Macron's psychological crisis

The words that French President Emmanuel Macron has spoken about Islam in recent days are, in their content and coherence, the kind of talk that could be dismissed as delirium. But the time and setting in which the words were spoken, and the record of the one who spoke them, do not allow them to be dismissed. In psychology, both the subconscious and delusions have a counterpart.

The crisis that Macron attributes to Islam is, above all, a reflection of his own psychological state. It is very clear that he has a fear and hatred of Islam. In the world he wants to build and controls, Islam, as it currently is, stands awkwardly and displays a lack of fit. With its dress, its clothing, its way of life, its philosophy, Islam in Macron's world is like a surplus that disturbs the comfort of life, ruins the pleasure of the eye, and spoils the mood. He cannot say that it must be destroyed entirely, but he says it must be changed. With the arrogance born of ignorance that those who do not accept Islam as it is have displayed throughout history, he speaks of changing it, of fitting it to himself. Has the reform of Islam not always been put on the agenda in exactly this way throughout history?

That Macron spoke these words in a speech on "the fight against separatist ideas," which is on the government's agenda, makes the matter even more telling. Moreover, in this speech Macron said that his goal is for Muslims in the country not to suffer discrimination, but that for this, "Islamist separatist ideas" must be fought. In his speech he also

argued that the Islamist ideology advocating "separatist" ideas is problematic, and that these people regard their own laws as superior to the laws of France.

To place all Muslims, who make up at least 10 percent of citizens, under such an accusation while opposing separatist practices or ideas is a typical example of Enlightened ignorance. Shall we begin reading Macron and French imperialism their record by asking what these ten percent French citizen Muslims are doing in their country?

The great majority of these Muslim citizens are those who came from North and Central Africa, which France colonized.

France practiced no discrimination while exploiting them to the marrow in their own countries. By not regarding any of them as human, it displayed its understanding of equality. While exploiting all the resources of their countries like a cannibal, it violated the identity, language, privacy and honor of all of them without distinction.

The Muslims in France are witnesses to France's colonialist, discriminatory, inhuman record. Of course they will continue to cause discomfort. Because they exist to show that, whatever it does, it cannot take hold of souls and the future. This is the counterpart of the comfort it built with what it stole from their ancestors and tries to sustain with what it is still stealing. Besides, let it not be misunderstood, it is not the presence of these people in its country that produces the problem. The problem is the discomfort that people like Macron feel when they see them in their country every day. The source of this discomfort lies in the fear produced by this past.

Islamophobia, that is, fear of Islam, is a serious mental illness, especially in countries with a colonial past whose colonialisms still continue, in countries in the arrogance of the Enlightenment. This illness is a sign of guilt. It feeds on a fear that an oppressed one they think they have killed may rise from the dead and take revenge.

Jacques Lacan, himself a Frenchman and the founder of Structuralist psychoanalysis, says that in films and stories it is murderers who are most afraid of ghosts. Today, the fact that Islam, which the Western world thinks it has killed many times over, is becoming more visible every day everywhere has the effect of a nightmare. They themselves grant Islam a right of revenge. Even if Islam itself is not after revenge, and even if, in spite of everything, it keeps giving messages of peace and mercy for humanity, its very existence turns this possibility of revenge into a fear. Because they too know very well what they have made Muslim peoples suffer for centuries.

In fact, those who told Europeans, in a language they would understand, that all the claims of the Enlightenment are false were again the names of recent French thought. These thinkers, also described as postmodernist or poststructuralist, are names who saw the falsity of modernism and Enlightenment thinking by experiencing France's practices in Algeria. What Camus, Althusser, Foucault, Derrida, Guattari and Deleuze wrote and said revealed the ignorance, the racism and the idolatry at the core of France in particular and of all Western modernism in general.

What prompts Macron to speak this way today is not independent of this psychology. This psychology turns into a nightmare that does not leave him alone, through the events he lives through every day. Indeed, last week, Macron, who wanted to turn the rescue or release in Mali of the humanitarian aid activist Sophie Petronin, touted by an organization close to al-Qaeda as "the last French hostage," into an anti-Islamic show, suffered a shock when Petronin declared at the airport itself that she had become a Muslim, which was like a symbolic representation of the fact that fate does not leave him alone.

Like a splinter in the eye that guards itself, when Petronin said that her name was no longer Sophie but Meryem, Macron canceled the press conference he had planned to hold and hurriedly left the airport.