Sune Haugbolle

Social Boundaries and Secularism in the Lebanese Left

This article explores the social meaning of boundaries in Lebanon through debates about secularism in and around the Lebanese Left. The aim is to elucidate the political and social meaning of ‘Left’ in a Lebanese context, and the positioning of liminal political subjectivity in a system organized along sectarian boundaries. Based on readings of debates about secularism in 1975 and 1976, the article proposes that the Left has since that year been forced to embrace secularism as its primary ideological marker. This experience in turn has become constitutive for what it means to be a leftist, namely, a person who expressly transgresses, subverts and challenges social boundaries and their institutional organization.

Imprisonment, Truth Telling and Historical Memory in Syria

This article explores narratives of imprisonment in Syria and the implication of public narration of incarceration in the Arab Middle East more broadly. Since the late 1990s, ‘victim tales’ of Syrian political prisoners have become part of a counterculture against the present regime which calls for political reforms, an independent judiciary, free media and free and fair elections. This new focus on individual victimization corresponds to a trend in Arab countries, where political actors use the victims tale to de-legitimate the postcolonial states monopoly over violence. The article situates this conflict between post-colonial nationalism and post-modern individualism at the heart of current contentions over the meaning and legality of the Arab state, democratization, punishment and truth and reconciliation.

Introduction: Outlines of a New Politics of Memory in the Middle East

While the historical trajectories of emergent attempts to deal with legacies of political violence in the Arab Middle East differ widely, certain commonalities can help us understand this new field across the region. On the one hand, evidence presented in this volume suggests that grassroots movements have to some extent succeeded in ending the politics of pretence and denial that long dominated Arab states. On the other hand, particular political groupings and media monopolize discourses of a universally applicable process of truth and reconciliation in a way that consciously makes use of international idioms, but effectively obfuscates other aspects of social and political justice and reform.

The Ends of Revolution: Rethinking Ideology and Time in the Arab Uprisings

It is difficult to believe the level of disruption and despair that we are witnessing in the Middle East, from a broken Gaza, to a ruined Syria, a Yemen being bombed, a Libya in disintegration, and an Egypt on the slide toward state-centric fascism. These developments seem to be distantly removed from the days of Tahrir Square in early 2011, when people with elated spirits poured into the streets to demand a better political future. If the large-scale social mobilization back then provided the best refutation of Francis Fukuyama’s the-endof-history thesis then the failure to translate mobilization into structural change has made the current moment a liminal, open-ended situation lingering between hope and despair, action and inaction, exhaustion and revolutionary belief. Was this the end of revolution, a stillborn moment that caught fire but transformed and today has lost its radical potential? Or does the end goal of revolution still call forth actions to establish a new and different world, a better one? What, in other words, are the ends of revolution? The aftermath of the 2011 uprisings opens a number of pertinent questions for researchers of revolution in the Middle East and beyond. What is failure for a revolutionary movement? What is certainty and what is doubt? How is a sense of direction created and dismantled in global times when the very possibility of historical direction is circumspect? Can critique create ideological innovation, or does it become a symptom of permanent crisis—crisis of critique as well as crisis of social change? Has the temporality of revolution changed, or can we use previous post-revolutionary situations, from France to Russia and to Iran, to mirror current concerns? Are radical new horizons of possibility emerging from the last six years’ experience with revolution, and if so, in which directions do they point? These are the questions we address in this Introduction as well as in the individual articles that follow.

Moving Through the Interregnum: Yassin al-Haj Saleh in the Syrian Revolution

This article analyzes the iconic Syrian writer and activist Yassin al-Haj Saleh. It analyzes the film Baladna al-rahib [Our Terrible Country] by Syrian filmmakers Muhammad Ali Atassi and Ziad Homsy as a way to explore current debates about revolution, exile and representation in Syria and the Middle East. Homsy and Atassi embrace and use Saleh’s stature as an iconic figure whose embodied meaning functions as an ‘aperture’ to a truth beyond his own person; the truth, in this case, about the Syrian revolution. By using theories of iconicity and revolution, the article interrogates current debates about revolution. What can a revolutionary icon do or say in a situation of apparent defeat? What images of revolution can filmmakers create in a state of what Gramsci called the interregnum, when the old is dying and the new is struggling to be born? It suggests that icons do not only reflect struggle, but also make and remake ideological positions. For the revolutionary project, the key issue becomes what kind of ideological re-making emerges from crisis, and what kind of change to the repertoire of action critique animates.

Media, activism and the new political: ‘Istanbul conversations’ on new media and left politics

Held in October 2013, ‘Istanbul Conversations’ was the first public event organized by the Social Science Research Council’s Transregional Virtual Research Initiative (TVRI) on media, activism, and the new political. The TVRI brings together scholars from a range of disciplines and world regions to examine the interrelationship of media and politics within and across ‘InterAsia’, a spatially and historically networked expanse stretching from the Middle East through East Asia. In recent years there has been much interest in media and activism, focusing primarily on the role of new media and its potential to mobilize social and political change. For the most part, current discussions explore the mediated dynamics of mass mobilization and collective action. Thus, a central question concerns how the new networks of mobile, social and digital media alter capabilities of physical amassment and amplification – the spontaneous scaling up of conversion of individuals into collective, visible, and audible

The Secular Saint: Iconography and Ideology in the Cult of Bashir Jumayil

This chapter examines how the cult of Bashir Jumayil is produced by a combination of political, emotional and cultural motivation. It focuses on the longer historical context of the Lebanese Civil War and the post-war period, as well as the contemporary period after 2005, when Lebanon’s Christians continue to struggle for a common political and cultural project. The example of Bashir Jumayil, presented here, shows the extent to which religious symbolism is enmeshed in the political realm in Lebanon. Jumayil was followed by a number of less unifying Christian leaders. Many Lebanese Christians view his persona as the ultimate symbol of a strong and cohesive Christian community in Lebanon, which they nostalgically recall and wish to recreate. The chapter examines negative representations of Bashir, and how these portrayals inside and outside of Lebanon of Bashir as a fascist leader influence the production of his iconic status by his supporters. Keywords:cult of Bashir Jumayil; Lebanese Christians; Lebanese Civil War; Lebanon

“Best Practices” of Global Memory and the Politics of Atonement in Lebanon

In Lebanon, Haugbolle argues, the state has left the task of addressing difficult questions about mass violence in the recent past to cultural producers. While the impulse for truth telling and memory work evolved out of domestic debates, the logic and institutional design of the resulting cultural memory industry have been strongly influenced by Western models. European cultural centers act as platforms for activities related to the memory of the civil war, and individual activists with transnational or foreign biographical backgrounds are influenced by French or German debates, implying that there are “best practices” of global memory that can be applied to Lebanon. Haugbolle shows that this has resulted in accusations of elitism and in a substitution of cultural production for real political accountability.

The New Arab Left and 1967

Abstract In Arab political culture, the Naksa of 1967 had a number of watershed effects. Scholars have paid a lot of attention to the decline of secular Arab nationalism and the concurrent rise of Islamism. Much less research has been done on the way 1967 spurred radical left organizations, also known as ‘the new Arab left’, to organize resistance against Israel as well as gain a foothold in national politics. This article analyzes what 1967 meant for groups such as P.F.L.P., D.F.L.P., O.C.A.L. and the Syrian Communist Party - Political Bureau, and the wider political culture associated with the new left: its media, journals and art. Based on readings of this cultural production and new research on the tri-continental movement, revolutionary socialism and Third-Worldism in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the article argues that the defeat of 1967 helped to determine the shape the revolutionary moment that followed. This moment has had a lasting impact on Arab political culture and is being re-interpreted in interesting ways today by Arab revolutionaries post-2011.

Den anden revolution: De arabiske opstande belyst af arabisk postmarxisme

Denne artikel analyserer arabiske marxistiske intellektuelles laesninger af de arabiske opstande siden 2011 og introducerer til arabisk postmarxisme forstaet som social teori, der baserer sig pa hele den brede familie af marxistiske teorier og traditioner men forholder sig kritisk til den. Artiklen traekker pa Alain Badious undersogelse af begivenhed, situation og spor. For rigtigt at forsta en begivenhed som de arabiske opstandes betydning, ma nogen engagere sig i at undersoge dette spor kritisk. Jeg argumenterer, at arabisk postmarxisme repraesenterer en kritisk undersogelse af et Badiousk spor, der viser tilbage til uafklarede begivenheder i fortiden. Sporet gar i retning af tidligere arabiske revolutioner, og de arabiske marxisters deltagelse i dem samt deres tidligere laesninger af forholdet mellem stat, samfund og intellektuelle. Deres erindringsarbejde er saledes ogsa et politisk arbejde, der soger at forklare, hvordan de arabiske opstande blev muliggjort, og hvordan de adskiller sig fra tidligere revolutionaere ojeblikke. Denne analyse viser yderligere, at ikke-vestlige samfunds egne laesninger og intellektuelle traditioner skal tages alvorligt i sammenlignende studier af revolution. Postmarxistisk teori er relevant for revolutioner, fordi den giver redskaber til at analysere det revolutionaere subjekt, som Skocpol og andre ignorerede, men som revolutionsteori i dag har indset er af afgorende betydning for forstaelsen af sociale revolutioner. ENGELSK ABSTRACT: Sune Haugbolle: The Other Revolution: The Arab Uprisings in Light of Arab Post-Marxism This article analyzes Arab Marxist intellectuals and their readings of the Arab uprisings since 2011. In addition, it introduces Arab post-Marxism, or social theory drawing often critically on the broad family of Marxist theory and traditions. The article draws on Alain Badiou’s concepts of situation, event and trace. In order to understand events such as the Arab uprisings, someone must be engaged in examining the trace critically. I argue that Arab post-Marxism represents a critical examination of Badiou’s trace referring back to undigested events in the past. The trace points to earlier Arab revolutions, to the participation of Arab Marxists in them, and to their earlier readings of the relation between state, society and intellectuals. In this way, their memory work constitutes political work seeking to clarify how the Arab uprisings were made possible and how they are different from earlier revolutionary moments. On a general level, this analysis shows that intellectual traditions of non-Western societies and the way they engage their past must be taken seriously in comparative studies of revolution. Post-Marxist theory is relevant for revolutions because it provides tools to analyze the revolutionary subject, which Skocpol and others have largely ignored, but which, as most theorists of revolution theory acknowledge, is crucial for our understanding of social and political revolutions. Keywords: revolution, Arab uprisings, post-Marxism, collective memory, Badiou.