Arab Spring, 2011: a symptomatic reading of the revolution (to the memory of Edward W. Said).

True historical materialism does not pursue an empty mirage of continuous progress along infinite line time, but is ready at any moment to stop time, because it holds the memory that man's original home is pleasure. It is this time which is experienced in authentic revolutions, which, as Benjamin remembers, have always been lived as a halting overtime and an interruption of chronology. But a revolution from which there springs not a chronology, but a qualitative alteration of time (a kairology), would have the weightiest consequence and would alone be immune to absorption into the reflux of restoration. He who, in the epoche of pleasure, has remembered history as he would remember his original home, will bring this memory to everything, will exact this promise from each instant: he is the true revolutionary anti the true seer, released from time not at the millennium but now

--Giorgio Agamben, "Time and History" (1993)

In Morocco, there has always been a war between the left and the Islamists, and the state wants it that way. When the state saw we had agreed on basic things, like values, change, democracy, they just didn't know what to do.

--Younes Belghasi (age 21), qtd. in Slackman, "Bullets" (2011)

We raised our heads into the sky. And hunger no longer mattered to us. Most important are our rights, And that with our blood we write our history.

--"Sour al Horeya" (Song of Freedom) (1)

The Revolution that ignited-spontaneously in Tunisia in the spring of 2011, following the self-immolation of the poor grocer Mohamed Bouaziizi, and then spread electrically into Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen, Libya, and Syria, is a Revolution taking place, it is important to remember, in authoritarian North African and Middle Eastern Arab nation-states that were founded for nothing more than strategic reasons by Western imperial powers in the World War I era and, in the wake of World War II, with the demise of colonialism and the emergence of the Cold War, became clients or enemy's of the United States and its global New World Order. With the possible exception of Libya, (2) this Revolution is radically unlike all other revolutions of the modern era. I am not only referring to such globally resonant moments of political change as the Chinese Revolution (1949), the Hungarian Revolution (1956), the Iranian Revolution (1979), the Polish Revolution (1989), the unification of East Germany with West Germany (1989), and the implosion of the Soviet Union (1991), but also to those revolutions that Western historians have monumentalized and, in so doing, produced the discursive frame of reference through which the very idea of revolution has been hitherto defined and evaluated: the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and the Bolshevik Revolution. This, to put it provisionally but baldly, is because this Arab Revolution was spontaneous- a surge of resistant force emanating from an existential condition, rather than one or more ideological or a preconceived strategic ends. All of the characteristics of this Revolution, from its major to its most minor gestures and wherever its flashpoints, seem to resist the representational system-the "regime of truth" in Michel Foucault's phrase-that is endemic to Western modernity. To introduce a locution that will become prominent in the sequel, these characteristics of this Arabic Revolution refuse to accept the name the modern West has devised to explain-and contain-revolutions, thus signaling the nothing that the truth discourse of the modern West will monomaniacally have nothing to do with, the void that haunts the latter's discursive plenitude. Like Bartleby, the scrivener, vis a vis his liberal lawyer employer in Herman Melville's great proleptic story about Wall Street, they, as it were, "prefer not to" be answerable to the calling of Western, particularly American, modernity (Melville 1987) (3) or, in Louis Althusser's more contemporary version, to be interpellated by the democratic/capitalist "problematic." (4) The Revolution being enacted against authoritarian regimes in Tunisia, Egypt, and other countries of the Arab world, that is to say, is an "event" in Alain Badiou's understanding of the term, though more radical than the example he gives in the following passage (and elsewhere):

We might say that since a situation is composed by the knowledges circulating within it, the event names the void inasmuch as it names the not-known of the situation.

To take a well-known example: Marx is an event for political thought because he designated, under the name 'proletariat', the central void of early bourgeois societies. For the proletariat-being entirely dispossessed, and absent from the political stage-is that around which is organized the complacent plenitude established by the rule of those who possess capital.

To sum up: the fundamental ontological characteristic of an event is to inscribe, to name, the situated void of that for which it is an event. (Badiou 2001, 69; my emphasis)

It will, therefore, be the purpose of what follows to 1) "name" the "void" disclosed by the "event" I will call synecdochically and for convenience "Tahrir [Liberation] Square" and 2) to think the implications for "the coming community" that this disclosure renders possible.

Since the only language available for the purpose of "naming" this void is that intrinsic to the Western/American problematic, however, this first initiative must of necessity proceed by indirection. In other words, it must begin by determining what the void disclosed by the event I am calling Tahrir Square is not. As the representations by American political officialdom and the media massively testify, the vast majority in the United States (and Europe), both liberal and conservative, has expressed sympathy for the revolution, ranging from anxious approval to enthusiasm. But these official and mediatic readings have been almost invariably represented from the Western, especially American, perspective. In general, they have, predictably, viewed the uprising on the analogy of the (exceptionalist) American Revolution: a revolt not simply against the tyranny of "undeveloped" or "anti-modern" authoritarian regimes, but also, as the insistent focus on the inordinate wealth accumulated by the various despots suggests, the luxurious life style (decadence) achieved at the expense of the oppressed people (5) of their ruling elite and, thus, a demand for American-style-capitalist-"democracy." More particularly, these official and mediatic American representations almost universally perceive the uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen, Libya, and Syria as, above all, the initiatives of huge populations of "Westernized" dissident Arab youths. I mean disaffected young men and women who have been educated according to "progressive" Western "secular" standards-disinterested inquiry, global English, individualism, self-reliance, gender equality, the can-do perspective, the parliamentary nation-state, technology, free-market economics, and so on-that the despotic regimes, in order to ensure their economic survival, have been compelled by the globalization of capital to adopt, and who, through their articulateness, have gained the support not only of most of the traditional categories of the oppressed: peasants, workers, servants, the aged, and so forth, but, in some degree, of their more religiously-oriented-and thus "benighted" - Muslim parents and grandparents.

This "Westernization," if not "Americanization" of the Revolution in the Arab countries of North Africa and the Middle East is especially borne witness to by the immediate and then more considered responses of American officialdom and the media to the sudden domino effect of the Tunisian uprising in Egypt. The Obama administration was caught by surprise by the apparent amorphousness of the uprising in Tahrir Square--a symptom of an intelligence service that, as WikiLeaks vis a vis U.S. diplomacy has made disturbingly clear, operates according to the unerring dictates of an exceptionalist American geopolitical scenario rather than to the humane imperatives of justice. Its initial pronouncement thus predictably minimized the question of the nature of the revolt itself in favor of tacitly supporting, if not overtly endorsing, Hosni Mubarac's thirty-year old secular dictatorial regime- a regime in which the state of exception had become the norm- on the long-standing basis of the latter's partnership with the U.S. in keeping the "peace" with Israel, that is to say, in the geopolitical project of securing the supply of oil and/or neutralizing the power of a militant Islam. (6) When, after several days, during which the revolt intensified, accumulated greater support from the Egyptian people at large, demonstrated its predominantly secular nature, and revealed its irreversibility - a momentum epitomized by the rebels' nonnegotiable demand, following Mubarac's strategic announcement in February that he would resign seven months later in September, that he vacate his office immediately and their call for free elections-the Obama administration began to distance itself from the Egyptian dictator, without, however, breaking its ties with the regime. This initiative, which the media, by and large, mimicked, was epitomized by the president's famous call to this erstwhile ally of the United State to terminate his rule "now," which, however, at the same time insisted, against the demands of the rebels, on a gradualist process of transition of power from dictatorship to democracy mediated first by Omar Suleiman, Mubarac's second in command, and then, when this figure was denounced as a puppet of the dictator, by the "neutral" military establishment.

Disregarding its patently singular aspects, in other words, the Obama administration and the mainstream media have predictably represented the Revolution in the Arabic world according to the predictable dictates of the contemporary version of American exceptionalism. I mean, more specifically, the Orientalist geopolitical global order, now, as a self-fulfilled prophecy called "the clash of civilizations," (7) inaugurated by the United States' intervention in the Middle East as the protector of the state of Israel- and the supply of oil-at the outset of the Cold War and culminating in the George W. Bush administration's declaration of the "war on terror" and its establishment of the state of exception as the rule in the name of "Homeland Security" in the wake of 9/11. What the panoptic gaze of the Obama administration and the media sees in the squares of Cairo, Tunis, Bahrain, Yemen, Libya, Syria, and elsewhere in the Arab world is, in fact, despite the potential for American-style democracy, a volatile multitude (if not a mob) that, according to the discursive regime established in the West by a long colonial/ Orientalist tradition, is thus susceptible to the manipulation of the fanatic directionality of a theocratic, if not Jihadist, Islam. This is made manifestly clear by the insistent, pervasive, and anxious reference to--the over-determination of-the fate of a "beleaguered" Israel and to the Islamic element in the revolution (the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and the specter of Islamic Iran) at the expense of the patent multiplicity of resisting perspectives.

This regressive late Orientalist perspectives is especially evident in the Arab leaders and intelligentsia whom the American media have selected to analyze the unfolding events in North Africa and the Middle East. I think, for example, of CNN's consistently choosing members of the governments under siege-for example, Sameh Shoukry, the Egyptian ambassador to the United States-and native born "Arabist experts," such as Fouad Ajami and Fareed Zacharia, whose pro-American positions are quite well known, to inform the American public about the revolution. This perspective, which is undertaken in the avowed name of objectivity, not only systematically obfuscates the reality it purports to illuminate; it also, and more important, insidiously serves the neocolonial purposes of the United State. A retrieval of Edward Said's brilliant contrapuntal reading of Rudyard Kipling's passing reference in his novel Kim to the "Great Mutiny" of 1857, which he puts into the mouth of a loyalist Indian soldier of the British army, will immediately underscore this.

In that reading of Kipling's Orientalist novel celebrating British imperialism, it will be recalled, Said foregrounds that which Kipling leaves unsaid (must disavow) about the "mutiny" and the vicious retaliation of the British:

For an Indian, not to have those feelings ["of solidarity with the powerless victims of the ruthless British reprisal"] would have been to belong to a very small minority. It is therefore significant that Kipling's choice of an Indian to speak about the Mutiny is a loyalist soldier who views his counntrymen's revolt as an act of madness: "A madness ate into all the Army, and they turned against the officers. That was the first evil, but not past remedy if they had then held their hands. But they chose to kill the Sahib's wives and children. Then came the Sahibs from over the sea and called them to most strict account."

To reduce Indian resentment, Indian resistance (as it might have been called) to British insensitivity to "madness," to represent Indian actions as mainly the congenital choice of killing British women and children-these are not merely innocent reductions of the national case but tendentious ones. And when Kipling has the old soldier describe the British counter-revolt--with its horrendous reprisals by white men bent on "moral" action-as "calling" the Indian mutineers "to strict account," we have left the world of history and entered the world of imperialist polemic, in which the native is naturally a delinquent, the white man a stern but moral parent and judge. Thus Kipling gives us the extreme British view on the Mutiny, and puts it in the mouth of an Indian, whose more likely nationalist and aggrieved counterpart is never seen in the novel. So far is Kipling from showing two worlds in conflict that he has studiously given us only one, and eliminated any chance of conflict appearing altogether. (said 1993)

Equally important, this regressive late Orientalist perspective is also borne witness to by the "analyses" of the "area experts"-Middle Eastern, globalist, former American diplomats-whom the television news media-CBS, ABC, NBC, CNN, PBS-have relied on, against public oppositional intellectuals in the tradition of Edward said-Rashid Khalidi, Alexander Cockburn, Amy Goodman, Noam Chomsky, Cornel West, among many others-to interpret the volatile events unfolding in a lightning-like way in North Africa and the Middle East. They have been almost invariably "experts" trained in North African or Middle Eastern graduate school area studies programs of the kind said has decisively exposed as ideological state apparatuses rather than authentic educational institutions. Whether Richard Haass, director of the Council of Foreign Relations and former foreign policy advisor to the George W. Bush administration (Haass 1997); (9) Paul Wolfowitz, former Deputy Defense Secretary in the George W. Bush administration, Richard Perle, a leading member of PNAC (Project for the New American Century), to name only a few who have been carefully selected by the mainstream media to analyze the uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East. these policy pundits, whatever the differences between their analyses, have all, in a concerted effort to annul its "eventness," represented the revolution according to the unerring ideological dictates of the Western, particularly American discursive regime I have been all too briefly attempting to characterize: to "stabilize" the revolutionary movement the volatility of which threatens American hegemony in the Middle East by identifying it ultimately as a manifestation of the "clash of civilization." (10)

Following the deeply inscribed vocational logic of the "American calling," to put the above in a way that resonates from the American Puritans to George W. Bush, (11) American officialdom and its ventriloquized media, have systematically and predictably represented the world historical events in North Africa and the Middle East from above rather than from below: from "a center elsewhere," to retrieve Jacques Derrida's enabling but virtually forgotten terms that define the Western (logocentric) tradition (Derrida 1978). (12) They insistently appeal to "secular" history, in opposition to (their representation of) "Islam" it is important to emphasize, but they view this history from a transcendental rather than historical point of view. More precisely, their perspective on historical events constitutes a "naturalized supernaturalism" (said) or a "political theology" (Schmitt 2005). (13) The technology of the media-the mobile television camera, instant electronic mobility, the roving correspondent, and so on-that contributed enormously to the modern Western notion that history has been de-theologized, that is, "secularized" conceals this perennial panoptic view from above--the "center elsewhere "that renders the below "lowly," if not entirely invisible (non-existent). The media, by way of the correspondents' presence and the instantaneity of his/ her message, convey the impression of their disinterestedness. They give the viewer at home the sense that they are there, in the midst of the historical events in Tahrir Square. And this impression is enhanced by occasional sound-bite conversations with the rebels. But this technological underscoring of the sense of "being there" (as opposed to "hearsay") is an illusion. As in the synecdochical case of the insidious representational strategy of the still-to-be-understood-and, in the long view, immensely influential-anti-protest Vietnam War film, John Wayne's The Green Berets (1968), (14) the mainstream media, despite the baffling contradictions of its latest manifestation (the cell phone and the instant communicating enabled by Facebook) render the very being-the singularity-of the historical actors invisible. And they achieve this by imposing the "secular'-naturalized supernatural-discursive regime endemic to the West and especially the United States on their words and actions. To recall my initial rhetoric, they name the unnamable, Speak the unspeakable, Identify the unidentifiable, give (prescribed) Voice to the voiceless, and thus, like the Adam of the Old Testament, domesticate the "beast" of revolution.

Put alternatively, history, such as that erupting in North Africa and the Middle East, is always written by the victors. And the vanquished are bereft of a voice. It is worth reconstellation Walter Benjamin's resonant seventh proposition in "On the Concept of History" into this fraught context:

The nature of this melancholy [which results from the despair of "mastering the genuine historical picture, which so fleetingly flashes by"] becomes clearer, once one asks the question, with whom does the historical writer of historicism actually empathize. The answer is irrefutably with the victor. Those who currently rule are however the heirs of all those who have ever been victorious. Empathy with the victors thus comes to benefit the current rulers every time. This says quite enough to the historical materialist. Whoever until this day emerges victorious, marches in the triumphal procession in which today's rulers tread over those who are sprawled underfoot. The spoils are, as was ever the case, carried along in the truimphal procession. They are known as the cultural heritage. In the historical materialist they have to reckon with a distanced observer. For what he surveys as the cultural heritage is part and parcel of a lineage which he cannot contemplate without horror. It owes its existence not only to the toil of the great geniuses, who created it, but also to the nameless drudgery of its contemporaries. There has never been a document of culture, which is not simultaneously one of barbarism. And just as it is itself not free for barbarism, neither is it free form the process of transmission, in which it falls from one set of hands into another. The historical materialist thus moves as far away from this as measurably possible. He regards it as his task to brush history against the grain. (Benjamin, "On the Concept of History," 2-3)

Two

As I observed at the outset of this symptomatic reading, the apparently spontaneous Revolution that began in Tunisia and spread like wildfire to Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain, Libya, and Syria and threatens to ignite the whole Arab world cannot any longer be identified in the terms of the political theological categories available to the triumphant Western discursive regime. This impossibility is because these categories have been delegitimized by the revolution in Western thinking inaugurated by a "certain Marx," Nietzsche, Freud, and Heidegger, developed by the German continental philosophers (Adorno, Horkheimer, Benjamin, Arendt) and the French existentialist (Sartre, de Beauvoir) and post-structuralists (Derrida, Lacan, Lyotard, Althusser, Foucault, Virilio, Deleuze and Guattari, Lacoue-Labarthe, and Nancy, among others) in the tumultuous years of the Algerian and Indo-Chinese wars, and brought to political fruition by the postcolonial thinkers (C.L.R. James, Frantz Fanon, Edward said, Gayatri Spivak, Ranajit Guha, Partha Chatterjee, and Dipesh Chakrabarty, among others). In other words, the illegitimacy of these categories is the necessary paradoxical precipitate of the interrogation and, at best, de-centering of the essential logic of the Western metaphysical tradition (thinking meta-ta-physica: from after or above physis: panoptically)--and the relay of hierarchical binary structures extending from the ontological site (Identity/difference, Something/nothing), through the gender (Male/ female), racial (White/colored), and cultural sites (Civilization/barbarism, Sedentary/nomadic, Center/periphery), to the global site (Empire/colony). I am, of course, referring to the once startling and exuberant, however, contested, but now virtually forgotten claim that "philosophy has come to it end"-its fulfillment and demise-in the "Age of the World Picture," when, that is, by way of the gradual but unerring historical spatialization or reification (closure/colonization) of radical temporality in the modern era, the metaphysical thinking endemic to the West self-de-structed: culminated in the disclosure of the nothingness (das Nichts], to which I will return, that is ontologically prior to Being (Heidegger 1993, 431-449; Heidegger 1977, 115-154).

The Arab revolution, it could be said, had its immediate world historical origins in the post-World War II period, which bore witness to a multitude of political rebellions in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia undertaken in the name of self-determination against several centuries of ruthless and predatory Western colonial (political and discursive) rule and the establishment of what came to be called "post-colonial" states, but which were immediately and inexorable reduced to the neocolonial Cold War scenario by the United States and the Soviet Union, and then, with the demise of the latter, to client states of an exceptionalist U.S. bent, by way of securing Israel, on securing the Middle East-its oil reserves-against the threat of "Islam": a neocolonial strategy that lent itself to the restructuring of these differently and more loosely organized geographical spaces in terms of repressive political categories--nationalism, dictatorship, militarism, theocracy-endemic to the Western discursive regime. But this broad-basically geopolitical-way of putting the revolution's origins, which, mutatis mutandis, is the way it has been by American officialdom, the media, and most policy experts, is inadequate to the actual history it represents. And, as I have been implying, this is because, in overdetermining the spatialized categories of Realpolitic, it obscures more foundational, though not less decisive historical origins. I mean, not least, the perennial hierarchical ontological opposition between (triumphant) West and (vanquished) East (Occident and Orient), disclosed by what I am calling the "post-structuralist revolution" in Western thinking but marginalized to the academy by the policy experts, that goes back to the origins of the very idea of "the West:" its cartography (figuration/construction) of the planet under the aegis of the metaphysically ordained binary Identity/ difference (Center/periphery), in which the West, as Dipesh Chakrabarty has decisively observed, has identified itself as the principle of Identity (the Center, Sedentary, Civilization) and the East as difference (the periphery, nomadic, barbarian) (Chakrabarty 2000).

Let me repeat the triumphalist argument about the origins of the contemporary Arab Revolution summarized above, now however, including the ontological register it obfuscates, if not entirely annuls. Following the directives provided by Edward said's materialist history of the Western imperial project--not least his account of the "voyage in [to the metropolis]" of colonial subjects such as Frantz Fanon, C.L.R. James, George Antonius, S. L. Alatas, Ranajit Guha (15)-in his aptly titled Culture and Imperialism, we might say far more precisely, that the present Arab Revolution had its origins in the self-destruction of the Western imperialist project in the World War II period. I mean by this locution the "fulfillment" of imperialism's metaphysically sanctioned binarist logic-an imperial/spatializing logic-that had its Arche in the Greco-Roman era (16) and its paradoxical "Telos" in the precipitation into being, at the moment of it fulfillment/closure, of its colonized peripheral "others' in the post-World II era, now known as the post-colonial occasion. To re-invoke Alain Badiou's analogous but more precise terms, the Arab Revolution to which we are presently bearing witness had its origins in an "event" that "names" the "void" in "the complacent plenitude established by the rule of those who possess capital," the "not-known in the [modern colonial] situation." No more illuminating summary of this "evental (evenementiel) epochal event has been written than Edward said in the closing section of Culture and Imperialism, tellingly entitled "Movements and Migrations" to reflect the influence of Paul Virilio, and Gille Deleuze and Felix Guattari, (17) no doubt with the first Palestinian Intifada (1987-93) (18) in mind. I quote at length not only 1) to point to the unprecedented-revolutionary in the radical sense of the word--nature of the historical occasion--the interregnum--to which said is referring; but also 2) to underscore that which in his account of the "end of empire" has been tellingly missing in the official and mediatic analyses of the origin and nature of the present Arab revolution-the singularity of the postcolonial condition that renders the categories-the frame-provided by the Western discursive regime utterly inadequate, indeed, a violence against, its reality; and, beyond that, 3) the possibilities concerning the coming polis enabled by this de-centering and singularization of the global human condition:

We can perceive this truth [of the various attributes-"precision, concreteness, continuity, form"-of "a nomadic practice whose power, Virilio says, is not aggressive but transgressive] on the political map of the contemporary [post-imperial] world. For surely it is one of the unhappiest characteristics of the age to have produced more refugees, migrants, displaced persons, and exiles than ever before in history, most of them as an accompaniment to and, ironically enough, as afterthoughts of great post-colonial and imperial conflicts. As the struggle for independence produced new states and new boundaries, it also produced homeless wanderers, nomads, and vagrants, unassimilated to the emerging structure of institutional power, rejected by the established order for their intransigence and obdurate rebelliousness. And insofar as these people exist between the old and the new, between the old empire and new state, their condition articulates the tensions, irresolutions, and contradictions in the overlapping territories shown on the cultural map of imperialism. There is a great difference, however, between the optimistic mobility, the intellectual liveliness, and "the logic of daring" described by the various theoreticians on whose work I have drawn, and the massive dislocations, waste, misery, an horrors endured in our century's migrations and mutilated lives. Yet it is no exaggeration to say that liberation as an intellectual mission, born in the resistance and opposition to the confinements and ravages of imperialism, has now shifted from the settled, established, and domesticated dynamics of culture to its unhomed, decentered, and exilic energies, energies whose incarnation today is the migrant, and whose consciousness is that of the intellectual and artist in exile, the political figure between domains, between forms, between homes, and between language. From this perspective then all things are indeed counter, original, spare, strange. From this perspective also, one can see "the complete consort dancing together" contrapuntally. And while it would be the rankest Panglossian dishonesty to say that the bravura performances of the intellectual exile and the miseries of the displaced person or refugee are the same, it is possible, I think, to regard the intellectual as first distilling then articulating the predicaments that disfigure modernity-mass deportation, imprisonment, population transfer, collective dispossession, and forced immigration. (Said 1993, 332-333; my emphasis)

I will return to said's provocatively enigmatic articulation of the coming polis later in this essay. Here, taking my directive from said's decisive, but virtually ignored, disclosure that, in the globalized post-imperial world "liberation as an intellectual mission has now shifted from the settled, established, and domesticated dynamics of culture to its unhomed, decentered and exilic energies, energies whose incarnation today is the migrant," I want to return to and amplify on the "void" that the "event" I am calling the Arab Revolution "names." As I have noted, the general official and mediatic representations of the Revolution have by and large willfully disregarded the sustained poststructuralist interrogation of Western thinking, culture, and national and inter-national politics as "academic" and continue, in a remarkably unexamined way, to apply Western definitional categories to its unpresentable singularity. In radical opposition to what can only be called this paranoidal Western will to identify-and annul by containing-the vital force of the Revolution, I want to retrieve, from the margins to which the amnesiac Western memory has relegated this alternative, the historical fact that "it" is the precipitate of the self-de-struction of the spatializing/reifying-structuralizing-logic of Western imperialism and thus to stress its spectral de-centered and Protean amorphousness. The "name," in short, that the event of the Arab Revolution provides the void at the origin of the modern West's totalitarian discursive regime is "the unnameable."

To retrieve this postructuralist genealogy, I invoke at length, at the risk of invidious comparison, Martin Heidegger's now virtually forgotten essay "What Is Metaphysics?," one the most revolutionary interrogations, whatever the author's own politics, of the foundational logic of post-Enlightenment Western modernity, particularly of its triumphal apotheosis of "Man":

Man-one being among others-"pursues science [knowledge in the modern or anthropological mode]." In this "pursuit" nothing less transpires than the irruption by one being called "man" into the whole of beings, indeed in such a way that in and through this irruption beings break open and show what they are and how they are. The irruption that breaks open, in its way, helps beings above all to themselves. This trinity-relation to the world, attitude, and irruption-in its radical unity brings a luminous simplicity and aptness of Dasein to scientific existence. If we are to take explicit possession of the Dasein illuminated in this way for ourselves, then we must say: That to which the relation to the world refers are beings themselves-and nothing beside. That from which every attitude takes its guidance are beings themselves-and nothing further. That with which the scientific confrontation in the irruption occurs are beings themselves-and beyond that nothing. But what is remarkable is that, precisely in the way scientific man secures to himself what is most properly his, he speaks of something different. What should be examined are beings only, and besides that-nothing; beings alone, and further-nothing; solely beings, and beyond that-nothing. What about this nothing? Is it an accident that we talk this way so automatically? Is it only a manner of speaking--and nothing besides? However, what trouble do we take concerning this nothing? The nothing is rejected precisely by science, given up as a nullity. But when we give up the nothing in such a way do we not concede it? Can we, however, speak of concession when we concede nothing? But perhaps our confused talk already degenerates into an empty squabble over words. against it science must now reassert its seriousness and soberness of mind, insisting that it is concerned solely with beings. The nothing-what else can it be for science but an outrage and a phantasm? If science is right, then only one thing is sure; science wishes to know nothing of the nothing. Ultimately this is the scientifically rigorously conception of the nothing. We know it, the nothing, in that we wish to know nothing about it. Science wants to know nothing of the nothing. But even if it is certain that when science tries to express its proper essence it calls upon the nothing for help. It has recourse to what it rejects. What incongruous state of affairs re veal itself here? With this reflection on our contemporary existence as one determined by science we find ourselves enmeshed in a controversy In the course of this controversy a question has already evolved. It requires explicit formulation: How is it with the nothing? (Heidegger 1993, 95-96) (19)

Given the negative climate of opinion concerning Heidegger produced by the traditional Western humanist community's all too easy equation of his "anti-humanist" thought with Nazism, this genealogy of Western modernity-this retrieval of the nothing [das Nichts]-and the anxiety (Angst) it instigates-that is ontological prior to (the Anthropological understanding of) Being will, no doubt, sound either nihilistic or Eurocentric. But, it should be remembered, Heidegger's genealogy of Western humanist modernity was, also, however marginally, insistently articulated as a critique of its Eurocentrism, that, in other words, it was consciously undertaken with the Western modernity's global "will to power" in mind. His awareness of the global reach of this imperial language of Western modernity-it will not be inappropriate to call it Orientalist after said--is epitomized in his "Dialogue on Language" with his former Japanese student Shiuzo Kuki:

J. But, as I have indicated, the temptation [in modern Japan] is great to rely on European ways of representation and their concepts.

I. The temptation is reinforced by a process which I would call the complete Europeanization of the earth and of man.

J. Many people consider this process the triumphal march of reason. At the end of the eighteenth century, in the French Revolution, was not reason proclaimed a goddess?

I. Indeed. The idolization of that divinity is in fact carried so far that any thinking which rejects the claim of reason as not originary simply has to be maligned today as unreason. (Heidegger 1971, 15)

Seen in the reconstellated light of this retrieved "East"--the West's perennial (vanquished) "other"-in rethinking his critique of Western humanism, Heidegger's retrieval of the "nothing" that Western thinking has in a willful and increasingly paranoid way had nothing to do with from its origins undergoes a remarkable sea-change. On the one hand, the West's nullification of the nothing becomes the ontological foundation of the nullification of, among other sites on the continuum of being, humanity, culture, and the polity of the "East": its representation of the Orient as non-existent, or more precisely, as yet-to-be-developed, on the analogy of its representation of the nothing as that which is not some thing. Thus the persistent Western identification of the land of the Orient as having reverted to terra nullius and of its peoples as nomadic, which is to say, amorphous, uncivil (devoid of vocation), and without history. On the other hand, as Heidegger's emphasis on the West's persistent appeal to the nothing to establish the truth of Being (as Summum Ens) resonantly suggests, its very will to nullify the nothing-or to transform or "work" (cultivate) it into something-implies that the nothing does indeed exists as a specter that haunts this absolute truth of the vocational West. (20) And, although Heidegger says little overtly beyond his insistent generalized reminder of the catastrophic consequences of the arrogant "Europeanization of the earth and man," about the social and political relations between the West and the East, what he does is enough to suggest the analogous relationship between the specter of the nothing that haunts the triumphal truth discourse of the West and the emergence in the wake of the self-de-struction of Western imperialism of the (vanquished) world of the East--the multitude of beings that the West from its origins has perennially reduced to "nonbeings" and colonized in the name of Humanism and History.

This development from the ontological to the worldly global phase of the posthumanist retrieval of the nothing, I suggest, is represented by the erratic and sometimes contested, general history of poststructuralist thinking-one that, as the evolution of deconstruction (Derrida) to genealogy (Foucault) to (nonidentitarian) postcolonial theory (said) testifies, (21) transformed, however unevenly, its original overdetermination of textuality (the undecideability of the signifier) into a worldly practice of resistance. But for the sake of convenience--and to underscore the continuity between Heidegger's retrieval of the nothing from the margins to which it has been relegated by Occidental thinking and the emergence of its spectral "Oriental" other to center stage in the wake of the implosion of the logic of Western imperialism, I will invoke the exemplary witness of the Dipesh Chakrabarty, one of the Indian Subaltern Studies group. I mean, specifically, this "Bengali's" post-nationalist effort to "provincialize Europe"--to read its "universal" truth from the perspective of its "local"--its vanquished--Other. Like Heidegger's vis a vis the nothing that belongs to being in the above passage, this Oriental initiative is "grounded" not, as in the telling case of the Indian nationalist Jawaharlal Nehru, in the accommodational identitarian nationalism of the modern West and the "progressive" concept of history that Western humanism (including Marxism) assumes, but in the nothing that is ontologically prior to identity:

To provincialize Europe in historical thought is to struggle to hold in a state of permanent tension a dialogue between con tradictory points of view. On the one side is the indispensable and universal narrative of capitalism--History 1, as I have called it. This narrative both gives us a critique of capitalist imperialism and affords elusive but necessarily energizing glimpses of the Enlightenment promise of an abstract, universal but never-to-be-realized humanity. Without such elusive glimpses ... there is no political modernity. On the other side is thought about diverse ways of being human, the infinite incommensurabilities through which we struggle-perennially, precariously, but unavoidably--to "world the earth" [Heidegger] in order to live within our different senses of ontic belonging. These are the struggles that become--when in contact with capital--tile History 2s that in practice always modify and interrupt the totalizing thrusts of History 1. Although this book is not committed to either Marx or Heidegger in any doctrinaire or dogmatic sense, the spirit of their thinking and their guiding concepts preside over the two poles of thought that direct the movement of this book. Marx and Heidegger represent for me two contradictory but profoundly connected tendencies that coexist within modern European social thought. One is the analytic heritage, the practice of abstraction that helps us to universalize. We need universals to produce critical readings of social injustices. Yet the universal and the analytical produce forms of thought that ultimately evacuate the place of the local. Such thought fundamentally tends to sever the relationship between thought and modes of human belonging. The other European heritage is the hermeneutic tradition that tends to reinstitute within thought itself this relationship between thought and dwelling. My attempt in this book has been to write some very particular ways of being-in-the-world--I call them Bengali only in a provisional manner--into some of the universal, abstract, and European categories of capitalist/political modernity. For me provincializing Europe had been a question of how we create conjoined and disjunctive genealogies for European categories of political modernity as we contemplate the necessarily fragmentary histories of human belonging that never constitute one or a whole. (Chakrabarty 2000, 254-255; my emphasis) (22)

In this resonant passage of global historical cartographic dis-location or de-centering, the marginalized nothing (das Nichts) that, according to Heidegger and the poststructuralists, has come in the post-modern era to haunt the metropolitan (universalist) discourse of the West is indissolubly joined with the "local" ("provincial")--or "subaltern" (vanquished)--that has come, in the global post-colonial era, to haunt the imperial polity of the West. This reconstellation means, above all, that metropolitan West's perennial cultural Other must now be understood on the analogy of the nothing disclosed by the coming to its self-destructive end of Western (metaphysical) thinking: not as an identifiable--a nameable-entity, which can be accommodated, managed and administered (recolonized)--but as an amorphous and unnameable force: precisely as the spectral "phantasm" its ontological counterpart has been called by the imperial discourse of Western "science," though now, of course, to be thought positively, i.e., as pure potentiality.

Three

To return, after this detour into ontology, to the very worldly (ontic) events in North Africa and the Middle East, what I am suggesting, is 1) that the official West's, particularly the American state's, and its ventriloquized media's, representation of the Arab Revolution, constitutes a frantic effort to bring to presence--give a fixed identity or, at best, a related and relatable system of names to its existential force for the ultimate purpose of containing its differential dynamics within the admissible spatial parameters of the disciplinary discursive regime, which is to say, policing its "errancy." Thus, as I have observed, the unrelenting and pervasive media spectaclealded and abetted, alas, by all too many Western political radicals--of a trial-and-error naming of the revolutionary force--the disgruntled "poor," the "fellaheen," the "unemployed," "youth," the "female sex," the "working class," the "adherents of Western style (capitalist) democracy," "foreign intervention," the "Muslin Brotherhood," "Islamic jihadists," the "military," and so forth, or some combination of these related disciplinary/policing categories of the Western discursive regime--a wishful, indeed, paranoid thinking that, of course, as in so many social upheavals of the past, can all too easily become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Thus also, however--and this needs underscoring to register the "being" of its non-being--the spectral quality of that errant revolutionary force that these Western categories would police--accommodate, contain, domesticate, and administer--at all costs in behalf of its "higher cause" (the "big Other"). I mean "its" refusal, like Bartleby the scrivener's "I would prefer not to" visa vis the call of the Wall Street lawyer, to be answerable to the vocational calling of the interpellative Western state. (23) (I will return to Melville'e seminal figure of this nobody (homo tantum: "mere man and nothing more'[Hardt and Negri (2000, 203)], later in this essay.)

This refusal of the Arab rebels to be interpellated by the higher call of the West, is, precisely what said anticipates in what follows said's articulation of the possibilities disclosed by the coming to its cataclysmic liminal end of the logic of Western imperialism by way of its precipitation of a vast population of de-centered, unhomed migrants, "unassimilated to the emerging structure of institutional power," who exist "between the old and the new, between the old empire and the new state," though here pursuing the directives of the damaged, exilic German Jew, Theodor Adorno:

"The past life of emigres is, as we know, annulled," says Adorno in Minima Moralia, subtitled Reflections from a Damaged Life. ... Why? Because anything that is not reified, cannot be counted and measured, ceases to exist." Thus the emigre consciousness--a mind of winter, in Wallace Sevens' phrase-discovers in its marginality that "a gaze averted from the beaten track, a hatred of brutality, a search for fresh concepts not yet encompassed by the general pattern, is the last hope for thought." Adorno's general pattern is what in another place he calls the administered world" or, insofar as the irresistible dominants in culture are concerned, "the consciousness industry." There is not just the negative advantage of refuge in the emigre's eccentricity; there is also the positive benefit of challenging the system, describing it in language unavailable to those it has already subdued: "In an intellectual hierarchy which constantly makes everyone answerable, unanswerability alone can call the hierarchy directly by it name [note the reversal of the interpellative calling]. The circulation sphere, whose stigmata are borne by intellectual outsiders, opens a last refuge to the mind that it barters away, at the very moment when refuge no longer exits. He who offers for sale something unique that no one wants to buy, represents, even against his will, freedom from exchange." (said 1993, 333)

Said acknowledges that what Adorno offers here "are certainly minimal opportunities," but he also notes, in a telling locution, that Adorno elsewhere "expands the possibility of freedom by a form of expression whose opacity, obscurity, and deviousness ... moves from the dominant system, enacting in its 'inadequacy' a measure of liberation": an "inadequacy" that, in resembling the unpredictable errancy of life, "is able ... to represent an unregimented one." Lest this Adornian "respite from regimentation" be interpreted as "too privatized" (and Eurocentric), said concludes tellingly by demonstrating the "public" (and Eastern) face of this revocational vocation--this radical antinarrative sense of "beginning"--in the provocative words of "an Islamic intellectual like Ali Shariati, "a prime force in the early days of the Iranian Revolution, when his attack on 'the true, straight path, this smooth and sacred highway'--organized orthodoxy--contrasted with the devastations of constant migration":

   man, this dialectical phenomenon, is compelled to be always in
   motion. ... Man, then, can never attain a final resting place and
   take up residence in God. ... How disgraceful, then, are all fixed
   standards. Who can ever fix a standard? Man is a "choice." A
   struggle, a constant becoming. He is an infinite migration, a
   migration within himself, from clay to God; he is a migrant within
   his own soul (said 1993, 333-334). (24)

In sharp contrast to the will to closure endemic to the official and mediatic Western (means-and-end) representational vocation vis a vis the event--and to the authoritarian Arab client (ventriloquized) states against which it has irrupted--this "migratory," "anti-systemic," "unregimented" energy--this revolutionary "sense of beginning (without end)," to invoke the ungrounded ground principle of said's worldly criticism, "which occurs in all genuinely radical efforts to start again" (said 1993, 334) (25)--is precisely what characterizes the Revolution being enacted in North Africa and the Middle East.

Four

To reiterate, it is not a particular oppressed class or a combination of classes recognizable to the oppressive regime that has ignited the revolts in Tunis and Cairo and elsewhere in the Arab world; it is, rather, the "people" (as opposed to "the People," die Volk) in all their amorphous and indefinable singularity or "the multitude" (the "un-homed" understood as partaking of a state of radical "in-betweenness"): the very disposable non-entities, or, in Hannah Arendt's term, the "superfluous,"26 to which the nation-state has reduced their humanity, now, however, understood positively. To appropriate and foreground a term that, in its indefinite generality, has insinuated itself into my discourse as a directive, the Arab Revolution, in short, is a revolution of the vanquished--those whom the discursive regime (and practice) of the dominant culture (in this case the authoritative regimes ventriloquized by Western colonialism) have bereaved of a language and, therefore, in Hannah Arendt's term, a polity. "Yes," Michel Foucault wrote proleptically, echoing Walter Benjamin,

I would like to write the history of the vanquished. It is a beautiful dream that many have had to finally give back language to those who, until the present, have not be able to make use of it, to those who have been constrained to silence by history, by the violence of history, by all the systems of domination and exploitation. Yes. But there are difficulties. First, those who have been vanquished ... are those to whom by definition language has been denied! And if, however, they speak, they do not speak their own language. They are not mute. No, they speak a language that one would not understand (entendue) and that one would feel now the need to hear. On the basis that they are dominant, a language and its concepts have been imposed on them. And the ideas that have been thus imposed on them are the scars of the oppression to which they were forced to submit. These scars, these traces which have impregnated their thought. I would even say, which impregnated their bodily attitudes. (Foucault ]995, 390; my translation)

Taking my directive from Foucault's resonant term, let me invoke here an emergent language, not different from but more precise in its inclusive resonance than the usual categorical "other," "wretched of the earth," "plebe," "subaltern," "minority," "dispossessed," "emigre," "alienated," "unhomed" "oppressed," and so on, being thought by a loosely affiliated constellation of alienated "Western" intellectuals of the post-colonial global, particularly post--9/11 occasion, to address the radical singularity of the subject emerging out of the rubble of the fallen structured/regimented imperial world. I call them post-poststructuralist to emphasize their radicalization and worlding of the nothing--the global zero zone, as it were--disclosed by the earlier poststructuralist interrogation of the relentless and unerring structuring logic of Western metaphysical thinking vis a vis temporality and the difference it disseminates. The Arabic Revolution--the essentially passive (but no less violent) violence in the face of the violence of a totalized state power justified by the establishment of the state of exception as the norm (27)--I suggest, has been instigated by the multitude of identityless identities--those who don't count (have, for all practical purposes, no being--are as the nothing that Western knowledge production will have nothing to do with--in a global age and place where what counts is determined, even in the East and South, by some version of the binary logic of the Western nation-state system: "bare life" (homo sacer: the excluded included by the state or, in its positive phase "whatever being": qualunque (Giorgio Agamben, following, not incidentally, the directives of Hannah Arendt (28)),

He has been excluded from the religious community and for all political life. ... What is more, his entire existence is reduced to a bare life stripped of every right by virtue of the fact that anyone can kill him without committing homicide. ... He is pure zoe, but his zoe is as such caught in the sovereign ban and must reckon with it at every moment. (Agamben 1998, 183-184) (29)

the "ungrievable" (Judith Butler):

The shared condition of precariousness especially "under contemporary conditions of war," by which Butler means the U.S.'s war on terror, which has rendered the state of exception the norm] leads not to reciprocal recognition, but to a specific exploitation of targeted populations, of lives that are not quite lives, cast as "destructible" and "ungrievable." Such populations are "lose-able," or can be forfeited, precisely because they are framed as being already lost or forfeited; that are cast as threats to human life as we know it rather than as living populations in need of protection. ..." (Butler 2009, 31)

"the part of no part" (Jacques Ranciere"):

Political subjectification produces a multiple that was not given in the police constitution of the community, a multiple whose count poses itself as contradictory in terms of police logic. ... "Workers" or "women" are identities that apparently hold no mystery. Anyone can tell who is meant. But political subjectification force them out of such obviousness by questioning the relationship between a who and a what in the apparent redundancy of the positing of an existence. In politics "woman" is the subject of experience--the denatured, defeminized subject--that measures the gap between an acknowledged part (that of sexual complementarity) and having no part. "Worker" or better still "proletarian" is similarly the subject that measures the gap between the part of work as social function and the having no part of those who carry it out within the definition of the common of the community. All political subjectification is the manifestation of a gap of this kind. The familiar police logic that decides the militant proletarians are not workers bur declasses and that militant feminists are strangers to their sex, is, all in all, justified. Any subjectification is a disidentification, removal from the naturalness of a place, the opening up of a subject space where anyone can be counted since it is tire space where those of no account are counted, where a connection is made between having a part and having no part. (Ranciere 1990, 36)

the "uncountable" or, in its positive phase, the "universal singular" (Alain Badiou):

Our world is in no way as "complex" as those who wish to ensure its perpetuation claim. It is even, in its broad outline, perfectly simple. On the one hand, there is an extension of the automatism of capital, fulfilling one of Marx's inspired predictions: the world finally configured, but as a market, as a world-market. This configuration [the echo of said's Adorno of this version of the reduction of the modern world to "world picture" is worthy of note] imposes the rule of an abstract homogenization. Everything that circulates fall under the unity of a count, while inversely, only what lets itself be counted in this way can circulate. Moreover, this is the norm that illuminates a paradox few have pointed out: in the hour of generalized circulation and the phantasm of instantaneous cultural communication, laws and regulations forbidding the circulation of persons are being multiplied everywhere. So it is that in France, never have fewer foreigners settled than in the recent period! Free circulation of what lets itself be counted, yes, and above all of capital, which is the count of the count. Free circulation of that uncountable infinity constituted by a singular human life never! (Badiou 2003, 9-10; first emphasis is mine)

the "inarticulate," to slightly modify Alain Brossat's Foucauldian formulation ("L'inarticulable") of the unspeakable act called "9/11":

This world of the vanquished, this plebeian world, is the other of the legitimate people, endowed with a proper capacity to make history, to inscribe a trace, to make its proper language immediately understandable and registered in a political space. This plebeian commons, on the contrary, appears to be constantly doomed to a condition of loss, indeed, to disappearance, from the time that its difficulty with language prevents its political constitution, a prevention that, in its turn, nourishes the violence specific to the plebeian essence. This is the hypothesis that we intend to pursue in mobilizing a literary tale [Herman Melville's Billy Budd] at the heart of which one is able to identify this stake (Brossat 2002, 53; my translation)

I am, of course, aware of the risk of reduction in thus conflating such singular intellectual itineraries. I am also aware of the risk of sounding Eurocentric entailed in singling out these exemplary contemporary Western intellectuals to speak about the essence of the Arab Revolution. It should be clear from what I have said, however, that, whatever their differences, they, unlike all too many of the early poststructuralists, are in conscious solidarity with, indeed, have been deeply influenced by their post-colonial Arab (and African) counterparts, not least by those Palestinians (or "non-Jewish Jews," such as Hannah Arendt) who have addressed the occupation of Palestine by Israeli Zionists as having its origins and its continuing existence in the geopolitical machinations of the West. Equally, if not more important, concerning this delicate matter, is the geographical and geopolitical proximity of the primary and enabling contingency of Arab rebels and these radical European intellectuals. Attending carefully--visually and aurally--to the margins of the media's, especially of Al Jazeera's, representations of the tumultuous crowds gathered at the now absent hearts of the capitols of these authoritarian Arab nation-states, not least, in Tahrir Square in Cairo, one was enabled to conclude with a considerable degree of certainty that the driving force of the uprising was not simply a disaffected youth per se as the mainstream media sometimes has noted, but, as a few commentators have observed, by a globally conscious college educated but unemployed and disaffiliated youth. By this description I not only mean a well educated and articulate charismatic force armed with Facebook and Twitter technology, which has been acknowledged, but also--and, unlike earlier colonial-period uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East, with some significant degree of awareness, conscious and affective, of the operational binary logic of the colonial and postcolonial history that, as I have underscored, was the ultimate orisins of its enabling occasion: the predatory global imperial history that has been analyzed in the intertextual work of postcolonial intellectuals such as Frantz Fanon, Amilcar Cabral, George Antonius, S, H. Alatas, Albert Memmi, C.L.R. James, George Padmore, Jean Paul Sartre, Edward Said, Ranajit Guha, Gayatri Spivak among many others--those colonial intellectuals, who, in Said's apt phrase, made the inevitable "voyage in [to the metropolis]" (said 1993, pp. 239-261), (30) and, more recently, those Western heirs of the poststructuralist revolution, Jean-Luc Nancy, Alain Badiou, Jacques Ranciere, Giorgio Agamben, Slavoj Zizek, Judith Butler, and others, who, acutely attuned to the devastating legacy of Western imperialism (both colonial and neocolonial), have related the ontological nothing disclosed by their predecessors' interrogation of Western thinking to its worldly manifestations. (31) Given the singularity of the historically fraught time and place, in other words, it is quite likely, as opposed to the unerring calculative geopolitical discourse of the policy experts, the spontaneous igniting factor of the Arab Revolution was a felt consciousness--and the spontaneous adoption--of the positive revolutionary possibilities inhering in the very representation by the Tunisian, Egyptian, Libyan, Syrian states, all, in one way or another ventriloquized by the West, of their human being as non-being-bare life, the part of no part, the uncounted, the ungrievable, the inarticulate--or, to put it alternative, of the reverberating silence incumbent on their bereavement of language: their refusal to be answerable to the call of the discursive regime of the State.

This radically revolutionary paradigm, I suggest, had its tentative origins in the West in the various sporadic uprisings of the multitude during the long Indochina war, both in the United States (the so called "protest movement') and, more suggestively, in France (the "events of May 1968"). But because the spontaneous nonviolent violence (against the States' exceptionalist "Law") of the protesters did not materialize into a counter-language, its revolutionary force was easily neutralized--explained away--by the discursive regime of the dominant culture.32 It is for this reason, perhaps, that Giorgio Agamben, one of the most eloquent and suggestive thinkers of this revolutionary initiative of the singular universal chooses the event of Tianamnen Square (April 15-June, 1989) as its paradigm. "What could be the politics of whatever singularity [Agamben's version of the paradoxical singular universal that renders the opposition between identity and difference inoperative], that is, of a being whose community is mediated not by any condition of belonging (being red, being Italian, being Communist) nor by the simple absence of conditions (a negative community, such as that recently proposed in France by Maurice Blanchot), but by belonging itself?." And, not incidentally, with Bartleby's "I would prefer not to" in mind--his refusal to be answerable to his Wall Street boss's call (33)--he adds, "A herald from Beijing carries the elements of a response" (Agamben 1993, 84; my emphasis). I quote Agamben's lucid analysis of this paradoxical epochal annunciation at length to underscore both its suggestiveness vis a vis the political potential of the silent spectral nothing ("whatever singularity") and its revolutionary force:

What was most striking about the demonstrations of the Chinese May was the relative absence of determinate contents in their demands (democracy and freedom are notions too generic and broadly defined to constitute the real object of a conflict, and the only concrete demand, the rehabilitation of Hu Yao-Bang [the tolerant CPC General Secretary whose death the populace wished to mourn], was immediately granted). This makes the violence of the State's reaction seem even more inexplicable. It is likely, however, that the disproportion is only apparent and that the Chinese leaders acted, from their own point of view, with greater lucidity than the Western observers who [inscribed by the binary categories of knowledge production endemic to the West] were exclusively concerned with advancing increasingly less plausible arguments about the opposition between democracy and communism. The novelty of the coming politics is that it will no longer be a struggle for the conquest or control of the State, but a struggle between the State and the nonState (humanity), an insurmountable disjunction between whatever singularity and the State organization. This has nothing to do with the simple affirmation of the social in opposition to the State that has often found expression in the protest of recent years. Whatever singularities cannot form a societas because they do not possess any identity to vindicate nor any bond of belonging for which to seek recognition. In the final instance the State can recognize any claim for identity--even that of State identity within the State (the recent history of relations between the state and terrorism is an eloquent confirmation of this fact). What the State cannot tolerate in any way, however, is that the singularities form a community without affirming an identity, that humans co-belong without any representable condition of belonging (even in the form of a simply presupposition). The State, as Alain Badiou had shown, is not founded on a social bond, of which it would be the expression, but rather on the dissolution, the unbinding it prohibits. For the State, therefore, what is important is never the singularity as such, but only its inclusion in some identity, whatever identity (but the possibility of the whatever itself being taken up without an identity is a threat the State cannot come to terms with. A being radically devoid of a representable identity would be absolutely irrelevant to the State. That is what, in our culture, the hypocritical dogma of the sacredness of human life and the vacuous declaration of human rights are meant to hide. Sacred here can only means what the term meant in Roman law: Sacer was the one who had been violence'] precisely insofar as it entails ceasing this obsessive activity--in it, violence and nonviolence overlap (nonviolence appears as the highest violence), likewise activity and inactivity (the most radical act is to do nothing" (476). For a brilliant analysis of Agamben's appropriation of Melville's Bartleby, see de la Durantaye (2009, 164-172). See also Spanos (2008, 105-166). excluded from the human world and who, even though she or he could not be sacrificed, could be killed without committing homicide. Whatever singularity, which wants to appropriate belonging itself, its own being-in-language, and thus rejects all identity and every condition of belonging, is the principle enemy of the State. Wherever these singularities peacefully demonstrate their being in common there will be a Tiananmen, and sooner or later, the tanks will appear (Agamben 1993, 84-86; my emphasis, except for the second).

What I am suggesting, by way of Agamben's resonant model, is, in short, that the very worldly Arab Revolution against the various despotic states in North Africa and the Middle East (and their Western ventriloquizers) is being paradoxically "enacted" precisely by the vanquished: those who, in the eyes of the State and its discursive regime, have, by way of bereaving them of language and thus of a polity, been reduced to the status of non-being and inaction--"bare life" (the included excluded), "the uncountable," "the part of no part," "the ungrievable," "the inarticulate," "the superfluous "now, however, in some degree or other, attuned to the positive possibilities of this denuded condition. And that is why, under the aegis of this metamorphosis of the amorphous into the spectral, the only alternatives of these nation--states where the state of exception is the rule (though they are, in the last instance, not alternatives) is either massive repression (the wholesale killing of its own people, which exposes and underscores its disavowed reduction of their humanity to bare life), as in the case of Libya and Syria, or disintegration, as in the cases of Tunisia and Egypt, that is, an extreme or genocidal violence that, in its global visibility irreversibly delegitimizes the State or the implosion of State (34).

But the possibilities of this metamorphosis of "whatever singularity"--the Protean nothing that the State, will paranoically have nothing to do with in its determination of being--into a spectral force without a Telos (a means without end, or pure potentiality, in Agamben's terms) is not limited to a politics of resistance against the tyranny of the binarist concept of belonging endemic to the nation-state system. The retrieval and worlding of the nothing, I suggest, also enables the possibility of a radically revolutionary "coming community" that, in understanding belonging, not as an identitartan category that privileges the (Schmittian) Friend/enemy opposition as the norm of relationality and thus the beginning--middle-end vocational narrative, but as non-identitarian belonging as such--as, in other words, a pure potentiality that, in overdetermining the time of the now (i.e. beginnings as such), renders the old binarist categories of belonging--including property--"inoperative."

Five

The idea of revolution has perhaps still not been understood, inasmuch as it is the idea of a new foundation or that of a reversal of sovereignty. Of course, we need gestures of foundation and reversal. But their reason lies elsewhere: it is in the incessant present moment at which existencein-common resists every transcendence that tries to absorb it, be it in an All or in an Individual (in a Subject in general). The moment cannot be "founded," and no foundation, therefore, can be "reversed" in it, This moment--when the in of the "in-common" erupts, resists, and disrupts the relations of need and force-annuls collective and communal hypostases; this violent and troubling moment resists murderous violence and the turmoil of fascination and identification; the intensity of the word "revolution" names it well, a word that, undoubtedly, has been bequeathed or delegated to us by an ambiguous history, but whose meaning has perhaps still to be revolutionized.

--Jean-Luc Nancy, Tire Inoperative Community

It is the possibilitay of this non-identitarian belonging visa vis the coming community, I suggest, that the Arab Revolution is announcing in refusing to be answerable to the names that both the regimes under assault by the multitude and the heavily invested Western states would give its force. But to clarify this rather opaque theoretical formulation, it will be necessary to return to my point of departure in Edward Said's very concrete diagnosis of the post-imperial occasion. There, it will be recalled, Said bears witness to the emergence of the exilic condition--the condition of in--betweenness--as the fundamental demographic and psychic characteristic of the post-imperial global occasion in order to underscore his thesis that "liberation as an intellectual mission ... has now shifted from the settled, established, and domesticated dynamics of culture [the objectifying dialectical Western perspective vis a vis global history] to its unhoused, decentered, and exilic energies, energies whose incarnation is the migrant, and whose consciousness is that of the intellectual and artist in exile, the political figure between domains, between forms, between homes, and between languages." There, also, no doubt with the question of Palestine in mind, Said observed that, from such an exilic perspective, one could see the contours of a coming community "founded" on this exilic in-betweenness, a vision he characterizes as "'the complete consort dancing together' contrapuntally."

What does Said mean by this enigmatic figure of the coming community, which, as the caesura between them testifies, yokes together by violence a phrase from T.S. Eliot's poem "Four Quartets" referring to the tonal (harmonic) resolution of different musical voices and a word from the antithetical domain of atonality in what, following Samuel Johnson, could be called a discordia concors. The answer to this difficult question is too complex for brief summary (35), but some intimation of the meaning of this provocative locution can be inferred from what I have said about Said's understanding of the exilic consciousness. I mean the transformation of the bereaved in-between status of the exiled observer--his/her having become at once an inside outsider, a part of and at the same time apart from the homeland--into a de-centered condition for positive thought. In this new eccentric dispensation, the old categories of the nation-state logic of belonging--the centric, binary identitarian categories that, in the name of native and organic solidarity (the People) required the representation of the nation's others as dissonating enemies that have to be forcefully accommodated to the harmonious whole or exterminated, undergo a sea change. As that which divides and destabilizes ethnic or racial identity, the exilic condition, that is to say, following Said's paradoxical characterization of Isaac Deutscher and Sigmund Freud as " non-Jewish Jews," (36) renders the Arab "a non-Arabic Arab" or, more particularly, an Egyptian, "a non-Egyptian Egyptian"; a Libyan, "a non-Libyan Libyan"; a Palestinian, a "non-Palestinian Palestinian;" and so on. To reconstellate Said's enabling paradoxical insight into the context of Agamben's meditations on "the coming community," the old categories of nation-state belonging become "inoperative." The Arab remains an Arab, the Jew a Jew--but relationality metamorphoses from enmity-war-to-the-end (and the annihilation of the human)--into the contrapuntal play of multiple voices--or, more precisely, into a loving strife (Auseinandersetzung) that, since it is not tethered dialectically to a Telos can never end, is always already potentiality.

This revolutionary theoretical initiative concerning the coming community is not restricted to the "non-Palestinian Palestinian," Edward Said. As I have been suggesting, it is an initiative that, however tentatively and unevenly, has been gestating ever since the simultaneous implosion of imperialism--the emergence of the postcolonial global occasion--and that revolutionary, anti-philosophical way of thinking I have called, for lack of a better term, "post-structuralist" and whose fundamental contribution has been the retrieval of the nothing that Western thinking would have nothing to do with--would objectify at all costs--for positive political thought. "Saidian humanists" and, no doubt, "poststructuralist anti-humanists" will, alas, be offended by my reconstellation of Said's postcolonial work into the latter context, particularly into Giorgio Agamben's. But this antipathy, I think, is precisely symptomatic of the failure of all too much so-called "advanced criticism" to fully free itself from the anxiety--annulling categories of belonging endemic to the very politics it would resist in the name of authentic democracy. Bracketing these categories of belonging, as the implosion of the concept of the nation-state (which is to say, the example of the present exilic Arab rebels) directs us, in addressing the relationship between Said's and Giorgio Agamben's commentaries on the coming community, one is struck by the uncanny similarity, despite their quite difference philosophic origins and rhetorics, of their analysis of its ontological origins and its essential being.

Agamben everywhere draws heavily on the "conscious pariah" or "nonJewish Jew," Hannah Arendt's proleptic announcement in the second volume of The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) of the disintegration and waning of the Western nation-state system; the disabling illogicality of the doctrine of the "rights of man"; the reduction of human life to "superfluous" or "bare life" and human politics to biopolitics in modernity; and the replacementt of the city (polis) by the concentration camp as "the fundamental biopolitical paradigm of the West" (the establishment of the state of exception as the norm); and, not least, the emergence of the figure of the refugee or stateless person as the epitome of human life in the post-war global occasion. For the sake of brevity, however, I will limit my commentary to the section of his aptly titled Means without End (2000; originally published in 1996) entitled "Beyond Human Rights," where, in a gesture remarkably similar to Said's, he retrieves Arendt's' significant but marginalized wartime essay "We Refugees" (1943) to underscore her characterization of the refugees of World War II as the "vanguard of their people," and, following her directives, to inaugurate a discussion of the coming community as it pertains to the exemplary global question of Palestine. I quote Agamben at length to demonstrate the remarkable similarity between his reading of Arendt's proleptic overdetermination of the figure of the nomadic refugee (and the intellectual exile or "conscious pariah" who is its consciousness) and Said's singling out of the mobile emigre as the figure that defines the post-imperial global occasion:

One ought to reflect on the meaning of this analysis [Arendt's announcement that with the advent of the conscious pariah "History is no longer a closed book to them (refugees) and politics is no long the privilege of Gentiles"], which after fifty years has lost none of its relevance. It is not only the case that the problem presents itself inside and outside of Europe with just as much urgency as then. It is also the case that, given the by now unstoppable decline of the nation-state and the general corrosion of traditional political-juridical categories [by way of the establishment of the state of exception as the norm], the refugee is perhaps the only thinkable figure for the people of our time and the only category in which one may see today--at least until the process of dissolution of the nation-state and of its sovereignty has achieved full completion--the forms and limits of a coming political community. It is even possible that, if we want to be equal to the absolutely new tasks ahead, we will have to abandon decidedly, without reservation, the fundamental concepts through which we have so far represented the subject of the political (Man, the Citizen and its rights, but also the sovereign people, the worker, and so forth [this is a reference to the "whatever singularity" (qualunque) Agamben develops in The Coming Community] and build our political philosophy anew starting from the one and only figure of the refugee. (Agamben 2000, 15.5)

Taking his directives from Arendt's figure of the refugee, Agamben then goes on to point to the essential contradiction inhering in the logic of belonging of the nation-state system: the incompatibility between its understanding of the "human" and the "citizen" (the "people" and a "People"), thus showing that this logic of belonging becomes a biopolitical apparatus of capture that inevitably produces the countless--and unaccountable--stateless refugee, the expendable bare life, and the concentration camp. But in underscoring its spectrality, Agamben, like Said, also shows that this dispossessed figure (so much like Said's Adornian emigres, who, because they are "not reified," "cannot be counted or measured" and, therefore, "cease to exist"), constitutes the naught (the "mind of winter") that does stand irreparably in the way of the state's plenary forwarding goal--and, however tentatively, to the "renewal [the rendering inoperative] of [the nation-state's] categories" (Agamben 2000, 22.3).

If the refugee represents such a disquieting element in the order of the nation-state, this is so primarily because, by breaking the identity between human and citizen and that between nativity and nationality, it brings the originary fiction of sovereignty to crisis. What is new in our time [this speaks proleptically to the Arab Revolution[ is that growing sections of human kind are no longer representable inside the nation-state-and this novelty threatens the very foundations of the latter. Inasmuch as the refugee, an apparently marginal figure, unhinges the old trinity of state-nation-territory [Agamben derives this locution from Arendt], it deserves instead to be regarded as the central figure of our political history (Agamben 2000, 20-21; my emphasis).

Having thus defined the unhomed refugee as the uncountable and unaccountable remainder of the imploded binarist Friend/enemy logic of the nation-state system, Agamben goes on to think the possibilities of this now central and directive spectral figure vis a vis the human polis. Like Said, also, he invokes the fraught question of Palestine (Jerusalem) as his point of departure, but it is quite clear that, to him, as in the case of Said, Palestine, precisely because it epitomizes the global problem of the relationship between the nation-state and the refugee precipitated by Western imperialism, is a synecdoche of the coming global community. Following Hannah Arendt's early call, in opposition to the reactionary "Revisionist Zionist" commitment to the establishment of an exclusively Israeli state in all of Palestine, for a denationalized and de-territorialized "bi-national state," Agamben envisions this alternative in terms of a problematized "spatial" metaphor which is remarkably similar in its implications for belonging to Said's atonal musical metaphor for the coming Palestine: "the Klein bottle or Mobius strip," in which, in radical opposition to the biopolitical paradigm of the concentration camp (which fulfills the logic of nation-state belonging), "exterior and interior in-determine each other." (My emphasis.) Following the de-centering and nomadologizing implication of this metaphor, Agamben transforms the territorialized nationstate's hierarchical binary biopolitical logic of belonging--Friend and enemy or, at its extreme, Citizen and bare life--into a mobile "reciprocal extraterritoriality" modeled on the "reciprocal extraterritoriality" precipitated by the de-centering or deterritorializing of the territory: two voices (or more), to recall Said's commitment to the one nation solution, in counterpoint, as it were. Agamben, admittedly, is thinking of Europe, particularly of the ominous problem of the massive migration of post-colonial peoples into its nation-state cities, but his diagnosis and solution is, as I have been at pains to suggest by way of underscoring the amorphousness of the revolt, also, indeed, perhaps even more applicable to the present political conditions of the North African and the Middle Eastern nation states gerrymandered by the Western colonial powers in the imperialist age and at the beginning of the twentieth-century after World War I:

Before extermination camps are reopened in Europe (something that is already starting to happen), it is necessary that the nationstates find the courage to question the very principle of the inscription of nativity as well as the trinity of state-nation-territory that is founded on that principle. It is not easy to indicate right now the ways in which all this may concretely happen. One of the options taken into consideration for solving the problem of Jerusalem is that it becomes--simultaneously and without any territorial partition--the capital of two different states. The paradoxical condition of reciprocal extraterritoriality (or, better yet, aterritoriality) that would thus be implied could be generalized as a model of new international relations. Instead of two national states separated by uncertain and threatening boundaries, it might be possible to imagine two political communities insisting on the same region and in a condition of exodus from each other--communities that would articulate each other via a series of reciprocal extraterritorialities in which the guiding concept would no longer be the ius (right) of the citizen but rather the refugium (refuge) of the singular. This space would coincide neither with any of the homogeneous national territories nor with their topographical sum, but would rather act on them by articulating and perforating them topologically as in the Klein bottle or in the Mobius strip, where exterior an interior in--determine each other (Agamben 2000, 23.4-24.5).

In the deterritotialized topological space Agamben envisions, where the "trinity of state-nation-territory" have been called into question, the binarist categories endemic to the nation-state and the "divide" or "borders" it produces would remain the same. Jews would remain Jews and Palestinians would remain Palestinians as would the tensions between them. But, as in the case of the Klein bottle or Mobius strip, where, as Agamben emphasizes "exterior and interior in-determine each other," the disabling operations of their hitherto hierarchical original status--Filial and non-filial, Friend and enemy, Citizen and refugee, Belonging and not belonging, the Counted and the uncounted, Life and bare life--and the deadly vocational imperatives of these binarist operations would be put under erasure or, in Agamben's resonant term, rendered "inoperative"37. As in the case of Said's Palestine, where the "'complete consort danc[es] together' contrapuntally," so in Agamben's coming community the war between the Jews and Palestinian to, and in behalf of, the End in the vocational teleologic of the nation-state metamorphoses into a radically secular, opened-ended, intimate, and creative-playfulstrife between 'peoples"--a community of "whatever singularities"--which is to say, into "means without end" or potentiality as such. "Means without end"--a multitude of "whatever singularities" empowered by an always open-ended potentiality that has been untethered from its traditional subordinate relation to the act, to the vocational Telos that renders one the obedient servant to a "higher cause" (the "big Other"): it is this--and the coming community understood on the analogy of " 'the complete consort dancing together' contrapuntally" or "the Klein bottle"--to which, I suggest, the event I am calling the Arab Revolution in North Africa and the Middle East, in its refusal to be named, is bearing witness--if one is attuned to the dis-operative nomadic imperatives disclosed by imperial deracination. The Western discursive regime, both officialdom and the media, will, of course, react, as it already has begun, to these amorphous and spontaneous uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Libya, and Syria by way of representing them systematically according to the dictates of its traditional Western nation/ state frame of reference. It is, therefore, to the eventness of this revolutionary event--the irreversible disclosure of the "void" (the uncounted, the part of no part, the inarticulate, bare life, the ungrievable) at the origin of the "complacent plenitude" of the Western capitalist/imperial discursive regime that has hitherto named and structured the world either directly or through one form of ventriloquy or another--that oppositional intellectuals, both Western and Eastern, must also bear witness. The Arab Revolution has happened. The past history of revolution has been irreversibly revised. And a new global era has been announced. Conviction of--and fidelity to--that ultimately irreversible deracinating global event requires not only that oppositional intellectuals, wherever they "reside," bear witness to its eventness--the universality of its singularity. It also requires of us the courage to risk the charge of Eurocentrism.

Coda

Immediately following the lines from the video/song "Sout al Horeya," quoted as one of my epigraphs to this essay, the singers sing: If you are one of us,/Stop your chattering/Stop telling us to leave and abandon our dream/ Stop saying the word, "I."

These words are impatient commands addressed by the revolutionaries to the cavilers, both local and foreign, who fear the solicitation of the status quo. And they call these caviling listeners to cease and desist using the language of the self-serving, practical identical Western self--the administrative language that has ventriloquized the multitudinous East--to speak to the common dream or, rather, to the dream of the commons this multitude is enacting in history. One hears in the "we" of this synecdochical song/video the radical singularity of this coming commons.

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(1) These lines from "Sout al Horeya" (Voice of Freedom) are quoted (in translation) from the video of the same name produced at the time of the Arab uprising in Tahrir Square, Cairo by Amir Eid, Hany Adel and videographer Mustafa Fahia. In the video, the lines of the song are simultaneously sung by a multitude of singers--a cross section of Egyptian humanity--and displayed on the signs they carry. As of May 22, 2011, the video has had over a million "hits" on "You Tube." I thank Adam Spanos for calling my attention to this resonant video and for the translation of the Arabic into English.

(2) In expressing uncertainty over of the case of the Libya uprising, I am thinking of Alain Badiou's strong criticism of Jean-Luc Nancy, who supported the American-French-British decision to intervene militarily against Colonel Muhammad Gaddafi. In response to Nancy, Badiou wrote in part: "Don't you realize how all these details [suggesting an orchestrated rather than spontaneous people's uprising] chime with the fact that here, and nowhere else, the great powers were called in to support? That such rift raff as Sarkozy and Cameron, whose aims are transparently sordid, were applauded and worshipped--and you suddenly give them support. Isn't it self-evident that Libya provided an entry for these powers, in a situation that elsewhere totally escaped their control? And that their aim, completely clear and completely classic, was to transform a revolution into a war, by putting the people out of the running and making way for arms and armies--for the resources that these powers monopolize? This process is going on before your eyes each day. And you approve it? Don't you see how after the terror from the air, heavy weapons are going to be supplied on the ground, along with instructors, armoured vehicles, strategists, advisors and blue helmets, and in this way the reconquest ... of the Arab world by the despotism of capital and its state servants will recommence?" (my emphasis.)

(3) It may seems strange to invoke a nineteenth century America novelist in this contemporary global context, but if it is realized that Melville's writing, particularly "Bartleby, the Scrivener," has had an enormous influence on contemporary, especially European, theorists who focus on ontological and worldly questions precipitated by the depredations of Western imperialism, it will be seen that he speaks proleptically to the issues that concern this essay. See also Blanchot (1986), Deleuze (1979), Agamben (1993), and Hardt and Negri (2000).

(4) As its etymology (from the Latin inter and appelare: to interrupt in the form of a call or appeal), suggests, "interpellation"--the call that, in Althusser's terms, renders the called a "subjected subject"-orients the addressee's temporal perspective towards a Telos (or higher cause) to be accomplished and thus his/her sense of being-in-the-world as an obligation to deny the possibilities of immediacy--the time of the now--to work in behalf of (to serve) the fulfillment of that higher cause. Interpellation reduces life to "a calling" or "vocation." The "problematic," therefore, is the panoptic mode of knowledge production that enables this paradoxical "oversight": the super-vision (seeing from on high) that blinds the see-er to that which he/she sees.

(5) This familiar version of the corruption that is said to be endemic to these authoritarian regimes is epitomized by the repeated reference to Colonel Muammar Gaddafi's son hiring Mariah Carey to sing for a million dollars. See New York Times (Feb. 23, 2011).

(6) Immediately following the outbreak in Egypt, Hillary Rodham Clinton, as Secretary of State, for example, supported Mubarac against the rebels, claiming he was a personal friend and a friend of the American nation.

(7) This now ubiquitous phrase was given national visibility in the United States by the neoconservative policy expert Samuel P. Huntington in an essay entitled "The Clash of Civilizations" published in Foreign Affairs (1993) and then in a book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (2004). As Said has observed, however, the phrase was actually coined by the Orientalist Bernard Lewis. See Said (2000, 571-572).

(8) Following Said, I am distinguishing between the earlier version of Orientalism epitomized by the erudition of European scholars such as Sylvestre de Sacy and Ernest Renan and the later "American" version Said call "expertise," which reduces scholarship to instrumental geopolitical propaganda. See Said (1979, 321-328).

(9) For an extended critique of this influential diagnosis of the post-Cold War occasion that harnesses the myth of American exceptionalism to its argument in behalf of America's "reluctant" burden in the wake of the implosion of the Soviet Union, see Spanos (2009, 4-6). For a recent commentary by Haass on the events in North Africa and the Middle East see his interview with Katie Couric (2011).

(10) The symposium on "The New Arab Revolt" published in Foreign Affairs (2011), is a telling example of American "officialdom's" vocation of erasing colonial and neocolonial responsibility for the power relations that exist in North Africa and the Middle East. All six of these "objective" essays, written by prominent policy experts, are, in fact, unerringly characterized by the predictable ideological assumption that it is the urgent responsibility of the U.S. to name this revolutionary occasion according to the policy imperatives of the national security state. None of them refer to the imperial/colonial history that produced the existent political structures that characterize that fraught region--and the revolution that is de-structuring them. One, entitled "Understanding the Revolutions of 2011," and written by Jack A. Goldstone of the School of Public Policy, George Mason U, astonishingly identifies the object of the various revolts, as "Sultanism." Such a reductive name thus suggests the continuing hegemony of Orientalism (and American exceptionalism) in the official discourse of the U.S., despite its decisive and massive exposure in the real world since the publication of said's Orientalism in 1979.

(11) I am referring to the American exceptionalist history that begins with the American Puritans' fundamental commitment to "the calling" (and the "vocation": working obediently in behalf of the fulfillment of a higher cause) endemic to their "election" by God and culminates in the global exceptionalism of the George W. Bush administration's announcement of the United States' "war on terror." In a speech on September 11, 2006 commemorating the infamous attacks on tile World Trade Center and the Pentagon by Al Qaeda, Bush said: "The war against this enemy is more than a military conflict. It is the ideological struggle of the 21st century, and the calling of our generation." Gwbush911 jointsessionspeech.htm--32k

(12) [I]t has always been thought that the center, which is by definition unique, constituted that very thing within structure which while governing the structure, escapes structurality. This is why classical thought concerning structure could say that the center is, paradoxically, within the structure and outside it The center is at the center of the totality, and yet, since tile center does not belong to the totality (is not part of the totality, the totality has its center elsewhere. The center is not the center. The concept of centered structure--although it represents coherence itself, the condition of the episteme as philosophy or science--is contradictorily coherent. And as always, coherence in contradiction expresses the force of a desire. The concept of centered structure is in fact the concept of a play based on a fundamental ground, a play constituted on the basis of a fundamental immobility and a reassuring certitude, which itself is beyond the reach of play" (279)

(13) said derives the term "natural supernaturalism" from Abrams (1971).

(14) I am referring to the directorial strategy that inaugurates the story: Colonel Kirby (John Wayne) tells the anti-war reporter Beckworth (David Jansen) that in order to arrive at the truth of the war in Vietnam he must not rely on hearsay as he does in his columns, but should go to Vietnam to see for himself. Beckworth does go and, of course, he is converted. What he experiences in Vietnam, however, is not Vietnam but, as the first image he encounters on arriving synecdochically suggests--a sign naming the army base "Fort Dodge"--a simulacrum of exceptionalist America's errand in the wilderness. This representational strategy also informs many best-selling collections of veterans' reminiscences published in the United States during 1980s, when, under the impetus of the Reagan administration, the process of "healing the wound"--which eventually became kicking the Vietnam Syndrome--was getting underway. See especially Al Santoli 1981. For an amplified critique of this representational strategy, see Spanos (2009, 101-106).

(15) Concluding his analysis of the paradoxical fulfillment of the accommodational logic of capitalist imperialism in the eventual penetration of the metropolis by deracinated colonial people" said writes: "The voyage in then, constitutes an especially interesting variety of hybrid cultural work. And that it exists at all is a sign of adversarial internationalization in an age of continuing imperial structures. No longer does the logos dwell exclusively, as it were, in London and Paris. No longer does history run unilaterally, as Hegel believed, from east to west, or from north to south, becoming more sophisticated and developed, less primitive and backward as it goes. Instead the weapons of criticism have become the historical legacy of empire, in which the separations and exclusions of 'divide and rule' are erased and surprising new configurations spring up" (144-145).

(16) In my view, following Heidegger and Arendt, this origin is not Greece, as said, following tradition, claims; it is the establishment of imperial Rome as the metropolis of the orbis terrarum. See Spanos (2000, 52-99).

(17) said is referring to Paul Virilio's notion of the new, de-centered space of habitation rendered possible by the implosion of the nation-state system and imperialism as a space of "counter-habitation: to live as migrants do in habitually uninhabited but nevertheless public spaces." said goes on to note that "a similar notion occurs in Milles Plateaux (volume 2 of AntiOedipe) by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. ... The chapter entitled 'Traite de nomadologie: La Machine de guerre,' builds on Virilio's work by extending his ideas on movement and space to a highly eccentric study of an itinerant war machine. This quite original treatise contains a metaphor about a disciplined kind of intellectual mobility in an age of institutionalization, regimentation, co-optation. The war machine, Deleuze and Guattari say, can be assimilated to the military power of the state--but, since it is fundamentally a separate entity, and need not be, any more then the spirit's nomadic wandering needs always be put at the service of institutions. The war machine's source of strength is not only its nomadic freedom but also its metallurgical art--which Deleuze and Guattari compares to the art of music as compositionby which materials are forged, fashioned 'beyond' separate forms; [this metallurgy, like music] stresses the continuing development of form itself, and beyond individually differing materials it stresses the continuing variation within matter itself.' Precision, concreteness, continuity, formall these have the attributes of a nomadic practice, whose power Virilio say, is not aggressive but transgressive" (331-332; my emphasis).

(18) Following said's suggestion that liberation in the wake the old imperial model of colonialism, will rely on its "unhomed, de-centered, and exilic energies," I am referring, to the highly remarked indefinability of the Palestinian Intifada's agents.

(19) It is anxiety (Angst), which has "nothing as its object," that reveals the "nothing" that modern science would annul by objectifying (naming) it. "In anxiety, we say, 'one feels ill at ease [es ist ein unheimlich]." What is 'it' that makes 'one' feel ill at ease? We cannot say what it is before which one feels ill at ease. As whole it is so for one. All things and we ourselves sink into indifference. This, however, not in the sense of mere disappearance. Rather, in this very receding things turn toward us. The receding of beings as a whole that closes in on us in anxiety oppresses us. We can get no hold on things. In the slipping away of beings only this 'no hold on things' comes over us and remains. Anxiety reveals the nothing" (101).

(20) Melville, whom, as it will be seen later, I take to be an uncannily proleptic presence in the contemporary interrogation of the Western imperial will to power, illuminates this devastating irony, especially in his narration of Captain Ahab's monomaniacal pursuit if the white whale in Moby-Dick: "Naught's an obstacle, naught's an angle to the iron way!" Ahab soliloquizes, utterly unconscious of its spectral irony.

(21) This is the thesis of my book The Legacy of Edward W. said (2009). See especially Chapter One (1-25).

(22) Chakrabarty's notion of the universal ("History 1") is, I take it, what Heidegger means, in his account of the hermeneutic circle, by the "presuppositions" or "forestructures" vis a vis the meaning of being that enable inquiry but that, in being put at risk by the inquirer, are deconstructed by the ontologically prior differential dynamics of temporality, or, in Chakrabarty's terms, "the local" ("History 2")

(23) This locution is especially appropriate to the present occasion, when the Western imperial project, now in its neo-colonial, neo-liberal phase, is led by the United States--an exceptionalist America, whose exceptionalism goes back to the "elected" Puritans' covenant with God and their momentously consequent willing submission to His call, a vocation, as it were, that passed over the radically temporal imperative of the local in favor of an abiding Telos: His "higher cause."

(24) The quotation is from Shariati (1979, 92-93; my emphasis).

(25) said (1975): "The state of mind that is concerned with origins is, I have said, theological. By contrast ... beginnings are eminently secular, or gentile, continuing activities. ... A different way of putting this is to say that whereas an origin centrally dominates what derives from it, the beginning ... encourages nonlinear development" (372-373).

(26) Arendt (1976): "The calamity of the rightless is not that they are deprived of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, or of equality before the law and freedom of opinion ... but that they no longer belong to any community whatsoever. Their plight is not that they are not equal before the law, but that no law exists for them; not that they are oppressed but that nobody wants even to oppress them. Only in the last stage of a rather lengthy process is their right to live threatened; only if they remain perfectly 'superfluous,' if nobody can be found to 'claim' them, may their lives be in danger" (295-296).

(27) I am thinking here of Benjamin's notion of "pure violence": a "law-annihilating" violence against the state which will not tolerate a violence outside the law and, in thus enacting this "pure violence"--a violence which is a means without end, i.e non-vocational-inaugurates a new, revolutionary historical era. See Benjamin (1978). I quote Agamben's succinct analysis of pure violence" for convenience: "The aim of the essay is to ensure the possibility of a violence ... that lies absolutely "outside' ... and 'beyond' ... the law and that, as such, could shatter the dialectic between lawmaking violence and law-preserving violence. ... Benjamin calls this other figure of violence 'pure' ... or 'divine', and, in the human sphere, 'revolutionary.' What the law can never tolerate--that it feels as a threat with which it is impossible to come to terms--is the existence of a violence outside the law; and this is not because the ends of such violence are incompatible with law, but because of 'its mere existence outside the law.' ... The task of Benjamin's critique is to prove the reality of such a violence: 'If violence is also assured a reality outside the law, as pure immediate violence, this furnishes proof that revolutionary violence--which is the name for the highest manifestation of pure violence by man--is also possible.' The proper characteristic of this violence is that it neither makes nor preserves law, but deposes it ... and thus inaugurates a new historical epoch" (Agamben 2005, 53). See also Hamacher (1994, 110-138).

(28) See especially Agamben (1998, 126-136), which draws heavily from Arendt's account of "the superfluous," the "stateless," "the pariah," the "refugee," in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1976).

(29) For "whatever being" see Agamben (1993, 1-5).

(30) or an extended analysis of the deconstructive dynamics of this "voyage in" to the metropolis, see Spanos (2009, 124-129).

(31) I am referring to a history of Western oppositional theory and criticism that was intimately related to the Algerian and Vietnamese struggle for independence from colonial France, the multiple struggles for self-rule in Africa, the events of May 1968, the American war in Vietnam, the Israeli occupation of the West Bank in 1967, Tianamnen Square in China, to name but a few instance of this geopolitical proximity.

(32) In the United State this revolutionary potential came to be represented by the discursive regime as a national psychosis: "the Vietnam Syndrome." In France, it was annulled by the usurpation of the question by the traditional opposition between the liberals and communists. In China, on the other hand, its was, tellingly, as we shall see, quelled by brutal military force.

(33) Earlier in The Coming Community Agamben invokes Melville's uncanny scrivener as the epitome of "whatever being": "The perfect act of writing comes not from a power to write, but from an impotence that turns back on itself and in this way comes to itself as a pure act (which Aristotle calls agent intellect). This is why in the Arab tradition agent intellect has the form of an angel whose name Qalam, Pen, and its place is an unfathomable potentiality. Bartleby, a scribe who does not simply cease writing but 'prefers not to' is the extreme image of this angel that writes nothing but its potential to not write" (36.7; my emphasis). See also Agamben (1999), Deleuze (1979), Blanchot (1986, pp 177ff), Hardt and Negri (2000, 203-204), and, not least, Zizek (2008, pp. 472-479). In this last, Zizek, echoing Badiou and Agamben's account of Tianamnen Square, brilliantly identifies Bartleby's refusal to be answerable to the call of the sovereign law ("I would prefer not to ") with the "divine" or "pure" violence that, according to Walter Benjamin, in "Critique of Violence," sovereign state violence will, under any circumstances, not tolerate: "Better to do nothing than engage in localized acts whose ultimate function is to make the system run more smoothly (acts like providing space for the multitude of new subjectivities, etc.). The threat today is not passivity, but pseudo-activity, the urge to "be active," to "participate" to mask the Nothingness of what goes on. People intervene all the time, 'doing something'; academics participate in meaningless 'debates,' etc.; but the truly difficult thing is to step back, to withdraw from it all. Those in power often prefer even 'critical" participation or critical dialogue to silence, since to engage us in such a 'dialogue' ensures that our ominous passivity is broken. The 'Bartlebian act' I propose is violent [in the Benjaminian sense of 'divine

(34) I am thinking here not only of the hit and run guerilla strategy of the National Liberation Front against the United States' military juggernaut, the strategy that molecularized the latter's immense forwarding power and prevented the decisive battle, but also of the American response to this refusal on the part of the Vietnamese insurgents to conduct warfare according to the dictates of the Western concept of warfare. Following the narrative imperatives of Western metaphysical thinking, the U.S., in retaliation, unleashed the genocidal "war of attrition" on Vietnam, i.e. the body count, that implied the absolute reduction of the humanity of the Vietnamese "other" to bare life, and, in so doing, decisively disclosed to the world the utter illegitimacy of the Americana initiative "to save Vietnam for the free world," a disclosure that precipitated the withdrawal of the U.S. from Vietnam.

(35) For an extended analysis of Said's phrase, see the chapter entitled "Hannah Arendt and Edward Said: An Affiliation in Counterpoint" in Spanos (2012).

(36) "The task of the humanist is not just to occupy a position or place; not simply to belong somewhere, but rather to be both insider and outsider to the circulating ideas and values that are at issue in our society or someone else's society or the society of the other. In this connection, it is invigorating to recall Isaac Deutscher's insufficiently known book of essays, The NonJewish Jew, for an account of how great Jewish thinkers-Spinoza, chief among them, as well as Freud, Heine, and Deutscher himself--were in, and at the same time renounced, their tradition, preserving the original tie by submitting it to the corrosive questioning that took them well beyond it, sometimes banishing them from community in the process" (Said 2004, 77). See also Said (2003, 38 ff).

(37) "Inoperative" (inoperosita), Agamben's key term for the "coming community" (borrowed from Georges Bataille and Jean-Luc Nancy ["desoeuvrement"]) must be understood, as I have been suggesting throughout this essay, not simply in terms of its etymology (opera: work), but also in terms of its deconstructive relationship with the secularized theological concept of the "calling (Beruf), which, as Max Weber has demonstrated, involved the transformation of human existence into a task (work) to be done--a "vocation"--in the name of a higher cause and the human individual into an absolute servant of that Telos. The meaning of "inoperosita" is thus also illuminated by Louis Althusser's term, "interpellation": the call that renders the called not simply a"subject." but a "subjected subject." To render "inoperative" thus means to retrieve the possibilities--or better, since it points to the empowerment of the weak--the potential--that service to a task necessarily annuls. Agamben invokes this term everywhere in his work, but its meaning is most fully developed in The Time that Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to tire Romans (2005), where, Agamben, via the Paulian term katargesis (to render [the Law] unworkable), argues, against the Christian interpretation of the "apostle" Paul's "mission," in favor of a Benjaminian materialist messianism.

WILLIAM V. SPANOS

BINGHAMTON UNIVERSITY, SUNY

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Author:	Spanos, William V.
Publication:	symploke
Article Type:	Essay
Geographic Code:	70MID
Date:	Jan 1, 2012
Words:	17990
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