Fethi Benslama

Daniel Tutt: “Islam and Psychoanalysis”
Time: Wednesday, February 28th, 12:30pm
Location: Georgetown University, ICC 450
**Open to the public. Food provided

The Department of Arabic and Islamic Studies and the Arabic Department Graduate Association are very pleased to present the Arabic and Islamic Studies Graduate Colloquium, a forum in which graduate students have the opportunity to present and discuss their research projects, hold academic workshops, and participate in roundtable discussions. The Colloquium aims at encouraging discussions among graduate students and professors over their research and its contribution to the scholarship in the field. It is also open to discuss works-in-progress by more advanced scholars.

Colloquium Description:
In this colloquium, we will explore the broader implications of scholarly efforts to interpret subjectivity in Muslim societies and to deconstruct Islamic scripture through the theoretical lens of psychoanalysis. We will review the literature in this wider field by noting two general tendencies: the first is an effort to derive a theory of Muslim subjectivity modeled off of Freud’s late work on Judaism in Moses and Monotheism, which seeks broader claims about alterity, desire and authority within Muslim societies through a more detached, textual analysis.

The other tendency is a more postcolonial method of reading psychoanalysis as a heuristic for understanding the transition to modernity within Muslim societies. This method presents more localized and culturally specific applications of psychoanalytic frameworks to particular regions and time periods.

We will review the work of Fethi Benslama and his controversial theological interpretation, Psychoanalysis and the Challenge of Islam (2001) as well as more recent work that frames the encounter between Islam and psychoanalysis in explicitly postcolonial terms such as Omnia El Shakry’s The Arabic Freud (2017), the work of anthropologist Stefania Pandolfo and Bülent Somay’s work, The Psychopolitics of the Oriental Father (2014).

Joseph Massad’s chapter  Psychoanalysis, “Islam, ” and the Other of Liberalism in his Islam and Liberalism (2015) is an excellent orientation to the topic. In it, Massad identifies some key conceptual tensions and political problems raised by psychoanalysis and Islam. While Massad does not close down the field as entirely problematic, he does convincingly show the way in which interventions have effectively reduced their analysis of Muslim subjectivity to ‘Islam’ and over-determined the phenomenon of Islamism and sought forms of imperialism under the banner of a particular western, and mostly French, cosmopolitanism.

Fethi Benslama est un psychanalyste soucieux des enjeux et des contradictions de cette pratique, d’une double façon : dans la confrontation avec l’Islam, ainsi avec la religion en général, et dans son regard sur la pratique de la clinique face à la normalisation scientifique et institutionnelle. « Manifeste des libertés », « Sauvons la clinique » sont des initiatives théoriques et pratiques.

Longue discussion de l’ouvrage de Florence Bergeaud-Blackler (Le Marché halal ou l’invention d’une tradition, Paris, Éditions du Seuil, 2017), pour la rubrique "Grand Résumé" de la revue SociologieS.
Mon texte est accessible à l'adresse : https://journals.openedition.org/sociologies/8233
Tandis que le "Grand résumé" de Florence Bergeaud-Blackler est accessible à l’adresse : https://journals.openedition.org/sociologies/8230 et son autre discussion, par Nedjib Sidi Moussa, à l’adresse : https://journals.openedition.org/sociologies/8232

Time: Wednesday, February 28th, 12:30pm
Location: Georgetown University, ICC 450

Hosted by the Department of Arabic and Islamic Studies and the Arabic Department Graduate Association. The Arabic and Islamic Studies Graduate Colloquium is a forum in which graduate students have the opportunity to present and discuss their research projects, hold academic workshops, and participate in roundtable discussions. The Colloquium aims at encouraging discussions among graduate students and professors over their research and its contribution to the scholarship in the field. It is also open to discuss works-in-progress by more advanced scholars.

Colloquium Description:
In this colloquium, we will explore the broader implications of scholarly efforts to interpret subjectivity in Muslim societies and to deconstruct Islamic scripture through the theoretical lens of psychoanalysis. We will review the literature in this field by noting two general tendencies: the first is an effort to derive a theory of Muslim subjectivity modeled off of Freud’s late work on Judaism in Moses and Monotheism, which seeks broader claims about alterity, desire and authority within Muslim societies through a more detached, textual analysis.

The other tendency is a more postcolonial method of reading psychoanalysis as a heuristic for understanding the transition to modernity within Muslim societies. This method presents more localized and culturally specific applications of psychoanalytic frameworks to particular regions and time periods.

Joseph Massad’s chapter Psychoanalysis, “Islam, ” and the Other of Liberalism in his Islam and Liberalism (2015) is an excellent orientation to the topic. In it, Massad identifies some key conceptual tensions and political problems raised by psychoanalysis and Islam. While Massad does not close down the field as entirely problematic, he does convincingly show the way in which interventions have effectively reduced their analysis of Muslim subjectivity to ‘Islam’ and over-determined the phenomenon of Islamism and sought forms of imperialism under the banner of a particular western, and mostly French, cosmopolitanism.

La storia dell'implicazione della psicoanalisi nelle decolonizzazioni parte dal subcontinente indiano, ove si affrontano le due anime della psicoanalisi nascente, incarnate rispettivamente da Owen Berkeley-Hill, psichiatra militare e psicanalista pro-coloniale, e Girindrasekhar Bose, primo psicoanalista post-coloniale, fondatore dell'Indian Psychoanalytical Society, precocemente insediata a Calcutta già nel 1922.
Il secondo capitolo propone il confronto a distanza tra Octave Mannoni e la sua Psychologie de la colonisation, concepita a Madagascar intorno al 1947, e Pelle nera, maschere bianche di Frantz Fanon.
Infine, nel terzo capitolo, sono evocate alcune figure contemporanee del freudismo post-coloniale indiano e franco-magrebino: Ashis Nandy, Sudhir Kakar e Fethi Benslama.

لقد طرح سيجموند فرويد في كتابه "موسى والتوحيد"  على سؤال الأصل، وتجاسر على تفكيك وإعادة قراءة النصوص التأسيسية التوراتية وإعادة بناءها على حدود الحقيقة التاريخية، من خلال ردّ الاعتبار بارتباط توحيد موسى بتاريخ الأنبياء عامة وتاريخ أنبياء بني إسرائيل خاصة، على اعتبار أن تاريخ الأنبياء جميعًا يشكّل تراثًا دينيًا متصلًا ببعضه البعض.
سنعمد في هده المساحة، على التّجاسر على فتح السؤال نفسه على التّجربة المحمّدية والدين الإسلامي، عبر قراءة لحظة تلقّي النّبي محمد على النّص المعُجر، القرآن، ونحاول من خلال هذا الطرح، تقديم قراءة منفتحة ليس على تاريخ الأديان التوحيدية فقط كما سلك فرويد مع موسى والتوحيد، وإنما بتقديم قراءة منفتحة كذلك على أدوات التحليل النفسي لتفسير بداية النّبع القرآني الأول، وذلك من خلال توظيف مفهوم الذهان الفريدوي في البنية العميقة للنّص القرآني. وسنمهّد لهذا التّجاسر -الذي قد لا يُحمد عقباه، بعتبتين أساسيتين ستشكّل لنا بمثابة مداخل لولوج موضوع البحث.