Concise definition
The unthought is what remained outside questioning because of exclusion, cognitive habit, or the authority of orthodoxy. It is not merely a passing absence, but a field of meaning that was never allowed to emerge because the dominant epistemic system fenced it off or became accustomed to ignoring it.
Its place in the project
This concept appears as one of the keys to Arkoun’s critique of the closed mind and of forms of epistemic fixity. It is directly linked to orthodoxy, to power and knowledge, and to historicity, because it reveals what was concealed when one reading became a standard. It also stands alongside discourse analysis and applied Islamology, because these tools are used to open up what had settled in as self-evident.
Example or witness
The unthought is embodied in the pathways that preceded normative fixation or coexisted with it and were then excluded from the acceptable field of thought. It also appears when Arkoun asks what disappeared because of schoolbook reading or because the tradition was turned into a single block, rather than being dismantled into its layers and multiple trajectories.
See also: the Unthought (concept page)