exposed by religious morality and the reigning ideology. And yet it seeks treatment in order to find a self it may no longer recognize. But one mask only gives way to another in an endless cycle as the subject continues to prop up the censorship under which it is so clearly suffering.
Seeking cover within its own subjectivity, the subject gets lost amid its own disguises and fear sets in. Indeed, it grows fearful of its own movements in the silent darkness, afraid it may disappear into the blank space of speech. Nabile Farès evokes this state:
Fear of oneself, fear of others. Fear of oneself: yes, as though haunted from within; haunted in the most visceral way, as though you could feel the brittle limit of your life, right there, inside your body; as though your body defined the limit, the limit of resistance and of duration; as though you needed to learn how to hide your body, just like you learn to hide your feelings.17
Farès reveals with this the secret of the body/feelings to be covered and hidden: the ferocity of fear and its effects. Indeed, this fear creates the many “masks”: ideological, moral, political, and other markers of identity. Is censorship the control center of fear? Does one’s fear correspond to the severity of censorship? And might censorship be responsible for the orchestrated confusion over who speaks, who imposes taboos, who thinks? Is the invisible force pulling the levers both a subjective and political matter? Fear surges forth near the dismissed zones of discourse and thought, as there are no support barriers there. As previously indicated, the subject’s masks multiply in this invisible space. It seeks to find refuge for its most taboo thoughts so that they won’t be confiscated from it. However, in the process of looking, it digs deep into the horror of the blank space.
Initially, the subject dons a whole series of masks needed for its acts of détournement. But then, little by little, it finds itself the victim of its own act. The more it loses itself in its roles, the closer it comes to the fear it strove to escape in its playacting. The whole affair unfolds outside of speech in the greatest secrecy. The scale of this “silent act,” one that remains protected from onlookers, raises some pressing questions: to what extent is the subject’s act a performance? Does this personal performance mirror the political dynamic of the larger public?
This sheds light on how the individual bolsters the LRP bloc by unwittingly performing its dictates. A growing religious morality suppresses differences in lifestyle, thought, and beliefs. It doesn’t allow for any separation between the inside (one’s superego) and moral principles. This lack of separation makes it hard to know precisely who – which superego – is speaking. Is it the subject or the voice of a community of believers converted to a new form of Islam spread from the Middle East? There is no room for this question in the subjective space of the patient. Both voices merge to form a single entity, resulting in an endless internal struggle. Treatment takes place amid this war with censorship, which, striving to contain fear, ends up making it spread more aggressively. In the land of the LRP, for both the patient and the analyst, it is hard to get over this embattled struggle.
The duplicity of subjects confronting censorship from the LRP
In Algeria, subjects need incredible strength and energy in order to keep dreams and desires within the realm of possibility. This can lead to new subjective discoveries that are all the more pleasurable for being hard to achieve. But the effort to get there can be overwhelming. Oftentimes the subject prefers to give up rather than let go of the social and imaginary taboos to which it clings. If all desiring subjects (no matter where they are) confront the same problem, in Algeria the internal work performed by the very nature of the human psyche is crushed by the demands made by the larger public. In this case, the outside is no more than an eternally retreating space incapable of accommodating a troubled inside. Freud helps explain what a desiring subject endures when struggling with morality. In Algeria, morality has the final word and the public has become the one who delivers it. “Anyone thus forced to react continually to precepts that are not the expressions of his impulses,” writes Freud, “lives, psychologically speaking, above his means, and may be objectively described as a hypocrite, whether he is clearly conscious of this or not.”18
Desire must be discreet and cunning in order to counter the subject’s morality, which is reinforced and amplified by the larger public, morality’s faithful guardian.
Confusion becomes the subject’s best tactic for creating a secret, off-stage site within its subjectivity and for deceiving fear (from within and without). These ploys occur on a daily basis, and one of the most noteworthy among them concerns conjugal schemes, especially for gay men and women.
Gay women cunningly make use of the social division of gender in public space to make everyone believe they’re merely living with a female friend rather than living as a couple. As opposed to gay men, very little acting is involved. Indeed, until recently, unmarried women rarely left the parental abode to live alone or with another individual (male or female), as this choice was viewed as a sign of sexual promiscuity. These women speak openly about their housemates rather than their partners. This clever strategy is a perfect illustration of how performance is used as a form of détournement. These women use the division between sexes and the traditional practice of placing them within one homogeneous group to their own advantage. Indeed, forced to be together, it requires almost no extra effort to live out their sexual and romantic lives. And so, unseen by the censors, they satisfy their desires under a regime where homosexuality is banned while following the law established by men to keep the sexes apart. Paradoxically, they benefit from respecting this division of the sexes, which also makes it easy for them to engage in sex outside of marriage. Staying quiet and out of the spotlight, they avoid making themselves targets for exclusion and repression. It requires minimal effort on their part. And, for this same reason, this practice of détournement does nothing to change the taboos in place. The public display of obedience persists and, as a result, difference is never witnessed since everything happens behind the scenes.
The practice of détournement opens up a whole field of desires and fantasies, but it does nothing to challenge censorship and other taboos, which remain in full force. This subversive, and at times transgressive, tactic is subtle, as it outwardly conforms with censorship. Why flout the censors when you can profit from them at little cost to satisfy your desires? This logic can be found operating on many levels. At its best, it can subvert private life by bringing to light valuable discoveries on the social stage. But, more often than not, as the endless performances of détournement remain invisible, they are robbed of their subversive potential. The reign of secrecy is upheld by all as the (silent) path of salvation against a deafening censorship. A potentially subversive act that can lead to change and transformation is thus disabled. Right where an irreversible break should have occurred we have instead invisible performances played out in the dark. Détournement teams up with subversion only to cancel each other out.
Whereas détournement upholds the established order, allowing for only a small number of desires to be satisfied, subversion overthrows it. In other words, subversion creates staggeringly new signifiers that bring the endless performances to a stop. Détournement, for its part, does just the opposite, churning out performance after performance with no end in sight. This clearly prevents a new subject position from emerging, which could lead to an irreversible emancipation from censorship. Instead, there is an endless game of hide-and-seek going on in private and social life. Difficult to identify and delimit, censorship creates a need for transgression. This is felt by the subject every day, but it also signals a more serious transgression: material and moral corruption, including the deliberate distortion [détournement] of existing laws (see chapter 7). Détournement works with and against disruption. The fact that citizens perceive the law as inoperative is a case in point. Each individual is left to fend for him- or herself. The subject is at the mercy of inexplicable taboos designed to serve the interests of some individuals as well as amoral and arbitrary laws imposed by the religious sphere.
Through
