le "monde" méditerranéen

This year my birthday happily coincided with the end of Ramadan and the coming of the Fitr. Otherwise, it’s Hiroshima as usual, one more time, like a burden. I will miss Ramadan, which, like Christmas, has something secular into it. That it shifts two weeks backwards every year makes it even better, as it desperately associates itself with the four seasons. In Beirut, a lousy city in every respect, streets are quiet by 7:00 in the evening, which is one of Ramadan’s blessings for a city filled with noise, extra noise, more noise for nothing, noise like garbage. I’ve developed so much hatred to this place that I’m beginning to think that my liking it in the last few years must be related to teaching: I hate teaching more than I hate Beirut, therefore I tolerate this damned city. On the positive side, I need castration to work, hence the toleration. The real pleasure is at the beach, with a nearly empty swimming pool all for myself in Ramadan. What would happen to me when in few years Ramadan shifts back to winter? But the real blessing is this deep blue Mediterranean, and all those young women tanning themselves endlessly, who seem “possessed” for life by men who are notoriously absent, as if they’re having their moment of “fun” elsewhere. (Freud would say there’s no “sexual liberation,” because it’s all in that damned oedipal unconscious; hence we repeat ourselves indefinitely; we score well or poorly; at best there’s pleasure, if we can find it, but no jouissance.) It’s those couple of hours every afternoon at the beach that I’ll miss once in Chicago—moments of relaxation and serenity which have no equivalent elsewhere—certainly not on “Lake Eerie”—or its cozy apartment. I can forget myself and my failures: something uncanny in the heat of a Mediterranean sun that would urge such forgetting. I am by temperament not much of a social animal, hence the solitude of loneliness is all what it takes to get hold of that elusive “self.” At least it gives me the energy to write few hours a day, with that feeling of accumulation and achievement, in spite of all failures. Writing about the eastern Mediterranean, this world where I grew up, is a frustrating experience, as there is so little that “comes together” through the symbolisms of language. As I read Foucault’s lectures at the Collège de France, with his elaborate genealogies that connect socio-historical layers of discourses and practices, I realize that all my life I’ve been struggling precisely with that desire of continuity, of things and phenomena connecting together through their most obscure layers. I then decided to drop every “about” I could think of: not to write about an about is a great blessing; not to write with a thesis in mind and proofs for that damned thesis; hence all writing and teaching became more confusing, for the better. Difficult not to think of Fernand Braudel’s Mediterranean “world” and its three archeological cultural layers: the Greco-Roman and Latin Christianity, the Islamicate, and the Greek-Orthodox, in relation to their temporalities. There is a layer, says Braudel, that never moves, completely immobile, like those mountains on the Mediterranean; on the top of it sits the layer of institutions, which are slow moving; still on the top is what we are instinctively attracted to: the events on the surface which give us that wonderful illusion that so much is happening, so much is going on, to the point that change is all over the place. Yet, we remain the same, no matter what. Had you known me at twenty, you would have realized that “I” was back then exactly as “I” am now, at fifty-seven, but with less gray hair. Time and age only bring forth that element of consciousness that was not present before: I know now why I made such a decision at twenty. Only time brings that satisfaction: I haven’t changed because that’s how I always wanted to be in the first place; but I only understand it now. Freud used to compare the unconscious to archeological layers, deep down into our consciousness, which we know nothing about (that is, “it” cannot be formulated in the symbolisms of language; hence the “violence” “it” inevitably holds from within our libidinal impulses) until a contingent event accidentally hits on one of those layers. The event which looks like an innocuous accident would be perceived through the lens of analysis and therapy as situated within a broader traumatic structure, which could be discovered by connecting what seems at face value disconnected events. For Freud Rome was the quintessential metaphor of the unconscious, sitting as it has been for thousands of years on archeological layers, some of which are visible all at once at its center—the Forum. The Mediterranean is just like that—unconscious archeological layers which are open to be associated with one another into infinite temporalities. Like any unconscious, it is neither egalitarian, nor democratic, nor ready to be reeducated. That’s my fate and destiny. That’s why I find myself useless as a teacher—and lover. Needless to say, I’ve got no urge for icy Chicago!

femmes

Beirut, the week before the new year

I did not write in the first place. I was not (into) writing at all. I could not do it, nor commit to it. I was not reading much either. Not until I went to college, and it was that complete fiasco of entering into college as a bio-chemistry (premed) major that forced me into excessive reading, then, much later, into wanting to be a writer. The disconnection with society and the world-at-large could not be anymore concealed. Rather it is, indeed, the sine qua non of my shattered existence, or of my parlêtre, as Lacan would say, meaning that being-into-language. What I like about Lacan is that he does not conceive language as a “tool” for “communication,” but as an entity inscribed within the body, without which the body would be shapeless and motionless. That it hasn’t been revealed earlier, in my teens, is a constant source of regret. Was I too docile back then, wearing a mask-of-satisfaction, like a protective shell, that I did not believe in? Is it a character flaw? But even the disaster of the college experience—from its first weeks—did not propel that urge to write. With the urge to read there was no urge to write yet. That damn sense of urgency, that writing should matter more than oxygen, was not there. We tend to think modern Arabic through a détour—that we learn “it,” we learn its potentials, by going through the other major Latin languages: French, English, and to some, German. We learn modernity from the potentials of the likes of French and English; then come back to Arabic as a language of “lacks” of sorts, assuming we ever come back to it. Maybe we’ve abandoned it in the first place, with no desire to learn it, to be-with-Arabic. If language is the house of being, as Heidegger has claimed, then we’re into an orphaned culture without language. This Arabic which has stubbornly maintained itself for more than fifteen centuries, beginning with the notorious poetic and pre-Islamic seven muᶜallaqāt, gives us that feeling of inaccessibility. The Jāhiliyya of the muᶜallaqāt had at least a sense of community, because some of the best poems of the time were “hanged” on the Kaᶜba, which was allegedly a pagan monument, prior to passing to the prophetic hands. I should have done the same since high school, with an urgent sense to write for a (virtual) community. I’ve learned since then to procrastinate and defer endlessly—defer the writing process. When I did my first book, I wrote it in French, but I was ill at ease in the whole process. Not much of a jouissance, not even the modicum of pleasure. I had the writing of the likes of Foucault and Braudel in mind, but had no idea where to situate my first serious project on the political economy of Damascus. Which is precisely the cultural and political problem of the eastern Mediterranean: the absence of a viable narrative, something that would make sense at least for the last couple centuries. I want a prose that makes me feel “one” with the city; I want to feel that I belong to it; and that she belongs to me. Instead, I happen to come and go like a stranger. There is a notion of stranger that I do not mind, propounded by the German sociologist Georg Simmel: a stranger is not only someone who must learn the shared codes of society, but, more importantly, he is seen by others as having “not yet” learned those norms, that he is not one of us, and will never be. But then no one would take you seriously if you simply learn the norms, adapt, and behave well. The stranger must reveal the insidiousness of those norms, how treacherous and uncanny they are.

Hence this whole theory of my hands tied by divine ordinance, parental repression, fatherly superego which forbids jouissance, all of this does not make sense. I was not into writing to begin with, and this has been an agony ever since I’ve realized the importance of writing, of believing in it, of investing into and being committed into it. It’s like being in love: to give what we don’t have to someone who does not want it. Because such a mindset was not there to begin with, say, as a teenager, where it should have all begun, it has always been an agony. Going public has also been another of those agonizing experiences. Instead of repression pure and simple, we should think in terms of shame, anxiety, castration of the body.

Think of photography in terms of the relationship between the object produced by the photograph and the reality of the setting. Ultimately, there is no reality outside the artifact of the object. Likewise, the signifier does not represent a trace of reality, but represents a subject which makes its apparition into the real, by effacing the original trace, while substituting itself into the infinite chain of signifiers that make reality possible—comprehensible by being discursive.

At a downtown bookstore my eyes caught the title of a just published French novel: “the artist of sex.” In one passage picked at random, the mother tells her daughter that men are miles away from women, will never figure out how to bring them to sexual jouissance—not even pleasure. Forget therefore about the missionary position and its affiliates (so-called oral and anal sex, no such terms exist in French), as they won’t even bring even a modicum of pleasure. And the mother raves on: men would do better masturbating on their own, but they need the woman to exhort their masculinity and honor games. Ultimately, the daughter went for the artistry of sado-masochism, though it remains unclear if such move was at the mother’s exhortation. We see her commanding and receiving pain, though it could be only one way: I like receiving pain but not giving it, or vice versa. The woman as dominatrix, subjugating men to her desire—would that bring the much heralded jouissance of the flesh? Which reminds me of Talal Asad on judicial torture in the late middle ages, perhaps a transformation in the 12th and 13th centuries, if not earlier. Medieval Christian torture became a doctrinal necessity to “see” what was “inside” the flesh and soul, as if it was not enough to simply claim belief (as is the case in Islam), as the latter could not be externalized and offered for evaluation by the Other. The body is therefore subject to torture with the hope that it would deliver a certain truth, hence a system of symbolic utterances called knowledge of the soul (or self). Foucault who was into S&M himself wanted his sexual practices for the sheer pleasure of the flesh: but is that possible? Can sexuality be conceptualized outside discourse?

An Indian critic à la Chakrabarty, Aijaz Ahmad, notes how much Said’s Orientalism owes to the Foucauldian topology of epistemic systems, that of the “order of things,” whereby an epistemic structure is valid for a particular time-space framework. My problem with all this Orientalism saga is that it is not even concerned with the massive work that is needed to recover the essence of the third-world texts. Only when such work is done, only when such texts are taken seriously for their own sake, can we speak of a recovered modest dignity.

The smells of this city. Nothing like Damascus or Aleppo, the quintessential city of smells. Everything is more modest here. On a warm Saturday afternoon I took it to the back streets. Many shops had their electricity out, part of the daily three-hour-minimum rationing. That smell of being old: shops that belong to the 1950s and 1960s, simply because they are benefiting from the old-rent law. The oldness is a far cry from Aleppo, which still smells the Ottoman centuries. With my narcissistic psyche, I kept pondering, Why did I leave? Why did I go west? Too late perhaps, now that I’m “enjoying” the city—the jouissance of the pervert. What is it that I know now that I did not know then? Is it a question of knowledge? We do not progress as individuals; what time and duration bring to us is that “insertion” of present knowledge into a past where supposedly it was “not there” “yet.” But it was there—in an embryonic form—and that’s precisely what we appreciate: I love my fate, because it was all there from day one; I can now better appreciate why I did what I did. No regrets; only one failure after another. A friend of mine once gave me the greatest reward: Tu réussis tous tes échecs; you’re so damn good at succeeding in all your failures. So fucking French erotic!

On the long run we’ll all be dead. On the short run, however, even if we indulge into serious relationships, even if we’re committed, we’re at the end of the day alone. Yet, being alone-alone is not like being alone-in-a-relationship. The latter poses the fundamental question, What is it being-with-an-Other?, which the alone-alone would not even dare to question. How to “be” “with” that Other, whether another being, or non-being, remains the fundamental dilemma of our times.

I did not buy this story of the Wall Street broker who all of a sudden turns as photographer of prostitutes and drug users in the larger New York area in order to “discover” the existence of God in himself, like a medieval sufi, leaving behind all speculative wealth—and atheism. It seems that in both instances—from Wall Street to the drug addicts and the prostitutes—there is a jouissance of excess: from the excesses of speculative capital to those of the deterioration of body and soul. In both instances, however, there is that jouissance that emerges from the deterioration-as-excess. It could be reformulated as the “quest for excitement,” to use Norbert Elias’ formulation of sports in general. As to the photography on Flickr, it has a blatant voyeuristic element into it which could be termed “enjoying the pain of others.” The top photographers of the last century have come to realize that what remains outside the frame, and which is left at the viewer’s discretion, is equally important, if not more crucial, than what we see on the “screen” in front of us. In the photography depicting drug addicts and prostitutes in the New York area, we’re told in every frame that “there must be something important to see,” which is right in front of us, and, frankly, as a viewer, I find myself deprived of my imaginative powers, like bombarded with pornographic images. How is this related to God’s existence and religion? The thesis that there is an atheistic rupture between Wall Street and God neither makes sense historically nor sociologically. Max Weber has amply demonstrated the correlations between the Protestant ethic and capitalism. More importantly, the entire history of capitalism, since its inception in the Italian city-states in the 13th and 14th centuries points to a process of “accommodation” between the Church and capitalism, so that, for example, usury is “approved” in spite of earlier prohibitions in both Christianity and Judaism. So let’s not think even for a moment that our financial markets are godless! It is precisely because God is dead, that prohibitions are all over the place, that nothing is permitted. Because religion cannot serve anymore as that grandiose framework that encompasses all aspects of life, God must be exhausted at the sight of all those folks who turn towards him for help, like our broker-cum-photographer: God is in deep pain, not at the sight of drug addicts and prostitutes (he is not into social security), however, but at all those morons who “discover” him all of a sudden—asking for help, because they lost faith in the financial markets!