I first encountered Moustapha Safouan in 1970 when I read a text of his entitled 'De la structure en psychoanalyse'. I was an undergraduate intoxicated by the then ferment of French thought and politics, and trying desperately to understand the works of Derrida and Foucault, of Althusser and Barthes. Of all these ferociously difficult thinkers Jacques Lacan was perhaps the most difficult.
Safouan wrote in a spare and economical style and provided a clear guide to Lacan’s reworking of the Oedipus, in which the struggle with the father is understood as only the first imaginary stage in a process which reaches a conclusion when the child realises that the father is not the all-powerful being he promised to be but is himself subject to the law of desire. This moment, which is also the moment of the most profound hatred of the father, is Lacan’s re-reading of what Freud called castration; the entry of the small child into the world of the symbolic. I read this text of Safouan’s time and time again, so that many of its formulations became engrained in my thinking.
I first met Safouan in l974 when I went to his consulting rooms in the Rue Guénégaud, to talk, I think, about a translation of 'De la structure en psychoanalyse'. I remember feeling a certain anxiety that all my inner conflicts would spill out in embarrassing fashion in the presence of this great psychoanalyst. However, my anxiety was soon dissipated by Safouan’s skills as a host. It was about four o’clock in the afternoon and Safouan first served me a perfect English tea. After we had finished this ceremonial, Safouan reached into a cupboard and took out the largest and most expensive bottle of cognac that I had ever seen and asked me if I liked brandy. I stammered that I did like it but I wasn’t sure that it agreed with me. “I do not see how cognac cannot agree with anyone normally constituted” opined the psychoanalyst.
Our friendship really developed in 1979 when I spent a sabbatical in Paris with my young children and their mother, Flavia. Safouan is the most hospitable and generous of men, and he delighted in entertaining Flavia and I. I do not know if there is anybody with whom I have spent so many enjoyable hours eating, drinking and talking. The culmination of this hospitality came in 1993 when Safouan took Flavia and I on a two week tour of Egypt which is etched in both my and Flavia’s memory.
When I first read Safouan in 1970 I was engaged in the intellectual effort of articulating Freud and Marx in the revolutionary perspective provided by the magazine Tel Quel. If, by 1979, this perspective seemed little more than a buffoonish Parisian fashion, I continued to think that psychoanalysis had much to contribute to political understanding. In particular, I talked long and hard with Safouan about the Iranian revolution and the imaginary identification with a pure pre-colonial past which has proved so powerful an ideology in our time. I was flattered when Safouan said that our conversations had stimulated a book which he entitled Speech or Death, but slightly disappointed that the book dealt not with the imaginary identifications which I was so obsessed by (perhaps regarded by Safouan as too obvious), but with the symbolic basis of any civilised society. He sub-titled the book 'Language as Social Order' but, dissatisfied with both sub-title and argument, he rewrote ‘Speech or Death’ (for publication last year) with the new sub-title: 'Essay on the Division of the Subject'. This rewriting makes it even clearer than the original that Safouan, like Freud, regards some version of Judaic monotheism as the necessary basis for any society which is to avoid the most traditional forms of revenge. This argument is also one of the sub-themes of ‘Why are the Arabs not Free? – The Politics of Writing’.
This brilliant and original work locates the widespread forms of Arab despotism not in ethnic character or Islamic religion, but in the fact that writing in the Arabic tradition is ineluctably linked to the sacred. For Safouan, there can be no freedom when writing remains the possession of a limited caste with no active relation to the demotic of the mass of the people. It should be noted that the case of contemporary Arab societies is not the exception but the rule for almost all known societies, as, for example, Latin in medieval Europe. Indeed, the two startling exceptions are 5th century Greece and post medieval Europe, with Dante and Luther standing as the two great examples of the creation of vernaculars in which the majority of the people can find expression.
It should be noted that, from Safouan’s perspective, the achievements of the Arab spring are likely to be very short lived unless they are accompanied by a linguistic and cultural revolution. When, in June 2011, I went once again to the Rue Guénégaud (this time for gin rather than brandy), I was continuing a long conversation, but one re-energised both by Zamyn, and by the political events of this year in the Arabic world.
