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Notes
1. Derrida, “Geopsychoanalysis,” 64.
2. Derrida, “Geopsychoanalysis,” 64.
3. Fromm, “Method and Function,” 483, 484.
4. Fromm, “Method and Function,” 485.
5. Marx, Poverty of Philosophy, 119.
6. Irigaray, Irigaray Reader, 82.
7. Irigaray, Irigaray Reader, 82.
8. El Shakry, Arabic Freud, 1; hereafter cited in the text.
9. Pinto, Doctor and Mrs. A., 1; hereafter cited in the text.
10. See Jain, Murthy, and Sarin, “Story of Satyanand.” Pinto acknowledges Dr. Jain and the Psychiatry Department of the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences (NIMHANS) for their contribution to this research project.
References
Derrida, Jacques. “Geopsychoanalysis.” In The Psychoanalysis of Race,
edited by Christopher Lane, 65–90. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998.
El Shakry, Omnia. The Arabic Freud: Psychoanalysis and Islam in Modern Egypt. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017.
Fromm, Erich. “The Method and Function of an Analytic Social
Psychology.” In The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, edited
by Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt, 477–96. New York: Continuum, 2005.
Irigaray, Luce. The Irigaray Reader, edited by Margaret Whitford.
Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1992.
Jain, Sanjeev, Pratima Murthy, and Alok Sarin. “The Story of Satyanand.” Indian Journal of Psychiatry 57, no. 4 (2015): 419–22.
Marx, Karl. The Poverty of Philosophy, translated by H. Quelch. Mansfeld, CT: Martino Fine Books, 2014.
Pinto, Sarah. The Doctor and Mrs. A.: Ethics and Counter-Ethics in an
Indian Dream Analysis. New Delhi: Kali for Women, 2019.
doi: 10.1215/1089201X-9698307
MODERNITY FROM ELSEWHERE: PSYCHOANALYSIS,
ETHNOGRAPHY, AND SPECULATIVE HORIZONS
OF SELF-ASSERTION
Milad Odabaei
Hans Blumenberg famously defned the modern epoch
as the age of self-assertion.1 He was writing after the
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2022
Second World War in Germany and responding to a
debate on the legitimacy of the modern age in the face
of unprecedented crises. Blumenberg ofered a critical
theory of secularization that countered accounts such
as that of Carl Schmitt, who attributed to modern political society a religious essence.2 Blumenberg considered diferent epochs to be constituted of distinct questions and answers. Echoing his contemporary Hannah
Arendt, he sugested answering modern predicaments
in reference to antecedent discourses is not only theoretically misguided but is also politically dangerous.3
It forecloses scientifc debate and the ethical imagination in relation to uniquely modern questions. Aside
from the essentialist representation of premodern traditions—characteristic of postcolonial nationalisms
across civilizational divides—what signifcances do
premodern traditions hold for the developments of the
sciences and ethics of the modern self ? Or are ancient
traditions relics of an unenlightened past, only legible
as objects of secular aesthetic appreciation?4
What follows is a reflection on the ways premodern discourses are put in conversation with the debates
of the modern self and society across three sites. I begin
with Omnia El Shakry’s theorization of the importance
of premodern Islamic discourses for the development of
Arab psychoanalytic thought, The Arabic Freud: Psychoanalysis and Islam in Modern Egypt, and Sarah Pinto’s illustration of the signifcance of Hindu mythopoetics for an
imaginative ethics of the self, The Doctor and Mrs. A.: Ethics and Counter-Ethics in an Indian Dream Analysis (henceforth The Doctor). The Arabic Freud and The Doctor, which
belong to a familiar scholarly discourse in the United
States, are exemplifcations of the generative intellectual
space of debate between historical-archival research and
anthropological modes of problematization. El Shakry
and Pinto draw on the capacities of psychoanalysis and
ethnography as distinct modes of inquiry to transcend
the representation of modern Egypt and India as nationstates among others, and to instead conceptualize them
as deterritorialized and experimental terrains for philosophical speculation and the ethical imagination that,
while historical, are irreducible to history as representation. In this imaginative terrain, they elaborate on the
signifcance of premodern Islamic sciences and Hindu
mythopoetics for sciences and ethics of the self.
I then turn to Javad Tabatabai’s writing on Ibn Khaldun’s (d. 1406) “new science,” Ibn Khaldun and the Social
Sciences (henceforth Ibn Khaldun), which ofers an archaeological problematization of the postcolonial migration
of scientifc discourse from European to Middle Eastern
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After Lacan: Literature, Theory and Psychoanalysis in the
Twenty-first Century (2018), and she has published in
leading journals. She is currently writing A Very Short
Introduction to Postcolonial Literature (Oxford University
Press) and coediting Decolonizing the English Literary
Curriculum (Cambridge University Press).
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Milad Odabaei
Translation as Transference
For good reason, the conventional historiography of
knowledge theorizes the emergence of modern discourses of the self and society within a narrative of
colonial modernity. El Shakry’s and Pinto’s studies can
be read as part of this paradigm. Their scholarly interlocutors are European-trained practitioners who lived
through the political decolonization of Egypt and India
and contributed to the representations of the self in the
newly independent nations.
However, El Shakry’s and Pinto’s studies traverse
the epistemological limit of secular historiography that
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Kitabkhana
reduces premodern Islamic and Hindu discourses to an
object of enlightened aesthetic appreciation, on the one
hand, or a marker of nativism and sectarianism against
“enlightened culture,” on the other. El Shakry and
Pinto turn their respective study of psychoanalysis to
an occasion for psychoanalytic readings of the archive
and ethnographic writing of history. Weaving together
psychoanalytic and ethnographic modes of reading and
writing, they step outside the teleology of the self to
account for the self ’s discontinuous emergence in history. In this opening, they suspend the reign of secular
humanism and instead demonstrate the central signifcance of Islamic and Hindu discursive traditions for the
political-theological genesis of the self.
The Arabic Freud identifes the point de capiton (quilting or anchoring point) in Islamic thought that enabled
the suturing of psychology and psychoanalysis to existing discursive formations in midcentury Egypt. “For
Jacques Lacan,” El Shakry notes, “quilting points are
signifers around which dense webs of meaning converge, thereby providing ideological coherence to discursive formations.”7 In El Shakry’s generative uptake
of the concept, the suturing that ties the psychoanalytic
self to time and place is shown to be a multivectoral process of translation and transmission across synchronic
and diachronic coordinates. El Shakry simultaneously
traverses the discursive and imaginative discontinuities
between Europe and the Arabic Middle East and the historical gaps between the past and the future within the
Middle East. The latter move renders The Arabic Freud
more than a conventional history of the postcolonial
reception of European discourses or of unidirectional
migrations of discourses along North-South coordinates. Instead, El Shakry theorizes the translation of
modern sciences across European and Middle Eastern
formations of knowledge to be predicated on a transferential relation with Islamic discursive tradition.
The quilting point of psychoanalysis in Egypt is
ethnographically elaborated in the Cairene salon of
Egyptian psychologist Yusuf Murad (1902–66). Friday
mornings throughout the 1940s and ’50s, students and
scholars would gather in Murad’s house to debate the
self. After training in philosophy at Fu’ad I University
in Cairo, Murad had received a doctorate in psychology
from the Sorbonne in Paris. He returned to Egypt for a
career of teaching and publication that introduced students and the wider public to modern philosophy and
the psychology of the self. Murad interpreted Freudian
psychoanalysis as a synthesis of philosophical introspection, positivism, and phenomenology. He drew on
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formations of knowledge. Ibn Khaldun is in Persian and
reflects the debates on sunnat (tradition) and tajadod
(modernity) in postrevolutionary Iran that are the sites of
my research on interrelated questions of translation and
transmission of tradition. These debates, and Tabatabai’s
critical intervention in them, extend beyond the scholarly public that includes academics and Shi‘i seminarians
to social and political activists. They reflect the interpretive exigences of Isalmic societies such as Iran where
secular transformations that enable historical comparision, cultural translation, and social theorization are
themselves contested. This is an intellectual and political
space where human sciences are debated as part of the
extractive economies of the West, as objectifcation of
constitutive myths, beliefs, and transcendental realities
of Iranians that parallels comodifcation of Iranian oil.5
Responding to this situation, Tabatabai’s archaeological
theorization of premodern traditions does not take the
perspective of human sciences (including psychoanalysis and ethnography), as well as their institutional and
geopolitical locations for granted. It therefore ofers an
opprotunity for defamiliarization and thus better understanding of Angolophone critical theorization of premodern traditions such as El Shakry’s and Pinto’s.
El Shakry, Pinto, and Tabatabai all elaborate on the
signifcance of premodern discourses for the epistemological and ethical development of the modern self.
They break from conventional teleological imagination
of both tradition and modernity, as well as the philosophical grounding of the human subject on either side
of this divide. Instead, they theorize the epochal, or political-theological emergence of the modern self and society in history.6 However, as I will argue in closing, only
Ibn Khaldun turns the distinction between the premodern and the modern debates into a historical problem,
thereby transcending a seemingly ahistorical epistemological frame of legibility across epochal diferences.
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Writing the Imagination
Pinto’s approach to the archive of the self in India is
similarly psychoanalytic and ethnographic. The Doctor
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is based on the analysis of “The day-dream of Hindu
socialism,” which was dreamed and documented in
1940s Punjab. On the eve of the partition of British
India into the independent states of India and Pakistan,
a young woman of twenty-one years from an urban,
upper-class Hindu family leaned back into free association on the couch of the psychoanalyst Dev. Satya
Nand. We know her as Mrs. A., as she appears in Satya
Nand’s Objective Method of Dream Interpretation: Derived
from Researches in the Oriental Reminiscence State (1946
or 1947). At the time, Satya Nand was a young practitioner. He was trained as a physician at the University of
Edinburgh and as a psychoanalyst under colonial analyst Owen Berkeley-Hill. In the same manner and during the same decades that El Shakry’s interlocutor drew
on intimate and distant discourses for elaborating the
self, Satya Nand brought together Indian and modern
sources to develop what Pinto describes as a scientifc
stance toward the world, “an ethic.”8 Throughout his
life, he expansively explored the ethical self through
literature, mythology, philosophy, sociology, and psychology and developed an experimental doctrine of neoindividualism that brought together Sigmund Freud,
Ivan Pavlov, Carl Jung, Martin Heideger, and the teachings of the Bhagavad Gita (14–15).
Objective Method is Satya Nand’s frst book. Pinto
makes clear that the term oriental in the full title of
the book, much like the term Islam for Arab scholars
of Freud, did not signify the provincial nature of his
method but its universality. He conceived of his method
as a scientifc improvement on the analytic models of
Freud and Jung. The Doctor somewhat backgrounds the
status of psychoanalysis as a distinct science that enables
Satya Nand to bring and weave together intimate and
distant discourses in Objective Method. Instead, Pinto
inhabits the psychoanalytic experiment as it opens to
the layered times and an impersonal topography of the
psyche and as it activates the work of the ethical imagination—Mrs. A.’s, the Doctor’s, and ours.
The Doctor is a masterful ethnography of the imagination that disrupts the secular hermeneutics of man,
myth, and time. In the space of the case the times of
past, present, and future fold onto one another and new
futures are born out of reimagining the past. Mythical fgures Draupadi, Shakuntala, and Ahalaya documented in the Mahabharata and Ramayana acquire an
ethical reality in their capacity to guide Mrs. A.’s experimental attitude toward customary practices and norms
of social and sexual conduct. The psychoanalytic orientation toward the unconscious keeps the afective and
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the form and content of Islamic philosophy and mysticism to make legible, to himself and to his Arab audience, Freudian thought and to develop what he called
an integrative psychology. For example, El Shakry highlights Murad’s recourse to forms of analogical reasoning (istinbat) and intuitive inference (hads) endemic to
Islamic pedagogy for the elaboration of psychoanalytic
epistemology (30–33). Alternatively, she shows how the
medieval discourse of firasa, concerned with discerning
the unknown from the known, enabled Murad’s translation of Gestalt psychology (33–36).
The Arabic Freud establishes the signifcance of formal comparison with, and semantic expansion of, prepsychoanalytic Islamic discourses for the genesis of the
psychoanalytic self in relation to representations of ethics, sexuality, and law in modern Arab discourses. While
knotting the analytic, sexual, and juridical subject to
Islamic discourses is said to provide ideological coherence to the former, El Shakry masterfully demonstrates
the gradual development of science over time through
accretion of shared references and emergence of scholarly debate. In debates over criminality, for example, later
scholars criticized their predecessors’ interpretations of
psychoanalytic theories and in so doing extended the
breadth and rigor of Arabic psychoanalytic science.
El Shakry locates Murad’s salon at the center of a
much larger Arab intellectual engagement with questions of selfood and modernity. The participants, who
were at the time in their twenties and thirties, would go
on to become the critics, philosophers, academics, and
statesmen who set the parameters of public debate and
knowledge production across postcolonial Arab nations.
At the same time, The Arabic Freud centers the practices
of reading, interpretation, and translation of Islamic discourses of the past and modern European ones around
two central questions, How can the scholar be a philosopher, and How can the teacher be a mentor? El Shakry
thereby theorizes Arab modernity as a speculative and
ethical striving that, while entangled with discourses of
law and society of the modernizing nations, necessarily
exceeded them. In psychoanalytic terms, she sugests
the practices of Arab intellectuals have a positive relation
to the drive, exceeding the economies of subjectivity, religion, politics, and so on, that have been the loci of both
postcolonial politics in the Middle East and their debates
within the Anglophone academy in the global North.
42.1
Milad Odabaei
Speculative Ethics
In a conversation with the anthropology of ordinary
ethics, Pinto recognizes the ensemble of precepts, narratives, times, and ideas about justice, the good, and
life more generally, which appear in the case as “ethics” (8).9 Following Mrs. A.’s relation to ethics, hitherto
defned, Pinto distills an imaginative, experimental,
and reflective approach that she theorizes as “counterethics.” The postscript to the book ofers an account of
counter-ethics that draws on Michael Warner’s theorization of “counter-public” (180–82).10 In the anthropology of ethics, Charles Hirschkind has used the concept
to theorize the discordant resonances of Islamic and
modern political forms.11 Pinto, who does not address
the question of politics directly, thinks with the concept to emphasize the limit of discursive economies of
tradition and modernity and retheorize ordinary ethics
beyond normativity and recognition. In this movement,
Pinto’s counter-ethics acquires a relation to the ethics
of psychoanalysis as theorized by Jacques Lacan. In his
seminar on ethics, Lacan elaborates on Freud’s theorization of the work of death and the death drive in the animation of subjectivity. In ways that resonate with Pinto,
Lacan foregrounds the intimate excesses of “the good,”
which in Aristotelian and utilitarian traditions is conceptualized as the site of ethical engagement (181).12 Yet,
Lacan identifes the beyond of symbolic economies of
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Kitabkhana
exchange and recognition, with risk of not just “dogmatism, failure, and contradiction,” which Pinto accounts
for, but of an intimate and undialectizable confrontation
with destruction and with what Lacanian psychoanalysis
elaborates as the (political-theological) problem of evil.13
Stefania Pandolfo’s study of madness, Islam, and
psychoanalysis demonstrates that the space of imagination and experimentation that lies beyond the ethical
economies of conventional ways of being in the world
is also a space of annihilation of the subject. She shows
that madness and creativity are radically intertwined.
Therefore, it is difficult to valorize experimentation,
imagination, and particularly reflection in the theorization of (counter-)ethics. This is also why the presence of an analyst, or a speculative scholar who is also
a spiritual guide in the terrain of the imagination, is
crucial in navigating the times and topographies of the
unconscious and imagination. To pose ethnographic
(counter-)ethics of experimentation, imagination, and
reflection against anthropology’s turn to virtue ethics
risks turning experimentation, imagination, and reflection into anthropological virtues. In the case of Mrs. A.,
the projection of anthropological counter-ethics risks
conceptually erasing the scholar and the ethical guide
in the room (Satya Nand) and replacing him with a virtuous anthropologist.
Scholars can be virtuous. In The Arabic Freud, we
might identify the open-ended nature of the efort of
Arab scholars of the self to be premised on a speculative
scholarly ethics that traverses the limit of inherited discourses and occupies the threshold of the new. This ethics can be said to transcend discursive diferences and
be grounded in what Walter Benjamin theorizes as the
immediate communicability (Mitteilbarkeit) and translatability characteristic of any languages or discourse.14
This is how I interpret the ethics associated with the Shi‘i
practice of ijtehad (Arabic: ijtihad, learned judgment),
where a learned scholar draws on revealed textuality,
scholarly consensus, and reason to provide an authoritative answer to an unprecedented question. Ijtehad
can be understood as a speculative and experimental
ethics because absolute knowledge is impossible for the
human as a fnite being. Ijtehad is therefore premised on
imaginative and speculative (from Latin specere, to look
at, view) activity of reasoning for what can only be a tentative approximation of absolute knowledge.
Condition of Im-possibility
What would it mean to write speculatively without taking for granted the discursive organization of human
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embodied tension between the actual and the possible
within the diagnostic frame. Through her writerly craft,
Pinto keeps this tension alive.
Pinto develops the dream of “Hindu socialism” by
following the interpretations of Satya Nand and Mrs.
A., which are included in the case report, and by putting
their interpretations in conversation with her own original research and problematization of ethics and gender
as an American anthropologist with a long history of
research in India. Pinto highlights the knots of marriage,
sexuality, and gendered selfood that tie Mrs. A. to time
and place, and to India as an ethical community and a
political promise. It also shows how Mrs. A. negotiates
the unraveling of these knots and forges new ones in reference to social and mythical realities. Her marriage, for
example, might be at risk due to absence of a child but
the emerging nation demands feminine care. Drapuadi
is her guide through limits of conjugality and the possibilities of singularity. In these intimate movements, both
real and hypothetical, Pinto indirectly addresses the
modulations of living traditions and predicaments of a
new society as indexed by the dream of Hindu socialism.
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Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East
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Ibn Khaldun’s efort as an early attempt, prior to the
Enlightenment, to establish an epistemological break
from the coordinate of inherited sciences of law, philosophy, and theology as well as the mirror of the prince
genre of the Islamic West and elaborate on phenomena
from an epistemological standpoint of an unprecedented science. While framing this efort as an instance
of what European historiography debates as the quarrel
between the ancients and moderns, Tabatabai argues
that Ibn Khaldun’s discourse does not entirely break
with earlier epistemologies and does not carve out a
new science from the matrix of inherited traditions.
Chapters of the book demonstrate this thesis by elaborating on the theoretical foundation of “social” thought
at the time of Ibn Khaldun, theoretical foundations of
modern social sciences, and by locating Ibn Khaldun’s
writing on justice, wealth, and economy in an epistemological in-between of the two.
Tabatabai’s approach to the Muqaddima is part of
a more general problematization of “tradition” within
the Islamic civilization. This method complements
the genealogical theorization of the “condition of possibility” of modern sciences of man and society with a
novel archaeological approach that Tabatabai theorizes
as the “condition of im-possibility” (sharayet-e emtena’).
The condition of im-possibility refers to speculative
attempts that do not lead to generative quarrels with
the ancients or epistemological ruptures pregnant with
the political-theological birth of new discourses. On the
one hand, it is in conversation with French historical
epistemology, the writings of Gaston Bachelard, Louis
Althusser, and Michel Foucault and, on the other, with
German debates on secularization and political theology among Blumenberg, Schmitt, Leo Strauss, and
Jürgen Habermas that Tabatabai translates to reflect on
tradition and modernity in Iran. Tabatabai puts forth
the condition of im-possibility as a critical theory of a
discourse that unfolds beyond the epistemological limits of tradition and, consequently, outside the horizon
of knowledge. It is an epistemological theorization of
a historical situation where modern social and human
sciences emerge by the way of the unidirectional colonial and postcolonial migration of discourse, and in an
epistemological and institutional gap with inherited
traditions of knowledge. In this situation, Tabatabai
highlights the signifcance of the reactivation of Ibn
Khaldun’s critical reckoning with the limit of inherited tradition and his attempt to elaborate on historical
and social phenomena within the coordinates of a yetunborn “new” science.
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sciences including ethnography and psychoanalysis?
What possibilities exist for speculative thinking across
discernable discourses of knowledge that does not reify
the rationality of one while exploring the other?
Tabatabai’s Ibn Khaldun was frst published in 1995
in Iran, over two decades after the 1979 revolution and
the establishment of a self-proclaimed modern Islamic
state, an “Islamic Republic.” A third revision and ffth
printing of the text is forthcoming in Tehran. Tabatabai
(b. 1945) was educated in Islamic philosophy, Persian
literary and ethical genres, and law in Shi‘i seminaries
and Iran’s nascent academy prior to the revolution. At
the time of the event, he was completing his doctorate
at the Sorbonne on German idealism under the supervision of François Châtelet. In the last three decades
his writing on Iran, Islam, constitutionalism, the university, and modernity more generally has emerged
as a key reference of Iranian debates. This is a context
where texts, theories, and methods of human sciences
and social inquiry are condemned by some as agents of
cultural imperialism and ethical decay and celebrated
by others as a form of resistance to authoritarianism
and fundamentalism.15 Some, including seminarians
and bureaucrats who set the agenda of education and
research across Iranian universities, see the need to
Islamicize (islami-sazi) and indigenize (boomi-sazi) Iran’s
modern education. Others, including popular intellectuals, see religion as the antithesis to thinking itself.
Reckoning with this unprecedented situation, Tabatabai turns to Ibn Khaldun, who in the late fourteenth
century announced the discovery of hitherto unprecedented social science (‘ilm al’umran, the science of civilization). Ever since its discovery and popularization
by French colonial scholars, Ibn Khaldun’s Muqaddima
(lit., Prolegomenon) has been read within a predominantly synchronic frame of “Islamic” and more recently
“decolonial” social sciences. Anthropological readings
of Ibn Khaldun continue this trend while historical
readings of the text, such as Muhsin Mahdi’s important
book Ibn Khaldun’s Philosophy of History, rightly situate
him within the Platonic and Aristotelian coordinates
of medieval philosophy.16 Tabatabai breaks with both
these tendencies in an archaeological study that situates
the Muqaddima in the divergent, discontinuous, and yet
interrelated history of philosophy across Islamic and
Christian civilizations.
Tabatabai sets Ibn Khaldun’s “social” science in the
epistemic world of the Islamic West, the cultural space
between Arab Spain on the margins of Latin Christendom and Iran in the Persianate East. It theorizes
42.1
Milad Odabaei
The Unconscious of History, Untranslatibility,
and the Ethics of Ijtehad
unlike the human sciences, which, even while turning
back towards the unconscious, always remain within the
space of the representable, psycho-analysis advances and
leaps over representation, overflows it on the side of fnitude, and thus reveals, where one had expected functions
bearing their norms, conflicts burdened with rules, and
signifcation forming a system, the simple fact that it is
possible for there to be a system (therefore signifcation),
rule (therefore conflict), norm (therefore function). 19
Ethnology, on the other hand, “suspends the long
‘chronological’ discourse by means of which we try to
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reflect our own cultures within itself, and instead it
reveals synchronological correlation in other cultural
forms.”20 Along with psychoanalysis, ethnology forms
“an undoubted and inexhaustible treasure-hoard of
experiences and concepts, and above all a perpetual
principle of dissatisfaction, of calling into question, of
criticism and contestation of what may seem, in other
respects, to be established.”21 Psychoanalysis allows El
Shakry and Pinto to leap beyond modern economies
of representation and recognition (colonialism, virtue
ethics, etc.) and relate their analyses of knowledge and
ethics to the excess that Freudian psychoanalysis conceptualized in the language of the drive.
But the psychoanalytic and ethnographic pushback
against the one-sided operation of the human sciences
and social theory that has come to defne the raison
d’être of the discipline of anthropology can only occur
through the reifcation of the historical-epistemological
event that occupies the center of the debates on secularization. This is the “absolutely singular event” that
encompasses not only the historicity of modernity (“our
historicity”) but also that of “all men who can constitute the object of an ethnology,” enabling modernity
(“our culture”) to relate to “other cultures in a mode of
pure theory.”22 In reacting against the human sciences
toward its deprovincialization, the counter-sciences
unwittingly naturalize a provincial representation of
this event.23 In El Shakry’s and Pinto’s accounts, this
epochal shift manifests as the fact of epistemological
hybridity and the heterogeneity of time in ethnographic
and psychoanalytic frames. We can observe social and
psychological facts of singularity, hybridity, and heterogeneity to be true only because social and psychological
sciences are unquestionably established.
Tabatabai draws on the capacities of critical thinking to theorize a priori historical-epistemological condition of hybridization as tajaddod (modernity). Ibn
Khaldun centrally relates what El Shakry and Pinto
explicitly or implicitly theorize as hybridization to both
the one-way flow of scientifc discourse from centers
of modern knowledge in Europe to postcolonial societies, and the revolutionary contestation of hybridization by secularist and Islamic movements such as those
in Iran today. By turning the periodization of tradition
(premodern vs. modern) into a historical problem, he
powerfully and explicity relates his analysis to contestations over modernity and tradition by scholars and
activists alike. Drawing on the Islamic vocabularies of
speculative thought, Tabatabai argues that an ijtehad
on this historical-epistemological situation, which tra-
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In bringing together El Shakry’s and Pinto’s contributions with Tabatabai’s, my aim is not to elide the diferences that animate the three texts. Indeed, I have sought
to highlight how the interrelated linguistic, cultural,
and historical diference, as well as anonymous and
impersonal demands internal to diferent languages,
cultures, and histories, manifest in the three thinkers’
respective problematization of “tradition.”
In contrast to El Shakry’s and Pinto’s ethnographic
and psychoanalytic translations, Tabatabai is skeptical
of the capacity of human sciences to transcend their
philosophical and epistemological perspectivism and
accounts for the epochal (or political-theological) genesis of modern self and society. In conversation with
Foucault, he points to the distinct analytic of the human
that emerged in the Enlightenment and conceives of
the human as both the fnite being of the empirical sciences and the transcendental condition of the possibility of modern knowing.17 This event, which emerges
in a particular time and place to enable the universal
consciousness of historiography, inscribes the limit of
human cognition as the shadow cast on the entire feld
of historical knowledge. Knowledge, for the frst time
in the history of knowing, comes to acquire what Foucault describes as a historical and cultural unconscious.
Human sciences can inquire about their own diachronic
and synchronic specifcity and provincialize their own
self-assertion. This is what the “counter-sciences” psychoanalysis, ethnology, and linguistics come to do.18
They each push back against the self-assured self-assertion of the human sciences in ways that correspond to
their respective position and function within the modern episteme.
Psychoanalysis turns to death, desire, and the law
as the condition of possibility of signifcation, rules, and
normativity,
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Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East
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2022
seemingly alternative sociopolitical projects. I sugest
that in the Euro-American context, it serves as a critical
engagement with positivist historiography and anthropology of the Islamic and non-European societies more
generally that elide the epistemological crises, continuities, and gaps internal to those histories and exceed
the dialectics of colonialism. In this, Ibn Khaldun is resonant with El Shakry’s and Pinto’s eforts to shift the
horizon of speculative thought and ethical imagination
to Arab modernity and Indian history and account for
political-theological genesis of modernity elsewhere. It
echoes their call for facing the new, complementing it
with an invitation to not take for granted modern sciences of the self and society—to really speculate.
Milad Odabaei is a postdoctoral research associate at
Princeton University. Centered on modern Iran, his
research interests include history and historiography,
religion and politics, violence and subjectivity, and
translation and migration. His writings have appeared
in hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Comparative
Islamic Studies, Iranian Studies, Debates do NER, and the
edited volume Iran’s Constitutional Revolution of 1906 and
Narratives of the Enlightenment (2016).
Notes
1. Blumenberg, Legitimacy of the Modern Age, 138.
2. “All signifcant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts not only because of their historical
developments . . . but also because of their systematic structure.”
Schmitt, Political Theology, 36.
3. See Arendt, “Tradition and the Modern Age.” Talal Asad emphasizes a similar theoretical point when he writes that across historical
periods, however related and analogous discourses yield diferential
results. See Asad, Formations of the Secular, 189–90.
4. On secular as an aesthetic sensibility, see Asad, Formations of the
Secular, particularly 52–56.
5. Al-e Ahmad, Occidentosis, 27–33. For a critical discussion of Al-e
Ahmad and this context see Odabaei, “Slip of the Philosopher.”
6. From its inception in interwar Germany to its recent uptake within
critical theory, the concept of political theology has problematized
(1) the capacity of modern historiographic discourse to narrate its
own arrival and (2) the categorical distinction between theological and political discourse. I read the three texts as they write with
and against both these limits. For an analytical overview of political
theology as a space of critical debate, see Dubilet, “On the General
Secular Contradiction,” and Chepurin and Dubilet, “Introduction.”
7. El Shakry, Arabic Freud, 24; hereafter cited in the text.
8. Pinto, The Doctor and Mrs. A., 9; herafter cited in the text.
9. On “ordinary ethics,” see the edited volume Lambek, Ordinary
Ethics.
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verses the horizon of political decolonization, is necessary. Therefore, to genealogical and postcolonial theorizations of modern discourses of self and society, he
adds a critical theorization of the epistemological limit
of inherited tradition. I consider his critical enterprise
speculative and ethically minded, because the practice
of ijtehad, not unlike critique, draws on textual sources,
scholarly consensus, and reason to provide an authoritative answer to an unprecedented and practical question. Like Arab scholars of Freud and the analysand in
The Doctor, it makes space for the new by reimagining
the old.
Perhaps it can be said that, with El Shakry and
Pinto, Tabatabai emphasizes the Kantian insight into
the categorical structuring of experience that is central
to Foucault’s discontinuous historiography of modern
knowledge and to psychoanalysis and anthropology
as modern sciences of the self and the other. Accordingly, the three thinkers’ historiography of modernity
can be characterized in contrast to G. W. F. Hegel’s. Yet,
Tabatabai puts pressure on the Foucauldian tendency
to defne the subject (of pleasure, ethics, and freedom)
primarily in relation to him- or herself. Instead, he activates the opposing tendency in Foucault to undo the
distinction between the subject of understanding and
the moral subject in Immanuel Kant’s philosophy and
further emphasizes untranslatibility and conflict in the
feld of intersubjectivity and hybridization. Philosophically speaking, Tabatabai occupies the space between
Kant and Hegel that Foucault himself occupied and is
often settled on the side of secular modernity when ethics and religion are affirmed as morality or knowledge
of the self. Accordingly, Tabatabai’s practice of ijtehad,
unlike that of modernist and orientalist renderings of
Islam, is not opposed to taqlid, or the practice of emulation of authoritative conduct that is understood to constitute the ethical community. In line with the classical
synthesis of ijtehad and taqlid in Shiism, it is speculative without divorcing ethics from politics in the face of
a novel circumstance (modernity).24
Ibn Khaldun ofers a critical theory of the territorialized and racial view of religion and science that
informs the ongoing state-sponsored projects of the
“Islamicization” and “indigenization” of European discourses of science in Iran. In a regional conjuncture
where both secularist and Islamist revolutionary activism risks furthering authoritarianism as in Egypt and
Morocco, or military interventions and civil wars as in
Syria and Libya, Tabatabai pessimistically elaborates on
the epistemological condition that precedes and limits
42.1
Katherine Pratt Ewing
10. Warner, Publics and Counterpublics.
11. Hirschkind, Ethical Soundscape.
12. See also Lacan, Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 10–12.
14. Benjamin, “On Language,” and Benjamin, “Task of the Translator.”
15. See Odabaei, “Outside (Kharij) of Tradition,” and Odabaei, “Slip
of the Philosopher.”
16. See, for example, Pandolfo, Knot of the Soul, 223.
17. Foucault, Order of Things, 312–28.
18. Foucault, Order of Things, 373–86.
19. Foucault, Order of Things, 373.
20. Foucault, Order of Things, 376.
21. Foucault, Order of Things, 372.
22. Foucault, Order of Things, 377.
23. In parallel to Foucault’s archaeology of the human sciences,
Matt Ffyche’s traces “the beginning” of psychoanalysis to the
threshold of the nineteenth century. Ffytche, Foundations of the
Unconscious. El Shakry references Ffyche’s philosophical genealogy
of psychoanalysis, and by extension romanticism and post-Kantian
idealism, while highlighting the philosophical reception of psychoanalysis in Egypt. For Tabatabai, this philosophical foundation
is taken as the central historical problem and brought to bear on
the transmission of human sciences to Islamic societies. Tabatabai,
Ibn Khaldun.
24. On Foucault contra Kant, see Jambet, “Constitution of the
Subject and Spiritual Practice.” On the categorical separation of
ijtehad and taqlid in secularist discourses, see Stephens, Governing
Islam.
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Psychoanalysis, the Sufi, and the Story
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doi: 10.1215/1089201X-9698320
PSYCHOANALYSIS, THE SUFI, AND THE STORY
Katherine Pratt Ewing
Omnia El Shakry’s Arabic Freud: Psychoanalysis and Islam
in Modern Egypt and Sarah Pinto’s The Doctor and Mrs.
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13. Lacan, Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 186–87, 191–97. On Lacanian ethics,
see Alenka Zupančič’s and Marc de Kesel’s excellent studies Ethics
of the Real and Eros and Ethics, respectively. For political theological
reflection on the question of evil in reference to ethics of psychoanalysis, see Žižek, Santner, and Reinhard, Neighbor.
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