Jihad on the Couch

Abstract

In his most recent book, entitled Un Furieux désir de sacrifice. Le surmusulman (A Furious Desire for Sacrifice: The Super Muslim), Benslama sets himself the task of laying down on the psychoanalytic couch the jihadi figure he calls ‘le surmusulman,’ which literally means a sort of super- or Über-Muslim. In this essay, I shall not pursue a symptomatic reading of Benslama's symptomatic reading of the surmusulman, but will focus my tentative reading of his diagnostic appraisal on the psycho-affective dynamics of melancholia and jouissance – two concepts that are mentioned in passing (and are almost taken for granted by Benslama), but that seem to me to anchor the furious desire for sacrifice that is said to characterize the surmusulman. I conclude by engaging with Benslama's conception in Psychoanalysis and the Challenge of Islam of an alternative form of subjectivity (I dub l'altermusulman) that is paradoxically the product and harbinger of secular modernity, and that may need, in the final analysis, to be laid as well on the psychoanalytic couch, something Benslama hardly ponders.