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Psychoanalysis and the Postcolonial Genealogy of Queer Theory

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 April 2013

Dina Al-Kassim
Dina Al-Kassim*
Affiliation:
Peter Wall Institute of Advanced Studies, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, B.C.; e-mail: [email protected]
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Extract

In his final lecture, Freud and the Non-European, Edward Said drew our attention to a fundamental contribution of psychoanalysis to political life. Through a reading of Moses and Monotheism, Said showed how Freud's “unresolved sense of identity” is revealed by his desire that Moses be Egyptian. When Said finds Freud haunted by the trace of Egypt at the origin of Jewish identity, he locates a spectral effect of alterity in a text purporting to expose a norm of identity; instead of establishing the grounds of that norm, Said's Freud symptomatically exposes a desire to be other. This in turn inspires Said's hope that textual moments like this can become sites of affinity and relation that undo the certainties of enmity.

Type
Roundtable
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 45 , Special Issue 2: Queer Affects , May 2013 , pp. 343 - 346
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013

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References

NOTES

1 Said, Edward, Freud and the Non-European (London: Verso, 2004)Google Scholar.

2 Said, Edward, The Question of Palestine (London: Routledge, 1980), 119Google Scholar passim. See Bollas, Christopher, “Introduction,” in Said, Edward, Freud and the Non-European (London: Verso, 2004)Google Scholar.

3 Foucault, Michel, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction (New York: Vintage Books Edition, 1990)Google Scholar.

4 Butler, Judith, “The Lesbian Phallus and the Morphological Imaginary,” in Bodies That Matter (New York: Routledge, 1993)Google Scholar; Bersani, Leo, Intimacies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 From its beginning, queer theory has been in conversation with postcolonial studies. See, for example, Parker, Andrewet al., eds., Nationalisms and Sexualities (New York: Routledge, 1992)Google Scholar, which includes discussions of queer nation and HIV/AIDS activism as well as Cindy Patton's pathbreaking essay “From Nation to Family: Containing ‘African AIDS.’”

6 Deeb, Lara and Al-Kassim, Dina, “Introduction,” Journal of Middle East Women's Studies 7, no. 3 (2011): 1–5CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Foucault, , “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976 (London: Picador, 2003)Google Scholar.

8 Najmabadi, Afsaneh, Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2005)Google Scholar.

9 Freccero, Carla, Queer/Early/Modern (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006), 5Google Scholar.

10 Ibid., 112.

11 Ibid., 6.

12 For a recent example, see Bourdieu, Pierre, Masculine Domination (London: Polity Press, 2001).Google Scholar

13 Al-Kassim, Dina, On Pain of Speech: Fantasies of the First Order and the Literary Rant (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2010)Google Scholar.

14 Ibid.