Comment posted to Dolores O'Brien's blog:
I deeply appreciate this blog in its attempt to get to grips with both Giegerich and the interface between Islam and the West. However, I notice some (probably unconscious) Orientalist tendencies in the some of the things you write or quote ("fanatical", "frenzy", "untempered by/beyond the bounds of the rational", "naive", "participation mystique", "primal", Hamas "lacking a clear political goal") and in many of Giegerich's ideas, although I appreciate his attempt to get away from the numinous and to deal with the concrete and the particular. But if you are going to come down from the peaks into the marketplace, you need a little knowledge of the local lingo, I feel, and that would mean an awareness of some contemporary political scholarship on these matters, and of the nuances of the various strands of argument among Muslims. As I have argued previously (although I think perhaps my comment didn't successfully appear on your blog), there is a multiplicity of discourse here about which one really needs to know something before one attempts to 'see through' it. I'm not sure I'm up to this task, but I know enough Muslims in contemporary Britain to know that many holes could be picked in some of your most basic statements (and Giegerich's). This has the unfortunate effect of diminishing what is a very important thinking effort among depth psychologists. Actually, neither Giegerich, nor you, nor me, are qualified to speak about the Muslim's experience, or the Islamic terrorist's experience precisely because the West has been so successful at separating itself from itself and overcoming itself. Western thinking is profoundly colonial (to paraphrase Edward Said), and, I believe, lacks a discourse with which to engage the excluded Other. Can we have (and I am no longer referring just to your blog, or addressing only you) more Islamic voices, or more voices who have at least been schooled in this massive problem, in this debate?

