We are very happy to share with h-madness readers the next session of this Resarch Seminar. The next session is entitled Freud, a lifelong companion of Edward Said by Fadi A. Bardawil

Date: April 30, 2025 Time: 6pm (Cairo/UTC+3) – 5pm (Paris/UTC+2) – 11am (New York/UTC-4)  Speaker: Fadi A.Bardawil’s work investigates the traditions of intellectual inquiry, and modalities of political engagement of contemporary Arab thinkers at home and in the diaspora, and their friction with the different genealogies of critical theory. In doing so, his research explores how the various relationships cultural production (creating and thinking), political practice (acting) and generational dwelling (living) entertain in different sites (Global North/South), can help us reckon with questions of power, emancipation and solidarity in an increasingly interconnected, yet fragmented world.His recent Arabic and English writings have appeared in American Ethnologist, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East; The Journal for Palestine Studies (Arabic edition); al-Jumhuriya; The Immanent Frame; Megaphone; Political and Legal Anthropology Review Online; South Atlantic Quarterly; and World Records Journal.He is the author of Revolution and Disenchantment: Arab Marxism and the Binds of Emancipation (Duke UP, 2020) and teaches in the department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke University.

Abstract Freud was a lifelong intellectual companion of Edward Said. Beginnings: Intention  and Method (1975), Said’s major early work, which laid the conceptual groundwork for many of the themes he will explore in the decades to come, includes a close reading of Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams. Said’s final work, Freud and the Non-European (2003), an exemplar of Said’s own late style, returns once more to Freud. In the nearly three-decades separating the two works, Said also drew on Freud’s œuvre his other works, namely in Orientalism (1978). I propose to sketch the contours of this relationship, by asking how did Said draw on Freud? And to what ends? What I am concerned with is the kinds of interventions Said makes by drawing on Freudian concepts, in particular vis-à-vis his longstanding theoretical preoccupation with the question of mediation between culture and power, and his political-intellectual engagement in favor of Palestinian emancipation. Register now to attend online:https://cnrs.zoom.us/meeting/register/IV7j2l7VQ3Wb50c5OKnmyg