Nationalist Anxiety or the Fear of Losing Your Other

Ghassan Hage
Anthropology, University of Sydney

The nation of the nationalists is always conceived to be in crisis. There is always

an other standing between them and ‘it’. ‘It’ is often the impossible goal of a
‘totally gratifying nation’. Within a psychoanalytic framework, gratifying this
nation is perceived as a fantasy, an object-cause of desire (Lacan), that is, a
practical impossibility that neverthless keeps the practitioner trying to reach it.
Within such a framework the other standing between the nationalists and their
goal becomes a necessary subjective construction which allows the conversion
of the impossibility of the nationalist fantasy into deferred possibility. The crisis
presented by nationalist thought as triggered by the presence of the other is in
fact a mode of reproducing the nationalists’ belief in themselves and their nation.
The ‘real’ crisis is when nationalists ‘lose’ their other and are forced to face the
impossibility of the desired nation. Such situations can be described as states of
nationalist anxiety. This paper, based on research during the civil war in
Lebanon, examines certain events where the Lebanese Christian Nationalists
were faced with the threat of losing their Muslim other. The paper describes the
states of anxiety generated by this ‘threat’ and the nature of the strategies the
Christian militias deployed to bring their state of anxiety to an end.

Introduction
In recent years the work of the Lacanian philosopher and psychoanalyst Slavoj Zizek
(1991, 1993) has provided some exceptionally sharp analytical insights into a variety of
current ideological formations. Of particular importance have been scattered reflections on
the wave of ethnic and national chauvinism in ex-communist Europe from which emerge
the contours of a much needed theory of the nature of the affective structure that underlies
communal1 imagining.

1 I take communal to encompass all modes of communality (national, ethnic, etc.)

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122 THE AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF ANTHROPOLOGY

The core of Zizek’s approach is based on Lacan’s work on fantasy, with the organised
community taking the place of the Thing reflecting the way such a community ‘organises
its enjoyment’. An essential feature of this structure is the necessity of the other within it.
Nationalists and communalists in general cannot perceive their community without an
otherness of some sort standing between them and ‘it’. The presence of this threatening
other is one of the key elements that provide the structure of communal imagining with a
minimum of stability. In this sense, ‘instability’ is not produced by the threat of a
destabilising other, rather, paradoxically, it is produced by the threat of the destabilising
other’s disappearance. It is this threat of the other’s disappearance that is one of the
sources of a more serious anxiety for the communal subject. It is precisely this anxiety
generated by ‘the fear of losing the other’ within communal imagining that I will examine
in this paper.
Through a historical examination of the dominant mode of communal identification
among the Maronite Christians in Lebanon, I will begin by exploring more clearly how the
other can function as a stabiliser of communal imagining. Then, I will examine the specific
case during the recent Lebanese civil war (1976-1991) where the Maronites were faced
with an explicit threat of losing their other (the ‘Muslim Arab’) and the strategies that
emanated from the state of anxiety they found themselves in.

The dominant structure of Maronite communalism

The following edited passage is taken from an editorial of the influential Maronite
Christian daily el-Arnal. It was written in the wake of one of the many murderous episodes
of the Lebanese civil war. This particular episode involved an intense shelling of the
Christian-held areas by the Syrian army.*
They want to Arabise Lebanon completely.
. . . This conflict is nothing but an attempt to appropriate or to dissolve the
specificity of the Christian presence countered by a Christian refusal till death.
Everything that is said in describing this conflict other than this is mystification
and falsification .
. . . This attempt is not new but has existed long before the Palestinian and the
Syrian presence. How else can we explain the Nasserite phenomenon and other
phenomena before and after it? (el-Amal 24/9/78).
The editorial is inviting readers to perceive this event as a repetition (‘This attempt is
not new . . .’): the repetition of a Christian3 struggle for a specific mode of
presence/existence in the face of a continuing Arab Muslim (Syrian, Palestinian,
Nasserite) attempt at dissolving this Christian4 specificity of Lebanon.

2 Syria is predominantly an Arab and Muslim country bordering much of the Lebanese
territory.
3 Being the dominant Christian sect the Maronites always refer to themselves as ‘the
Christians’ tout court.
4 As we shall see, Christianity is not perceived simply in religious terms but also as secular
Western culture.
NATIONALIST ANXIETY OR THE FEAR OF LOSING YOUR OTHER 123

Soon after the Syrian shelling, a book appeared presenting a more elaborate but
basically similar interpretation reviewing the ‘history’ of the Maronites and the whole of
the Lebanese civil war:
Bullets were fired from machine guns . . . . Joseph Abou Assi (a Maronite
militia fighter-G.H.) falls on the ground in a pool of blood . . . It was the
morning of Sunday the 13th of April 1975 . . .
If this is the first image of the eruption of the greatest war in the history of
modern Lebanon, the confrontation had in fact begun before the thirteenth of
April. It began thirteen centuries ago! It began with the Arab conquest and
continued with the Umayyads and the Abbasids and the Mamlouks and the
Ottomans and the Iqta’ and evolved with the Arab Nationalists and the
Nasserites, until it reached the Palestinians. All of these represented in the
Christians’ eyes an expansionary intention which aimed at eradicating their free
and independent and sovereign presence. The intention is still what i t has been
for thirteen hundred years: Arabising Lebanon, forcing Arabism on the
Christians . . . So one should not be astonished at what happened on the
morning of the thirteenth of April. It was inevitable that it would happen . . .
(Fares 1979:287)
If a knowledgeable reader hoped to find any new arguments, thesis, explanations and the
like of the Lebanese predicament, that reader would have been disappointed. However,
Fares’s knowledgeable readership (the ‘educated’ Maronites, as they are known) loved the
book and obviously did not hope for anything original along that line. What was original
was the power of its repetitive discourse. Not only is ‘everything’ explained but it is
explained as it should be explained. Its power was a power of confirmation, not of
revelation. And it was precisely confirmation that the readership wanted from a book that
starts with the claim of engaging in a ‘scientific enterprise of serious research’ (Fares
1979:12): yes, the history of the Maronites is made out of a series of repetitions: yes, since
the seventh century, they have been trying to live as a community in an environment that
expressed their specific cultural values: yes, their attempts are always frustratedthreatened
by ArabsMuslims (the two identities are considered as interchangeable). A thirteen
century old Fort-Da.
A common ‘detached’ response to texts such as this is to dismiss them as nationalist
mythology, a manufacturing of history aimed at legitimising the present. They are, of
course, all of this. But to see them as j u s t that, would make one miss an important
dimension of the whole process. This discourse does not just function to legitimise the
social and political interests of the Maronite community, or more precisely those who have
acquired the right to speak in the name of/construct the Maronite community. This
discourse is a discourse in which the Maronite community stages its very symbolic
existence.
The fact is that this image-of a community yearning for a Christian existence always
threatened by a Muslim other-has been dominant among the Maronites, and can be
documented at least as far back as the fifteenth century.
At the beginning of the fourth century Christianity had become the official state religion
of the Roman Empire. However, many historical traditions and theological issues,
undoubtedly related to other social concerns, divided the Christians (Rabbath 1981:20).
124 THE AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF ANTHROPOLOGY

Often, these divisions took the form of intense debates about the nature of Christ. While
the initiators of the various interpretations were necessarily members of the clergy, the
debates over those interpretations were far from being confined to clerical circles. They
caused considerable popular ferment. A religious authority of the time wrote that:
. . . if you ask a person about the price of a commodity, he answers you by a
debate over the born and the unborn, if you ask about the price of bread he
answers you: the Father is highest and the Son comes only in second place, and
if you ask if the bath is ready, he answers you that the Son is born from
nothingness (Rabbath 1981: 17).
Given this popular interest, the theoretician of a new interpretation usually developed a
following of people who gathered around him or sometimes settled around his place of
worship. The official Church dealt ruthlessly with such unorthodox groupings. This
created an important impetus for the transformation of the believers into communities
privileging their own new sectarian category of identification.
Most historians agree that the Maronites were an unorthodox sect that followed the
Monothelite doctrine which argued that while Christ had a dual nature, divine and profane,
he had a single will. This helps explain why they formed into a distinct community since
they would have needed to protect themselves against the defenders of orthodoxy such as
the Greco-Roman armies. Undoubtedly, the invading Islamic armies reproduced a similar
need.
The Muslim Shari’a’s differentiation of people on the basis of their religious identity,
and both their collective ‘tolerance’ and persecution on the basis of this identity, led the
Maronites to become acutely conscious of their status as a religious minority in a Muslim-
dominated region.
When they settled in Mount Lebanon, the need for cohesion was further strengthened by
their collective subjugation, as an overwhelmingly peasant community, to the exploitation
and sometimes tyranny of Shi’a Muslim overlords. Their aspiration for unity was mostly
expressed through the Maronite Church (Sharara 197559).
In the writings of the Maronite historian Ibn el-Qilai (b.1450), who belonged to the
clergy (Dib 1962:102), we find the first clear expression of the structure of Maronite
communalism: a yearning for an idealised communal life in the face of many divisive
issues whether of a religious doctrinal, or of a more explicitly political, nature. Already
among these, it is the Muslims that constitute the most important threat. Because of the
Church’s dominant role within the community, one can assume that the aspirations and
fears of Ibn el-Qilai were common among the Maronites. His ‘history’ begins with the
depiction of a golden past (in Daou 1977: pt.iv, ch.2):
But histories tell us
of what happened in our home countries
and to those who were before us
the inhabitants of Mount Lebanon (282)
. . . They were united in the religion
all working for it
the rich as well as the poor
NATIONALIST ANXIETY OR THE FEAR OF LOSING YOUR OTHER 125

obedience and love with faith (284)

. . . Heretics they did not have
and no Muslim lived among them
and if a Jew was found
his grave was soon covered by crows (285).
Whether such a past existed is, of course, doubtful. What is important, however, is its
glorification: ‘God lived among them . . . ’(283). Such a glorification points to the desired
state that the communal subject is yearning for.
In contrast to the golden past, the Maronites’ present was shaped by divisions which
brought their defeat at the hands of the Muslim Mamluks, who were ruling the Lebanese
mountain at the time when Ibn el-Qilai was writing:
The devil father of all tyranny
saw the people of Maron happy
he envied them and sunk them in sorrow
through two men who were monks
. . . They said Jesus had no spirit
or nature that suffers and feels
and‘we shall not obey Peter’s see
because it believes otherwise’
. . . Evil spread and became two parties
and there was a split because of the two
. . . King Barkuk heard of this
a closed door opened to him
he sent armies up and down
to besiege Mount Lebanon (536)
While the cause of the Maronites’ subjugation was internal divisions, what made the
divisions particularly dangerous was that the Muslims were always waiting for the
opportunity (‘a door to open’) to put an end to the Christians independent communal
living. Thus while there are many ‘others’ in Ibn el- Qilai’s writings (the Jew, the Muslim
and the heretic), the Muslim is undoubtedly the central one. This is not due, however, to
any special inherent antagonism between the Muslim and the Maronite identity that did
not exist between the Maronite and the Jewish identity, for instance. The Muslims are
central for the obvious fact that they constituted the most powerful and the most
immediate danger. They are not only enemies of the faith, but also oppressors who aimed
at and were capable of subjugating the Maronites. One is permitted to speculate that such a
Maronite identity reflects also, albeit in a primitive form, the class position of the
Maronites as a mainly peasant community, involved in identical practices determined by
an identical and collective subjugation to Muslim overlords.
This remained the case following the Ottoman invasion which led to a further
formalisation or institutionalisation of the Muslim Shari’a law through the introduction of
the ‘millet’ system. This system erected a political order of quasi-religious segregation. It
was based on the Shari‘a’s inherent privileging of the confessional category of
identification as well as its differentiation between the ‘social worth’ of different sects.
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While, under early Ottoman rule, the Maronites remained a mainly peasant community
subjugated to Muslim rulers as a class, the millet system also ensured their institutional
marginalisation from political power as a religious community. As Dubar and Nasr
(1976: 14), describing the millet system, point out:
. . , theoretically, the social and political distinctions of privileges and
restrictions, of power and submission, of prestige and humiliation, distribut-d
the nations (Tawa’if religious groups) that made up the Empire along a veritable
pyramid on top of which were the Turks, spinal column and lance-head of the
Sunni Muslim Umma (the community of believers), followed by other non-
Turkish Islamic communities (Arabs, Kurds, Albanians), themselves followed
by non-Turkish and non-Muslim ethnic groups going from the central
communities (Greeks and Armenians) to the more peripheral (Slavonic
Christians, Arab Christians,. . .
Beside this semi-formal positioning within the Empire, the Maronites’ social sphere did
not witness any significant changes in the early years of Ottoman rule. The Maronites’
major preoccupations and aspirations persisted, and the meanings articulated to their
identity remained essentially the same. Like the writings of Ibn el-Qilai, the writings of the
period’s Maronite historian, Bishop Istphan el-Duwaihi (1630-1704), are also concerned
with Maronite yearnings for unity and independent communal life in the face of Muslim
domination (Harik 1968: 132).
It was with the advent of capitalism that the Maronite communal identity began to
undergo certain transformations. This is clearly seen in the writings of Bishop Niqula
Murad (see Harik 1968) in the 1840s. Like Ibn el-Qilai and Istphan el-Duwaihi, Murad
emphasised the Maronites’ communal yearnings. But he aimed much more systematically
at differentiating the Maronites from thc Muslims in general, and more specifically the
Druze who were the dominant Islamic sect in Mount Lebanon and to which the semi-
feudal class that ruled the Mountain belonged.
Owing to the penetration of the Mountain by French capitalism, there was a constant
struggle to make the development of the Mountain’s economy complementary to, and
dependent on, the needs of French capital. It was the needs of this capital to develop silk
production as well as mercantilist activities, that dominated the Lebanese economy during
much of the nineteenth century and which led to the spread of capitalist social relations in
the Mountain to the detriment of the feudal relations.
Because France used religious affinity as a basis for forging alliances in the area, and
because the Muslim Druze ruling class had an interest in the preservation of the quasi-
feudal order, capitalist social relations spread almost exclusively within the Maronite
community at the expense of the Druzes, lords and peasants alike. This led to the
translation of the conflict between the new and old social relations into a series of
communal wars between Muslim Druze and Christians throughout the middle of the
nineteenth century. Despite this, these communal wars, which led to a massacre of
Maronites, were experienced once again by the latter as another Muslim attack on their
communal aspirations.
This was clearly reflected in Murad’s writing. But as mentioned above, the Bishop put
considerable effort into explaining the Maronites’ cultural distinctness. The practices
NATIONALIST ANXIETY OR THE FEAR OF LOSING YOUR OTHER 127

Murad invokes to explain the distinctiveness of the Maronites are no longer strictly limited
to the religious sphere or to the portrayal of the ‘other’ as a political/military threat as with
Ibn el-Qilai. Harik’s account of his writing is worth quoting at length. In Murad’s opinion,
Harik tells us:
The Druze . . . are inferior in all respects. They are religiously confused and
socially backward, generally lazy with no skills or trades other than tilling the
ground . . . Except for a few of them who have intimate contact with the
Maronites . . . the Druze can neither read nor write. Beside they are dependent
on the Maronites, for ‘they cannot live without the Christians of the country who
are familiar with all the occupations prevalent in Europe’ . . . (1968:139).
Along with the element of religious differentiation, two new bases of difference are
explicitly emphasised by Murad. First, a difference based on socio-economic practices; the
‘occupations prevalent in Europe’ as opposed to ‘tilling the ground’. Second, a difference
based on intellectual skills; the Druzes, unlike the Maronites, ‘cannot read or write’. These
differences had their basis in the new reality of the Maronites. This was not only true with
regard to economic practices, it was also true with regard to reading and writing skills.
Since Pope Gregory XI11 opened the Maronite college in Rome in 1584 (Dib 1973:42),
many of its graduates returned and opened Maronite schools in the area. ‘By the 18th
century’, Harik points out, ‘ . . . the number of Maronite clericals educated in Rome had
increased and their missions in Mt Lebanon started to give results after more then a
century’s work . . . The first seeds of learning appeared among the Maronites’ (Harik
1968:103). More important was the army of French missionaries that was established in
the Maronite regions in the wake of the French penetration. These missionaries, belonging
to various French orders, initiated a veritable boom in schooling as they competed for
students and influence. The competition between the Jesuits and the Lazarites was most
notable (Chevallier 1982:260-265). This education was not unrelated to the economic
developments in the area. The Lazarites, for instance, explained that they had opened the
Ayntura college in 1834 to educate the French children living in Syria and the ‘young
Maronites destined to become tax collectors, shop owners, clerks and interpreters’ (264).
The French traveller Volney remarked that ‘the most solid advantage which resulted
from these missionary works, was that the art of writing became more common among the
Maronites’ (in Salibi 1965:13). In much the same way as they remained marginal to the
capitalist development of the Mountain, the Druzes were virtually unaffected by the
educational development that accompanied it. Consequently, educational practices were
seen as specific to the Maronite community and became adapted to the Maronite identity.
This adaptation along with the introduction of the ‘occupations prevalent in Europe’
established by Bishop Murad present a Maronite identity vastly different from those
revealed in the writings of Ibn el-Qilai or Istphan el-Duwaihi. The elements used to
differentiate the Maronites from the Druzes within it are greater in number and different in
nature. Nevertheless, what is most important about these differences is neither their
number nor their individual nature but what they add up to. With ideas such as ‘the Druzes
are socially backward’, Murad establishes between the Maronites and the Muslims
differences in levels of civilisation, not simply differences in certain practices.
128 THE AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF ANTHROPOLOGY

Although the extent of this difference is constantly exaggerated by the Maronites, it was
not without a solid basis in their practical reality. Structurally, this ‘new mode of
otherness’ reflected a difference between modes of production rather than the difference
within one mode of production reflected by el-Qilai and el-Duwaihi. This structural reality
was experienced by the Maronites not simply as a change in some economic and/or
intellectual practices but more fundamentally as a transformation of their ‘way of life’,
affecting several aspects of their daily lives. Indeed the equation between affinity to
Western civilisation and the availability and appreciation of the Western commodity
remains an important aspect of Maronite identity.
Despite the above we still find in Murad’s writing a repeat of the same structure of
Maronite communalism: a yearning for a glorified mode of Christian communal existence
effectively threatened by a Muslim other. However, an interesting new dimension
becomes articulated onto this structure; a more universal articulation which depicts the
Christian communal yearning as part of the more general yearning of ‘humanity’ towards
a ‘modern’ life universalised by the internationalisation of Western capital. Here, the
Muslim other increasingly becomes a colonial construction representing pre-modern,
backward forces frustrating humanity’s forward march. It is this construction which has
continued to shape Maronite communalism until today.
What needs to be retained at the moment from this very brief history of Maronite
communal identification is that, regardless of what else the conflicts between Maronites
and Muslims in the last four or five centuries have been about, there is no doubt that a
large majority of Maronites have experienced those conflicts as a struggle for their very
survival as a community against the Muslims. This subjective structure has framed and
helped constitute their ‘reality’ and their history. By the same token it has constituted them
as a community: it is not just that without the continual reproduction of this structure the
Maronite community cannot give meaning to the historical events it is shaping and
encountering, rather, it is that without it, it cannot give meaning to itself as a constructed
social/historical force. This subjective structure constructs the social forces mobilised
within a communal space into a specific collective subject: a confessional community
whose very existence as a symbolic entity depends on this structure. Without it the
Maronite communal subject faces immediate symbolic death. It is this aspect of the
structure that is explained best by Lacan’s concept of fantasy that Zizek has taken up in
explaining what he calls the ‘national Thing’.
The nation is a Thing, in Lacanian terms, because it is ‘something more’ than the
affectively neutral features composing ‘a specific way of life’(Zizek 1993: 201). This
feature of the national home constitutes it as ‘what gives plenitude and vivacity to our life’
which is the Lacanian definition of a Thing (ibid.). Consequently, Zizek argues, ‘what is . .
. at stake in ethnic tensions is always the possession of the national Thing’ (1993: 202).
Communalists are constantly worried that the other is going to steal their Thing (their
fulfilling community) away from them. It is by taking this argument to its logical end and
imputing on the community the ontological consistency of the Thing as posited by
Lacan/Zizek that we obtain a radically different perspective on the Maronites’ communal
yearning and the function of the Muslim other within it.
NATIONALIST ANXIETY OR THE FEAR OF LOSING YOUR OTHER 129

For Lacan the Thing has the status of the object-cause of desire. It is that which is
desired (an object of desire, the goal) and, at the same time, that which causes desire-i.e.
causes the subject to exist as a desiring subject. This is so because desire emerges in the
subject’s attempt at overcoming what psychoanalysis postulates as a constitutive originary
lack that can never be overcome. The subjects come to exist as desiring by relating to a
Thing constructed as that which will satisfy their desire, something that will satisfy the
originary lack. However, on the one hand, the Thing cannot be fully satisfying since its
attainment cannot satisfy the originary lack. On the other, for the subject to continue to
exist, it has to continue trying to attain the Thing as if it was attainable, Thus, the Thing,
for it to be a Thing, has to both cause the subject to try and attain it and be unattainable. It
is in that sense that the Thing stages a fantasy space, since ‘in Lacanian theory, fantasy
designates the subject’s impossible relation to the object-cause of its desire’ (Zizek 1991:
6). As Zizek explains:
What the fantasy stages is not a scene in which our desire is fulfilled, fully
satisfied, but on the contrary, a scene that realizes, stages the desire as such. The
fundamental point of psychoanalysis is that desire is not something given in
advance, but something that has to be constructed-and it is precisely the role of
fantasy to give the coordinates of the subject’s desire, to specify its object, to
locate the position the subject assumes in it. It is only through fantasy that the
subject is constituted as desiring (1991: 6).
What does this mean with regard to Maronite communal identification? Firstly, that the
idea of a Maronite community fully united, unperturbed by otherness such as the one
described by Ibn el-Qilai is a communal Thing. This means that, for the Maronites who
aspire to it, it is an object-cause of desire. It is that goal with which they aim to fill the gap
created by their constitutive lack as subjects. According to the popular meaning of fantasy
it is the attainment of this ideal community that constitutes the fantasy. For Lacan, on the
other hand, fantasy is the very existence of a space in which the subject aspires to attain
the ideal and in so doing stages its very existence. To put it differently, it is the space
where subjects give their lives a meaning and in doing so give a meaning to their very
being, to themselves. Thus, for Lacan, the existence of the meaningful, aspiring symbolic
subject (i.e., the subject that exists at the level of the symbolic) is part of the fantasy. It is
in trying to attain the ideal community that the Maronite subject can come to exist as a
meaningful communal subject. A subject which has access to the communal ‘we’.
Therefore, fantasy stages the dynamic which allows subjects to ‘go on’ (trying to attain
the ideal community) and it is only in so far as they are moved by such a dynamic, as long
as they are motivated to pursuelbuild the ideal community that they can exist as a
communal ‘we’. In this construct, the subjects cannot possibly end their pursuit of the
ideal community, since to end it means to end their very ruison d’2rre. If there is no
fantasy of a yet-to-be-attained community the communal subject constructing it dies (at
the level of the symbolic). This is why the communal Thing is always both a never-
attained and a yet-to-be attained goal. It is only in so far as it can stage the desire of
achieving a never-to-be achieved goal that fantasy can stage the subject’s existence.
It is here that the crucial function of the other emerges in the structure of the fantasy.
For the subject to go on desiring what is unattainable, it has to construct that which is
unattainable into something that is yet-to-be-attained. The other of the fantasy is precisely
130 THE AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF ANTHROPOLOGY

that element which transforms the impossibility of attaining the Thing into a deferred
possibility. It is precisely an element which allows the fantasy to reproduce itself and in SO
doing allows the subject to go on existing.
Within this construct, the ideal Maronite community is by its very nature unattainable.
The Maronite subject, perceives it as something that is not yet attained. But it also
perceives it as something that can be attained. This is what legitmises the Maronite
subject’s existence as a ‘community-builder’, a subject desiring a fulfilling community,
that is, as a communal subject tout court. In such a process, the function of the Muslim
other is radically transformed. Instead of just being that which is constantly frustrating the
Maronites’ communal aspiration, its presence allows the Maronite to believe in the
possibility of its ideal community precisely by positing ‘the Muslim’ as that which is
standing between it and its desired community. The Christian Maronite needs ‘the
Muslim’ in order to believe in the ideal community, in order to go on pursuing it and, as
such, in order to continue existing as a communal subject (an ‘I’ speaking the ‘we’
language).
From this perspective, crisis-an always frustrated yearning for ideal communal life-
is the stable state of the Maronite, or any other, subjective structure of communal being. It
is to the extent that it exists in the way it does (an ideal Maronite community in crisis,
forever frustrated by a Muslim other), that this structure provides the dynamic principle
behind the community’s existence (community building), which, as we have argued, is the
only way the communal subject can exist. The presence of the Muslim other is crucial for
this structure to exist as a ‘stable crisis’ that can repeat itself to allow for the continued
existence of the communal subject. Consequently, the phenomena of repetition that we
have noticed at the beginning of this section can now be understood as no less than the
affirmation of the very being of the communal subject.
It is in light of the above, that I would like to examine now what Lacan defines as a
state of anxiety, a state generated by the fear of losing the fantasy structure, the fear of
losing our desire-that is, the fear of losing ourselves as desiring subjects. This is the case
when the subject is faced by a destabilisation of the fantasy structure that constitutes it,
and is thus faced with its symbolic death. In particular, I want to examine the
destabilisation that can be caused by the threat of losing the other of the fantasy. If the
threatening other is an element that provides the fantasy structure with its stability and by
the same token the stability of the communal subject constituted by it, what happens if this
threatening other, ‘threatens’ to disappear or even more ironically ‘threatens’ to stop being
threatening? How does the communal subject express the anxiety it faces on such
occasions and what sort of politics is generated in such states of anxiety?

Anxiety and the stability of the fantasy structure

Given that the practical reality of the communal subject produced by the fantasy is
always changing (especially when, as in our case, we are dealing with the survival of a
structure over five centuries old), there is always a certain ‘low level’ anxiety generated by
the less than total fit between the fantasy structure and the practical reality of the subject.
It can be argued that part and parcel of the structure is a constant anxiety-driven
NATIONALIST ANXIETY OR THE FEAR OF LOSING YOUR OTHER 131

ideological work required to assure its reproduction across changing social and historical
conditions.
This does not mean that the reproduction of the structure is assured internally regardless
of social and historical conditions. Of course, such conditions have to exist for the
structure to be reproduced. At the same time, however, these conditions do not explain in
themselves the capacity of the fantasy to endure such changes and remain virtually intact
in its basic ~tructure.~ At least, some of the processes that ensure its survival have to be
internal. It is such processes that anxiously function to incorporate the changing ‘reality’
of the subject into the symbolic space of its fantasy.
Turning to the structure of the Maronites’ fantasy, it is clear that this structure has
remained the same despite some important changes to the empirical Muslim other that it
had to symbolise within it. We have already seen that this Muslim other has changed from
being the invading Mamluks to being the Ottomans and then to being the Druzes. The
change does not stop here. When a Lebanese republic was proclaimed early this century,
the French colonial forces had basically constructed it through the forced connection of
several mainly Sunni, but also Shi’a, Muslim areas adjacent to the Christian and Druze
Mount Lebanon. The inhabitants of these areas saw themselves initially as Syrian rather
than Lebanese. From then on the key Muslim other became those mainly Sunni Muslims
of Lebanon who now outnumbered the Druzes. They were seen, on the whole, as never
really wanting to be part of Lebanon. Syria was also incorporated into the fantasy structure
as a Muslim Arab nation always yearning to re-annex the whole of Lebanon to itself and
dissolve its Christian character.
How does the Muslim other remain basically unchanged despite these transformations?
Or to put it differently, how can the aggressive intent of the Muslim remain the same
within the fantasy structure despite it empirically changing from Mamluks to Ottomans to
Druzes to Sunnis? Obviously, because all of the above share an aggressive Muslim
essence which dictates how they will behave towards Christians no matter where or how
this essence expresses itself. That is, it is an essentialist logic that allows the communal
fantasy to reproduce itself.
Thus, in his history of endless repetition examined above, Fares explains the repetition
by the fact that the ‘fuel’ of the interaction between Muslims and Christians is always the
same. ‘It is Islam and Christianity’ (1979:12). The difference between these two, Fares
tells us, is ‘not only a racial difference (emphasis in the text)’ (1979:30). ‘It is’, he informs
us, ‘a difference between civilisations and this is the highest mode of differentiation
between human beings’ (1979:30). ‘From a psychological perspective’, he adds, ‘we
notice that the difference in the nature and mentality of the individual in the Eastern
Christian grouping is different from the nature and mentality of the individual in the Arab
Islamic grouping . . . And we can say that this difference in nature and mentality is the
product of the difference in civilisation. This is what all the scientists and the thinkers of
the earth have agreed upon’ (1979:30).

5 Bourdieu has also hinted at the existence of a core within the habitus, what he called,
following Spinoza, conatus, and which remains immune to social and historical conditions.
132 THE AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF ANTHROPOLOGY

It has often been pointed out that essentialism conceives identities as cutting across
historical change. Not often is it also noticed that essentialism allows for ubiquitous modes
of existence. The essence can exist in several places at the same time: everywhere and
nowhere, The Maronite’s Muslim other can be the Lebanese Muslims representing an
internal danger and at the same time the Syrians representing an external danger.
Consequently, it is both the essence’s trans-historical and trans-spatial qualities that allow
the fantasy structure to integrate within its symbolism the lived reality of the communal
subject with a minimal amount of ‘anxious’ ideological labour: it becomes merely a
question of asserting that the other’s behaviour expresses its essence. What is important is
that essentialism, here, is not merely a mode of reducing the other to an essence. By being
a mode of reproducing the fantasy structure through the stabilisation of its other, it is also
a mode of reproducing/stabilising the subject constructed in the fantasy.
As I began by arguing, the ideological work of adequation generated by ‘low level’
anxiety is part of the ‘normal’ state of the fantasy structure. And it is the essentialist logic
that permeates the fantasy that allows such work to be possible. But what if the essentialist
category, despite its elasticity, is not enough to incorporate and symbolise an emerging
reality, challenging the stability of the fantasy in a major way? I would like to suggest that
it is in such situations that anxiety moves from being ‘low level’ to being the dominant
feature of the communal subject’s struggle for existence. I will take two examples that
occurred during the recent civil war to illustrate such states of anxiety.

Black Saturday
The first event is linked to the rise of the Lebanese National Movement (LNM), an
alliance of Muslim and secular leftist forces, as the main power facing the
Maronite/Christian Right during the early stages of the civil war.
As with all essentialist thought, the Maronites’ mode of perception framed by their
fantasy space meant that whatever else Muslims might be, poor, working class, merchants,
members of the Communist Party, it was as Muslims that they were primarily classified.
Whatever their political aspirations, it was seen as further proof of the Muslim’s
threatening intent towards Christianity in Lebanon. If a Muslim became a communist,
communism became yet another essentially Muslim strategy aimed at destabilising
Christian communal life. That is, the ‘anxious ideological work’ performed within the
fantasy aimed at stabilising the Muslim not only as a threat, but particularly as a Muslim
threat. It struggled so that the Muslim remains ‘Muslim’.
The fact that the ruling classes of both the Christian and the Muslim communities had an
interest in confessional mobilisation created more than the ample conditions for the
Maronites’ essentialism (and the Sunni Muslims’, for that matter) to be grounded in their
practical reality. The ‘naturalness’ and the primacy of the confessional categories of
identification-Christian and Muslim-so permeated Lebanon’s political culture that it
was enshrined in a semi-formal manner by Lebanon’s elite in an unwritten constitution
which virtually de-legitimised any other mode of political identification. The ‘National
Pact’ as this unwritten agreement became known, saw the Lebanese constituted by two
NATIONALIST ANXIETY OR THE FEAR OF LOSING YOUR OTHER 133

political forces Christians and Muslims aiming for a balance of power in a parliament
where deputies had to be elected on the basis of their confessional identity.
Many historians and analysts have commented that the National Pact fell short of the
Maronites aspiration for an ideal Westernised Christian national community. What they
did not realise is that by enshrining the existence of a Muslim side that yearns for Arabism
as opposed to the Christians’ yearning for the West, the National Pact merely formalised
and institutionalised the Christian fantasy of the Christian-community-forever-frustrated-
by-the-Muslims. In so doing it institutionalised and stabilised the Christian identity of the
communal subject and the Muslim identity of its other.
However, some social and historical developments produced a different tendency in the
processes of identification among the Muslims. Because of the nature of the development
of capitalism in Lebanon, it was the Muslims who provided the bulk of the unskilled
workers and peasants. It was also among the Muslims that the main anti-colonial and anti-
capitalist forces emerged. Constantly, although it has a strong demographically Muslim
constituency, one of the main struggles of the secular left had been to break the straight
jacket of confessional identification, aiming to present itself as a secular leftist force rather
than Christian or Muslim. While an attempt during the 1958 civil war was unsuccessful,
the 1976 civil war saw the emergence of an increasingly powerful secular leftist
organisation, the LNM, capable not only of voicing secular demands, but also of imposing
its secularism as a legitimate political force to be reckoned with in Lebanese politics.
In facing the LNM, the Maronite Right found itself pitted against a somewhat unusual
adversary. Here was a political opponent not asking for more parliamentary seats for the
Muslims or more equality between the sects. Politically, the leftist alliance did not simply
challenge the dominance of the Christian ruling class; it questioned the very basis of its
dominance. There was less room for any confessional Christian-Muslim Pact-like politics.
Although the LNM also included Islamic non-leftist forces, and leftist forces whose
leftism was articulated to a confessional identity (e.g. the Shi’a Muslim movement Amal),
the non-confessional tendency dominated its leadership during the Two-Year War (1 976-
78).
What is most important to us here, however, is that the politics of the LNM belonged to
a reality within which the Maronite community could not operate. To the language of
inter-communal fear (Muslims vs. Christians) the LNM opposed the language of social,
economic and political disadvantage. The Maronites tried to position the LNM within their
fantasy space. That is, they tried to portray the LNM within an essentialist logic: the
Muslims were at it again uttering different ideological pronouncements but still trying to
eradicate the Christian specificity of Lebanon, the Maronite leadership argued.
Sometimes this leadership even attempted to ‘engage intellectually’ with the LNM.
Pierre Gemayel, leader of the main Maronite militia, for instance, pointed out that
socialism might be acceptable for ‘a country suffering from poverty and social inequality’
but not for ‘a country like Lebanon which is more advanced in its social development than
any developed nation . . . and where the standard of living of the labourer and the peasant
or any hard-working person is as good as in any advanced country’ (Khoueiry 1977 v01.2:
174). In other instances, Gemayel tried to put doubt on the ‘Lebanese-ness’ of the LNM.
134 THE AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF ANTHROPOLOGY

‘The National Movement is only national by name. What is national in it?’ he asked,
‘some of it is Libyan, some of it is Iraqi . . . Everything is Soviet . . . (el-SaJir2 August
1979). Along with this attack usually came a call for ‘the genuine Lebanese on the other
side’ (i.e. Muslims who identified as Muslims) to liberate themselves from ‘foreign
ideologies’ and go back to the politics of the Pact. It was the persistence of the reality of
the LNM, basically linked to the practical inability of the Maronites to win against it that
plunged the Maronite subject into a state of anxiety.
On 6 December, 1975, in what became known as Black Saturday, Maronite militias
began a day of mass killing against Muslims. Militia members either identified Muslims
living in the ‘Christian sectors’ or asked passers-by for their ID card which stated the
confessional status of the bearer. More than two hundred Muslims were thus identified and
massacred in a brutal fashion. This event has been usually explained away as an act of
revenge for the killing of Christians in Muslim areas (Randal 1983:84-85). Yet, such an
explanation hardly accounts for the scale of the atrocities, especially since it was not the
first time that Christians were killed by Muslims. Nor can it be totally explained as an act
of desperation in the face of what was perceived as an increasingly powerful Muslim side.
In fact, by the time of the massacre, the militias knew quite well that their enemy was the
LNM not ‘Muslims’. I would like to suggest that it is only by taking into account the state
of anxiety of the Maronite subject that we can explain this event along with the strong
affective dimension that constitutes it.
The killing of Muslims was precisely a desperate attempt at reimposing a reality that can
be incorporated within the Maronites’ fantasy structure. With the rise of the LNM, whose
members were refusing to identify as Muslims, the Maronites were losing their other, and
by the same token were losing the structure that sustained their very existence as a
communal subject. To oppose ‘the left’ they had to operate practically as ‘the right’ and
such an identity would have led to the elimination both practical and symbolic of the
Maronite community as a collective subject. That is, the Maronite communalists were
facing their symbolic death. The killing of Muslims because they were Muslims,
especially because of the brutal manner in which it was done, was an anxiety driven
politics aimed at reconstituting social reality so that the other remains a Muslim despite all
and the Maronites’ fantasy structure was reproduced: even if our adversaries refuse to
identify themselves as Muslims, we will force them to do so. For the Maronite communal
subject, it was literally a strategy of survival, of warding off the prospect of their symbolic
annihilation.

The Syrian bombing of Ashrafieh

The second example I would like to consider emerges in the wake of the above events,
when Syria, which had initially supported the LNM, decided to thwart its victory and
entered Lebanon thus saving the Christians from being militarily defeated by the LNM. To
understand the significance of such a move, we need to briefly examine the meaning of
Syria in the Maronites’ fantasy.
In their early theorisation of the Lebanese nation at the turn of the century, Christian,
and particularly Maronite nationalists, saw Lebanon in almost purely Christian terms.
NATIONALIST ANXIETY OR THE FEAR OF LOSING YOUR OTHER 135

Although it was not clear what the new nation would look like geographically,
demographically or socially, the ‘Lebanese’ for those early thinkers was a natural
extension of the ’Christian’. That is, they merely transformed the Christian communal
fantasy into the national realm. Lebanon is to be that always dreamt about ideal
community, now having to be a nation since this is the only way a community can have an
existence: a free will, the right of self-determination and other nationalist illusions.
Lamenting the small size of (feudal) Mount Lebanon and arguing for the extension of the
‘Lebanese territory’, one of the earliest nationalist Christian intellectuals, Joupelain,
reveals an extreme Christian-centrism. As in most colonial discourses where the colonised
is always rendered invisible, the Muslims, for Joupelain, simply did not count. A land
‘should be’ part of Lebanon either because it was economically necessary or helpful for
the viability of the nation, or, because it had Christians in it. Consequently, it was
necessary to ‘free’ the people of Hasbayya and Rashayya (South Lebanon) ‘from
servitude’ because they ‘are from the same race; they are Christians; they are united by a
glorious past’ (1961582). Even Tripoli is reclaimed as part of Lebanon because it is
‘inhabited by thousands of Christians’ (582). Who cares about the other hundreds of
thousands of Muslims.
It is not surprising, then, that the images of Lebanon and the Lebanese for Joupelain and
those who followed him were essentially a simple projection of the Maronite into the
Lebanese. The Maronites’ desired distinctiveness from the Muslim Arabs, their sense of
superiority, their fear of the ‘backward’ internal and surrounding Muslim other simply
became those of ‘the Lebanese’. Nowhere was this thought more clearly presented than in
the work of one of ‘Lebanon’s founding fathers’, Michel Chiha.
Chiha’s conception of Lebanon followed closely the earlier conceptions of Youssef el-
Sawda, a Maronite thinker who attempted to ‘prove’ the Phoenician roots of Lebanon and
the Lebanese. To Sawda, today’s Lebanon like yesterday’s Phoenicia was different and far
superior from its Arab surroundings. Unlike the Arab world, ‘Lebanon . . . was a bastion
of freedom’ and ‘a centre of enlightenment’ (in Haroun 1979:161-165).
Likewise, in Liban d’aujourd’hui, a lecture he gave in 1942, Chiha moves to ‘prove’
beyond reasonable doubt that Lebanon is distinct from its Arab environment and that the
Lebanese cannot be Arabs. This, he argues, is first apparent in the country’s landscape.
‘Lebanon of today covers a surface of 10,500 sq. km., almost the quarter of Switzerland’
explains Chiha (1984:24). Immediately, in this innocent comparison he removes Lebanon
from its Middle-Eastern environment and re-positions it in Europe. But the difference
between Lebanon and its environment is much more concrete: ‘The Lebanese landscape
possesses the most characteristic features of Southern Europe. It particularly resembles
that of the big Mediterranean islands’ .(23). In opposition to this peaceful similarity,
Lebanon ‘contrasts violently with the nearby landscapes, offered by the oasis, the steppe
and the desert’ (23).
If Lebanon’s landscape makes it so different from its Arab environment, the Lebanese
are even more different. Like Sawda before him, but more ‘scientifically’, Chiha
demonstrates this on racial grounds. Reviewing the many people that had invaded
Lebanon, he takes a special interest in reminding us that of the ‘thousands of Westerners
who came from Europe, without forgetting the Scandinavians, many never went back’
136 THE AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF ANTHROPOLOGY

(32). He goes to considerable pains to show that after those Westerners many other non-
Arab people came and stayed. The ‘proof‘ that the Lebanese are not Arabs accumulates:
‘And let us remember a fact that we cannot neglect. Only in the last twenty-five years, the
mixed marriages between Lebanese and Westerners have produced thousands of children
. . . (34). Immediately following this revelation concerning the sexual prowess of the
Europeans in Lebanon comes the question whose answer had become obvious to any
scientific reader who cares about facts: ‘After all this, is it going to be said that the
Lebanon of today is semitic? Are we going to say that it is Arab?’ (34). Like the Christians
within the identity of the Maronite subject, Lebanon and the Lebanese are ‘different’.
Using some European works on the Middle East and the Phoenicians as a source, Chiha
argues that what distinguished the Phoenicians from the people that surrounded them (the
Arabs) was not only the geography of the terrain they occupied but also their ‘political
methods’ (1984:28). People have ‘contradictory interests according to whether they are
people of the sea or people of the desert’ (ibid.). While the desert breeds despotism, the
sea invites contact, exchange, openness to ideas and commodities. This necessarily leads
to democracy. This is a key differentiation for Chiha. Since the difference in political
outlook is rooted in the geographic location, that difference is the same today as it was at
the time of the Phoenicians. The Lebanese cannot but be democratic. The Arabs cannot but
be despotic. It is one of these characteristically colonial contradictions, where the will to
be democratic is at the same time racist, as it serves an essential purpose of showing ‘the
democrat’ as superior to those who have not yet reached such a civilised level of political
development.
Whether it is in the mixture of races that occurred throughout history, the physiognomy
of the terrain or the politics of its people, the distinctiveness and superiority of ‘the
Lebanese’ for Chiha, have an unmistakably European flavour; just like the Christians’
conception of their difference as expressed in the identity of the Maronite class subject.
The articulation of ‘the Christian’ to ‘the Lebanese’ extends even further. Like the
Christians, or any other superior people surrounded by ‘people from the desert’ for that
matter, the Lebanese are seen to have reasons to be fearful. ‘One thousand individuals’,
Chiha advises, ‘can be worth one hundred thousand if they are highly intelligent.
However, the vastness of the intellectual horizon and the superiority of the mind are not
enough against numbers. It is not enough to create intellectual and material riches. One has
to know how to defend them. In the fruit season the unguarded orchards lure the looter’
(1984:29). Fear is one of the most dominant themes in the writing of Chiha: ‘We have
lived, we are condemned to live dangerously’, he wrote in 1938 (19). And again, ‘our
situation carries with it many menaces and dangers’ (40). Five years later he was still
arguing: ‘it is the fate of a small country, if it is worth anything, not ever to know security’
(1980:29).
What is the source of the danger, however? Certainly not the West with which Lebanon
has so many kin, geographical and political ties. While lecturing ‘the Lebanese’ on how
‘the unguarded orchard lures the looter’, Chiha advances a metonymic image of the
dangerous other. Plunderers are people who have nothing to lose and it goes without
saying that: ‘Only the desert does not fear plunder’ (29). And so the Muslim other re-
emerges to threaten the Lebanese Christian nation Thing, reconstituting the communal
NATIONALIST ANXIETY OR THE FEAR OF LOSING YOUR OTHER 137

fantasy into a specifically national one. The desert people are at it again, ready to eradicate
the ever-so different and superior entity they happen to surround. Just as, within another
discourse, they are ready to eradicate the ever-so different and superior confessional
community that lives in it. It is within this construct that Syria, being the nation that
virtually surrounds Lebanon, came to represent for the Maronite the quintessential
externally threatening Muslim other. Particularly since Syria had always had a Pan-Arabist
orientation dreaming of a unified Arab world that included Lebanon.
When at the beginning of the civil war the Syrians openly helped the LNM, they simply
lived up to the Maronites’ expectations concerning their intent. But when in 1976 the
LNM looked like being victorious and the Syrians intervened explicitly stating that their
reason for doing so was to help the Christians, the Christians were faced with a peculiarly
disturbing destabilisation of their fantasy. Their quintessential threatening other had
decided to become not just non-threatening, not just friendly but a down-right saviour!
There were probably several reasons behind the Syrians’ intervention. Undoubtedly,
however, it aimed to avoid the creation of a mini Christian state that the Christians would
have proclaimed in all likelihood in the areas that remained under their control. Such a
state would have become a certain ally of Israel. Likewise, it aimed to prevent the
possibility of an Israeli military intervention that could lead to an occupation of at least
parts of Lebanon under the guise of saving the Christians. At the same time, the Syrians
were not entirely happy with the domination of a leftist-Palestinian alliance which could
become capable of engaging in regional politics that the Syrians could not control. It was
because of all this that they acted to weaken the LNM. They even assassinated its leader,
Kamal Jumblat, who understandably opposed their intervention.
It was not because of the LNM, however, but because of their not-so-reliable and newly
found Maronite friends that the Syrian peace initiative failed. Indeed, the Syrian peace was
a very short-lived affair. Its duration reflected the precariousness of its main foundation:
the alliance between the Christian Right and the Syrian regime. The Syrian President
Assad hoped to give the Syrian presence a popular legitimacy based on a new image of
Syria as a protector of the Christians. It was, as Assad was soon to find out, a very short-
sighted understanding of the Christians’ ideological world, which simply could not
incorporate such a reality.
The Syrians underestimated the depth and the necessity of the Christian’s racism and
suspicion towards them. This was reinforced by a Christian ruling class who could not
perceive a Lebanon of free trade under Syrian ‘socialist’ tutelage. No sooner had the
Syrian army arrived to save the Maronites, than the latter were already trying to get out of
an acute state of anxiety that the Syrian presence had generated. When, following Sadat’s
trip to Jerusalem, an Israeli-conceived peace plan (what became known as the ‘Begin
plan’) emerged allowing for a role to the Christian Right, the latter did not hesitate to grab
the opportunity and quickly turned against Syria.
On February 7, 1978 a limited armed confrontation between the Syrians and some
Christian elements of the Lebanese army took place. Soon after this confrontation
developed into a full-scale war. The confrontation began to appear in its political
dimension when, on June 6, 1978, the Christian Lebanese Front met to discuss the
138 THE AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF ANTHROPOLOGY

Palestinian issue. Israel had by then began to work towards its ‘peace plan’ by invading
South Lebanon (March 15, 1978) declaring that it would stay there until a permanent
solution prevented the Palestinian guerilla from returning (el-Sufr 16 March1978). At its
meeting, the Lebanese Front took its most extremist stand on the Palestinian issue so far.
‘The Palestinian armed presence has to be eliminated’ argued its communiquk. The
communiquk ends by declaring void all the previous agreements established with the
Palestinians. The Front was clearly following the logic of the new ‘Begin plan’. It was
soon after that the situation exploded between the Christian militias and the Syrians, and
the Syrian forces began their heavy bombardment of the Christian quarters of Beirut.
The Syrian bombing was the most ferocious and destructive that the Christians had ever
experienced. It was certainly not a militarily or politically strategic bombing. It could
probably best be explained as a kind of punishment. It was a reflection of the frustration of
Syrian President Assad to see the Christian rightists, whom he had basically saved, and
whom he had attempted to handle with the utmost care, move away from him with such
ease.
It was during this bombing that one could notice a rather peculiar phenomenon that only
an understanding of the state of anxiety that the loss of the Syrian other had generated
among the Maronites can help us comprehend. While the Syrians’ intensive shelling of the
Christian areas was wreaking death and havoc everywhere, one cannot fail to detect that
the main mood among the Christians was one of relief! In destroying the Christians’
houses, the Syrian army had managed, at the same time, to cement the cracks in their
fantasy space that the earlier Syrian peace initiative had caused. It was back to the age of
certainty: ‘we knew this was going to happen’ was often said by people I talked to later.
‘Since when does the wolf turn into a lamb’ a high-ranking officer in the Christian militia
said to me with a grin, ‘at least, from then on, we did not have to pretend. We could be
ourselves’.
It is precisely relief that emanates between the lines of the repetitive statements that
abounded during the bombing. In the middle of the shelling, the Maronite leader Camille
Chamoun could now confidently come out and issue a call to ‘the civilised people of the
world’. It could have been the same call he issued during the civil war of 1958 when he
was a President. He asked the ‘civilised’ world ‘to interfere to stop the war of
extermination waged by the Syrians on the unarmed civilian population’. As he explained,
‘the attack has left behind material destruction and many innocent victims and we wonder
anxiously when the civilised world is going to put an end to this barbarian aggression’ (in
Khoueiry 1978 vo1.3: 333). The Muslim Arab barbarian has revealed its true nature and
was back doing what it does best: shelling the centre of civilisation and trying to eradicate
the uniqueness of Lebanon and the Christian presence in it.
It was at that time that the editorial of the daily el-Arnal, with which I began this essay,
appeared. It epitomised the relieved and triumphant re-assertion of the reconstituted
fantasy. For the editor the issue was the same as it had ever been and it is worth quoting at
length to show the sense of relief from anxiety that is written in between the repetition of
the forever repeated. It was as if it became necessary to re-assert the whole Maronite
‘story’ entailed by the fantasy structure, in order to re-assure the communal self that things
are, once again, exactly as they should be:
NATIONALIST ANXIETY OR THE FEAR OF LOSING YOUR OTHER 139

. . . The truth is that the ‘unique Lebanon’, the one differentiated from its
surrounding is not acceptable to them! Either it will be one hundred per cent
Arab, or it will not be.
And because the Christians are ready to go to the greatest limits of resistance,
and are determined to preserve their specificity at whatever price, it is natural
that the conflict will always end up in divorce and separation.
. . . We notice from the declarations of the Muslims, the Lebanese among them
and the Syrians in particular, that there is no change in the way they perceive this
country. We still hear the same old assertions . . . The Christians in their eyes,
and irrefutably, are Arabs before all Arabs.
But what if the respect of differences is the only way to stop partition or
complete divorce?
. . . The problem requires, above all, a democratic spirit deeply implanted in
the souls and the hearts. This is what the Arabs lack above all.
Thus, we seem to have reached a point of despair about the possibility of
obtaining an Islamo-Arab recognition of the specificity of Lebanon. Especially
after the collapse of the wager on the ‘Syrian initiative’ and its transformation
into an operation of armed occupation. This transformation has showed us how
hard it is for Muslim Arabs to accept the presence of any other civilisation or
culture! . . . Given this historical truth we predict the emergence of a second
Israel . . . and a third and a fourth, if the Muslim majority keeps on insisting on
Arabising every living creature in this region and every grain of sand (el-Amal
24 September 1978.

Conclusion
In this essay, I have attempted to show some of the insights that a psychoanalytic angle
on Nationalistkommunal identification can provide. As I have stressed and shown
throughout, such an approach is far from providing, though it contributes to, an answer to
issues such as the practical process of community formation, the dominance of a specific
kind of otherness, the nature of the empirical variations framed by communal fantasy: all
of these require a sociological analysis of their formation and transformation.
What the psychoanalytic framework helps us with is to explain that affective layer that
is a constitutive part of all communal identifications. Being a constitutive part means that
this dimension cannot be treated as an add-on. Its presence actively interacts with and
shapes all aspects of a community’s identity as well as its historical development and
social existence. As such it needs to be integrated, from the start, in any analysis that aims
to further our understanding of the processes of communal formation.
140 THE AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF ANTHROPOLOGY

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