Hassan Saad Boutayeb Interview | Alexandre Gilbert #349
Mehdi Belhaj Kacem writes that before reason, there was madness. In Arabic, ʿaql evokes the fetter (ʿiqāl) and junūn what is veiled. Is reason a fetter placed upon an originary excess?
Hassan Saad Boutayeb: Arabic already takes his side. Aql comes from ʿaqala, “to fetter”: the ʿiqāl is the rope that hobbles a camel’s leg. Junūn comes from janna, “to cover, to veil” (the root of jinn, of janīn, the hidden fetus, and of majnūn, the “covered one”). The language thus conceives reason as a fetter placed on a prior movement, and madness as something veiled rather than something missing. The Sufis, Ibn ʿArabī foremost, play on this kinship. The fetter is not an insult: it is what turns the camel into a caravan animal. Reason is constitutive but secondary. It is training, not origin. Your phrase, “an originary excess,” therefore seems right to me, except that the excess is not defeated, only held.
Anthropology: rites before concepts. Dodds, in The Greeks and the Irrational, shows that the Greece of reason rests on a ground of possession, trance and Dionysianism. Plato himself writes in the Phaedrus (244a) that the greatest goods come to us through a madness (mania) bestowed by the gods. Bataille, in The Accursed Share, makes surplus energy the primary fact: societies are simply ways of spending what overflows. Mauss with the potlatch, and Girard with the contagious violence that sacrifice channels, say the same thing: order arises from managing a disorder that was already there. Everywhere, trance, mask and sacrifice come before demonstration.
History: we only exclude what is already there. Foucault showed that classical reason constitutes itself by dividing off and confining what it calls unreason. But one only excludes what pre-exists. The Islamic tradition knew this too: the genre of the ʿuqalāʾ al-majānīn, the “wise fools,” and the figure of the majdhūb, the one enraptured, acknowledge that truth sometimes speaks through those whom reason has set aside.
Shakespeare and Kubrick: the same scene twice. In King Lear, the king is never blinder than in his court of flatterers, sensible and calculating. In the storm, having lost his reason, he finally sees, and Edgar says it: “Reason in madness.” The reason of Goneril and Regan is cold, efficient and monstrous; Lear’s madness is knowledge. Hamlet says the same: there is method in madness.
Kubrick, in 2001: A Space Odyssey, holds the thesis at both ends. At the dawn of humanity, the monolith awakens the tool in the apes, and the raised bone is a weapon from the start: technology is born in the frenzy of killing. The famous match cut from the thrown bone to the spacecraft in orbit says that this frenzy was never overcome, only refined. Then HAL, perfect reason, goes mad: caught between contradictory orders, he shows that reason cannot ground itself. The film ends not on a surplus of reason but on a rebirth, the Star Child. Madness is at the origin and at the summit.
Which Arabic word best expresses MBK’s “pleonectic”: ṭamaʿ, istizāda, or another?
Hassan Saad Boutayeb: Ṭamaʿ captures covetousness well. Istizāda (the Quranic “more,” hal min mazīd, “is there more?”) expresses the logic of excess itself. For hubris, I would rather use ṭughyān. “Pleonectic” comes from the Greek pleonexia, which Aristotle makes the root of injustice. MBK turns it into a structural law of desire, capital and technics, so the Arabic word must name a logic, not a character flaw. Ṭamaʿ is ambivalent (the Quran speaks of calling upon God “in fear and ṭamaʿ,” 7:56), but it remains the disposition of a subject. Istizāda, a tenth-form noun of demand, names the structure that persists when the subject disappears: Hell answering “is there more?” (50:30). Takāthur (102) and ḥirṣ give the social and psychological versions. Ṭughyān, from water overflowing its bounds (69:11), is the flood that istizāda, the appetite, produces.
Does MBK think being (wujūd) in the same language as the Arabic tradition of Being and Time?
Hassan Saad Boutayeb: Wujūd is the language of Avicenna and Ibn ʿArabī, for whom being is found, gives itself. MBK’s being is closer to the event and to nothingness than to the unity of being. There is a dialogue to be built, not an identity. Wujūd (from wajada, “to find”) resembles Heidegger’s es gibt, which explains Corbin’s ease in moving between both worlds. But Avicenna seeks a necessary ground behind contingency, and the Akbarian school a unity behind multiplicity. MBK, formed by Badiou, Lacan and set theory, has neither: being is inconsistent multiplicity. A bridge should rather be built on non-being, with the Muʿtazilite thesis al-maʿdūm shayʾ and the debate on ʿadam.
Does the pair kashf and ḥijāb illuminate Heideggerian alētheia, or is it a convenient misreading?
Hassan Saad Boutayeb: It does, provided one keeps what Heidegger keeps: lēthē, concealment, never disappears. If the veil is lifted for good, it is a convenient misreading. The pair organizes Sufi epistemology (al-Ghazālī’s veils of light, Hujwīrī’s Kashf al-maḥjūb). The strongest texts share Heidegger’s intuition that concealment belongs to truth: the veils are infinite, God speaks “from behind a veil” (42:51), and Ibn ʿArabī holds that self-disclosure is never repeated (lā takrār fī l-tajallī), which brings it closer to Ereignis. The criterion: wherever concealment survives its disclosure, the parallel is productive.
Is the pharmakon (dawāʾ and samm) a concept MBK could make his own?
Hassan Saad Boutayeb: He can, if dawāʾ and samm are read as a single substance whose dose decides. But in his work excess often remains without remedy, and that separates him from Stiegler. Arabic splits Derrida’s undecidable pharmakon into remedy and poison, yet Arabic pharmacology knew that the difference lies in dose and preparation. Read this way, the pharmakon dramatizes the pleonectic logic: the excess that creates also destroys. Stiegler turns poison into remedy through a politics of care; for MBK, no instance outside the system can regulate the dose, because the system is what doses.
What becomes of the ethics of care (muʿālaja, murāqaba) in the face of captured attention?
Hassan Saad Boutayeb: Murāqaba, the vigilance of the heart, and muʿālaja, care as treatment, become practices of counter-attention against technological capture. The tradition treated attention as a discipline: murāqaba (grounded in the hadith of iḥsān), al-Muḥāsibī’s muḥāsaba, al-Ghazālī’s Iḥyāʾ. Muʿālaja, literally medical, extends to the soul’s diseases. Together they make attending and treating inseparable. Against platforms colonizing attention, murāqaba becomes reappropriation of that faculty, and muʿālaja a collective and technical care, close to Stiegler’s soin. These practices were once cultivations of piety; now they are conditions of remaining a subject.
Is there a Maghrebi equivalent of Iranian gharbzadegī?
Hassan Saad Boutayeb: The closest are taghrīb (Laroui), the loss of self in the West, and Khatibi’s “double critique.” Al-e Ahmad diagnosed imitation without production. Laroui’s taghrīb (same root as gharb and ghurba, “estrangement”) says that becoming Western and becoming a stranger to oneself are one movement; his answer is a historicism critical of both traditionalist and imitator. Khatibi’s double critique targets Western metaphysics and Arab-Islamic theology together, aiming at a “pensée-autre.” Bennabi’s qābiliyyat al-istiʿmār (“colonizability”) adds an inner diagnosis. None has Al-e Ahmad’s polemical heat.
Is fawḍā a good term for chaos, echoing Stiegler (negentropy) and Meillassoux (hyper-chaos)?
Hassan Saad Boutayeb: Fawḍā works for disorder. For hyper-chaos, contingency without sufficient reason, I would think rather of the occasionalism of al-Ghazālī and the Ashʿarites. Fawḍā suits the dissipation Stiegler’s negentropy struggles against. But hyper-chaos is not disorder, which presupposes an order that fails; it is the absence of any necessity, better rendered by al-imkān al-muṭlaq. The real precedent is al-Ghazālī’s denial of necessary connection between cause and effect (Tahāfut, seventeenth discussion; Averroes replies). The difference: Ghazālī grounds contingency in a sovereign will, whereas hyper-chaos removes the sovereign. There, the dialogue becomes interesting.
See also:
- “Dialogue avec Mehdi Belhaj Kacem”
- “Mehdi Belhaj Kacem: « le suicide est une forclusion de l’Autre »”
- “Mehdi Belhaj Kacem : « la métaphysique est immunodéficiente »”: a dialogue with Nika Dubrovsky
- “Mehdi Belhaj Kacem : « Déconstruisons toutes les Subsomptions »”: a letter in which he announces his withdrawal from public speech