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 epoché 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 and 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.

—"Sout 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...