Umbr(a): Islam

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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

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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

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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.

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$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

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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)

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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

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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)

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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

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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

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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

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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.]

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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

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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 .

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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,

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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).

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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?

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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"

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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

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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

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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,

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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,

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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

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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"! "

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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

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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.

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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"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

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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.

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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

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(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.

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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-

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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

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'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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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 .

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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

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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

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[ . . . ] 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

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.)

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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

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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

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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,

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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,

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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

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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.) -

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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

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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

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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 l