felt where morality has replaced tradition, which once provided a fundamental source of social cohesion by establishing, reinforcing, and celebrating a common set of references. It enforces political taboos by excluding any form of alterity. Censorship maintains the status quo between the subject and the community, between the subject and the political order, and finally between the subject and the Other who lives within it. Obeying the censors offers the major advantage of appeasing interior conflict, but this conflict is consequential for subjectivity. Tired of fighting, the subject may prefer the advantages offered by remaining morally vigilant. Make no mistake, censorship corrupts from within, not unlike the corruption affecting the national economy.
Tradition, insofar as it brought together heaven and earth, the human and the transcendent, the visible and the invisible, curbed violence and tension and mediated between generations. Tradition often embraced conventional morality, but it was never reduced to it. We are witnessing today the transformation of tradition into religious morality. Previously, tradition was made up of a diverse set of religious and pagan practices which were inherited from a plurality of regions and linguistic cultures. Many distinct worlds fanned out across all of Algeria, each with a multi-faceted belief system and a rich array of practices. Religious rituals within these traditions were borrowed from the three principal monotheistic religions, especially Islam, and even today (although increasingly less often) one can find aspects that hark back to this hybridity.
For example, in the Chenoua region (in the Tipaza province), to celebrate Eid al-Adha, a small glass of fresh sheep’s blood was to be drunk by the person who carried out the sacrifice immediately after the animal’s throat had been cut, which recalls the symbolism of the blood of Christ in Christianity. Similarly, in the district of Djanet (Illizi province) in the Algerian desert, inhabitants of this region still recount the legend of the Jewish origins of the Sbiba festival, which is celebrated during the period of Ashura (a Muslim religious festival) and which commemorates the Jews’ exodus from Egypt. Amin Zaoui’s novel Le Dernier Juif de Tamentit (2012) evokes in a similar vein the long history of a Jewish tribe that lives in the Algerian desert. The story unfolds in the city of Tamentit, in the Touat region (Adrar province). Blending historical fact with legend in a narrative account, it displays the mosaic of region-specific traditions that span an immense country. “I like stories where different histories mix together, where there is an itch to stitch and unstitch,” Zaoui writes. “I love confusion, the tangle of language! The joy of frenzy!”14
The power of the “language, religion, and politics” (LRP) bloc as revealed by clinical psychoanalysis
Islamists are not wrong when they claim Algerian traditions contain what they deem elements of impurity. Thus, they call for a veritable dismantling of tradition by eradicating the existing state of affairs. This attempt to dismantle tradition is nothing new; but it has been dramatically aided by capitalist, and its corollary, technocratic, discourse. Post-Independence Algeria has taken it upon itself to continue this dismantling. It accomplishes this by collapsing the distinctions between language, religion, and politics, which leads to a configuration I have designated as the “LRP.”
It is worth pointing out how religion’s spiritual, civil, and social function has been distorted [détournée]. Religion is now no more than an act of passing judgment between what is accepted (el halal) and what is taboo (el haram), between yadjouz (literally, “this passes”) and la-yadjouz (“this doesn’t pass”). It is difficult to fight this type of judgment, which is brandished like a weapon in all types of discourse. As for the private sphere, one’s relation to self-judgment – in the sense of making demands – is defined by the need to obey, therefore pre-empting critique and resistance. As a result, when insurrection is visibly and openly waged, it will inevitably be violent. This is why the subject spares itself this violence by opting for private transgressions, which, without effecting any real change, are in reality just another form of moral obedience.
This moralization is meant to foster social cohesion and offer a shared set of references. But it also serves as a straitjacket for the subject, who can neither intervene nor resist. Each individual is thrust into his or her own solitude and left to devise spaces where culture and knowledge regulate internal (self) and external (social) relations. Reducing religion to moral conduct is a way of imposing uniformity, which is driven by a hatred of difference.
In The Future of an Illusion (1927), Freud explains that the civilizational process, which allows people to live together, is fragile. People are in need of culture to control their violent, anarchic impulses, but, at the same time, this domestication leads to many sacrifices: “[E]very individual is virtually an enemy of civilization, though civilization is supposed to be an object of universal human interest.”15 Freud adds: “Human creations are easily destroyed, and science and technology, which have built them up, can also be used for their annihilation.”16 The importance of the individual’s ambiguous relation to culture cannot be overstated. Culture serves a need to create, then maintain, a subjective space that makes social cohesion possible. But this is countered by another force, a destructive one that pushes individuals to work against themselves internally by demolishing their progress toward civilization.
Each individual is therefore responsible for helping construct and maintain the civilizational process. Culture begins with the acquisition of language and speech.
This initiates a break with the organic state (or “animal” state, according to Freud). Viewed in this way, education, instruction, and knowledge work to enrich and strengthen the construct of culture, and, by extension, the construct of the human, by keeping the human’s destructive instincts in check. But culture’s hold on the subject is constantly threatened by interior and exterior forces. Today, the moralization of religion is the foundation of culture and knowledge in Algeria. No one living in, or visiting, Algeria fails to notice this. Moral pronouncements have risen to a fever pitch: everyone has his or her own interpretation of religious morality.
Patients are not immune from this moralization of religion. Their perceptions of the effects of analysis during treatment reinforce the existing state of censorship. For its part, susceptible to becoming yet another vehicle for extending the moral reach of the LRP, psychoanalysis faces its own troubles.
Psychoanalytic treatment exposes how censorship, taboos, and social conventions govern thought and speech. Analysis is perceived sometimes as a threat and sometimes as an ally in this struggle. Indifferent to conventions, it encourages private speech, serving the individual and yet allowing for the collective nature in each individual to be revealed. Speaking freely shows that censorship, although externally imposed, is aggressively internalized. Overcoming it is a personal matter. Reaching this point, patients still have a very long way to go. Will they recognize, and then refrain from, the role they play in abetting the empire of censorship? And if so, what to make of a freedom deprived of the social space where it can be exercised? Isn’t it safer to keep up the minor transgressions in the dark, a practice much less costly and promising its own secret pleasures?
With psychoanalysis, patients first find themselves delightfully surprised by the suspension of moral judgment. But a reversal then occurs and over time things only get harder. It becomes hard to discern between what may be triggered by social taboos (charged with religious signifiers) and patients’ own self-censorship. What is particularly striking is how the subject ends up fully and unquestioningly embracing the taboos it is besieged by. It hasn’t lost its ability to think for itself, but this ability is increasingly placed out of its reach.
This relationship with censorship can be found in any patient, regardless of his or her language and the place of treatment. But usually, at some point during the treatment, the subject steps out from behind the taboos imposed from the outside (family, education, religion) and begins to question its own practice of self-censorship. In Algeria, reaching this point of dissociation has proven stubbornly difficult. Taboos continue to exercise control over thought. For this reason, the subject finds ways to hide behind its
