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Roundtable
Queer Theory and Middle East Studies
In his final lecture, Freud and the Non-European,1Edward 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.
We know that the field of postcolonial studies inaugurated by Said's critique of orientalism was motivated by Foucault's notion of discursive formations and the historical mutability of structures of knowledge and truth. Less has been said about Said's work with psychoanalysis as a tool of critical insight or the proliferation of psychoanalytic terms such as "negative hallucination" or "projection" when he describes the mechanisms of a colonial imaginary.2For Said, ideology derives its power from fantasy and proliferates itself as truth effects through the deployment of discursive formations, most notably orientalism. Given that postcolonial theory has been and must continue to be fundamental to Middle East studies, it is surprising that Said's career-long interest in psychoanalytic speculation has not been more influential in the field. This may derive from cautions against imposing western models of subjectivity on eastern cultures or a narrow interpretation of Foucault's acts and identities distinction,3which has grounded some claims for essential cultural differences between east and west. Yet Said was suspicious of such identity claims and in his final work expressed the unlikely hope that a shared ambivalence about pure identity might become a fertile ground of approach between Israeli and Palestinian, Jew and Arab, in an imagined affinity, if not actual community. The insight that identity is not a stable entity with closed borders but limited, impure, and haunted by its own indeterminacy is extended by queer theorists like Leo Bersani...