ABSTRACT
Muslims are likely to remain Europe's Other for a considerable time to come. Objections and opposition to Muslims are increasingly phrased in terms like a coming out. The process of mutual implication and constitution illustrated in coming out, schismogenesis and mimesis are a reminder of how porous are the boundaries between categories and persons, even in bureaucratic contexts where they are often expected to be rigid and watertight. Islamophobe is mimetic, intolerant, violent, and contemptuous of the institutions of the liberal democratic state, just like the extreme Islamist. Muslims appear as a distorted alter ego of the West, embodying qualities it prizes but reflecting them back through the prism of Western fears in a distorted, unheimlich form. The complexity of the contemporary makes ambivalence less suitable as a concept, despite the undeniable fact that the overdetermined representations of Muslims continually push in the direction of binaries–the Western versus the Muslim.
