Welcome everyone to what is now starting to become an evening event.
Given our change of clocks and the winter coming upon us.
Thank you for joining us for another week at the Oxford Political Thought seminar convened by myself and Professor.
My name's Osama Azmi and Professor Faisal Typekit from the Asian Studies Centre.
This is a fortnightly opportunity. We have to reflect on developments in political thought within an Islamic Islamic register.
And we're delighted to be able to welcome this week Nadia Buari and Fathi, by the way,
one from the other side of the Atlantic and one from the other side of the Mediterranean, I suppose.
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.
But now we've really benefited from taking advantage of scholarly expertise from around the world.
So I'd like to begin by introducing our two speakers, and our first speaker is Nadia Abu Ali, and each of us speakers will speak for about 20 minutes.
She is beaming in from the American University of Beirut, and she is, of course,
well known to us as a graduate of the Middle East Centre and is currently an
assistant professor of Civilisation Studies at the American University of Beirut.
And you're sort of the co-editor of Lacan Contrast who code, subjectivity, sex and politics.
And when Nadia will be speaking to us about is the heart for the East and reason for the West.
Nadia Amir's critique of Edward Said.
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.
Thank you very much. Just to add that, Nadia, this book is called Psychoanalysis and A Love of Arabic Hall of Mirrors, which appeared not so long ago.
Wonderful read. Thank you so much. Thanks.
So thank you both for this invitation. Hi, Fadi.
It's nice to be on this panel together. I'm just going to kind of jump right into it.
The topic of the I'm kind of my presentation here,
the talk is Nadia Amer's critique of Edward Said's thesis or main thesis in the book Orientalism in 1986 and 86,
Ahmed critiques what he perceives to be Syed's cogent account of the interconnectedness of knowledge and power and Orientalism.
Iman's main contention and response to Sayeed is that discourse analysis cannot offer an adequate
account of the relationship between material conditions of production and discursive ones.
So I'm as problem with the Orientalism thesis as I will proceed to show.
And in so far as it is, this kind of Zaidi and Vicodin account that is presented in it.
I'm his main problem is that it leaves no outsides to discourse and sees power everywhere.
But not only so its most dangerous component for damage is the rebuke of all modern thought as Western and Orientalism.
Of course, for those of you who don't know, I'm his main concern in line with his is with his general theoretical and political project.
His main concern with modern thought is precisely the critical and rationalist tradition, and more specifically, Marx,
meaning he regards as indispensable for any consideration of practices that are committed to emancipation,
especially emancipation from colonial capitalism.
So for an account of mechanisms of domination that would be adequate for the aims of local emancipatory politics must be justified rationally.
And this is this is something that we can talk about later.
What does account of rationality is and what is particular approach to this?
But it must be justified rationally through grasping the singular historical process that is specific to said society,
whatever society is being under investigation. And Iman's account sides focus on mechanisms and discourses of power as mechanisms of
interpellation of what you could say for mechanisms for the formations of subjectivity,
includes any possibility for understanding and thereby critiquing structures that are
specific to colonial capitalism beyond the confines of the logic of representation.
So he has a problem with the logic of representation as it unfolds in Edward Saied's account of Orientalism,
and which he kind of also traces to kind of a. Vicodin. So I'm in those question sites for cogent account of power knowledge.
And raises for us a set of questions How can we ever escape power, which is everywhere, if knowledge can never be disinterested and truth right?
Does it counter to power, knowledge regimes or ideologies does not exist itself, outside regimes of truth.
And here, perhaps we could add Darwin's disapproval of the Orientalism thesis that why?
Why would we even speak truth to power if power doesn't listen?
If there is no knowledge that can escape mechanisms of power, there is no outside power.
And this is a given these questions. How can you then develop concepts for analysing capitalist domination in the postcolonial world?
If rationality, which is precisely what one requires to construct concepts, is complicit and must be thrown out with the bathwater of Western thought.
So interestingly,
the concept that Iman was invested in developing in his larger project of rehabilitating dialectics and he has a particular approach to this again,
this is stuff I've discussed elsewhere, but but I won't spend time on this here.
But the central concept that Iman was interested in development was the concept of break or cut or cuckoo or epistemic a cuts,
one that we all know is not far from Zuko's own account of history as a compilation of discontinuous episodes.
But it's very interesting because I'm as both close to this account of cut, of epistemic cut of epistemic break.
But he comes to it from a different place, not just from Episteme, but from thinking about social structure.
And this is crucial. And so although he's very close to this problem, he comes to, which from a very different angle.
So the problem for me, Daniel, that can be stated if we can put it in stated quite simply, it's it's like this.
If colonial capitalism sundered the history of the colonised,
how can that break be superseded without reproducing fantasies of a return to some untarnished past,
the very fantasies that seemed complicit and extending the historicity of the colonial relation which you will see or where you are, you are.
You will argue that Edward said in fact promulgates such a fantasy.
So the Orientalism thesis does not provide a horizon for politics and Madonna's account in the postcolonial world.
This is the problem. What to east is even salvageable after it has been discursive being produced is that
even the question to be asked must be simply right and rewrite history against master.
Now, is this precisely is this the only procedure? Is this the only thing that we can do in the post-colonial moment?
So I was considered the colonial problem or the problem of colonisation in these terms.
Colonisation introduces a rupture, a break or a cut in social formations, a break which instils a new historical temporality.
And the historical temporality, this, this historical temporality of, of colonial societies is, is primarily driven by the reproduction of capitalism,
by capitalist accumulation on the one hand, but also more crucially on the reproduction of what we could call identity thinking.
On the other hand, and this this is I mean, this is very,
very important because it will be precisely the kind of the accusation the Commonwealth
will put forth against Edward site that the thesis he provides in Orientalism,
the politics or the horizon of politics that is given by that text from from within the post-colonial world.
Right. This is Medea Ahmed, writing in Beirut in 1986 at the height of the Lebanese civil war.
He will argue that Syed's account is can be somewhat categorised within a
bourgeois nationalist identity thinking mode of apprehending reality or so on.
So Ahmed's designation of this a what I'm calling identity thinking here in his in his works,
is what he calls this kind of a method of thinking that is premised on the repetition
of what he calls essences or what we could perhaps call a logic of essentialism.
And what is important for us here is that Ahmed and lists values under this form of thinking,
which, of course, for us sounds perhaps counterintuitive, right?
In the post-colonial world, it is that the national bourgeoisie that mobilises this form of identity,
thinking and according to I'm inside, perhaps on. Promulgates this position so I'm argues that side like to before him fell into the trap of assuming
what he calls right this kind of unity of thought or again as I call it identity thinking.
So then the notion of a unity of thought in the West about the Orient creates a synchronic frozen structure that cannot be overcome.
Sorry, it claims that Western thought is permeated by the discourse of Orientalism,
even in its most radical thinker, most radical critical thinker, thinker Marx.
No one can escape the discourse of Orientalism. And here, of course, I mean, it's interesting that only perhaps someone like Montesquieu does.
And the book. Right, just requires some qualification. Is it because he's so juridical, so liberal?
I mean, it's an open question, right. But time it proceeds to read science account of knowledge as a positive and historicist form of knowledge.
Again, these are variations, what we would call variations of identity versions of identity thinking,
because what it does is it conflates with what Ahmed calls an object of thought with a real object.
It confuses the two sides, according to him, it confuses a representation.
The Orientalism is a representation of the East with the object itself.
Western thought to occur in all of Western thought, but for neither the East nor the West exist as real entities outside nationalist ideology.
They can only exist from within the purview of nationalist ideology because both sides,
the East and the so-called West are permeated by one primary contradiction and antagonism.
For Ahmed, that is the antagonism of class or the real of class struggle.
And of course, here again, a side note class is not understood here as a sociological category,
nor is it understood within the terms of what we would think about the logic of representation or as a category of representation,
but as a site of antagonism of really existing contradiction, so to speak, an unconscious motor of history somewhat.
But its conflation, according to Ahmed,
does not allow for a properly objective account of material contradictions within thought itself, which in turn arises.
These contradictions and thought are not separable,
but rather arise from real conditions of class struggle or class antagonism and society, both in theory and in reality.
And it is class society for Ahmed and the Colonial, a kind of what he calls the colonial mode of production.
And outside it, it is class society that is the condition of possibility for all identity thinking, right?
The East and West are identities only for bourgeois consciousness, as he says,
and there are equally and we should critically assert that they are equally traversed by a negativity.
The West is not one. Neither is the East. They can only relate to each other as opposing identities.
Only if we are able to think the negativity right?
This kind of universal class antagonism,
the class struggle that is kind of the real universal of capitalist society that permeates both and relates them to each other.
So this is kind of but I want to get into a bit into the nitty gritty as of,
of Saeed's particular reading of Marx and what is at stake in each side's particular reading of Marx
in relation to the discourse of Orientalism and the West is premised on the argument that Marx,
the individual thinker, Marx, the person, so to speak, could not escape the hegemonic rules of reason and rationality, which is a unity, right?
This this unity of thought. And so far as it relates to individual thought from the outside, right?
So there's this kind of unity of thought that is Western reason, Western rationality,
Western episteme and discourses that somehow relate or over relate on onto the individual from outside like external.
So a marxist shortcoming and sides reading is that he could not relate to or recognise
the existential human condition of oriental suffering from colonisation society.
Its rejoinder to Marx is premised on the assertion that he cannot be simultaneously compassionate to the East and
rational about the so-called revolutionising of relations of production that has been that is instilled by colonisation,
by capitalist colonisation. So to kind of continue in this line of it, if Marx feels sympathy with the suffering of the East,
he cannot possibly think the conditions of that suffering.
Thus, Marx has to disavow the suffering of the East and argues that side here adopts a classical approach to contradiction a state.
It cannot be true and false at the same time. Right? How can Marx feel bad about colonisation yet rationally accept it?
As for the higher good. This is the contradiction the site points to in his reading of Marx.
Either Marx should condemn colonisation in both feeling and thought, so to speak,
or his contradictory statements are deemed as false as a disavowal that is complicit in the promulgation of Orientalism and colonisation.
However, I.M. reminds us here in his in his assessment of this argument that the very first premise of the dialectic,
which is I mean, I'm in this committed to dialectical thinking,
is to overcome the limits of classical logic and reject the principle of non contradiction,
contradictions in a dialectical approach index of truth that is not simply irrational and absurd, but essential and.
And and and actual. So for Ivan, sorry, there was a mix up in the PowerPoint there.
I'll come back to this.
So for the insight lies not in saying the discourse is contradictory, but only in saying that we must be able to grasp reality and its concept.
Right. In other words, the reality that Marx attempts to grasp and his analysis of a mode of production and the
encounter between colonisation and capitalist expansion is in itself contradictory,
really contradictory and historical through and through.
So condemning colonisation without acknowledging its role and transforming relations of
production and a Marxian dialectical approach that it wishes to defend is simply not enough.
And that's precisely kind of the the rejoinder, right, that that that side poses against Marx.
So inside reading,
Marx's disavowal of compassion returns somehow in his affirmation of the rational unfolding of history defined as a history of progress.
This about compassion and this sense masquerades as violent reason.
And, you know, this is a familiar argument. We hear this argument a lot.
It's not just one novel by Edward XII, but. But this is the familiar story, right?
The familiar caricature of Marx. Marx as a technological thinker, like all Western rationalists, Marx Marx's account of history has it has a telos.
But we can just 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?
That he states that all of capitalist history, all of this capitalist history, is understood as a pre-history of humanity.
This is a claim that Marx makes in the manifesto. There is indeed a capitalist telos, but it is somehow without its ideology, right?
It is. It is. It ends with an end of history, not with a beginning, not with a continuation of its of its historicity.
It isn't a stepping stone to progress, but has the capacity to reproduce itself.
Or reproduce what Edward said cause what? What Whitman Diamond calls a selloff or regression.
Again, between quotes, we can come back to this spuriously ad infinitum.
This is the problem is that the moment that you have this capitalist temporality
introduced into the colonial and the colonial with colonial capitalism,
the tempo that is put to work, the historical temporality is one that is premised on the reproduction of regression,
crisis, essentialist logic and identity thinking.
This is the this is the this is the stuckness, as he calls it, of history as it unfolds.
And this colonial or post-colonial?
post-Colonial world. Right. So I will add to this picture and his works that prehistory takes on these different forms of in the
postcolonial words where postcolonial it does nothing beyond extending the conditions of domination.
This is his problem in 1986. The post-colonial doesn't lead to emancipation by necessity.
There is no.
If anything, there's a stuckness and cycles of repetition within postcolonial nation forms that are instilled by particular state apparatuses,
by ideological formations, such as, for example, sectarianism and the Lebanese state.
So to go back to state interprets Marx's rationalisation of colonisation as a renunciation of what he calls an existential human identity.
And it translates it as who we are with Judea and said, This is what Marx lacks, right?
The disavowal of the heart affirms abstract ideals, according to Syeed, like freedom and necessity.
So Marx, the feeling individual is a con and the drama of collective and abstract Western reason.
And it argues that this presentation of Marx cannot but be grounded for this.
Presentation of thought as being an individual thinker versus the unity of thought
that is being kind of impressed on the individual thinker that they cannot escape,
right? There's no exit from power. There is no exit from discourse. There's no exit from from hegemonic.
Right. So Ahmed proposes that this presentation of Marx can only be possible through a discursive account of knowledge.
Because Norway's knowledge is always already this will to power, right?
This is always the structure of of knowledge. As such, Marx's individual knowledge cannot escape the collective discourse of Orientalism.
There's no way out of the discourse of Orientalism. Moreover, Marx's rationality is nothing but the reflection of collective Western reason.
So ultimately, I'm in questions decided reduction of knowledge to discourse.
He argues that this reduction affirms a bourgeois understanding of sociality as a collection of individuals.
Right? So society is a collection of individuals that expresses itself in one discourse.
So if knowledge cannot escape domination by Western reason,
and if no individual subject in the West can escape Orientalist discourse again, besides more Montesquieu, right?
This kind of question then by what means and asks, Can we think universal emancipation?
So if Marx,
the critique of capitalism is included in the discourse of Orientalism and thus rendered unfit for emancipation in the non non-Western world,
what is left for the East other than the heart? Right. 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,
with Marx's heart, with his compassion for the violence of colonisation?
And moreover, the question that that raises what is Marx's heart without his mind,
compassion, sentiment and sympathy, although commendable human traits,
once we can wrestle them out of the so-called kind of smidgen understanding of faculties,
they do not make for the possible reorganisation of social life beyond the captives domination.
Possible colonised nations, in particular, according to Ahmed, need less feeling and more Marxist science.
Right. This is again, we can discuss this, but this is his position, right? More of shaft, which is neither positivist nor simply a historical.
So, you know, granted here that although I'm in, does sound like a crude, mechanistic defender of the so-called iron laws of history.
We have to remember that he was precisely the kind of the thinker who had this main concept,
consistent argument with what he called again between parentheses Western Marxism,
because colonised de gens have their own singular trajectory to to kind of attempt to exit from captain's relations,
which is not only dictated by the developments in Western capitalism.
So. I was mean question in his response about to site or his or his or his main problem in a sense can be posed in this way.
Why can't one think and feel at once without that translating into the impossibility of knowing in a disinterested manner?
Can we not condemn violence while seeking to understand it and critique it if there can be no disinterested
knowledge or no truth from where to level a critique from then by what means can be apprehended?
Violence and social conditions of violence and the means to their overcoming.
Right. So Iman's main question in his response to Saeed can be posed as such if the heart is for the East and the mind for the West.
Then to what hall do these parts correspond? Are they parts of a whole that can be identified dialectically?
A whole that would be more than the sum of its parts. Or to be more precise.
To quote here, a hole that is equal to its parts, but not equal to them as parts to quote from Hegel.
What organic totality can be achieved from the part full relationship?
If we take east and west as parts a heart and a mind, right?
So the dialectical approach, the one that Ahmed kind of tries to pursue in the discussion of side and sides, the problem with Marx and the task text,
the dialectical approach would seek to unravel how the whole is present in each of its parts, yet remains autonomous from them.
That is the dialectically achieved relation in itself, right?
Ivan argues that sides problem the unequal partnership of parts east and west,
heart and mind cannot be solved in sides on terms inside the limits of discourse, but requires a dialectical account of the totality.
That is capitalism for me as a totality that appears in all these parts.
So if science, cosmopolitanism, reified,
the two distinct entities of East and West as heart and reason are the questions the use of hearts and mind as representatives of East and West,
and asks to what possible whole or totality do they belong?
And here again, as a background for those of you anyone is doing research on Almond, the reference here for men is someone like Christiane said,
right in the French context, it makes an argument for something that requires a scientific theory of emergence that is dialectical but not whitelist.
Right. This is an interesting kind of sphere of influence and French epistemology was very much crucial for my mahatma's works.
So to go back to this problem of organic totality by the organic totality of
capitalist society is nothing but a totality that cannot totalising right.
This is precisely its thing. It's a hole that cannot be won. This is that this is the problem.
It's permeated by contradiction. So in other words, for Hermann, what he wants to propose is to kind of, in a certain sense, push.
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.
And I would propose that we have to think of capitalism in this totality that does not total lies as the condition of possibility, the gridlock,
as he says and is and is, and his in this formulation for both East and West and colonisation,
is the base, the group that gives capitalism its fundamental character.
And it is in this dialectical sense that colonial capitalism installed a new ground,
albeit violently a new explanatory base for a next level of transformation,
so-called transformation, or perhaps not also reproduction of the same conditions of immiseration, which for any society.
And so it's not necessarily a trajectory of progress, a loss of progress.
So particular nations, colonised nations in the east can no longer refer back to their own histories.
This is precisely their problem.
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,
because now they are bound to the laws of capital, the ground,
the conditions of possibility that are at work and to to this historicity, to this to its own logic of its internal relations.
Right. This kind of the ground the ground where the base of capital.
In other words, the colonised and the sense are double the alienated.
And of course, this is not just something to do. And I'm right,
you hear this and for no there's a claim that similar to this in Dubois in this is something that a
lot of Marxist thinkers who are how would you say engaging with the problem of capital from you know,
from. Senator, so to speak, also whether there is a centre in surgery in this model, but this double alienation of colony of the colonised.
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.
So colonial nations are thereby locked into what Ahmed calls their stunted histories, relegate to a kind of a tragic repetition of essence.
But what a tragic one, because it is one that is an irresolvable, irresolvable conflict between the institutions of the post-colonial state.
Right. So like the sectarian states in Lebanon, for instance, and the demands for emancipation from from domination.
Right. So. So the. The historicity of this. So there's a lot one is locked into this this this problem in the colonised world.
I'm coming shortly to the end. I hope I haven't come too late to this.
I need 2 minutes. Right. So Ahmed argues that a dialectical account of a relational totality is needed.
Right. One that has a non-linear dynamic. Can this account allow for the overcoming of conditions of inequality without an
account of what kind of body we have to assign to the hearts and the mindset?
Right. The East and the West. If it is simply a demand for equal recognition is not all recognition anyways premised on a missed recognition.
Right. A mismatch of organs without a body. A fragmented body in a body which always leaves something more to be desired.
Is the question that. That Iman poses. Right. And and what he's saying is that what it should leave us more and desire of is is a dialectical account
of totality that can somehow reconstitute the body of this division between heart and heart and mind,
east and west. Right. So Iman argues that it is precisely this kind of account that is needed.
And here I mean, if I'm at the end of my time, you know, I'm it proceeds to kind of make an argument.
And you is very perceptive because there are people, you know,
engaging with this kind of thing today that what's happening in this Vicodin analysis of discourse is that
you have what he calls this kind of cultural structuralism bound together with the Nietzsche and nihilism.
Right. That there's a there's a problem, right.
That in this proposition that there's a unity of reason is possible based on this kind of alliance, theoretical alliance.
And this is a problem identifies this as a kind of a, you know, the real problem, the dialectical a kind of a thinking has to engage with.
Right. Because it forecloses any emancipatory potentials of of of rationality, which I'm and remains committed to.
Right. This is at the height of the again, the Lebanese civil war, 86, already the so-called leftist,
a kind of a project has somewhat been defeated, in fact, de facto and in the end, the progress of the Civil War.
Right. So I want to kind of jump a bit ahead to kind of a conclusion here.
The problem that that somehow Mark to start on the Orient raises where I'm right is that
this is thought cannot be understood as being as falling into a system of knowledge,
relations of power, also relation to the South like Marx does on contradiction with his own self.
Right. He verifies Orientalist knowledge, affirms its relations of power, and allows it to trump his feelings.
Right. And his own relationship to himself, like Marx, the individual as bereft of critical acumen as is any other self, any other subject.
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.
He's basically saying in this account that that takes which code, that what is lacking is any possibility of a subjective, subjective moment,
an account of subjectivity that can exit this discourse, that can be somehow a material for projects that are really trans transformative.
Right. So Marx, the individual is also bereft of political acumen like any other self right side.
And Fuku somehow assumes and asks, how do they escape the slope of power?
Right, which kind of somehow wraps every, every, every and everyone into it.
Right. So Marx, like all other European thinkers of his time, was like a fish contained in a bowl of water.
Right. That he did not see the captive of a discourse that sired all these groups who could somehow identify.
So I'm Bill asks how do you feel? Go inside escape the fishbowl of Western reason the iron rules of discourse.
Unfortunately, in the account that they provide us, we don't allow subjects to kind of exist outside of them.
We are all already in framed and discursive practices,
caught up in their images and always destined to speak a will that is disguised as truth to power.
This is kind of a provocative ending that I be precisely.
Precisely ends his critique with this tone. Right. This is a problem that he that he somehow leaves us with or raises.
Okay, I'll stop here. Sorry if I went over time. Thank you so much, Nadia.
That was really illuminating on so many levels and actually a sort of traversing of so many different intellectual streams.
And I think it will give us so much to discuss at the end of this.
I want to remind participants that you can always ask questions in the Q&A,
and we will try our best to come to your questions in the second half of our session.
And I also want to sort of take the opportunity, Nadia, to mention your book again, because I did admit to mention it.
Thank you, Fazal, for highlighting it, that you have a book published in 2020 Psychoanalysis and the Loves of Arabic,
published by Edinburgh University Press. So I do encourage people to try and get their hands on that next and waiting very patiently.
Fadi. Well, I didn't think you needed a lot of patience to enjoy this wonderful exposition by Nadia.
Already, by the way, is a professor at Duke University and can give me just got my notes.
An anthropologist by training and currently based at the Duke University with
research that focuses on the international circulation of critical theory,
the genealogies of postcolonial critique and traditions of intellectual inquiry and modalities of political engagement of contemporary Arab thinkers.
And you also, of course, have a book published in the same year as Nadia.
Your most recent book is entitled Revolution and Disenchantment, Arab Marxism and the Binds of Emancipation.
I'm sure that your two lectures will be in a wonderful opportunity for dialogue.
I'll let you go ahead with it. Thank you.
Thank you, Salma and five sons for extending the invitation.
It's nice to be on the same panel as Nadia. Let me say a few things before I start reading my paper.
I think it's very refreshing that Nadia went first because I'm going to be talking
about the period which is 20 years before the period that she's talking about.
So, Maria, I'm going to stick to responding to statements published in the mid-eighties.
I'm going to be focusing on them on the mid-sixties to the mid-seventies.
And this is, I think, important for a variety of reasons, because in the mid-eighties,
someone like Mehdi Army was on the defensive after the defeat of the left and the best in the resistance in the wake of the Israeli invasion of 1982,
despite the leftist resistance to Israel.
But there was a sense, you know, a decade after the beginning of the Lebanese civil and regional wars, that that revolutionary subject.
Of that's supposed to bring about change.
And emancipation has been fractured along international sectarian lines on the one hand, and more importantly, in the case of Ahmed,
as a conversion of the revolutionary subject into an Islamist revolutionary subject
in the wake of the Khomeini's devolution and the Iranian revolution of 79.
And it's sort of like Khomeini's resonances in that text that Nadia mentioned.
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,
and he ends up assassinated then 87. And it's most widely known that it's at the hands of these factions that he was assassinated.
This is important because I'm going to be talking about 67 and 61, which is the period when.
People were not very much engaged in the politics of theory, that sort of an idea so eloquently talked about,
but rather they were very interested in formulating a theory of politics.
And it's also the period when someone like Edward Seides, who was a detached professor at Columbia University, gets his political awakening,
as he sort of mentions in his memoirs and turns his gaze back in a moment of recovery,
discovery of identity towards Palestine and and commits himself to Palestinian struggle.
So there is in that moment that I'm going to be talking about a common a common sort of a difference.
The difference is the distinction between the politics of fear and the fear of politics on the other, on the one hand.
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.
I don't have a PowerPoint. I have a paper in seven sections that I will read and hopefully will go over time.
Section one, the ubiquity of the 1967 defeat.
There is no doubt that 1967, which marks the swift military defeat of Arab armies against Israel, has a ubiquitous historiographical presence.
It is the turning point, but it also you will find it referenced in Arab newspaper articles,
in Arab human development reports put out by the UNDP and the critical literature discussing artistic,
intellectual and political trends in books and contemporary Arab thought as the marker of what is contemporary, etc.
Disuse of the date of a military defeat as a marker for different genres and not, for instance,
the date of events that are internal to these fields of practice is symptomatic of the saturation of Arab cultural scenes with politics.
There were just theories on the increasing autonomy of cultural fields away from the sociopolitical contexts and external constraints.
Find their limits in the new colonial and postcolonial Arab world.
Section two, 1961. The Forgotten Date or the Birth Pangs of the New Left?
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.
This event, which exists outside of the contradiction with colonialism and imperialism,
was crucial for a generation of militants, which will constitute the 1960s new left.
It constitutes the first major setback of the anticolonial nationalist regimes.
Less than a decade after the 1952 Egyptian revolution.
This intro Arab event ushered in the first eminent critics of the regime that pointed out the gap that separates
their pan-Arab ideologies from their practices that could not sustain a union for more than three years.
It inaugurated an early critical reflexive turn that found in Marxism a critical theory and a weapon of political transformation which,
by conjugating together internal class contradictions of these societies with an anti-imperialist agenda,
was much more conceptually sophisticated than Arab nationalist ideologies.
Some of the comrades who founded Socialist Lebanon, an underground Marxist organisation composed mostly of militant intellectuals in the mid-sixties,
came from this cohort of disenchanted Arab nationalists.
The now distinguished historian and well-known public intellectual, Ahmed Bynum, recalls the importance of 1961 in one of our conversations.
He says, and I quote, It was a blow that changed the meaning of the world for us.
The political history of the last three or four generations does not really stop sufficiently at that date.
They stop more at 67. For us, 61 was decisive.
It is this disenchantment.
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,
by which he meant an Arab nation, not an Islamic nation.
The Question of society by Daum presses on was the true and effective mediator of Marxist evolutionary theory.
The were 61, as I said, ushered in an early reflexive moment that turned away from the nationalist rhetorically against external enemies,
towards criticising the progressive regimes in power,
and diagnosing the internal political contestations lodged at the heart of these societies their social structures.
It laid the first bricks of what would come to be known after 67 as the New Left.
Underscoring this genealogy is, I think,
important to forestall an easy assumption of the Arab new left by the trope of the global sixties or a global 68,
which takes the student and worker demonstrations of France at their centre.
Section three. Down with the Arab regimes.
Another Marxist turn. In the wake of the 67 Arab defeat against Israel,
the Arab nationalist movement previously gravitating in Nasser's orbit will increase its leftwards radicalisation that had started earlier.
The shock of the defeat spurred a demand for a theoretical renewal and the direction of more solid and scientific theories.
The Arab nationalist fogey rhetoric as well as a rethinking of the modalities of
political struggle and the agents that will carry out the task of emancipation.
Would it be a popular war of liberation? Of liberation?
Would it take the form of Palestine commando operations,
or would it remain in the sphere of conventional warfare conducted by the armies of the Arab regimes?
Vietnam as a model was discussed. At that time.
In addition to its more rigorous conceptual arsenal, Marxism, unlike Nasser's dismal failure, seemed to work at the time.
The successes of the Chinese,
Cuban and Vietnamese revolutions fuelled the hopes of the militants who joined the Palestinian resistance or oscillated in its orbit.
There is, of course, a distinguished genealogy of the collapse of conceptual truth to political victory on the left.
Little has eviscerated Marxism. Russell Jacoby noted a while ago in one of his signature distilled sentences,
more than his acceptance of the judgement of history as the truth itself.
Victory, he reminds us, is not proof of truth. Marxism, he says, evangelising these.
This sort of this tradition and leftist thought is compelling precisely because it's accurate.
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.
Success is the proof. And of course. Section four.
Long live the revolution. Long live the Palestinian revolution.
Our historical chance. On November eight, 1969, the Cairo agreement was signed between the PLO and the Lebanese army,
legitimising the PLO guerrilla actions on Lebanese territory.
After 1971, Lebanon became the only vital space for the resistance in the aftermath of its clashes with the Jordanian army in 19 7071,
which resulted in its defeat and relocation of the relocation of its command to Beirut.
Around the same time, the Syrian regime also shut its borders to passenger activity.
Socialist Lebanon had been criticising the Nazareth regime since its founding in 1964 and had no visibility on the national political radar.
Things will change after 67. In the absence of masses, since there were a bunch of little intellectuals,
it's their theoretical virtuosity which positioned them to the left of Arab nationalist regimes and the Lebanese
left that managed to draw attention to the organisation at a time when there was a high demand on Marxist theory.
It will result in their merger with the radicalised Lebanese branch of the Arab nationalist movement led by Muslim Brahim.
In the wake of the 67 defeats. They brought the gift of theory to the much more numerous and Veterans Party
founding together the Organisation of Communist Action in Lebanon in 1970.
Around 40 years later. What that allowed a socialist Lebanon's main theorist at the time recalled that era.
He says. In 1969, we entered a different epoch.
It's important the different EPPO could be looked at from its internal side, i.e. how we were seeing it and experiencing experiencing it.
At this time. One was 26 or 27 years old, not an old man, but with already 10 to 12 years of militancy.
Part of them in the French Communist Party. He studied at Lille, where they studied.
They both studied in the same French city and in contact with European Marxism.
And then he said there was this tremendous internal shock where it was revealed to us after
what was called the defeat of the regime's in and that this was our historical chance.
Section five to resistances the Palestinian and the Lebanese.
I cite the ruling Lebanese interests cannot acknowledge the links that tie its farmhouse in Lebanon to the region's causes,
wrote the anonymous author. What that rather in the piece titled to Resistance is the Palestinian and Lebanese.
A central piece from 1969 that captures the height of the activist fervour at the time.
The long and scathing article against the Lebanese authorities located the Palestinian resistance
as the external revolutionary agent that will detonate the contradictions of the system,
the Lebanese opposition wrote. Either authorities position is clear.
Lebanon is of the Arab region. Its economy and the prosperity of its financiers and merchants relies on the role they play in that region.
Lebanon, however, is on the margin of the Arab region when it comes to the political problems threatening to destabilise those who do it.
And of course. The main diagnosis in that article constituted a strong indication of the Lebanese state's polluted
politics of neutrality in the Arab-Israeli conflict and the country's laissez faire capitalist system.
It was into this situation characterised by Lebanese economic integration, into political isolation from the Arab world.
The Palestinian resistance made its entrance.
It unmasked the real face of the Lebanese regime for how good a regime that plays the role of a watchdog of imperious dependence.
They ask, agitate an entire people for a national battle.
And how can the Lebanese system, which survives on the remains of imperial interests,
go through this battle that will put its banks agents in some resorts endangered?
At the heart of this theory position is a view of the Lebanese political, sectarian, political system, as devised by French imperialism,
a system that pre-empts the elaboration of a class, interest driven story of class, interest driven politics.
So that relates to the sectarian formation which was made, the geographic and political basis of Lebanon,
as able to stifle every form of political maturity that carries the masses to fuse with the Arab region's battles against imperialism.
This is not only because it puts every political discord to the test of civil war,
but because it stifles every disagreement by annulling its true political aspect a conflict of interest within the framework of power.
By making it subsidiary subservient to the sectarian conflict that conceals and fragments the issues pertaining to power.
This makes political opposition, whether it wants it to or not, acquire a sectarian dimension in this situation.
There's no national party that covers the Lebanese territory and no Lebanese ideology and no Lebanese history.
And of course.
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.
The Homogenising force of capitalist expansion,
which is supposed to drown the excesses of religious fervour and futurist enthusiasm in the icy waters.
Egotistical calculation stopped at Lebanon's gate of sectarian pool of sectarian politics.
Sectarian and regional distinctions.
Socialist Lebanon, right bring to the attribute of the citizen other attributes that dominated the Sunni from Beirut,
the Maronite from the mountain, the Shia from the south, or Baalbek.
The coming into being of the upstart committee citizen that would follow an interest based politics
was prevented by the political system that produced and here I say it again hybrid citizens.
Section six. The dualities of two resistances.
Two resistances was built on a series of dualities that sought to account for the blockage of evolution in practice.
By noting the disjunction between the economic infrastructure and the political superstructure Lebanon had argued,
is characterised both by the propagation of the universal laws of capitalist expansion and the economic sphere and sectarian political
breaks in the political system that were devised by French imperialism and impede the birth of interest based politics of citizens.
This duality is also inscribed at the heart of Lebanon's exploitative relationship with its Arab region's Arab neighbours.
Lebanon is economically integrated into the Arab world, thriving on the investment of Palestinian capital.
In 19, after the 1948 Nakba, while being politically isolated from Palestine via its politics of neutrality in the Arab-Israeli conflict.
The ruling alliance itself reproduces this duality,
since it's conceived as the partnership between the banking and commercial bourgeoisie of the coast and the landowning families of the mountains.
The hybrid Lebanese citizen is also the outgoing of the storeyed structure,
which combines the universality of the bourgeois notion of citizenship and the particularity of sectarian affiliations.
Sectarianism in tourist instances plays a very different role, whether we are talking about the Lebanese ruling alliance or the people.
Sectarianism by splitting the Lebanese citizen is responsible for stifling Class B politics.
The split needs to be overcome for a mature, interest based, portable practice to take place.
However, if we shift our analytical gaze to the composition of the Lebanese regime, we get a different picture.
The split between universality and particularity is not internalised in its hybrid subjects.
Rather, it becomes a sociological feature of the two groups The Bourgeoisie of the Coast and the Landowning Lords of the Mountains.
Socialist Lebanon does not attach a sectarian attribute, Christian or Muslim, to the Lebanese bourgeoisie.
Sectarianism is not treated as an essential component of the Lebanese bourgeois identity, but as a veil that masks its defence of its privileges.
The reason for that, I think, is that during his militant days,
Shiraz analysis had to provide an account of the particularity of Lebanese sectarian politics and loyalties on a marxian ground
that takes class politics and exploitation as the universal underlying realities that explain the Lebanese social formation.
He was faced with a puzzle of how to square the proliferation and multiplicity of apparent supranational,
communal loyalties and political divisions with a notion of politics that spread dictated on the contradiction between labour and capital.
The differential distribution of these binaries economic integration, command, stability, banking, bourgeoisie,
and on the other hand, political isolation, incommensurability, political feudalism, hybrid citizens,
and the different meanings sectarianism acquires are his answers to the conundrum of explaining along
class lines the multiple sectarian allegiances and divisions within the frame of one exploitative system.
The Palestinian resistance as an anti-imperial Arab agent by excellence after it made its entrance into
the best politics will contribute according to the authorisation to overcoming the system's duality.
Its intrusion unmasked the bourgeoisie and exploitation which can no longer be itself
a sectarianism and refashioned the sectarian subjects into a revolutionary one.
Revolutionising the Lebanese polity and the solidarity with the Palestinian resistance will not envisage as a bloodless undertaking.
Yet the impact of the revolution socialist Lebanon predicted would transform the classes.
And here I could throw a sectarian conflict into a civil war.
End of quote. Echoed again if Democratic national rules cannot be reached without a civil war, they wrote.
The real coordination with fidelity based in actions cannot also take place without exposing the southern region to an Israeli invasion.
And the serious 1969 prognosis was right in predicting the coming conflict and wrong in predicting its nature.
Six years later, a civil war erupted, splitting the country along sectarian lines.
Israel invaded in 78 to push the PLO away from the borders before invading again in 1982,
which this time around resulted in forcing the PLO out of Lebanon.
I conclude with Section seven. Titled Coda in the Wake of a Civil War.
This text, published in 1969 to Resistance, has had multiple political and academic afterlives, both in Arabic and in English.
40 years later, after its publication,
the famous Lebanese poet Abbess By Noon recalls the beginning of the collaboration in 1969 between the Organisation of Lebanese Socialists,
which he belonged to, and socialist Lebanon before their union.
Around this time, he says, I founded the Lebanese rubric in Algeria, which did not exist earlier.
I wrote it through an understanding and an alliance with socialist Lebanon and predominantly with what?
With whom we had a developed relationship. And around that same time, he adds.
I wrote a theoretical text that a similar parallel to socialist Lebanon's text called The Two Resistances.
Mine was called a look at the Palestinian Resistance, and the Lebanese will have something of that sort.
The authorisation was the same. They were both based on a frightening idea.
It was the authorisation of the Civil War.
It ran along the lines that this was a prosperous country which cannot generate a revolution for a number of reasons,
because it has benefited from Arab defeats and it has a certain level of economic, leisure, etc.
Natural evolution was possible here unless it comes from the outside.
In the first month of the Lebanese civil war in 1976.
So seven years after the publication of the text, as is largely the Syrian historiography,
an Islamic studies scholar and first former comrade offered an account of the beginning of the Civil War that recapitulates the texts.
His main thesis, he wrote. Through the Palestinians,
the Lebanese entity was inserted into its Arab context and deprived of that artificial isolation with which had
you to hear the to serve to maintain the political safeguards necessary for its international economic role.
And of course. In a similar vein, Ms.
Ibrahim, who said that the head of the Organisation of Lebanese Socialists before becoming
the Secretary General of the Organisation for Communist Action for nearly 50 years,
dubbed at the time the Palestinian Resistance as the lever that would lift the Arab National Liberation Movement.
On the 40th day commemorating the assassination of George Harvey,
the former secretary general of the Lebanese Communist Party, which took place in Beirut in 2005.
Mohsen Brahim issued a lot of critique of the Lebanese nationalist movements involvement and said in the 75 war,
which centred on two major points of fall as he fought, as he called them.
The first consistent and Ibrahim's acknowledgement that in supporting the Palestinian struggle,
the left went too far in burdening Lebanon with the military weight of the Palestinian cause.
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.
End of quote. A major figure in socialist Lebanon at the time commented on Ibrahim's utter critique.
He said he used the same idea found in two resistances, but flips its valence in the late sixties.
The resistance with the detonator. Detonator, the lever, the catalyst that in alliance with the left would explode the system in 2005.
Ibrahim, the major political leader of the Lebanese New Left,
observed that the left went over the top by overburdening the country with its support for.
Thank you very much. Thank you so much for that.
Really. 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.
Thank you both for really sort of fascinating opening papers.
We now have around half an hour for some discussion.
And I want to remind sort of audience members, some esteemed academic colleagues in the audience,
if you have any questions, please feel free to put them in the Q&A and we will pick them up.
But I actually wanted to invite face on,
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.
Thank you. Sure. Thanks very much. I really enjoyed both papers.
I actually have questions for each of you, but maybe I can ask one, the first one to Nadia and then we can see the other.
And then I could come back for the. My question to you, Nadia.
You know, I see why you are placing side with bit fuko.
And there is a critique to be had of football, which you of you do you and Roy do in in your call control the book.
But I wonder if it might be more productive to contemplate, say, than for goal here, because it you know,
it might allow us to actually make more sense of of sight and your critique of him.
I mean, already it's clear that, you know, Sade's idea of Orientalism can be so extensive and found everywhere,
precisely because it's not of Victorian discourse. It has.
It is not informed by the kind of discipline and regulation that modern foucauldian discourses.
Are seen as possessing and therefore side can locate it.
You know, in the time of the, you know,
personal Greek rivalry of of ancient times to the contemporary day and he can also find Orientalism in properly constituted in for coded terms,
disciplines, anthropology, political science, etc. It really doesn't have a disciplinary existence of its own.
So that's already very clear. But what I think is interesting is how Saeed has to really struggle.
With football. You know, he wants to take on board some of his categories and ideas and sort of concede others.
So, you know, quite apart from repudiating focus and humanism, because it is all about humanism and focus,
focus on discontinuity rather than continue to rise, Orientalism is all about continuity.
You know, on occasion say it seems to come close to a kind of accordion, if you will, a form of negation.
You know, in the famous statement, the Orient does not exist, but it never really, to my knowledge, follows it up.
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 because the negative is never available
for said dialectically and therefore it can never be the impetus for freedom.
As it would be in a dialectical schema, but rather is hidden away in the figure of Orientalism itself,
which I think is so supercharged of being precisely because it includes the being of the Orient itself, which otherwise.
It said not to exist. You know, it's a kind of double being almost.
I think that's. That Orientalism represents.
And you know what you what you say about the critical reputation.
I entirely agree.
A critique of representation can only be conservative and predicated on the recovery of identities because it's about discovering the truth.
And yet, as Amell points out in your telling, such a recovery actually is impossible given the premises that in this case, both side and focal share.
So I you know. Do you think that. In a way,
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,
the negative and the discontinuous. Quite apart from the kind of obvious things about and humanism and all the rest.
And it's almost as if it has to be Orientalism.
It's required for its continuities are required for that.
No, great. That's a great question. So thanks as usual.
No, I mean, this is it's it's it's interesting to raise this.
I mean, honestly, it's interesting to raise this in relationship to all of sides.
And so it's because you could I mean, you could also do this, let's say,
with sides reading of Adorno or his relationship to adore and or how he interprets and dawn.
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.
So this kind of whatever syncretism we're putting together these things in a way that renders them somewhat at the end,
at the risk of a consistency, it creates a theoretical quandary for the reader.
Right. Is a problem. Yes.
I mean, it would be interesting to read them against each other, surely in the question of anti humanism.
And also, I think it would be interesting to which the problem would be in a certain sense, so side as a humanist.
Right. But yet his account of subjectivity is completely liberal.
Right. This is a completely I mean, it's an individual that he takes for a subject.
I mean, you see this clearly in his other texts on whatever, on the style and his engagement with someone like Adorno and so on.
So and this is something that you would that you would think, you know, there's also a problem with subjectivity.
And, I mean, I think that's what I was kind of trying to get out,
which is a crucial problem that obviously management doesn't frame it in these terms.
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.
But I think you can how do you say supplement those shortcomings by introducing this problem?
Right. In the sense that inside account.
Right. Marx doesn't escape the critique precisely because there is no subjective.
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,
which I say I think is probably accurate between some of his account of discourse, empirical and then in Fuku as well.
There is no outside, there's not exactly discourse.
In fact, Fuku, I mean, and arguably here one could even allow to serve to push it to another place.
They both reproduce the same problem it produces.
Kind of by the account of materiality, you have materiality constituted by discourses and knowledge systems and so on,
and then you have whatever the subject is, just kind of being imprinted on this.
They recreate this inside, outside, probably. Right.
And I think, you know, this is precisely why I mean, and I think, you know, although maybe I'm it doesn't have these terms,
why does he so much stick to this problem like like you really laboriously.
You know, Marx can't think and feel. Marx feels. And how does this work?
What? Who is Marx here? What is Marx? If not, you know, the critical subject, the subject there is looking always for this negative and so on.
So, yes, I mean, this would be this would be an interesting thing to engage with.
I mean, the tensions between side and call. And precisely on this question of, you know, science kind of liberalism.
And I think Gore is not simply a liberal. I think things are much more complicated there.
Right. So this is this is a this is somewhere to one could follow through this.
But I hope in this kind of response,
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 going to never name is both trying to sort out right now how to think of Marx in relationship to Orientalism.
Right. The individual and the discourse. But yeah, I mean, thanks for that.
It's very interesting. I'll think about this. So if it's all, I'm going to maybe direct my I have a series of questions,
but this could actually because you're both dealing with Marx and my questions is somewhat general could actually be picked up by both of you.
So perhaps I'll go and ask the question.
And Nadia, if you'd like to sort of do technique on the sort of on on Fatty's remarks, please feel free.
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,
though not of the type that you have in Lebanon, which is quite distinctive with Shia Islamism.
But I look at much of the Sunni world and, you know,
reading an author like Elizabeth Kassab and her wonderful sort of kaleidoscopic view of the of Arabic thoughts.
One does get the impression that a lot of a lot of the ideas that are in some respects engaging the
European sort of thinkers of the last couple of centuries are in many respects quite cacophonous.
They're still trying to figure out, okay, how do we interact with each other? We're coming from such different places very often.
And Lebanon is a perfect example of this because you have a mosaic society with people with so much diversity of backgrounds.
But, you know, when you compare it to the different national contexts, it's even more cacophonous in some respects.
And add to this the sort of propagandising of Islamists about mosques as this small head,
this person who is basically the arch and anti-religion person and suddenly mocks his appeal,
is kind of like washed away for large numbers, large sections of the population.
And I kind of wonder in that sort of context, to what extent marks can be salvaged.
You know, in a sense, this is a problem we actually suffer from outside the Middle East as well and in the Western world.
Neo liberalism has been dominant, just has been raging for decades, you could say, and the left has been battered for perhaps as long as that as well.
And I sort of look with hope at South America at the moment.
But in that sort of a context, is this also reflective of a global problem in terms of the left's inability
to really think in any unified fashion to create meaningful social movements,
aside from engaging in much more what are very interesting academic debates.
And, you know, I think everyone in the room enjoys them thoroughly because we're all academics.
But translating from that into something into the realms of practice,
I guess the main question I'm asking is, is that even practical in the context that you see in Lebanon?
In the Mosaic Society of Lebanon and what are its prospects outside the space of Lebanon as well?
It's a huge question, but you and I 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. How many days do I have to respond to this?
And how many years is the case with us?
No, thank you. I mean, it's a big question.
If you permit me, I want to say a couple of words on sort of the conversation between Nadia and Faisal and Ahmed.
Before I go back to this big question, I think what is because they are related, I think.
You know, if you read sort of the intercepts in the U.S. and you put it in Brazil to examine deception,
he was slammed by Paul Structuralist for not being good enough.
Someone like Jim Clifford, the historian anthropologist, did that.
So if you take both of these stories together, you get a sense of what kind of machine this text is,
so to speak, and how it lends itself to sort of two different, different readings.
That's the first observation because, of course,
there are people who sort of try to excite away from go into the sort of Lucas Adorno, Raymond Williams, Gramsci and so on.
These are students. So in a way that the text lends itself to these different things.
And of course its emphasis on the author in Orientalism is one way in which he, Bradley, can differentiate himself from that question of discourse.
So. I'm reading, I think of of say those two things is first of all, in my opinion,
it's sort of very much inflected by I'm is a thorough immersion in the French intellectual field.
So he collapses for insight into each other, which is basically I think some of what,
as you know, first of all, as you were saying, is not collapsible. But also, I think the reason why he focuses so much, you know,
there's so much like transference on these three pages is precisely because of the Iranian revolution,
precisely because they are on the defensive at that point. I mean, he will he will get assassinated two years later.
And that moment this is a partially an answer to your question, whatever that moment is.
Basically in the Middle Ages, it's the moment of the Oslo debates of basically the question of authenticity,
where where Marxism, where literally like militant Islamist militants are fighting,
but also arguing against Marxists, showing them they are they really have a revolutionary project at that time,
which was called, they had been associate Islamiya to reconstruct the Islamic personality.
And one of their main targets is to go against the materialism of the Marxists.
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,
which is a very interesting document in which he talks about, you know, the fact that you are you are towards the end of your empire.
And and we have something that you don't have, which is basically this dimension which goes beyond materialism.
I mean, if you don't know this letter, I would sort of encourage you to read it.
So so that moment and that moment is not only I think about sort of structuralism versus like Marxism or enlightenment and Madrid,
it really it's a moment in which like.
They're being like Marxists are being attacked from their east by basically
their own evolution and being cornered by bad from the West by both fascists.
And and I'm is trying to find a way, a breathing space in a way to do that.
Now, to go back to the present and to your to your question.
I do personally think that sort of precisely because we are in the wake of decades of neoliberal policies,
that Marx is more relevant than ever in order to understand our present now.
There's a there's a difference between a Marxian grid of analysis and what I tried to talk about in the paper,
which would Marxian bit of analysis which basically,
you know with people like David Harvey and what happened in the past three decades in American academia or people like Zizek is quite,
you know, quite prevalent.
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?
I think here there's questions that that have to basically be answered,
which are which I hear you sort of pointing to questions that have to do with the question of difference.
So the big question is, it is and is everyone who needs to sort of, you know, join a marxist faction political movement,
be a priori a secular subject, for example, or are we only can we have, you know,
when we're sort of I talked about science view of sort of a veneer of individuality as a sort of liberal subjectivity is a liberal subjectivity,
a precondition for engaging in Marxist militancy or not. These are big questions, I think.
Of course, if you go back to history, you know, there are ways in which.
That stark contrast between, you know, sort of secular militancy and and and religious militancy can be sometimes sort of more complicated,
that there were movements, for example, in Egypt in the eighties of Yasser Islami and sort of like, you know, Islamic left and things like that.
So. So I think the question of marks needs to be sort of as close to that as one
is on the level of the good of analysis and which I think is an easy answer,
which is yes. And to the more difficult question, which is what form with a marxian political organisation basically take in the future.
And I think that that is an answer that.
Cannot be answered. April i3 Theoretically, I think it has to be much broke from below, from practice,
to see how can people come together in order to basically further that.
Because one of the one of the other issues that sort of which which makes us very different from the moment of the sixties,
is that in the last four decades, if you look at political theory,
the concept of the political and the concept of power has been expanded tremendously.
Hmm. So the idea of sort of thinking that power is basically, you know, class exploitation or imperial domination.
I mean, you know, they're not the sort of agendas of intersectionality.
Different kinds of agendas and the solutions they are trying to deal with this sort of.
And someone like Wendy Brown noted this a long time ago,
the fact that the notion of power and the notion of political have been really, really sort of stretched.
And if you want to think about sort of the different modes of sort of exploitation,
domination, without falling into the trap of a liberal politics of recognition,
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?
And I'll stop here for now. That's and that's a wonderfully sort of.
It's amazing what you did when we when you initially started.
How many days do we have said, NASIR, do you want to add anything?
Yes, I mean, I want to kind of just to follow through this, you know, this point, that fading kind of notes, right, that Edward said, madame.
And this debate becomes more interesting in the context of kind of the internal, I would just say,
inter ongoing antagonism or contradictions between the left and the so-called authentic
cultural forces that express whatever the real geist of the people and so on and so forth.
So this is this is important because I think what I was trying to point to in the in the talk is
that I'm in was saying that precisely this that Orientalism or the account that Sage offers.
Right. Of this kind of, you know, the the what happens with with the transformation of entire,
you know, people or cultures into this into this kind of representation.
Right.
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,
that, you know, as you pointed out, of course, and up to his direct assassination.
Right. I mean,
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.
Right. That are that are doing this kind of work, arguing that not all culture is revolutionary culture.
Right. Or trying to formulate this problematic how to think about culture and from a kind of a marxian account.
But what I'm going to saying here is that Edward Said's argument on Orientalism.
Unwittingly,
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.
Within the so-called postcolonial context itself.
Right. So this is the this is the you know, this is the the irony of the problem.
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 rightness.
Precisely the kind of the point I was raising that the colonised are doubly alienated.
There's no way to go back to some kind of culture, to some kind of authentic belonging.
Right. There's no way to reassert that right after this break or has happened.
And so the pushing forward of so what does Orientalism give us?
What kind of politics can ensue from this? What kind of identity are we supposed to rehabilitate in the wake of a so-called
US kind of a mutation or kind of transformation in the eyes of the West?
And how that kind of takes becomes actually mechanisms of power and numbers of kind.
So so this is I mean, I think this is the crucial question that at the time is raising.
I mean, why in the middle of this kind of ongoing combat drive, theoretically, practically politically, why engage with Edwards?
Because he's seeing it as.
As actually being locally articulating somehow in a very sophisticated manner the very position that he himself is in combat with.
This is, I think what is what is what I what I'm trying to what I was kind of trying to point out to the right kind of appointments in this context.
Thank you so much. I mean, it's really the the paradoxes of Saeed,
because he's been a source of great empowerment for postcolonial theory and, you know, developments in, I think,
western sort of theoretical spaces that have allowed for a space for in some respects people of colour to articulate,
you know, perspectives that were systemically marginalised.
But at the same time sort of reinforcing I think to a certain extent, some might say the General Adams response as well as he put it.
And Matt Diamond, who I mean, thank you for introducing me to him.
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.
I just you know, if, you know, I take Nadia saying that these are structural.
Similarity between the structure, between the structural essence of what is and the Islamist.
Yes. And indeed, it's no accident that a site is such a celebrity among the Islamists because it's kind of a rewriting of the history of Islam.
Yeah. So it's yeah, but you know, the Western Academy, of course.
I mean, I think this kind of double, you know, this doubling of where this is happening.
So very intriguing right now. And that, you know,
we probably fall into the trap of authenticity talk if we refuse to see the
structural relationship between the both the Islamists as being sui generis,
whereas before the art went further, you know, I was you know, I was really struck by, you know, your beginning with these dates.
And I entirely agree. I think 1961 really deserves much more attention than it has received.
And you have 1961 as opposed to 1967, but also 1968 and the kind of global student movement, I might add.
You know, how would this arrange of dates? What would it look like if you included 1956, 57, the Suez Crisis?
But I wanted to ask, you know, the thing about the United Arab Republic and it's coming apart,
the very fact that it was put together seems to me to be,
if you will, it was put together almost as a kind of rehearsal of a Leninist style national question.
So it was, you know, I mean, whatever the class background of this this strange contraption was this a state separated by other territory?
Is that it seems to presuppose, if you will, the Soviet critique of the nation state and the posing of a national question.
And I say this because in some of my own previous work, I'll be a part about how it was that in 1947,
Pakistanis created also two separate pieces separated by India.
You know that. What a bizarre idea of a state.
And of course, in that case, explicitly, they are looking at the Soviet Union and other kinds of, if you will,
post-national or at least non-Muslim on national forms of state making without themselves being proletarian in any sense or Marxist in any sense.
It made me wonder whether, you know, with the 1961 also it signals the return or the the genesis of, if you will,
classical or bourgeois forms of nationalism that come not before the Leninist version of the national question, but after.
It might be possible to think that because the the.
You are such a. From that point of view, from the bourgeois and the nation status point of view, it's such an aberration.
But if that is indeed the case, then.
You. The standard issue convention nation state can only be a hollow entity because it's already been.
It's almost like an item isn't so that we can't look at it in the way that we tend to look at national movements.
You know, first job colonialism, then you have nationalism,
then you have something else happening because there seems to be a back in front thing here.
And I've been thinking in other respects of the end of the post-colonial state, and it seems to me that.
The splitting apart of Egypt and Syria on this can serve as one example of that.
I mean, I had originally look at that looked at the end of Pakistan in 1971 with the creation of Bangladesh,
which finally becomes a conventional, if you will, a nation state, except, of course, it isn't.
And and I took that as being the end at the very end of decolonisation.
If you leave South Africa out as a special case, you have suddenly there's no more decolonisation.
But what you have is the end of the post-colonial state itself.
And now it's post-colonial states that are being excluded or, you know, and precisely through the logic of civil war.
And that might allow us to think about the Lebanese civil war also slightly differently.
Again, not as an indication of a place which has never become a nation state, properly speaking,
but as one that exists in the wake of nationalism, in the wake of the nation state.
So a bit incoherent, but does that make any sense? I was just inspired by your foregrounding 1961.
No, because I don't think it all anew. Thank you.
This is I mean, for me, it's very, very provocative. I really need to think more about this.
But so thank you very much. I mean, one small observation I would make is that, you know,
that sort of three years does not compare with basically the sort of timeline of of the splitting of Pakistan in 71,
which is, you know, more than more than a decade, a bit like a decade and a half, as I think.
But it would be interesting. So maybe. Maybe it would be sort of imputing too much on that event in its founding and its dissolution to take it as.
An early sign of the end of the post-colonial state and the way in which maybe it
could be more productive to to sort of to to think to think through these questions.
A second minor observation on the question of 56th.
This generation that I was interested in were mostly born in the early mid-forties.
So they they sort of they were kids when 56 happened.
It was very striking for them. But there was no sort of like sort of theoretical output or, you know,
they didn't they were not part of an age group in which they could sort of think things through things without 56 had different ramifications,
I think, for earlier generations.
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,
you know, there was the sort of the Arabs hippies were a bit discredited by sort of toeing
the Soviet line along the partition of Palestine and in the end in the forties.
So they came to Marxism as the first critics of national liberation.
So this it's a very condensed history of a generation which basically thinks like believes in the promise of the nation,
then realises that it's not all about the outside.
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,
because they really believe that that we are one nation divided by basically colonialism and one is going it was out then of course,
we've got to unite. They also.
I mean, that's sort of a circuitous answer to your to basically, you know, sort of like this natural question.
I don't know. Actually, I don't know if.
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,
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,
for example, or moving out of the Arab national, Arab nationalist movements, etc.
But I think it's a fascinating idea to to think about these sort of non territorially contiguous unions, as you mentioned,
you know, and like, what is it that they what do they say as and what is it that they say about the nation state as a form but.
In the case of the Arab world, I think that that idea of, you know,
the nationalist idea of sort of removing all of them and uniting directly, was that so the question of really understanding two things.
Marxism was an answer, two things. One is, well, there's something else which is called the social structure,
but then there's something else which is very important, which is the sort of class composition of these regimes.
You know, the the.
There's an Egyptian Marxist trio that was very important for this for this generation, which is some who wrote under the pseudonym of Hasan Robert.
He wrote this amazing book that was never translated into English, I think called The Ship Necessary in Nasser, Egypt,
which is based on his working in the state and with basically like and I think the Office of Planning or something like that.
The second one is what Abdul Malik is book Egypt, a military society.
And the third, they are still alive are the baguette.
And Nadia and I did that do that right under the name of Mahmoud Authentic, who wrote Class Struggle in Egypt.
So these were older people who are older.
They were not born in the forties, they were the twenties or the thirties, and they were sort of Marxist critics of the.
Last the positions of these officers and of their petty bourgeois nature and how there's a cast of bureaucrats that's developing around them.
And there's a very, very prescient sort of, in a way, analysis of the class privileges that the Army officers as a cast sort of sort of develop.
So out of this out of this universe, I think, comes an articulation of a critique of these progressive regimes,
which is way before, I mean, not way, but like a few years before 67.
So, yeah, I'm not sure if I'm being again very, very coherent in answering you, but I do think that.
That's what that's what I would say, actually.
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.
But also, I don't think. It could be given the same weight as the 71.
But, you know, the Lebanese civil war was, for me, very, very interesting as an early model.
As an early model, which is. Which sort of in a way, shows a failure of a particular nationalism.
At the same time as. There was a resurgence of nationalism that get inscribed in a book like Ben Anderson's imagined community.
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,
we have basically Marxist regimes that are having wars against each other.
So obviously there's something else here which is not ideology that can have can explain what's happening,
what's happening between Vietnam and Cambodia. Therefore, there's this thing called nationalism and we need to go back and study it.
So in a way, these anachronisms have always been fascinating for me, you know, sort of that this question of.
The dissolution of Lebanese nationalism at the same time as the nationalist question
is sort of gaining more and more traction and then gets inscribed in theory,
the anachronism of the Palestinian question,
which is basically a national liberation question in the age of decolonisation and after the age of post-colonial postcolonial,
then 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,
not in the sense that they're related, but the sense that they're they're out of times.
I'm sorry. I thought I think I spoke too much. Thank you so much to both.
Sorry. I just wanted to actually take the option, even though we've gone a bit over time.
I'd like to give Nadia the opportunity to add anything you may wish to.
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.
But if you want, you can know. I'm good. I'm good for now. Thanks.
Fantastic. So if it's all right, I'm going to sort of wrap up and just briefly let the audience members know that.
And of course, panellists, if you'd like to join in a fortnight's time, we'll have our next session.
So I'd first like to thank sort of Fadi and Nadia for really giving us a lot of food for thought and about in a sense,
mid 20th century, mid to late 20th century Marxist thinking in the Middle East.
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 and some thoughts on South Asia in more recent years.
We can't have no, no, no her a shot from the American University of Sharjah and shed a little rain from Franklin and Marshall College.
And they will both be speaking. We'll be speaking about friendship and Islamic ethical, political thought and charity today.
And we'll be talking about debating Hindu-Muslim friendship after empire.
So we really look forward to having people join.
And I once again conclude by thanking Nadia Farhadi and of course Faisal for participating in the discussion and co convening with me,
getting things off the ground. Thank you all, really. And I look forward to continuing our conversations.
Please do join in future weeks, if you can as well.
Thanks. Thank.