Knot of the Soul
Madness, Psychoanalysis, Islam
- Contents
- Review Quotes
Table of Contents
Contents
Introduction
Part I. Psychiatric Fragments in the Aftermath of Culture
1. Testimony in Counterpoint
2. The Hospital
3. The Jinn and the Pictogram: “The Story of My Life”
4. The Knot of the Soul (or the Cervantes Stage)
Interlude. Islam and the Ethics of Psychoanalysis
Part II. The Passage: Imagination, Alienation
5. Taʿbīr: Figuration and the Torment of Life
6. The Burning
Part III. The Jurisprudence of the Soul
7. Overture: A Topography of the Soul in the Vertigo of History
8. Faqīh al-nafs: The Jurist of the Soul
9. Shariʿa Healing: “Knowledge of the Path to the Hereafter”
10. Prophetic Medicine and the Ruqya
11. The Jouissance of the Jinn
12. The Psychiatrist and the Imam
13. Black Bile and the Intractable Jinn: Threshold of the Inorganic
14. The Argument of Shirk (Idolatry)
15. Extimacy: The Battlefield of the Nafs
16. The Writing of the Soul: Soul Choking, Imagination, and Pain
17. Concluding Movement: The Passion of Zulikha, a Dramaturgy of the Soul
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
Review Quotes
Talal Asad, City University of New York
“Knot of the Soul combines sensitive ethnography, Islamic practices of healing, and suggestive encounters with psychiatry and psychoanalytic theory. Pandolfo has written an unusually insightful work that serves as an excellent example of the riches that these three different traditions, in conversation with one another, can offer our contemporary understanding of madness and reason. It deserves to be widely read and pondered.”
Joan Copjec, Brown University
“Knot of the Soul is a stunning breakthrough book. Creating its own genre—not by mixing existing genres but by seeing beyond their divisions—it exposes the profound homologies between Sufi philosophy and psychoanalysis and the structural madness that haunts the subject, for good as well as ill. Beautifully written and conceptually precise, it cannot but convince readers of the timeliness and inestimable value of these marginalized discourses.”
Veena Das, Johns Hopkins University
“Reading this book is both an intellectual and an aesthetic experience. Pandolfo’s subtle and nuanced rendering of the meandering life of reason, unreason, terror, and hope is unparalleled in anthropological and psychiatric literature. Her deep knowledge of Islamic theology and poetry, her mastery over anthropological and psychoanalytical theory, and, above all, her capacity to listen, show what an anthropological devotion to the world might mean.”
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