Category: Knot of the Soul book event

Knot of the Soul Book Event: Oscillation, Eschatology, Space

~ biqbal

This final post in the book forum is by Daniel Colucciello Barber.

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“What if the heteronymous agency of the drive were seen from the perspective of Islamic eschatological ethics as having the structure of the ordeal?” (5) With this question Stefania Pandolfo elegantly adumbrates a central aim of her profound book, Knot of the Soul: the elaboration of a certain affinity or resonance—what she at one point calls a “family relationship”—“between the psychoanalytic and the Islamic traditions” with regard to illness. (11) The stakes, implications, and challenges of this resonance, as Pandolfo articulates it, might be observed by means of another question, which emerges out of the same problem space: What is the end of illness?

There is, of course, a double valence intrinsic to this question: on one hand, end invokes the practical question of a cessation of illness, of what might be imagined in terms of reaching health or well-being; on the other, end invokes the theoretical or even metaphysical question—can one think being as that which is well?—of a meaning, a sense or direction, in relation to illness. Such a metaphysical register is catalyzed by the fact that, at least on my reading, one of the proposed resonances between psychoanalytic and Islamic traditions is the reality of what might be called an Outside—a denomination I present only provisionally, since there is no presumption of a distinct third term in which the two traditions participate. This is to say that the encounter Pandolfo articulates between psychoanalysis and Islam does not proceed in terms of a logic of one and many, where the difference between these two traditions would be mediated in virtue of a point of reference that transcends each.

Continue reading “Knot of the Soul Book Event: Oscillation, Eschatology, Space” →

Knot of the Soul Book Event: Encountering the Invisible

~ biqbal

This post comes to us from Ali Altaf Mian, Assistant Professor of Islamic Studies at Seattle University. His review essay on Knot of the Soul, forthcoming in qui parle, particularly considers how Pandolfo inhabits the “ethics of psychoanalysis” and the citational status of the Qur’an in her ethnography.

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Say (O Muhammad): It has been revealed to me that a company of the Jinn gave ear [to the Qur’an], and they said: Lo! We have heard a marvelous Qur’an.

—Qur’an 72:1.

DJINN: according to the Muslim conception bodies (adjsam) composed of vapour or flame, intelligent, imperceptible to our senses, capable of appearing under different forms and of carrying out heavy labours (al-Baydawi, Comm. to Kur’an, LXXII, 1; al-Damiri, Hayawan, s.v. djinn). They were created of smokeless flame (Kur’an, LV, 14) while mankind and the angels, the other two classes of intelligent beings, were created of clay and light. They are capable of salvation; Muhammad was sent to them as well as to mankind; some will enter Paradise while others will be cast into the fire of hell.

—The Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd Edition, 2:546-7.

Their speech is an incised shape of silence, an intaglio,
in which the word is not a single, schisted bloc
of sense, like ours, but guards its pristine
opacity and is impossible
for any dragoman to approximate.

—Eric Ormsby, “The Jinn.”

Possession-form identities in dissociative identity disorder typically manifest as behaviors that appear as if a “spirit,” supernatural being, or outside person has taken control, such that the individual begins speaking or acting in a distinctly different manner. For example, an individual’s behavior may give the appearance that her identity has been replaced by the “ghost” of a girl who committed suicide in the same community years before, speaking and acting as though she were still alive. Or an individual may be “taken over” by a demon or deity, resulting in profound impairment, and demanding that the individual or a relative be punished for a past act, followed by more subtle periods of identity alteration. However, the majority of possession states around the world are normal, usually part of spiritual practice, and do not meet criteria for dissociative identity disorder. The identities that arise during possession-form dissociative identity disorder present recurrently, are unwanted and involuntary, cause clinically significant distress or impairment…and are not a normal part of a broadly accepted cultural or religious practice.

—American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th Edition

What does it mean to assume a subject position in the context of the ‘therapies of the jinns’?

—Stefania Pandolfo, Knot of the Soul, 87.

The invisible figures of jinns populate Muslim-majority societies. They come up not only in Qur’anic verses that report of their astonishment at Muhammad’s recitation of sacred writ but also in folk tales that portray them as paranormal parasites that possess or perturb bodies but especially brains. The idea of the jinn, living beings that many Muslims hold to be invisible to human perception, indicates for many of us in the Western academy a limit of the ontological thinkable. To assume that jinns are real existents, to take them not as figures of fiction but of fact—of veridicality—flies in the face of “enlightened man.”

Continue reading “Knot of the Soul Book Event: Encountering the Invisible” →

Knot of the Soul Book Event: Knotting South Asia

~ biqbal

The following post comes to us from Rajbir Singh Judge, Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life with affiliations in the Department of Religion and Institute of South Asia at Columbia University in the City of New York. He specializes in the cultural and intellectual history of South Asia, with a particular emphasis on the Punjab.

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Is psychoanalysis doomed to fail, sullied, as numerous scholars remind us, by its colonial stain? Against this unavoidable historicization, there has emerged a different and important endeavor that undoes this originary moment by fragmenting psychoanalysis itself, unable to be contained within a singular historical trajectory emanating from the West. In Knot of the Soul: Madness, Psychoanalysis, Islam, Stefania Pandolfo embodies such queries, challenging historicist concerns without reproducing psychoanalysis as an atemporal universal. But, in her exploration of the “time-space of ruins”[1] and “the never-ending work of ethical struggle,”[2] another difficult question emerges that fragments the ordering of the first: Is it possible to “carve a path towards an encounter with the divine, as a possibility open at the very site of [colonial] agony?”[3] Here, in this unresolved space, the ground is no longer a void enacted by the colonial regime’s epistemic violence nor the tracing of a residual historical genealogy and, therefore, a continued symbolic belonging in relation to the void. Instead, our attention is forced to openings of the very temporal order, suspensions in the symbolic enacted by the Divine, which haunt the anguish that clouds the historical.[4]

I want to tentatively consider how Pandolfo’s insights enact this shift by questioning two interrelated concepts, the subject and historicity, in relation to literature on South Asia. Though brief, I hope to demonstrate how Pandolfo’s insistence on the dissonant and, thus, open encounter between psychoanalysis and Islam provides an opportunity to rethink our troubled conceptual terrain. Importantly, such an encounter reorients our disavowal of alterity, compelled as we are to take easier routes to more comforting destinations through a palatable and recoverable inheritance. A psychoanalytic approach offers another possibility, refusing ontic concerns masquerading as ontological ones that provide satisfaction in the production of meaning, heterogeneous or otherwise. Instead, the task of psychoanalysis provides an opportunity, as Alenka Zupančič tells us, “to slowly but thoroughly deactivate the path of this satisfaction, to render it useless,” through what we can think of as an “object-disoriented ontology.”[5] Pandolfo grapples within this disoriented space itself through ethnography, theology, and poetics, turning our attention to the Islamic tradition. And, rather than enact a satisfying closure through psychoanalysis or Islam as ontological totalities or multiplicities, Pandolfo guides us to the encounter between the two, which requires we consider “the productivity of taking seriously this overlap, and the participation of the knowledge of the unconscious in the ontology of the Invisible (al-ghayb) and divine knowledge.”[6]

Continue reading “Knot of the Soul Book Event: Knotting South Asia” →

Knot of the Soul Book Event: On Philosophical Ethnography

~ APS

“Life is essentially itself.” — Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion, p. 290

“There’s no such thing as life, just phenomena after phenomena after phenomena.” — Co—star App, horoscope for the author algorithmically generated August 16th, 2018.

“Knot of the Soul reflects a commitment to ethnography as both empirical research and a philosophical project. […] The stories, or ‘cases,’ are themselves theoretical sites of elucidation. Concepts emerge within the ethnography, and are brought into conversation with other concepts. […] The ethnography is more than just a description of the there-and-then of its anthropological object, be that contemporary Morocco, psychiatry, the life of patients, psychoanalysis, Qur’anic cures, or the Islamic ethical tradition. It has the nature of a coming to the fore, an encounter, with a world and a tradition, but more fundamentally with what Ilyas called the ‘torment of life’.’” — Stefania Pandolfo, Knot of the Soul, pp. 22, 23

The attentive reader of Stefania Pandolfo’s Knot of the Soul: Madness, Psychoanalysis, Islam cannot help but by struck by the beauty of its sadness and the depth of the suffering attended to within its writing. It is this quality of the book that lies at the center of its resistance to the standard modes of academic commentary or review. What do you write about in the face of suffering? It’s a question that lies at the heart of Pandolfo’s project, as I understand it. How do you write and analyze in a way that is faithful to the incoherence of a life lived? How do you deploy concepts and stories, which are used to form coherence, without then shifting attention away from the suffering attended to?

Though these are but two ways of formulating the question, for me the configuration of this question demands a response that looks to the method of the project. Pandolfo’s book, like her earlier Impasse of the Angels, is beautiful at the level of its writing, precisely because her work takes seriously the melancholy of a life lived amongst a people, in a culture, positioned within a society. Yet, the method of her book is not simply to tell sad stories. Continue reading “Knot of the Soul Book Event: On Philosophical Ethnography” →

Knot of the Soul Book Event: A Poetics of Infraction

~ biqbal

The following post comes to us from Aaron Eldridge, PhD candidate in Anthropology and Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley. His dissertation research, staged in Lebanon, concerns the foreclosures/inheritances of revival in Arab Orthodox Christianity.

“Lost in the rift of classification, there remained the question of the soul” (309). Knot of the Soul forays into the rift of thinking itself. Just as in the now famous preface to The Order of Things, wherein the “et cetera” of Borges’ Chinese encyclopedia, “the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by means of the fable, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that.” But the question of the soul remains. It does not present an epistemological limit (for that is not what thinking is), a horizon of knowledge whose beyond can only be understood as the critical boundaries of interpretation. Instead, the question of the soul, as rendered here, is an enfolded extimacy that striates the necessarily assumed borders between psychoanalysis and Islam, madness and sanity, visible and invisible, the secular (immanent) and the Divine (transcendent). It is a wound, or, more precisely, a wounding. The question of the soul remains, addressing us through scenes of marginalia: immiseration, the ruin of community, the traumatic history of the subject.

Continue reading “Knot of the Soul Book Event: A Poetics of Infraction” →

Knot of the Soul Book Event: Knots

~ Marika Rose

I should constantly remind myself that the real leap consists in introducing invention into existence. In the world in which I travel, I am endlessly creating myself. And it is by going beyond the historical, instrumental hypothesis that I will initiate my cycle of freedom.
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks

Thinking amidst the ongoing catastrophe of colonialism’s legacy in Morocco; in homes, hospitals and sacred places riven by trauma; alongside families, doctors and imams seeking if not for healing then for ways to survive, Stefania Pandolfo invokes Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks. A central question of Knot of the Soul has to do, she says, ‘with the possibility of reorienting the existential and ethical position of the subject in the world by an act of imagination; of interrupting a habitus of entrapment, resentment, and self- reproach in relation to a history of loss, thereby transforming one’s relation to that history, opening up the possibility of living again— of futures unforeseen.’ I was struck, by the book’s resonances with the work of Sylvia Wynter, whose ‘Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth /Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation – An Argument’ ends by invoking the same text: ‘The true leap, Fanon wrote at the end of his Black Skins, White Masks, consists in introducing invention into existence. The buck stops with us.’

For Wynter, the central struggle of the contemporary world is between, on the one hand, those who seek to ensure that a particular (white, Western, masculine, property-owning) conception of the human continues to be seen as universal and normative and, on the other hand those who work instead for ‘the well-being, and therefore the full cognitive and behavioural autonomy of the human species itself/ourselves.’ There is a complex interplay in Wynter’s work between, on the one hand, her rejection of modern accounts of the human and, on the other, her affirmation of our need to recognise that human life is what we make it, to take responsibility for our own collective self-fashioning, what Fanon called sociogeny; between, that is, the rejection of modern notions of sovereignty and the affirmation of human responsibility. I want to suggest that Pandolfo’s work is located in the middle of this tension.

Knot of the Soul plays out around two key figures of human life – the figure of jihad, struggle, and the figure of ibtila, ordeal. Jihad signifies struggle against the world and the self in order to transform them. It is both the ongoing grappling with ‘an internal enemy, impossible to eliminate, and in fact also necessary for life’ and also ‘a war against an external enemy’ the fight against the injustice and violence of the world which threatens to violently tear apart social bonds of care and solidarity. Ibtila, ordeal, calls instead for endurance and discernment; the ordeal ‘is not just what falls on us, what breaks our lives and hurls us into bereavement or disablement; it contains an address, the sign of a divine interpellation, even when we don’t understand its meaning.’ To struggle with the world but also to bear it; to resist violence and trauma but also to suffer them.

If the birth of modernity is characterised by the secularisation of theological concepts, including the transfer of characteristics previously attributed to God onto the figure of sovereign (white, wealthy, rational) Man, then the Copernican revolution of which psychoanalysis is a part signifies a second decentring of the world. Not only are human beings not the centre of the universe, Freud teaches us, but we are not even the centre of our own selves. For all that it might seem as though our minds revolve around our conscious intentions, for all that we might envision ourselves as prime movers of our own being, eppur si muove; we are in the hands of unconscious forces, endlessly locked in an ordeal in which we must endure what we is given to us, including our own selves. What does it mean, Pandolfo’s book asks, to struggle for a better world when we cannot control even that which is most intimately our own?

The book is marked by a commitment to kind and careful examination of madness, by an affirmation of Piera Aulagnier’s suggestion that sometimes, often, ‘people said to be crazy in the ordinary sense of the term, show us what it was necessary to do in order to survive’. It is significant, then, that the key moments when Pandolfo struggles to reconcile herself to her interlocutors’ ideas are those where she finds her belief in the crucial importance of revolutionary struggle to be at odds with that of the Imam (a Qur’anic scholar and healer, her most important interlocutor), for whom the Arab Spring is better understood not as faithful jihad, but as a refusal of ibtila. Like ‘people in the West’, too many of those around him ‘want to be the way they themselves want, but life, our life span, is decided by God. They end up clashing with the real … They are hit by reality; and in the end become sick.’ A similar conflict plays out too, in the theological debates Pandolfo describes between Kamal and Jawad, two young Moroccan men, who argue whether the decision to risk one’s life in the attempt to migrate illegally to Europe (l-harg, the burning), is better understood as the struggle for a better life for oneself and one’s family or as a failure of patience and endurance. What is at stake in this disagreement is not, for Kamal and Jawad, merely a question of tactical wisdom. Like the passage to Europe itself, the question of when to act, to struggle against the world, and when to endure, to bear with what is given to us, evokes ‘the sirāṭ, the traverse or narrow bridge over the chasm of Hell; the bridge thinner than a blade or a thread, which will widen up like a highway to let across the saved, or instead shrink like a blade to make the damned fall, pushed down into eternal fire.’

The buck stops with us; and to fully assume this responsibility Wynter says that we must come to sociogeny as a new object of knowledge, to learn how we are formed by the narrative principles which create the worlds we inhabit so that we might re-write them, tell different stories about our selves, introduce invention into existence. What Knot of the Soul suggests is that that task of knowing ourselves is endless; that to be human is to be constantly following the thread which ties our individual self to others, and to our cultural, linguistic and religious heritage. The ‘knot of the soul’ is the name that a mother Pandolfo speaks to gives to ‘a wound … the intertwining of her suffering with that of her son’; because what we are is the ways we have been broken by the world, the ways we struggle against and bear with that brokenness, the ways we inherit and transmit that brokenness. The buck stops with us; yet we are not ourselves but, as Lacan has it, that which is in us more than ourselves, that which is to be struggled against and endured, that which goes by the name of God, or the jinn; that which is nameless and unknown.

Knot of the Soul Book Event: A Political Theology of Jinn?

~ Adam Kotsko ~ 2 Comments

Stefania Pandolfo’s book provides us with an intersecting account of the wounds left open by the trauma of colonization in Morocco. It is less a theoretical work than an attempt to be true to the lives and experiences of those to whom she has lent her ethnographic ear. Their lives and experiences are outlined and unfolded in terms of dialogue between Islamic psychology and psychoanalysis that she finds to be already well underway—not only in colonial and postcolonial debates over psychiatric practice in France and Morocco, but in the most authoritative texts of psychoanalysis itself. Yet even this framing is inadequate, as her rich exploration of the artwork produced by Ilyias while in a psychotic “state” (hāla) draws on the aesthetics of Aby Warburg and Giorgio Agamben as well as Islamic thought on the importance of the image and the imagination. Here above all, we can see that her theorization follows her ethnographic subject rather than the other way around—a priority that had already become clear in Chapter 6, “The Burning,” which is made up largely of her interlocutors’ debate over whether risking the passage to Europe amounts to suicide. Indeed, she concludes her work with a harrowing account of the Imam’s use of Qur’anic healing to drive out a jinn.

There is much in this work to instruct a Western reader—I certainly learned a great deal. Few academics in the West know much of anything about the history of public policy in any postcolonial society, and in that respect her discussions of the debates surrounding psychiatric care in Morocco were very informative. Here and elsewhere, she shows the Western debate to be parochial and narrow compared to what is found in the postcolonial world, where intellectuals engage with Islamic traditions and Western thinkers as a matter of course. Hence when she draws her own analogies with Freud, Lacan, Warburg, Agamben, or any number of other Western thinkers, it comes across as a suggestion or a hypothesis rather than an “explanation” in any strong or reductive sense. She never claims that the jinn simply “are” unconscious drives, for instance, even if psychoanalytic explorations of the drives can shed some light on the dynamics of the fraught relationship between human beings and jinn. If the Imam can live in a world in which Western psychiatry and Qur’anic healing can coexist without fully reducing one to the other, then so can she.

While I admire this approach, I did find myself wishing for more explicit theorization. Continue reading “Knot of the Soul Book Event: A Political Theology of Jinn?” →