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Islamists are not wrong when they claim Algerian traditions contain what they deem elements of impurity. Thus, they call for a veritable dismantling of tradition by eradicating the existing state of affairs. This attempt to dismantle tradition is nothing new; but it has been dramatically aided by capitalist, and its corollary, technocratic, discourse. Post-Independence Algeria has taken it upon itself to continue this dismantling. It accomplishes this by collapsing the distinctions between language, religion, and politics, which leads to a configuration I have designated as the “LRP.”

It is worth pointing out how religion’s spiritual, civil, and social function has been distorted [détournée]. Religion is now no more than an act of passing judgment between what is accepted (el halal) and what is taboo (el haram), between yadjouz (literally, “this passes”) and la-yadjouz (“this doesn’t pass”). It is difficult to fight this type of judgment, which is brandished like a weapon in all types of discourse. As for the private sphere, one’s relation to self-judgment – in the sense of making demands – is defined by the need to obey, therefore pre-empting critique and resistance. As a result, when insurrection is visibly and openly waged, it will inevitably be violent. This is why the subject spares itself this violence by opting for private transgressions, which, without effecting any real change, are in reality just another form of moral obedience.

This moralization is meant to foster social cohesion and offer a shared set of references. But it also serves as a straitjacket for the subject, who can neither intervene nor resist. Each individual is thrust into his or her own solitude and left to devise spaces where culture and knowledge regulate internal (self) and external (social) relations. Reducing religion to moral conduct is a way of imposing uniformity, which is driven by a hatred of difference.

In The Future of an Illusion (1927), Freud explains that the civilizational process, which allows people to live together, is fragile. People are in need of culture to control their violent, anarchic impulses, but, at the same time, this domestication leads to many sacrifices: “[E]very individual is virtually an enemy of civilization, though civilization is supposed to be an object of universal human interest.”¹⁵ Freud adds: “Human creations are easily destroyed, and science and technology, which have built them up, can also be used for their annihilation.”¹⁶ The importance of the individual’s ambiguous relation to culture cannot be overstated. Culture serves a need to create, then maintain, a subjective space that makes social cohesion possible. But this is countered by another force, a destructive one that pushes individuals to work against themselves internally by demolishing their progress toward civilization.

Each individual is therefore responsible for helping construct and maintain the civilizational process. Culture begins with the acquisition of language and speech.

This initiates a break with the organic state (or “animal” state, according to Freud). Viewed in this way, education, instruction, and knowledge work to enrich and strengthen the construct of culture, and, by extension, the construct of the human, by keeping the human’s destructive instincts in check. But culture’s hold on the subject is constantly threatened by interior and exterior forces. Today, the moralization of religion is the foundation of culture and knowledge in Algeria. No one living in, or visiting, Algeria fails to notice this. Moral pronouncements have risen to a fever pitch: everyone has his or her own interpretation of religious morality.

Patients are not immune from this moralization of religion. Their perceptions of the effects of analysis during treatment reinforce the existing state of censorship. For its part, susceptible to becoming yet another vehicle for extending the moral reach of the LRP, psychoanalysis faces its own troubles.

Psychoanalytic treatment exposes how censorship, taboos, and social conventions govern thought and speech. Analysis is perceived sometimes as a threat and sometimes as an ally in this struggle. Indifferent to conventions, it encourages private speech, serving the individual and yet allowing for the collective nature in each individual to be revealed. Speaking freely shows that censorship, although externally imposed, is aggressively internalized. Overcoming it is a personal matter. Reaching this point, patients still have a very long way to go. Will they recognize, and then refrain from, the role they play in abetting the empire of censorship? And if so, what to make of a freedom deprived of the social space where it can be exercised? Isn’t it safer to keep up the minor transgressions in the dark, a practice much less costly and promising its own secret pleasures?

With psychoanalysis, patients first find themselves delightfully surprised by the suspension of moral judgment. But a reversal then occurs and over time things only get harder. It becomes hard to discern between what may be triggered by social taboos (charged with religious signifiers) and patients’ own self-censorship. What is particularly striking is how the subject ends up fully and unquestioningly embracing the taboos it is besieged by. It hasn’t lost its ability to think for itself, but this ability is increasingly placed out of its reach.

This relationship with censorship can be found in any patient, regardless of his or her language and the place of treatment. But usually, at some point during the treatment, the subject steps out from behind the taboos imposed from the outside (family, education, religion) and begins to question its own practice of self-censorship. In Algeria, reaching this point of dissociation has proven stubbornly difficult. Taboos continue to exercise control over thought. For this reason, the subject finds ways to hide behind its speech so as to avoid being caught off guard and fully exposed by religious morality and the reigning ideology. And yet it seeks treatment in order to find a self it may no longer recognize. But one mask only gives way to another in an endless cycle as the subject continues to prop up the censorship under which it is so clearly suffering.

Seeking cover within its own subjectivity, the subject gets lost amid its own disguises and fear sets in. Indeed, it grows fearful of its own movements in the silent darkness, afraid it may disappear into the blank space of speech. Nabile Farès evokes this state:

Fear of oneself, fear of others. Fear of oneself: yes, as though haunted from within; haunted in the most visceral way, as though you could feel the brittle limit of your life, right there, inside your body; as though your body defined the limit, the limit of resistance and of duration; as though you needed to learn how to hide your body, just like you learn to hide your feelings.¹⁷

Farès reveals with this the secret of the body/feelings to be covered and hidden: the ferocity of fear and its effects. Indeed, this fear creates the many “masks”: ideological, moral, political, and other markers of identity. Is censorship the control center of fear? Does one’s fear correspond to the severity of censorship? And might censorship be responsible for the orchestrated confusion over who speaks, who imposes taboos, who thinks? Is the invisible force pulling the levers both a subjective and political matter? Fear surges forth near the dismissed zones of discourse and thought, as there are no support barriers there. As previously indicated, the subject’s masks multiply in this invisible space. It seeks to find refuge for its most taboo thoughts so that they won’t be confiscated from it. However, in the process of looking, it digs deep into the horror of the blank space.

Initially, the subject dons a whole series of masks needed for its acts of détournement. But then, little by little, it finds itself the victim of its own act. The more it loses itself in its roles, the closer it comes to the fear it strove to escape in its playacting. The whole affair unfolds outside of speech in the greatest secrecy. The scale of this “silent act,” one that remains protected from onlookers, raises some pressing questions: to what extent is the subject’s act a performance? Does this personal performance mirror the political dynamic of the larger public?

This sheds light on how the individual bolsters the LRP bloc by unwittingly performing its dictates. A growing religious morality suppresses differences in lifestyle, thought, and beliefs. It doesn’t allow for any separation between the inside (one’s superego) and moral principles. This lack of separation makes it hard to know precisely who – which superego – is speaking. Is it the subject or the voice of a community of believers converted to a new form of Islam spread from the Middle East? There is no room for this question in the subjective space of the patient. Both voices merge to form a single entity, resulting in an endless internal struggle. Treatment takes place amid this war with censorship, which, striving to contain fear, ends up making it spread more aggressively. In the land of the LRP, for both the patient and the analyst, it is hard to get over this embattled struggle.