In his treatise on sex, passion and the color white, the Tunisian intellectual, Abdelwahab Meddeb wanders through vernacular Arabic and French uses of “blanc” (“white”) to trace a semiotic confusion of whiteness with the sacred and woman with the profane. Arguing that whiteness has been sublimated as purity in both languages, Meddeb assembles out of fragments of memory and phrases, both colloquial and liturgical, a set of ambivalent counter-senses of whiteness that resist the erasure of materiality and the emergence of new images. Blanches traverses du passé offers a distinct theory of the impurity of signs and images which are dependent upon base matter and ambivalence. Mixing philosophical meditation with ethnographic detail (e.g. the text provides a surprising record of pious undergarments circa 1950), Meddeb’s meditation complicates a trend of cultural studies that would elevate one set of affective disorders, melancholia, to a master category capable of organizing and comprehending Arabic letters and cultural sensibilities since 1967 (al-naksa). Situating Meddeb’s poetic meditation in the context of his cultural writings of the last two decades both as author of several influential book length engagements with political Islam and revolution and as editor (Dédale) and in the context of his influential weekly radio broadcast on France Culture, “Cultures d’Islam”, we find that the short poetic work crystalizes an argument under way over his entire career and articulated in disciplines as diverse as literature, religious studies, sociology, art history and political commentary. Throughout the range of his considerations, Meddeb produces an understanding of the political usefulness of sublimation, the psychoanalytic notion that drives can modify both aim and object through consideration of “social valuation” (Freud). While this critical practice does not prescribe remedies for crisis, it continually foregrounds existing and historical discourses on minoritarian identity from a rich and erudite command of texts by muslim writers while countering this high cultural legacy with partial, fragmentary perceptions attentive to the feminine, bedouin or foreigner in Tunisian landscapes. This is a critical practice not stalled by loss or melancholia but propelled by it. In a consideration of the work as whole and through the example of Blanches traverses du passé in particular, we examine this critical practice of sublimation vitally concerned with the ways that racial and sexual purity are even now being reconsolidated as timeless tradition.