The uncanny Muslim
8 September 2024
In this article, I analyse Orientalism through a psychoanalytic lens, an approach absent from Edward Said’s 1978 classic. Psychoanalysis reveals that Orientalism, rather than a random set of stereotypes, has a coherent logic rooted in the unconscious.
To illustrate the value of this approach, I examine the figure of the vampire. While commonly seen as originating in Slavic or Greek folk religion, evidence suggests that vampire myths existed in the Ottoman Empire much earlier. These stories spread from Muslim to Christian regions, with the vampire’s Islamic origins later repressed but resurfacing in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), which is pervaded by the British fear of “reverse colonization.”
A horrible punishment from the East
In 1907 Freud began treating a new patient who complained of certain “obsessional thoughts.” These thoughts involved the idea that “an especially horrible punishment used in the East” was being inflicted upon both a “lady whom he admired” and his father. This idea had first come to the patient, whose name was Ernst Lanzer, while he was on manoeuvres with the army the previous year. It was during these manoeuvres that “a captain with a Czech name” who “was obviously fond of cruelty” told Lanzer about a torture technique “used in the East.”
At first, Lanzer was extremely reluctant to say what this “ghastly punishment” involved. He got up from the sofa, and begged Freud to “spare him the recital of the details.” Freud assured him that, while he “had no taste whatever for cruelty, and certainly had no desire to torment him,” he could not grant Lanzer his request. “The overcoming of resistances,” Freud explained, “was a law of the treatment, and on no consideration could it be dispensed with.” Freud went on to say that he would do all he could, nevertheless, to guess the details if Lanzer would just give him some hints, and Freud hazarded the following guess: “Was he perhaps thinking of impalement?”
“No, not that,” replied Lanzer; “the criminal was tied up” (he did not specify in what position) and then “a pot was turned upside down on his buttocks.” Lanzer did not manage to finish the next sentence: “Some rats were put into the pot and they … bored their way in…” At this point, Lanzer broke off and got up from the couch, “showing every sign of horror and resistance.” Freud completed the sentence for him in his usual, matter of fact way; “into his anus.”
In order to protect his patient’s anonymity, Freud would later refer to Lanzer as “the Rat Man” when he wrote up the case in his Notes Upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis (Freud, 1909). This was the second of six case histories that Freud published, and the first in which he claimed that the patient had been cured by psychoanalysis. It has been the subject of countless essays, talks, and books. What I want to focus on here, however, is simply one detail — namely, the fact that when Lanzer mentions the “especially horrible punishment used in the East,” Freud immediately suspects that he is referring to impalement. It would appear, not just that Freud thought of impalement as an “Eastern” kind of punishment, but also that he had in mind one particular figure associated with “the East” — the notorious figure of Vlad the Impaler (Romanian: Vlad Țepeș). Vlad III, to give him his proper title, was Voivode of Wallachia in the fifteenth century, and he is still considered to this day as one of the most important figures in Romanian history.
As his nickname suggests, Vlad was rather fond of impaling his enemies. While fighting the Transylvanian Saxons, for example, he impaled many of the Saxon villagers. When the Ottoman Sultan, Mehmed II, ordered Vlad to pay homage to him, Vlad had the Sultan’s two envoys impaled. The use of impalement as a method of execution was certainly not unique to Vlad and was practised by many other rulers in the region at the time, the purpose being to make the execution as public and gruesome as possible as a means of deterring others from challenging the ruler’s authority.
There is, by the way, no evidence to suggest that Vlad ever targeted his victims’ rectums. The idea that he impaled people specifically through their anus does not appear in any contemporary sources. While Vlad was certainly a violent and ruthless ruler, the idea that he specifically impaled his victims through the anus is almost certainly a later invention by Christian polemicists, many of whom, despite claiming that anal sex was especially horrifying and attributing this vice primarily to Muslims, seem to have been particularly fascinated by it, to judge from the amount of ink they spilt on the topic. In this respect, these Christian writers resemble the Rat Man who, as Freud observed, exhibited a kind of “horror at a pleasure of his own of which he himself was unaware.”
Vlad also had, of course, another more famous nickname. Contemporary diplomatic reports and popular stories refer to him as Dracula, Dracuglia, or Drakula. He himself signed letters as Dragulya or Drakulya. This nickname had its origin in the sobriquet of his father, Vlad Dracul (which means “Vlad the Dragon” in medieval Romanian), who received it after he became a member of the Order of the Dragon (Latin: Societas Draconistarum, literally “Society of the Dragonists”), a monarchical chivalric order. Dracula is the Slavonic genitive form of Dracul, meaning “son of Dracul” or “son of the Dragon.”
There is no evidence that Vlad Dracula was ever considered a vampire by his contemporaries. The first book to make a connection between Dracula and vampirism was, in fact, Bram Stoker’s eponymous novel, which was only published in 1897. Nor are there any contemporary sources that describe Vlad ever as drinking blood. The closest we get is a few lines by the German poet and chronicler Michael Beheim (1416 — c.1472) in which he accuses Dracula of washing his hands in human blood:
It was his pleasure and gave him courage
To see human blood flow
And it was his custom
To wash his hands in it
As it was brought to the table
I suppose Dracula might possibly have consumed the blood if, let’s say, he had licked his fingers after dipping them in it, but there is no explicit statement to that effect in Beheim’s poem (Dickens & Miller, 2003). It is quite a leap, then, to cite this poem as evidence that Dracula would have the blood of his victims “gathered in bowls on his table” and then “take bread, dip it in the blood, and slurp it down,” as Raymond McNally and Radu Florescu fancifully state in their 1972 book, In Search of Dracula (McNally & Florescu, 1972). This wilful misreading of the historical sources is clearly coloured by much later ideas.
The crucial point about this story, as Dickens and Miller point out, is its allusion to the death of Jesus. “The image presented in Beheim is much more of an echo of Pontius Pilate: washing his hands and all that this implies aligns Vlad with the enemies of Christ” (Dickens & Miller, 2003). Beheim’s poem, from which these lines come, and which is entitled Story of a Despot Called Dracula, Voivode of Wallachia, was allegedly based on his conversation with a Catholic monk who had managed to escape from Vlad’s prison. It is hardly surprising, then, that the poem casts Vlad as an enemy of Christ. The poem also relates, for example, that Vlad had two monks impaled (to assist them to go to heaven) as well as ordering, for good measure, that their donkey be similarly impaled when it began braying after its masters’ death.
Vlad Dracula was, in fact, as much of a Christian as Beheim or his anonymous source, but we can see in Beheim’s poem how already, during Vlad’s own lifetime, a process of Christian mythmaking was transforming him into an infidel, a heathen, a veritable antichrist. And this, as we will see, is what connects the later idea of the vampire with the Christian image of the diabolical Muslim.
The vampiric Muslim
Western historians generally agree that “vampire beliefs are of basically Slavic and Greek origin,” with the first clear vampire cases reported in Silesia in 1591, Bohemia in 1618, and Poland in 1624 (Klaniczay, 1987: 172). In the second half of the seventeenth century more reports emerge from Greek, Bulgarian, Romanian, and Serbian sources. This trickle of cases grows into a veritable flood at the beginning of the eighteenth century in what has been called “the vampire epidemic” in peripheral territories of the Hungarian kingdom such as Transylvania, Banat, and Bačka, all of which now lie within Romania and Serbia (Klaniczay, 1987: 173).
These territories formed the bloody borderlands between the Habsburg and Ottoman empires, and political control over them swung back and forth between the two empires over the course of the Ottoman–Habsburg wars (1526–1791). It is curious, then, that Western historians have rarely, if ever, considered the idea that vampire beliefs may not have been of purely Greek and Slavic origin, but might also have Ottoman roots. For there is, in fact, some compelling evidence for precisely this.
Sometime around 1540, villagers from the provinces of Rumelia arrived at court of the distinguished jurist, Ebussuud Efendi (1490–1574) with reports of something very strange. A member of the local Christian community had risen from his grave and visited his relatives, suggesting they “pay a visit to certain persons.” The following day these Christians died. A few days later the revenant had called on another person, who also died shortly after. Their Muslim neighbours, who saw so many Christians dying in such a way, were frightened and wanted to flee the village, but were unsure whether this course of action was in conformity with the sharia. Efendi issued a fatwa saying that it was not. The fatwa also included advice on what to do with the corpse of the Christian revenant:
The solution of the problem is as follows: The day the event takes place, a stake, well stripped, must be driven into the body until the heart; the problem is therefore expected to be eliminated. If not, and if redness appears on the face of the corpse, the head must be severed and placed next to the feet. Some sources inform us that this method is efficient. If the corpse, after having been reburied, is found in the same situation, slaughter it and place it at the same position. If, after the application of all these methods, the problem remains unsolved, take the corpse out and burn it with fire. At the time of our well-guided predecessors, the practice of burning with fire was many times reiterated.
The fatwa was still being quoted two centuries later, when the inhabitants from Edirne — then also in Rumelia — complained before the court that the signs of cadi had appeared on the grave of a woman called Cennet, who had died three months before:
Fear overwhelmed all of them; the judge assigned a deputy, and they visited the woman’s grave. Four women examined the deceased and observed that her cadaver was not rotten, and her face was red, and informed that such particularities were signs of the cadi.
The judge ordered that the same procedure prescribed by Ebussuud Efendi be followed — driving a stake through the heart, severing the head, and so on.
It is notable that all these cases come from Rumelia (Ottoman Turkish: روم ايلى, romanized: Rum İli, transl. Land of the Romans; Turkish: Rumeli; Greek: Ρωμυλία)— the Ottoman province in South-eastern Europe which roughly corresponds to what we now call the Balkans (see map below). In addition, the first cases predate all reports of vampires by Christian scholars in Silesia, Bohemia, Poland, and Hungary. This strongly suggests that vampire beliefs originated in the Islamic world, not in Christendom.
It is also noteworthy that in the earliest vampire stories, the vampires are Christians who lived in Muslim lands. There is no mention, in these early cases, of vampires fearing crucifixes or holy water — these features of the vampire myth only emerge later, when the stories spread to Christian lands, or when the territories of Rumelia cease to be part of the Ottoman empire and become Christian lands. It is not hard to see in these later developments a gradual transformation of what was originally a Muslim story about Christian undead into a Christian story about Muslim undead. Not only do these later stories portray vampires as hating crucifixes, but they also acquire the following features:
- Vampires come out at night: Can we detect here, perhaps, a veiled reference to the Muslim fast of Ramadan? Just as vampires sleep all day and emerge only when the sun goes down, so do Muslims during the fast — or so it can seem to outsiders. In Islam, the darkness of night (and night vigil) is associated with prayer and piety. In the Christian version of the vampire story, we see this element of Islamic spirituality cast as satanic.
- The Black Cape: Christians travelling in Muslim lands often commented on the black capes they saw worn by both men and women (in a Turkish context, see the capes worn in the Mevlevi Order for example). Indeed, travellers sometimes described Muslims as bat-like on this basis. The Sufi murid is often described as “dead” and, indeed, as “living dead” and wears a black cape (hirka) to signify the tomb. The distinctive Mevlevi fez (kulah or sikke) signifies the tombstone, as Rumi and other Mevlevi authorities tell us. The gnostic elements in vampire mythology point to a specifically Sufi influence here.
My thesis is, then, that when the Ottomans conquered the Balkans in the fifteenth century, they brought with them, in addition to Islam, their folklore, including the strange stories about Christians rising from their graves which had been reported to Ebussuud Efendi around 1540. There, in that ethnic cauldron, figures such as the Arabian ghoul, the Persian jadi (cadi) and the Turkish obur combined with local myths to give rise to the new figure of the vampire. As the stories spread to Christian Hungary, and later when the territories of Rumelia ceased to be part of the Ottoman empire, Muslim stories about Christian undead were transmuted into Christian stories about Muslim undead. Soon, however, the Muslim identity of these revenants was effaced, repressed, buried — just as the Islamic origins of many other cultural products were similarly forgotten as Christians rewrote their history to make it look as if they owed nothing to their hated enemies.
The Islamic origins of the vampire myth do not remain buried forever, though. They return to haunt the Christian version of the vampire story in later centuries, most spectacularly in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), the most famous vampire of all.
Was Dracula a Muslim?
Stoker does not mention Islam or Muslims even once in his celebrated novel — which is precisely what we should expect if the Islamic origins of the vampire myth have been repressed in Christian versions, as I am suggesting. The novel is, however, replete with clues that hint at this forgotten secret. Consider the opening paragraph, for example:
3 May. Bistritz. — Left Munich at 8:35 P. M., on 1st May, arriving at Vienna early next morning; should have arrived at 6:46, but train was an hour late. Buda-Pesth seems a wonderful place, from the glimpse which I got of it from the train and the little I could walk through the streets. I feared to go very far from the station, as we had arrived late and would start as near the correct time as possible. The impression I had was that we were leaving the West and entering the East; the most western of splendid bridges over the Danube, which is here of noble width and depth, took us among the traditions of Turkish rule.
In the very first lines in the novel, Stoker invokes the traditional Orientalist opposition between East and West and highlights the Turkish cultural milieu that surrounds Count Dracula. The reference, in the first sentence, to the train arriving late, plays on a common Orientalist trope in which Turks, Muslims, and Orientals in general are portrayed as lacking in punctuality. A few paragraphs later, Stoker comments on the clothing worn by the locals, some of whom are dressed “just like the peasants at home,” while others are “very picturesque.” But the “strangest figures” that Jonathan Harker observes are the Slovaks, who are “more barbarian than the rest.” They wear “enormous heavy leather belts, nearly a foot wide, all studded over with brass nails,” and sport “long black hair and heavy black moustaches.” Harker sums them up in the following words: “On the stage they would be set down at once as some old Oriental band of brigands.”
This highly significant phrase anticipates Said’s remark that “the Orient is the stage on which the whole East is confined. On this stage will appear figures whose role it is to represent the larger whole from which they emanate” (Said, 1978: 63). Slovakia is today considered to be part of Europe, and therefore a Western country, but for much of the past things were not so clear. In the Battle of Vienna (1683) for example, Thököly’s kuruc rebels from what is now Slovakia fought alongside the Turks, against the Austrians and Poles. Like the other territories on the borderlands between the Habsburg and Ottoman empires, Slovakia had an ambivalent, in-between status, hovering uncomfortably betwixt East and West.
The structure of Orientalism
Western representations of “Orientals” in general, and Muslims in particular, as fundamentally strange, mysterious, and inherently non-Western, have a long and venerable history that was famously deconstructed by Edward Said in his seminal work, Orientalism (Said, 1978). My aim in this talk is not to rehearse Said’s analysis, which many of you are probably familiar with, but to expand it. For psychoanalysis is noticeably absent from the list of perspectives that Said suggests can be brought to bear on Orientalism.
This is a shame, because, as I hope to show, psychoanalysis can make sense of what may otherwise appear to be a rather senseless collection of stereotypes. Far from being a random, irrational collection of prejudices, Orientalism has a logic to it. It is not just a discourse, as Said argued, but a coherent discourse. Its coherence, however, is not immediately apparent, for the logic that underpins it is the logic of the unconscious. The tropes of orientalist discourse are bound together by a libidinal economy, and it takes a psychoanalytic perspective to recognise this.
Let us remind ourselves, briefly, of the structure of Orientalist discourse. Said explains that Orientalism is structured as a series of binary oppositions in which one term predominates over the other. If we put the dominant terms in one column and the subordinate term in another, we end up with something like this:
Said’s book is full of examples in which these binary oppositions are clearly visible. They are, as it were, the manifest content of Orientalism. It does not require any psychoanalytic interpretation to reveal them. Psychoanalysis makes its contribution to this field by showing how and why these distinctions are maintained in the face of countervailing evidence. The Orientalist scholars were constantly confronted with texts, people, and events which undermined and destabilised the binary oppositions that structured their discourse, and yet they never once doubted these axioms. They showed a remarkable creativity in absorbing anomalies into their framework and transforming them from apparent refutations of their prejudices into evidence for them. Psychoanalysis can throw light on this powerful “will to ignorance,” as Nietzsche called it, and trace its causes and effects.
Islam: Symbolic, Imaginary, and Real
In order to analyse Orientalist discourse from a Lacanian perspective, we must first distinguish between three Islams. None of these Islams are indigenous concepts produced by Muslims for their own purposes. On the contrary, all three are produced by the West to serve its own interests.
- Symbolic Islam: This is Islam as the West’s big Other. It is the network of signifiers that both structure and are produced by Orientalism.
- Imaginary Islam: This is the panoply of images and tropes about Islam that circulate in the Western imagination. It is the Islam of Western poets and Western novelists, but also of Western political theorists and Western imperial administrators.
- Real Islam: This is the Islam that the West does not want to know about, the objet petit a which must be foreclosed in order for the West to maintain an image of itself as a complete, coherent whole, and to establish the set of binary oppositions that constitutes Symbolic Islam. It manifests itself in the return of the real, such as in the Iran hostage crisis of 1980–81 and the attacks on New York in September 2001.
One way to develop a Lacanian analysis of Orientalism is by interpolating these terms into Lacan’s famous schema L as follows:
The ego (a) is the Western ego, which is both the Christian ego and the Cartesian ego. The little other (a’) here is not the objet petit a. Lacan had not yet formulated this concept when he first produced schema L in 1955, and thus it does not figure explicitly in this schema. With its introduction in Lacan’s later work, both diagonals of schema L will “become troubled and presage a disaster” as they are “haunted by the intrusion of the real” (Dolar, 1996: 8). In the schema L as it first appears in 1955, the symbol a’ designates something purely imaginary: the specular image. It is here that we can locate Imaginary Islam, or the Imaginary Muslim, for it is the mirror image of Christianity.
The Christian ego misrepresents Islam by viewing it through a Christian lens; therefore, there has to be an Islamic equivalent for everything that Christianity sees in itself. Since the central revelation in Christianity is Christ himself, the Logos, the Word made Flesh, it follows that Muhammad must play a similar role in Imaginary Islam. In fact, the closest analogy in Islam to the role that Christ plays in Christianity is not Muhammad, but the Quran. However, the Christian ego necessarily misrepresents Islam when it sees in it nothing but its own reflection and assumes that Muhammad is to Islam what Christ is to Christianity. Hence the insulting name that Christians gave to Islam when they first started writing about it: Mohammadenism.
But if Muhammad is represented as a Christ-like figure in the Christian imaginary, he can only be an impostor, for the real Christ has already come and gone (and will come again). Hence in the Orientalist imagination, Muhammad is Christ’s evil twin, the antichrist, a false prophet. And this is, indeed, the trope that recurs most frequently in Christian writings about Islam from the very beginning right up to the present day: Muhammad the Impostor.
At S we can locate the Western Subject, which is both the Christian Subject and the Cartesian Subject. And at A we can locate Symbolic Islam as the Big Other for the Western Subject. Following Lacan’s famous statement that “the unconscious is the discourse of the Other” we can locate the Western unconscious on the diagonal line pointing up from A to S. This line is solid up to the point where it intersects with the imaginary relation between the ego and the specular image. The rest of the line is dotted, indicating that the discourse of the Other is blocked to a certain extent by the imaginary. Whatever manages to slip past this barrier reaches the Subject only in an interrupted and inverted form — as symptoms, dreams, slips of the tongue, and so on. This is the return of the repressed, the Islam that comes to haunt the nightmares of the West.
This analysis suggests that we should not expect to see Islam represented explicitly in the manifest content of Western nightmares. When Islam is condemned by Western pundits as a “backward religion,” for example, there is no censorship disguising the prejudice, no need to look for a hidden or repressed hatred of Islam; it is there for everyone to see. It is relatively superficial, though no less harmful for that. To remain at this level of criticism, however, as Edward Said does, is to miss a far deeper and more extensive kind of Islamophobia — an unconscious Islamophobia that pervades and structures the very notion of the West itself. The symptoms of this unconscious Islamophobia appear, to the naïve observer, to have nothing to do with Islam. It is only when we listen to them with a psychoanalytic ear that we can discern the discourse of the Islamic Other.
The Eastern Question
Having briefly looked at the structure of Orientalist discourse from a Lacanian perspective, let us now return to Dracula. For British readers of 1897, Transylvania (the location of Castle Dracula) would have evoked, first and foremost, the vexed “Eastern Question” that dominated British foreign policy at the time. The Eastern Question encompassed a dizzying multiplicity of interrelated elements: Ottoman military defeats, Ottoman institutional insolvency, the ongoing Ottoman political and economic modernization programme, the rise of ethno-religious nationalism in the Balkans, and Great Power rivalries.
Britain was nearing the high watermark of its global hegemony at the time, but there were already premonitions of subsequent decline. The “imperial gaze” that structures the vision of Slovaks, Serbs, and other inhabitants of the Balkans as little better than Muslims (and sometimes even worse) is beset by repressed fears about the fragility of empire (Kaplan, 1997). In Lacanian terms, the observer’s feeling that they are in control of the process of observation is haunted by the sense that the object of their observation is looking back at them (Felluga, 2011). The imperialist is terrified by the possibility that the colonial situation may come to be inverted — the horrific fantasy of “reverse colonisation” (Burns, 2017).
The threat of reverse colonisation is made explicit in Dracula when Harker discovers that the Count has made an exhaustive study of British culture and geography. In the Count’s library, Harker finds “a vast number of English books, whole shelves full of them, and bound volumes of magazines and newspapers.” A table in the library is “littered with English magazines and newspapers,” and books “of the most varied kind — history, geography, politics, political economy, botany, geology, law — all relating to England and English life and customs and manners.” Referring to these books, the Count tells Harker: “Through them I have come to know your great England.” This is the perfect inversion of the Orientalist scholarship which Said describes, which functions as a way for the Westerner to “know” –the East, and thereby to colonise it. As Stephen Arata points out: “When Harker arrives at the end of his journey East, he finds, not some epitome of irrationality, but a most accomplished Occidentalist” (Arata, 1990: 637).
It is not an exaggeration to say, as Arata does, that Dracula is the most “Western” character in the novel: “no one is more rational, more intelligent, more organised, or even more punctual than the Count” (Arata, 1990: 637). This horrific inversion of Orientalist discourse reflects not just the apparently noble quest for knowledge which the Orientalist claims to motivate his research, but also its (usually hidden) dark side. For Dracula’s obsessive preoccupation with English culture is, of course, not motivated purely by a disinterested desire for knowledge for its own sake but is driven by his “sinister plan to invade and exploit Britain and her people” (Arata, 1990: 638). It is hardly surprising, then, that when Harker looks for Dracula’s reflection in the mirror, he sees only himself.
The most shocking thing about the Count, however, is not that he impersonates Harker in so many ways, but that he does it so well. Edward Said notes that a common trope of Orientalist discourse is that, while the Westerner may come to be so knowledgeable about the East that he can pass for an Easterner (as Richard Burton does, for example, when he pretends to be Muslim so he can visit Mecca), the Easterner is incapable of passing as a Westerner. Whenever he tries to, he is caught out by his poor accent or some embarrassing failure to master Western manners. Men of a superior culture may mimic those of an inferior one, but not vice versa; imitation is a one-way street. Count Dracula gives the lie to this conceit. He is so convincing as an Englishman that, when in London, he is just “like the rest” of the people walking the streets. He does not attract attention; “no man stops” if he sees him on the street or notices an accent when he talks. Nobody will ever laugh at him, or snigger “Ha, ha! a stranger!”
The fantasy of reverse colonisation is also evident in the way the Count travels to England — as an illegal immigrant who crosses the Channel as a secret stowaway in a boat. This image anticipates the fears of English nationalists today, who paint horrifying pictures of hordes of Muslims crossing the channel and entering the country illegally, where they threaten to turn the nation into a Muslim land, a mere province of the global caliphate.
Once in England, Dracula drains his victims of their English blood, effectively deracinating them (Stevenson, p.144). In exchange, they are transformed into vampires themselves, and “they receive a new racial identity, one that marks them as literally ‘Other’” (Arata, 1990: 630). The invasion is both political and biological; Dracula threatens to colonise the body politic precisely because he can colonise the physical body. He does not destroy the bodies of his victims; he appropriates and transforms them, and in doing so he “imperils not simply his victims’ personal identities, but also their cultural, political, and racial selves” (Arata, 1990: 630). After Dracula bites Lucy, for example, she ceases to be a prim and demure English lady and develops the monstruous sexual appetite that Orientalist discourse assigns to Eastern women, especially Muslims. Hence the necessity of “re-racinating” her by reinfusing her with “proper” blood — primarily English, then Dutch, and last of all American (as Arata points out, Van Helsing’s “old, Teutonic blood,” while not English, is still preferable to Morris’s “young, American blood”).
Lurking underneath this fantasy is the fear that the English are already in a state of terminal decline, subject to a process of racial enervation. Jonathan Harker is repeatedly described as “pale,” “weak-looking,” and “exhausted,” and the other male British characters are not much manlier, and none of them has fathered a child. Dracula, on the other hand, is animated, vibrant, and robust. Here, as Arata notes, Stoker departs significantly from his literary predecessors; “unlike Polidori and Le Fanu, for instance, who depict their vampires as wan and enervated, Stoker makes Dracula vigorous and energetic” (Arata p.628). He is also remarkably virile and fecund, capable of producing literally endless numbers of offspring. It is this fecundity that so terrifies Jonathan Harker — the thought that “perhaps, for centuries to come he might, amongst its [i.e. London’s] teeming millions, satiate his lust for blood, and create a new and ever-widening circle of semi-demons to batten on the helpless.” It is not a great leap to see this horde of “semi-demons” as Muslims, the “blinded race” who, according to the Scottish historian and novelist Walter Scott, “had their descent from the foul fiend” (Scott, 1825).
The Eastern European: between two worlds
The fantasy of reverse colonisation is nightmarish on one level, but on another level, it is strangely reassuring, for while it inverts the binary oppositions that structure Orientalist discourse, it does not dismantle them. In Lacanian terms, it remains at the level of the Imaginary; it is Occidentalism as a mirror image of Orientalism. Count Dracula is, in this sense, simply the alter ego of Jonathan Harker, his uncanny double.
But there is something far more threatening about Dracula than this specular image — something that is hinted at by the fact that, unlike Harker, he does not have a reflection in the mirror. This is his in-between status — he is both Western and Eastern, and neither. He is that curious paradox — an “Eastern European” — which implies that the border between East and West is not identical with the boundaries of Europe but runs through the heart of Europe itself. This notion destabilises the whole set of binary oppositions that underpin Orientalism and points to the contradictions, lacunae, and aporias that threaten to undermine the very notion of Western identity and reveal its incoherence. That is why “the strangest figures” that Jonathan Harker observes in the novel are not, in fact, the various vampires he comes across, but the Slovaks, with their weird apparel that seems to be neither Western nor Eastern, but a hybrid that combines elements of both.
In the same way, the vampire is neither a Christian nor a Muslim, but carries traces of both. Like a Christian, but unlike Muslims, he drinks blood in a kind of parody of the Eucharist, and this gives him eternal life. He has the incorruptible body of the Christian saint — another kind of “special dead” — and hates silver, the sacred metal of Islam. And like a Muslim, he hates the crucifix and holy water, wears a black cape, and comes out at night to eat. Last but not least, he comes from Transylvania and the Balkans, territories where the Christian and Muslim worlds overlap and hybridize in weird and uncanny ways. He is both a “European Muslim” and an “Eastern Christian” — figures that are equally abhorred by the Latin Christendom of Medieval Western Europe, and the Protestant sects which emerged from this culture in the Reformation.
In order to maintain its apparent stability and its claim to logical coherence, Orientalist discourse must foreclose the possibility of such confusing hybridity. In Lacanian terms, this hybrid is the objet petit a — and the discursive field of Orientalism can only create its necessary illusion of coherence by excluding this object, the “surplus meaning” that it cannot embrace. But this object does not go away quietly; it continually returns to haunt the subject who is constituted by this discursive field, the transcendental Western subject of Orientalist discourse. This is not just the “return of the repressed” (Freud); it also the “return of the real” (Lacan). It is the eruption of the East in the midst of the West, of the Muslim in the soul of Christendom, of the premodern in the heart of the modern.
It is the presence of the objet petit a that lies at the heart of the experience of the uncanny. Freud, it may be recalled, defined the uncanny as “that class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar” (Freud, 1919: 220). The German word unheimlich brings this out very clearly, since it is obviously the opposite of heimlich, which means “familiar” or “homely.” The English word that Ernest Jones uses in his translation, uncanny, was an apt choice, for its etymology lies in the sixteenth century Scots word, can, “to know.” It thus points to the unknown and the unknowable, that which escapes our capacity to comprehend and make sense of the world. The French language, however, doesn’t possess anything similar, and French translations of Freud fell back on the cumbersome phase l’inquiétante étrangeté, so Lacan had to invent a new word: extimité — adding the prefix ex (from exterieur, “exterior”) to intimité (“intimacy”). This neologism, which may be rendered extimacy in English, neatly expresses the way in which psychoanalysis problematises the opposition between inside and outside, between container and contained (see S7, 139).
As Mladen Dolar points out, one could say that traditional Western metaphysics consists of a constant effort to draw a clear line between the interior and the exterior. All the great binary oppositions of Western metaphysics (pairs such as essence/appearance, mind/body, subject/object, etc), as well as the binary oppositions which structure the discourse of Orientalism (which are ultimately grounded in Western metaphysics), can be seen as just so many transcriptions of the division between interiority and exteriority, and as such they must repeat the same attempt to draw a hard and fast line between their terms. In coining the term extimité, Lacan highlighted the ultimate failure of all these attempts, the inevitable blurring of the dividing line. Extimité signals that the most intimate interiority always coincides with the exterior, in a way that becomes threatening, provoking horror and anxiety: “the extimate is simultaneously the intimate kernel and the foreign body; in a word, it is unheimlich.” (Dolar, 1991: 6).
For Lacan, then, the uncanny is “the eruption of the real in the midst of familiar reality; it provokes a hesitation and an uncertainty and the familiar breaks down” (Dolar, 1991: 21). This is why, for Lacan, the dimension of the uncanny is located at the very core of psychoanalysis: “it is the dimension where all the concepts of psychoanalysis come together, where its diverse lines of argument form a knot” (Dolar, 1991: 5). You might not get this impression from a superficial reading Freud’s little essay on the topic, published in 1919. While very suggestive and evocative, the essay is also rather fragmented and unsatisfactory. It is only by reading it from a Lacanian perspective that we can see the central position that the uncanny occupies in Freud’s work and understand how it “provides a clue to the basic project of psychoanalysis” (Dolar, 1991: 5).
Reanimating the Muslim corpse: Reagan’s Monster
Another way in which the vampire embodies the uncanny is by virtue of his status as “undead.” He is neither alive nor dead but bears traces of both life and death. Another famous monster in Western fiction who stands in the no man’s land between life and death (or, as Lacan would say, “between the two deaths”) is, of course, the nameless monster created by Doctor Frankenstein. And, like Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster is both a product of Orientalism and a figure that comes to haunt it.
Edward Said highlighted the way that Orientalism constructs “the East” from fragments of Oriental texts. Since Oriental literary productions are not written with enough “taste and critical spirit,” they are “essentially alien to the European” and they therefore do not merit publication except as extracts, citations, and textual fragments (Said, p.128). For such publication, a special genre is required: the chrestomathy, in which a variety of extracts from Oriental texts is pieced together by a diligent Western scholar. Just as Victor Frankenstein assembles his monster by stitching together a variety of body parts, the Orientalist scholar constructs “the East” by piecing together a variety of literary extracts. The fragments of text are first decontextualised, purged of their significance to Muslim readers, and recontextualised, endowed with a new meaning by the Orientalist, who breathes new life into the corpus.
It is by this form of alchemy that the Orientalist reanimates the dead body of Islamic culture or reassembles the fossils of a dead Oriental language. As Said comments:
To reconstruct a dead or lost Oriental language meant ultimately to reconstruct a dead or neglected Orient” (Said p.123).
Nobody illustrates this better than Chateaubriand, who “puts the whole idea in the Romantic redemptive terms of a Christian mission to revive a dead world, to quicken in it a sense of its own potential, one which only a European can discern underneath a lifeless and degenerate surface” (Said, p.172). If the Oriental is, as Kinglake wrote, “a thing dead and dry — a mental mummy” (Said, p.193), it is up to the Orientalist to bring this mummy back to life by infusing it with the vivifying spirit of the West:
If the Orient is to live at all, now that its gods have fled, it must be through his [the Orientalist’s] fertile efforts. (Said p.182)
But if the Islamic world was, at the time when Chateaubriand and Kinglake were writing, if not dead, then at least moribund — if the Ottoman empire was then “the sick man of Europe” — the Islamic revival, which began in the 1970s and continues to this day, is in large part a monster of the West’s own making. One is reminded of Marx’s famous remark, in the Communist Manifesto, that the powers of technology unleashed by capitalism now threaten the existence of capitalism itself:
Modern bourgeois society, a society that has conjured up such mighty means of production and exchange, is like the sorcerer who can no longer control the powers of the underworld that he has called up by his spells. (Marx, Communist Manifesto)
In his use of magical and occult metaphors, Marx “evokes the spirits of that dark medieval past that our modern bourgeoisie is supposed to have buried” (Berman, p.101). Just as the members of the bourgeoisie, while presenting themselves as rational children of the Enlightenment, cannot help conjuring up the dark forces of technology that will ultimately destroy them, so also the West, while presenting itself as secular and liberal, ends up by summoning the demon of “fundamentalist Islam.” Like Goethe’s Faust and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, by striving to expand human powers through science and rationality, the West has unleashed hellish powers that erupt irrationally, beyond human control, with horrifying results. Paraphrasing Marx, we might say that a spectre is now haunting America — the spectre of Islam.
And just as “the sorcerer’s apprentices, the members of the revolutionary proletariat, are bound to wrest control of modern productive forces from the Faustian-Frankensteinian bourgeoisie” (Bergman, p.102), so those other sorcerer’s apprentices, Al Qaeda, have literally wrested control of modern mass transport systems (aircraft and underground trains) and transformed these sources of wonder into volatile, explosive social forces. If Shelley’s Creature is “Frankenstein’s Monster,” the Islamic Terrorist is “Reagan’s Monster.”
The revenge of God
It is no accident that Frankenstein is set at the time of the French Revolution, which was already labelled as “monstrous” by Burke. In the terrifying birth of Frankenstein’s creature, we can see the birth of the proletariat and the horror that it evokes among the bourgeoisie. And indeed, conservative discourse very soon adopted the monster as a metaphor for revolutionary upheavals, a personification of the masses, “the rule of the mob” (Dolar, 1991: 19).
The same sense of the uncanny — of being overwhelmed by the proletariat, of having the rug pulled from under one’s feet, of losing one’s sense of balance — was also captured, famously, by Marx and Engels in the opening pages of The Communist Manifesto (1848):
All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned… (Marx & Engels, 1848: 16)
As Marshall Berman comments, “Marx is moving in the dimension of time” in this passage; he is working to evoke “an ongoing historical drama and trauma” — namely, the Springtime of the Peoples, the wave of revolutions that swept Europe throughout 1848 and 1849. This remains the most widespread revolutionary wave in European history to date. As with the French Revolution that had taken place sixty years before, the old religious justifications for monarchy — the divine right of kings and so on — were swept away, and “all that is holy” was “profaned.” But Marx is not merely echoing the shocked tones of the bourgeoisie here; in calling attention to the fact that the aura of holiness, which previously hung over some of Europe’s most venerable institutions, has suddenly vanished, Marx is also pointing to an absence that prevents us from fully understanding the revolutionary moment (Berman, 1982: 89).
The tide of Enlightenment rationalism which bears the revolutions forward is constituted by a primary act of repression, an original exclusion — the erasure of the sacred, the holy, the supernatural. The premodern world of medieval Europe, the world of Latin Christendom, was an enchanted world. This was a world of spirits, of course, both good and bad: not just God, but also his saints, and on the other side, not just Satan, but a whole host of demons, threatening from all sides. There were “demons and spirits of the forest, and wilderness,” as well as more familiar spirits “which can threaten us in our everyday lives” (Taylor, 2007: 32). People prayed to the saints and visited their shrines in the hope of a cure, or in thanks for a cure already prayed for and granted, or for rescue from extreme danger, among many other things.
The Protestant Reformation paved the way for the Enlightenment by exorcising these spirits, doing away with the cult of the saints and (less successfully) fighting against the belief in demons and witchcraft. Protestants such as Luther and Calvin also rejected the Catholic doctrine of purgatory. In doing so, they pushed the spirits of the dead beyond the reach of the world of the living. The notion of purgatory had enabled Medieval Christendom to maintain close and reciprocal bonds between the living and the dead, and thus licensed many popular superstitions (even while the clergy denounced them). One of the effects of the Reformation was to break this relation. There was no longer any theological room for ghosts, though of course popular practice remained very distant from scholarly theory. This was even more the case in England than in other Protestant countries on the continent. Despite repeated clerical denunciations, ghost stories spread like wildfire in England throughout the seventeenth century. In the end, the preachers gave up denying the existence of ghosts and, in a remarkable about turn, began to proclaim their existence — mainly in response to attacks from atheists and freethinkers. Compared to these diabolical ideas, the theological inconsistency of the uneducated laity was clearly the lesser of two evils.
From the perspective of European modernity, which is as much the child of the Reformation as it is the child of the Enlightenment, ghost stories are merely quaint. Far stranger than all these spirits and saints, is the fact that in Medieval Christendom power resided, not just in these spiritual agents, but also in things — in objects such as relics, holy water, and the consecrated host. And not just the power of God; evil too could inhere in objects, such as pagan idols, evil books, and cursed trees which brought luck to those who touched them (in Medieval England, the wood of the elder tree was believed to be cursed, since Judas had allegedly hung himself from an elder tree; it was also thought to be a witches’ tree). As Taylor points out, “these objects were loci of spiritual power, which is why they had to be treated with care, and if abused could wreak terrible damage” (Taylor, 2007: 32). We can already see here what appears to us moderns as a perplexing absence of certain boundaries that today seem essential — boundaries between mind and matter, for example, or between subject and object.
The rational world of modernity is predicated on such boundaries. There is a strict division between the mind and those things outside of it. As Taylor (2007: 33) spells out in analytic detail, these things may impinge on the mind in two possible ways:
- We may observe these things, and therefore change our view of the world, or be stirred up in ways that we otherwise wouldn’t be.
- Since we are ourselves as bodies continuous with these external things, and in constant exchange with them, and since our mental condition is responsive causally to our bodily condition in a host of ways (something we are aware of without espousing any particular theory of what exactly causes what), our strength, moods, motivations, etc. can be affected, and are continually being affected, by what happens outside.
In both cases, the responses that arise in us, the fact that things outside our minds take on these meanings, is always a function of how we, as minds, interpret them. In the enchanted world of Medieval Christendom, however, “the meaning is already there in the object” — it is there quite independently of us; it would be there even if we didn’t exist. And this means that the object “can communicate this meaning to us, impose it on us, in a third way, by bringing us as it were into its field of force. It can in this way even impose quite alien meanings on us, ones that we would not normally have, given our nature; as well as, in positive cases, strengthening our endogenous good responses. In other words, in the enchanted world, the object doesn’t just affect us by presenting us with certain stimuli, which we react to in accordance with our own nature and endow with our own meanings; “the meaning exists already outside of us, prior to contact; it can take us over, we can fall into its field of force. It comes on us from the outside” (Taylor, 2007: 34).
The saintly relic, the holy water, the blessed sacrament — these premodern objets petits a, with their uncanny force fields, are precisely what the Reformation and its sequels, the Scientific Revolution, and the Enlightenment, banish from the world via the process that Weber called “disenchantment.” Modernity distinguishes itself from the premodern by this inaugural act of exorcism, by casting the ghost out of the machine. This is nowhere articulated more explicitly than in La Mettrie’s L’Homme-Machine (1747), the book from which Mary Shelley probably borrowed the subtitle for Frankenstein: “The Modern Prometheus.”
But, as always, the object doesn’t simply go away quietly; it returns in the real — in this case, in the form of the Islamic revival, in which the West sees the distorted mirror of its own past. For Western atheists, the Islamic revival “marks the rebirth of the God they had killed” — it is “the revenge of God,” and it “signals the return of faith, the return of all that puts into question the idea of the progressive liberation of humanity” (Sayyid, 1997: 4). Orientalist discourse trades on the notion that only in the West can humans be truly free, truly human; in articulating “a global Muslim subjectivity,” the Islamic revival is seen by the West as threatening human emancipation “by trying to make the world a slave to Allah” (Sayyid, 1997: 4). As Bobby Sayyid explains:
Islamic fundamentalism arouses such anxiety because it questions a number of assumptions which allow us to continue to see the West as a model of political, economic, cultural and intellectual development. Unlike some challengers to the world order, Islamic fundamentalists seem to make no concessions to the political traditions that have been with us for over two hundred years. The references of Islamic fundamentalists tend to be to the Qur’an, and the formative history of the first Muslim empire (630–61), and not to the rights of man or Marxism in its various forms. Thus, the resurgence of Islam raises questions as to the limits of what has been called the legacy of the Age of Europe. (Sayyid, 1997: 4)
Conclusion: The snare of Occidentalism
We are still living in a world of Western imperialism in which Islam is global enemy number one. Even in countries where Islam occupies a hegemonic position, such as Saudi Arabia and Iran, this hegemony is purely local, and is constrained to a large extent by the inferior position these countries occupy in the global order.
This description is a crude simplification, of course, but it is nonetheless valid as a first approximation, and it may serve as the basis for some general remarks about the situation that confronts, not just Muslims, but all those living in what Marxist theories of imperialism designate as peripheral countries. This situation is, in many respects, substantially the same as that which confronted the Islamic world in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, with the first incursions of European colonial powers into the dar al Islam.
The British defeat of the Nawab of Bengal at the Battle of Plassey in 1757, and Napoleon’s astonishing destruction of the Mamluk army at the Battle of the Pyramids in 1798, combined to produce a profound sense of shock and disorientation in the Islamic world which continues to reverberate to this day. The burning question which confronted nineteenth century Muslim intellectuals such as Sayyid Jamāl al-Dīn al-Afghani — namely, how best to respond to the “modernising” discourse of Orientalism that the colonial powers brought with them — continues to structure many of the fundamental debates in the Islamic world today. And, just like Afghani, many intellectuals in the Islamic world today regard the choice between (1) clinging to a traditional form of Islam that utterly rejects any “Western” influence, and (2) embracing the discourse of western modernity, as a false dichotomy.
The first alternative is, in fact, illusory. A purely indigenous Islam, completely untainted by Western modernity, was rendered forever impossible (if it ever, in fact existed) by the colonial conquests of the late eighteenth century. All the so-called “fundamentalist” forms of Islam that exist today are, therefore, thoroughly modern, right down to their very roots. It therefore seems that the choice facing intellectuals in the Islamic world today is merely between various kinds of modernism, involving differing degrees of secularisation. For those who do not wish to abandon Islam completely, it would appear that they have no option but to construct a thoroughly “modern” form of Islam that makes at least some concessions to the Orientalist discourse of Western colonialism — whether by embracing its fundamental binary oppositions, or by inverting them (as in the fictional example of Dracula’s Occidentalism). And this seems even less appealing than the illusory dichotomy between “traditional Islam” and Western secular modernity which struck Afghani as so unsatisfactory, for all the same reasons that make Orientalism itself so problematic.
The most important of these problems is, as Edward Said so clearly observed, the “human” failure of Orientalism that arose from its having taken up “a position of irreducible opposition to a region of the world it considered alien to its own” — namely, its failure to “identify with human experience;” its failure to see it as human experience (Said, 1978: 328). The essential inhumanity of Orientalism, and its consequent dehumanising effects, is an inevitable consequence of its principal dogma — namely, the assertion of an “absolute and systematic difference” between East and West (Said, 1978: 300). Hence “the answer to Orientalism” is certainly not Occidentalism — a point which Said was particularly keen to stress — since this maintains the very same “absolute and systematic difference” between East and West, and merely reverses the values assigned to each term (Said, 1978: 328). Occidentalism does not permit any escape from the horrors of dehumanisation that attend Orientalism — it merely displaces them onto new victims, as the case of al Qaeda illustrates.
If we are to move beyond such horrors, we need to escape from the hall of mirrors represented by the imaginary relation in both the Orientalist and Occidentalist versions of schema L (see below) and grapple with the symbolic questions of representation. Said summed these up as follows:
How does one represent other cultures? What is another culture? Is the notion of a distinct culture (or race, or religion, or civilization) a useful one, or does it always get involved either in self-congratulation (when one discusses one’s own) or hostility and aggression (when one discusses the “other”)? (Said, 1978: 325)
This is, of course, no easy task. It is one we have barely even begun. But if we wish to construct a more peaceful world, one free of the imaginary yet ferociously destructive “clash of civilisations,” it is one we have no choice but to embark on.
References [incomplete — I will add in the other references later]
Freud, Sigmund. (1909). Bemerkungen über einen Fall von Zwangsneurose (Der “Rattenmann”). Jb. psychoanal. psychopathol. Forsch., I, p. 357–421; GW, VII, p. 379–463; Notes upon a case of obsessional neurosis, SE, 10: 151–318.
Freud, Sigmund (1919) “The ‘Uncanny’,” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, ed. James Strachey, vol. XVII (London: Hogarth Press).
Said, Edward W (1978) Orientalism (New York: Random House).
