Pandolfo 2010

"I read Fanon side by side with a parallel reflection on destruction, trauma, and the possibility of ethical-political struggle in a contemporary Islamic tradition, in the context of a renewed problematization of the concept of jihad al-nafi, "the struggle of the soul" (but also struggle at such), in relation to the experience of oppression, violence, pain, melancholy, and what Fanon calls the "annihilation of being." I will consider the figure of "spiritual murder" (tadbih al-ma'nawi) in a sermon by the Moroccan Shaykh Abdessalam Yassine, and reflect on the practice and thought of a Moroccan faqih an-nafi and mu'alij, an imam and a healer of madness, with particular reference to what he dubs as the predicament of tadiyq al-nafi, the choking of the soul. "Spiritual murder" and "soul choking" speak of the subjugation of the soul, and the oppression of the collectivity, when life shrinks, death is generalized in a proximity that makes it unthinkable, and the divine message is no longer present in the heart" (26-27)"He describes the raced/colonized subject as constituted by the violent intrusion of the other, the colonizer, in the psychic space of the self, an intrusion that evacuates the self, and replaces it with the poisonous object of the other's fantasy, an object with which the self will coincide. The intrusion is a seizure of the imagination and of the bodily space of the other; an occupation understood in spatial, almost military terms, as a shrinking of vital space, which snatches the self and pulverises its corporeal schema, halting the work of the imagination and producing in its place a somatic hallucination" (27)"The moral law, Fanon says, Kant's universal imperative, is falsified in the colony, it reveals its other side, as destructive "carnivorous power" and perverse enjoyment. In the colony the symbolic order is maimed, for the seizing of the imagination, the intrusion, swallows both space and time, and abolishes at once the possibility of culture and of the unconscious as the site of mediation and symbolic transformation. The raced subject, Fanon says, is "clad in mourning," a kind of living death. It is precisely this asphyxiating proximity of death, of a death within, and of death all around, which, Fanon is saying, makes it a arduous yet fundamental task to "think" death, subjectivize it as a singular experience of being, re-socialize it, think the possibility of a collectivity, from it. Ethical violence, for Fanon, was aimed at reactivating the possibility of struggle" (28)"The question becomes: how can one repossess space and being, what Fanon called "ontological resistance", imagine exits that are not already inscribed in instrumental logics that further and reproduce exclusion and oppression? In a different tone than in Fanon's later writings, in Black Skin White Mask the emphasis is not on liberation (however ambiguous and never fulfilled is the space of freedomin Fanon's later work) but on entrapment and mourning" (28)"Shaykh's Yassine's figure of failed mourning belongs within an Islamic tradition in which the ability to visualize and vicariously experience death, and the related ability to engage in a spiritual struggle that transforms the soul, as well as the arenas of collective life, is pivotal for the possibility of ethics and political critique. "Spiritual murder" is the destruction, or crippling, of this ethical faculty" (29)"In calling the massacre "symbolic/moral" he is engaging with the political-spiritual question of the debasement of life, a life-death that is for these youths a living death, or in the words of the Moroccan youth I talked to in my research "a slow death" (al-mawt al-bati)" (30)"For, as the 12th Century faqih al-nafi Abdu Hamid al-Ghazali put it, "Death cannot be understood by those who do not understnad life." It becomes clear, then, that for Sheikh Yassine a moral/spiritual murder is much more destructive than a literal one, for it turns the living into undead, incapable of experiencing either life or death, and forecloses the subject's capacity for ethical self-transformation. In this reflection, he comes remarkably close to the considerations of Fanon on subjugation, death, and the possibility of regeneration in the assumption of death in life, as a crucial dimension of responsibility" (30-31)"The slaughter, or tadbih, destroys the possibility of imagining the future, as well as of relating to the past. It freezes time, and reduces life to a flat surface without exits. The only "exists," under the rule of "soul murder", are suicide and self-immolation, if one has the strength and courage to pursue them" (31)"Untruth [kadhib], injustice [zulm], and oppression are the characteristics of the world of the jinn: they are also dispositions located in the human soul. The prime cause of sorcery [sihr], and hence madness, argues the Imam, is, al-ikrah [coercion] the absence of justice, the impossibility of an equitable recourse by the oppressed, as well as the condition of intimate terror and intimidation in which the person is thrown by the state of coercion... The second cause of sorcery, and hence madness, is the envy [al-hasad] generated by the delusion of commodities" (34)"It is not an external demon that strikes the person, but an internal enemy, a capacity for evil that is at once internal and external to the nafs [soul]. What is important to grasp in this duality, and in the notion of struggle itself, is that the Imam is speaking of a positive challenge, the challenge of a radical heterogeneity that sets the rhythm and pulsation of a form of life. Evil in this sense is a revealing element, which at once dis-figures the status quo, providing as always-precarious angle of visibility, and sets a flow of subjectivity in movement, in the punctuation of an ethical life" (34)"Tadyiq al-nafs, the oppression, or choking of the soul, is the result of an unbearable pain that paralyzes and sculpts in the soul and in the heart, as if in stone, images of destruction that shut the door to all possibility of imagining a horizon, erecting the high walls of a claustrophobic space. Soul choking describes a world of living death, where the proximity with death is such that there is no longer a relation, "death" can no longer be "imagined"" (36)"Beyond this struggle of images is the concern with enabling once again al-'amal, the possibility of ethical action - activity, work, movement, and the fact of having a job, an active role in society, which, the Imam says, is the condition of possibility of faith"" (37)"Traumatic becoming is a form of awakening, not a consolation philosophy" (38)