Frontiers: Between Psychoanalysis and Islam

Abstract

This paper was presented by Abdelkebir Khatibi at the colloquium ‘Entre Psychanalyse et Islam’ in 1989 at the Collège International de Philosophie. Khatibi, taking up Freud's propositions in Moses and Monotheism that Moses was an Egyptian, and Christ a murderer and that Islam, lacking a murder, is an abbreviated repetition of the Jewish religion, subjects Freud's account of monotheism to a deconstructive reading. Khatibi reads the dismissal of Islam as an abbreviated version of the Jewish religion as symptomatic of the dismissal of difference that lies at the origin of monotheism. Following Freud, who wrote that the origin was the mythical account of a borrowing of names, and reconsidering his account of the Islamic imaginary as merely an abbreviated repetition, Khatibi takes up this question of frontiers at the origin of monotheism in order to challenge psychoanalytic theory as an exercise of a ‘frontierial’ position.