; unlike Christianity, it did not equip itself with a Church" (94). And yet, the Islamic seminaries of "religious authority" were modeled on the Vatican, with the Supreme "guardians of moral ity" today issuing edicts from AI-Azhar (the M ufti of Egypt), Najaf (Ayatollah Sistani of Iraq) and Oom (the Supreme Guardian Khamenei of I ran) dealing with absurd ities such as how long one's pubic hair should be. In order to build an inclusive community, the chief identity marker of the twenty-first century must be the respective local languages of the Arabs, languages of and for the people, and fertilized in the womb of the mother. But such a combative project will require dissent, as implied in the following joke related by Safouan: "What's the difference between a language and dialect? The former has an Army and a Navy" (xiv). If a merger of both norms is deemed appropriate by the Other, a war may be prevented .
REVIEWS
·· · 0
Linguistic plasticity, it must be remembered , is possible when "hot spots," or "black holes," can accommodate targeted integration through either a horizontal or a vertical transfer of word units from one "variant" to another (and this even holds for i llegitimate transpositional events). So long as Arabs perceive language as subject to evolutionary changes (such as expansion , contraction, and redundancy) similar to that of biological genomes, th is change will not be a compromise, but part of a Darwinian enhancement of the genomic plasticity of language. After Safouan 's Why Are the Arabs Not Free?, there can be no more ambiguity: the language question in the Arab world is not a merely grammatical one, but essentially political insofar as it is the language of the government, not the people. As it has always been . . . . Sigh . - Keith AI-Hasani
®
:' ,
F i g u re 5 . 1 3
The s t i c k l eback may ignore the top model b u t will attack any of the lower ones because the red underbelly acts a s t i m u l u s to aggressive behavior.
as
(After Tinbergen, 1 951 .)
Fig u re 5 . 1 4 Y o u n g h e r r i n g g u l l s peck at t h e bottom model most freq u e n t l y .
Umbr(a)
209
FETH I BEN S LAMA is a Tun isian psychoanalyst who l ives and practices i n Paris; he is also professor of psychopathology at Paris VI I (Jussieu). He is the founding editor of Intersignes, a French journal of psychoanalysis and culture, and the author of numerous books, including La nuit brisee (Ramsay, 1 9S5); Une fiction troublante (Editions de l 'Aube, 1 994); and Declaration d'insoumission (Flammarion, 2005). H is seminal work, La psychanalyse a I'epreuve de l'lslam (Flammarion, 2002), translated into English as Psychoanalysis and the Challenge of Islam, will be published this spring by University of M innesota Press. KEITH AL-HASAN I has a BA in French and a Ph.D. in molecular biology from Monash U niversity in Melbourne. While conducting research on the molecular mechanisms by which bacteria cause disease in humans and developing genetically engineered vaccines against bacterial pathogens, he is currently in training as a Lacanian analyst. His interest in M iddle-Eastern politics is long standing. CHRISTIAN JAM BET teaches philosophy i n Paris and is the French translator of numerous texts by Islamic philosophers and poets. A former student of Henry Corbin, he is also the author of La logique des Orientaux: Henry Corbin et la science des formes (Seuil, 1 983) and editor of Henry Corbin (L'Herne, 1 98 1 ) . He co-authored two books with G u y Lardreau and is sole author o f L a grande resurrection d'AlamOt (Verdier, 1 990). Recently his book, The Act of Being: The Philosophy of Revelation in Mulla Sadra, was translated and published by Zone (2006). JOSEPH A. MASSAD is Associate Professor of modern Arab politics and intellectual history at Columbia U niversity. He is the author of Colonial Effects: The Making of National Identity in Jordan (Columbia U niversity Press, 2001 ); The Persistence of the Palestinian Question: Essays on Zionism and the Palestinians (Routledge, 2006) ; and Desiring Arabs (University of Chicago Press, 2007).
STEFAN IA PAN DOLFO is Associate Professor of Anthropology at UC Berkeley. Educated in Italy and the U . S . , she has l ived an extended part of her l ife in Morocco, where she conducts research and participates in intellectual debates. She is the author of numerous essays on subjectivity, trauma, and Islam and of Impasse of the Angels: Scenes from a Moroccan Space of Memory (University of Chicago Press, 1 997). Her forthcoming book, The Knot of the Soul, focuses on the experiences of trauma and madness in the context of psychiatry and contemporary Islam. Her anthropological works u nfold at the i nterface of psychoanalysis, Islamic thought, and local healing traditions.
MOUSTAPHA SAFOUAN , an Egyptian psychoanalyst who practices in Paris and teaches in various countries, translated into Arabic, among other works, Freud's Interpretation of Dreams and Shakespeare's Othello. One of Lacan 's first students after the war, he is the author of numerous books on psychoanalytic theory, including La sexualite feminine and l'Echec du principe de plaisir (Le champ freudien , 1 976, 1 979); and Le Transfert et Ie desir de I'analyse (Seuil, 1 988). Several of his books have been translated into Eng lish, including Four Lessons of Psychoanalysis (Other Press, 2004) and Why Are the Arabs Not Free?:The Politics of Writing (Wiley-Blackwel l , 2007). ADI SOREK is a writer and the editor of Vashti, a prose series published by Resling (Tel Aviv). Her books, Seven Matrons and Internal Tourism, were both published by Yediot Ahronot (Tel Aviv) in 2001 and 2006.
ALBERTO TOSCANO teaches at Goldsmiths College, University of London, and is a mem ber of the editorial board of Historical Materialism . He is the author of The Theatre of Production: Philosophy and Individuation between Kant and De/euze (Palgrave, 2006) and the translator, most recently, of Alain Badiou's Logics of Worlds. His book, Fanaticism: The Uses of an Idea, is forthcoming from Verso.
There is a certain lack of precision in the contemporary use of the psychoanalytic concept of writing. Lacan clearly seeks to differentiate the function of writing, l'ecrit, from writing as written , l'ecriture. This distinction is difficult, even problematic, but also crucial to grasping the stakes proper to each. Psychoanalytic criticism is often concerned exclusively with the written: the text, l iterature, the book. This criticism has and will indeed continue to produce profound and unforeseen resu lts in both criticism and psychoanalysis. But this issue seeks to address the function of writing in its psychoanalytic specificity. The purpose of doing so is two-fold: first, to re-establish the function of writing by carefully marking out that which fundamentally differentiates it from reading, speech , the letter, literature, and all of the other terms with which it is so readily fused and confused. The second purpose is to explore the mutual gain at stake in the encounter between this function of writing and the act of criticism. Put d ifferently, this encounter poses the question of whether it is possible to elaborate a psychoanalytic eth ics of writing which wou ld clarify our subjective position - and therefore our responsibility as psychoanalytic critics, in all of the vicissitudes of our engagement with the function of writing and the written. Confronted with ever-intensifying demands to "put it in writing," the exploration of such an ethics becomes all the more exigent. Following Godel's incompleteness theorem, we are aware that any consistent logical system which Lacan , not unproblematically for our purposes, characterizes as noth ing but writing - that proposes to justify its own truth must contain a statement which cannot be justified and yet remains true: there is a lack. Accordingly, when we seek to redress a lack in something like a constitutional document, psychoanalysis seems to confront us with a choice: first, to write more, to displace the absent center by accounting for it with an amendment, a supplement. This bears witness to a certain palliative repetition, which seeks to pave over the quicksand in the hope that this time, final ly, the ground will remain firm for the crossing. But, on the other side, the side beyond the pleasure principle, Freud and Lacan alike discover that the jouissance at stake in this lack is the jouissance of repetition , of the absent center. Therefore, the more radical choice is to write in order to actively preserve this absent center and to transmit, through the symbolic, that which is fundamentally recalcitrant to it. The possibility of navigating this terrain is precisely the task of this issue. We invite submissions that address the aforementioned topics as well as any related topics, including the fol lowing: Lacan 's statement in Sem i n ar XX that everythi n g written derives from t h e fact that the sexual relation cannot, itself, be written; the relation between the Freudian technique of .construction and critical speculation; the problem or verifiabil ity in analysis, criticism, and politics; the modern conjunction of the act of foundation and the foundational document; the role of truth in criticism itself, as opposed to the role of truth within the text; the locus of writing in the psychoanalytic clinic; the
interweaving of writing and repression, or by extension, a properly psychoanalytic conception of writing under persecution; writing and/as repetition, especially in psychoanalysis' relation to deconstruction ; the functions of logic and counting in relation to the limits of psychoanalytic criticism. UMBR(a): A Journal of the Unconscious is currently seeking articles that add ress such issues. Submissions should be 1 ,500-6,000 words in length , may be e-mailed as an MS Word document or mailed on d isk, and must be received no later than December 3 1 , 2009. Please send all submissions to:
[email protected] U M BR(a) c/o M ichael Stanish Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Culture 408 Clemens Hall Buffalo, New York 1 4260-461 0
Umbr(a)
21 3
