ABSTRACT
The following consideration of the Arab Uprisings of 2011 wagers that the political and ethical radicality of these events, as well as their ongoing defiance of the strategies of representational and physical containment which have since attempted to domesticate them within an established colonial and Orientalist imaginary, are deeply resonant with the ethics of psychoanalysis. In this view, the emergent notion of the human, of humanity as such, which animated the uprisings is analogous to the subject of the unconscious. This analogy does not mean to absorb the events of 2011 within a Freudian explanatory frame, but rather to push psychoanalysis beyond its original cultural and ontotheological context and into conversation with Islamicate peoples and practices in order to open the Freudian field to practical considerations of its own revolutionary potential. A psychoanalytic attunement to the limits of representation, moreover, makes clear that the 2011 revolts were a historical rupture – an opening onto another, incalculable future – therefore a collective movement from the repressive logic of the symptom to the realization of a new Idea of the political animated by a notion of the human not as a static being, but as a dynamic process of becoming. The horizon of this analysis is the hypothesis that this inchoate revolutionary subjectivity, the Idea it portends, and the model of social justice it promotes are intimately bound, but finally irreducible, to Islam because of the ways in which the latter defies or complicates the unconscious paternalistic fantasy at the core of the other major monotheisms.
