The encounter of Islam and psychoanalysis is ably traced in this early millennial text from one of France's leading Lacanian thinkers who is also magrebien and an able scholar of the Islamic archive. Elsewhere, Benslama has engaged in a dialogue with Jean-Luc Nancy on Translations of Monotheism and his work is a necessary recourse for anyone seeking an extension to psychoanalytic thinking from and about religion. The splendidly titled Jan van Eyck Review of Lacanian Cultural Critique devoted its second 2009 issue to Islam and Psychoanalysis and Benslama is its genius loci.
Benslama characterises his approach as a deployment of ‘psychoanalytic method to historical events’, which entails examining what human beings say about history in their making of it and situating that experience in ‘permanent confrontation with libidinal forces, feelings of guilt and the threat of [the] dislocati[on] of established connections’ (213). For Benslama, Islam has undergone a catastrophic caesura over the last period in its confrontation with the West and modernity giving rise to scepticism and self-disapprobation on the one hand and profound reassertion of a putative originary form on the other. Disidentification and rupture led to a pursuit of the ‘simulacrum’ of modernity, which in turn led to a destitution of the self (a voiding of the historical and affective content of Islam). One response to this was the rise of Islamism sous rature a form of identificatory despair and reassertion of the origin as both threatened source and future site of redemption. Islamism is not the return of tradition but a profound eruption ‘of the spectral in the real, a triumph of law in the destruction of interpretation, and the arrangement of the communion of community around the corpse of the martyr’ (214). For Benslama, Islamism is neither unitary nor simply identifiable with Islam, but he shows the links that can be drawn with the account of origins of Islam and the return to origins of Islamisms. And he is clear: ‘Islam has become unhinged… Islam is out of joint’ (214).
So, in the first chapter, he outlines his own position of enunciation as a secular Tunisian indebted to the authoritarian modernisation of
Bourguiba, who closed an ancient theological seminary and converted madrassas into state secondary schools, removed the obligation for women to wear the veil and as a final transgressive gesture, on television drank an alcoholic toast to the health of the people during the month of Ramadan. Here is one origin of Islamism, a revulsion at impiety, but also a recognition of the breach of sacred time, that Bourguiba's ‘sovereign’ gestutre entailed and its attempted suture. But it is also the origin of Benslama's generation's desire to be other, a desire scattered across a number of possible incarnations, including that of the analyst. He comes to see psychoanalysis as a means of transport back to that origin at the level of knowledge, but also as a means of dealing with the fact that such returns are impossible, as the Islam that he comes to investigate is the ‘Islam interpreted through the problematic of the unconscious’.
So the shift toward origin is a shift of origin, which leads Benslama to the problem of propriety and impropriety, especially as limned in Moses and Montheism. Here the context of Nazism as positing a single and unique self that originates in pure self-identity provides Freud with an impetus to re-read the origins of Judaism as precisely split across multiple origins, where the other is inscribed at the heart of self. So, for Benslama, the challenge of Islamism requires a deconstruction of the origins of Islam. Against an account of a return to an original plenitude, Benslama emphasises the void of withdrawal at the point of the Prophet's revelation, which in turn generates a stance of openness: Islam only comes to itself out of a provenance in the foreign. The originary injunction at the commencement of the Qur'an, ‘Read’ then emerges as the opening to internal difference, where the word lodges in the cut of the flesh. ‘Man is never entirely man. He is ultimately foreign to his species’ (13). And if the foreign is at the beginning of revelation, the latter's content is indebted to other words, the traditions of the preceding monotheisms. As completion of an other's promise Islam must maintain its openness to what was before it. Original revelation is repetition.
Part of the problem of alterity is the relation of language to being: in language being becomes other even as its truth is asserted through its very alienation. Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses provided a reconfigured account of language and its relation to revelation. The question
of truth and fiction—does truth have the structure of fiction and can fictions tell truths?—is focussed by Rushdie's emphasis on the satanic suras, the moment where falsehood masqueraded as revelation, and sought to use this moment to problematise the structure of truth itself. For Rushdie, according to Benslama, literature becomes ‘an act of justice toward origins’ but one that claims the rights of subjectivity against the subjection of authoritative disclosure and interpretation. But it is also through fiction that a certain proper identification can take place. Fiction allows Rushdie's Saladin to move from abandonment to a relationship with Changez, his fictional father, and in doing so traces a structure similar to the Prophet's own movement from orphanhood to belonging with God. Fiction repeats truth, but in doing so poses a problem for truth as origin. Repetition unworks singular truths, and wonders if being can only be recounted as fiction, since all being must lose its revelatory quality, its quidditas, in language. With Freud's notion of illusion, Benslama seeks to move beyond the truth/fiction binary to a question of how Islam deals with the imaginary presentation of the impossible. Fictions of origin, he says, are not antagonistic to truth, but rather deal with the impossible, and the question for Islam must be ‘how does its fictional structures accommodate the impossible’— here being is the ultimate withdrawn ground—‘and recognise its sovereignty’ and how does such an impossible maintain a relationship with the father?
The rest of the book is a working through of this programme. In many ways the method is scriptural, that is Benslama reads central texts of the Islamic tradition— the Qur'an and hadiths (the ‘traditions’ or attested sayings of the Prophet), but also the Bible itself as the ‘before’ of Islam, the Arabian Nights, and the philosophical tradition of Ibn-Rushd and Ibn Arabi. But he does so with an eye to the libidinal economy of the texts. Three themes occupy him: the question of the father, the question of woman and the ‘imaginarisation of the impossible’, although these are not separate either historically or theologically.
The question of the father is read from the problem of Abraham and his two women: Sarah, who miraculously bears him a child when she and her husband are in their eighties and Hagar, who as a young slave bears a natural child to Abraham at the behest of her mistress, but who is subsequently vilified and exiled with her child Ishmael. For
Benslama these two women are the sources of different lineages (Sarah the Jewish and Hagar the Arab/Muslim) but also descry different visions of the father: for the Jews, Isaac is an impossible child, divine in his origins (and hence the prolepsis seen by Christian commentators of Mary and Jesus) and the fruit of God rather than man, whereas Ishmael is a ‘natural’ child. Abraham is a real father to the Muslims but a transmogrified father to the Jews, a father only in name, where Isaac's true progenitor is God, the echo of the primal father. Allah is elsewhere, a withdrawn God. This serves, I think, to buttress the argument that in Islam at its origins there is a non-paternal conception of the divine, which is lost in the development of Islam as a monotheism. The Arab lineage is both trivial (exemplified by such an ordinary event as the birth of Ishmael) and low: Hagar is a slave. Indeed this very humility of origins leads to problems later, where there are attempts to ‘raise’ Hagar's status or to eliminate her. The place of origins ‘between two women’ provides a structure of repetition: in the hadith that discusses the conception of the Prophet, Benslama discerns a similar vacillation between status and the impossible, signalled by the gaze of two women on the Prophet's father. This gaze testifies to a power of women which Islam, according to Benslama, initially acknowledges but seeks subsequently to erase or to cover.
In a powerful reading of one of the passages of the Qur'an, Benslama sees how the Prophet seeks reassurance about the probity of his visions form his wife Khadija. Cradled in her arms, he asks her whether the angel of his revelation is indeed angelic or demonic. What interests Benslama is the fact that Khadija can see as well as the Prophet, indeed better, since she adjudicates the truth: it is an angel, but one who disappears at her recognition. Just as Ruqqaya can see the Prophet as a potential in his father before his conception and Hagar sees God in the wilderness without damage, so Khadija can see the presence of the divine, knows it for what it is, and endures its intensity. In this Lacanian reading, then, woman is the site of a jouissance beyond or prior to language, a necessary but threatening capacity that must be controlled for the phallic version of jouissance and law to hold sway. This control requires the shrouding of the perilous place—the niqqab or burka (or even the hijab, Benslama suggests in a Bataillean allusion, since it covers the site of a more originary vision, the pineal gland). Yet,
in its emphasis that such a covering gives to the eyes, there is a trace of the primal power that women still demonstrate. Indeed this idea of ‘monstrance’, a showing forth of jouissance, is linked to the monstrosity that patriarchal Islam sees in woman. Veiling is both repression and testimony to the power that must be repressed.
This structure of repetition also conditions the Arabian Nights, which Benslama reads beyond its orientalist appropriations as an allegory of death, jouissance and language, where Shahrazad both redeems a complex play of doublings too often over-looked in the fragmented reading of the collection that eliminates its opening mise en scène (two kings, two duplicitous queens, two phalloi) and articulates a critique of the phallic bid for absolute jouissance that murderously seeks to eradicate the sites of Other jouissance. In all this, then, Benslama reveals the tropes within scripture and the classics which trace the history of several revelations, only one of which has been allowed to stand as truth, and a truth that betrays an original lack of origins, in the sense of an original revelation of self-sameness. Moreover, in placing language as deferral of death and yet opening to jouissance as a gift of woman, The Arabian Nights underscores a return of the repressed feminine: implicitly, Shahrazad echoes Khadija, now in a game of thirds. The voice emerges between ‘hymen and tympanum’, where Shahrazad's younger sister witnesses the scene of deflowering but also initiates the mechanism of narrative that will defer the king's murderous violence. Narrative thus maintains that which is unavailable to the king, the beyond of another being, ‘sustaining the unattainable part of herself night after night’ (162). The Nights then, is a ‘prodigious device for undoing the eradication of women’. Shahrazad, like Khadija, is capable of discrimination beyond the phallic: she can differentiate the jouissance of the Other from the Other jouissance, and in this capacity frees the Prophet from the fear of madness and allows him to attend to the message endorsed by God. For Benslama, then, Shahrazad solves through narrative the problem of masculine narcissistic madness in the face of female jouissance.
But what of God? There appear to be at least two models of God at work in the Islamic tradition: the most familiar to our ideologised West is perhaps the one that shares in the character of the jealous God of Moses and the Christian Reformation. Speaking psychoanalytically,
this God is God as resurrection of the primal father of the horde, or in another locution, modelled after the narcissistic self-identity of the masculine subject. But another God haunts Islam, a God where feminine jouissance introduces a lack into this self-completion. What phallic Islam reduces to defect and falling-away, another Islam (that pursued by Sufi mysticism for example) exalts as the very place of abandonment where the beyond is encountered as ‘the linguistic exile of the lack in “Him’” (167). What this suggests is a reading of Islam that will stress destitution (of phallic being) as the site of encounter with the impossible that is named but cannot be enclosed with the imaginary. This potential encounter is covered over—eradicated—by the strict monotheising of original revelation: ‘the inventions’ of monotheism emerge to deal with the problem of masculine inadequacy in the face of ‘disjunction-conjunction with the originary Other’ and the intractable problems of rivalry with the specular other, the semblable. Here violence is the central problem, and in a fascinating reading of the narratives of sacrifice—the substitution in the story of Abraham, the fratricidal dispute of Cain and Abel, but also the sacrifices of Oedipus—Benslama illuminates the links between sacrifice and hermeneutics, paternity and interpretation, truth and falsity. Basing himself on the writings of Ibn Arabi, he sees a line that connects dream, language and the separation from ‘the obscure god’ who demands flesh and blood for the guilt of the fathers. And in the study of Cain and Abel, the willed sacrifice of the latter in order to enact the law contrasts with the violence of the former whose refusal of loss in the paternal prohibition of absolute jouissance (the bar here on Abel's wife, another repetition of the place ‘between two women’) prompts the murder of his brother. But here two narcissisms are in play, and the ‘narcissism of the righteous’ who find satisfaction in death is wholly balanced by the paranoid narcissism that finds satisfaction in murder. This dismal dualism has its obvious contemporary resonances.
Beyond dualism, the impossible. Echoing throughout Benslama's thought is the insistent rhythm of a nomadic movement in a space: ‘the desert between god and the father’, the gap between a revelation that is inclusive and unfinished as it points beyond to a ‘There is a there is not’, the groundless ground, and a ‘revelation’ that is fixed and closed, an impossibility imagined and educed to the phallic dimensions of patriarchal
form. Tracing the originary community in the texts of Islam, Benslama sees the dangers within Islam as that offered by the life-space of the early Arabs: ‘the threat that haunts men in the desert is either the ‘There is nothing’ of nihilism or the abundance of totalitarian mirage' (216). But there is a third option an opening to the empty space that does not fall into imaginarisations but rather ‘tarries with’ the impossible not as fullness but as not-all, the ever-open.
What commends Benslama's book (and his thought more generally) is his arrival at this place from astute readings of a tradition that is too often treated as merely a finished, phobic object by its detractors or a closed monologic ‘truth’ by its zealots.