LIKE A FEVER

After the Revolutions: Inheriting Tragedy

Samer Frangie examines an impasse following the Arab revolutions, the out-of-jointness of time, and the concept of “afterness.“

Part of What Time Tells, an ongoing series on time and the problems we face today. Published in conjunction with Countering Time, AAA’s exhibition about archival time and the idea of afterlives.

 

 

On 11 February 2011, as I was waiting to board a plane from London back to Beirut, news was arriving from Egypt about demonstrations and clashes in the vicinity of the presidential palace in Cairo. Something dramatic was in the air, but I did not expect the resignation of the Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak to be the culmination of these weeks of protests. It was true that a month earlier, the Tunisian president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali had resigned after weeks of protests, but his resignation seemed to be an isolated glitch in the system, not the beginning of a process that will transform the region. Or at least, this is how things appeared on 11 February 2011.

For those of us who were politically educated in the post–Cold War period, “revolutions” were not credible alternatives, let alone thinkable possibilities. Neither were political reforms after the disappointing 1990s, nor any other political change for that matter. The post–Cold War conjuncture was not amenable to political acts, and we kept replacing a discredited and often-naive activism with ever more sophisticated theoretical deconstruction of the system, however defined. It was not simply a question of moving from one end of the imagined spectrum to the other, from acting to thinking, but of getting used to thinking without the horizon of acting in view. In other words, we were immune to the possibility of revolution, vaccinated against its temptation, cured from its desire.

But in the span of the five hours that took me from London to Beirut, something happened. I had forgotten all about the events in Egypt, only to land in Beirut with the news of Mubarak’s resignation beeping on every smart phone in the plane. Ben Ali, then Mubarak—something was going on. It was not an isolated glitch in the system. Rather, the whole system was crumbling. And it followed from there on in crescendo. On 17 February, Libya and Bahrain revolted, and on 15 March, the Syrian revolution started against all expectations.

In less than a month, the Arab world had changed, and us with it. Our immunity to revolutions had been compromised, and we had succumbed to the temptation.

Nobody expected the Arab revolutions before they happened. This, in itself, is normal, as revolutions are events without a history, at least before they happen. But our inability to foresee these events was not a simple cognitive failure on our part. After all, we knew how bad and untenable the situation had become. All the economic reports were suggesting an imminent social and demographic crisis, and countless signs were indicating that the political deadlock in the region had become untenable. Even environmental studies were warning of the dire consequences of climate change on the livelihood of rural populations and local economies. After the revolutions, it was easy to explain not only their occurrence, but also their inevitability, and the scores of books on the Arab spring attest to the ease of its belated explanation.

But despite all this retrospective evidence, we were immune to the revolutions, having been brought up listening to the litanies of the failures of past uprisings. We knew, but we did not know what to do with this knowledge. After all, wasn’t our dark present the result of the foolish hopes of previous generations? The Egyptian revolution of 1952 gave us the defeat of 1967. The Algerian revolution looked like a faint memory when compared to the bloody civil war of the 1990s and the dominance of a military junta. The Palestinian revolution officially ended with the Oslo Accords and their corrupt apparatus, even though it had already ended earlier. And the “progressive” coups of the 1960s in Syria, Iraq and Libya gave us the various nightmares of our present. Thinking in terms of revolution, totality, emancipation or social change was a dangerous game, and we gradually learnt the theoretical lingo of thinking cautiously, without essentialism, teleology, totalisation, binaries, or any other -isms. We learnt to act on the margins, at a grass-roots level, through horizontal organisations, with the “others of,” trying to mitigate the costs of the post-1989 global order, a Sisyphean task since our theoretical critiques of the system did not change and were still as damning as before, if not more.

I am using Sisyphus here to point to the tragic undertone of our political education, characterised by the keen awareness of the unbridgeable gap between knowledge and action, into which the past emancipatory pasts fell. The trope of tragedy was our version of the thesis of Arab exceptionalism, our manner of coming to terms with what felt like an impasse. In his World Theatre Day address in 1996, the late Syrian dramatist Saadallah Wannous uttered his famous words that were to become the rallying cry of intellectuals and activists in an increasingly grim and hopeless Arab world: “We are condemned to hope,” he declared, before he reassured his audience that “what is taking place today cannot be the end of history.”1 The tragic tone of the address resonated with what the late Lebanese intellectual Samir Kassir described as the “Arab malaise,” a sense of disempowerment caused by the articulations of foreign interventions and occupations, a resurgent Islamism and culturalism in the Arab world and the tighter hold of authoritarian regimes, turned neo-liberal, on Arab societies.2 The post-1989 “end of history” was not the promise heralded by the fall of the Berlin Wall. Rather, all it had to offer these intellectuals, and us with them, was a grim present, stuck between impossible alternatives, against which the only remaining resource was that of tragedy. In a 2004 article tellingly titled “Time Out of Joint,” the Syrian intellectual Sadiq Jalal al-Azm describes “the modern Arabs” as the “Hamlet of our times, doomed to unrelieved tragedy, forever hesitating, procrastinating, and wavering between the old and the new.”3 Tragedy, in other words, was the language to express the out-of-jointness of the Arab post-1989 time. And for those born amidst the trope of tragedy, the revolution was reminiscent of a romantic trope against which we defined ourselves.4

 

 

Image: Ruins of Idlib, Syria, in 2020. Photo: Ahmed Akacha.

 

 

The Tragic Enlightenment

The disruption in time that required tragedy was not limited to the post-1989 era. Or, at least, for Wannous and his generation of disillusioned-militants-turned-critical-intellectuals, the product of the crisis of the national liberation movements of the mid-twentieth century, the crisis was not only political. It was more fundamentally a breach of the temporal imagination that guided and authorised such projects of emancipation, a disjoining of the neat alignment of past, present, and future. The end of the sense of temporal concordance left these intellectuals, to use the words of the Jamaican scholar David Scott, with “a certain experience of temporal afterness…in which the trace of futures past hangs like the remnant of a voile curtain over what feels uncannily like an endlessly extending present.”5 Only Sisyphus can inhabit such an endlessly extending present, amidst the shreds of historical reason, a present that seems out of joint now that the sense of temporal concordance is gone.

In this present, stricken with immobility and pain and ruin, the temporal crisis was perceived as fundamentally a crisis of modernity, with the short, twentieth-century read as successive failed attempts to come to terms with the modern rupture of the nineteenth century. Azm’s Hamlet was a tragic figure that “never acknowledged, let alone reconciled [himself] to, the marginality and passivity of [his] position in modern times,” having been “dragged kicking and screaming into modernity.”6 Faced by the shreds of their modern project, the answer for those who lived through the breakdown in the temporal imagination was to blame the “Hamlet of our times” for failing to fit into the mold of historical reason, tearing it up to shreds with his kicks and screams. Based on such a diagnosis of the ills of the present, the first steps towards the awaited reconciliation and away from tragedy resided in coming to terms with what was seen from behind the remnant of the voile curtain as the foundational moment of Arab modernist thought, the Nahda, the moment in which Arabs seem to have accepted, albeit briefly, the fact that they got dragged kicking and screaming into modernity.

Wannous, himself, was involved in such a project of re-excavating the Nahda from under the rubble left by the radical experiments of the mid-twentieth century and the subsequent Islamist revival. With other Arab intellectuals, he established a short-lived journal, Qadaya wa-Shahadat (1990–92), aimed at unearthing the legacy of the Nahda, part of a growing intellectual industry striving for a different “return” to this moment. In the post-ideological age of the 1990s, and coming against the backdrop of the failure of Arab postcolonial states and their “progressive” discourse-turned-ideological-nightmare, the journal attempted to uncover a democratic culture by returning to the liberal and pluralist experimentation of the Nahda, as the historical backbone for a revival of critical thinking. But this often-nostalgic gaze backwards was similarly apprehended in tragic terms, with the growing marginalisation of the modernist intellectual and his enlightenment values. A “lone voice in the wilderness,” this was the fate of enlightened intellectuals in a fallen world.

The crisis of the Arab post-1989 present called for a return to the question of the enlightenment as the founding moment of critical thought. But despite the heroic struggles of the proponents of this tragic enlightenment, I, like many of the generation that grew up amidst Kassir’s “Arab malaise,” could only hear in the tragic optimism of Wannous echoes of what the American theorist Lauren Berlant calls, in a different context, “cruel optimism,” the self-inflicted cruelty resulting from “the condition of maintaining an attachment to a significantly problematic object.”7 Tragedy as a source of wisdom can easily slip into cruelty when its object of desire emerges as the problem; in this case, the imagined enlightenment. Like Sisyphus, the modernist intellectuals were condemned to carry the torch of the enlightenment, returning to the first Nahda, after the faltering of the second Nahda, in the hope of a third one, with all that can be expected from this succession, a mere repeat of the same. The goals of pluralism, liberalism, rationality, universalism and critical thinking appeared as a forever-deferred moment, locking Arab societies and their critical intellectuals into the “imaginary waiting room of history,” to use the imagery of Dipesh Chakrabarty, one of the founding members of the school of Subaltern Studies.8 The present as the waiting-room-of-a-history-that-ended is a very long present that can only be apprehended through the figure of Sisyphus, doomed to hope without any guarantees.

 

The Enlightenment as Tragedy

For those born amidst the ruins, and who never experienced the lost sense of temporal concordance, the tragic optimism of Wannous could not be enough. In addition to our political education in tragedy, we also learnt that the out-of-jointness of time is nothing but the reverse side of the teleological narratives of progress when they go awry, as they always do. And we learnt to reverse the terms of the question, problematising the teleology rather than the out-of-jointness of time; in other words, posing the question at the level of the epistemology guaranteeing these past hopes of emancipation and their present tragic predicament. The return to the enlightenment in the Arab world coincided with its problematisation in the Western academe, and we could only read the tragedy of Arab intellectuals contrapuntally with the famous warning of the Palestinian intellectual Edward Said, in the concluding pages of his Orientalism, that “the modern Orient…participates in its own Orientalizing.”9 Said’s 1978 book was the first salvo of the postcolonial critique in the Arab world, which reversed the terms of the debates, making us see that the tragic intellectuals were still disgruntled romantics, that they might have been the “Hamlet of our times,” and that the enlightenment itself was tragic. In other words, our intellectual tradition was at fault, with the need to problematise the underlying epistemological assumptions and theory of representation that authorised such discourses, a problematisation that cut through the past ideological lines of opposition and the teleologies of the twentieth century.

We started asking different questions, more cautious questions: How do we break from this cruel cycle of self-orientalisation? How do we separate the political hopes of emancipation from their orientalist epistemologies? How do we accept to live with the shreds as all there is, rather than as eternal reminders of a fallen world? Or as the French philosopher Michel Foucault’s late rejoinder to Immanuel Kant argued, how do we refuse to submit our thinking to the “blackmail of the enlightenment”?10 The answer to these questions was in learning to think cautiously, eschewing concepts such as nationalism, socialism, teleology, unilinear view of time, modernity and the enlightenment, or at least stripping them of their normative aura. Escaping from the tragic predicament of living in a present out-of-joint paradoxically passed by the suspension of its constitutive assumption; namely, the sense of temporal concordance implied by linear or evolutionary time. In other words, it is through embracing the notion of modernity as a forever-incomplete project mixing genres, styles and stages that one can free the political project of emancipation from its cruel, tragic and ultimately paralyzing epistemologies. The conception of the enlightenment was what was at stake, and we found ourselves at the crossroads of two intellectual trajectories that clashed over what it meant to be modern.

Armed with this “new” theoretical apparatus, we contested the tragic tone of our predecessors, lambasting them for their “naive” epistemologies. But despite our theoretical critique, we did not come up with our own politics. After all, we were brought up with the knowledge that theory and politics rarely translate into each other seamlessly. We knew that their proposals (the nation-state, secular democracy, liberal rights or even emancipation) were not the promised panacea, but we could not propose a different political imagination. Or we could, if we suspended the lessons of the past, a gesture that was not available to those who did not have the privilege of distance from the local concerns of the Arab world. We returned to the trope of tragedy, but phrased differently. It was not a tragic trope that stemmed from the temporal disjoining that followed the broken promise of the teleologies of the past, but rather one stemming from the impossibility of exiting the state of tragedy, constitutive of our present. Our tragic predicament often took the form of clashes between our theoretical deconstruction and our political precepts, clashes that translate spatially in the geographical distance separating the spaces for thinking, often located in the West, from the spaces of acting, in the Arab world. Not only was our time out of joint, but so was our space.

The struggle over the enlightenment and its effects, modernity and colonialism, and their ensuing debates, was what was at stake in the intellectual conjuncture that preceded the Arab revolutions. Postcoloniality had firmly superseded the anticolonial moment. Yet, a nagging suspicion remained that with the theoretical horizons that were opened by these new critical tools, something was lost; or to put it differently, some questions were suspended to allow for new ones to be foregrounded. In Refashioning Futures, Scott argues that post-coloniality was made possible by “the space enabled by the prior moment of anticoloniality in which the problem of the horizon of politics…had appeared resolved,” which allowed “a certain suspension or deferral of the question of the political, a deferral of the question of the renewal of a theory of politics,” the condition for its “sustained interrogation of the internal structures of the cultural reason of colonialist knowledges.”11 Decoupling the political question from the epistemological one was made possible by, and, in turn, confirmed the deferral of a theory of politics, with what it entails in terms of questions of strategy, organisation, horizons of emancipation and alternative futures. Between a melancholic adaptation to the loss of the romantic historical reason that guaranteed one’s politics, and a gestural inheritance of its politics freed from its epistemological assumption, renewing our theory of politics was not on the table.

 

 

Image: People celebrating after former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s resignation in 2011. Photo: Mariam Soliman. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

 

 

The Scandal of the Arab Revolutions

It is with these theoretical concerns that we first experienced the eruption of the Arab revolutions, concerns that were quickly brushed aside by the event of the popular uprisings. We suspended our theoretical “cautiousness” and succumbed to the romantic trope inherent to the revolutionary moment. The uprisings were “collective acts of overcoming,” as Iranian-American professor Hamid Dabashi argues,12 that led us to lower our theoretical guards, and to indulge in thinking in temporal terms: the revolutions were our present and everything before them their, and our, past. A new-old agent appeared or reappeared at last, tasked with fulfilling the desire for overcoming. “The people was found,” the Lebanese poet and editorialist Abbas Beydoun wrote a couple of days after the fall of Mubarak.13 Such an agent had been “found” after decades of wandering in the maze of previous ideologies. It was different from the outdated and compromised agents of the past—the Third Worldist state, the revolutionary parties, the vanguards, the intellectuals, the NGOs, the promised Islamist or the idealised masses—and it overcame them. In other words, the desire for the political was expressed again, albeit without a renewal of our theory of politics, and tragedy gave way to romance.

This was a fleeting moment, as we quickly discovered, and it took a couple of months before our sense of temporal concordance broke down, again. The promised overcoming did not materialise, as promises never do, and in its wake, more destruction and rubble filled the Arab landscape. Amidst the ruins of these promises, the event of the Arab revolutions became a faint memory, with its “cathartic charge eroding,” as the introduction to a section of a recent Paris exhibition on Arab photography stated.14 The Arab revolutions were reduced to a psychological release of emotions, one that was temporary even though irreversible. The romantic trope was an interlude that allowed us to release some tension before a return to the trope of tragedy and its practices of holding out. Or, at least, this was how many interpreted the revolutions, as a temporary break from an otherwise unchanging situation. Or worse, as a foolish return to the hopes of emancipation that can only lead to more destruction.

But if there is no return to the emotions of the revolution, there is no return also to the pre-revolutionary era. Something happened during the first year of these events, which cannot be subsumed under the older tropes, however renewed. The revolutions were a scandal that could not fit into the existing discourses, a scandal that unmasked the fact that we suspended or deferred the question of the political and found ourselves speechless once the revolutions arose. The injunction to act imposed by the uprisings was met by a silence as to the question of “What is to be done?” In such a situation, we could only express our political desires in a critical language that belongs to a world that we no longer inhabited, a world that we theoretically discredited. We found ourselves overcoming yet suspicious of teleologies, demanding with the “people” yet wary of any totalisation, asking for elections yet suspicious of the claims of liberal democracy. And with the faltering of the revolution, the hope for another episode of uprisings seemed to be nothing more than another version of the “cruel optimism” that plagued our predecessors. “One more try, the word crisis says to us,” French philosopher Jacques Derrida once wrote.15 One more try, the word “revolution” seemed to be telling us ironically.

The revolutions forced us to face what American theorist Wendy Brown, in her Politics Out of History, called “ungrievable losses,” lost attachments that cannot be grieved because they were never fully avowed as attachments and hence cannot be claimed as losses.16 Our politics was such an ungrievable loss, as we discovered painfully—and our theoretical mourning, to misquote Sigmund Freud, was unmasked as a political melancholia. We were forced to face the brutal fact that what we thought was behind us was still our object of political desire despite its theoretical loss. Our predicament, then, was not simply the gap between the end of the old and the not-yet beginning of the new, but rather the paradoxical awareness of the theoretical end of our political ideals and our persistent reliance on them, if not desire for them. We have reached the end of our tragic inhabitation of the present, and we know now that our mourning cannot be completed.

The scandal of the revolutions brought to the fore the fact that we are in an impasse, “a time of dithering from which someone or some situation cannot move forward,” as Berlant defines it, “a space of time lived without a narrative genre.”17 An impasse is a temporal stretch in which the intensity of the desire to escape from its clutches is compounded by the inability to find the genre required to navigate such escape. It can be thought of as a space of time lacking its critical narrative genre or genres, yet demanding an act. The revolutions forced us to realise that we are in an impasse, one that cannot be exited through a return to the narrative genre of romance, as we discovered, but that cannot be inhabited anymore through the trope of tragedy. Our time is out of joint, but our out-of-jointness of time is neither a historical fact nor an ontological one. Rather, it is a political feature of the aftermath of the Arab revolutions; or more precisely, it is the result of a lack in our politics. The temporal sense of concordance was not re-established, with the present again losing its familiarity, cornered by the return of pasts, on one side, and a fleeting future, on the other.

If the linearity of time was not re-established, another temporal signpost remains, the sense of an afterness, of coming after, of following, of being a post-, of arriving in the wake of an event.18 Such a modest sense of temporal succession might not have the nobility of history, but is enough to break the various attempts at returning the post-revolutionary situation to past discourses. If the past, present, and future are always subject to anachronism and reversal that threatens their linearity, the figure of the following offers a way to ground our contemporary moment in a relation of afterness that allows the inevitability of time to ward of any repetition. Coming after might be the first step towards historicising the previous “post,” that of 1989, not as our constitutive present anymore, but as our slowly emerging past. Thinking past the enlightenment might be what coming after currently means. This, in itself, does not take us beyond our impasse, but recognising our afterness might be the beginning of the genre needed to do so.

 

 

Samer Frangie is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Studies and Public Administration at the American University of Beirut, where he teaches courses on Arab politics and political thought, as well as social and political theory. He received his PhD from the University of Cambridge in 2009. Aside from his academic work, Frangie is the Editor-in-Chief of Megaphone News

Samer Frangie, “After the Revolutions: Inheriting Tragedy” in The Time Is Out of Joint: Volume I, pp. 129–138. Copyright 2016, Sharjah Art Foundation. All rights reserved. Republished by permission of the copyright holder.

 

 

Notes

1. Saadallah Wannous, “Theater and the Thirst for Dialogue,” Middle East Report 203 (Summer 1997).

2. Samir Kassir, Being Arab, trans. Will Hobson (London: Verso, 2013).

3. Sadiq Jalal al-Azm, “Time Out of Joint: Western dominance, Islamist terror, and the Arab imagination,” Boston Review, 4 October 2004.

4. Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975).

5. David Scott, Omens of Adversity: Tragedy, Time, Memory, Justice (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 6.

6. al-Azm, “Time Out of Joint.”

7. Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 24.

8. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).

9. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (London and Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), 325.

10. Michel Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?,” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 32–50.

11. David Scott, Refashioning Futures: Criticism after Postcoloniality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 14.

12. Hamid Dabashi, The Arab Spring: The End of Postcolonialism (London and New York: Zed Books, 2012).

13. Abbas Beydoun, “Wujida ash-sha’b,” As-Safir newspaper, 13 February 2011.

14. Géraldine Bloch and Gabriel Bauret, Première biennale des photographes du monde arabe contemporain (Paris: Institut du Monde Arabe, 2015).

15. Jacques Derrida, “Economies of the Crisis,” in Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews, 1971–2001, ed. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 69–73.

16. Wendy Brown, Politics Out of History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 21.

17. Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 4–5, 199.

18. Gerhard Richter, Afterness: Figures of Following in Modern Thought and Aesthetics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011).

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Fri, 3 Jan 2025
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What Time Tells
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An ongoing series on time and the problems we face today

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The Time Is Out of Joint: Volume I and II

2016