In western, and not only western, cultural history, the issue of the Orient and unlimited Power is embedded in a broader search for answers to some “ultimate questions” concerning Authority. The relation between “Eros and Authority, or Love and the Law,” as Harold Bloom puts it, “is central to Jesus, to Paul, to Freud. But also it is crucial in Moses, in Socrates/Plato, and in King Lear and all Shakespeare …” [1] Paul, moreover, the contrast opposing Love and the Law is joined to one that pits Spirit against the Letter and indeed Life against Death. Bloom adds that “Freud names the Law as Thanatos, thus oddly joining himself to Paul and Luther.”

In the following table, I have arranged these oppositions and added two more:

 

Authority	Eros
Law	Love
Letter	Spirit
Death	Life
Body	Soul
Old Testament	New Testament
The Orient	The West

 

Orientalism provides, in western cultural history, a language in which the relation between “Authority and Eros, or Love and the Law” is rehearsed along with the others. In Christian theology that relation is discussed in terms of an opposition between the Old and the New Testaments, which, I suggest, is assimilated to the contrast between East and West. In the orientalist imagination, it is only the Christian West that is able to unite the left and the right side of the table. The Orient belongs firmly on the left side.

At first blush, contrasting “Authority” with “Eros” might seem to belie this statement. Is the erotic not a prime register of the orientalist imagination? Certainly, the erotic character of orientalist fantasy is one of its chief characteristics. But what distinguishes orientalist erotica from other varieties is typically its setting in the context of unlimited Power. Typically, the despot’s boundless power to concentrate in himself the jouissance of his empire is reflected in the fact that all women are potentially available to him. In Rycaut’s report of a common rumor, the sultan’s harem is but a bordello full of virgins waiting for their one encounter with the lord:

When the Grand Signior resolves to choose himself a Bed-fellow, he retires into the Lodgings of his Women, where (according to the story in every place reported, when the Turkish seraglio falls into discourse) the Damsels being ranged in order by the Mother of the Maids, he throws his handkerchief to her where his eye and fancy best directs, it being a token of her election to bed. The surprised Virgin snatches at this prize and good fortune with that eagerness, that she is ravished with the joy before she is defloured by the Sultan, and kneeling down first kisses the handkerchief, and then puts it in her bosom, when immediately she is congratulated by all the Ladies of the Court, for the great honour and favour she hath received.[2]

Even in stories where the harem women gain the upper hand over the despot, the point is that they do this within the context of and in spite of the formally unlimited patriarchy. Westerners knew well the history of the so-called Sultanate of Women in the 16^th and 17^th century, during which the mothers or wives of an ineffectual Ottoman sultan took over the reins of government. In fiction, the feminist potential of such stories often turns into male bragging by a western man who cohorts with a harem inmate, who together subvert the power of an ineffectual “despot.” Such stories occur in traveler reports, including by Rycaut, and in the late eighteenth century find their way into fiction such as Mozart’s Abduction from the Seraglio. It was no doubt a common feature of male bragging by western visitors, as when Hyacynthe Anquetil-Duperron, the first translator of the Zend Avesta, reports on an invitation to him by two harem beauties who expose themselves in their window, conveniently located across the street from his. It may be a good thing that Anquetil, a good Catholic, rejected the invitation, because if Rycaut is to be trusted young westerners who succumb to such illicit provocation find themselves murdered after carousing with the harem inmates, their bodies dropped in the river to dispose of the incriminating  evidence.

Authority and Eros do unite in the orientalist imagination, and even crucially so; but it is Authority that is the point. Orientalism is about the erotics of sublime Power. And just in the imagined Orient Authority contrasts from a position of greater importance with Eros, so does the Law lord it over Love, the Letter over the Spirit, Death over Life, and Body over Soul – and, I will argue, the Old Testament over the New.

The oppositions in the table as a whole, as much as in the East-West opposition specifically, combine theological, political, and oniric dimensions in complex and intriguing ways. The left side, moreover, has been imagined as a kind of personification. We can think of this as a single imagined personage appearing in three aspects, each corresponding to one of the three dimensions. In its theological aspect it is Allah, the Muslim God as imagined in the Christian West: a personage derived from notions of Jehovah, “the God of the Old Testament.” In its political aspect it is the oriental despot, an important figure of eighteenth to twentieth century political philosophy. And last but not least it is the “Obscene Father” at the oniric level. I use this term in place of Freud’s “archaic father” and “the Father-of-Enjoyment” used in Žižek’s interpretation of Lacan. The Obscene Father is, I claim, the psychological substance of the western notions of Allah and of the oriental despot. It is because these notions have tenacious roots in the depths of the soul that they have persisted through centuries of western thought and western fantasy.

Allah

Though we will see that historically the political dimension of orientalism preceded the theological and the oniric, in the resulting three-dimensional complex the theological dimension is perhaps primary. In the western Christian tradition, the Orient is where God reveals himself to “Man,” where the divine sphere impinges on the mundane. Yet it is also where God’s ultimate revelation, his incarnation in Christ, is refused: first by the Jew and then again by the Muslim. This constitutes a refusal to see that God unites Authority and Love. The “Old Testament God” is not (yet) a Father but a stern Master instead.[3] He becomes God the Father only once he miraculously engenders his part-human Son (who is called not “father” but “friend”). Stubborn and blind, Muslims like Jews prefer the remote, majestic, sublime One who is completely aloof from the human multitude. A God of the Letter rather than the Spirit, and of the Law rather than of Love, moreover, this Old-Testament-Koranic Lord is, in short, the almighty despot in Heaven.

The western Christian image of Islam owes much to a Christian reading of the Old Testament. Its foundations are not so much in Muslim religion (of which most Christians remined fairly ignorant even in the eighteenth century) as in another, earlier Christian trope: that of Jehovah, the “Old Testament God.” For this reason, it behooves us to study what Christians thought of Jehovah before we return to what they have thought of Allah.

It is a central tradition in Christian theology to locate in the Old Testament the Law, the Letter, and Death; as opposed to the Love, the Spirit, and the Life of the New Testament. Such a reading of the Bible would until very recently underlie not only theological treatises but also the sermons of practicing ministers and priests.[4] The idea goes back to the biblical epistles of Paul.[5] Often, it is expressed as a contrast between Law and Gospel. Generally, the Old Testament is equated with Law and the New with Gospel, although there have certainly been more sophisticated versions as well. The seventeenth century preacher Samuel Mather, for example, insisted that there was much Gospel in the Old Testament and much Law in the New. Nevertheless, he made the same contrast between the two: Law meant mercilessly, literally executed Justice, while Gospel meant the liberating, freely given grace of God that alone abolished human Sin.

The challenge has been to explain how the character of God could change so much from what even Mather called the “first dispensation” of Law to the second dispensation of Gospel. Karen Armstrong has talked intelligently about the history of God.[6] But to speak of a development in God’s personality is anathema to the mainstream theologians, who see him as eternal and perfect. The most successful way out has always been to suggest that God himself does not change, but our perception of him does. “When I was a child,” Paul writes in the famous passage in 1 Corinthians, “I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”[7] Paul means that God is seen in the Old Testament in a way that Christians have grown out of (though even Christians only know in part until the end of days when they will know in full).[8] Mather suggests that the ancient Israelites had

the same Gospel blessings preached unto them of old, that we have at this day: and these blessings and good things are demonstrations that it was Gospel, because those blessings are not promised in the Law. It knows no remission, or regeneration of a lost Soul, no salvation of a Sinner.[9]

With this handy exegetic move, Mather can explain the obvious fact that a fatherly, loving and merciful God does appear in the Old Testament, which, he proposes, does include the “blessings” of “the writing of Gods Law in the heart;” the “remission of sins;” as well as the promise of “everlasting life and salvation in Heaven,” all divine gifts that other Christians may consider to come only with the appearance of Christ. Mather agrees in principle, but to him Christ had come, though in disguise, before the events of the New Testament.

Hence they did so often make mention of Abraham, Isaak, and Jacob, (as being the Types of Christ) in their Prayers, and especially of David. For thy servant Davids sake, Psal. 89, not as resting in David literally; but looking beyond the shadow, unto him that was the truth thereof; for by David they meant Christ: Christ is oft called by that name, because David was so eminent a type of him.[10]

There is also, a bolder, unorthodox opinion in Christianity, however, that does see a change in God himself and not only in our understanding of God. A tradition that can be traced at least from Thomas J.J. Altizer’s theology of the death of God in the nineteen sixties, to writers like Jean-Luc Nancy and Slavoj Žižek today, proclaims that God has divested himself, indeed divests himself continuously, of his Old Testament style transcendental existence and incarnates himself in the material world.[11] However, regardless of the novelty of their claim, radical Christians, who represent almost visually a move by God from the remote heavens to our very midst, continue the old Lutherite tenet about the remoteness of the Old Testament God and the closeness of the New Testament one. 

The incompletely revealed, Old Testament God has a distinct personality. Though remote and aloof, he has an overwhelming power on his worshippers, for he is the punitive enforcer, whose commandments must always be obeyed to the letter. When humans disobey him he is ruthlessly violent. He is the dispenser of death, who expelled Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden lest they eat from the tree of eternal life. He is a jealous tribal God, helping his people’s armed forces to eradicate the enemy, and savagely chastising his people when they turn to the gods of the Nations.

There is a name for this figure in the long history of the Christian preoccupation with the Letter and the Spirit, Eros and Thanatos, Love and Law: “Jehovah.” Of course by “Jehovah” I mean a traditional figure of Christian theology, not the character that actually emerges, on a more critical reading, from the biblical text. “Jehovah” is not to be confused with “Yahweh:” the first is a Lutherite construction motivated especially by the theological, moral, and political concerns of the Renaissance, the second, a figure we discover by following scientific philological methods applied to the actual biblical text. Generally, the two do not coincide. As Harold Bloom has shown among others, the Yahweh that is revealed by Scripture is, far from a remote legislator, a personable, fickle, hysterical, human-like God, scary and loving at the same time.

It is this Yahweh – and not the Lutherite Jehovah – that Bloom is referring to when he points out that Yahweh is unlike both the Christian and the Muslim God.

The earliest strand of Torah centers upon Yahweh, who is a rather different personage from Christianity’s God the Father and from Islam’s Allah. The J Writer’s Yahweh is intimate with us, close by, while the Christian God the Father has retreated into the heavens. And Yahweh knows his limits (which may spur his irascibility), but Allah possesses total powers. (…) Yahweh walks and talks with men and with angels: he sits under the terebinth trees at Mamre, devouring a meal prepared by Sarah, and he picnics on Sinai with seventy-three elders of Israel. (…) Mischievous, inquisitive, jealous, and turbulent, Yahweh is fully as personal as a god can be. Allah’s dignity does not permit such descents into human vagaries.[12]

The problem is simply that Bloom does not deliberately distinguish between Yahweh, as described above, and Jehovah, who is a “strong misreading” (to use one of Bloom’s favorite terms) of the same by Christians. This explains why Bloom appears to contradict himself. For in another passage of the same book just quoted, he equates what he had said were two different personalities; this time he writes that “…Yahweh has not survived in Christianity, but only in the Allah of Islam. (…).” He proposes, too, that “Like Yahweh, Allah in the Qur’an is perpetually furious with us – a tightly regimented fury.”[13] In fact, when distinguishing Yahweh from Allah, Bloom is speaking of one personage (“Yahweh” proper) and when comparing them he is speaking of another (“Jehovah”).

Yahweh, to put it differently, is the God of the Old Testament as projected by the text (what Umberto Eco called intentio operis), and Jehovah, the same as projected by the Lutherite reader (intentio lectoris).[14] Yahweh, a cunning trickster and nasty disciplinarian as well as a loving father, is not like Allah (or more precisely, the traditional caricature of Allah). Jehovah, the remote, impersonal administrator of a strict but often incomprehensible legal code, is. Allah is not a belated Yahweh, but Jehovah is a precocious Allah.

There is, to be sure, one very major difference in orientalist theology between Jehovah and Allah. When Jehovah is described as an unfeeling legalist, he is, from the Lutherite point of view, being misunderstood. As Christians know - because the truth was revealed to them by Jesus and his apostles - the real Jehovah is God the Father, prepared to sacrifice his own son to save his followers. The merciless Jehovah I am referring to here is, rather, the misunderstood God of the Jews. Allah does not have the potential to turn into a “higher” god. He is, so to speak, a stunted Jehovah: one who will never become a God the Father. The Hebrew scriptures can be read and interpreted to accord with the later New Testament message. The Qur’an must remain on the outside.

Nevertheless, especially in hard orientalism, Allah is much more similar to Jehovah – that is, to Yahweh misread the Lutherite way - than he is different from him. And while this near-equation of Allah with Jehovah goes back to the very first Christian impressions of Islam, it becomes far more explicit in the Enlightenment and Romantic period. Hegel’s philosophy of religion provides perhaps the most interesting example. I will deal with his notion of a Judeo-Muslim tradition much more fully in a later chapter; for now, a brief illustration may suffice.

To Hegel, the Jewish mission was exhausted with the incarnation of Christ. Judaism should have disappeared at that point. But not only did it survive; its religious principle even produced a delayed reaction, an anomalous upsurge of Begeisterung, a belated swan song of energy, and that was Islam.[15]

In the 1827 lectures on religion, Hegel suggested that the proposition that the one God “is a jealous God who will have no other gods before him” is “the great thesis of the Jewish, of overall Arab religion of the western Orient and Africa.”[16] Evidently “Arab” was to Hegel a synonym of “Semitic,” as it was for many before the term “Semitic” came into common use.[17] The label Hegel gave to “overall Arab religion,” with its Judaic and Islamic branches, was “religion of the sublime” (Religion des Erhabenen).

The sublime or “sublimity” had been a major topic of eighteenth century literary criticism and philosophy. A revived interest in a first-century-CE Latin fragment on the subject by “the pseudo-Longinus” stimulated important work by Robert Lowth, Edmund Burke, and Immanuel Kant. In Hegel’s summation, when we try to express the sublime we make an “attempt to express the infinite, without finding in the sphere of phenomena an object which proves adequate for this representation.”[18] Jewish and Muslim religion, according to Hegel, views God as such an infinite, and so necessarily fails to find a means of anchoring its conception of the divine in the finite world. As a result, the “religion of the sublime” posits a hopelessly wide, unbridgeable chasm between God and the world. Judaism and Islam find the world utterly separated from God, the sublime, infinite Being. As usual, Hegel was here merely making clearer and more systematic the prevailing view of oriental worship. Ignatius Mouradgea d’Ohsson (1740-1807), for example, an Armenian Catholic born in Constantinople, wrote that Muslim prayer “is the worship which the creature pays to his Creator, as a token of homage, of gratitude, and of a solemn confession of his own nothingness, when compared with the omnipotence of the Eternal Deity.”[19] How easily this conception of prayer migrated between Muslims and Jews we see in Hegel’s condemnation of Spinoza as supposedly maintaining that only God has substance, and that in contrast the world is simply Nothing. (This is an odd attribution, as Spinoza could surely be read as one whose God most definitely dwells within the world.)

In this Hegelian variation on the Pauline and Lutherite theme, the Many who are nothing face the remote God of the Orient, the all-powerful One. This One is not the One of Plato: not the Absolute that encompasses the divinity along with us and our world. Only after the Incarnation of God in Jesus does religion gain the potential to recognize the One as the absolute unity of the Spirit and the world. It can become “the religion of the absolute” only in Christianity, and does become so especially in Protestantism (as interpreted, of course, by Hegel). The oriental, Jewish and “Arab” religion of the sublime is only an intermediate stage in the history of the Spirit, between its beginning in the earliest, primitive religions of nature and its final fulfillment in the religion of the absolute.

The Oriental Despot

The theological figure of Jehovah/Allah is closely related to the embodiment of oriental political authority, the oriental despot. Grosrichard The laws of Allah sanctioned oriental despotism as the political system considered typical for the Orient. The oriental despot is as central to orientalist political rhetoric as Allah/Jehovah is in the theological. In one of the first works devoted entirely to the origins of despotism, published in 1761, Nicolas Boulanger expressed quite clearly the imagined connection between despotism and “Asia,” i.e. the Orient.

If we take a review of the histories and accounts of Asia, we shall be amazed to find, that for so many succeeding ages no other law hath been known in these climates but the will of their monarchs, who have been always revered as visible gods; and before whom the rest of the earth, in prostrate silence, was to shrink into annihilation.[20]

Boulanger traces the origins of the idea of oriental despotism – correctly, as we will see - it all the way back to antiquity: the Greek “histories and accounts of Asia.” The contrast between the One that is All and his subjects who are Nothing is almost as explicit here as it would become in Hegel. The oriental ruler rules much like Allah rules in heaven. This is an all-important idea, and true on the whole; in a later chapter we will return to it in detail, as well as to its limitations.

The Obscene Father

We come to the third, oniric dimension of orientalism. The oniric dimension includes, as I have suggested earlier, a gendered and erotic aspect. Here unlimited Power is imagined as manifested by one male over many women, and ultimately also as his erotic enjoyment of potentially any and all his subjects, female and male. We see the despot not in heaven or presiding over his divan, but in his harem. All aspects of the imagined oriental despot are produced by “the same metaphysical commitments to an ideal One—logos and phallus,” to quote Daniel Boyarin writing in a different yet related context.[21]  

The oriental despot, who is a slave holder and not a father in Aristotle’s or the Bible’s terms, now appears as a representation of the phallic primeval Father of psychoanalysis. In terms of the oedipal metaphor of psychoanalysis, the Father occupies the position of the author and administrator of the Law. He cuts the bond of identity between the Mother and Ego (who, in the more gender-biased original versions, may be specifically the Son, the Daughter requiring separate treatment): in fact, the Ego is the result of this cut. In subjecting the Ego to the Law, the Father ensures Ego’s survival in society as an independent, active entity. There are, however, fathers and then there are fathers. 

In psychoanalysis the figure of the father refracts into two dialectically opposed aspects. One is the caring domestic father figure, who appears to occupy many analysts today, because they see problems in individuals who did not have such a father present in their childhood home.[22] At the religious level, this is God the Father. This figure is the Abba! Jesus cries out to in Mark 14:36: “Father!” The incident was important enough for Paul to repeat in his epistles twice, and not in Greek but in the original Aramaic that a first-century Jew would have used at least on informal occasions.[23] Paul’s intention was to stress the close familial relation Jesus bore to God. He probably meant to suggest that through Jesus Christians acquire the same warm proximity to their heavenly father. Jews who reject Jesus would not be given this opportunity. One of the modern preachers who caught Paul’s intent best was Martin Luther King. “Compare the early Hebrew's statement,” King wrote, “‘Let not God speak with us, lest we die,’ with the words of Jesus, ‘When ye pray, say, Our Father.’”[24] The Old Testament God (whom I mean by “Jehovah” here) is not (yet) a father, though he will become one within the Christian Trinity.

But there is another aspect of the father figure, and one that cast a giant shadow on the classic writings of Freud and his descendants: the father castrating father. This tyrant cuts the link between mother and son not to enable his child to become an independent member of a functioning society, but rather in order to keep keeps the mother and all jouissance, all pleasure and enjoyment to himself. He is the father of the primitive horde that Freud, in one of his most delirious moments, imagined killed by his sons so that they could bond to found society.[25] Lacan called calls him le père jouissant or le père jouissance, which Žižek translates as Father-of-Enjoyment or Father Enjoyment. The Father-of-Enjoyment is the erotic equivalent of Allah at the theological, and of the oriental despot at the political level.

The political economy of oriental despotism posits a sovereign who takes everything from his subjects and gives them next to nothing; the economy exists essentially only to nourish him like a beehive nourishes its queen. To this, Alain Grosrichard has shown, corresponds a homologous libidinal economy. All jouissance flows in the direction of the despot. In the sexual sphere the sign of this one-way adulation is the harem, into which a steady and in principle infinite flow of beautiful virgins enter, many of them from beyond the confines of the realm, thus affirming the imperial, universal importance of the ruler as the sublime One. Young boys, too, are continuously brought in, to replenish his army but also to supply his homosexual appetites, for the lord of all enjoys all.

The Father-of-Enjoyment is, it must be stressed, not a specifically orientalist figure, unlike Allah and the oriental despot. It is rather, a metaphor for a very general feature of the human, or certainly the western, psyche. Allah and the oriental despot are, however, means to externalize this internal feature: to project it onto the Orient. The Father-of-Enjoyment is frightening. Pretending that he resides in a far-away region of the globe feels better than recognizing him in the depths of one’s own soul.

The obvious period for imagining a despot with the characteristics of the Father-of-Enjoyment was when absolutism became a contested form of government, rather than an almost universally desired panacea for disorder caused by wars and plagues, as it had often been in Europe in the sixteenth century. Absolutism may have quite successfully established the role of the State as the single source of sovereignty. But the question became whether the much greater authority assigned to the State at the expense of the traditional estates, cities, guilds, etc. would reside in a single person, with Louis XIV the proverbial example, or in “the law,” as in England after the Glorious Revolution of 1688. (Both the sovereign’s unfettered authority and the uncompromising rule of law were seen as combined, we will see later in the book, in the Oriental empires – another important nuance of the orientalist imagination.) In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, the crisis of the absolute monarchy that led to the American and French revolutions engendered a perverse preoccupation with the all-powerful and boundlessly egoistical male administrator of a self-serving law: an imagined character that we can identify as the Father-of-Enjoyment. Unlimited male, especially sexual, power became a characteristic fantasy. The Marquis de Sade explored the limits of the privileged male’s power to command all jouissance for himself, without any regards to those who are ordered to provide it. Less radical were other versions of the homme fatal; especially of Don Juan or Don Giovanni, later explored and exploited by romantics such as Byron. Byron’s play Sardanapalus inspired one of the most striking works of romantic sadism, Delacroix’s Death of Sardanapalus (1827). In Delacroix’s monumental canvas, the turbaned king watches with an almost bored expression as his numerous concubines, stark nude and in various poses of desperate contrition, are stabbed on his orders by his guards. The “gothic” gloom of such sadistic scenes recalls William Thomas Beckford’s Vathek (also known as The History of the Caliph Vathek), the story of a murderous, bisexual libertine who wishes to acquire supernatural powers but is instead, like Don Giovanni, doomed to hell. Completed in 1786, Vathek is considered by some to be the first orientalist novel.

Such sadistic fantasies provoke the worst of our erotic imagination, but they do not celebrate the erotic. Like the crime of rape, they reduce it completely to a relation between the all-powerful and the completely powerless. To return to the oppositions at the beginning of this chapter, they celebrate the total victory of Authority over Eros.

The Father-of-Enjoyment personifies that victory. His gender essence is nowhere as clear as in the hard orientalist image of the despot. The despot’s unlimited political power finds its exact oniric equivalent in the unlimited prerogatives of his male libido. And the abject adoration he receives from his completely powerless subjects has an equally precise erotic parallel in the sexual submission of women and/or boys who serve his pleasure.

Conclusion

At all levels – theological, political, oniric – the oriental appears to the hard orientalist imagination as the embodiment of what we fear we ourselves might be: puny slaves of aloof powers far greater than we. Only faith assures a Christian that when she calls “Father!” it is the loving God the Father and not the fearsome Jehovah that responds. Unfortunately, the Lutherite construction of God the Father never really succeeds in eliminating all the traces of the old God the Despot. As one atheist web site put it perhaps a bit too harshly, “Calling somebody father doesn't mean he's not a psychopath.”[26]

The end of absolutism and the rise of bourgeois liberalism was marked by regicide: a king’s head rolled in England under Cromwell, and eventually in France under Robespierre. The second regicide, especially, unleashed widespread anxiety, not because it was more blood-thirsty than thousands of other executions, but because it was, symbolically, the murder of a Father. Absolute monarchs typically portray themselves as fathers of their people, who seek his protection, not only by the law but also, if necessary, from the law. In the bourgeois revolutions, people hoped that the law would give them more consistent protection than the king from injustice and injury. But that presupposes that the law is rational and compassionate. The Law of the oriental despot – of the sultan, of Jehovah, of Allah – is neither. Oriental despotism is, at the oniric level, the nightmare of abandonment by the Father. At the political level, it is the nightmare of the modern age.