The Leaking Subject
This paper examines leaking as conceptual framework for rethinking contemporary writing practices and critiques of power in the Arab world. Starting with examples of leaking scandals in cyberspace, the paper turns to episodes in Thousand and One Nights, investigating leaks as involuntary bodily movements that subvert narrative and discursive orders. Activating a dialogue between affect theory, on the one hand, and writing and dissent in the Arabic tradition on the other, I identify a break with dialectical models of consciousness, subjectivity, and critique. I argue that the cyber and political scene, wherein leaks unsettle by causing mayhem and chaos, put in question notions of public sphere and community rooted in the Enlightenment’s privileging of oculocentricity, containability, and representation. Finally, I explore the ways in which leak critique dovetails with feminist critique, marking the shift from the subject of lack to a new political, leaking subject.
Biography
Tarek El-Ariss is Associate Professor of Arabic and Comparative Literature at the University of Texas at Austin. His research interests include contemporary Arabic literature, visual culture, and new media; 18th- and 19th-century French and Arabic philosophy and travel writing; and literary theory. He is author of Trials of Arab Modernity: Literary Affects and the New Political (2013), and editor of the forthcoming MLA anthology, The Arab Renaissance: Literature, Culture, Media. He’s associate editor of Journal of Arabic Literature, and edits a series on literature in translation for the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Texas Press entitled, Emerging Voices from the Middle East. His new book project examines new media’s effects on Arabic artistic and political practices by exploring the way that modes of confrontation, circulation, and exhibitionism shape contemporary writing practices and critiques of power.
