In the Absence of the Face

Social Research, Spring, 2000 by Hamid Dabashi

As the return of the Qur'anic repressed, Joseph is not only signaled out by his extraordinarily perceptive eyes and by God having selected him, but by his having been endowed with the power to interpret the dreams that he sees. "Thus thy Lord will prefer thee and will teach thee the interpretation of events, and will perfect His grace upon thee and upon the family of Jacob as He perfected it upon thy forefather, Abraham and Isaac. Lo! thy Lord is Knower, Wise" (The Qur'an 12:6). Interpretation is to deliver the Sign into the realm of the Signifier, through the site of the Revelatory Signature, and letting it loose to mean. Interpretation (the Qur'anic ta'wil) is the architectonic edifice of hermeneutically burying the repression of the absence of the Sign in the Qur'anic memory. Joseph is signaled out, retrieved from the Qur'anic memory, as the return of the Qur'anic repressed, by being identified as a dream-interpreter, both seeing the Sign and delivering it into the realm of the Signifier, the mutation and the mutant at the same time. Joseph is made even more emphatically the Sign of the absent Face by the Qur'an being emphatic about his story being the very Sign (ayatun) for "the inquiring" (li-lsa'iliyn).

The perilous anxiety of the narrative exposure of the actively repressed is immediately evident in the danger to which Joseph, as the momentary and strategically conditioned retrieval of the Sign, is exposed. Joseph's jealous brothers at once begin to conspire against him. This is the danger to which the Qur'anic memory exposes itself by retrieving its carefully repressed. One brother suggests to kill him, while the other proposes to throw him into the depth of a pit. Throw him into the depth of a pit they do and then they come weeping to their father "Saying: O our father! We went racing one with another, and left Joseph by our things, and the wolf devoured him, and thou believest not our saying when we speak the truth" (The Qur'an 12:17). Joseph's brothers blame the wolf and produce his blood-stained shirt as evidence. Jacob has no choice but patience. Meanwhile Joseph is discovered by a water-drawer from a caravan on its way to Egypt and rescued from his subterranean dungeon. Joseph is sold very cheaply into slavery in Egypt. His owner, the Prince of Egypt, entrusts him to his wife Zoleikha and asks her to treat him honorably so that perhaps they can adopt him as a son. Reading Joseph as the retrieved Sign and the carefully remembered lost memory of the Qur'anic narrative, pulling it up, as it were, from the subterranean dungeon of its repressed anxieties, is now in full view.

The Qur'anic narrative is very emphatic here as to the particularly evil way in which Joseph is treated. He is cast into a pit by his brothers out of jealousy and malevolence. He is rescued by the Divine Will but he is sold very cheaply into slavery out of the ignorance of who he really is. But the Qur'an is equally emphatic as to what God has in store for Joseph. God speaks in the First Person, Majestic We Narrative: "... Thus We established Joseph in the land that We might teach him the interpretation of events. And Allah was predominant in His career, but most of mankind know not" (The Qur'an 12:21). The repressed returns but under the full control and the protective custody of the Unseen the Narrator. It is precisely from the Unseen that Joseph will learn the "interpretation of event" (ta'wil al-ahadith), where he will deliver the realm of the suppressed and absent Sign to that of the promised Signification and begin to interpret things. This transmission is under the direct "teaching" of the Unseen the Narrator: "And when he reached his prime We gave him wisdom and knowledge. Thus We reward the good" (The Qur'an 12:22).