ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the conceptualization of US Muslims as political subjects. It explains the recommendation of moving “from an ethics of infinitely demanding commitment to a politics of resistance”. According to M. Bracher, the analyst’s discourse “offers the most effective means of achieving social change by countering the psychological and social tyranny exercised through language”. The agent of the analyst’s discourse is the Real Muslim, whose truth is epistemic resistance. The ethico-political praxis of epistemic/ontic resistance is not only about coming up with a new discourse, or fantasy, but it is more importantly about upending the libidinal economy, that is, shifting it from phallic jouissance to Other jouissance, or from mythical-jouissance to divine-jouissance. Upending the libidinal economy entails overturning the political economy, hence the Radical dimension at work. Politics, for S. Critchley, “is the praxis in a situation that articulates an interstitial distance from the state and allows for the emergence of new political subjects who exert a universal claim”.
