Creative Radicalism in the Middle East

Culture and the Arab Left after the Uprisings

Sorcha Thomson

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781838601522
• eBook ISBN: 9781838601171
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

Addressing the question of how neoliberal ideology has served to conflate the radical left with extremism, this book examines how the Arab left has asserted itself in the context of authoritarianism and Islamic extremism during and after the Arab uprisings. It examines how the Arab cultural left has offered a critique of the signifying practices of political hegemonies in the region and argues that though creative expression as constituted in the very language of the Arab uprisings, it has put forward its own alternatives
Using a wide array of texts and sources, both Arab and non-Arab, the opening chapters of the book identify how ethical and radical values pertaining to sociality are co-opted by political leaders in the Middle East and turned into jargon. Later chapters outline resistance to this co-option through a poetics of inter-subjectivity that takes structures of feeling into account, ranging from disappointment, despair and distrust, to dignity, solidarity and reconfigured senses of the sacred. In showing how psychological and affective states relate to signifying practices, the book offers an original conceptual framework for differentiating 'radicalization' from the creative radicalism of the Arab avant-garde.

1

Politics as theatre in Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition

As noted by Daniel Zamora, ‘In a conference in Tokyo in 1978 Michel Foucault wondered whether we were not witnessing, “in the late 20th century, something that would be the end of the age of the Revolution”’ (Zamora 2016, 63). Foucault could be regarded as speaking for his poststructuralist and postmodernist generation, one widely resigned to capitalist inevitability. However, recent years have proved Foucault wrong, and the Arab revolutionary uprisings, especially in Tunisia and Egypt, may be said to have instituted an epistemic rupture with the ideologies and discourses of the late capitalist West.

While Maha El Said (2013) and Hamid Dabashi (2012a) address the Arab Spring in terms of a rupture with Western ideological and cultural hegemony, there have nonetheless been repeated attempts to account for the Arab Spring in terms of theories that are deeply rooted in European philosophical traditions. In particular, the political theory of Hannah Arendt has been turned to in a number of analyses of the uprisings (Hanssen 2013; Elmarsafy 2015; Butler 2015; Hyvönen 2016) in ways that are thought-provoking but without a critical consideration of the European and especially German philosophical legacies and contexts that shaped Arendt’s thought. With these considerations, I will offer a close reading of Arendt’s The Human Condition since its particular vision (and not necessarily Arendt’s vision more widely) is one that I consider to be significantly at odds with the revolutionary vision of the Arab Spring in key respects. Most of the chapter will focus on how Arendt’s theatricalization of politics unfolds in The Human Condition, clarifying what I mean by this, while I will conclude with an explanation of how Arendt’s theoretical model fails to account for the Arab uprisings.

The performance of politics

The probable reason for the renewed uptake of Arendt’s work at this juncture is that it is broadly concerned with the revolutionary institution of political democracy. However, this is explicitly from a non-Marxist position and is thus a question of capitalist democracy or of unelaborated alternatives to such. Arendt’s further and more basic concern is one of how to renew belief and trust in the political after the devastations of the Second World War. In The Human Condition, she mentions nuclear warfare particularly, but of course the Holocaust was an unavoidable subtext for her endeavour too.

The Human Condition begins with a striking philosophical foreclosure, namely of the contemplative life as starkly distinct from what is to be Arendt’s exclusive interest in the active life. That Arendt brackets off the contemplative life as unconcerned with the human condition is because she maintains that the contemplative life pertains to mysticism, ‘be it the ancient truth of Being or the Christian truth of the Living God’ (Arendt 1998, 15). She goes on to identify this mystical orientation with passivity, and through a consideration of Plato and Aristotle, she further posits it as a mute condition (1998, 20), apparently in contradistinction to speech as definitive of the human condition. Nonetheless, she goes on to write: ‘Only sheer violence is mute, and for this reason violence alone can never be great’ (1998, 26). Moreover, she later writes that oral poetry is the closest expression of the contemplative life or mysticism, and she maintains that poetry derives from thought (a philosophical bias some would contest, begging the question of how much poetry is dependent on feelings and forms of receptivity) (169–70). Arendt’s active/passive dichotomy is furthermore an implicitly gendered one given the conventional associations of masculinity with the active and femininity with the passive.

In Arendt’s lecture notes of 1955 for a course on political philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, can be found the outlines of ideas leading to The Human Condition that appeared in 1958. In these notes, Arendt positions Socrates as an unmanly and passive philosopher (although it is Plato whom she is more usually averse to) and also Spinoza with his intellectual love of God as nature (Arendt 1955b). Spinoza’s amor fati, literally ‘love of fate’, is posited by Arendt to be at odds with her version of amor mundi, ‘love of the world’, where amor fati refers to reality just as it is, or as Arendt translates the term: ‘I want that to be as it is’ (Arendt 1955b). Although there is a certain inconsistency in Arendt’s statements concerning the mystical and the mute, what appears to be her position is that she seeks a typical Western Enlightenment separation of the sacred and the secular, the spacing apart of religion and politics although, as I will come to, it is not as simple as this.

Arendt’s opening gesture in The Human Condition is recognizable to me as her version of the foreclosures performed by her German philosophical predecessors, in particular, Hegel and Heidegger. As I have examined in my book African Literature, Animism and Politics (2000), Hegel forecloses African animist cultures from history, maintaining that Africans are ‘inhuman’, while Arendt implicitly forecloses Spinoza’s pantheistic orientations. As regards Hegel, his gesture allows him to maintain that Africans need to be brought into history or, more accurately, a Western patriarchal and colonial economy of ownership, by means of slavery. Similarly, Hegel forecloses the freedom of the feminine when he assigns the figure of Antigone to the familial sphere, positioning her as goddess of the domestic hearth as opposed to affirming her as the free-spirited rebel or revolutionary that others (ranging from Jean Genet to Nelson Mandela) see her as (Rooney 1997). Hegel’s foreclosures precisely enable him to set up hierarchical dualisms, in particular, the public sphere of masters over the private sphere of slaves and domesticated existence, as is relevant to Arendt’s concerns.

Arendt’s more immediate inf luence is Heidegger. In fact, she wrote the following in a letter to him: ‘Had the relations between us not been star-crossed […] I would have dedicated [The Human Condition] to you […] it owes you just about everything in every regard’ (Ettinger 1995, 114). In his philosophy, what Heidegger forecloses, or initially puts under erasure, is Being and the metaphysics devoted to an understanding of Being. For Arendt, this equates with the mystical and contemplative. For both Heidegger and Arendt, the bracketing off of cosmic origination produces man as his own beginning thrown into a historical existence. Arendt terms this ‘natality’, drawing on St Augustine’s assertion that God created man as a new beginning, although she implicitly de-theologizes St Augustine’s notion as the human is treated as self-initiating by her, seemingly owed neither to natural evolution nor to a beyond human spiritual genesis. Whereas St Augustine’s vision concerns the unique gift of each soul, Arendt substitutes the political and historical agency of the human subject apart from God. In her lecture notes of 1955, she treats of man making his own world in an existentialist fashion, her reading list culminating with Sartre and Camus.

Regarding the world of historical existence, Arendt introduces a strange way of determining the value of the human condition. While on the mystical side the concern is with the immortal soul and eternity, for Arendt it is temporal existence that concerns the immortal. She writes: ‘By their capacity for the immortal deed, by their ability to leave non-perishable traces behind, men, their individual mortality notwithstanding, attain an immortality of their own and prove themselves to be of a “divine” nature’ (1998, 19). For Arendt, as we will see, this partly concerns the traces people leave of themselves in their works but beyond this and more importantly it concerns the effects of individually motivated actions on human history.

Arendt begins her model for immortality by setting up a hierarchical division between the economic sphere and the political sphere, the former as much inferior to the latter in entailing necessity as opposed to freedom. The economic sphere is subdivided into menial labour and manufacturing work, the former constituting the lowest rung of the human condition. Whereas menial labour was once a matter of the private sphere of woman and slaves since the relative liberation of this class as a working class, Arendt sees that this labour has become more public and therefore, we could say, recognized as labour. Still, for Arendt, this work does not have much value for the reason that, as she puts it, ‘the least durable of tangible things are those needed for the life process itself’ (1998, 96). Because not durable, it is labour that has to be repeated over and over with nothing to show for this drudgery – other than keeping life going! We might think that would be the most important thing due to its necessity, as well as to possible pleasures in sustaining life. For instance, although cooking does not produce anything lasting, we find value and pleasure in it, and while we do our laundry again and again, we may enjoy wearing freshly laundered clothes. But for Arendt, work activities such as farming, cooking, cleaning and taking care of the ill, young and elderly are banal and unremarkable in their lack of lasting achievement. It may be added that with the sacred bracketed off through the foreclosure of the mystical, life itself loses precisely its sacred value as something to be cared for, becoming for Arendt merely animalistic, hence her term ‘the labouring animal’. For her (as is clear from her lecture notes), life as zoe is the other of life as bios (Arendt 1955a). Paradoxically, life itself is aligned with mortality in that life as human deeds and their story is aligned with immortality.

Moving up the hierarchy, Arendt finds more value in the manufacturing work of homo faber since this gives rise to more durable products. Arendt’s value category of ‘immortality’ pertains to what outlasts the perishable, on a material or quasi-tangible level as opposed to spiritual one. It seems that she finds this in things, and as such she emerges as something of a commodity fetishist in Marx’s sense where Marx considers it ridiculous that we accord more ‘life’ to inanimate things than to labour. While Arendt praises the ‘worldly stability of the human artifice’ (1998, 126), in a capitalist society, fabricated commodities are constantly updated and replaced, that is to say trashed, so this supposed endurance of the manufactured product is less stable than Arendt would like. And yet, the beauty of ancient Greece remains for us in its art works (poetry, for instance) and architectural ruins (temples, for instance). However, such remnants would pertain to the contemplative life.

Finally, what Arendt calls ‘political actors’ are those freed from the realm of economic necessity and thus not instrumentalized by its ends in ways that prove effacing for the workers and makers of things. Thus, Arendt is concerned with those who are capable of making some kind of permanent impression of themselves on their societies in terms of historical destiny. If a class question (where an alternative will be considered further on), we run into here the question of why these actors would be needed if they do not contribute to society through the work expected of others. Moreover, in order to be free to perform themselves, these actors would be dependent on drawing their livelihoods from the work done by others: that is, its surplus value would accrue to them, at least in part. While the labour of economic necessity is replaceable, in that even if it requires some skills it does not matter who exactly carries it out, for Arendt, there would need to be something irreplaceable about the political actors to justify their transcendence of ordinary life. Here, the answer given by her is that each human being is unique by virtue of their birth. In that case everyone would be irreplaceable, but Arendt implies that labour enters into an obligation of giving up on the uniqueness that should be valued in the case of each being where this is for the sake of those who do not sacrifice themselves in this way. As already touched on, while the political actors would owe their freedom to labour, they would be in the position of justifying this not on private selfish grounds but in terms of demonstrating how others depend on their irreplaceability.

Implicitly, Arendt is trying to find her way around the sociality of labour, that is, that we work as so-called labouring animals not only to care for ourselves but for the benefit of others. Indeed, Arendt aligns the social (something she thinks of in terms of mass society) entirely with the economic as distinct from the political sphere where actors appear to each other as individuals. In that the ‘mob’ is potentially ‘superfluous’ (terms used in her notes, Arendt 1955c) necessity emerges on the side of the political actors rather than on the side of life. It is as if, through an ideological inversion, the political actors supposedly do not need the workers but the workers need or are obliged to depend on the political actors.

While Arendt’s explicit yardstick is one of permanence and endurance, she also works with the logic of appearance and disappearance maintaining that her political actors require ‘a space of appearance’ (1998, 199). In capitalist terms, she could be seen to be protesting against faceless labour and mechanized production as causing the disappearance of humanity or its obscurity: as if the human had become just an unknown private life. Thus, the ‘space of appearance’ is actually a ‘theatre of re-appearance’ where humanity is able to appreciate and even worship itself as such. The notion that the public sphere is of importance to the sense of a shared historical reality and recognition of a life in common cannot be disputed. However, what is questionable is the depiction and valuation of the public sphere in terms of the visibility of political performance.

In capitalist terms, it might be proposed that Arendt’s political actors appear as celebrities: although Arendt would most probably not have approved of such an outcome, her arguments do in certain respects fit with celebrity culture. She states: ‘Only the vulgar will condescend to derive their pride from what they have done. […] The saving grace of all really great gifts is that the persons who bear them remain superior to what they have done’ (1998, 211). She also maintains that greatness ‘can only lie in the performance itself’ (1998, 206) where ‘in the performance of the dancer or play-actor, the product is identical with the performing act itself’ (1998, 207). Thus, it seems that for her political actor, the act of self-performance is an end in itself. Problematically, Arendt’s concept of greatness is very self-referential even as it requires an audience.

I raise the question of celebrity culture in that celebrities appear larger than ordinary life, and they are expected to put on public display every aspect of their lives. Moreover, while the conventionally honoured are famed for great achievements that they have worked to attain (the discoveries of a scientist, the novels of a writer, the wins of a football team), celebrities, like Arendtian actors, are known for mainly just performing themselves, as previously cited. Neal Gabler aptly points out in his work on celebrity Life the Movie that while celebrities are spoken of as royalty, celebrity value is different from royalty (2000, 174). To clarify this, it may be said that Princess Diana achieved celebrity status while Queen Elizabeth is not a celebrity as such. Queen Elizabeth may be said to preserve a distance between herself and her role. Indeed, her role is treated very much as a role, one of public duty and service, while she also maintains a private life. Princess Diana conversely put the intimate details of her private life on display, performing her ‘unique self’. With celebrity, life and performance coincide, while Arendt maintains this is what happens with the political actor. Moreover, Gabler states that celebr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: From radical distrust to the darwish avant-garde
• 1 Politics as theatre in Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition
• 2 Discourses of authenticity and poetic good faith: Algeria, Israel and Syria
• 3 From hegemonic interpellations to revolutionary signs or amāra
• 4 Chronic disappointment, humiliation and pariah elitism in the Arab novel
• 5 Cults of pride and cultures of right-wing populism
• 6 The poetics of karāmah or why the Egyptian revolution was a poem
• 7 Figuring the sacred in martyr art
• 8 Equine messianism in Palestinian literature and art
• Concluding remarks: Adab and iqtibās
• Notes
• Work cited
• Index
• Copyright