(Post)colonial Egypt & its simulacra of liberation a capture of revolutionary desire

Haddadi, Anissa (2021) (Post)colonial Egypt & its simulacra of liberation a capture of revolutionary desire. PhD thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science.

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Abstract

What is the revolutionary event and what tongue does its desire speak? Can we really understand and analyse revolutionary events through a logic of representation that works through processes of Identification and Signification? This thesis challenges assumptions that the revolutionary event/experience can be thought through the logic of Representation/Signification/Identification. It does so by highlighting the continuities between the colonial and post-colonial moments in Egypt. In this, it critiques both modern thought and modern political thought and their assumption that the regime of Representation and its Symbolic Simulations of experience remains an unescapable subjective panopticon. Indeed, the thesis proposes to look at revolutionary events as moments that challenge the Simulation and its production of experiences as simulacra. To his end the research asks the following question: Is (post)-Colonial revolutionary thought thinking revolutionary events/experiences as their colonial simulacra? To explore this problematic of liberation, the research looks at three series of times that all share a similar temporal sequencing of space: the Modern Fold. The thesis starts its analysis of the mode of subjectivations that keep thought prisoner of its Simulation by looking at the modern colonisation of Egypt. It then moves into postcolonialism and explores the continuities between the Nasserist and Colonial Symbolics by highlighting how they both function by Oedipalizing desire. Its third moment looks at the thought of Sayyid Qutb as an illustration of a thought that challenges postcolonial reality and beyond it, modern reality as a Simulation. However, as the research highlights, Qutb’s moment of escape turns into a line of death. So, can revolutionary desire free itself from the Symbolics of Simulation and their capture of desire? Perhaps, the thesis concludes, if we move from a paranoid to a Schizoid semiotic assemblage.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Additional Information:	© 2021 Anissa Haddadi
Library of Congress subject classification:	J Political Science > JA Political science (General) J Political Science > JV Colonies and colonization. Emigration and immigration. International migration J Political Science > JZ International relations
Sets:	Departments > International Relations
Supervisor:	Gerges, Fawaz
URI:	http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/4239

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