1 00:00:09,940 --> 00:00:14,770 Welcome everyone to what is now starting to become an evening event. 2 00:00:15,220 --> 00:00:18,100 Given our change of clocks and the winter coming upon us. 3 00:00:18,610 --> 00:00:24,610 Thank you for joining us for another week at the Oxford Political Thought Seminar convened by myself and my name, 4 00:00:24,790 --> 00:00:29,680 Samar Azmi and Professor Faisal Typekit from the Asian Studies Centre. 5 00:00:30,220 --> 00:00:37,960 This is a fortnightly opportunity. We have to reflect on developments in political thought within Islamic at register. 6 00:00:38,470 --> 00:00:43,840 And we're delighted to be able to welcome this week Nadia Buari and Paddy by the way, 7 00:00:44,230 --> 00:00:48,700 from one from the other side of the Atlantic and one from the other side of the Mediterranean, I suppose. 8 00:00:49,240 --> 00:00:56,950 And it really is one of the joys of actually taking things online, which obviously we were forced to do a couple of years ago. 9 00:00:57,310 --> 00:01:02,140 But now we've really benefited from taking advantage of scholarly expertise from around the world. 10 00:01:02,590 --> 00:01:06,670 So I'd like to begin by introducing our two speakers. 11 00:01:07,090 --> 00:01:11,140 Our first speaker is Nadia Abu Ali, and each of us speakers will speak for about 20 minutes. 12 00:01:11,590 --> 00:01:15,070 She is beaming in from the American University of Beirut. 13 00:01:15,820 --> 00:01:21,070 She is, of course, well known to us as a graduate of the Middle East Centre and is currently an 14 00:01:21,070 --> 00:01:25,030 assistant professor of Civilisation Studies at the American University of Beirut. 15 00:01:25,570 --> 00:01:31,780 And you're the co-editor of Lacan Contrast Who Code, Subjectivity, Sex and Politics. 16 00:01:32,200 --> 00:01:32,880 Forgive me, 17 00:01:32,920 --> 00:01:42,430 the rest of your biographies suddenly been cut out of my screen and you'll be speaking to us about is the heart for the East and reason for the West. 18 00:01:42,850 --> 00:01:45,220 Mahdi Amir's critique of Edward Said. 19 00:01:45,820 --> 00:01:52,360 So with that, we'll begin with yourself, Nadia, and for about 20 minutes, and then we'll switch over to Fadi, if that's right. 20 00:01:52,510 --> 00:02:02,290 Thank you very much. Just to add that Nadia's book is called Psychoanalysis and a Love of Arabic Hall of Mirrors, which appeared not so long ago. 21 00:02:02,440 --> 00:02:07,750 Wonderful read. Thank you so much. Thanks. I thank you both for this invitation. 22 00:02:07,780 --> 00:02:13,540 Hi, Fadi. It's nice to be on this panel together. I'm just going to kind of jump right into it. 23 00:02:13,540 --> 00:02:24,369 The topic of the I'm kind of my presentation here, the talk is Nadia Amer's critique of Edward Syed's thesis or main thesis and the book Orientalism. 24 00:02:24,370 --> 00:02:36,430 In 1986 and 86, Ahmed critiques what he perceives to be Saeed's chookagian account of the interconnectedness of knowledge and power and Orientalism. 25 00:02:37,210 --> 00:02:44,290 Iman's main contention and response to Saeed is that discourse analysis cannot offer an adequate 26 00:02:44,290 --> 00:02:50,890 account of the relationship between material conditions of production and discursive ones. 27 00:02:51,520 --> 00:02:57,490 So I'm as problem with the Orientalism thesis as I will proceed to show in so far as it is, 28 00:02:57,760 --> 00:03:01,540 this kind of Sidon Vicodin account that is presented in it. 29 00:03:02,350 --> 00:03:11,950 I'm his main problem is that it leaves no outside to discourse and sees power everywhere, but not only so its most dangerous component. 30 00:03:11,950 --> 00:03:18,220 For me, damage is the rebuke of all modern thoughts as Western and Orientalism. 31 00:03:18,640 --> 00:03:28,150 Of course, for those of you who don't know, I'm his main concern in line with his is that with his general theoretical and political project, 32 00:03:28,480 --> 00:03:33,610 but his main concern with modern thought is precisely the critical and rationalist tradition, 33 00:03:34,150 --> 00:03:43,780 and more specifically, Marx, meaning he regards as indispensable for any consideration of practices that are committed to emancipation, 34 00:03:44,440 --> 00:03:47,740 especially emancipation from colonial capitalism. 35 00:03:48,740 --> 00:04:01,210 So for Amil, an account of mechanisms of domination that would be adequate for the aims of local emancipatory politics must be justified rationally. 36 00:04:01,220 --> 00:04:09,440 And this is. This is something that we can talk about later, which is account of rationality is what is particular our approach to this. 37 00:04:09,860 --> 00:04:18,019 But it must be justified rationally through grasping the singular historical process that is specific to said society. 38 00:04:18,020 --> 00:04:30,290 Whichever society is being under investigation. And Iman's account sides focus on mechanisms and discourses of power as mechanisms of interpellation. 39 00:04:31,220 --> 00:04:38,959 What you could say for mechanisms for the formations of subjectivity includes any possibility for understanding and 40 00:04:38,960 --> 00:04:47,610 thereby critiquing structures that are specific to colonial capitalism beyond the confines of the logic of representation. 41 00:04:47,630 --> 00:04:54,890 So the army has a problem with the logic of representation as it unfolds in Edward Saeed's account of Orientalism, 42 00:04:55,430 --> 00:04:58,760 and which he kind of also traces to kind of its Vicodin roots. 43 00:04:59,240 --> 00:05:03,410 So I'm in those questions sites for cogent account of power knowledge. 44 00:05:03,460 --> 00:05:10,610 Right. And raises for us a set of questions how can we ever escape power, which is everywhere? 45 00:05:10,910 --> 00:05:16,590 If knowledge can never be disinterested and truth right as a counter to power, 46 00:05:16,610 --> 00:05:22,190 knowledge, regimes or ideologies does not exist itself outside regimes of truth. 47 00:05:22,940 --> 00:05:28,849 And here, perhaps we could add Diamond's disapproval of the Orientalism thesis that why? 48 00:05:28,850 --> 00:05:33,320 Why would we even speak truth to power if power doesn't listen? 49 00:05:33,830 --> 00:05:39,530 If there is no knowledge that can escape mechanisms of power, there is no outside power. 50 00:05:40,160 --> 00:05:49,100 And this is a given these questions. How can you then develop concepts for analysing capitalist domination in the postcolonial world? 51 00:05:49,640 --> 00:06:00,260 If rationality, which is precisely what one requires to construct concepts, is complicit and must be thrown out with the bathwater of Western thought. 52 00:06:01,550 --> 00:06:02,300 So interestingly, 53 00:06:02,300 --> 00:06:12,170 the concept that Iman was invested in developing in his larger project of rehabilitating dialectics and he has a particular approach to this again, 54 00:06:12,320 --> 00:06:18,200 this is stuff I've discussed elsewhere, but but I won't spend time on this here. 55 00:06:18,200 --> 00:06:27,140 But the central concept that I'm and was interested in developing was the concept of break or cut or cuckoo or epistemic cuts, 56 00:06:27,530 --> 00:06:34,579 one that we all know is not far from Falco's own account of history as a compilation of discontinuous episodes. 57 00:06:34,580 --> 00:06:39,590 But it's very interesting because I'm as both close to this account of epistemic break. 58 00:06:39,590 --> 00:06:44,970 But he comes to it from a different place, not just from Episteme, but from thinking about social structure. 59 00:06:45,050 --> 00:06:51,470 This is crucial, though. And so although he's very close to this for cogent problem, he comes to, which from a very different angle. 60 00:06:52,190 --> 00:06:58,640 So the problem for me, Daniel, that can be stated, if we can put it and stated quite simply, it's it's like this. 61 00:06:59,300 --> 00:07:03,680 If colonial capitalism sundered the history of the colonised, 62 00:07:04,100 --> 00:07:12,830 how can that break be superseded without reproducing fantasies of a return to some untarnished past, 63 00:07:13,280 --> 00:07:20,419 the very fantasies that seemed complicit and extending the historicity of the colonial relation which you will see? 64 00:07:20,420 --> 00:07:26,390 Or are you are propose? Are you will argue that Edward said in fact promulgates such a fantasy. 65 00:07:26,990 --> 00:07:34,040 So the Orientalism thesis does not provide a horizon for politics and Madonna's account in the postcolonial world. 66 00:07:34,100 --> 00:07:42,169 This is the problem. What to east is even salvageable after it has been discursive reproduced is that even 67 00:07:42,170 --> 00:07:49,010 the question to be asked must be simply right and rewrite history against master. 68 00:07:49,010 --> 00:07:55,730 Now is this precisely is this the only procedure is the only thing that we can do in the post-colonial moment? 69 00:07:55,880 --> 00:08:04,490 Right. So I read considered the colonial problem or the problem of colonisation in these terms, colonisation introduces a rupture, 70 00:08:04,880 --> 00:08:12,260 a break, or cuts in social formations, a break which instils a new historical temporality. 71 00:08:12,620 --> 00:08:20,000 This historical temporality of of colonial societies is primarily driven by the reproduction of capitalism, 72 00:08:20,240 --> 00:08:27,950 by capitalist accumulation on the one hand, but also more crucially on the reproduction of what we could call identity thinking. 73 00:08:28,190 --> 00:08:34,639 On the other hand, and this is very important because it will be precisely the kind of the accusation the 74 00:08:34,640 --> 00:08:40,010 government will put forth against Edward site that the thesis he provides in Orientalism, 75 00:08:40,010 --> 00:08:46,760 the politics or the horizon of politics that is given by that text from within the postcolonial world. 76 00:08:46,760 --> 00:08:51,830 Right. This is Medea Iman. Right. In Beirut in 1986 at the height of the Lebanese civil war. 77 00:08:52,130 --> 00:08:58,190 He will argue that Saied's account can be somewhat categorised within a bourgeois nationalist identity, 78 00:08:58,190 --> 00:09:06,200 thinking, modes of apprehending reality, or so on. So I'm a designation of this what I'm calling identity. 79 00:09:06,200 --> 00:09:12,290 Thinking here in his in his works is what he calls this kind of method of thinking that is premised 80 00:09:12,290 --> 00:09:18,350 on the repetition of what he calls essences or what we could perhaps call a logic of essentialism. 81 00:09:18,860 --> 00:09:27,080 And what is important for us here is that I'm in science under this form of thinking, which, of course, for us sounds perhaps counterintuitive, right? 82 00:09:27,530 --> 00:09:33,590 In the post-colonial world, it is the national bourgeoisie that mobilises this form of identity thinking. 83 00:09:33,860 --> 00:09:38,480 And according to I'm inspired, perhaps unwittingly promulgates this position. 84 00:09:39,080 --> 00:09:46,690 So I'm it argues that side, like Franco before him fell into the trap of assuming what he calls that right, 85 00:09:46,730 --> 00:09:50,870 this kind of unity of thought or again, as I call it, identity thinking. 86 00:09:51,410 --> 00:09:59,870 So the notion of a unity of thought in the West about the Orient creates a synchronic, frozen structure that cannot be overcome. 87 00:10:00,380 --> 00:10:04,790 Side claims that Western thought is permeated by the discourse of Orientalism, 88 00:10:05,060 --> 00:10:09,950 even in its most radical thinker, most radical, critical thinker, thinker, Marx. 89 00:10:10,280 --> 00:10:17,239 No one can escape the discourse of Orientalism. And here, of course, I mean, it's interesting that only perhaps someone would dispute us. 90 00:10:17,240 --> 00:10:22,490 And the book. Right, just requires some qualification. Is it because he's so juridical, so liberal? 91 00:10:22,490 --> 00:10:31,270 I mean, it's an open question. Right. But often proceeds to read science account of knowledge as a positiveness and historicist form of knowledge. 92 00:10:31,280 --> 00:10:37,550 Again, these are variations, what we could call variations of identity versions of identity thinking, 93 00:10:37,970 --> 00:10:44,970 because what it does is it conflates what Iman calls an object of thought with a real object. 94 00:10:44,990 --> 00:10:48,110 It confuses the two. Sorry. 95 00:10:48,290 --> 00:10:51,290 According to TIME, it confuses a representation. 96 00:10:51,740 --> 00:10:56,240 Orientalism is a representation of the East with the object itself. 97 00:10:56,330 --> 00:11:04,490 Western thought to occur on all of Western thought, but from neither the East nor the West exist as real entities. 98 00:11:04,670 --> 00:11:11,659 Outside nationalist ideology, they can only exist from within the purview of nationalist ideology because both sides, 99 00:11:11,660 --> 00:11:17,120 the East and the so-called West are permeated by one primary contradiction and antagonism. 100 00:11:17,390 --> 00:11:22,010 For that is the antagonism of class or the real of class struggle. 101 00:11:22,640 --> 00:11:27,950 And of course, here again, side note, class is not understood here as a sociological category, 102 00:11:27,950 --> 00:11:34,640 nor is it understood within the terms of what we would think about the logic of representation as a category of representation, 103 00:11:34,850 --> 00:11:39,770 but as a site of antagonism of really existing contradiction, so to speak. 104 00:11:40,370 --> 00:11:47,060 An unconscious motor of history somewhat. But sadly, its conflation, according to Fanon, 105 00:11:47,360 --> 00:11:55,930 does not allow for a properly objective account of material contradictions within thought itself, which in turn arises. 106 00:11:55,940 --> 00:11:58,309 These contradictions in thought are not separable, 107 00:11:58,310 --> 00:12:06,410 but rather arise from real conditions of class struggle or class antagonism and society, both in theory and in reality. 108 00:12:06,980 --> 00:12:14,120 And it is class society for Ahmed and the colonial kind of what he calls a colonial mode of production in outside it. 109 00:12:14,260 --> 00:12:19,850 It is class society that is the condition of possibility for all identity thinking, right? 110 00:12:20,840 --> 00:12:26,540 The East and West are identities only for bourgeois consciousness, as he says, 111 00:12:26,720 --> 00:12:32,930 and there are equally and we should critically assert that they are equally traversed by negativity. 112 00:12:33,260 --> 00:12:40,040 The West is not one. Neither is the East. They can only relate to each other as opposing identities. 113 00:12:40,370 --> 00:12:43,570 Only if we are able to sink the negativity. Right? 114 00:12:43,580 --> 00:12:45,739 This kind of universal class antagonism, 115 00:12:45,740 --> 00:12:53,600 the class struggle that is kind of the real universal of capitalist society that permeates both and relates them to each other. 116 00:12:54,050 --> 00:12:59,150 But I want to get into the nitty gritty of Saeed's particular reading of Marx and what is at 117 00:12:59,150 --> 00:13:04,790 stake in each side's particular reading of Marx in relation to the discourse of Orientalism. 118 00:13:04,790 --> 00:13:12,050 And the West is premised on the argument that Marx, the individual thinker, Marx, the person, so to speak, 119 00:13:12,290 --> 00:13:20,630 could not escape the hegemonic ruse of reason and rationality, which is a unity away that allows this this unity of thought. 120 00:13:20,810 --> 00:13:24,470 And so far as it relates to individual thought from the outside. 121 00:13:24,530 --> 00:13:28,490 Right. So there is this kind of unity of thought that is Western reason, western rationality, 122 00:13:28,850 --> 00:13:35,990 Western episteme and discourses that somehow relate onto the individual from outside external. 123 00:13:36,800 --> 00:13:42,770 So Marx's shortcoming and sides reading is that he could not relate to or recognise 124 00:13:42,770 --> 00:13:47,600 the existential human condition of oriental suffering from colonisation. 125 00:13:48,350 --> 00:13:56,749 So sorry. Its rejoinder to Marx is premised on the assertion that he cannot be simultaneously compassionate to the East and 126 00:13:56,750 --> 00:14:05,240 rational about the so-called revolutionising of relations of production that has been that is instilled by colonisation, 127 00:14:05,690 --> 00:14:12,710 by capitalist colonisation. So to kind of continue in this line of it, if Marx feels sympathy with the suffering of the East, 128 00:14:13,040 --> 00:14:16,910 he cannot possibly think the conditions of that suffering. 129 00:14:17,420 --> 00:14:25,970 Thus, Marx has to disavow the suffering of the East and argues that side here adopts a classical approach to contradiction. 130 00:14:26,600 --> 00:14:35,989 A statement cannot be true and false at the same time, right? How can Marx feel bad about the colonisation yet rationally accepted? 131 00:14:35,990 --> 00:14:40,700 As for the higher good? This is the contradiction that points to in his reading of Marx. 132 00:14:40,970 --> 00:14:46,190 Either Marx should condemn colonisation in both feeling and thought, so to speak, 133 00:14:46,490 --> 00:14:55,160 or his contradictory statements are deemed as false as a disavowal that is complicit in the promulgation of Orientalism and colonisation. 134 00:14:56,100 --> 00:15:02,759 However, I think reminds us here and has an assessment of this argument that the very first premise of the dialectic, 135 00:15:02,760 --> 00:15:05,310 which is I mean, I'm in is committed to dialectical thinking, 136 00:15:05,550 --> 00:15:11,460 is to overcome the limits of classical logic and reject the principle of non contradiction, 137 00:15:11,850 --> 00:15:20,640 contradictions in a dialectical approach index of truth that is not simply irrational and absurd, but essential. 138 00:15:21,180 --> 00:15:26,640 And actually, for Arnold, the insight lies not in saying the discourse is contradictory, 139 00:15:26,940 --> 00:15:31,810 but only in saying that we must be able to grasp reality and its concept. 140 00:15:31,830 --> 00:15:39,030 Right. In other words, the reality that Marx attempts to grasp and his analysis of a mode of production and the 141 00:15:39,030 --> 00:15:43,830 encounter between colonisation and capitalist expansion is in itself contradictory, 142 00:15:44,160 --> 00:15:47,490 really contradictory and historical through and through. 143 00:15:47,820 --> 00:15:53,790 So condemning colonisation without acknowledging its role and transforming relations of 144 00:15:53,790 --> 00:16:00,110 production and a Marxian dialectical approach that it wishes to defend is simply not enough. 145 00:16:00,120 --> 00:16:04,830 And that's precisely kind of the the rejoinder, right, that side poses against Marx. 146 00:16:05,340 --> 00:16:06,780 So in reading, 147 00:16:06,840 --> 00:16:17,070 Marx's disavowal of compassion returns somehow and his affirmation of the rational unfolding of history defined as a history of progress. 148 00:16:17,880 --> 00:16:22,830 This about compassion and this sense masquerades as violent reason. 149 00:16:23,430 --> 00:16:27,400 And, you know, this is a familiar argument. We hear this argument a lot. 150 00:16:27,420 --> 00:16:32,000 It's not just one novel by Edward XII, but. But this is the familiar story, right? 151 00:16:32,070 --> 00:16:42,000 The familiar caricature of Marx. Marx as a technological thinker, like all Western rationalists, Marx is account of history, has it has a telos. 152 00:16:42,840 --> 00:16:49,469 This is a long discussion, but we can suffice it to say here that we can always remember at least one point for Marx, right? 153 00:16:49,470 --> 00:16:56,310 That he states that all of capitalist history, all of this capitalist history, is understood as a pre-history of humanity. 154 00:16:56,640 --> 00:17:04,320 This is a claim that Marx makes in the manifesto. There is indeed a capitalistic loss, but it is somehow without a teleology. 155 00:17:04,860 --> 00:17:10,680 It ends with an end of history, not with a beginning, not with a continuation of its of its historicity. 156 00:17:11,100 --> 00:17:22,290 It isn't a stepping stone to progress, but has the capacity to reproduce itself or reproduce what Whitman Diamond calls the selloff or regression. 157 00:17:22,300 --> 00:17:26,940 Again, between quotes, we can come back to this spuriously ad infinitum. 158 00:17:27,120 --> 00:17:33,330 This is the problem is that the moment that you have this capitalist temporality introduced with colonial capitalism, 159 00:17:33,630 --> 00:17:35,700 the tempo that that is put to work, 160 00:17:35,700 --> 00:17:45,690 the historical temporality is one that is premised on the reproduction of regression, crisis, essentialist logic and identity thinking. 161 00:17:45,990 --> 00:17:52,020 This is the stuckness, as he calls it, of history as it unfolds in this colonial or post-colonial world. 162 00:17:52,090 --> 00:18:00,540 Right. So, I mean, adds to this picture and his works that prehistory takes on these different forms of the postcolonial 163 00:18:00,540 --> 00:18:06,120 words where postcolonial Leti does nothing beyond extending the conditions of domination. 164 00:18:06,780 --> 00:18:13,500 This is his problem in 1986. So the post-colonial doesn't lead to emancipation by necessity. 165 00:18:13,800 --> 00:18:21,390 There is no telos. If anything, there's a stuckness and cycles of repetition within postcolonial nation forms, right? 166 00:18:21,390 --> 00:18:28,800 That are instilled by particular state apparatuses, by ideological formations, such as, for example, sectarianism and the Lebanese state. 167 00:18:29,760 --> 00:18:39,180 To go back, to, say, Insight interprets Marx's rationalisation of colonisation as a renunciation of what he calls an existential human identity. 168 00:18:39,270 --> 00:18:44,100 And it translates that as who we are with Judea and said, This is what Marx lacks, right? 169 00:18:44,550 --> 00:18:51,810 The disavowal of the heart affirms abstract ideals, according to Syeed, like freedom and necessity. 170 00:18:52,530 --> 00:19:00,270 So Marx, the feeling individual is a con and the drama of collective and abstract Western reason. 171 00:19:00,690 --> 00:19:08,819 I will argues that this presentation of Marx cannot but be grounded for this presentation of thought as being an individual 172 00:19:08,820 --> 00:19:16,440 thinker versus the unity of thought that is being kind of impressed on the individual thinker that they cannot escape, 173 00:19:16,440 --> 00:19:22,110 right? There's no exit from power. There is no exit from discourse. There's no exit from from hegemonic. 174 00:19:22,110 --> 00:19:30,000 Right. So Iman proposes that this presentation of Marx can only be possible through a discursive account of knowledge, 175 00:19:30,570 --> 00:19:33,930 because all knowledge is always already this will to power, right? 176 00:19:33,930 --> 00:19:41,820 This is always the structure of knowledge. As such, Marx's individual knowledge cannot escape the collective discourse of Orientalism. 177 00:19:41,850 --> 00:19:50,520 There's no way out of the discourse of Orientalism. Moreover, Marx's rationality is nothing but the reflection of collective Western reason. 178 00:19:51,120 --> 00:19:55,230 So ultimately I'm in questions beside and reduction of knowledge to. 179 00:19:55,440 --> 00:20:04,920 Of course, he argues that this reduction affirms a bourgeois understanding of sociality as a collection of individual's right. 180 00:20:05,190 --> 00:20:14,550 So society is a collection of individuals that expresses itself in one discourse so that knowledge cannot escape domination by Western reason. 181 00:20:14,970 --> 00:20:21,700 And if no individual subject in the West can escape Orientalist discourse again besides Montesquieu, 182 00:20:21,720 --> 00:20:28,020 right, this kind of question, then by what means and asks, Can we think universal emancipation? 183 00:20:28,710 --> 00:20:38,250 So if Marx, the critique of capitalism is included in the discourse of Orientalism and thus rendered unfit for emancipation in the non-Western world, 184 00:20:38,820 --> 00:20:41,820 what is left for the East other than the heart? Right. 185 00:20:41,880 --> 00:20:51,480 Other than Marx's heart. If Marx were to give the East his heart and reserve reason for the West, then what can the East really do with his heart, 186 00:20:51,810 --> 00:20:55,800 with Marx's heart, with his compassion for the violence of colonisation? 187 00:20:56,250 --> 00:21:01,350 And moreover, the question that Iman raises. What is Marx's heart without his mind? 188 00:21:01,740 --> 00:21:06,390 Compassion, sentiment and sympathy, although commendable human traits, 189 00:21:06,600 --> 00:21:11,190 once we can wrestle them out of so-called kind of smidgen understanding of faculties, 190 00:21:11,460 --> 00:21:17,520 they do not make for the possible reorganisation of social life beyond the captives domination. 191 00:21:17,520 --> 00:21:24,959 Possible colonised nations, in particular, according to Ahmed, need less feeling and more Marxist science. 192 00:21:24,960 --> 00:21:32,720 Right. This is again, we can discuss this, but this is a position, right? More visent shaft, which is neither positivist nor simply a historical. 193 00:21:34,050 --> 00:21:40,410 Granted here that although I'm and does sound like a crude mechanistic defender of the so-called iron laws of history, 194 00:21:40,620 --> 00:21:45,660 we have to remember that he was precisely the kind of the thinker who had this main concept, 195 00:21:45,750 --> 00:21:50,970 consistent argument with what he called again between parentheses Western Marxism, 196 00:21:51,210 --> 00:21:59,040 because colonised de gens have their own singular trajectory to kind of attempt to exit from captain's relations, 197 00:21:59,160 --> 00:22:02,460 which is not only dictated by the developments in Western capitalism. 198 00:22:03,750 --> 00:22:10,470 So I'm his main question in his response to cite or his main problem in a sense can be posed in this way. 199 00:22:10,560 --> 00:22:18,180 Why can't one think and feel at once without that translating into the impossibility of knowing in a disinterested manner? 200 00:22:18,660 --> 00:22:23,130 Can we not condemn violence while seeking to understand it and critique it? 201 00:22:23,640 --> 00:22:31,379 If there can be no disinterested knowledge or no truth from where to level a critique from then by what 202 00:22:31,380 --> 00:22:37,440 means can we apprehend violence and social conditions of violence and the means to their overcoming? 203 00:22:37,650 --> 00:22:42,420 Right. So I'm his main question and his response to say it can be posed as such. 204 00:22:43,050 --> 00:22:50,070 If the heart is for the East and the mind for the West, then to what hall do these parts correspond? 205 00:22:50,610 --> 00:22:54,300 Are they parts of a whole that can be identified dialectically? 206 00:22:54,780 --> 00:22:59,550 A whole that would be more than the sum of its parts. Or to be more precise. 207 00:23:00,150 --> 00:23:05,520 To quote here, a hole that is equal to its parts, but not equal to them as parts to quote from Hegel. 208 00:23:06,000 --> 00:23:11,430 What organic totality can be achieved from the part full relationship? 209 00:23:11,700 --> 00:23:15,530 If we take east and west as parts a heart and a mind, right? 210 00:23:15,960 --> 00:23:24,990 So the dialectical approach, the one that I'm kind of tries to pursue in the discussion of side and sides, the problem with Marx and the text, 211 00:23:25,290 --> 00:23:33,180 the dialectical approach would seek to unravel how the whole is present in each of its parts, yet remains autonomous from them. 212 00:23:33,570 --> 00:23:37,230 That is the dialectically achieved relation in itself. 213 00:23:38,250 --> 00:23:48,659 I in argues that sides problem the unequal partnership of parts East and West, heart and mind cannot be solved inside its own terms, 214 00:23:48,660 --> 00:23:50,700 inside the limits of discourse, 215 00:23:50,700 --> 00:23:59,580 but requires a dialectical account of the totality that is capitalism for as a totality that appears in all these parts. 216 00:24:01,120 --> 00:24:08,229 So if science cosmopolitanism reified the two distinct entities of East and West as heart and 217 00:24:08,230 --> 00:24:15,070 reason are big questions the use of hearts and mind as representatives of East and West, 218 00:24:15,370 --> 00:24:19,630 and asks to what possible hall or totality do they belong. 219 00:24:20,440 --> 00:24:24,310 And here again, as a background for those of you, if anyone is doing research on Almond, 220 00:24:24,760 --> 00:24:28,829 the reference here for someone like Christiane said right in the French context, 221 00:24:28,830 --> 00:24:36,150 too, it makes an argument for something that requires a scientific theory of emergence that is dialectical but not vitalism. 222 00:24:36,340 --> 00:24:39,729 Right. This is an interesting kind of sphere of influence. 223 00:24:39,730 --> 00:24:43,960 And French epistemology was very much crucial for many of these works. 224 00:24:44,560 --> 00:24:49,360 So to go back to this problem of organic totality by the organic totality of 225 00:24:49,360 --> 00:24:53,860 capitalist society is nothing but a totality that cannot be totally right. 226 00:24:53,860 --> 00:24:58,269 This is precisely its thing. It's a hole that cannot be won. This is that this is the problem. 227 00:24:58,270 --> 00:25:06,250 It's permeated by contradiction. So in other words, for Akerman, what he wants to propose is to kind of, in a certain sense, push, 228 00:25:06,430 --> 00:25:14,889 if we were to push the stage and critique dialectically beyond the limits of its own foucauldian kind of boundaries we'd have to consider. 229 00:25:14,890 --> 00:25:22,960 And I would propose that we have to think of capitalism in this totality that does not totalising as the condition of possibility, the gridlock, 230 00:25:23,020 --> 00:25:28,630 as he says, and his in his formulation for both East and West and colonisation, 231 00:25:28,660 --> 00:25:32,950 is the base, the group that gives capitalism its fundamental character. 232 00:25:33,610 --> 00:25:39,280 And it is in this dialectical sense that colonial capitalism installed a new ground, 233 00:25:39,400 --> 00:25:46,330 albeit violently a new explanatory base for a next level of transformation, 234 00:25:46,330 --> 00:25:53,680 so-called transformation, or perhaps not also reproduction of the same conditions of immiseration, which for any society. 235 00:25:53,680 --> 00:25:57,730 And so it's not necessarily a trajectory of progress, the loss of progress. 236 00:25:58,210 --> 00:26:04,150 So particular nations, colonised nations in the east can no longer refer back to their own histories. 237 00:26:04,180 --> 00:26:05,530 This is precisely their problem. 238 00:26:05,800 --> 00:26:15,070 This is what with A.S. you can no longer refer back to the histories in these nations as the support or the base for the present or the future, 239 00:26:15,310 --> 00:26:18,190 because now they are bound to the laws of capital, right? 240 00:26:18,250 --> 00:26:28,090 The ground block, the conditions of possibility that are at work and to to this historicity, its own logic of its internal relations. 241 00:26:28,090 --> 00:26:31,210 Right. This kind of the ground the ground where the base of capital. 242 00:26:31,540 --> 00:26:35,589 In other words, the colonised and the sense are double the alienated. 243 00:26:35,590 --> 00:26:38,049 And of course, this is not just something to do. And I'm right, you hear this. 244 00:26:38,050 --> 00:26:46,300 And so I know there's a claim that similar to this in Dubois, and this is something that a lot of Marxist thinkers who are how would you say, 245 00:26:46,420 --> 00:26:50,810 engaging with the problem of capital from not its centre, so to speak, 246 00:26:50,830 --> 00:26:57,090 and also whether there is a centre and tertiary in this model, but this double alienation of colony of the colonised. 247 00:26:57,220 --> 00:27:05,290 They're both they're both alienated from their own history and they're also alienated within the real abstractions of kind of capitalist society. 248 00:27:05,620 --> 00:27:10,630 So colonial nations are thereby locked into what Armand calls their stunted histories, 249 00:27:11,050 --> 00:27:16,060 relegate it to a kind of a tragic repetition of essence that what a tragic one, 250 00:27:16,060 --> 00:27:23,530 because it is one that is an irresolvable, irresolvable conflict between the institutions of the post-colonial state. 251 00:27:23,920 --> 00:27:31,180 Right. So like the sectarian states in Lebanon, for instance, and the demands for emancipation from from domination. 252 00:27:31,440 --> 00:27:38,230 So the historicity of this so there's a locked one is locked into this this problem in the colonised world. 253 00:27:38,680 --> 00:27:44,100 So Amel argues that a dialectical account of a relational totality is needed, right? 254 00:27:44,200 --> 00:27:52,059 One that has a non-linear, linear dynamic. Can this account allow for the overcoming of conditions of inequality without an account 255 00:27:52,060 --> 00:27:57,580 of what kind of body we have to assign to the hearts and minds to the East and the West, 256 00:27:57,970 --> 00:28:05,230 if it is simply a demand for equal recognition is not all recognition anyway, is premised on a missed recognition, right? 257 00:28:05,350 --> 00:28:10,540 A mismatch of organs without a body and fragmented body and a body which always 258 00:28:10,540 --> 00:28:14,739 leave something more to be desired is the question that the dominant poses. 259 00:28:14,740 --> 00:28:21,250 Right. And and what he's saying is that what it should leave us more and desired of is is a dialectical account 260 00:28:21,250 --> 00:28:27,670 of totality that can somehow reconstitute the body of this division between hearts and heart and mind. 261 00:28:27,670 --> 00:28:34,100 East and west. Right. So it argues that it is precisely this kind of account that is needed. 262 00:28:35,340 --> 00:28:40,079 And here, I mean, if I'm at the end of my time, you know, I may proceed to kind of make an argument and, 263 00:28:40,080 --> 00:28:42,440 you know, is very perceptive because there are people, you know, 264 00:28:42,480 --> 00:28:47,490 engaging with this kind of thing today that what's happening in this Vicodin analysis of discourse is that 265 00:28:47,490 --> 00:28:53,040 you have what he calls this kind of cultural structuralism bound together with Nietzsche and nihilism. 266 00:28:53,040 --> 00:28:54,719 Right. That there's a problem, right. 267 00:28:54,720 --> 00:29:00,360 That in this proposition that there's a unity of reason is possible based on this kind of alliance, theoretical alliance. 268 00:29:00,600 --> 00:29:09,149 And this is a problem. He identifies this as a kind of a, you know, the real problem that dialectical kind of thinking has to engage with. 269 00:29:09,150 --> 00:29:15,240 Right. Because it forecloses any emancipatory potentials of rationality, which I'm and remains committed to. 270 00:29:15,240 --> 00:29:18,360 Right. This is a height of the again, the Lebanese civil war, 86. 271 00:29:18,360 --> 00:29:27,420 Already the so-called leftist project has somewhat been defeated, in fact, de facto in the progress of the Civil War. 272 00:29:27,630 --> 00:29:32,580 Right. So I'll jump a bit ahead to kind of a conclusion here. 273 00:29:33,660 --> 00:29:39,360 The problem that that somehow Mark to start on the Orient raises where I'm right is that 274 00:29:39,540 --> 00:29:43,889 this is thought cannot be understood as being as falling into a system of knowledge, 275 00:29:43,890 --> 00:29:49,290 relations of power, also relations to the South like Marx does on contradiction with his own self. 276 00:29:49,290 --> 00:29:49,590 Right. 277 00:29:49,770 --> 00:29:58,670 He verifies Orientalist knowledge, affirms its relations of power, and allows it to trump his feelings right and his own relationship to himself, 278 00:29:58,680 --> 00:30:05,550 like Marx, the individual as bereft of critical acumen as is any other self, any other subject. 279 00:30:05,700 --> 00:30:11,519 This is the problem and it doesn't talk about this, but I think this is something to proceed from to kind of continue with that. 280 00:30:11,520 --> 00:30:20,790 He's basically saying in this account and that takes with bukola that what is lacking is any possibility of a subjective, subjective moment, 281 00:30:20,790 --> 00:30:28,710 an account of subjectivity that can exit this discourse, that can be somehow material for projects that are really trans transformative. 282 00:30:29,010 --> 00:30:35,219 Right. So Marx, the individual is also bereft of political acumen like any other South Side. 283 00:30:35,220 --> 00:30:41,070 And Fuku somehow assumes and asks, How do they escape the look of power? 284 00:30:41,280 --> 00:30:44,790 Right, which kind of somehow wraps everyone into it, right? 285 00:30:45,210 --> 00:30:51,660 So Marx, like all other European thinkers of his time, was like a fish contained in a bowl of water, right? 286 00:30:51,660 --> 00:30:57,630 That he did not see the captive of a discourse that sired all these groups who could somehow identify. 287 00:30:58,350 --> 00:31:04,680 So I'm Bill asks how do you feel coincide escape the fishbowl of western reason the iron rules of discourse, 288 00:31:04,920 --> 00:31:11,430 unfortunately and the account that they provide us with do not allow subjects to kind of exist outside of them. 289 00:31:11,730 --> 00:31:15,090 We are all already in framed and discursive practices, 290 00:31:15,420 --> 00:31:22,110 caught up in their images and always destined to speak a will that is disguised as truth to power. 291 00:31:22,710 --> 00:31:29,300 This is a kind of a provocative ending that to be precisely he precisely ends this critique with this tone, right? 292 00:31:29,310 --> 00:31:32,550 This is the problem that he somehow leaves us with or raises. 293 00:31:32,580 --> 00:31:36,430 Okay, I'll stop here. Sorry if I went over time. Thank you so much, Nadia. 294 00:31:36,430 --> 00:31:44,440 That was really illuminating on so many levels and actually sort of traversing of so many different intellectual streams. 295 00:31:44,440 --> 00:31:47,980 And I think it will give us so much to discuss at the end of this. 296 00:31:48,340 --> 00:31:52,900 I want to remind participants that you can always ask questions in the Q&A, 297 00:31:53,350 --> 00:31:58,600 and we will try our best to come to your questions in the second half of our session. 298 00:31:59,320 --> 00:32:04,310 I also want to take the opportunity, Nadia, to mention your book again, because I didn't want to mention it. 299 00:32:04,330 --> 00:32:05,800 Thank you, Faisel, for highlighting it. 300 00:32:06,130 --> 00:32:12,670 But you have a book published in 2020 Psychoanalysis and the Love of Arabic, published by Edinburgh University Press. 301 00:32:13,120 --> 00:32:16,150 So I do encourage people to try and get their hands on that. 302 00:32:16,720 --> 00:32:19,660 Next, waiting very patiently. Vardy. 303 00:32:20,320 --> 00:32:29,710 Well, I didn't think you needed a lot of patience to enjoy this wonderful exposition by Nadia Flatley, by the way, is a professor at Duke University, 304 00:32:30,040 --> 00:32:39,070 an anthropologist by training and currently based at Duke University with research that focuses on the international circulation of critical theory, 305 00:32:39,850 --> 00:32:48,370 the genealogies of postcolonial critique and traditions of intellectual inquiry and modalities of political engagement of contemporary Arab thinkers. 306 00:32:48,880 --> 00:32:52,240 And you also, of course, have a book published in the same year as Nadia. 307 00:32:53,140 --> 00:32:59,710 Your most recent book is entitled Revolution and Disenchantment, Arab Marxism and the Binds of Emancipation. 308 00:33:00,460 --> 00:33:09,550 I'm sure that your two lectures will be in a wonderful opportunity for dialogue, so I'll let you go ahead with it. 309 00:33:09,970 --> 00:33:15,520 Thank you. Thank you, Salma and Faisal, for extending the invitation. 310 00:33:16,390 --> 00:33:22,960 It's nice to be on the same panel as Nadia. Let me say a few things before I start reading my paper. 311 00:33:23,260 --> 00:33:26,829 I think it's very refreshing that Nadia went first because I'm going to be talking 312 00:33:26,830 --> 00:33:32,170 about the period which is 20 years before the period that she's talking about. 313 00:33:32,170 --> 00:33:37,570 So I'm going to stick to responding to Sade was published in the mid-eighties. 314 00:33:37,600 --> 00:33:42,399 I'm going to be focusing on the mid-sixties to the mid-seventies. 315 00:33:42,400 --> 00:33:47,140 And this is, I think, important for a variety of reasons because. 316 00:33:48,260 --> 00:33:49,399 In the mid-eighties, 317 00:33:49,400 --> 00:33:59,310 someone like Mahdi Army was on the defensive after the defeat of the left and the Palestinian resistance in the wake of the Israeli invasion of 1982. 318 00:33:59,330 --> 00:34:02,899 Despite the leftist resistance to Israel. 319 00:34:02,900 --> 00:34:08,690 But there was a sense, you know, a decade after the beginning of the Lebanese civil and regional wars, 320 00:34:09,080 --> 00:34:18,739 that that revolutionary subject that's supposed to bring about change and emancipation has been fractured along international sectarian lines, 321 00:34:18,740 --> 00:34:23,450 on the one hand. And more importantly, in the case of, I mean, 322 00:34:23,840 --> 00:34:29,809 as a conversion of the revolutionary subject into an Islamist revolutionary subject 323 00:34:29,810 --> 00:34:34,510 in the wake of the Khomeini's revolution and the Iranian revolution of 79. 324 00:34:34,520 --> 00:34:39,860 And it's sort of like Khomeini's resonances in that text that Nadia mentioned. 325 00:34:40,250 --> 00:34:49,850 Ahmed is really sort of adamant to argue against what he dubs the obscurantist forces by which he means these sort of Shia Islamist militants. 326 00:34:50,270 --> 00:34:57,860 And he ends up assassinated in 87. And it's most widely known that it's at the hand of these factions that he was assassinated. 327 00:34:58,160 --> 00:35:03,290 This is important because I'm going to be talking about 67 and 61, 328 00:35:03,770 --> 00:35:10,909 which is the period when people were not very much engaged in the politics of theory that sort of Nadia so eloquently talked about, 329 00:35:10,910 --> 00:35:14,480 but rather they were very interested in formulating a theory of politics. 330 00:35:15,430 --> 00:35:26,979 And it's also the period when someone like Edwards said, who was a detached professor at Columbia University, gets his political awakening, 331 00:35:26,980 --> 00:35:33,340 as he sort of mentions in his memoirs and turns his gaze back in a moment of recovery, 332 00:35:33,340 --> 00:35:38,560 discovery of identity towards Palestine and and commits himself to Palestinian struggle. 333 00:35:38,830 --> 00:35:45,070 So there is in that moment that I'm going to be talking about a common a common sort of a difference. 334 00:35:45,100 --> 00:35:50,620 The difference is the distinction between the politics of fear and the fear of politics on the other, on the one hand. 335 00:35:50,920 --> 00:36:00,880 But there was a common conjuncture, which was basically that of the best in the revolution that side joined and that the Lebanese left was part of. 336 00:36:01,850 --> 00:36:09,550 I don't have a PowerPoint. I have a paper in seven sections that I will read and hopefully will go over time. 337 00:36:10,550 --> 00:36:14,540 Section one The Ubiquity of the 1967 defeat. 338 00:36:16,170 --> 00:36:24,810 There's no doubt that 1967, which marks the swift military defeat of Arab armies against Israel, has a ubiquitous historiographical presence. 339 00:36:25,410 --> 00:36:33,030 It is the turning point, but it also you will find it referenced in Arab newspaper articles and Arab human 340 00:36:33,030 --> 00:36:38,790 development reports put out by the UNDP and the critical literature discussing artistic, 341 00:36:38,790 --> 00:36:45,720 intellectual and political trends in books and contemporary Arab thought as the marker of what is contemporary, etc. 342 00:36:46,670 --> 00:36:52,760 This use of the date of a military defeat as a marker for different genres and not, for instance, 343 00:36:52,970 --> 00:37:00,260 the date of events that are internal to these fields of practice is symptomatic of the saturation of Arab cultural scenes with politics. 344 00:37:01,410 --> 00:37:07,139 Pierre Bourdieu. His theories on the increasing autonomy of cultural fields away from the socio political contexts 345 00:37:07,140 --> 00:37:12,090 and external constraints find their limits in the neocolonial and postcolonial Arab world. 346 00:37:14,680 --> 00:37:20,560 Section two, 1961. The Forgotten Date or the Birth Pangs of the New Left? 347 00:37:22,230 --> 00:37:32,190 I'm like 1967, the end of the Union between Egypt and Syria in 1961 with the dissolution of the United Arab Republic, is now largely forgotten. 348 00:37:33,360 --> 00:37:37,710 This event, which exists outside of the contradiction with colonialism and imperialism, 349 00:37:38,160 --> 00:37:43,290 was crucial for a generation of militants, which will constitute the 1960s new left. 350 00:37:44,580 --> 00:37:49,020 It constitutes the first major setback of the anticolonial nationalist regimes. 351 00:37:49,320 --> 00:37:52,740 Less than a decade after the 1952 Egyptian revolution. 352 00:37:54,060 --> 00:38:00,180 This intro Arab event ushered in the first eminent critics of the regime that pointed out the gap that separates 353 00:38:00,180 --> 00:38:06,330 their pan-Arab ideologies from their practices that could not sustain a union for more than three years. 354 00:38:08,990 --> 00:38:16,790 It inaugurated an early critical reflexive turn that found in Marxism a critical theory and a weapon of political transformation which, 355 00:38:16,790 --> 00:38:22,670 by conjugating together internal class contradictions of these societies with an anti-imperialist agenda, 356 00:38:23,150 --> 00:38:26,870 was much more conceptually sophisticated than Arab nationalist ideologies. 357 00:38:29,520 --> 00:38:37,440 Some of the comrades who founded Socialist Lebanon, an underground Marxist organisation composed mostly of militant intellectuals in the mid-sixties, 358 00:38:37,440 --> 00:38:40,260 came from this cohort of disenchanted Arab nationalists. 359 00:38:41,630 --> 00:38:49,670 The now distinguished historian and well-known public intellectual, Ahmed Bloom, recalls the importance of 1961 in one of our conversations. 360 00:38:51,110 --> 00:38:56,150 He says, and I quote, It was a blow that changed the meaning of the world for us. 361 00:38:57,080 --> 00:39:02,540 The political history of the last three or four generations does not really stop sufficiently at that date. 362 00:39:02,870 --> 00:39:07,220 They stop more at 67. For us, 61 was decisive. 363 00:39:09,510 --> 00:39:10,950 It is this disenchantment. 364 00:39:10,960 --> 00:39:18,180 And here I'm quoting him again, which gave rise to the desire and the need to know these societies that are called an ummah, 365 00:39:18,720 --> 00:39:21,390 by which he meant an Arab nation, not an Islamic nation. 366 00:39:22,560 --> 00:39:28,680 The question of society by dawn presses on was the true and effective mediator of Marxist evolutionary theory. 367 00:39:30,450 --> 00:39:38,840 The EUR 61, as I said, ushered in an early reflexive moment that turned away from the national strike against external enemies, 368 00:39:38,850 --> 00:39:41,310 towards criticising the progressive regimes in power, 369 00:39:41,610 --> 00:39:47,430 and diagnosing the internal political contestations lodged at the heart of these societies their social structures. 370 00:39:48,490 --> 00:39:52,930 It laid the first bricks of what would come to be known after 67 as the New Left. 371 00:39:55,240 --> 00:39:58,180 Underscoring this genealogy is, I think, 372 00:39:58,180 --> 00:40:04,089 important to forestall an easy assumption of the Arab new left by the trope of the global sixties or a global 68, 373 00:40:04,090 --> 00:40:07,900 which takes the student and worker demonstrations of France at their centre. 374 00:40:10,490 --> 00:40:15,810 Section three. Down with the Arab regimes another Marxist turn. 375 00:40:17,620 --> 00:40:20,380 In the wake of the 67 Arab defeat against Israel, 376 00:40:20,440 --> 00:40:29,350 the Arab nationalist movement previously gravitating in Nasser's orbit will increase its leftwards radicalisation that had started earlier. 377 00:40:31,080 --> 00:40:38,850 The shock of the defeat spurred a demand for a theoretical renewal and the direction of more solid and scientific theories. 378 00:40:39,180 --> 00:40:44,159 The Arab nationalist fogey rhetoric as well as a rethinking of the modalities of 379 00:40:44,160 --> 00:40:48,540 political struggle and the agents that will carry out the task of emancipation. 380 00:40:49,940 --> 00:40:53,120 Would it be a popular war of liberation? Of liberation? 381 00:40:53,780 --> 00:40:56,750 Would it take the form of Palestine commando operations, 382 00:40:57,140 --> 00:41:03,380 or would it remain in the sphere of conventional warfare conducted by the armies of the Arab regimes? 383 00:41:05,280 --> 00:41:08,940 Vietnam as a model was discussed. At that time. 384 00:41:11,790 --> 00:41:19,180 In addition to its more rigorous conceptual arsenal, Marxism, unlike Nasser's dismal failure, seemed to work at the time. 385 00:41:20,280 --> 00:41:21,689 The successes of the Chinese, 386 00:41:21,690 --> 00:41:29,010 Cuban and Vietnamese revolutions fuelled the hopes of the militants who joined the Palestinian resistance or oscillated in its orbit. 387 00:41:29,940 --> 00:41:35,730 There is, of course, a distinguished genealogy of the collapse of conceptual truth onto to political victory on the left. 388 00:41:37,090 --> 00:41:42,640 Little has eviscerated Marxism. Russell Jacoby noted a while ago in one of his signature distilled sentences, 389 00:41:43,000 --> 00:41:46,630 more than its acceptance of the judgement of history as the truth itself. 390 00:41:48,540 --> 00:41:51,270 Victory, he reminds us, is not proof of truth. 391 00:41:52,730 --> 00:42:01,070 Marxism, he says, ventured, realising these this sort of destitution and leftist thought is compelling precisely because it's accurate. 392 00:42:01,370 --> 00:42:09,320 And finally, because it's successful, it works. The strengths of the working class, as well as the victory of several revolutions, leave little doubt. 393 00:42:09,350 --> 00:42:15,860 Success is the proof. And of course. Section four. 394 00:42:17,180 --> 00:42:20,240 Long live the revolution. Long live the Palestinian revolution. 395 00:42:20,870 --> 00:42:29,500 Our historical chance. On November eight, 1969, the Cairo agreement was signed between the PLO and the Lebanese army, 396 00:42:29,650 --> 00:42:33,190 legitimising the PLO guerrilla actions on Lebanese territory. 397 00:42:35,090 --> 00:42:43,850 After 1971, Lebanon became the only vital space for the resistance in the aftermath of its clashes with the Jordanian army in 19 7071, 398 00:42:44,420 --> 00:42:49,370 which resulted in its defeat and relocation of the relocation of its command to Beirut. 399 00:42:50,430 --> 00:42:55,800 Around the same time, the Syrian regime also shut its borders to passenger activity. 400 00:42:58,390 --> 00:43:06,580 Socialist Lebanon had been criticising the Nazareth regime since its founding in 1964 and had no visibility on the national political radar. 401 00:43:07,300 --> 00:43:13,420 Things will change after 67. In the absence of masses, since there were a bunch of little intellectuals, 402 00:43:13,840 --> 00:43:19,749 it's their theoretical virtuosity which positioned them to the left of Arab nationalist regimes and the Lebanese 403 00:43:19,750 --> 00:43:25,960 left that managed to draw attention to the organisation at a time when there was a high demand on Marxist theory. 404 00:43:28,350 --> 00:43:32,820 It will result in their merger with the radicalised Lebanese branch of the Arab nationalist movement, 405 00:43:33,120 --> 00:43:41,489 led by Mohsen Brahim in the wake of the 67 defeat. They brought the gift of theory to the much more numerous and Veterans Party 406 00:43:41,490 --> 00:43:45,960 founding together the Organisation of Communist Action in Lebanon in 1970. 407 00:43:49,510 --> 00:43:56,890 Around 40 years later. What that allowed a socialist Lebanon's main theorist at the time recalled that era. 408 00:43:58,500 --> 00:44:02,430 He says. In 1969, we entered a different epoch. 409 00:44:03,090 --> 00:44:11,760 It's important the different epoch be looked at from its internal side, i.e. how we were seeing it and experiencing experiencing it. 410 00:44:13,210 --> 00:44:20,080 At this time. One was 26 or 27 years old, not an old man, but with already 10 to 12 years of militancy. 411 00:44:20,320 --> 00:44:26,260 Part of them in the French Communist Party. He studied at Lille, where they studied. 412 00:44:26,320 --> 00:44:30,700 They both studied in the same French city and in contact with European Marxism. 413 00:44:32,500 --> 00:44:38,680 And then he said there was this tremendous internal shock where it was revealed to us after 414 00:44:38,680 --> 00:44:43,900 what was called the defeat of the regime's in and that this was our historical chance. 415 00:44:46,970 --> 00:44:51,650 Section five to resistances the Palestinian and the Lebanese. 416 00:44:53,060 --> 00:45:01,760 I cite the ruling Lebanese interests cannot acknowledge the links that tie its farmhouse in Lebanon to the region's causes, 417 00:45:02,090 --> 00:45:09,260 wrote the anonymous author moderator in the piece titled To Resistance is the Palestinian and Lebanese. 418 00:45:10,230 --> 00:45:15,510 A central piece from 1969 that captures the height of the activist fervour at the time. 419 00:45:18,610 --> 00:45:23,499 The long and scathing article against the Lebanese authorities located the Palestinian resistance 420 00:45:23,500 --> 00:45:27,790 as the external revolutionary agent that will detonate the contradictions of the system. 421 00:45:28,660 --> 00:45:33,280 The Lebanese opposition wrote to the authorities, position is clear. 422 00:45:33,760 --> 00:45:42,070 Lebanon is of the Arab region. Its economy and the prosperity of its financiers and merchants rise on the role they play in that region. 423 00:45:42,910 --> 00:45:49,840 Lebanon, however, is on the margin of the Arab region when it comes to the political problems threatening to destabilise those who do it. 424 00:45:49,990 --> 00:45:57,780 And of course. The main diagnosis in that article constituted a strong indication of the Lebanese state's polluted 425 00:45:57,780 --> 00:46:03,120 politics of neutrality in the Arab-Israeli conflict and the country's laissez faire capitalist system. 426 00:46:04,060 --> 00:46:11,030 It was into this situation characterised by Lebanese economic integration, into political isolation from the Arab world. 427 00:46:11,140 --> 00:46:13,480 The Palestinian resistance made its entrance. 428 00:46:15,270 --> 00:46:22,030 It unmasked the real face of the Lebanese regime for how good a regime that plays the role of a watchdog of imperious dependence. 429 00:46:22,050 --> 00:46:25,410 They ask, agitate an entire people for a national battle. 430 00:46:25,740 --> 00:46:30,030 And how can the Lebanese system, which survives on the remains of imperial interests, 431 00:46:30,390 --> 00:46:34,530 go through this battle that will put its banks agents in some resorts endangered? 432 00:46:37,770 --> 00:46:44,460 At the heart of this theory position is a view of the Lebanese political, sectarian, political system, as devised by French imperialism, 433 00:46:44,880 --> 00:46:50,850 a system that pre-empts the elaboration of a class, interest driven story of class, interest driven politics. 434 00:46:54,800 --> 00:47:01,070 So that relates to the sectarian formation which was made, the geographic and political basis of Lebanon, 435 00:47:01,070 --> 00:47:09,650 as able to stifle every form of political maturity that carries the masses to fuse with the Arab region's battles against imperialism. 436 00:47:10,280 --> 00:47:14,720 This is not only because it puts every political discord to the test of civil war, 437 00:47:15,020 --> 00:47:21,800 but because it stifles every disagreement by annulling its true political aspect a conflict of interest within the framework of power. 438 00:47:22,040 --> 00:47:28,640 By making it subsidiary subservient to the sectarian conflict that conceals and fragments the issues pertaining to power. 439 00:47:30,760 --> 00:47:37,210 This makes political opposition, whether it wants it to or not, acquire a sectarian dimension in this situation. 440 00:47:37,420 --> 00:47:43,479 There's no national party that covers the Lebanese territory and no Lebanese ideology and no Lebanese history. 441 00:47:43,480 --> 00:47:44,120 And of course. 442 00:47:45,670 --> 00:47:53,610 This idea he will sort of develop later on when he will write in the wake of the civil war about dominance without a Germany in Lebanon. 443 00:47:55,660 --> 00:47:58,180 The human terrorising force of capitalist expansion, 444 00:47:58,300 --> 00:48:03,220 which is supposed to drown the ecstasies of religious fervour and humorous enthusiasm in the icy waters. 445 00:48:03,730 --> 00:48:09,520 Egotistical calculation stopped at Lebanon's gate of sectarian pool of sectarian politics. 446 00:48:10,510 --> 00:48:12,339 Sectarian and regional distinctions. 447 00:48:12,340 --> 00:48:19,060 Socialist Lebanon, right bring to the attribute of the citizen other attributes that dominated the Sunni from Beirut, 448 00:48:19,450 --> 00:48:23,080 the Maronite from the mountain, the Shia from the south, or Baalbek. 449 00:48:25,120 --> 00:48:29,890 The coming into being of the upstart committee citizen that would follow an interest based politics 450 00:48:30,130 --> 00:48:35,770 was prevented by the political system that produced and here I say it again hybrid citizens. 451 00:48:38,850 --> 00:48:42,600 Section six. The dualities of two resistances. 452 00:48:44,290 --> 00:48:49,870 Two resistances was built on a series of dualities that sought to account for the blockage of pollution in practice. 453 00:48:50,290 --> 00:48:54,490 By noting the distinction between the economic infrastructure and the political superstructure 454 00:48:55,150 --> 00:48:59,889 Lebanon had argued is characterised both by the propagation of the universal laws of capitalist 455 00:48:59,890 --> 00:49:05,200 expansion and the economic sphere and sectarian political breaks in the political system that 456 00:49:05,200 --> 00:49:10,330 were devised by French imperialism and impede the birth of interest based politics of citizens. 457 00:49:11,630 --> 00:49:17,780 This duality is also inscribed at the heart of Lebanon's exploitative relationship with its Arab region's Arab neighbours. 458 00:49:18,140 --> 00:49:23,750 Lebanon is economically integrated into the Arab world, thriving on the investment of Palestinian capitalism. 459 00:49:23,750 --> 00:49:31,430 In 19 after the 1948 Nakba, while being politically isolated from Palestine via its politics of neutrality in the Arab-Israeli conflict. 460 00:49:33,200 --> 00:49:36,139 The ruling alliance itself reproduces this duality, 461 00:49:36,140 --> 00:49:42,530 since it's conceived as the partnership between the banking and commercial bourgeoisie of the coast and the landowning families of the mountains. 462 00:49:43,960 --> 00:49:47,740 The hybrid Lebanese citizen is also the outgoing restored structure, 463 00:49:47,740 --> 00:49:53,470 which combines the universality of the bourgeois notion of citizenship and the particularity of sectarian affiliations. 464 00:49:54,940 --> 00:50:00,930 Sectarianism in tourist instances plays a very different role, whether we are talking about the Lebanese ruling alliance or the people. 465 00:50:01,940 --> 00:50:06,920 Sectarianism by splitting the Lebanese citizen is responsible for stifling Class B politics. 466 00:50:07,900 --> 00:50:12,220 The split needs to be overcome for a mature, interest based, portable practice to take place. 467 00:50:12,550 --> 00:50:18,160 However, if we shift our analytical gaze to the composition of the Lebanese regime, we get a different picture. 468 00:50:19,820 --> 00:50:24,380 The split between universality and particularity is not internalised in its hybrid subjects. 469 00:50:24,890 --> 00:50:31,640 Rather, it becomes a sociological feature of the two groups The Bourgeoisie of the Coast and the Landowning Lords of the Mountains. 470 00:50:33,760 --> 00:50:38,860 Socialist Lebanon does not attach a sectarian attribute, Christian or Muslim, to the Lebanese bourgeoisie. 471 00:50:39,940 --> 00:50:47,200 Sectarianism is not treated as an essential component of the Lebanese bourgeois identity, but as a veil that masks its defence of its privileges. 472 00:50:48,360 --> 00:50:51,660 The reason for that, I think, is that during his militant days, 473 00:50:51,990 --> 00:50:59,069 serious analysis had to provide an account of the particularity of Lebanese sectarian politics and loyalties on a marxian ground 474 00:50:59,070 --> 00:51:05,730 that this class politics and exploitation as the universal underlying realities that explain the Lebanese social formation. 475 00:51:07,810 --> 00:51:13,090 He was faced with a puzzle of how to square the proliferation and multiplicity of apparent supranational, 476 00:51:13,090 --> 00:51:20,560 communal loyalties and political divisions with a notion of politics that spread located on the contradiction between labour and capital. 477 00:51:22,920 --> 00:51:29,010 The differential distribution of these binaries economic integration, command, stability, banking, bourgeoisie, 478 00:51:29,340 --> 00:51:34,410 and on the other hand, political isolation, incommensurability, political feudalism, hybrid citizens, 479 00:51:34,710 --> 00:51:40,050 and the different meanings sectarianism acquires are his answers to the conundrum of explaining along 480 00:51:40,050 --> 00:51:45,690 class lines the multiple sectarian allegiances and divisions within the frame of one exploitative system. 481 00:51:49,320 --> 00:51:56,020 The Palestinian resistance as an anti-imperial Arab agent by excellence after it made its entrance into the beast. 482 00:51:56,040 --> 00:52:01,650 Politics will contribute according to the authorisation to overcoming the system's duality. 483 00:52:02,740 --> 00:52:06,100 Its intrusion unmasked the bourgeoisie as exploitation, 484 00:52:06,100 --> 00:52:11,680 which can no longer be itself with sectarianism and refashioned the sectarian subjects into a revolutionary one. 485 00:52:13,340 --> 00:52:20,750 Revolutionising the Lebanese polity and the solidarity with the Palestinian resistance will not envisaged as a bloodless undertaking. 486 00:52:22,070 --> 00:52:26,930 Yet the impact of the revolution socialist Lebanon predicted would transform the classes. 487 00:52:27,110 --> 00:52:30,820 And here I could throw a sectarian conflict into a civil war. 488 00:52:30,860 --> 00:52:37,820 End of quote. It would again if Democratic national rules cannot be reached without a civil war, they wrote. 489 00:52:38,060 --> 00:52:45,200 The real coordination with the devastating actions cannot also take place without exposing the southern region to an Israeli 490 00:52:45,200 --> 00:52:53,390 invasion and the psoriasis 1969 prognosis was right in predicting the coming conflict and wrong in predicting its nature. 491 00:52:54,110 --> 00:52:58,280 Six years later, a civil war erupted, splitting the country along sectarian lines. 492 00:52:58,730 --> 00:53:04,969 Israel invaded in 78 to push the PLO away from the borders before invading again in 1982, 493 00:53:04,970 --> 00:53:08,270 which this time around resulted in forcing the PLO out of Lebanon. 494 00:53:10,510 --> 00:53:15,680 I conclude with Section seven. Titled Coda in the Wake of a Civil War. 495 00:53:17,900 --> 00:53:26,120 This text, published in 1969 to Resistance, has had multiple political and academic afterlives, both in Arabic and in English. 496 00:53:28,410 --> 00:53:31,290 40 years later, after its publication, 497 00:53:31,290 --> 00:53:39,300 the famous Lebanese poet Abbess By Noon recalls the beginning of the collaboration in 1969 between the Organisation of Lebanese Socialists, 498 00:53:39,480 --> 00:53:42,930 which he belonged to, and socialist Lebanon before their union. 499 00:53:44,070 --> 00:53:50,040 Around this time, he says, they founded the Lebanese rubric and Alhurra, which did not exist earlier. 500 00:53:50,670 --> 00:53:57,300 I wrote it through an understanding and an alliance with socialist Lebanon and predominantly with Wapda, with whom we had a developed relationship. 501 00:53:57,840 --> 00:54:06,130 And around that same time, he adds. I wrote a theoretical text that is similar parallel to socialist Lebanon's text called The Two Resistances. 502 00:54:06,730 --> 00:54:11,230 Mine was called a look at the Palestinian Resistance, and the Lebanese are something of that sort. 503 00:54:11,830 --> 00:54:15,370 The authorisation was the same. They were both based on a frightening idea. 504 00:54:16,210 --> 00:54:18,130 It was this realisation of the Civil War. 505 00:54:18,370 --> 00:54:24,400 It ran along the lines that this was a prosperous country which cannot generate a revolution for a number of reasons, 506 00:54:24,850 --> 00:54:29,950 because it has benefited from Arab defeats and it has a certain level of economic, leisure, etc. 507 00:54:30,490 --> 00:54:34,180 Natural evolution was possible here unless it comes from the outside. 508 00:54:36,860 --> 00:54:39,920 In the first month of the Lebanese civil war in 1976. 509 00:54:40,080 --> 00:54:45,500 So seven years after the published publication of the text, as is largely made, the Syrian historiography, 510 00:54:45,560 --> 00:54:53,180 an Islamic studies scholar and first former comrade offered an account of the beginning of the Civil War that recapitulates the texts. 511 00:54:53,180 --> 00:54:57,020 His main thesis, he wrote. Through the Palestinians, 512 00:54:57,620 --> 00:55:04,519 the Lebanese entity was inserted into its Arab context and deprived of that artificial isolation with which had 513 00:55:04,520 --> 00:55:10,580 you to hear the to serve to maintain the political safeguards necessary for its international economic role. 514 00:55:11,980 --> 00:55:15,540 And of course. In a similar vein, Ms. 515 00:55:15,540 --> 00:55:19,949 Ibrahim, who said that the head of the Organisation of Lebanese Socialists before becoming 516 00:55:19,950 --> 00:55:24,090 the Secretary General of the Organisation for Communist Action for nearly 50 years, 517 00:55:25,320 --> 00:55:30,390 dubbed at the time the Palestinian Resistance as the lever that would lift the Arab National Liberation Movement. 518 00:55:31,350 --> 00:55:34,470 On the 40th day commemorating the assassination of George Harvey, 519 00:55:34,710 --> 00:55:40,020 the former secretary general of the Lebanese Communist Party, which took place in Beirut in 2005. 520 00:55:40,650 --> 00:55:46,560 Mohsen Brahim issued a lot of critique of the Lebanese nationalist movements involvement and said in the 75 war, 521 00:55:46,950 --> 00:55:50,820 which centred on two major points of fall as he fought, as he called them. 522 00:55:52,170 --> 00:55:56,340 The first consistent and Ibrahim's acknowledgement that in supporting the Palestinian struggle, 523 00:55:56,610 --> 00:56:00,810 the left went too far in burdening Lebanon with the military weight of the past in equals. 524 00:56:01,440 --> 00:56:08,760 And the second was that the IDF deemed it easy to board the Civil War strip under the illusion of cutting short the road to democratic change. 525 00:56:09,150 --> 00:56:14,850 End of quote. A major figure in socialist Lebanon at the time commented on Ibrahim's utter critique. 526 00:56:15,660 --> 00:56:21,360 He said he used the same idea found in two resistances, but flips it as violence in the late sixties. 527 00:56:21,570 --> 00:56:29,430 The resistance with the detonator. Detonator, the lever, the catalyst that in alliance with the left would explode the system in 2005. 528 00:56:29,760 --> 00:56:32,520 Ibrahim, the major political leader of the Lebanese New Left, 529 00:56:33,000 --> 00:56:37,140 observed that the left went over the top by overburdening the country with its support for. 530 00:56:38,330 --> 00:56:41,780 Thank you very much. Thank you so much for the really. 531 00:56:42,530 --> 00:56:49,080 And I if I may say so, you have the sort of voice of a wonderful radio presenter, so I could listen to you all day. 532 00:56:50,700 --> 00:56:55,710 Thank you both for really sort of fascinating opening papers. 533 00:56:55,950 --> 00:56:59,520 We now have around half an hour for some discussion. 534 00:56:59,940 --> 00:57:06,149 And I want to remind sort of audience members, some esteemed academic colleagues in the audience, 535 00:57:06,150 --> 00:57:09,750 if you have any questions, please feel free to put them in the Q&A and we will pick them up. 536 00:57:10,230 --> 00:57:12,900 But I actually wanted to invite face on, 537 00:57:12,900 --> 00:57:20,280 if you would like to sort of jump in at this point and perhaps provide some reflections on the paper and ask some questions to our panel. 538 00:57:20,310 --> 00:57:24,220 Thank you. Sure. Thanks very much. I really enjoyed both papers. 539 00:57:24,240 --> 00:57:25,799 I actually have questions for each of you, 540 00:57:25,800 --> 00:57:32,550 but maybe I can ask the first one to Nadia and then we can see each other and then I could come back for the. 541 00:57:33,300 --> 00:57:42,990 My question to you, Nadia. You know, I see why you are placing side with bit Foucault and there is a critique to be had of football, 542 00:57:43,140 --> 00:57:49,560 which you of you do you and Roy do in in your football contre le card book. 543 00:57:49,830 --> 00:57:57,000 But I wonder if it can be more productive to counter Paul's say than football here, because it you know, 544 00:57:57,000 --> 00:58:02,040 it might allow us to actually make more sense of of sight and your critique of him. 545 00:58:02,640 --> 00:58:05,030 I mean, already it's clear that, you know, 546 00:58:05,040 --> 00:58:12,930 sides idea of Orientalism can be so extensive and found everywhere, precisely because it's not in discourse. 547 00:58:13,260 --> 00:58:18,540 It is not informed by the kind of discipline and regulation that modern foucauldian discourses. 548 00:58:19,650 --> 00:58:24,440 Are seen as possessing and therefore side can locate it. 549 00:58:24,450 --> 00:58:28,500 You know, in the time of the, you know, 550 00:58:29,070 --> 00:58:39,540 personal Greek rivalry of of ancient times to the contemporary day and he can also find Orientalism in properly constituted in for coded terms, 551 00:58:39,540 --> 00:58:45,830 disciplines, anthropology, political science, etc. It really doesn't have a disciplinary existence of its own. 552 00:58:45,840 --> 00:58:53,340 So that's already very clear. But what I think is interesting is how Saeed has to really struggle. 553 00:58:54,340 --> 00:59:02,470 With football. You know, he wants to take on board some of his categories and ideas and sort of consign others. 554 00:59:02,620 --> 00:59:10,970 So, you know, quite apart from repudiating focus anti humanism because it is all about humanism and focus, 555 00:59:10,990 --> 00:59:14,780 focus on discontinuity rather than continue to rise. 556 00:59:14,800 --> 00:59:23,960 Orientalism is all about continuity. You know, on occasion say it seems to come close to a kind of accordion, if you will. 557 00:59:24,870 --> 00:59:28,650 Form of negation in the famous statement Orient does not exist. 558 00:59:28,660 --> 00:59:31,889 But he never really, to my knowledge, follows it up. 559 00:59:31,890 --> 00:59:40,110 And I just wonder whether that in a way gets that the nub of the argument that at many others argument as you as you retell it, 560 00:59:40,350 --> 00:59:48,960 because the negative is never available for side dialectically and therefore it can never be the impetus for freedom. 561 00:59:49,840 --> 00:59:56,799 As it would be in a dialectical schema, but rather is hidden away in the figure of Orientalism itself, 562 00:59:56,800 --> 01:00:04,120 which I think is so supercharged with being precisely because it includes the being of the Orient itself, which otherwise. 563 01:00:05,250 --> 01:00:12,420 It said not to exist. You know, it's a kind of double being almost I think that's that Orientalism represents. 564 01:00:12,840 --> 01:00:16,889 And you know what you what you say about the critique of representation. 565 01:00:16,890 --> 01:00:17,760 I entirely agree. 566 01:00:17,760 --> 01:00:27,870 The critique of representation can only be conservative and predicated on the recovery of identities because it's about discovering the truth. 567 01:00:27,870 --> 01:00:31,560 And yet, as I.M. points out in your telling, 568 01:00:32,190 --> 01:00:39,540 such a recovery actually is impossible given the premises that in this case, both sides in football share. 569 01:00:39,600 --> 01:00:42,690 So I you know, do you think that. In a way, 570 01:00:42,690 --> 01:00:53,099 the relationship between cited for one way in which you can describe it is by understanding how society is so anxious about what to do with negation, 571 01:00:53,100 --> 01:00:59,790 the negative and the discontinuous. Quite apart from the kind of obvious things about and humanism and all the rest. 572 01:00:59,790 --> 01:01:02,939 And it's almost as if it has to be Orientalism. 573 01:01:02,940 --> 01:01:06,540 It's required for its continuities are required for that. 574 01:01:07,410 --> 01:01:10,530 No, great. That's a great question. So thanks as usual. 575 01:01:10,830 --> 01:01:15,840 No, I mean, this is honestly, it's interesting to raise this in relationship to all of sides. 576 01:01:15,840 --> 01:01:18,930 And so it's because you could I mean, you could also do this, 577 01:01:18,930 --> 01:01:23,650 let's say Woodside's reading of Adore nor his relationship to adore and or how he interprets in darkness. 578 01:01:23,700 --> 01:01:30,570 He has a free hand if you would if we can say and kind of how do you taking what he wants and not taking what he doesn't want. 579 01:01:30,690 --> 01:01:37,800 Right. So this kind of whatever syncretism we're putting together these things in a way that renders them somewhat at the end, 580 01:01:38,550 --> 01:01:42,510 at the risk of inconsistency, it creates a theoretical quandary for the reader. 581 01:01:42,510 --> 01:01:50,120 Right. Is a problem. Yes. I mean, it would be interesting to read them against each other, surely in the question of anti humanism. 582 01:01:50,140 --> 01:01:56,160 And also, I think it would be interesting to which the problem would be in a certain sense. 583 01:01:56,160 --> 01:02:01,650 So sorry as a humanist. Right. But yet his account of subjectivity is completely liberal. 584 01:02:01,890 --> 01:02:06,120 Right. This is a completely I mean, it's an individual that he takes for subject. 585 01:02:06,120 --> 01:02:13,379 I mean, you see this clearly in his other texts or whatever on the style and his engagement with someone like Adorno and so on. 586 01:02:13,380 --> 01:02:17,560 So and this is something that you would think, you know, there's also a problem with subjectivity. 587 01:02:17,560 --> 01:02:25,440 And I mean, I think that's what I was kind of trying to get at, which is a crucial problem that obviously management doesn't frame it in these terms. 588 01:02:25,440 --> 01:02:31,950 Right. He's not dealing with the question of subjectivity. I mean, he's a he's a bit of a classical dialectical materialist at the time he's writing. 589 01:02:32,020 --> 01:02:36,690 But I'm can how do you say supplement those shortcomings by introducing this problem. 590 01:02:36,780 --> 01:02:40,079 Right. In the sense that inside account. 591 01:02:40,080 --> 01:02:45,300 Right. Marx doesn't escape the critique precisely because there is no subtractive. 592 01:02:45,690 --> 01:02:53,579 How would you say kind of a moment or possibility outside the discourse outside, you know, give and take the differences that you point out, 593 01:02:53,580 --> 01:03:00,389 which I say I think is probably accurate between some of his account of discourse in Focus and then in Fuku as well. 594 01:03:00,390 --> 01:03:03,590 There is no outside there's not outside of discourse. 595 01:03:03,990 --> 01:03:08,790 In fact, go. I mean, and arguably here one could even allow to serve to push it to another place. 596 01:03:08,970 --> 01:03:13,680 They both reproduce the same problem. It produces kind of bad account of materiality. 597 01:03:13,680 --> 01:03:17,520 You have materiality constituted by discourses and knowledge systems and so on, 598 01:03:17,520 --> 01:03:21,290 and then you have whatever the subject is, just kind of being imprinted on this. 599 01:03:21,300 --> 01:03:28,290 They recreate this inside, outside, probably. Right. And I think, you know, this is precisely why I mean, and I think, you know, 600 01:03:28,290 --> 01:03:31,979 although maybe I'm it doesn't have these terms, why does he so much stick to this problem? 601 01:03:31,980 --> 01:03:36,299 Like like you really laborious. You know, Marx can't think and feel. 602 01:03:36,300 --> 01:03:39,510 Marx feels. And how does this work? Who is Marx here? 603 01:03:39,510 --> 01:03:46,320 What is Marx? If not, you know, the critical subject, the subject there is looking always for this negative and so on. 604 01:03:46,770 --> 01:03:50,370 So, yes, I mean, this would be this would be an interesting thing to engage with. 605 01:03:50,370 --> 01:03:57,150 I mean, the tensions between stage and score and precisely in this question of, 606 01:03:57,540 --> 01:04:02,639 you know, sides kind of liberalism and I think is not simply a liberal. 607 01:04:02,640 --> 01:04:08,220 I think things that are much more complicated there. Right. So this is somewhere one could could follow through this. 608 01:04:08,400 --> 01:04:09,719 But I hope in this kind of response, 609 01:04:09,720 --> 01:04:16,680 I just restate what it was that was interesting in the sense this what I name as being this kind of missing thing that I'm a never names but 610 01:04:16,680 --> 01:04:24,839 is trying to kind of find is they're sort out right how how to think of Marx in relationship to Orientalism the individual and the discourse. 611 01:04:24,840 --> 01:04:28,860 Right. But yeah, I mean, thanks for that. It's it's very interesting. 612 01:04:28,870 --> 01:04:34,859 I'll think about this. So, Professor, if it's all right, I'm going to maybe do it. 613 01:04:34,860 --> 01:04:39,149 Mike. I have a series of questions, but this could actually, because you're both dealing with marks, 614 01:04:39,150 --> 01:04:42,300 and my questions are somewhat general, could actually be picked up by both of you. 615 01:04:42,690 --> 01:04:45,840 So perhaps I'll go and ask further your question. 616 01:04:46,290 --> 01:04:54,330 And Nadia, if you'd like to sort of do technique on the sort of on Fatty's remarks, please feel free. 617 01:04:54,750 --> 01:05:04,260 So in a sense, one of the things that I always come away with, I'm someone who works on contemporary Islam and Islamists very often, 618 01:05:04,650 --> 01:05:08,460 though not of the type that you have in Lebanon, which is quite distinctive with Shia Islamism. 619 01:05:08,850 --> 01:05:14,309 But I look at much of the Sunni world and reading an author like Elizabeth 620 01:05:14,310 --> 01:05:20,430 Kassab and her wonderful sort of kaleidoscopic view of the of Arabic thoughts. 621 01:05:20,850 --> 01:05:27,120 One does get the impression that a lot of the ideas that are in some respects engaging the 622 01:05:27,120 --> 01:05:34,649 European sort of thinkers of the last couple of centuries are in many respects quite cacophonous. 623 01:05:34,650 --> 01:05:39,480 They're still trying to figure out, okay, how do we interact with each other? We're coming from such different places very often. 624 01:05:39,840 --> 01:05:46,050 And Lebanon is a perfect example of this because you have a mosaic society with people with so much diversity of backgrounds. 625 01:05:46,710 --> 01:05:52,170 But when you compare it to the different national contexts, it's even more cacophonous in some respects. 626 01:05:52,770 --> 01:06:03,690 And add to this the sort of propagandising of Islamists about Marx as this small head, this person who is basically the arch anti-religion person, 627 01:06:04,290 --> 01:06:11,759 and suddenly Marx, his appeal is kind of like washed away for large numbers, large sections of the population. 628 01:06:11,760 --> 01:06:17,130 And I kind of wonder in that sort of context to what extent Marx can be salvaged. 629 01:06:17,910 --> 01:06:23,580 You know, in a sense, this is a problem we actually suffer from outside the Middle East as well. 630 01:06:23,580 --> 01:06:30,149 And in the Western world, neoliberalism has been dominant, just has been raging for decades, 631 01:06:30,150 --> 01:06:36,330 you could say, and the left has been battered for perhaps as long as that as well. 632 01:06:36,780 --> 01:06:42,389 I sort of look with hope at South America at the moment, but in that sort of a context, 633 01:06:42,390 --> 01:06:47,730 is this also reflective of a global problem in terms of the left's inability 634 01:06:47,730 --> 01:06:53,490 to really think in any unified fashion to create meaningful social movements, 635 01:06:54,000 --> 01:06:58,690 aside from engaging in much what are very interesting academic debates. 636 01:06:58,710 --> 01:07:03,570 And, you know, I think everyone in the room enjoys them thoroughly because we're all academics. 637 01:07:04,050 --> 01:07:11,790 But translating from that into something into the realms of practice, I guess the main question I'm asking is, 638 01:07:12,270 --> 01:07:18,330 is that even practical in the context that you see in Lebanon, in the Mosaic Society of Lebanon, 639 01:07:18,720 --> 01:07:23,310 and what are its prospects outside the space of Lebanon as well? 640 01:07:23,970 --> 01:07:24,900 It's a huge question. 641 01:07:24,900 --> 01:07:32,010 But, you know, and Nadia and I don't expect sort of straightforward responses or anything else, but I'd really love to hear your thoughts on that. 642 01:07:33,640 --> 01:07:41,400 How many days do I have to respond to this? How many years is the case with. 643 01:07:44,390 --> 01:07:46,220 No, thank you. I mean, it's a big question. 644 01:07:46,460 --> 01:07:53,300 If you permit me, I want to say a couple of words on sort of the conversation between Nadia and Faisal and Ahmed. 645 01:07:53,570 --> 01:07:57,830 Before I go back to this big question, I think what is because they're related, I think. 646 01:08:00,070 --> 01:08:06,190 You know, if you read sort of the intercepts in the U.S. and you put it in Brazil, tourism is the exception. 647 01:08:07,030 --> 01:08:10,270 He was slammed by Paul Structuralist for not being good enough. 648 01:08:10,900 --> 01:08:13,630 Someone like Jim Clifford, the historian of anthropologists, did that. 649 01:08:13,810 --> 01:08:19,690 So if you take both of these stories together, you get a sense of what kind of machine this text is, 650 01:08:19,690 --> 01:08:24,100 so to speak, and how it lends itself to sort of two different, different readings. 651 01:08:24,370 --> 01:08:32,439 That's the first observation because, of course, there are people who sort of drive this either way from the go into the sort of Lucas, 652 01:08:32,440 --> 01:08:35,530 I don't know, Raymond Williams, Gramsci line and so on. These are students. 653 01:08:35,530 --> 01:08:38,799 So in a way that the text lends itself to these different things. 654 01:08:38,800 --> 01:08:45,610 And of course its emphasis on the author in Orientalism is one way in which he radically differentiates himself from that question of discourse. 655 01:08:46,000 --> 01:08:57,819 So. I'm reading I think of offside say those two things is first of all in my opinion it's sort of very much inflected by I'm is a thorough 656 01:08:57,820 --> 01:09:04,130 immersion in the French intellectual field so he collapses for people and scientists are there which is basically I think some of what, 657 01:09:04,180 --> 01:09:10,180 as you know, first of was saying is not collapsible. But also, I think the reason why he focus is so much, you know, 658 01:09:10,180 --> 01:09:14,379 there's so much like transference on these three pages is precisely because of the Iranian revolution, 659 01:09:14,380 --> 01:09:19,780 precisely because they are on the defensive at that point. I mean, he will he will get assassinated two years later. 660 01:09:20,200 --> 01:09:25,359 And that moment this this is a partially an answer to a question, whatever that moment is. 661 01:09:25,360 --> 01:09:30,429 Basically in the Middle Ages, it's the moment of the Oslo debates of basically the question of authenticity, 662 01:09:30,430 --> 01:09:36,969 where where Marxism, where literally like militant Islamist militants are fighting, 663 01:09:36,970 --> 01:09:43,330 but also arguing against Marxists, telling them they are they really have a revolutionary project at that time, 664 01:09:43,330 --> 01:09:47,200 which was called the added bonus of Islamiya to reconstruct Islamic personality. 665 01:09:47,200 --> 01:09:50,470 And one of their main targets is to go against the materialism of the Marxists. 666 01:09:50,920 --> 01:09:59,260 So it happens by guns, but also happens by argument. It happens by literature, it happens by Khomeini's letter to Gorbachev in the late eighties, 667 01:09:59,260 --> 01:10:06,040 which is a very interesting document in which he talks about, you know, the fact that you're you are towards the end of your empire. 668 01:10:06,040 --> 01:10:12,040 And and we have something that you don't have, which is basically I mentioned, which goes beyond materialism. 669 01:10:12,340 --> 01:10:17,020 I mean, if you don't know this letter, I would sort of encourage you to read it. So so that moment. 670 01:10:18,020 --> 01:10:23,570 And that moment is not only I think about sort of structuralism versus like Marxism or enlightenment and enlightenment, 671 01:10:23,870 --> 01:10:27,350 it really it's a moment in which like. 672 01:10:28,460 --> 01:10:33,860 They're being like Marxists are being attacked from their east by basically their own evolution and being cornered. 673 01:10:34,040 --> 01:10:42,649 Bye bye bye. From the West by both structures. And and I'm is trying to find a way, a breathing space in a way to to do that. 674 01:10:42,650 --> 01:10:46,310 Now, to go back to the present and to your to your question. 675 01:10:47,600 --> 01:10:54,499 I do personally think that sort of precisely because we are in the wake of decades of neoliberal policies, 676 01:10:54,500 --> 01:10:58,250 that Marx is more relevant than ever in order to understand our present. 677 01:10:58,900 --> 01:11:07,670 Now, there's a difference between a marxian grid of analysis and what I tried to talk about in the paper, 678 01:11:07,670 --> 01:11:10,249 which would Marx in a grid of analysis, which basically, 679 01:11:10,250 --> 01:11:16,670 you know, with people like David Harvey and what happened in the past three decades in American academia or people like this is quite, 680 01:11:17,210 --> 01:11:18,570 you know, quite prevalent. 681 01:11:18,590 --> 01:11:31,129 But if we go to the question of what does it mean now to actually basically militate and form a political party on the basis of Marxian principles? 682 01:11:31,130 --> 01:11:36,590 I think here there's questions that that have to basically be answered, 683 01:11:36,590 --> 01:11:41,030 which are which I hear you sort of pointing to, which are questions that have to do with the question of difference. 684 01:11:41,690 --> 01:11:46,160 So the big question is, it is and is everyone who needs to sort of, you know, 685 01:11:46,220 --> 01:11:54,680 join a marxist bourgeoisie political movement, be a priori a secular subject, for example, or are we all can we have, 686 01:11:54,710 --> 01:12:01,010 you know, when we're sort of wed talked about sides view of sort of of of individuality of liberal 687 01:12:01,010 --> 01:12:05,510 subjectivity is a liberal subjectivity a precondition for engaging in Marxist militancy or not. 688 01:12:05,690 --> 01:12:10,520 These are big questions, I think. Of course, if you go back to history, you know, there are ways in which. 689 01:12:11,760 --> 01:12:21,430 That stark contrast between, you know, sort of secular militancy and and and religious militancy can be sometimes sort of more complicated, 690 01:12:21,430 --> 01:12:28,380 that there were movements, for example, in Egypt in the eighties of Yasser Islami, sort of like, you know, Islamic left and things like that. 691 01:12:28,650 --> 01:12:33,360 So. So I think the question of marks needs to be sort of apples to apples. 692 01:12:33,360 --> 01:12:37,950 One is on the level of the good of analysis and which I think is an easy answer, which is yes. 693 01:12:37,950 --> 01:12:45,300 And to the more difficult question, which is what form would a marching political organisation basically take in the future? 694 01:12:46,230 --> 01:12:50,490 And I think that that is an answer that. 695 01:12:51,670 --> 01:12:53,200 Cannot be answered APRA. 696 01:12:53,740 --> 01:13:00,879 Theoretically I think it has to be merged both from below, from practice to see how can people come together in order to basically further that. 697 01:13:00,880 --> 01:13:08,260 Because one of the one of the other issues that sort of which which makes us very different from the moment of the sixties, 698 01:13:08,260 --> 01:13:10,990 is that in the last four decades, if you look at political theory, 699 01:13:11,260 --> 01:13:15,070 the concept of the political and the concept of power has been expanded tremendously. 700 01:13:16,920 --> 01:13:22,650 Hmm. So the idea of sort of thinking that power is basically, you know, class exploitation or imperial domination. 701 01:13:23,010 --> 01:13:27,540 I mean, you know, they're not the sort of agendas of intersectionality. 702 01:13:27,720 --> 01:13:31,430 Different kinds of agendas are the sciences are trying to deal with this sort of. 703 01:13:31,590 --> 01:13:34,290 And someone like Wendy Brown noted this a long time ago, 704 01:13:35,130 --> 01:13:39,090 the fact that the notion of power and the notion of political have been really, really sort of stretched. 705 01:13:39,450 --> 01:13:44,879 And if you want to think about sort of the different modes of sort of exploitation, 706 01:13:44,880 --> 01:13:50,490 domination, without falling into the trap of a liberal politics of recognition, 707 01:13:50,700 --> 01:13:56,370 then that's the big question for the left is how do you how do you found a project that takes all of these things together? 708 01:13:57,360 --> 01:14:01,200 And I'll stop here for now. And that's that's a wonderfully sort of. 709 01:14:01,650 --> 01:14:04,650 It's amazing what you did when we when you initially started. 710 01:14:04,770 --> 01:14:07,830 How many days do we have said nothing. Do you want to add anything? 711 01:14:08,400 --> 01:14:16,320 Yes. I mean, I want to kind of just to follow through this, you know, this point, that finding kind of notes, right, 712 01:14:16,320 --> 01:14:23,070 that Edward said, madame, and this debate becomes more interesting in the context of kind of the internal, 713 01:14:23,160 --> 01:14:32,670 I would just say, inter ongoing antagonism or contradictions between the left and the so-called authentic 714 01:14:33,120 --> 01:14:38,609 cultural forces that express whatever the real geist of the people and so on and so forth. 715 01:14:38,610 --> 01:14:44,099 Right. So this is this is important because I think what I was trying to point to in the in the talk 716 01:14:44,100 --> 01:14:51,989 is that I'm was saying that precisely this that Orientalism or the account that Sage offers. 717 01:14:51,990 --> 01:14:58,890 Right, of this kind of, you know, the the what happens with with the transformation of entire, 718 01:14:58,920 --> 01:15:03,640 you know, people or cultures into this into this kind of representation. 719 01:15:03,660 --> 01:15:03,990 Right. 720 01:15:04,320 --> 01:15:14,340 I'm going to somehow, if you so irked by this in the context of an internal struggle with these kind of Islamist or Muslim politics that are emerging, 721 01:15:14,340 --> 01:15:18,329 that's, you know, as you pointed out, of course, end up to his direct assassination. 722 01:15:18,330 --> 01:15:18,890 Right. I mean, 723 01:15:19,050 --> 01:15:28,170 he's literally killed by these factions that he's kind of engaging with or theoretically not just him also has sent him to where others of his time. 724 01:15:28,170 --> 01:15:34,080 Right. That are that are doing this kind of work, arguing that not all culture is revolutionary culture. 725 01:15:34,260 --> 01:15:41,550 Right. We're trying to formulate this this problematic how to think about culture and from a kind of a marxist account. 726 01:15:41,760 --> 01:15:48,870 But what I'm going to saying here is that the Edward Sand's argument on Orientalism. 727 01:15:49,770 --> 01:15:50,850 Unwittingly, 728 01:15:51,120 --> 01:16:02,579 you see affirms or it can be taken to affirm these forms of politics that are unfolding within the so-called kind of local context, right. 729 01:16:02,580 --> 01:16:06,030 Within the so-called postcolonial context itself. 730 01:16:06,060 --> 01:16:10,920 Right. So this is the this is the you know, this is the the irony of the problem. 731 01:16:11,070 --> 01:16:18,000 Right. That it's precisely the same. So rather than say that there's that there can be a kind of a recourse to some kind of authentic. 732 01:16:18,270 --> 01:16:22,840 Right. Precisely. The kind of the point I was raising that the colonised are doubly alienated. 733 01:16:22,860 --> 01:16:27,090 There's no way to go back to some kind of culture, to some kind of authentic belonging. 734 01:16:27,120 --> 01:16:31,350 Right. There's no way to reassert that right after this break or has happened. 735 01:16:32,100 --> 01:16:36,360 And so the pushing forward of so what does Orientalism give us? 736 01:16:36,570 --> 01:16:44,240 What kind of politics can ensue from this? What kind of identity are we supposed to rehabilitate in the wake of a so-called 737 01:16:44,250 --> 01:16:49,979 US kind of a mutation or kind of transformation in the eyes of the West? 738 01:16:49,980 --> 01:16:54,700 And how that kind of takes becomes actually mechanisms of power and numbers of kind. 739 01:16:55,110 --> 01:17:00,059 So so this is I mean, I think this is the crucial question that Amina's Adam is raising. 740 01:17:00,060 --> 01:17:03,800 I mean, why in the middle of this kind of ongoing combat. 741 01:17:03,810 --> 01:17:08,010 Right. Theoretically, practically politically. Why engage with Edwards? 742 01:17:08,280 --> 01:17:09,690 Because he's seeing it as. 743 01:17:09,870 --> 01:17:18,750 As actually being locally articulating somehow in very sophisticated manner the very position that he himself is in contact with. 744 01:17:18,930 --> 01:17:23,760 This is, I think, what I was kind of trying to point out to the right kind of appointments in this context. 745 01:17:24,850 --> 01:17:34,299 Thank you so much. I mean, it's really the paradoxes of Saeed because he's been a source of great empowerment for postcolonial theory and, you know, 746 01:17:34,300 --> 01:17:45,520 developments in, I think, western sort of theoretical spaces that have allowed for a space for in some respects people of colour to articulate, 747 01:17:45,700 --> 01:17:49,260 you know, perspectives that were systemically marginalised, 748 01:17:49,270 --> 01:17:55,750 but at the same time sort of reinforcing things to a certain extent to like, say the General Adams response as well as he put it. 749 01:17:56,290 --> 01:17:59,080 And the women who I mean, thank you for introducing me to him. 750 01:17:59,110 --> 01:18:05,470 I need to read a bit more into some of these areas face of I I'm very conscious of the time we have 5 minutes left. 751 01:18:05,890 --> 01:18:10,030 I just I take Nadia saying that these are structural. 752 01:18:11,170 --> 01:18:17,350 Similarity between the structure, between the structural essence of what is and its limits. 753 01:18:18,340 --> 01:18:27,630 And indeed, it's no accident that the site is such a celebrity among these limits because kind of a rewriting of the history. 754 01:18:28,790 --> 01:18:33,160 Yeah. So it's yeah. But you know, the Western Academy, of course. 755 01:18:34,480 --> 01:18:38,020 I mean, I think this kind of double, you know, this doubling of where this is happening. 756 01:18:38,230 --> 01:18:41,590 So very intriguing right then. And that, you know, 757 01:18:41,590 --> 01:18:47,070 we probably fall into the trap of authenticity talk if we refused to see the structure 758 01:18:47,090 --> 01:18:51,640 relationship between them and the high both the Islamists as being sui generis. 759 01:18:52,660 --> 01:19:00,550 Whereas before the art went further, you know, I was, you know, I was really struck by, you know, your beginning with these dates. 760 01:19:00,850 --> 01:19:07,710 And I entirely agree. I think 1961 really deserves much more attention than it has received. 761 01:19:07,720 --> 01:19:15,970 And you have 1961 as opposed to 1967, but also 1968 and the kind of global student movement, I might add. 762 01:19:15,970 --> 01:19:22,900 You know, how would this arrange of dates? What would it look like if you included 1956, 57, the Suez Crisis? 763 01:19:23,320 --> 01:19:28,000 But I wanted to ask, you know, the thing about the United Arab Republic and it's coming apart, 764 01:19:28,000 --> 01:19:31,240 the very fact that it was put together seems to me to be, 765 01:19:32,050 --> 01:19:37,630 if you will, it was put together almost as a kind of rehearsal of a Leninist style national question. 766 01:19:38,080 --> 01:19:49,210 It was, you know, I mean, whatever the class background of this this strange contraption was this a state separated by other territory? 767 01:19:49,660 --> 01:19:57,970 Is that it's it seems to presuppose, if you will, the Soviet critique of the nation state and the posing of a national question. 768 01:19:58,480 --> 01:20:04,870 And I say this because in some of my own previous work, I'll be a part about how it was that in 1947, 769 01:20:04,870 --> 01:20:08,830 Pakistanis created also two separate pieces separated by India. 770 01:20:08,950 --> 01:20:17,680 You know that. What a bizarre idea of a state. And of course, in that case, explicitly looking at the Soviet Union and other kinds of, if you will, 771 01:20:18,580 --> 01:20:27,040 post-national or at least non-wage on national forms of state making without themselves being proletarian in any sense or Marxist in any sense. 772 01:20:27,040 --> 01:20:37,719 It made me wonder whether, you know, with the 1961 also signals the return or the the genesis of, if you will, 773 01:20:37,720 --> 01:20:45,430 classical or bourgeois forms of nationalism that come not before the Leninist version of the national question, but after. 774 01:20:45,430 --> 01:20:50,260 It might be possible to think that because the the you is such a. 775 01:20:51,150 --> 01:20:55,830 From that point of view, from the viewpoint of the nation state, his point of view, it's such an aberration. 776 01:20:56,220 --> 01:21:05,730 But if that is indeed the case, then the standard issue, conventional nation state can only be a hollow entity because it's already been. 777 01:21:06,240 --> 01:21:11,640 It's almost like an item ism so that we can't look at it in the way that we tend to look at national movements. 778 01:21:11,850 --> 01:21:19,200 First you have colonialism, then you have nationalism, then you have something else happening because there seems to be a back in front thing here. 779 01:21:19,200 --> 01:21:25,200 And I've been thinking in other respects of the end of the post-colonial state, and it seems to me that. 780 01:21:27,310 --> 01:21:32,860 The splitting apart of Egypt and Syria on this can serve as one example of that. 781 01:21:33,280 --> 01:21:41,500 I mean, I had originally look at the looked at the end of Pakistan in 1971 with the creation of Bangladesh, 782 01:21:42,250 --> 01:21:46,900 which finally becomes a conventional, if you will, a nation state, except, of course, it isn't. 783 01:21:47,440 --> 01:21:52,750 And I took that as being the end at the very end of decolonisation. 784 01:21:52,780 --> 01:21:59,620 If you leave South Africa out as a special case, you have suddenly there's no more decolonisation. 785 01:21:59,620 --> 01:22:03,190 But what you have is the end of the post-colonial state itself. 786 01:22:03,520 --> 01:22:09,640 And now with post-colonial states that are being excluded or, you know, and precisely through the logic of civil war. 787 01:22:10,060 --> 01:22:14,410 And that might allow us to think about the Lebanese civil war also slightly differently. 788 01:22:14,740 --> 01:22:20,320 Again, not as an indication of place which has never become a nation state, properly speaking, 789 01:22:20,800 --> 01:22:25,480 but as one that exists in the wake of nationalism or in the wake of the nation state. 790 01:22:25,990 --> 01:22:33,640 Sorry, a bit incoherent, but does that make any sense? I was just inspired by your foregrounding 1961. 791 01:22:34,180 --> 01:22:37,240 No, because I think it all anew. Thank you. 792 01:22:37,270 --> 01:22:41,230 This is. I mean, for me, it's very, very provocative. I really need to think more about this. 793 01:22:41,410 --> 01:22:46,000 So thank you very much. I mean, one small observation I would make is that, you know, 794 01:22:46,000 --> 01:22:52,750 that sort of three years does not compare with basically the sort of timeline of of the splitting of Pakistan in 71, 795 01:22:52,750 --> 01:22:56,200 which is, you know, more than more than a decade, a bit like a decade and a half. 796 01:22:56,830 --> 01:23:08,050 So maybe maybe it would be sort of imputing too much on that event in its founding and its dissolution to take it as. 797 01:23:09,060 --> 01:23:16,440 An early sign of the end of the post-colonial state and the way in which maybe it could be more productive to think through these questions. 798 01:23:17,190 --> 01:23:24,629 A second minor observation on the question of 56. This generation that I was interested in were mostly born in the early mid-forties. 799 01:23:24,630 --> 01:23:29,610 So they they sort of they were kids. When 56 happened, it was very striking for them. 800 01:23:29,610 --> 01:23:34,079 But there was no sort of like sort of theoretical output or, you know, 801 01:23:34,080 --> 01:23:37,799 they didn't they were not part of an age group in which they could sort of think things through. 802 01:23:37,800 --> 01:23:40,980 That 56 had different ramifications, I think, for earlier generations. 803 01:23:41,430 --> 01:23:50,760 And the reason why I was interested in them is precisely because this is these are Marxists who started out as Arab nationalists at the time when, 804 01:23:51,270 --> 01:23:57,749 you know, there was the sort of the Arabs were a bit discredited by sort of toeing the 805 01:23:57,750 --> 01:24:02,129 Soviet line along the partition of Palestine and in the end in the forties. 806 01:24:02,130 --> 01:24:06,480 So they came to Marxism as the first critics of national liberation. 807 01:24:06,960 --> 01:24:12,150 So this it's a very condensed history of a generation which basically thinks life, 808 01:24:12,150 --> 01:24:17,600 believes in the promise of the nation, then realises that it's not all about the outside. 809 01:24:17,610 --> 01:24:25,470 And then when once you remove that lid, which is colonialism, we're going to unite automatically, which is why 61 was such a shock for them, 810 01:24:25,740 --> 01:24:31,379 because they really believed that we are one nation divided by basically colonialism and one school year was out. 811 01:24:31,380 --> 01:24:34,020 Then of course we're going to unite directly. So. 812 01:24:36,230 --> 01:24:41,960 I mean, that's sort of a circuitous answer to your to basically, you know, sort of planning this natural question. 813 01:24:42,200 --> 01:24:44,720 I don't know. Actually, I don't know if. 814 01:24:46,210 --> 01:24:55,060 If they look at that, when, when, when, when they did that, I need to sort of I need to do more sort of digging into 61, 815 01:24:55,060 --> 01:25:04,000 which is not premised on the oral history interviews I did with how 61 is remembered and how it led to sort of fights within the Baath Party, 816 01:25:04,000 --> 01:25:09,309 for example, or moving out of the Arab national, Arab nationalist movements, etc. 817 01:25:09,310 --> 01:25:18,490 But I think it's a fascinating idea to to think about these sort of non territorially contiguous unions, as you mentioned, 818 01:25:18,490 --> 01:25:24,340 you know, and like, what is it that they what do they do say as and what is it that they say about the nation state as a form but. 819 01:25:25,850 --> 01:25:30,469 In the case of the Arab world, I think that that idea of, you know, 820 01:25:30,470 --> 01:25:37,370 the nationalist idea of sort of removing cohere them and uniting directly, was that so the question of really understanding two things. 821 01:25:37,370 --> 01:25:42,590 Marxism was an aspect of two things. One is, well, there's something else which is called the social structure, 822 01:25:43,490 --> 01:25:50,090 but then there's something else which is very important, which is the sort of class composition of these regimes. 823 01:25:50,720 --> 01:25:58,380 You know, there's an Egyptian Marxist trio that was very important for this for this generation, which is some I mean, 824 01:25:58,670 --> 01:26:03,620 who wrote under the pseudonym of Hassan Riad, he wrote this amazing book that was never translated into English. 825 01:26:03,620 --> 01:26:10,370 I think the Egyptian the Syrian Nasser Egypt, which is based on his working in the state and with basically the, 826 01:26:10,610 --> 01:26:15,700 I think the Office of Planning or something like that. The second one is Anwar Abdul Malik. 827 01:26:16,230 --> 01:26:19,340 It's a book, Egypt, a military society. And the third, 828 01:26:20,090 --> 01:26:29,420 they are still alive are the bad guys in the end identified that do that right under the name of Mahmoud percent who wrote class struggle in Egypt. 829 01:26:29,900 --> 01:26:33,070 So these were older people who are older. 830 01:26:33,080 --> 01:26:35,719 They were not born in the forties, they were the twenties or the thirties, 831 01:26:35,720 --> 01:26:41,959 and they were sort of Marxian critics of the classical positions of these officers and of their 832 01:26:41,960 --> 01:26:47,000 petty bourgeois nature and how there's a cast of bureaucrats that's developing around them. 833 01:26:47,330 --> 01:26:56,120 And there's a very, very prescient sort of, in a way, analysis of the class privileges that the army officers as a caste sort of sort of develop. 834 01:26:56,720 --> 01:27:05,090 So out of this out of this universe, I think, comes an articulation of a critique of these progressive regimes, 835 01:27:05,090 --> 01:27:08,870 which is way before, I mean, not way, but like a few years before 67. 836 01:27:09,740 --> 01:27:15,620 So, yeah, I'm not sure if I'm being again very, very coherent in answering you, but I do think that. 837 01:27:17,680 --> 01:27:19,479 That's what that's what I would say, actually. 838 01:27:19,480 --> 01:27:27,820 You know, I would say that, you know, 51, 58, 61 in itself is definitely worthy of sort of going back and reworking it and seeing the model. 839 01:27:28,120 --> 01:27:33,930 But also, I don't think. It could be given the same weight as the 71. 840 01:27:34,590 --> 01:27:38,430 But, you know, the Lebanese civil war was, for me, very, very interesting as an early model. 841 01:27:39,000 --> 01:27:46,110 As an early model, which is which sort of in a way shows a failure of a particular nationalism. 842 01:27:46,140 --> 01:27:54,260 At the same time as. There was a resurgence of nationalism that get described in a book like Ben Anderson's imagined community. 843 01:27:54,960 --> 01:28:02,270 If you read the first pages of Ben Anderson's imagined communities, what the book says is that basically what's happening in Southeast Asia, 844 01:28:02,270 --> 01:28:05,290 we have basically Marxist regimes that are having wars against each other. 845 01:28:05,370 --> 01:28:10,999 Obviously, there's something else here which is not ideology that can have can explain what's happening, 846 01:28:11,000 --> 01:28:16,970 what's happening between Vietnam and Cambodia. Therefore, there's this thing called nationalism and we need to go back and study it. 847 01:28:17,300 --> 01:28:24,290 So in a way, these election isms have always been fascinating for me, you know, sort of like that, this question of. 848 01:28:25,290 --> 01:28:30,119 The dissolution of Lebanese nationalism at the same time as the nationalist question 849 01:28:30,120 --> 01:28:33,750 is sort of gaining more and more traction and then gets inscribed in theory, 850 01:28:34,050 --> 01:28:36,630 the anachronism of the Palestinian question, 851 01:28:36,900 --> 01:28:44,460 which is basically a national liberation question in the age of know decolonisation and after the age of postcolonial, postcolonial. 852 01:28:44,610 --> 01:28:51,179 And how do you make sense of that in the Arab world? You know, the sort of persistence of these sort of like anachronisms in a good sense, 853 01:28:51,180 --> 01:28:54,570 not in the sense that they're related, but in a sense that they're they're out of things. 854 01:28:55,290 --> 01:28:58,960 I'm sorry. I thought I think I spoke too much. Thank you very much. 855 01:28:59,020 --> 01:29:05,100 Great. And to both. Sorry. I just wanted to actually take the option, even though we've gone a bit over time. 856 01:29:05,400 --> 01:29:09,390 I'd like to give Nadia the opportunity to add anything you may wish to. 857 01:29:09,510 --> 01:29:15,450 I also. I'm conscious, Nadia, that it's probably very late where you are, so I don't want to sort of insist or anything like that. 858 01:29:15,750 --> 01:29:19,070 But if you want, you can know. I'm good. I'm good for now. Thanks. 859 01:29:19,530 --> 01:29:26,070 Fantastic. So if it's all right, I'm going to sort of wrap up and just briefly let the audience members know that. 860 01:29:26,850 --> 01:29:32,010 And of course, panellists, if you'd like to join in a fortnight's time, we'll have our next session. 861 01:29:32,400 --> 01:29:40,139 So I'd first later thank Fadi and Nadia for really giving us a lot of food for thought and about in a sense, 862 01:29:40,140 --> 01:29:46,680 mid 20th century, mid to late 20th century Marxist thinking in the Middle East. 863 01:29:47,730 --> 01:29:58,920 And next week, we're going to shift from the left to to the from the modern left to friendship with a special focus on the medieval era. 864 01:29:58,950 --> 01:30:02,550 And some thoughts on South Asia in more recent years. 865 01:30:03,240 --> 01:30:11,400 We're going to have a shot from the American University of Sharjah and shed a little rain from Franklin and Marshall College. 866 01:30:11,850 --> 01:30:20,280 And they will both be speaking. Nuha will be speaking about friendship and Islamic ethical, political thought and charity today, 867 01:30:20,280 --> 01:30:24,360 and we'll be talking about debating Hindu-Muslim friendship after empire. 868 01:30:24,900 --> 01:30:27,990 So we really look forward to having people join. 869 01:30:27,990 --> 01:30:36,210 And I once again conclude by thanking Nadia Farhadi and of course Faisal for participating in the discussion and convening with me, 870 01:30:36,960 --> 01:30:42,360 getting things off the ground. Thank you all, really. And I look forward to continuing our conversations. 871 01:30:43,050 --> 01:30:46,110 Please do join in future weeks if you can as well. 872 01:30:46,290 --> 01:30:47,940 Thanks. Thank you.