CALL FOR PAPERS
UMBR(a) 2009
PSYCHOANALYSIS AND ISLAM
Something stronger than resistance, let us call it excision, defines in large part the relation of the West to Islam. The proliferation of labels such as “terrorists,” “evil doers,” “axis of evil,” that are the nearly illiterate issue of the clash-of-civilizations rhetoric machine, bear witness to a refusal to admit Islamic peoples and principles under the expanded tent of humanity. Even when the topic turns to religion, Christianity and Judaism have thus far captured the spotlight almost exclusively, leaving discussions of the religion of Islam unaccountably aside. Thus every threat (actual or imagined) coming from the Islamic world comes to us, it seems, from a real beyond politics or diplomacy, a vast desert real that does not wish us well.
In recent volumes, Umbr(a) has published essays by Henry Corbin and Christian Jambet, two authors whose extensive writings on Islamic thought are valuable both in themselves and for the way they open a space for a specifically psychoanalytic discussion of Islamic culture, its philosophy and religion.
In the forthcoming special issue, “Psychoanalysis and Islam,” we would like to examine this disjunctive nexus more closely. We are not interested in making sweeping claims about the Islamic psyche. We want rather to open specific problems arising in Muslim nations or out of the West’s relation to these nations to analysis in psychoanalytic terms, where they can be shown to be appropriate. But we are equally interested in “putting psychoanalysis to the test of Islam,” to use Fethi Benslama’s felicitous phrase.
We intend first of all to acknowledge – through translations of already existing texts – the important work that has already been done in this area by writers from Islamic cultures such as Benslama, Jambet, and Moustapha Safouan, among others. But we are also encouraging Western theorists to take up the challenge Islam presents to psychoanalysis.
Possible topics that may be addressed include but are certainly not limited to the following: the veiling of women in the “Orient” and the Western debate regarding it; the Islamic revolution; masculinity and femininity in Islam; the applicability of Freud’s theory of the father to the Islamic context; the influence of Arabic translations of classical Greek texts on Western thought; Iranian and/or Egyptian cinema; the importance of Islamic political theory and/or philosophy (which is thought in the West to be virtually non-existent); the wide influence of Ishraqi thought on colonized nations; Western thinkers such as Corbin, Jambet, Foucault, Leo Strauss, Giorgio Agamben, and Peter Hallward, who have written about or integrated Islamic ideas into their work.
Umbr(a) is planning this special issue in cooperation with S, the new on-line journal produced in Maastricht by the Jan Van Eyck Academie, which will concurrently publish its own special issue on “Psychoanalysis and Islam.” Form more information on that issue, and to submit papers for publication, contact the editors at editors@lineofbeauty.org or visit their website at www.lineofbeauty.org