‘The sickness of the soul, the domination of the mind, the possession of horizons’: Takwīn al-nafs (formation of the spirit/self) as emancipatory ethico-politics

This paper thinks through the concept-practice of takwīn al-nafs (formation of the subject-self) as a form of ethico-politics among a group of anti-colonial writers and actors in the years surrounding the Algerian Revolution (1954-1962). I investigate how takwīn al-nafs troubles the assumed secularity of freedom (and its correlates, liberation, emancipation) as a category of political modernity in its troubling of the boundaries of the ethical/political, as well as the self-contained subject self in the relationship of the anthropos to other living beings: the Divine, as well as animals, plants, the earth, and other celestial beings. Drawing from archival material, publications, and ethnographic fieldwork with students of the Association of Algerian Muslim Scholars and the philosopher and critic Malek Bennabi, I explore how takwīn functioned as a response to colonial subjectification and as an enduring mode of re-membering a dismembered epistemic and ethical-political horizon.