Long Live Mammon!

Stéphane Lavignotte

Translation Canon Tony Dickinson

A chain of clothes shops has decided to market clothes in a Muslim style – roughly speaking, veils and long dresses – thereby provoking a polemic: the world of fashion is ready to share in the imprisonment of women in order to make money.

And what if on the contrary it was necessary to shout (even to blaspheme): “Long live Mammon”?

The moralistic and integristic currents in all the religions have this shared point of wishing to isolate themselves from the world, in a society of “the pure”, in which desire is repressed. Women are the first victims of this. The veil sometimes has this meaning: above all not to give birth to desire among men and so to hide women behind their clothing.

However, whoever lives and works as I do in towns where a large number of Muslim women live, can only note the ways of wearing the veil which do not stick closely to that agenda. Very often, one comes across young women, faces carefully made up, the veil showing them up to much greater advantage than it hides the sensuality of the hair. The rest of their dress is fashionable; it is not uncommon for their clothes to be body-hugging.

What happens to the repression of desire when women take care about their beauty? Or to separation from the world when they try to be fashionable? Or to submission to men when they assert a decision about their appearance? Obviously these things do not vanish into thin air by magic. But something is going on.

Does that remind you of anything? Jesus rarely criticises the conservative arguments of his opponents head-on. He replies through paradoxes. He pushes their arguments to the point of making them explode or paralysing them, he hijacks their rituals.

Creating short-circuits, contradictions, oxymorons – “Muslim fashion”, “halal desire”, “Sabbath for human beings and not human beings for the Sabbath”, “a crucified messiah” – does not destroy contemporary oppressions. Besides is it not an illusion to believe that freedom is of this world? But something does happen: a bursting out of the frameworks which obliges us to invent something else. A “something else” which perhaps will allow us – as Michel Foucault used to say – “not to be governed like this”. So let us push contradictions like connecting conservative directions about dress with this desire machine which is fashion. God bless the mammon of fashion!

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