Abstract

In a recent essay Slavoj Zizek probes the “archives” of Islam for its secret history and by discussing the Quran’s story of Abraham and his slave girl Hagar concludes that despite the pivotal role of the feminine, it remains the secret repressed history of Islam. This paper takes Zizek’s insights to their theoretical conclusions. As Zizek has noted, the feminine is not entirely erased from the archives of Islam. The fantasy of the feminine continues to have a protective function of warding off Muslim male castration anxiety. I will explore ways in which the structuring effects of the masculine-same imaginary on Islam’s archives necessitate a simultaneous recognition of the hermeneutical efficacy of the feminine while denying its link to the biological woman. All retrievals of the feminine result in institutionalizing masculine imaginary and authorizing male supremacy, because the woman remains the inessential other never represented as a subject reflecting on her own being but an object of exchange within the masculine imaginary. The feminine, therefore, is circulated not as a secondary effect of repression, but as the masculine imaginary’s disavowed foundation. In other words, there is no prehistoric unrepressed feminine that can be recovered or returned to. Taking a cue from Zizek, I will conclude that a far more radical unsettling could be achieved through literal conformity to the masculine imaginary itself. This strategy of literal conformity will reveal the hidden necessity of the masculine imaginary’s reliance upon the feminine