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On 11th and 12th April 2019, the workshop “Power in Medicine: Interrogating the Place of Medical Knowledge in the Modern Middle East” will take place in Berlin. It is organized by&#160;Edna Bonhomme,&#160;Shehab Ismail, (both&#160;MPIWG) and&#160;Lamia Moghnieh&#160;(AUB,&#160;EUME) and will be convened by&#160;Europe in the Middle East—Middle East in Europe (EUME)&#160;and the&#160;Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG). The workshop will examine the history and politics of medicine and psychiatry in the Middle East from the 1800s until the contemporary period. You can find the workshop program here&#160;and the poster&#160;here. Omnia El Shakry will present the keynote lecture of the workshop, Psychoanalysis and the Imaginary: Translating Freud in Postcolonial Egypt, on Thursday 11 April 2019, 4pm. Convener, Shehab Ismail, interviews her about her research. SI: How do you see the relationship between your first and your second book? OES: Both books trace intellectual genealogies of the human sciences while also investigating the points of intersection between Arabic, Islamic, and European thought in colonial and postcolonial Egypt. Both books explore how knowledge is formulated and produced through encounters­—whether the encounter is between the colonizer and the colonized or between psychoanalysis and Islam. That said, I think there are crucial differences between them in terms of their theoretical lexicon and their defining questions. The Great Social Laboratory was very much embedded within Marxist, post-Marxist, and postcolonial theory (Gramsci, Althusser, Foucault, subaltern studies), while the Arabic Freud draws predominantly on psychoanalytic and Islamic thinkers (Freud, Lacan, Ibn ʿArabi, as well as my historical interlocutors, Yusuf Murad and Abu al-Wafa al-Ghunaymi al-Taftazani, both of whom I conceive of as theorists in their own right). These different lexicons had vast implications for the histories that followed.In my first book, I focused on concepts that we tend toconventionally associate with modernity: questions of governmentality, theformation of “population” as an object of study, bourgeois hegemony, etc. asthey were shaped across Arab and European knowledge formations. These questionsdo, of course, animate the movement from the colonial to the postcolonial andthey are significant questions. They show up in the field of psychology aswell. But Iwas becoming increasingly dissatisfied with approaches to knowledge production(including my own) that emphasized colonialism, nationalism, or politicaldevelopments more generally, as singularly determinative of intellectualformations and of the human subject in the postcolony. Omnia El Shakry, The Arabic Freud: Psychoanalysis and Islam in Modern Egypt. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017.In the Arabic Freud, I wanted to tackle a very different setof philosophical questions surrounding the nature of the unconscious, thesoul, ethics, and sexuality. Specifically,I wanted to think about the epistemological and ethical contours of psychiclife and about the human subject’s relationship to the divine. In this way I could address the significance ofIslamic thought to the formulation of social theory—an arena that wasunderexplored in my previous book. Crucially, this also enabled me toengage withthe question of modernity from the perspective of tradition. Oftentimes themodern is conceptualized as coming after the (traumatic) cut inaugurated bycolonialism, where a chasm separates the pre-colonial from the colonial. Thiscut can be viewed as a series of ontological and epistemological ruptures orbreaks that sever what came before colonialism from what transpires afterwards,such as modern processes of subject formation. Yet, I was more interested inthinking about the trace of that which preceded colonialism and that whichendures in its aftermath (particularly of the non-secular), rather than thecut. To give a concrete example, when in 1945 Yusuf Murad translated Freud’s conceptof “the unconscious” into Arabic, he borrowed the term al-la-shuʿur from the medieval Sufi philosopher Ibn ʿArabi—a termredolent with mystical overtones. Likewise, the term that best captured Freud’snotion of die Seele or psyche was aptly rendered as the nafs(soul, spirit, psyche), a concept implying a spiritualcore, alongside the presence of the unconscious as a place where God could bemanifested. Imbued with a primordial divinity, the term was intimately bound upwith Islamic invocations and preexisting meanings. SI: The Arabic Freud explores epistemological resonances between psychoanalysis and Islamic thought in postwar Egypt. As you show, this was not a story of incommensurability but of interbreeding and conceptualization across knowledge traditions. Still, one wonders how writers like Yusuf Murad and others evaluated what they considered moments of tension and contradiction, if there were any. Were these moments productive at all? OES: This is an excellent question and I think you are quite right topoint out that the book prioritizes epistemological resonances andco-productions over tensions and contradictions between discrete knowledgetraditions. This was partly due to the fact that I was responding to scholarswho had tackled the question of psychoanalysis and Islam as a problem.Moreover, they had assumed that both traditions were ignorant of each other, whileplacing Islam on the couch, as it were, alleging its resistance to the “secularscience” of psychoanalysis.&#160; I tried toundo the terms of this debate by asking, instead, how we might think ofpsychoanalysis and Islam together, not as a “problem,” but as a creativeencounter of ethical engagement.Nonetheless, there are numerous examples of disagreements,sometimes fundamental, between the thought of Yusuf Murad and Sigmund Freud. Forexample, Murad departed from Freud by emphasizing cultural and sociologicalfactors in the formation of the Oedipus complex as well as in the constitutionof male and female sexuality. He also repudiated Freud’s notion of the deathdrive. At a deeper level, my historical interlocutors approach the divine in waysquite distinct from Freud. Both Murad and Taftazani conceptualize the humansubject as the addressee of a divine and transcendental discourse, whereas Freudat times pathologized religion in texts such as The Future of an Illusion andCivilization and Its Discontents.Indeed, the wider literature on psychoanalysis andreligion oftentimes argues that psychoanalysis represents anon-religious and even atheistic world view. At the same time, Freud has beensubject to a wide variety of interpretations. In Freud and Man’s Soul,Bruno Bettelheim argued that, in the original German, Freud’s language was fullof references to the soul, going so far as to refer to psychoanalysts as “aprofession of secular ministers of souls.” And, in fact, throughout thetwentieth century there have been numerous psychoanalysts who have maintained areceptive attitude towards religion and mysticism. In an important sense, then,psychoanalysis as a tradition is open to multiple, occasionally conflicting,interpretations and we can take Freud’s own ambivalence towards religion, andtowards mysticism in particular, as an invitation to rethink the relationshipbetween psychoanalysis and religion.IntheArabic Freud&#160;I try to make this tensionor contradiction between religion and psychoanalysis generative. Through myhistorical interlocutors, the book “reopens the archive of the unconscious inpsychoanalysis and allows it to proliferate and disclose its secret connectionswith the problematic of the soul, in Islam and in religious traditions at large,”as Stefania Pandolfo notes. Can the archive of the unconsciousbe reopened and its meanings disseminated and proliferated with the concept of al-la-shuʿur?Would such dissemination dislodge the ontological and epistemological conceitof a universal grammar of the subject presumed by readers of the German (orFrench or English) Freud? What might it mean, in other words, to rethink theepistemological and ethical contours of selfhood and psychoanalysis whilestanding in a geopolitical elsewhere? Thus, Egyptian translations of the unconscious as divineunknowing and the drive as ethical self-transformation help us rethink not justthe&#160;nafs&#160;as psyche, but thepsyche as soul. SI: In the first volume of The History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault discusses confession as a certain “technology of the self” that was retooled by psychoanalysis. In Egypt, where confession has not had the same history, were there significant discussions concerning the incitement to speak? Did Sufi ideas mediate practices of narrating the self? OES: In Volume I, Foucault discusses the transformation fromthe Christian pastoral and “the task of passing everything having to do withsex through the endless mill of speech” into the modern incitement to discourseconnecting sex to the production of the truth of the subject. Within knowledgeformations such as medicine, psychiatry, pedagogy, and psychoanalysis onefinds, he argues, the dissemination of procedures of confession.It is appropriate, then, to ask about the incitement to speak inEgypt, where confession did not have the same history. One might further thinkabout the associations between confession, the bodily desires of the flesh, andnotions of asceticism, although not, of course, in the Orientalizing fashion ofFoucault’s distinction between an ars erotica and scientia sexualis.In the Arabic Freud, the question of confession comes up in Murad’sdiscussion of Shifaʾ al-Nafs and the techniques of introspection andself-disclosure, as well as in Taftazani’s elaboration of self-struggle or jihadal-nafs. I’ll focus on the latter since you asked about Sufi ideasmediating practices of narrating the self. For Taftazani, as within the Sufi tradition more broadly, jihadal-nafs referred to the greater spiritual struggle against the self (nafs).The nafs was understood here as the lower self or the nafs al-ammara bi-l-suʾthe commanding self that leaned toward the body, commanding pleasures,desires, and evil deeds. The jihad of the self was, therefore, a crucialtask for the Sufi initiate or disciple and entailed both bodily andpsychological components, aimed at ethical self-correction through thecontemplation of God. Jihad al-nafs was framed by Taftazani in fairlypsychological terms; he went so far as to state that the shaykh was in effect apsychologist to whom the initiate must confide all of his psychological issues,foraging his unconscious desires and healing his illnesses. On the surface,this discussion appears to share similarities with the modern confessional modeof power-knowledge Foucault describes, and yet I would argue that the status ofthe renunciation of the self is distinctive within these knowledge traditions.In “Technologies of the Self,” Foucault states, “[f]rom theeighteenth century to the present, the techniques of verbalization have beenreinserted in a different context by the so-called human sciences in order touse them without the renunciation of the self but to constitute, positively, anew self. To use these techniques without renouncing oneself constitutes adecisive break.” However, within the Sufi tradition, including in the modernperiod, the entire purpose of jihad al-nafs and its attendant vigilance,self-examination, self-censure, and striving (as Abu Hamid al-Ghazali outlinesin The Book of Vigilance and Self-Examination) is a steadfast struggleagainst the self in the purification of intention and sincerity. So,renunciation of the self remains, in fact, the goal, even when reconceptualizedin terms of modern psychology. Further, the incitement to speech through verbalizationis not the only modality, unless of course one wishes to expand speech toinclude the inner speech and dialogue of the human subject in conversation withthe divine and in emulation of the Prophet, his companions, and other exemplaryfigures. The meaning of “to speak” here is distinct, then, from the private andpublic confessional; it refers, as well, to an inner process of accounting (muhasaba)that takes place in the company of historical exemplum and the authoritativeweight of the discursive tradition.SI: As a historian of the social sciences and humanities in Egypt, how do you understand and assess efforts to write ‘global histories of knowledge’? Do you see yourself contributing towards these histories? OES:I see the Arabic Freud as very much about what Ranjana Khanna calls the“worlding of psychoanalysis,” by challenging its allegedly pristineuniversality. For me, this cannot be done by subsuming all histories into theglobal, which might be yet another Hegelian ruse. Like many historians trainedin postcolonial theory, I share a suspicion of the category of the ‘global,’particularly when it attempts to incorporate all histories into a unitarytotality. There is no singular history that we can map ideas onto, no global basetime of history as such, rather, what we find are multiple temporalities,spatial discontinuities, and epistemic indeterminacies. I recall here RobertYoung’s early critique in WhiteMythologies: Writing History and the West, in which he thought through the tenacityof the Hegelian dialectic in the writing of history. Is there a way to writehistory that does not make a pretense to render transparent and eminentlyvisible the entire globe? This would be a history of mastery, which would bethe same kind of history that G.W.F. Hegel was writing in his Lectures onthe Philosophy of World History or the histories that others wroteand continue to write in his aftermath. Might these be different modes ordifferent iterations of historical writing that cannibalize the rest of theglobe in the extraction of an epistemological surplus value? Can we think aboutwriting histories that do not aspire to totality or totalization while purportingto comprehensiveness? And yet, even within totalizing narratives there willalways be an excess that cannot be assimilated. Perhaps the presumptionof a singular history and homogeneous spatio-temporality might be discarded infavor of an“irreducible heterogeneity,” as Gyan Prakash and other subaltern studiesscholars would say.SI: What other projects are you working on now?OES:I’m following two lines of thought right now. One line continues to thinkthrough psychoanalysis geopolitically partly by way of an exploratory foray into theoeuvre of Sami-Ali, the Arabic translator of Sigmund Freud’s Three Essays onthe Theory of Sexuality, author of a large body of original psychoanalyticwritings, and translator of the poetry of Sufi masters. Taken together, hiswritings enable a critical rethinking of the role of the imaginary, themechanisms of projection, and the epistemology of non-knowledge in the workingsof the unconscious. Significantly, such a rethinking of key psychoanalyticconcepts drew upon the Sufi metaphysics of the imagination of Ibn ʿArabi, aswell as the wider clinical context structuring the conditions of(im)possibility of psychoanalysis within the postcolony. I’m envisaging this asa series of articles that will help us reconceptualize psychoanalysis as takingplace otherwise at the intersection of multiple epistemological andethical traditions. &#160;The second line of thought is part of a book-length project. I want to continue to examine different discursive traditions in conversation, by tracing the emergence of a vibrant movement of intellectual-religious exchange between Muslim and Catholic scholars and religious practitioners in 20th century Egypt. To be clear, I am not theorizing this in terms of the literature on interfaith relations, nor am I engaging with the question of the political status of minorities, as such. Rather, I wish to address, once again, questions of ethics and epistemology. Thus, I ask: how did the ecumenical encounter between Islam and Catholicism shape and transform religious concepts, such as the Oneness of God; practices, such as agape, sincerity, and truthfulness; and sensibilities, such as inwardness? I plan to focus on comparative theology and philosophy in order to explore the cross-fertilization of ideas and practices and the co-constitution of intellectual and social histories of spirituality that come about through experiences of encounter with the religious other.Omnia El Shakry is Professor of History at the University of California, Davis. Her research focuses the intellectual and cultural history of the modern Middle East, with a particular emphasis on the history of the human and religious sciences in modern Egypt.&#160; El Shakry’s latest book, The Arabic Freud: Psychoanalysis and Islam in Modern Egypt (Princeton University Press, 2017), traces the development of psychoanalysis and discourses of subjectivity in postwar Egypt as part of the transregional history of ideas of the self and the unconscious.Citation: Psychoanalysis and the Imaginary: Translating Freud in Postcolonial Egypt — Interview with Omnia El Shakry, in TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research, 03.04.2019, https://trafo.hypotheses.org/18296. 