The French parliament recently adopted the law prohibiting the public wearing of burka and its Arab equivalent, the niqab, which cover the woman’s face, except for a small slit for the eyes. The curious thing that cannot but strike the eye in the public debates about this topic is the ambiguity of the critique of burka: it moves at two levels. First, it is presented as the defense of the dignity and freedom of the oppressed Muslim women – one cannot accept that, in a secular France, a group of women has to live a hidden life secluded from the public space, and subordinated to brutal patriarchal authority, etc. However, the argument then as a rule shifts towards the anxieties of the non-Muslim French people themselves: faces covered by burka do not fit the coordinates of the French culture and identity, they “intimidate and alienate non-Muslims”… Some French women even used the argument that they experience someone wearing a burka as their own humiliation, as being brutally excluded, rejected from a social link.
This brings us to the true enigma: why does the encounter with a face covered by burka trigger such anxiety? Is it, then, that a face covered by burka is no longer the Levinasian face, the Otherness from which the unconditional ethical call emanates? But what if the case is the opposite one? From a Freudian perspective, face is the ultimate mask that conceals the horror of the Neighbor-Thing: face is what makes the Neighbor le semblable, a fellow-man with whom we can identify and empathize. (Not to mention the fact that, today, many faces are surgically changed and thus deprived of the last vestiges of natural authenticity.) This, then, is why a covered face causes such anxiety: because it confronts us directly with the abyss of the Other-Thing, with the Neighbor in its uncanny dimension. The very covering-up of the face obliterates a protective shield, so that the Other-Thing stares at us directly (recall that burka has a narrow slip for the eyes: we don’t see the eyes, but we know there is a gaze there). Alphonse Allais presented his own version of Salome’s dance of seven veils: when Salome is completely naked, Herod shouts “Go on! On!”, expecting her to take off also the veil of her skin. We should imagine something similar with burka: the opposite of a woman taking off her burka and revealing her natural face. What if we go a step further and imagine a woman “taking off” the skin of her face itself, so that what we see beneath her face is precisely an anonymous dark smooth burka-like surface with a narrow slit for the gaze? “Love thy neighbor!” means, at its most radical, precisely the impossible=real love for this de-subjectivized subject, for this monstrous dark blot cut with a slit/gaze… This is why, in the psychoanalytic treatment, the patient is not sitting face to face to the analyst: they both stare at a third point, since it is only this suspension of the face which opens up the space for the proper dimension of the Neighbor. And therein also resides the limit of the well-known critico-ideological topic of the society of total control where we are all the time tracked and recorded – what eludes the eye of the camera is not some intimate secret but the gaze itself, the object-gaze as the crack/stain in the Other.
Slavoj Žižek’s new book Living in the End Times is available from http://zizek.us/books/
The Two Types of Fear of the Burka by Slavoj Žizek
THE TWO TYPES OF FEAR OF THE BURKA
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK,
The French parliament recently adopted the law prohibiting the public wearing of burka and its Arab equivalent, the niqab, which cover the woman’s face, except for a small slit for the eyes. The curious thing that cannot but strike the eye in the public debates about this topic is the ambiguity of the critique of burka: it moves at two levels. First, it is presented as the defense of the dignity and freedom of the oppressed Muslim women – one cannot accept that, in a secular France, a group of women has to live a hidden life secluded from the public space, and subordinated to brutal patriarchal authority, etc. However, the argument then as a rule shifts towards the anxieties of the non-Muslim French people themselves: faces covered by burka do not fit the coordinates of the French culture and identity, they “intimidate and alienate non-Muslims”… Some French women even used the argument that they experience someone wearing a burka as their own humiliation, as being brutally excluded, rejected from a social link.
This brings us to the true enigma: why does the encounter with a face covered by burka trigger such anxiety? Is it, then, that a face covered by burka is no longer the Levinasian face, the Otherness from which the unconditional ethical call emanates? But what if the case is the opposite one? From a Freudian perspective, face is the ultimate mask that conceals the horror of the Neighbor-Thing: face is what makes the Neighbor le semblable, a fellow-man with whom we can identify and empathize. (Not to mention the fact that, today, many faces are surgically changed and thus deprived of the last vestiges of natural authenticity.) This, then, is why a covered face causes such anxiety: because it confronts us directly with the abyss of the Other-Thing, with the Neighbor in its uncanny dimension. The very covering-up of the face obliterates a protective shield, so that the Other-Thing stares at us directly (recall that burka has a narrow slip for the eyes: we don’t see the eyes, but we know there is a gaze there). Alphonse Allais presented his own version of Salome’s dance of seven veils: when Salome is completely naked, Herod shouts “Go on! On!”, expecting her to take off also the veil of her skin. We should imagine something similar with burka: the opposite of a woman taking off her burka and revealing her natural face. What if we go a step further and imagine a woman “taking off” the skin of her face itself, so that what we see beneath her face is precisely an anonymous dark smooth burka-like surface with a narrow slit for the gaze? “Love thy neighbor!” means, at its most radical, precisely the impossible=real love for this de-subjectivized subject, for this monstrous dark blot cut with a slit/gaze… This is why, in the psychoanalytic treatment, the patient is not sitting face to face to the analyst: they both stare at a third point, since it is only this suspension of the face which opens up the space for the proper dimension of the Neighbor. And therein also resides the limit of the well-known critico-ideological topic of the society of total control where we are all the time tracked and recorded – what eludes the eye of the camera is not some intimate secret but the gaze itself, the object-gaze as the crack/stain in the Other.
Slavoj Žižek’s new book Living in the End Times is available from http://zizek.us/books/