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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|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>
<blockquote>Such is woman concealed behind her veil: it is the absence of the penis that makes her the phallus, the [[object of desire]]. Evoke this absence in a more precise way by having her wear a cute fake one under a fancy dress, and you, or rather she, will have plenty to tell us about. [[A Glance into the Archives of Islam#Notes|11]]</blockquote>
The logic is here more complex than it may appear: it is not merely that the obviously fake penis evokes the absence of the ‘real’ penis; in a strict parallel with Parrhasios’ painting, the man’s first reaction upon seeing the contours of the fake penis is: “Put this ridiculous fake off and show me what you’ve got beneath!” The man thereby misses how the fake penis is [[The Real|the real ]] thing: the “phallus” that the woman is is the shadow generated by the fake penis, i.e., the specter of the non-existent ‘real’ phallus beneath the cover of the fake one. In this precise sense, the feminine masquerade has the [[structure]] of [[mimicry]], since, for Lacan, in mimicry, I do not imitate the image I want to fit into, but those features of the image which seem to indicate that there is some hidden [[reality]] behind. As with Parrhasios, I do not imitate the grapes, but the veil: “Mimicry reveals something in so far as it is distinct from what might be called an <i>itself</i> that is behind.” [[A Glance into the Archives of Islam#Notes|12]] The status of phallus itself is that of a mimicry. Phallus is ultimately a kind of stain of the [[human]] body, an excessive feature which does not fit the body and thereby generates the illusion of another hidden reality behind the image.<br><br>
And this brings us back to the function of veil in Islam: what if the true scandal this veil endeavors to obfuscate is not the feminine body hidden by it, but the INEXISTENCE of the feminine? What if, consequently, the ultimate function of the veil is precisely to sustain the illusion that there IS something, the substantial Thing, behind the veil? If, following Nietzsche’s equation of truth and woman, we transpose the feminine veil into the veil which conceals the ultimate Truth, the true stakes of the Muslim veil become even clearer. Woman is a treat because she stands for the “undecidability” of truth, for a succession of veils beneath which there is no ultimate hidden core; by veiling her, we create the illusion that there is, beneath the veil, the feminine Truth - the horrible truth of lie and deception, of course. Therein resides the concealed scandal of Islam: only a woman, the very embodiment of the indiscernability of truth and lie, can guarantee Truth. For this reason, she has to remain veiled.<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|Jacques Lacan]], <i>The [[Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis]]</i>, p. 99.</font>
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