The Meaning within Arkoun’s Project
For Arkoun, the unthought names a field that has been historically obscured until even posing it as a question becomes difficult. This field includes what the founding language cannot accommodate, what orthodoxy excludes, or what educational habit effaces when it fixes meaning in a single formula. The concept thus appears in Arkoun’s project as a sign of the limits of thought, and of the ways in which certain questions are kept out of circulation.
Within this horizon, the unthought reveals that the absence of certain questions is linked to a history of meaning-making within institutions and dominant readings. The issue concerns what was not said, and what was prevented from entering the field of speech in the first place. For this reason, the concept stands alongside orthodoxy and power and knowledge and historicity in Arkoun’s work, because exclusion is determined within relations of recognition, surveillance, and interpretation.
How Does the Concept Work?
The unthought functions as an instrument of disclosure that pushes reading beyond what is declared and canonized, in search of questions that have been excluded, neglected, or confined within ready-made formulas. It thus helps one understand codification, the closure of the text, and the formation of doctrines within specific political and cultural contexts.
The concept also shows that what is left unsaid leaves its mark on texts, readings, and institutions of reception. In critical analysis, this mark appears in the form of ruptures, contradictions, or stagnation in the development of certain questions. For this reason, the unthought in Arkoun is linked to discourse analysis and to critique of reason, since it calls for reading what has stabilized and what has been excluded at the same time.
Where Does It Appear in the Books?
The concept appears clearly in Fundamentalist Thought and the Impossibility of Founding. In this context, the unthought is directly connected to the effect of closure at the origin when the origin becomes an ultimate reference. Its presence in this book differs from its presence elsewhere because it is tied to a critique of fundamentalism itself: that is, to what fundamentalism prevents from historical questioning and to the possibilities for understanding that it obscures beyond the inherited formula.
It also appears in Islamic Thought: Critique and Ijtihad, where the unthought is linked to the call to reopen fields that have been blocked by dominant reading. Here the focus moves from the closure of fundamentalism alone to the necessity of ijtihad and critique in order to uncover what has remained outside thought within Islamic culture itself.
In The Human Formation of Islam, the concept’s presence becomes historically broader, because it is connected to the processes of formation themselves: memory, representations, language, power, and myth-making. Here it differs from the two previous books; it follows exclusion and prohibition, and also the way collective meaning takes shape until part of it becomes invisible within public consciousness.
It also emerges in When Islam Awakens from the perspective of surveillance, interpretation, and textual closure. In this book, the unthought appears inseparable from the mechanisms of guardianship that regulate the circulation of meaning, especially when legitimacy intersects with social and institutional surveillance, so that what cannot be said becomes part of the way the text and meaning are received.
It appears in a distinctly clear way in Readings of the Qur’an, because the question here concerns the Qur’anic text as a historical discourse open to rereading. The unthought appears here both in terms of external prohibition and in terms of the limits imposed by interpretive methods themselves, which narrowed attention to history, context, and reception, and kept some hermeneutical possibilities outside the usual field.
It can also be traced in Toward a Comparative History of Monotheistic Religions, where it takes on a meaning linked to closed identity and to what such identity conceals in terms of possibilities for comparison and shared history. Here it differs from the previous books because it moves beyond the Islamic interior alone to what the boundaries separating religions obscure, when each religion is read within a self-sufficient, final horizon.
Related Concepts
- Power and knowledge: shows how exclusion becomes part of the organization of legitimacy, rather than a merely incidental stance.
- Orthodoxy: reveals how dominant reading settles in place and narrows the field for other questions.
- Discourse analysis: makes it possible to see what is said and what is silenced within texts and institutions of reception.
- Historicity: shows that what disappeared from discourse was tied to the context in which meaning took shape and the conditions under which it changed.
- Critique of reason: opens the question of the limits produced by inherited thinking within religious knowledge.
Limits of the Reading
The unthought alone does not determine the nature of what was excluded or the final reason for its exclusion, because it describes the field of concealment more than it offers a complete explanation of it. Understanding this field always requires linking the concept to historicity, discourse analysis, and the books that work on the relation between text, power, codification, and reading.
See also: the unthought (brief definition)