Sectarian Discourse: Form of Perversion in Action in Our Modernity

Abstract

Monique Lauret draws on Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents and Group Psychology and the Ego to reflect on the capacity for the libidinal bonds necessary for social cohesion to become hijacked. Sects, founded on subjugation of their members for the aggrandizement of perverse leaders, produce a loss of moral sense and logical thinking. Lauret pushes Freud’s arguments further by way of Lacan’s discourses (the master, the hysteric, the university, the analytic, and the capitalist), suggesting sectarianism as a sixth discourse. She argues that isolating the logic of sectarianism might help cut through the cultural and historical baggage that distorts the way that Islam, for example, is seen via an Orientalist western gaze, but that also obfuscates a Christian fundamentalism that is subject to the same discursive traits.