ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author examines psychology’s contribution to Islamophobia studies, or what he calls ‘psychologization’ of Islamophobia, following J. De Vos’s conceptualization of the term. Psychologization is “the shadow, the nemesis of psychoanalysis itself,” it is “the monster that psychoanalysis itself created”. In his 17th seminar, J. Lacan equates the university with philosophy. For Lacan, the university discourse provides “legitimation or rationalization of the master’s will” because “the university is an arm of capitalist production”. Lacan “identifies the discourse of science with that of hysteria”. In the context of the War on Terror discourse, as a master’s discourse, the author theorizes US Muslims as having the potential to embody a counter-hegemonic subjectivity condensed in the ideological fantasy figure of the conceptual Muslim as object-cause of desire. The conceptual Muslim is legitimated by the objectal Muslim as an empirical object of knowledge in the university discourse.
