Description
Since the era of the narcissistic wound—that is, since the shock of encountering the West and the Arab world’s discovery of its backwardness reflected in the mirror of advanced Europe—Arab intellectual elites have suffered from a debilitating duality: defending themselves against the Western influx while simultaneously engaging in self-criticism to extricate themselves from the abyss of backwardness and civilizational decline. Consequently, the Arab intellectual class found itself in a Sisyphean and exhausting position, like someone forced to bury with their left hand what they had dug with their right. The greatest inheritor of this duality is Hassan Hanafi, who sought to embody both philosopher and jurist, and in his thought, to reconcile the triumph of modernity with the triumph of tradition, the desire for assimilation with the West with the desire for severing ties with it, and the critique of heritage to the point of demolition with its defense to the point of emulation.
This ability to say one thing and its opposite simultaneously, from the same perspective, is what gives Hassan Hanafi’s thought its distinctive flavor—a schizophrenic thought woven with contradiction, a duality of two strategies: an infinitely audacious critique of the self and its heritage, even to the point of violating sacred values, and a reverential defense of the self and its heritage that can even take the form of delirium.
When duality is elevated to this level of a method of thought, the only remaining approach for the researcher to diagnose the condition may be psychoanalysis. This is precisely what Trabishi does when he studies Hassan Hanafi’s writings as a specific individual case of the “collective Arab neurosis,” whose symptoms he identified in the first part of “The Disease in the West.”
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