food for thought
Later, the take of transhhistorical and transcultural tranlslation, an essential condition of politics of modernity, needed for 'continuity in the mental life of successive generations,' as Freud puts it (totem and taboo), would disappear beneath the twofold burden of the rapid extension of technology and the mechanics of "expropriation" of global capitalism. It was as if the peoples who had emerged into the modern world were unable to live out their present experience through an accessible language; they no longer had the ability to make meaningful connections through their idioms but were forced to undergo the physical transformations of their world and the harassment of so-called Western discourse without alteration. From within and without there arose a class of fearsome 'experts' claiming to operate directly on the real in all areas of knowledge, mouthing collectivist or liberal platitudes; experts who gave lessons, issues orders, dismantled. The prosaism of their jargon, which claimed to be both scientific and universal, asserted that it contained an intangible truth providing immediate access to a radiant tomorrow. In the name of development, the transition to the modern involved aimless wandering in the unthinkable.
This effort toward the widespread liquidation of speech and political meaning went on for two decades and produced a state of generalized ignorance. Falsehoods became commonplace. The field was ready for Islamist speech and its extreme representations. Having come on the scene with a moralizing language that implicated the body of our anxieties about existence, Islamists erected a monolithis Islam free of internal contradiction; they polarized the opposition between Islam and the West and announced their intent to rstore what was proper (In both senses: the exclusive and the immaculate) through another form of immediacy; that of access to the "originary plenitude of politics." This was the promise of a return to the golden age of the foundign of Islam, when the beginning and the commandment were united in a single principle in the hands of, first, the prophet-founder-legislator, then his four successors. This period was assumed to have been on of ideal justice on Earth, before the fall into the division and internal sedition (fitna) that the community would later experience.
One of the causes of Islamist extremism is the catastrophic collapse of language: language was no longer able to translate for people a particular intense historical experience, that of the modern era, which entails not only the scientific and industrial transformation of the world but also the conjunction between this furious power of transformation and the desire to the the other. Yet "Islamist" extremism is driven by an impulse, and this impulse is simply the inverse of the desire to be an other: "the despair that wills to be Itself," as Kierkegaard expressed it. What is this self? Its identity is defined by its origin, and its origin is bound by a framework of unique features: one religion (Islam), one language (Arabic), and one text (the Koran), to which is often added the national anthem here and there. The modern era replaced the desire to be an other with the despair that wills to be itself, enclosing us in a confrontation each of whose terms represents the impossible.
-Fethi Beslama
This effort toward the widespread liquidation of speech and political meaning went on for two decades and produced a state of generalized ignorance. Falsehoods became commonplace. The field was ready for Islamist speech and its extreme representations. Having come on the scene with a moralizing language that implicated the body of our anxieties about existence, Islamists erected a monolithis Islam free of internal contradiction; they polarized the opposition between Islam and the West and announced their intent to rstore what was proper (In both senses: the exclusive and the immaculate) through another form of immediacy; that of access to the "originary plenitude of politics." This was the promise of a return to the golden age of the foundign of Islam, when the beginning and the commandment were united in a single principle in the hands of, first, the prophet-founder-legislator, then his four successors. This period was assumed to have been on of ideal justice on Earth, before the fall into the division and internal sedition (fitna) that the community would later experience.
One of the causes of Islamist extremism is the catastrophic collapse of language: language was no longer able to translate for people a particular intense historical experience, that of the modern era, which entails not only the scientific and industrial transformation of the world but also the conjunction between this furious power of transformation and the desire to the the other. Yet "Islamist" extremism is driven by an impulse, and this impulse is simply the inverse of the desire to be an other: "the despair that wills to be Itself," as Kierkegaard expressed it. What is this self? Its identity is defined by its origin, and its origin is bound by a framework of unique features: one religion (Islam), one language (Arabic), and one text (the Koran), to which is often added the national anthem here and there. The modern era replaced the desire to be an other with the despair that wills to be itself, enclosing us in a confrontation each of whose terms represents the impossible.
-Fethi Beslama
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