Common representations of the counter-revolution in Egypt reflect a narrow understanding of authoritarian articulations of power as only top-down and coercive, in a sense, implying the inevitability of the failure of revolution in places like Egypt (Bishara 2013; Selim 2015). However, I argue that there is more to authoritarian rule than mere repression. Departing from R.B.J Walker’s remark that ‘Absolute authority has itself no absolute ground to stand on. What counts is the degree to which people can be persuaded to underwrite the sovereign power’ (1996: 20), I show in this paper how the mobilisation of the figure of the honourable citizen acts as a technology of government. I ask how citizenship and nationalism are mobilised and constructed in state discourses around the Egyptian January Revolution – temporally, affectively, and performatively? How do these discourses (re)produce counter- revolution? In this paper I trace the genealogy of the figure of the patriotic ‘honourable citizen’. I hold that this figure should be read as an eternal ideal type of citizenship to aspire to - ‘Egyptianness’ as it should be - that figures some citizens as normal/honourable and others as deviant (e.g., the ‘male homosexual’), and therefore constructs political subjectivity through perceived moral difference. This binary distinction is used to delegitimise the January Revolution by deeming its demands, aspirations, and actors as foreign and alien to a monolithic and hegemonic understanding of Egyptianness. The construction of this political subjectivity purports a citizenry that is incapable of self-government and seeks to inculcate an Egyptianness that is not ready for democracy (Abdelhamid 2020). I will draw on Foucauldian discourse analysis and figuration (Weber 2016) when analysing official speeches in the period between 2011 and 2021 to illustrate how the counter-revolution has been produced through biopolitical techniques that aim at the forsaking of multiplicity to form homogenous subjects who ‘loyally repeat the nation’ (Kuntsman 2009: ix; also see Haritaworn 2008).