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

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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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BENSLAIVA

language the urgent demand for martyrdom, a "niche" of deadly address opens up toward which certain subjects will orient themselves. But who opened up this "niche"? How does it become actually attractive? Words such as "kamikaze" or "suicide attacks," with all the horror that they possess, have obscured this event in the language through which the desire of the Other announces itself as the desire to see the subject kill itself while kill ing others. This explains, in my opinion, how at a given moment the demand for martyrdom could spread like a plague and martyr cand idates could appear everywhere, even there where there is no front, no war, no situation of oppression. We know that the first so-called "kamikaze" attacks claimed in the name of Islam appeared with Hezbol lah in 1 983 during the Israeli occupation of south Lebanon. The word " kami kaze" appeared with reference to the massacre at Lod Airport in Tel-Aviv carried out by members of the Japanese Red Army on May 30, 1 972. Two of the three terrorists ki lled themselves with their grenades . One might think that this act inspired Hezbollah. At the same time, however, the word and the self-destructive/destructive act concealed the most important fact, without which we wou ld not comprehend the expansion of the phenomenon, namely that Hezbol lah was not merely a laboratory where dreadful human bombs were prepared using a technique that would spread all over the Middle East; it was also an ideological laboratory where the infernal discursive machine I am descri bing here was invented . In order to grasp what d rives th is invention , we have to provide here a few historical facts concerning the creation of Hezbollah. Hezbol lah - "the party of God" in Arabic - was founded in J une 1 982 , and it is a Shi ite Lebanese political and religious movement with the military branch from which it began at its disposal . It was created in reaction to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Sh ia Islam is a minority branch of Islam that, nevertheless, brings together fifteen to twenty percent of M uslims in contrast to the Sunnis, who represent the orthodox majority. This conflict corresponds to a major h istorical fact at the beginnings of Islam . It is a result of a bloody civi l war over the succession of its founder. After the death of Mohammed , one group of Muslims thoug ht that sovereignty and power should remain within his family. The fi rst who ought to inherit it was the prophet's cousin, Ali, who was at the same time his son-in-law, the husband of his daughter. Another group of Muslims believed that, without the instructions of a will directing this, succession should be decided by a conference of M uslims and not necessari ly by the l ineage of the prophet. Th is disagreement led to a civil war marked by the assassination of Ali and the torture of his son , Hussei n . When I say torture, I refer to the fact that the body of H ussein, the prophet's grandson's body, was dismembered . It appears to me that th is dismembering of Hussein 's body, considering the position that it will occupy in the history of Shiite Islam, is not alien to the explosion of these "kamikazes' " bodies themselves. H ussein's body was, in fact, ripped apart and dispersed by his enemies. Hussein's torture constitutes the originary sacrificial scene, the foundation of Shiism. It gave rise to stories in every tradition of Islam as wel l as to impressive rites of commemoration in Shi ism during which the believers infl ict acts of auto-flagel lation on themselves in remembrance of this torture and as a sign of repentance; they attest to the intense sentiment of g u i lt inherited by the followers.

Umbr(a) -; 9

The story that leads up to the torture as well as the story of the torture itself was of great interpretive stabi lity in Shiism until the Iranian Revolution . U ntil 1 979 that is, for fourteen centuries - this story had almost always been the same. In general terms, the following are its principal components: Hussein , in his fight to reclaim sovereignty, which is supposed to return to the lineage of the prophet, receives from the inhabitants of an important city at the time, called Koufa, 1 70 kilometers from Baghdad , the assurance that they are h is all ies. When he leaves with a few supporters to meet them, he encounters along the way his enemies who greatly outnumber him; a ferocious and unfair battle thus ensues. The inhabitants of the city do not come to Hussein 's aid as they had promised . He is massacred. The symbolic core of Shiism constitutes itself out of this torture and the shamefu l desertion by the inhabitants of Koufa, whom the Shiites even today consider to be the descendants and heirs of the crime. They did not ki ll him directly, but they contributed to h is murder through their defection . After Hussein 's massacre, the inhabitants of Koufa respond by waging what will be called "wars of repentance" which, as the name suggests, were wars of revenge and expiation. We can find all this in the commemoration of the battle of Karbala, in the rituals and spirituality of Shiism. Thus this faith is marked by a certain dolefulness that in some way resembles what we find in Christianity, and for good reason , since we are dealing with the killing of the son whose father was also killed. There is, then , at the heart of Shiism a whole genealogy of martyrs, which will, moreover, continue since many of Hussein 's descendants will come to know a trag ic fate. But it is Hussein who wil l occupy a predominant position in the martyrological institution, since he will be named "the prince of martyrs." His sacrifice will eclipse that of his father, which remains an important point for the rest of my argument. Until the I ranian Revolution, the sacrificial story of Hussein is organized by the classical schema as I have just described it: Hussein is a warrior ("mujahid") killed at Karbala by his enemies and becomes a martyr ("chahld"). The faithful gather around the memory of his torture as a community of the guilty. His martyrdom is considered to be inimitable. But with the Iranian Revolution a new figure of the Shiite revolutionary emerges, and with it a new reading of the scene of Hussein's torture. This read ing will provoke a decisive change, of which one of the consequences will be to open the d iscursive "niche" of the "suicide attacks. " It is based on an interpretation proposed by an Iranian intellectual , close to Khomeini, named Ali SharTatT (1 933-1 977). We are deal ing here with a thinker who played a very im portant role (he was the translator of Franz Fanon; he held a doctorate in sociology from the Sorbonne; he had so much influence that the Shah 's secret service assassinated him) in theorizing the encounter between Islam and Marxism. He was the inventor of what he hi mse l f called "red Shiism" (red like the blood of the martyrs and like the emblem of the proletarian revolution). The new interpretation of the sacrificial scene of Hussein that he will propose relates to the following points: 1 . H ussein is not only a warrior ("mujahid") who met a death he did not wish for; rather he chose to go toward it with full knowledge of what he was doing . He knew that he was going to die, and he was there in the determination to overcome himself for the cause. Therefore, he is not only a "warrior-martyr" but a "martyr-martyr. " It is in this sense that he was a "candidate for martyrdom" ("istishhadi"). 2 . The Shiites are not only col lectively guilty, as heir to the community of Koufa, of having abandoned Hussein to his death , as the traditional interpretation has it. They are also individual ly and

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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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