Image/gaze/bomb them all. posted by Richard Seymour

Ideological interpellation, in Zizek's treatment (The Sublime Object of Ideology, 1989), involves the assumption of a 'mandate'. One is called upon to undertake a mission (lead the chosen people to Canaan, overthrow capitalism, establish an Islamic Emirate), and the hysterical subject is one who cannot fulfil this mandate. Take Jesus. In Martin Scorsese's film The Last Temptation of Christ, he is an ordinary man susceptible to the usual sins, lusts and tempers, yet who gradually discovers - horrified, fascinated - that he is the Son of God. He never totally accepts this role, and even on the cross is to be seen "looking for a loophole" (as WC Fields explained was his goal when found studying the Bible in his death-bed). Christ is hysterical precisely because he does not feel adequate to the task.

How is one interpellated? We know how people identify with a celebrity, a sports person, or a great political leader and try to emulate them - this is imaginary identification. One wants to be just like how that person seems, in order to be likeable to oneself. But for whom? Why should this identification make you likeable to yourself? Typically, one wants to fulfil a symbolic identification, in which one has wholly internalised the preferments of, say, the father. In other words, you are servicing the gaze of the father, seeking to make yourself acceptable to him, although you may be totally unaware of doing so. Zizek notes that, behind the feminine imaginary identification is an extremely masculine symbolic identification: a girl might emulate the comportment of a leading movie starlet in order to appease the paternal gaze, for some she wants to seem likeable.

This is the mechanism, which is by no means merely a psychological drama, by which one is integrated into a given socio-symbolic field. Of the Orwellistas on the pro-war Left, we might ask: for which gaze are they emulating the socialist who became a hero of the Cold War Right? Whence the imaginary identification with "The great Irshad Manji" ? I'll come back to this, but Barmecides , before he packed up his blog, had a suggestive answer.

However successful ideological interpellation is, there is always a hysterical remainder rendered as "che vuoi?" Which is to say, "you are asking this of me, but what is it you really want?" The mandate, it is suspected, comes with strings, clauses in small print that may be sinister or not. So, for instance, the Bolshevik demand for "Land, Bread and Peace" might have elicited the query: "but for what end? Isn't it really world domination you have in mind? Don't you want to bring about the return of the anti-Christ?" The usual way in which "che vuoi?" is manifested is through racism - when Jesse Jackson made some initial inroads in the 1988 Presidential elections, the press began to ask "what does Jesse Jackson really want?", which they hadn't asked of anyone else. And of course, the main target of such questioning has historically been Jews: "you say you only want emancipation, freedom from the ghettos, the right to free expression, but don't you actually want to control the world's financial system and...?" The end of such questioning, of course, was the near annihilation of Europe's Jews in gas chambers and Einsatzgruppen-style mass shootings.

Hence, "what do the Muslims really want?" According to Anthony Browne of The Times (who professes admiration for Irshad Manji), the Muslims want "to conquer the world". Daniel Pipes, (also a fan of Irshad Manji), thinks that what he calls Militant Islam wants to conquer the world, and remarks apropos of Muslim migrants that "West European societies are unprepared for the massive immigration of brown-skinned peoples cooking strange foods and not exactly maintaining Germanic standards of hygiene". The BNP - well, we know what they think of Islam (a "wicked, vicious faith"), but it is interesting to note that they too call on "moderate Muslims" to make their religion "compatible with the modern world".

Well, why raise Irshad Manji? Manji styles herself as a "Muslim refusenik" and has written a book entitled The Trouble with Islam, which purports to be a progressive critique of Islam, but is larded with extraordinary phrases like "the Muslim Mind", apologetics for Israel (some examples of which here ) and an extraordinary naivete about US military power which, she asserts, "is the unrealized hope, not the lead criminal". Not susceptible to the obvious, then, Irshad Manji is the model 'moderate Muslim' whom Islamophobes can trust and admire. Locating the problems of the Muslim world within Islam (see some of her comments in this obsequious article ), Manji exculpates those who oppress Muslims and corroborates them in their slanders.

The gallery of figures from the racist right to the pro-war Left lining up to pay homage to Manji is unsurprising in that respect. But if the latter form an imaginary identification with her, what is the underlying symbolic identification? Back to Barmecides:

About any [political affiliation] one can ask: what is its defining project? That of [the pro-war Left] seems to be this: to endlessly plead before an imaginary tribunal, packed with neo-cons/ assorted members of the Right. This tribunal tirelessly, and with the immense ideological and economic resources at its disposal, accuses the Left of predictable crimes and complicities. [The pro-war Left]'s principle aim is to exonerate itself before this tribunal by placing before it endless examples of Left-wing venality. Secondly, it seeks to occupy and re-tread a terrain of argument mapped out for it in advance by the Right. It scuttles obediently back and forth before the points of this circumscribed territory, reiterating that this is indeed the correct and proper terrain.

To exhort on behalf of a 'Muslim refusenik' who covers for the West and prattles naive gibberish about the people she pretends to be appealing to (Manji's co-religionists) is to make oneself likeable to the bourgeois gaze. One becomes an alibi, unwitting to be sure, of the anti-Muslim racism that corroborates extraordinary imperial aggression and its apparatus of extra-legal prisons and torture chambers. The liberal gloss, known as 'whataboutery', is always-already available: Torture in Abu Ghraib and Bagram? Yes, but what about the elections? What about women no longer obliged to wear the burlap sack in Afghanistan? Mass murder that makes 9/11 look puny? Yes, but what about the 'Cedar Revolution'? Occupation of Palestine? Yes, but what about 'the new anti-Semitism'?

Addendum: for those outraged on behalf of secularism, here is an intelligent, humane, socialist critic of Islam and particularly of the corrupt leaders and regimes which use it to legitimise their reign, who manages to be irreligious without slandering Muslims or apologising for the criminals in Washington and Tel Aviv.