In his final lecture, Freud and the Non-European,Footnote ¹ Edward 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.Footnote ² For 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,Footnote ³ which 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 and Judith Butler who share with Said a conviction that social attachments and obstructions must be understood in their psychological complexity, a complexity for which psychoanalysis has provided one of the most sustained reflections.Footnote ⁴ Queer theory shares with postcolonial studies as imagined by Said a commitment to unraveling certainties and decentering essences.Footnote ⁵

As I have noted elsewhere, Middle East studies can be enhanced by proliferating historical, ethnographic, and sociological studies of sexual practice and identity that interrogate the heteronormative assumptions imputed to both the historical record and the present moment.Footnote ⁶ The specificities of the deployment of sexuality in the Middle East are only now coming into historical focus as scholars track the development of modern biopolitics in the region. As sketched by Foucault, the biopolitical state materializes particular subjectivities, kinship structures, and erotic investments through networks of medical and demographic knowledges, colonial administrative regulation, and a host of institutions from education to taxation.Footnote ⁷ Here I want to emphasize a different set of imperatives derived from queer theory:

1. 1. Another Foucault—the Foucault who pursued the historical transformation of what counts as truth and therefore was interested in networks of competing definition, rather than the Foucault of successive constructions of reified social types;

2. 2. Queer theory as a practice of critical unraveling that extends the kind of reading practice we find in Said to questions of embodiment and desire. Indeterminacy and unconscious investment are key concepts in a contrapuntal approach that analyzes the differential relations and competing conditions of truth in the current confrontations of a modernity produced through the globalized reality of diaspora.

Afsaneh Najmabadi offers an example of a pivotal transformation in the conditions of truth that so interested Foucault in his later works.Footnote ⁸ Najmabadi describes historical changes in the relation of conceptions of gender, desire, and beauty and in the importance granted these key terms in Iranian imaginations of sovereignty and nationhood, and offers a detailed picture of how the multiple feminisms of modernist Iranian nationalists ushered in a hard-edged form of heteronormative masculinity on the “western” model, felt to be a necessary foundation of the modern nation-state. Prior to this prevailing discourse, diverse forms of gender and sexual performance had more latitude for public and private expression. The price of modern national self-consolidation was a straightened masculinity and the adoption of the nuclear family over against extended family and gender-segregated domesticity. That conceptions of the nation should depend upon particular gender and sexual expression is a major insight derived from research informed by the critical sensibilities of queer theory. Najmabadi's study is not an application of other theory to native data; it is an example of queer theory within Middle East studies that is also a major contribution to queer theory as a whole.

Najmabadi derives knowledge about women's homosocial and homosexual desire through analysis of archival references to male homosexuality. This historical technique recovers absences in the archive and exposes a lengthy process by which the object of male desire was progressively feminized to leave behind the 18th-century model of the beloved male warrior and exemplar of masculine virtue. A signature of Middle East studies scholarship is the centrality of woman in every field and approach; Najmabadi's history of the heterosexualization of eros recasts that centrality as an effect of modern biopower produced through a complex negotiation with the west but not imposed from without. No sequence of clear-cut epistemic difference can be found here. Instead, we are invited to think through figures of haunting and folded temporalities to comprehend the derivation of tradition from within competing definitions.

If Najmabadi's approach hesitates to invoke the term “queer” it is not in recoil from the politics of queer theory. All too often “queer” is used to mean an inclusive array of discrete sexual identities or practices while “sexuality” as in “sexuality studies” is more likely to expose the queer unraveling that is characteristic of the kind of reading practice advocated by Said. Describing her position on “queer,” Carla Freccero advocates “resistance to its hypostatization, reification into nominal status as designating an entity, an identity, a thing.”Footnote ⁹ This leaves us with queer theory as a “strategic conceptual category” rather than “an identity politics category.”Footnote ¹⁰ In this sense queer theory can be a tool of GLBT social justice and rights movements, but queer theory ranges over a wide field of critical theoretical approaches seeking to understand the indeterminacy of embodied subjectivities found in the historical and literary record. Accused from within queer theory of skirting material realities of GLBT lives, the same indeterminacy or irresolution that for Said holds out a possibility for co-existence and affinity is defended by Freccero, who suggests that it “may in fact constitute its usefulness as a deconstructive anti-identitarian critical and political practice.”Footnote ¹¹ Queer reading practices in some sense proceed through forms of hesitation—through a caution to name or decide in advance what an archive of absences or a rhetorical entanglement will yield up in the time of reflection. This too is a queer temporality; it is the slow time of critique.

Nowhere is this more evident than in queer theory's ambivalent engagement with psychoanalysis. Queer theory has known that it had to change psychoanalysis. Yet, Butler and Bersani, among others, have found resources in psychoanalysis to challenge the institutionally sanctioned homophobia of medicine, so often an alibi for attacks on sexual minorities and dissident desire. If queer theory and psychoanalysis have been allies in the fight to secure human rights for GLBT people, this derives from their shared ability to imagine desire, attachment, and life itself beyond fixed categories of identity. From its inception psychoanalysis has been a useful practice of cultural translation and interpretation.

The study of gender in Middle East studies is often still haunted by concepts of “traditional mediterranean masculinity” and other orientalist residues.Footnote ¹² Studies of masculinity that ignore the insights of queer theory remain vulnerable to repeating stereotypes of normativity in the region. We saw this played out in the world media over the issue of gender violence in the Egyptian revolution. Thinking gender today requires thinking queerly and for Middle East studies this means confronting the legacy of oedipal and fraternal identifications that appear recursively in the literary tradition, political writing, and everyday perceptions when issues of gender are raised. Queer theory is the one field that has interrogated the homosocial model of gender norming by engaging with psychoanalytic models of unconscious inscription, gender recruitment, and melancholic attachment. It has critiqued the normative underpinnings of the oedipal fixations of theory, even arguing that psychoanalytic attachment to the oedipal myth is itself a form of norming in theory.Footnote ¹³ These debates are not settled by queer theory; they are opened by queer critique and can be the starting point for a more cogent analysis and interrogation of heteronormative enforcement and the violence meted out to sexual and political dissidents alike.

From Foucault's antifoundationalist histories of subjectivity, truth, and power to queer indeterminacy and postcolonial critique, theory owes a debt to psychoanalysis; the implications for conceptions of subjectivity in Middle East studies are striking. Psychoanalysis developed as a resistance to biopolitical racialization and in its focus on embodiment as a basis of identity established a vocabulary and speculative models essential to queer theory and critique.Footnote ¹⁴ Embodiment thus becomes a site of the double inscription of social norms and the failure of that imposition at once. In the areas of subjectivity and desire, gender and sexuality, the one and the many, it offers techniques of analysis and dynamic models that can become critical interventions on (hetero)normativity. From The Question of Palestine to his final lecture Said reached into the lexicon of psychoanalysis to describe fundamental structures of violence and the psychic dangers of unending resistance. Queer theory is the inheritor of this postcolonial antifoundational critique.