Standing by the Ruins: Elegiac Humanism in Wartime and Postwar Lebanon by Ken Seigneurie (review)

Ken Seigneurie’s Standing by the Ruins is a compelling study of Lebanese literature, film, and popular culture from roughly 1975 to 2005. The book makes a unique contribution to Middle East studies and world literature by identifying an elegiac strain of humanism that emerges in dialogue with the classical Arabic trope of standing by the ruins as well as a broader Arab aesthetic of committed realism. Arguing that this strain of humanism constitutes a form of aesthetic resistance to a dominant war ethos in Lebanon specifically and a post–cold war world more generally, Seigneurie probes the nature of humanist thought as a Mediterranean construct and tracks its iteration in the discrete context of twentieth- to twenty-first-century [End Page e-21] Lebanon. Standing by the Ruins brings together studies available in English on Lebanese wartime literature, such as Miriam Cooke’s work on women writers during the Lebanese civil war, and scholarship concerned with the development of aesthetic currents in Arabic literature.

Seigneurie examines the remobilization of the classical Arabic literary trope of wuqūfʿala al-aṭlāl, or “stopping by the ruins,” in civil war (1975–1990) and postwar Lebanese cultural production. Well established in pre-Islamic Arabic poetry, the trope of stopping by the ruins belongs to the nasīb or amatory prologue of the qaṣīda (ode) in which a narrator-poet revisits the remains of a campsite he once shared with his beloved and contemplates the ruin traces of the site. The contemplative mood of the poet then gives way to expressions of longing and lament for the absent beloved that allow him to overcome his pain while preserving the memory of this loss. Standing by the Ruins argues that Lebanese novelists, filmmakers, and other agents of cultural production mobilized this trope to explore the sense of loss and sectarian conflict that marked the civil war. According to Seigneurie, these texts propose an elegiac form of humanism “that denies the comfort of identitarianism in the name of human dignity” (20). This aesthetic offers a counterdiscourse to the dominant ideology of “mythic utopianism” in Lebanese culture by moving away from the blood-driven economy of sectarian heroism, which produces martyrs as a means of achieving utopian redemption in the future, and toward a culture of mourning that expresses alienated suffering for irredeemable loss. Both mythic utopianism and the ruins aesthetic draw on a sense of nostalgia that is attached to the imagery of war ruins. However, the former views destruction and bloodshed as a commodity for the purchase of progress, whereas the latter interrupts the telos of a blood-driven economy by insisting on loss.

Concerned with suspending the “wholesale damning of humanism,” Standing by the Ruins argues for the value of an elegiac strain of humanism in twentieth-century Lebanese cultural production that offers an “alternative to the mythic-utopian conviction that human life is a quantum of matter-energy in the service of greater forces” (20). Seigneurie examines canonical critiques of humanism and identifies two camps: one that offers a genealogy of the concept with an emphasis on a certain point at which the logic of humanism goes awry and another that points to fundamental flaws in the concept itself. The first camp includes Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, who trace the breakdown of humanism to the Renaissance; Stephane Toulmin’s claim that Descartes’s work constitutes a problematic turning point in humanism; Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s critique of the Enlightenment; [End Page e-22] and Frantz Fanon’s concern with the colonial moment. Seigneurie situates his own work within this body of scholars by emphasizing a shared goal of salvaging humanist thought. In the second camp Seigneurie includes Martin Heidegger’s “objection to the metaphysical nature of the humanist subject,” Michel Foucault’s critique of “humanism as naturalization of the Western episteme,” Louis Althusser’s effort to expose its “ideological obfuscation,” and Gayatri...