ABSTRACT
We have seen how the elaboration of the myth of a clash between Islam and the West takes place at both the aesthetic (Chapter 2) and the cognitive level (Chapter 3). Yet we have also seen what is the politics that lies behind it (Chapter 4). But we do not mean to say that mythical discourses are simply the ideological cover for material interests. The concept of the social unconscious that we introduced in Chapter 2 is meant to signal the fact that there is a correspondence between the two levels, mythical and material, so that a change in one of them is likely to influence the other and vice versa. Major changes in the configuration of interests are likely to affect the way in which people look and feel about the world, and this can in turn also affect the way in which they act within it.
