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Which, then, is the repressed Event which gives vitality to Islam? The key is provided by the reply to [[another]] question: how does Islam, the [[third]] Religion of the Book, fit into this series? Judaism is the religion of genealogy, of succession of generations; when, in Christianity, the Son dies on the Cross, this means that the [[Father]] also dies (as Hegel was fully aware) – the patriarchal genealogical order as such dies, the Holy Spirit does not fit the [[family]] series, it introduces a post-paternal/familial community. In contrast to both Judaism and Christianity, the two other religions of the book, Islam excludes God from the [[domain]] of the paternal [[logic]]: Allah is not a father, not even a symbolic one – God is one, he is neither [[born]] nor does he give [[birth]] to [[creatures]]. <i>There is no place for a Holy Family in Islam.</i> This is why Islam emphasizes so much the fact that Muhammed himself was an orphan; this is why, in Islam, God intervenes precisely at the moments of the suspension, [[withdrawal]], failure, “black-out,” of the [[paternal function]] (when the [[mother]] or the [[child]] are abandoned or ignored by the [[biological]] father). What this means is that God remains thoroughly in the domain of [[impossible]]-Real: he is the impossible-Real outside father, so that there is a “genealogical desert between man and God”(320). This was the problem with Islam for Freud, since his entire [[theory]] of religion is based on the parallel of God with father. More importantly even, this inscribes [[politics]] into the very heart of Islam, since the “genealogical desert” renders impossible to ground a community in the [[structures]] of parenthood or other blood-links: “the desert between God and Father is the place where the [[political]] institutes itself”(320). With Islam, it is no longer possible to ground a community in the mode of <i>[[Totem]] and [[Taboo]]</i>, through the murder of the father and the ensuing [[guilt]] as bringing brothers together – thence Islam’s unexpected actuality.<br><br>
In contrast to Judaism and Islam, in which the sacrifice of the son is prevented in the last [[moment]] (angel intervenes to [[Abraham]]), <i>only Christianity opts for the actual sacrifice (killing) of the son</i>. (268) This is why, although Islam recognizes the Bible as a sacred [[text]], it has to deny this fact: in Islam, [[Jesus]] did not really die on the Cross: the Jews “said (in boast), ‘We killed [[Christ]] Jesus the son of Mary, the Messenger of Allah’; but they killed him not, nor crucified him, but so it was made to appear to them”(4.157). There is effectively in Islam a consistent anti-sacrificial logic: in the Quran version of Isaac’s sacrifice, Abraham’s decision to kill his son is read not as the ultimate indication of his willingness to do the God’s will, but as a consequence of Abraham’s <i>wrong [[interpretation]] of his dream</i>: when the angel prevents [[The Act|the act]], his [[message]] is that Abraham got it wrong, that God did not really [[want]] him to do it.(275)<br><br>
Insofar as, in Islam, God is an impossible-Real, this works both ways with regard to sacrifice: it can [[work]] against sacrifice (there is no symbolic [[economy]] of [[exchange]] between the believers and Gods, God is the pure One of Beyond), but also in favour of sacrifice, when the divine Real turns into the [[superego]] figure of “obscure gods who [[demand]] continuous blood”([[Lacan]]-XI). Islam seems to oscillate between these two extremes, with the obscene sacrificial logic culminating in its redescription of the story of Abel and Cain – here is how <i>Quran</i> reports on “the [[truth]] of the story of the two sons of Adam. Behold! they each presented a sacrifice (to Allah): It was accepted from one, but not from the other. Said the latter: ‘Be sure I will slay thee.’ ‘Surely,’ said the former, ‘Allah doth accept of the sacrifice of those who are righteous. If thou dost stretch thy hand against me, to slay me, it is not for me to stretch my hand against thee to slay thee: for I do [[fear]] Allah, the cherisher of the worlds. For me, I intend to let thee draw on thyself my sin as well as thine, for thou wilt be among the companions of the fire, and that is the reward of those who do wrong.’<br><br>
The (selfish) soul of the other led him to the murder of his brother: he murdered him, and became (himself) one of the lost ones.” (5:27-30)<br><br>
So it is not only Cain who wants the killing: Abel himself actively participates in this [[desire]], provoking Cain to do it, so that he (Abel) would get rid of his own sins also. Benslama is [[right]] to discern here traces of an “[[ideal]] [[hatred]],” different from the [[imaginary]] hatred of the [[aggressivity]] towards one’s [[double]] (289): the [[victim]] itself actively desires the crime whose victim it will be, so that, as a [[martyr]], it will enter Paradise, sending the perpetrator to burn in hell. From today’s perspective, one is tempted to play with the anachronistic [[speculation]] on how the “terrorist” logic of the martyr’s [[wish]] to die is already here, in <i>Quran</i> – although, of course, one has to locate the problem in the context of [[modernization]]. The problem of Islamic world is, as is well known, that, since it was exposed to Western modernization abruptly, without a proper time to “work through” the [[trauma]] of its impact, to [[construct]] a symbolic-fictional space/screen for it, the only possible reactions to this impact were either a superficial modernization, an imitated modernization destined to fail ([[Iran]] Shah [[regime]]), or, in the failure of the proper symbolic space of fictions, a direct recourse to the violent Real, an outright war between Islam Truth and Western Lie, with no space for symbolic mediation. In this “fundamentalist” solution (a modern phenomenon with no direct links to Muslim traditions), the divine dimension reasserts itself in its [[SuperEgo|superego]]-Real, as a murderous explosion of sacrifical [[violence]] to pay off the obscene superego divinity.<br><br>
A further key distinction between Judaism (together with its Christian continuation) and Islam is that, as we can see in the case of Abraham’s two sons, Judaism chooses Abraham as [[the symbolic]] father, i.e., the [[phallic]] solution of the paternal symbolic [[authority]], of the [[official]] symbolic lineage, discarding the second woman, enacting a “phallic appropriation of the impossible”(153). Islam, on the contrary, opts for the lineage of Hagar, for Abraham as the biological father, maintaining the distance between father and God, retaining God in the domain of the Impossible.(149) [[A Glance into the Archives of Islam#Notes|6]]<br><br>
But you, brothers and sisters, are children of the promise like Isaac. But just as at that time the one born by natural descent persecuted the one born according to the Spirit, so it is now. But what does the scripture say? ‘Throw out the slave woman and her son, for the son of the slave woman will not share the inheritance with the son’ of the free woman. Therefore, brothers and sisters, we are not children of the slave woman but of the free woman.”(4:21-4:31)</blockquote>
Paul [[stages]] here a clear symmetrical confrontation here: Isaac versus Ishmail equals [[The Symbolic|the symbolic ]] father ([[Name-of-the-Father]]) versus the biological (racial) father, “the origin through name and spirit versus origin through substantial transmission of life”(147), child of the free woman versus child of the slave, child of spirit versus child of flesh. This [[reading]], however, has to simplify the [[biblical]] [[narrative]] in (at least) [[three]] crucial points:<br><br>
(1) God’s obvious care for Hagar and Ishmail, his [[intervention]] to save Ishmail’s [[life]];<br><br>
(2) the extraordinary characterization of Hagar as not simply a woman of flesh and lust, a worthless slave, but the one who SEES God (“So Hagar named the Lord who spoke to her, ‘You are the God who sees me,’ for she said, ‘Here I have seen the one who sees me!’”). Hagar as the excluded second woman, outside symbolic genealogy, stands not only for the pagan (Egyptian) fertility of Life, but also for a direct access to God – she directly sees God himself [[seeing]], which was not given even to Moses to whom God had to appear as a burning [[bush]]. As such, Hagar announces the mystical/feminine access to God (developed later in Sufism).<br><br>
(3) the (not only narrative) fact that the [[choice]] (between flesh and spirit) cannot ever be confronted directly, as a choice between the two simultaneous options. For Sarah to get a son, Hagar has first to get hers, i.e., there is a [[necessity]] of succession, of repetition, here, as if, in order to [[chose]] spirit, we first have to chose flesh – only the second son can be the true son of spirit. This necessity is what symbolic [[castration]] is about: “castration” means that the direct access to Truth is impossible- as Lacan put it, <i>la verite surgit de la meprise</i>, the way to Spirit is only through Flesh, etc. Recall Hegel's [[analysis]] of phrenonolgy which closes the chapter on "Observing Reason" in his <i>[[Phenomenology]] of Spirit</i>: Hegel resorts here to a [[metaphor]] which concerns precisely [[phallus]], the [[organ]] of paternal insemination, in order to explain the opposition of the two possible readings of the proposition "the [[Spirit is a Bone|Spirit is a bone]]" (the vulgar [[materialist]] "reductionist" reading - the shape of our skull effectively and directly determines the features of a man's [[mind]] - and the speculative reading - the spirit is strong enough to assert its identity with the utmost inert stuff and to "sublate" it, i.e. even the utmost inert stuff cannot escape the Spirit's power of mediation). The vulgar materialist reading is like the approach which sees in phallus only the organ of urination, while the speculative reading is also able to discern in it the much higher function of insemination (i.e. precisely "conception" as the biological [[anticipation]] of [[concept]]):
<blockquote>The depth which the Spirit brings forth from within - but only as far as its picture-[[thinking]] [[consciousness]] where it lets it remain - and the [[ignorance]] of this consciousness about what it really is saying, are the same conjunction of the high and the low which, in the living [[being]], [[Nature]] naively expresses when it combines the organ of its highest fulfillment, the organ of generation, with the organ of urination. The [[infinite judgment]], qua infinite, would be the fulfillment of life that comprehends itself; the consciousness of the infinite judgment that remains at the level of picture-thinking behaves as urination.[[A Glance into the Archives of Islam#Notes|7]]</blockquote>
Back to role of women in the pre-history of Islam, one should add Muhammed’s conception, where we stumble again upon a mysterious “between-the-two-women.” After [[working]] in the clay on his land, Abdallah, his father-to-be, went to the house of another woman and made advances to her, but she put him off on account of the clay that was on him. He left her, washed himself, went to Amina and had intercourse with her – thus Amina conceived Muhammed. Then he went back to the other woman and asked her if she is now still willing; she replied: “No. When you passed by me there was a white light between your eyes. I called to you and you rejected me. You went to Amina and she has taken away the light.” The official wife gets the child, the other gets knows – she sees in Abdallah more than Abdallah himself, the “light,” something he has without [[knowing]] it, something that is in him more than himself (the sperm to beget the Prophet), and it is this <i>objet a</i> that generates her desire. Abdallah’s [[position]] is like the one of the hero of a detective novel who is all of a sudden persecuted, even threatened with death – he knows something that can put in danger a big criminal, but he himself (or she – usually a woman) doesn’t [[know]] what this is. Abdallah, in his [[narcissism]], confuses this <i>objet a</i> in himself with himself (he confuses the object and the cause of the woman’s desire), which is why he returns to her afterwards, wrongly presuming that she will still desire him.<br><br>
This reliance on the feminine (and on the foreign woman at that) is Islam’s repressed foundation, its un-thought, that which it endeavors to exclude, to erase or at least [[control]] it through its [[complex]] [[ideological]] edifice, but what persists to haunt it, since it is the very source of its vitality. - Why, then, is woman in Islam such a traumatic [[presence]], such an ontological scandal that it has to be veiled? The true problem is not the [[horror]] of the shameless exposure of what is beneath the veil, but, rather, the nature of the veil itself. One should link this feminine veil with Lacan’s reading of the anecdote about the competition between Zeuxis and Parrhasios, two painters from the ancient [[Greece]], about who will paint a more convincing [[illusion]]. <a title="" name="_ftnref10" href="#_ftn10">[10]</a> First, Zeuxis produced such a realistic picture of grapes that birds were lured into picking at it to eat the grape. Next, Parrhasios won by painting on the wall of his room a curtain, so that Zeuxis, when Parrhasios showed him his painting, asked him: “OK, now please pull aside the veil and show me what you painted!” In Zeuxis’s painting, the illusion was so convincing that [[image]] was taken for [[The Real|the real ]] thing; in Parrhasios’ painting, the illusion resided in the very notion that what we see in front of us is just a veil covering up the hidden truth. This is also how, for Lacan, feminine [[masquerade]] works: she wears a mask to make us react like Zeuxis in front of Parrhasios’ painting – <i>OK, put down the mask and show us what you really are!</i> Things are homologous in Shakespeare’s <i>As You Like It</i>, in which Orlando is passionately in [[love]] with Rosalind who, in order to test his love, disguises herself as Ganymede and, as a male companion, interrogates Orlando about his love. She even takes on the [[personality]] of Rosalind (in a redoubled masking, she pretends to be herself, to be Ganymede who plays to be Rosalind) and persuades her friend Celia (disguised as Aliena) to marry them in a mock ceremony. In this ceremony, Rosalind literally feigns to feign to be what she is: truth itself, in order to win, has to be <i>staged</i> in a redoubled [[deception]]. We can thus imagine Orlando, after the mock wedding ceremony, turning to Rosalind-Ganymede and telling her: “You played Rosalind so well that you almost made me believe to be her; you can now return to what you are and be Ganymede again.”<br><br>
It is not an accident that the agents of such double masquerade are always women: while a man can only pretend to be a woman, only a woman can pretend to be a man who pretends to be a woman, as only a woman can <i>pretend to be what she is</i> (a woman). To account for this specifically feminine status of pretending, Lacan refers to a woman who wears a concealed fake [[penis]] in order to evoke that she is phallus:
#[[G.W.F. Hegel]], <i>[[Philosophy]] of Mind</i>, Oxford: Clarendon Press 1971, p. 44.<br><br>
#Even Hegel’s logic of triads seems to get stuck into a deadlock here: the [[triad]] that offers itself, but that Hegel cannot admit, of course, is that of Judaism – Christianity – Islam: first the immediate/abstract monotheism which, as the price to be paid for its immediate [[character]], has to be embodied in a [[particular]] ethnic group (which is why Jews [[renounce]] all proselytism); then Christianity with its trinity; finally Islam, the truly universal monotheism.<br><br>
#Fethi Benslama, <i>[[La Psychanalyse|La psychanalyse ]] a l’epreuve de l’Islam</i>, Paris: Aubier 2002 (the numbers in brackets after a quote refer to this book).<br><br>#See Eric Santner, "Traumatic Revelations: Freud's Moses and the Origins of [[Anti-semitism|Anti-Semitism]]," in [[Renata Salecl]], ed., <i>[[Sexuation]]</i>, Durham: Duke UP 2000.<br><br>
#Of course, one can [[claim]] that there is an implicit undermining of its own official [[ideology]] at work already in Genesis, where God nonetheless intervenes to save Hagar’s son, promising him a great [[future]] – Genesis does (also) take the side of the other woman who was reduced to an [[instrument]] of [[procreation]].<br><br>
#G.W.F. Hegel, <i>[[Phenomenology of Spirit]]</i>, Oxford: Oxford [[University]] Press 1977, p. 210.<br><br>
#I once had a dream, the usual disgustingly self-indulgent one about getting some big prize; my reaction, IN THE DREAM, was that this cannot be true, that it is only a dream, and the [[content]] of the dream was my (successful) effort to convince myself, by way of pointing out to a series of indications, that it is not just a dream, but reality – the interpretive task here is to discover who was the woman hidden in the dream, who was my Khadija.<br><br>
#See [[Jacques Lacan]], <i>The Four Fundamental [[Concepts]] of [[Psycho]]-Analysis</i>, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books 1979, p. 103.<br><br>
#[[Jacques lacan|Jacques Lacan]], <i>[[Ecrits]]. A Selection</i>, translated by [[Bruce Fink]], New York: W.W.Norton&Company 2002, p. 310.<br><br>
#Jacques Lacan, <i>The [[Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis]]</i>, p. 99.</font>
