Notes on Psychoanalysis, Islam, and Contemporary Political Imaginaries

Author: Elias Taweel

Advisor: Marwa ElShakry

"What relevance does the current American political atmosphere hold in terms of its ideological translation within contemporary culture? Why is it that what appears on the level of a mass psychocultural involution, or regression, is celebrated alongside an impassioned disdain of propriety and deference towards formal and symbolic authoritative structures and principles? We may also ask what does the proliferation of group identity signifiers to a micro level degree of inconsequential nuance reveal in terms of its presupposing psychical reality? What symptomatic ramifications are to be identified of a systemic, internal disorder, and is there an imaginary site that is both desired and disavowed, and which marks the obverse of culturally ideal and normative modes of subjectivity and governance? Working from a psychoanalytic framework, the question of desire and the circuits of its ideological embeddedness may be examined in its utility for identifying those sites of sanctioned and forbidden libidinal investments, which will correspond to the positionality of the subjective vis-a-vis ideology."