 Arline Rooney, Professor of African and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Kent. Professor Rooney studied as an undergraduate at the University of Cape Town before embarking on doctoral research at Oxford University. She works and publishes mainly in the areas of post-colonial studies and Arab cultural studies, focusing on the cultural expression of liberation struggles and their aftermaths in sub-Saharan Africa, North Africa, and the Middle East. Her previous books include African Literature, Anomism, and Politics, 2000, and Decolonizing Gender, Literature, and a Poetics of the Real, 2007. In her new book, Creative Radicalism in the Middle East, Culture and the Arab Left After the Uprisings, 2020, Professor Rooney outlines the importance of aesthetic strategies and creative expression in the left's critique of authoritarian and Islamic extremist discourse. Drawing on a wide array of texts and sources from poems to photographs to theory, the book shows how a poetics of disappointment, despair, and distrust, alongside one of dignity and solidarity, reconfigured senses of the sacred and enabled the left to reclaim ethical and progressive, quote, radical, unquote, values. In this way, the book offers an original conceptual framework for differentiating so-called radicalization from the creative radicalism of the Arab avant-garde. Note that this research has been funded by AHRC and ESRC grant programs under the Global Uncertainty Scheme and the Partnership for Conflict, Crime, and Security Research. Professor Rooney, welcome. Thank you very much, Mali, for that introduction. And my thanks also to Dina and Aki for inviting me and for arranging the session. I'm delighted to join you all, and thank you for this opportunity. So I aim to speak for about 45 minutes to present an overview of my research. I don't have a PowerPoint at such, but I will try and show a couple of images along the way. So this latest book of mine, Creative Radicalism in the Middle East, is, as indicated, my third monograph. And although this wasn't intended, I think of it as the completion of a trilogy. And since this work sort of builds on the groundwork of my previous two books, I'll just say a few words about this earlier work. So my first monograph, Africa Literature, Anomism, and Politics, is a study of how anti-colonial liberation struggles, mainly in Africa, mobilized in tandem with spiritual and ethical philosophies that cannot just be subsumed within a Western Enlightenment philosophical framework. In fact, this Western idealist tradition informs post-structress theory and serves actually to foreclose the animus philosophies that I was interested in at stake. And so I undertook this because post-structress theory was informing post-colonialism in ways that were not looking at philosophies outside of this tradition, which I thought needed to be taken into account. My second monograph, Decolonizing Gender, Literature and the Politics of the Real, attends to how the liberation struggles and question uncover what may be termed a reality of the feminine in various ways. I'll say a little bit more about this in this session. And they do so in bringing to the fore what I call the lateral or horizontal dimension of being that certain Western philosophies and ideologies tend to eclipse in deploying overarching temporal frameworks that tend to relegate the other to the position of backwardness. So Decolonizing Gender is also a critique of the textual idealism that was being advanced through theories of ideological performative, performativity, sorry. And instead it draws attention to what I call a poetics of the real. Well, I published Decolonizing Gender in 2007 at a time when the consensus was that the age of revolutions was over in Foucault's phrase. So it felt strange to be arguing for the ongoing insurgency of revolutionary struggles at that time. However, I'd already begun to connect with the Palestinian struggle through work I'd done in the anti-apartheid context. And I then actually began a study of contemporary Egyptian literature and popular culture, very much influenced by my PhD students who had actually come to work with me on liberation theory but from the Middle East. And that's what got me involved in this area. I owe a lot to them. And so I began studying contemporary Egyptian literature and popular culture in the context of the war on terror, particularly that was the backdrop. And what struck me at the time was that the dominant discourse of area studies that I encountered assumed a duelless political configuration of authoritarian regimes on the one hand pitted against Islamic extremism on the other hand. And this didn't reflect the reality that I was encountering on the ground in visiting Cairo, Beirut, Jerusalem and so on. And I felt that it was completely ignoring what I would call the Arab left comprised of intellectuals activist youth culture and popular culture that was already in evidence years before the advent of Arab Spring. So one of the starting points of creative radicalism in the Middle East was therefore to differentiate creative radicalism from the so-called radicalization of extremism. And this will probably seem obvious to many people but because it wasn't part of a discourse as such I felt it needed to be flagged up as such. And it also seemed to me that what was problematic was this appropriation of the term radicalization which because radicalism is always referred to the left and it was being used in a different way. And my argument is that the ideological justifications of the war on terror together with this discourse of radicalization have strategically served to obscure the difference between radical left wing resistant movements and far right or extremist movements thereby serving to maintain the order of neoliberalism is that which offers security against the persistent threat of extremism, the question of other alternatives being discounted. And I think this is ongoing because while attention was given initially to the Egyptian and the Tunisian uprisings, the media have much underplayed the ongoing dimensions of the African and Arab revolutionary movements. I mean, it's strikingly how it has tried to not represent what's been going on in Sudan and Algeria and Lebanon and so on. Yeah, I mean, I've spoken to people who don't even know that these things are going on that much is how they're sidelined. Well, in my book I specifically refer to this ideological operation in terms of what I call doppelganger politics or the politics of doubling. I state that the duality under consideration differs from the binarism of Orientalism so popularized by Said in that it is not one of self and objectified other, but rather one of self and not self, where the not self is paradoxically posited as that which is definitively and elusively obscure, unrecognizable occult sinister, irresolvably and thus permanently threatening. I think the whole discourse of extremism actually relies on not being able to comprehend the terrorist phenomenon. So it remains this elusive, persistently threatening, obscure thing. If we take the classic doppelganger formation of Jekyll and Hyde, where Jekyll stands for the bourgeois liberal subject, Hyde does not constitute another self as such, but merely a terrorizing and shadowy not self, serving to justify a constant state of paranoia. I'm gonna see if I can share my screen here. So I'm wondering if you can see this, it's still from a 1931 movie of Jekyll and Hyde. So they're the same person, but obviously it's very different with the respectable Jekyll and the monstrous Hyde. But it was interesting looking through the images of Jekyll and Hyde because they rely on, a lot of them rely on really racist caricatures of the Hyde figure time and again. Actually, it's very striking how this is done, okay? So now I'm going to try and get back to, trying to actually sort of get out of the screen sharing, okay, so that we're not sort of dominated by that image. Okay, so that's what I mean by this Jekyll and Hyde formation. And in my work, I trace the discursive origins of the war on terror to a collection of essays edited by Benjamin Netanyahu entitled Terrorism, How the West Can Win, that appeared in 1986. Therefore, some years before 9-11 and the whole setting up of the war on terror, it was discursively prepared for beforehand. Netanyahu and his near conservative American colleagues argue that their mission is to defend what they call the spiritual values of Western democracies through defeating the forces of terrorism that are indiscriminately aligned with both left-wing and right-wing insurgent movements in the book they're treated as equivalent. For instance, although Islamism is anti-communist, Netanyahu and his supporters constantly lump it together with communism, communism and Islamic radicalism constitute the same thing in this discussion. And in brief, the agenda of this campaign is to set up a neoliberal extremist double whereby the antisociality of neoliberalism is disavowed and projected onto the extremist not self, who is never a proper other subject to such, just this shadowy not self. I argue that this ideological formation of doppelganger politics has its emblematic geopolitical formation in the gated community. Dr. Jekyll in the novel maintains the kind of gated community separatist logic in that his desires to house the Jekyll and hide sides of his being in what he calls two separate entities whereby he seeks self-sufficiency with no responsibility for his despised other. He likens himself to a city of refuge but the refuge or sanctuary is a privatized one as in the gated community. Supposedly self and close sanctuary of privilege. And in addition, what is at stake in this is the attempt to reconfigure the capitalist materialist formation of the gated community in terms of spiritual values. So the gated community is always this paradise, disavowing its sort of material values. And here I found the study of the double by Otto Rank Freud psychoanalytic colleague, an instructive one. Otto Rank demonstrates that the romantic figure of the double displaces an earlier form of doubling whereas the earlier formation posits a mortal self that is accompanied by its immortal soul. In the later secular formation that emerges with romanticism, the self is seen to usurp the place of the soul. So that what was the soul becomes merely the harbinger of death. The self and the soul are made to change places. So as a self becomes the soul, what was the soul becomes merely a deathly other. Thus political leaders like Netanyahu appeal to the West supposedly spiritual values that are to be defended from the death drive of extremists. Anyway, one of the things that I've been concerned with is the extent to which Islamism arises through being interpolated or hailed into this doppelganger structure entailing a kind of memetic rivalry as each side attempts to usurp the other as happens in the formation of the double. If neoliberalism attempts to spiritualize itself through its fake paradises and so on of the gated community fractal, Islamism constitutes in many ways a kind of commodification of religion. It's a structure I think of mirrored oppositionalism, spiritualized neoliberalism on the one hand versus commodified religion on the other. And on both sides, the other is at once foreclosed and internalized out of this drive towards self-sufficient singularity. In looking at the work of Sayyid Qatub, he describes Islam as a self-sufficient singularity which is what you find in the kind of neoliberal market fundamentalist accounts of neoliberalism. It's a self-sufficient singularity. And I think that the paradox of this doppelganger formation that is that it arises out of a desire to universalize singularity which is paradoxical because Jekyll wants to be a singular self but out of that very will to singularity he gives rise to the phantasmatic existence of Hyde. Well, in the context of Egypt, Mahel Sayyid has traced that Islamism arose mimetically as a simulacrum of commodified American culture with Islamic banking, Islamic TV, Islamic fashions, Mecca colons and so on. She has a very interesting essay on how this unfolded and she considers how the Egyptian revolution constituted a radical overthrow of this mimetic structure where it could be said that Egyptians got their culture back, which I think was something that we could see with the Egyptian revolution. And I think that, you know, what is at stake is an epistemic formation that does not rely on the singularizing foreclosure on the other, but is instead based on what I would call non-dualism and the affirmation of coexistence. So this is the kind of epistemic shift that I want to introduce. In my book, I write that while capitalism serves to de-sacralize human lives in its dispiriting ways, uprising to retrieve a sense of the sacredly real for many. Furthermore, in the face of the irrationality of the singular logic that paradoxically produces self-contradictory duality, the uprising supply in many respects on a philosophical level, the retrievals of non-duality. I speak of this non-duality, but it's extraordinarily difficult to explain non-duality. That's one of the difficulties I keep running into. But we can see how this non-duality manifests itself through how assertions made about the Egyptian revolution, for example, can be met with counter-assertions that are equally true. For instance, you could say that the revolution was both foreseen and not foreseen, both concerned with the secular and concerned with the sacred, both national and scope and critical of the nation state, both political and not political. I mean, if you say something about the uprisings, you often find you can say the opposite as being equally true. And what interests me is that this non-dualism maintains a kind of ambiguity that resists a binary logic in ways that works of art do. What works of art are able to accommodate contradictory readings or readings that seem contradictory. The point is that they're often only apparently contradictory because you can actually find the underlying connection between things in a non-dualist perspective, which relies actually on an underlying holistic unity. So things that seem different because there is an underlying unity will turn out to be somehow connected or related. Okay, so I'll now offer an overview of the chapters of the book as they unfold. The first chapter concerns itself with a critique of Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition because a number of commentators on Arab Spring have drawn on Arendt's secular humanist framework to explain the uprisings. However, I think that this use of Arendt fails to register how her thought is shaped by the German idealist Enlightenment tradition of thought. And my argument is that the uprising served to turn Arendt's theoretical paradigm on its head the way Mark speaks of turning Hegel on his head. While in my earlier work, I explore how Hegel's philosophy rests on the foreclosure of African animus philosophy and the brother-sister spirit of liberation, Arendt begins her account of the human condition with her own gesture of foreclosure. She maintains that what she calls the contemplative life is not of relevance to the human condition as the domain of human activity. The contemplative life, she says, pertains to the mysticism and the sacred Arendt saying be this the ancient truth of being or the Christian truth of the living God. As I state in the book, regarding the world of historical existence, Arendt introduces a strange way of determining the value of the human condition while on the mystical side you could say that 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. So Arendt thus makes the sacred and the secular change places in what could be termed a linguistification of the sacred. And I think that in a certain respect this does reflect on German Christian humanism, the kind of divinization of man that runs through German philosophy from Heiko and Föhrbach through to Heidegger. It's a kind of religious humanism that underlies us. Arendt sets up her model for worldly immortality through establishing an hierarchical division between the economic sphere and the political sphere, the former as inferior to the latter entailing necessity rather than freedom, economic necessity as opposed to political freedom. And the lowest rung of labor for Arendt is manual labor because it achieves nothing lasting or durable. For instance, the work of farming, cooking, cleaning, taking care of the young, ill and elderly does not produce tangible or durable products and seems to constitute a form of drudgery and having to be repeated time and again. The kind of work that Arendt devalues could I think alternatively be seen as the most crucial form of work in that it attends to keeping life going. I mean, the pandemic has also made me think about this, the work that keeps life going. But since Arendt has bracketed off the sacred, this means that life itself loses its sacred value and is paradoxically aligned with mortality. Whereas Arendt's notion of immortality is instead aligned with images of certain historical human greatness. More important for Arendt than the work of the laboring animal in her words is the work of Homo Faber or the manufacturers the issues and tangible products or commodities what she terms the stable world of human artifice. Arendt ignores how commodities are not in fact that durable as they're constantly updated and replaced. We're constantly trashing commodities. So how durable are they? Finally, Arendt considers that it is political actors who have the capacity to transcend the realm of economic necessity due to how they are said to make lasting or permanent impressions of themselves on human societies. So Arendt's yardstick is one of permanence and endurance but she also works with the logic of appearance in that her political actors, she says, require a space of appearance. In capitalist terms, her objection is to faceless labor where the political realm serves to confer visibility on human actors as it were retrieving their humanity in that way. And Arendt further maintains that the value of political actors lies in the performativity of their speech acts. And one of the things I found was that in 1955 the British philosopher J.L. Austin launched his lectures on how to do things with words in America at Harvard and Berkeley. And it's very likely that Arendt attended these lectures because she was there at the time. And her whole theory of these performative speech acts although she doesn't mention Austin is very, very close to what he says about the performative. But I think that the problem with this politically speaking is it becomes problematic to speak of the political in terms of performative speech acts which are not based on facts or referring to reality in that sense but rather they serve to literalize what they speak of that's what the performative does. And this is due to their power of authorization. So there's a kind of bureaucratic authoritarians on that stake, something becomes the case because an official is empowered to say so. I mean, for example, an example of the performative that Austin gives is the wedding ceremony. So if a priest pronounces someone, man and wife it's because he has the power, the authorization to do so, a person in the street can't just pronounce someone, man and wife. So what's important is this power of authorization that the speech act has. And what does that mean for the political is the question. Anyway, I'll now go on to explain how I think Arendt's paradigm does not be justice to Arab abrisings because for a start, the Arab protesters did not seek the durability of their political actors. Rather, the objection was to how these political actors you know, Mubarak, Badafi, Assad and so on were clinging on to power concerned only with their political immortality and empty self-congratulatory performances was a common perception. As I stated in my book with Arab revolutionaries in a democracy, political leaders should be temporary not seemingly or dynastically forever. Instead of this capitalist neoliberal economies render workers disposable. The uprisings reverses with the message we demand the right to remove our leaders especially when they act as a fey and their gated community dynasties were immortal while treating the workforce as superfluous. So it's this kind of reversal of the logic and it's the leaders who then became dispensable not the people. What accompanied this was that the social order was no longer subservient to the state leading to a reassertion of civil society. Egyptian demonstrator Ali Hassan Amin Rubeya observes that under Mubarak the Egyptian people forgot or made to forget what society means. Going on to say during the Egyptian revolution we discovered an astonishing new reality. The protesters treated their revolution on one another with the highest degree of civility. So the divide and rule tactics of the state were replaced with an ethics of cooperation, reciprocity and social decency. Manifested on the level of civil society. A number of those who took part in the Egyptian revolution have observed that it cannot just be seen as a political protest in that it offered the experience of a kind of awakening a transformation of consciousness. The ideology of the authoritarian capitalist nation state was in the turn so that people felt reconnected to each other as well as to reality again as Egyptian writers Allah Aswani and Mona Prince have observed it was a profoundly rehumanizing experience for them. And in my view, as the people refused the would be self-immortalization of political actors, I would say I would use the phrase that they got their souls back. I mean, and I'm drawing actually on testimonies. This is not just me. So, you know, in contrary distinction to a kind of idolatry of political leaders, it was the sacredness of ordinary lives that were being affirmed, that which I see the renters rather bracketing off. When in Cairo a couple of years after the revolution, I took a photograph of the street display of an antique cellar based in El Moer Street. And I just want to briefly show this picture. So I hope you can see that. So this was the photograph outside an antique cellar shop. And I took it because of the two famous heads of state. And what I didn't realize at the time that I took photograph is that the shop owner had placed an advert, looked to me like a 1950s advert for a pest control company called Sorko. And so you have this little cartoon character advertising his pest control company with drop dead and there's a little rat dead at his feet. And what was sort of funny was placing this advert for pest control above these portraits because the message was pest control for leaders who outstay their welcome. It was I think a deliberately sort of humorous take on things. So, sorry, I'm just trying to find my, okay. So yeah, so why don't the first chapter I sort of consider how the Egyptian revolution in particular serves to turn the human condition on its head restoring value to the people. In the second chapter, I analyzed how writers of conscience have mounted a critique of how authoritarian regimes resort to the theatricalization of politics in a kind of hollow self, performativity and in terms of what Adorno calls the jargon of authenticity. I begin with Zimbabwean writer, Chensher Ihovei's analysis of post-colonial Zimbabwe of stating, I believe the corruption begins with the corruption of language. If a senior politician uses vulgar language in public that is the beginning of corruption. Once language degenerates into a vehicle for untruth people are engulfed in a form of corruption. And this is very similar to Adorno's critique of the authoritarian corruption of language during the rise of fascism. Adorno is stating, the theological addictions of these years have seeped into language of sacred quality of the authentic's talk belongs to the cult of authenticity. Prior to any consideration of particular content this language molds thought. The authority of the absolute is overthrown by absolutized authority. Again, Adorno is pointing to this inversion within the secular sacred relation. And I go on to show Asya Jabbar addresses similar concerns in her readings of post-colonial Algerian her work, Algerian white. In this work Jabbar draws attention to how politicians across the political spectrum employ a hypocritical language of authenticity. While at the very same time Algeria's intellectuals and writers of conscience are assassinated for their speaking of truth to power. And she writes, above all, what can you say of those who continue to rule in the confusion of that hollow political theater of which she gives many examples. And she shows that in these situations political thinkers linguistify the sacred using a spiritual language in a merely performative way. Hence her phrase this hollow political theater. And what is at stake in this is the copting of liberation struggles for political advantage. In fact, it's paradoxically tantamount to colonizing the liberation struggle in ways that are cultish or sectarian. And I think this is something fairly widespread. I mean, I've noted in post-colonial Zimbabwe was a colonization of the liberation struggle that was allied with just those in power and their party and so forth. Marie Baguti sees that Israeli self-determination operates in a similar manner where he accuses Zionism of affecting what he turns verbicide. Where Chandra Hove speaks of the corruption of language by self-serving politicians. Baguti uses the phrase which is very similar to the pollution of language. Hove refers to the vulgarization of political discourse and also referring to the vulgarization of language by Guti states. Over simplification has always been a factor in the failure of poetry and prose indeed of any discourse. But when it is the dominant characteristic of the language of politicians it ends in fanaticism and fundamentalism coupled with invincible superiority and a sense of sanctity. Simplification might be as history teaches us a recipe for fascism. And Baguti adds poetry remains one of the astonishing forms in our hands to resist this obscurantism. We the poets of the world he says continue to write our poems to restore the respect of meaning and to give meaning to our existence. So against the jargon of authenticity poets be their intellectuals or grassroots figures have this responsibility of retrieving meaningful communication. Yeah, so when the Egyptian revolution broke out veteran Egyptian poet Raman Al Abnoudi wrote a poem characterizing the Arabs bringing us specifically the renewal of language. He writes it's as impossible lying can wear the mask of truth again. They, the youth have written the first lines on the page of revolution. In the Syrian context, Lisa Whideen has examined how the cult of Hafiz al-Assad drew on a fake war for sake of its own jargon of authenticity. An artist Sahar Omarine Syrian artist drawing on Whideen in a more contemporary context argues it is no longer acceptable to make representations of concepts such as freedom, justice and dignity using the same methods, language and techniques that the Bashir al-Assad regime's propaganda employs. So these terms are co-opted by ruling segments of the society in hypocritical ways. And if we look at the work of performance artists and rap poets, which I've done a fair amount of it's possible to see how they wrestle with retrieving responsible and meaningful use of language. So for example, rapper Loki raps they're calling me a terrorist like they don't know who the terror is insulting my intelligence. Oh, how these people judge. And this is a long-wrapped sequence about what, how do you use the term terrorist? What is, are its meanings? So he's arguing for a meaningful use of the term or Rafif Syada in her performance poetry states I wish for quiet from those who battle to get to the microphones and perform the rituals. I will not mourn my dead in 140 characters for your Twitter. Egyptian activist Allah Abad al-Fattah wrote in 2017 that the defeat of the revolution was quote a defeat of meaning, which I found striking. But he says that the struggle continues in that quote again meaning has not yet been killed. So what is at stake here? It is that many are especially writers and intellectual see it as this struggle for meaningful communication in the face of empty performativity. Well, in my third chapter I turned to Judith Butler's analysis of performative assemblies in that they, Butler using the plural pronoun put forward in the context of the Arab uprisings. So Judith Butler's one of those who apply around frameworks that are spring and in doing so Butler conceives of the revolutionaries as near mute bodies. Something that I find strange given her vocal and expressive the revolutionaries were but she uses this terminology referring to the revolutionaries as bodies throughout. And Butler's assumptions rest on their application of their performative gender ideology to the Arab spring. The whole account of performative assemblies begins with her reintroducing gender ideology. And the basis of Butler's analysis can be traced back to their earlier reading of Antigone where they read Antigone as representing the question of how queer and African-American identities are to be assimilated into the white American world of heteronormativity. And in that work Butler's conclusion is as follows and I've inserted the term the Arab alongside her use of the term Antigone to make a point. So she writes Antigone or the Arab is not of the human but speaks in its language. Antigone or the Arab speaks within the language of entitlement from which she has excluded participating in the language of claim. If Antigone or the Arab is human then the human has entered into cataclysmus. We no longer know it's proper usage. I've said that because I find this passage really startling. You know, what does it mean to speak of African-Americans or Arab revolutionaries as not of the human but speaking in its language? And I think that the assumption seems to be that language is owned by the patriarchal West whereby queer and transgender people followed by Arab protesters are obliged to claim this hegemonic language for themselves. This constituting supposedly an abnormal appropriation of the norm that has no foundation in reality. And I think that for Butler everything is always prescripted. This is the question in a way that for me forecloses the creativity and spontaneity that are so much in evidence and revolutions. You know, outside of this performative rehearsal is what is always already scripted. What about what is creative and spontaneous? And so with this, the others of the Western patriarchal subject are called at a position of muteness. Whereas, you know, people like Chomsky say we're all born with an innate capacity for language. So, you know, what is at stake in this hegemonic ownership of authority that Butler's ideology speaks of wanting to claim? So, yeah, Butler speaks of the revolutionaries as but bodies that lacking articulation resort to putting themselves on display for the media, she says, physically exhibiting their dejection and vulnerability, their precarity exhibiting it as such through their bodies. However, to me, this accords with the capitalist media gaze that constantly presents images of foreign others in terms of bodily distress. Bodies ravaged by famine, wounded by war, afflicted with illness, humiliated by powerlessness, washed up dead or dying through desperate bids to escape regions of conflict. And so we see this biopolitics of neoliberalism exhibited and seldom hear the stories of these people in their own voices. What does it mean to include those voices? Because the irony is that the theorists come to speak for the revolutionaries and I tried to quote as much in the book so that I would be allowing a lot of voices to be heard. So Butler asks, how does the unspeakable population speak and make its claims? I quote, she calls them the unspeakable population. And I just say, well, you could quote the revolutionaries, erhal, leave, change freedom and social justice as one of the slogans, raise your voices high, whoever chance will not die. I mean, you can just quote the revolutionaries. Okay, so what I attempt to do in my book is to show that the uprisings, particularly in Tunisia and Egypt, entailed a rejection of the hegemonic, hegelian forms of interpolation of healing where the revolutionaries proved capable of acknowledging healing and welcoming each other. And I call this anarchic healing because it doesn't depend on the mediation of authorities, but rather on the collective consciousness of the people beyond Hira Kaisen's sectarian identity politics. Here, speaking of how women used to view each other through the gender stereotypes of norms, revolutionary Amira Abdul Rahman states, for the first time we were not looking at each other in the old way. Our eyes met and we smiled at each other and we shared the victory sign. Businessmen has many estates and it was an amazing moment when I arrived in the square, people I'd never met before were hugging and welcoming like a brother. I didn't know there were so many people who wanted the same thing. So they were recognizing each other immediately without mediation. For Butler, the only alternative to hegemonic recognition and that kind of interpolation is the transgender form of auto interpolation or self-hailing. However, I think that the self-conscious self-acknowledgement was not what was at stake in Arab uprisings, rather you recognize the freedom of spirit in another as they recognize your freedom of spirit. So it's not that you're as it were hailing yourself, you are hailing the other and they are hailing you but not through the authorities. And what this gives rise to is the collective affirmation of each other's individual freedom of spirit. So it is at once relies on collective dynamics but it affirms the individual. And the uprisings had a very spontaneous character that I think depends on this other consciousness where self-consciousness is often really what inhibits spontaneity. It's hard to be self-conscious and spontaneous. There was this other consciousness that is I think related to spontaneity. So yeah, so I think that the experience of the uprisings did entail a kind of transformation of consciousness that was liberation, particularly from biopolitics as I say that in terms of the revolution is getting their souls back as a kind of joyful regaining of dignity. Anna Abed Al-Fattah uses the same terminology in saying that someone asks him whether the revolution had failed. And he said, yes, in a certain sense, but it also succeeded. And he said it succeeded in saving the soul of the people. He uses that terminology. Yeah, so and with this people attest to the revolution is feeling very real. Oma Robert Hamilton, for example, speaks of how real it felt. And I would add that the experience of the real pertains to this ethic of solidarity that has its own forms of signification. And revolutionary signification often draws on what I call extensive signs, extensive signs being signs that don't create reality in the form of the performative but point to a reality beyond them. Eamon Eldersuki speaks of this as Amara. In contra distinction to the jargon of authenticity, true Amara entails acting in good faith where a member of the community, sorry, may put forward signs to aid the community to find its best way forward, warning against the pitfalls of a given situation. Amara in its key orientation may be understood in terms of signifying practices, mobilise for the common good, both indicating what this might be and designating paths towards it. And so I think that this kind of extensive signification constitutes a kind of precisely a sign language outside of official discourses, a sign language say of rallying cries, of warnings, notice boards, blogs, support networks, scapegoats and the like. This popular discourse of revolutionary sign language often poetic rather than literal, can be found in the dominant expressions of the uprising, graffiti, rap music, popular a la mia poetry, cultural repertoire of songs, jokes and slogans, as has been widely examined by Alamamsi and Solomon Tripp Baker-Meres and many others very usefully so. And far from being a display of bodily vulnerability and dejection, the revolution articulated in as many voices as possible, the freedom of spirit of the people that could offer the hope at least of safety and solidarity. In the book, I speak of this as what I call the Darwish avant-garde, Darwish in the Lebanese sense of the everyman in a way, where the term avant-garde refers to a vanguard offering social support and social guidance. We've, I think forgotten this meaning of the avant-garde of people who try and point ways forward for the community. So I argue that the problem with Butler's frame of analysis is that instead of seeing the transgendered as a minority worthy of respectful treatment within a much wider whole where everyone deserves respect, it's as if the transgendered come to signify the new norm that the majority need to adapt to. So it's this creation of a new norm that I would call into question. Particularly because this very of gender ideology, there's so many problematic debates around it that you kind of almost don't want to go there, but what the revolutions brought to the fore, as many said, was the role of women in them, as has been affirmed by many scholars, including Dalia, the staff of Sahar, Mugi and others. So again, I'll just try and put up an image of relevance here. So here's the 2019 Lebanese Revolution, women very much at the fore. The Sudanese Revolution, Liberty is not a statue anymore. She is alive with fresh and blood, Adafsef addressing the crowds in Egypt. And there are so many of these iconic images, and there's been a lot of discourse about how women came to the fore. But I'd add that there's this difference from Western feminism in that it infirms the conredship between men and women in the mutuality of liberation struggles. So it's not about the individual advancement of women getting ahead, but it's much more about the contribution of women to society as whole, how their contribution is necessary to the sort of regained wholism of the society. Anyway, I think that the Arab uprisings were not about identity politics, constituting a break with such. I mean, you could possibly say that Islamism is a form of identity politics in reaction to Western identity politics, but I think, of course, the Arab revolutionaries were concerned with social justice and the rebuilding of inclusive civil societies. However, I think that you could say that the movements of Islamic extremism and the revolutionary left can be said to emerge out of the same socioeconomic conditions, but they constitute very different responses and trajectories to those conditions. And chapters of my book go on to explore that. So what is at stake is countering the authoritarian sectarian and neoliberal conditions that produced chronic disappointment, precarity, humiliation, and so on. But the extremist compensation tends to be one of a politics of pride, whereas the revolutionary one is one of dignity and I'm concerned with trying to explore the difference between the politics of pride and one of dignity. And I do this not through ideology because that tends to confuse things, but to look at psychological and emotional structures and their signifying practices, their practices of expression to explore how pride and dignity are not the same. There's the case that the Islamic phobic approach to Islamic extremism ignores that various pride movements have much in common as psychological formations and structures of feeling and also ignore how these movements express themselves through similar signifying practices. So for this reason, I devote to chapter two, juxtaposing Islamism in its Islamic state form with white pride, Hindi nationalist pride and Zionist nationalist pride to show some of the things in common. And one thing that came to intrigue me is how pride movements emulate left-wing liberationist movements, but do so in a separatist and nostalgic manner. So for example, the far-right racist white pride ban screwdriver appropriates the language of liberation, struggle saying, I stand and watch my country today, it's so easy to see it's been taken away and they go on and configure themselves as the colonized and as the oppressed. So they draw in this whole kind of language and to say that we're the colonized victims, feeling belittled and marginalized and overlooked. Here, what's at stake is that the sense of pariah, the victimhood is often reconfigured as a kind of elite position, the kind of irrationality of a kind of pariah elitism. Which actually kind of funny is analyzed in a Palestinian context where he warns against the danger hoods of victimhood as a badge of superiority. Your elite because of feelings of humiliation and victimization. So this is the kind of pride formation that I kind of look at that leads to a kind of identity fetishism in a way that we talk of, say commodity fetishism. Secondly, what I look at is how these pride groups have similar signifying practices. They often have a kind of sentimental and nostalgic approach to the loss of self-esteem resulting in fantasies around lost ideals and the desire to literalize these ideals. And it often produces a kind of kitsch aesthetic. A kitsch use of an idealized romanticized past of heroism variously identified with Braille XK's Viking cultures or pagan spiritualism or often chivalric medievalism. Crusader or jihadist depending on the context. And I think that this kitsch aesthetic starts to sort of replicate the kind of kitsch aesthetic of things like gated communities. In other words, it's a faking a kind of sincerity which is this jargon of authenticity. And I'd hasten to add that fakeness isn't the problem. I have no problem with what is fake but it's positing the faked as the epitome of authenticity and sincerity and so on. That's what produces the kitschness. Yeah, so the sixth chapter of the book is on the poetics of Karama or as I say why the Egyptian revolution was a poem. I'm beginning to run out of time here so it'll be difficult to go into this but what matters with the question of is the question of Karama I see is bound up with the poetics of the real. And I kind of discussed this in a great deal of technical detail around Jacobson's definition of the poetic function that he defines in terms of how synchronic and diachronic axes of language interrelate but for Jacobson the poetic is a language that draws attention to itself. It's linguistically self-referential but I see in the kind of revolutionary context that this is not how the poetic is functioning because instead of the two axes being linguistic they are existential. There's the temporal axis of deferral which is the diachronic for Jacobson and the synchronic axis is an axis of the lateral dimension of side-by-side relationships where everyone can be together at once and these two things interrelate. And the important thing is to mention here is that it displaces the temporal dynamics of a usurpatory dynamics, a capitalist dynamics of exchange and substitution and so on. It allows for the side-by-side to exist where this poetics of substitution doesn't come in. It's rather that it affirms in the creative dynamics of collective consciousness that everyone can stand side-by-side that there is room for everyone and this relates to the possibility of dignity. Schroeder and Benny Sadiah state that in Islam human dignity increases as we honor each individual and encourage them to increase their own dignity. And I draw on a number of other figures who see that dignity is a matter of allowing for the space of the other. And to do that, you also have a respectful distance from that other. You do not usurp them, you allow them their place. So a dignity revolution is about undoing coercive structures and a set of being about taking, claiming and grasping power. It's about giving, receiving and acknowledging others, living generously, which Reem Abu al-Fadal has discussed in terms of the, as it were, manners of the square, how people respected and helped each other. So it's allowing space for the other. Okay, so in the final two chapters, I take up different aspects of this question of the sacred. And I'll just rush over very, very quickly. So in one chapter I treat of figuring the sacred in martyr art because the question of martyrs I think has been huge for the revolutions. And I look at Ilias Khoury's white masks because he mounts, I think a certain critique of martyr posters as a kind of glorification of martyrdom that he sees as being potentially manipulative as whitewashing, the whole breakdown of society through these glorious images. So I do a reading of white masks in that way, but I also look at how different the martyr art of the Egyptian revolution was. And I can show an image if people would like to see later. But really what is emerges in the kind of martyrs and martyr mural art was an attention to the sacredness of each of those lies that were lost. And instead of glorifying sacrifice, the messages these lies should not have been sacrificed. And so finally, I have a rather strange last chapter which is where I look at what I call equine messianism in Palestinian literature and film because the figures of horses function in an interesting way as a kind of symbol of liberation struggles. And I explore what that means because they function as in an iconic way, these symbols rather than in an idolatrous way. Yeah, I'm sorry, I don't really have much time to explain this, but yeah, looking at the time of white horses, the horses signify a certain freedom of spirit that actually also goes beyond the human. And I thought that was also important because some of these debates start to link up with the kind of animus and indigenous philosophies that I was interested in earlier. And I kind of think that if you're really gonna overturn things, you probably have to also consider the ecological context of things. So I'll just end actually with the quotation from Alah Abed Al-Fattah, who's recently published prison writings. He states, one thing I know is that the sense of possibility was real. It may have been naive to believe our dream could come true, but it was not foolish to believe that another world was possible. It really was. And I remain haunted by that sense of what was possible and what we can remember as having learned from. You know, I'm very interested to know what other things other people think might have been the lessons of those uprisings that I think that we need to stay with. But yeah, I'm keen to find out what others think. Thank you. Thank you very much, Caroline. I, yeah, people should write their questions in the chat. I see there's one. I'm going to ask another one first as chair. I just, I was hoping you could talk a little bit about, because I feel like you're trying to, to maybe, we conceive things so that we no longer see the Islamic extremists on the one hand and the secular left on the other hand, but you want to show how the people who we would have associated with the secular left are also engaged with notions of the sacred and with religion. And this phrase, the Darwish avant garde that you use for me that evokes like kind of a Sufi vibe. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the kind of Islam that you see as feeding into these revolutionary activities. And how would a Darwish avant garde differ from a secular avant garde? That's my question for you. Yeah, well, that's very important. And it does get to the heart of what I'm trying to struggle with, because in a way, I was surprised when I was looking at a number of testimonies, how much the expression of the revolution in terms of the sacred came up. It surprised me, but it also interested me because when I was working on the Zimbabwean Liberation Struggle, that was very much conceived in terms of the sacred. And this kind of differs from how revolutions are looked at in a kind of Western context, certainly American and French revolutions. So I kind of have kind of wondered about how one articulates this sense of the sacred. And in a way, I think that the way I've tried to make sense of it is partly through Sufism, indeed, where, I mean, a number of people said that when the Egyptian revolution broke out, it reminded them of a Sufi mullid. So it was a festival sort of with that sense of celebrating the sacred, but the sacred therefore has to do with our ties to each other. So it could be accommodated within a secular framework. It doesn't necessarily have to be articulated in that way except for the experience that people said it felt sacred. It felt very powerful. And I'm always fascinated to talk by those who were involved in the revolution. I know that when it broke out, I just felt an incredible happiness. Every time I thought of the revolutionaries, I wanted to smile. I didn't rush out there because I thought, no, this is their revolution. I'll keep my respectful distance and watch with admiration and learn. But I did feel that extraordinary feeling of joy, actually, that people spoke of. And then one way of interpreting that is to affirm the sacredness of these connections, of people feeling that they were connected again, that they weren't so dreadfully alienated and alone and so forth. And I do think that if one wanted to sort of address it in a Sufi context, it's this case of that there is an underlying unity to our existence that makes things meaningful. And I found this very much in the context of the Zimbabwean liberation struggle in that each person has value because of the other people. So that's how you feel valued, but it's in connection to that collective, to that whole, which can have the sacred significance. And it is this case of valuing these lives that just shouldn't be thrown away. So you could just accord the sacredness to life itself, which is what Elias Khouri does in White Mars. He says that he himself is not religious, but he understands the discourse of the sacred because he believes in the sacredness of those lives that shouldn't just be thrown away. So it's not dogmatic as such, I think, but I am really struck by it being part of the discourse. I don't know if others have anything to say about that. Particularly though, it might have been, you know, actually in the revolutions at the time. Okay, we have a couple of questions. There's one from Noha Askar. Is the corruption of language evident in the Arab novel? Would you please extend on the topic of humiliation in the Arab novel? Thank you. I'm not sure. Do you know what she's referring to with the corruption of language? Yeah, I think that in the Arab novel, there is definitely a critique of this. I mean, Asya Jabaz Algerian White is all about it, you know, from start to finish, she is talking about this question, but in the book I look, I go back to Tana Fani and Mahfouz because they treat of these conditions of what I call chronic disappointment. So yeah, in the day the leader was killed, Mahfouz looks at how young couples are unable to marry and have their lives on hold because they can't get proper jobs. And they just want ordinary lives, but they are forced into situations of desperation and also of humiliation through their economic circumstances. And there is a kind of critique of how political language is being used in a false way that fails to engage with the hopes of these people. And I think that someone who takes that up and does his own version of it, there's Alaa Alaswani in the Yucubian building, which is all about a young person who gets radicalized because all their dreams come to nothing. So they believe in the discourse of the politicians around aspirations and things, but then they find that it's a hypocritical discourse and they can get nowhere with it. I'm not sure if this is answering your question, but I think that the Arab novel is very concerned with these questions, you know, from kind of funny Mahfouz up to now. Yeah, we have another question from Justin. You mentioned that discontent with conditions of neoliberalism or a foundation in leading to the revolutionary movement in the Arab Spring. I am also interested in hearing your thoughts about neoliberalism in the post-revolutionary context, specifically in Tunisia and its relationship with the growth of civil society. Did you get that? Yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah, I mean, it's so tenacious that that's one of the things that makes me despair, actually. And the question, it's extremely difficult to find ways around the dominance of how neoliberalism is accepted. It's accepted as if it is forever and we can't dislodge it a bit like, you know, we're saying about rulers that they go on forever. Well, neoliberalism has that position as well. And I do actually taking my cue from others, believe that as intellectuals and academics, we have to really be very critical about the languages used and insist on the relationship between language and reality and language and truth. Because without that, there's no foundation of trust amongst other things. But in terms of what I think, I do think that the one possibly promising way forward, it's why I ended the book where I did around introducing ecological questions is that I think that being able to address these things through a green new deal is timely to address the problems with neoliberalism, to take up all the questions of treating things that are public services as publicly owned and not privatized as in terms of taxing all the tax dodgers and finding all the people who are kind of ruining the environment and so on and so forth. I think that this is one helpful way forward. And I'm not so sure what is happening in Tunisia about that. I stand to learn from that. I need to, I'm a bit out of touch, especially with the pandemic, I haven't been able to travel and I feel that I'm desperately out of touch when I can't travel and actually speak to people. But in Lebanon, it's interesting that there are many who said that the uprisings there have been definitely linked to the whole kind of ecological movements in Lebanon. I was very interested in that, you know, the uprisings that began in Tripoli. There'd been for months and months beforehand, there had been a lot of ecological demonstrations that then fed into the demonstrations against political corruption. But I'd be very interested to hear more about the Tunisian situation. Stand to catch up. And we have a question from Sara who says, dear professor, thank you very much for this amazing presentation of your book. I am also working on creative activism and in particular in gender activism throughout creative practices in the Marribi public space after 2011. I am interested in knowing your opinion about the idea of scholars, that the aesthetic performance, okay, I'm a little, I'm interested in knowing what you think about scholars who maybe argue that the aesthetic performance is a fallback without a significant political impact like a demonstration of failure. I don't agree with these scholars and think that creative activism can impact and change mentality. So maybe it could produce a political and social impact in the middle to long run. Thank you for your attention. I think that's very interesting. I kind of feel that, yeah, I mean, what is really striking about the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions in particular is that their language was art. I mean, that's what it really was. It wasn't so much long political analysis or speeches. It was overwhelmingly poetry, song. And we have to ask ourselves why. And that's why I tried to answer the question through why the revolution was a poem. But in that respect, I did actually speak to people I was in touch with at the time, including Ahmed Haddad, the poet and Adaf Suf, and I said, the Egyptian revolution feels to me just like a poem. I don't know why, but it just does. Does it feel that way to you? And they said, yes, yes, that's what it is. It's a poem. So, you know, that's a kind of very interesting question. Why is it a poem? And I believe in some ways it occupied a kind of liminal space in that it occurred, if you like, between a sense of the sacred on one side, you know, what goes by religion and the political on the other. It was sort of between these two. And while these two things kept being conflated, you know, I was talking about neoliberal capitalism spiritualizing itself. And it treats the market as if it were God and there'd been analyses like that. You know, this whole self-spiritualizing neoliberalism collapses the political and the religious. And then on the other hand, with a certain kind of Islamism that commodifies Islam, there's also this sort of collapsing. And I thought that was kind of interesting about how artists functioning is that it opens up a space between these things that allows for a kind of dialogue where not everything is all on one side as it were. So this question also exercised me a lot around the question of martyrs because there were those who were trying to decide the value of martyr art about if your politics are correct, you can be considered a martyr, but if your politics are not correct, you're not considered a martyr. And I found that that politicization of martyrdom problematic, you know, partly because I have been reading about their accounts of British and American soldiers who got very traumatized by their role in the Iraq war and lost friends and who to them were martyrs. And in a certain sense, they began to sort of reevaluate what they were doing. And in a certain sense, they felt that they had been exploited and misled. And so in a way, when I speak about the question of the martyrs, also those whose lives should not be sacrificed, in a way they were being expected to sacrifice their lives. And then they were asking, but for what? For what political agenda? And interestingly, I see Ilya Skuri really, it's a very brave thing to do because it's such a kind of controversial question to raise. What does it mean to simply glorify martyrdom in the name of politics? You know, that there are other questions to be asked around this question of the politicization of everything. I found myself sort of, because in the past, I have fallen very, you know, it's easy to just fall into the political discourse as the thing you should do. But I was finding myself holding back from that and wondering, what is it that makes us think that politics is the highest good? That if you're politically correct, you're in the space of the highest good? And so I kind of think that it's also important not to politicize everything in terms of what revolution is saying, it's also about a human revolution, a humanizing revolution. Yeah, we have a few more questions. So Judith was asking if you could say more about your definition of the left and how creative radicalism, how it relates to the wide variety of so-called leftisms in the Arab world, from Third Worldism to state socialism and from communism to liberal pro-democracy movements. So I think, yeah, could you answer her question? Just, it's not dissimilar to the one I asked you, but... Yeah, it's interesting that when I started using the term the Arab left, someone said to me, but there's no such thing. And I thought, why? And the question that sort of came up is that it has no political force in Arab countries. But I find it hard to sort of conceive of the uprisings without a notion of an Arab left. And I think that for me, the one thing is that the important thing about it is not to fall into a sectarian politics and identity politics, but to be concerned with questions of social justice. Of course, these are up for dialogue and debate all the time, but the emphasis should be on social justice. And obviously, discussions around it, about what it constitutes and so on. And I also think that, yeah, I mean, it was also pointed out that the left is necessarily sort of international. And I do actually think that being able to support each other's struggles is important here too, because I think that the left is involved in trying to articulate a universality wider than the left as defined by capitalism, for example. So what is that wider universality? I always am interested in Fanon, Franz Fanon in that way, because he talks about this wider universality. And I've seen Said give lectures twice. And the first time I saw Edward Said give a lecture was actually at my university in the 1990s. And his lecture was on, he was actually affiliated to the post-colonial Center there for a few months. And he gave a lecture on this question of the wider universality. And so I would say that the left concerns trying to fight for this wider universality and including to try and define it and understand it. Thank you for that. We also have, we have a couple of questions in the Q and A, but also one that came in from Facebook. So regarding fundamentalism, I always think there should be a clear distinction made between practical Islam and theoretical Islam, considering that fundamentalism in practical Islam is used as a means to hold grounds, i.e. reproducing and controlling material things, material people, et cetera. Wouldn't you say fundamentalism is a form of capitalism par excellence? That's a question via Facebook. Well, I would say that sounds intriguing. I would love to actually meet you and talk to you about this because there is a form of, there is a kind of capitalism in that. And I also think that it's interesting to look at the ways in which these things are mobilized. I'm currently trying to undertake long distance work based in Tripoli, Lebanon. And looking at Jihadist groups who use Jihadist discourse in surprising ways, they will sometimes use it completely strategically. They will switch between Marxist discourses and Jihadist ones. What's interesting is that there's a lot of strategy sometimes on the ground around how these things are used. And on a theoretical level, I was reading quite a lot of Qatub because I was really interested in his views. And I found that there was a lot that really interested in me in them and that there were lots of sort of parallels where he was trying to sort of engage with Western philosophical traditions and make distinctions that I found intellectually interesting, that we've kind of lost sight of in the way that his questions and thoughts have been undertaken by fundamentalist agendas. And so it's a hugely complex and varied field more than we perhaps pay attention to, or at least I do. Someone called Hanin has a couple of questions. So maybe I'll merge them. She asks, do you think that after 10 years of Arab revolutions would you say there is a new revolutionary literature or new aesthetic novel that can capture the spirit and complexity of revolutions? And then she also asks, do you think Arab revolutions are continuations of post-colonial struggle but in a neoliberal context? Yeah. Well, you know, this, yes, I do actually think that they are a continuation of those liberation movements. I think they're ongoing. And I think that the interesting thing about this is that these liberation movements are quite often defeated, but then they pop up elsewhere. But I see them as part of the same thing. So, you know, it gets defeated in one place and it pops up somewhere else. And I always feel that we should support it where it resurfaces. It's a bit like Rosa Luxembourg said that revolution is like a kind of underground river. And this underground river, you know, it doesn't go away. So it might be damned in one place and then underground it will find its way and pop up somewhere else. So, yeah, I mean, I do actually think so. And I do actually think that the context in which these liberation struggles are having to operate is in a struggle against neoliberalism. And I kind of think that there's a kind of panic around the fact that neoliberalism has seen not to be working and a desperation to keep it going. So in some senses, I feel that because there is that perception that things are not necessarily as bleak as they seem. Yeah. And in terms of the aesthetic side of things, yeah, there's sometimes an attempt to say, ask the question, is there a post-colonial aesthetic? And for me, it has been this question of a poetics of the real. And so I'm kind of very interested to keep reading what is being produced in the wake of the uprisings around this question. But of course, I could be surprised by other new developments. And I mean, various forms of satirical writing have come to pour as well as dystopian fictions and so forth. But the one that really interests me is this question of a poetics of the real, which is not the same as social realism. It's not that you're creating a model of society. The poetics of the real for me is this thing of when writers are writing for the sake of certain communities where they're trying to point the way forward. There's one more question in Algeria of Iraq, Algerian, which is described as an Algerian nonviolent social movement, a real revolution since 2019. The military regime is accusing many opponents of Islamism. And when they say they are not the regime says it is taqiyah. What do you think about this? Is that something that you know about? Well, I don't know too much about it. I would like to know, again, what's happening in a contemporary sense. I'm a bit kind of starved for sources, actually. But there's a constant sort of actually sort of mimicry of the movement in which the neoliberal West keeps playing things off the Islamist threat, the terrorist threat, the extremist threat. And it's been globalized as questionable that you always have to defend yourself against this persistent threat. And it's used as an excuse that is, that I think that has to be challenged. Thank you very much. It's been wonderful hearing from you. I think that all the questions have been answered. And it's just about seven o'clock. Well, thanks. Thank you very much. Oh, thanks for those really interesting questions. Yeah, I mean, if any of you are writing things, please do get in touch. I'd like to read what you're writing. Well, thank you, everyone. I guess I'll wrap it up here.