Psychoanalysis, Islam, and the Calligraphy of Invention

What might it mean for psychoanalysis to understand the formulation of psychoanalytic theory outside the confines of a European tradition? This seminar will engage psychoanalysis geopolitically and reformulate key meta-psychological concepts by thinking through Islamic categories. How might we rethink the category of the imaginary from a theologically informed perspective, as distinct from European social theory? Exploring Islamic theology, Arabic linguistics, and the intermingling of poetic and psychoanalytic discourses, this talk will propose a more radical engagement of psychoanalysis with and in the world by reopening the conceptual archive of its canon. Throughout, psychoanalysis, Islamic theology, and poetry serve as provocations to the discipline of history in a time of war and death.

Omnia El Shakry is professor of History at Yale University. She specializes in 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. El Shakry is the author, most recently, of The Arabic Freud: Psychoanalysis And Islam In Modern Egypt. Prior to Yale, she taught in the History Department at the University of California, Davis.

Please register for access to readings and to reserve a seat and a box lunch.