This is a conversation with Dr Fadi Bardawil, Assistant Professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke University and the author of the book “Revolution and Disenchantment: Arab Marxism and the Binds of Emancipation“.

I wanted to have this conversation with Dr Bardawil because his study of the 1960s Arab New Left, and especially the Lebanese New Left of that period, evoked curious comparisons to what protesters in Lebanon are having to face today as well.

The experience of the Lebanese New Left offers insights into how intellectuals struggled with the questions of theory and practice and of how to transform societies despite all their contradictions.

As you’ll hear in the conversation, Dr Bardawil, who is of the civil war generation, is very much in conversation with the generation that came before his. At the same time, and for different reasons, I, as someone from the postwar generation, am in conversation with the war generation. As such we managed, hopefully succesfully, to have three generations of Lebanese briefly conversing with one another.

I hope you’ll enjoy this conversation as much as I did.

Here’s the abstract:

“The Arab Revolutions that began in 2011 reignited interest in the question of theory and practice, imbuing it with a burning political urgency. In Revolution and Disenchantment Fadi A. Bardawil redescribes for our present how an earlier generation of revolutionaries, the 1960s Arab New Left, addressed this question. Bardawil excavates the long-lost archive of the Marxist organization Socialist Lebanon and its main theorist, Waddah Charara, who articulated answers in their political practice to fundamental issues confronting revolutionaries worldwide: intellectuals as vectors of revolutionary theory; political organizations as mediators of theory and praxis; and nonemancipatory attachments as impediments to revolutionary practice. Drawing on historical and ethnographic methods and moving beyond familiar reception narratives of Marxist thought in the postcolony, Bardawil engages in “fieldwork in theory” that analyzes how theory seduces intellectuals, cultivates sensibilities, and authorizes political practice. Throughout, Bardawil underscores the resonances and tensions between Arab intellectual traditions and Western critical theory and postcolonial theory, deftly placing intellectuals from those traditions into a much-needed conversation.”

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Transcript prepared by Thomas Cugini and Antidote Zine:

Between a complete disparaging of this experience as a full-on failure or defeat, and a complete fetishization and melancholic attachment to it, I try to carve a path in which we can critically inherit the dual legacy of the 1960s generation: the legacy of both revolution and disenchantment. This became especially important to me after the first wave of Arab revolutions that were ignited in 2011.

Fadi Bardawil: Thank you, Joey, for your interest in my work, and thank you for taking the time to read it in these turbulent times. I’m trained at the PhD level as a cultural anthropologist. Before that I had an MA in sociology. For a long time now, around two decades, I’ve been interested in one main theme: the relationship of cultural production to political practice and political engagement. 

Around twenty years ago I started a research project—and it ended up as an MA thesis in the sociology department of the American University of Beirut—which traced the trajectory of the communist Lebanese musician and playwright Ziad Rahbani in his relationship to the Rahbanis’ inheritance as an heir to Fairuz and Assi El Rahbani as well as in his relationship to the other politically committed leftist musicians who were around at the time. The most well-known ones you may recognize, people like Khaled El Haber, Marcel Khalife, and Ahmad Kaabour; some other people were big then but no longer now, like Al-Kawras Al-Shaabi. The idea then, which I pursued later on, was to try and think of the different mediations and relationships between political engagement and practice, and fields of cultural production. 

My PhD is in cultural anthropology; I continued pursuing this idea, but I moved from an understanding of culture and its relationship to aesthetics—which was my project in the MA thesis, focusing on plays and music and radio shows—and moved towards interrogating the relationship of theoretical production to political practice. Roughly speaking, since my PhD work, I have been working in a triangle which consists of intellectual history, political anthropology, and critical theory. My work is located in the parameter of these three traditions. Because part of my interest is literally in how we can really rethink contemporary Arab thought, and also how we can think of contemporary Arab thought in its relationship to being embedded in certain political parties and political practices. The question of critical theory comes into the foreground because I’m interested in how we can develop a critical theory of power in our societies, one that takes the specificity of the multiplicity of logics of power into being.

And what I mean by critical theory is not only the strand of theory that was produced by the Frankfurt schools, such as Adorno and Horkheimer, or Walter Benjamin. I include also traditional post-colonial theory. The tradition I work with and think about is mainly the Indian subaltern studies tradition, as well as the tremendous work inaugurated by the work of Talal Asad, and in Talal Asad’s wake, Edward Said.

Joey Ayoub: Thanks for that introduction. So to start with a contextualisation of the topic of our discussion, would you mind explaining a bit why you felt it important to go back to the 1960s to excavate the lost archives of what is called the Lebanese New Left?

FB: Sure. All projects take shape as you stumble through different pieces of material, and the product does not always resemble what you started with. I started with an interest in thinking about the ideological movement of former 1960s leftists into more liberal positions, particularly in the wake of the invasion of Iraq in 2003, when the Arab press was using catch-all categories to refer to some journalists, thinkers, public intellectuals, as Arab liberals, “al-liberaliun al-arab.”

A lot of these Arab liberals that were part of the conversations then had leftist backgrounds. And as I met some of the militant intellectuals I was interested in meeting, hearing their stories about their life trajectories, I also stumbled upon an archive that I did not know existed when I had started the research project: the archive of the underground bulletins of the Lubnan Ishtiraki, Socialist Lebanon. They are the Marxist group I ended up focusing on mostly in this work. As is the case a lot in the Arab world, the archive was preserved by individuals. It was a private archive. In this case, it was preserved by Ahmad Beydoun, who was a distinguished Lebanese historiographer, among other things, and also a member of Socialist Lebanon. So he was the former comrade, so to speak, who had preserved most of the bulletins, and he gave me access to his personal archive. I read it and interpellated with it directly and decided to think through it seriously.

Now, why excavate this archive for our present? There are three major themes that structure the critical yield of bringing that archive and analyzing it in and for our present. Roughly speaking, these three themes are historical, political, and theoretical. I’ll say a few words about each. 

Historically, the 1960s generation is a fascinating generation in it’s own right, particularly in the Arab world. We’re thinking about people who were born between the late thirties and the mid-forties, so they were around six, seven, ten years old when the Palestinian Nakba took place in 1948; they were in their early teens or around ten years old when the Egyptian revolution happened and when Nasser took power in its wake. It’s a generation that lived through successive transformations of our modern Arab history, in a time which was very much ideologically saturated. 

We can think about the dialectic of political hope and disenchantment as defeats they lived through, sort of opening up their eyes to the world. And we’re not talking about ideas, but experiences. Many of the intellectuals I interviewed say that their first childhood memories are of Palestinian refugees arriving in Beirut in 1948 when they were eight years old, ten years old—and seeing the refugees, and going from neighborhood to neighborhood with bags collecting donations for them, such as food, batteries, blankets. We’re talking about a somatic experiential memory that’s embodied in these people’s trajectories. We’re not just talking about the attraction of anti-imperialist politics on paper. You have to sort of put yourself in that generational perspective of shivering with joy when you hear Nasser’s voice nationalizing the canal in 1956, and you’re fifteen years old.

And of course the setbacks as well: there was a huge setback that is not really discussed that often today, which was the rupture of the union between Syria and Egypt. The union took place in 1958, and the rupture / infisal took place in 1961. This was the first important setback to the project of Arab nationalism before the 1967 defeat, which then became a very important historiographical marker for trying to think through the history of contemporary Arab thought and the trajectory of these intellectuals. 

The book has a critical project, but it also has a historical story, and it is trying to do both at the same time. The historical arc of the book is trying to think about the experiences of a generation that moved from nation to class to community—by which I mean: they moved through being interpellated by Arab nationalism to becoming class-Marxist critics of Arab nationalism when they became Marxists in the mid-60s, and had the moment of their disenchantment with the left when they became critics of communal solidarities. What I mean by communal solidarities are sectarian, regional, and kinship solidarities. Some of them, in the wake of the Iranian revolution, became attracted to Khomeini’s politics, which are politics of cultural decolonization and authenticity. 

So it’s an arc of people who in their lifetime moved from nation to class to community and/or religion. That’s a fascinating story, because it encapsulates a lot of our postcolonial predicament. So that’s the historical arc of the book, and that’s why I think it’s important to excavate the experiences, the writings, and the archives of this 1960s generation that lived through all of that. For someone like me who was born in the first months and years of the Lebanese civil war, in the wake of 1975—you can imagine, that was a very different time to be born and raised into, especially in terms of the political hopes, and thinking about open horizons and revolutionary horizons. When you’re ten years old in 1985, it’s very different than being ten years old in the mid-fifties in terms of political hope and thinking about how that structures your generation’s education.

Politically, it’s important on many levels. There are two political readings of this history that I seek to avoid, that I think are problematic in their own way. One is the melancholic reading: The 60s was the golden age of the left and of international solidarity, and everything afterwards is a history of decline. It’s melancholic in the sense that you cannot let go of the object you’re attached to. They’re attached to that moment in the 60s, and everything else becomes insignificant in the present. The mirror image of this “golden age” melancholic reading is a liberal and Islamic triumphalism. I say liberal and Islamic because both the liberal reading and Islamic reading are triumphalists in the sense of saying: Why go back to these leftists of the 60s? They were defeated. They did not produce anything. From the Islamic perspective, you can say that Marxism is a “foreign import,” and that the foreign “graft” did not work in our societies; if you’re liberal, you can say, Look at what happened in the Soviet Bloc. 

So between a complete disparaging of this experience as a full-on failure or defeat, and a complete fetishization and melancholic attachment to it, I try to carve a path in which we can critically inherit the dual legacy of this 1960s generation: the legacy of both revolution and disenchantment. This became especially important to me after the first wave of Arab revolutions that were ignited in 2011. As I was writing this book, this question of revolution and disenchantment was no longer an archival story but became literally a story of the present as we witnessed the first waves of the Arab revolutions and then the waves of counter-revolutions in their wake. 

It occurred to me that, in and for our political present, to think of a previous generation who had gone through this dialect of hope and despair is very important as an antidote against public amnesia, and as an intergenerational conversation, now that the question of revolution had been opened up again in a different form. 

That was the political impetus behind the book, and third is the question of theory. How do you read the archive of critical and revolutionary Arab theory without over-determining it in its relationship to the West? How do you get beyond the sort of reading that had become very normalized in the wake of Edward Said’s Orientalism, which is to look at Arab intellectuals and test their discursive assumptions to see whether they’re self-orientalizing, whether they’re a Westernized thinker, or adopted as one, or not? How do you get a sense of the project they were trying to fashion without banishing them, or banishing their legitimacy, by saying that they’re just reproducing colonial taxonomies or Orientalist assumptions? 

This is just another way to have a conversation with the past, and this was not a charitable reading, and also a politically problematic reading that looks on from the perspective of the present as having a theoretical superiority to the past without any reflective position of what makes us in the present theoretically more enlightened than people in the seventiess or in the sixties—just because we read one or two more books that were published in the meantime? It seemed to me that this is reproducing in practice a historicist logic that it’s criticizing in theory. It criticizes some of these thinkers for saying We are not modern enough, while saying they were lagging behind.

It’s important to attempt to not re-inscribe the colonial divide in dealing with theory. What I mean by that is simply not to re-inscribe the idea that theory is only produced in the Global North, and the Global South either produces facts or local, native informants for the factories up North that produce theory. I wanted to theoretically avoid that and to show that there is a complexity in critical tradition; it is a very transversal tradition. What I mean by transversal is: it’s not interdisciplinary, it’s transversality. These thinkers were not asking, How do we put cultural studies in conversation with history? but rather, If these are the questions we’re interested in, in our present, what should we read? 

Then you could read Bourdieu, you could read Ibn Khaldun, you could read Lacan, you could read Fanon. But those readings were geared towards an intervention in the present, not towards an academic exercise of bringing disciplines together. And I wanted to try and capture that and move beyond this colonial divide that is implicit in the titles of articles or books. Imagine a title of a book which is something like Reading Althusser in Ras Beirut. That’s the kind of thing I want to avoid, because that is implicitly saying, Oh look, there’s something curious about reading this universal global thinker in this particular location. There is nothing to be excited about reading Althusser in the Ras Beirut. These kinds of texts were always written, read, translated, and commented on everywhere.

Another way of thinking about this is how I try to include someone like Edward Said as a character in the story I’m telling, but not as a theorist who would frame this generation’s lives. If you look at your books about contemporary Arab thought that are published in English for the Euro-American academy, Edward Said is never treated as an Arab intellectual or has his trajectory excavated in that way. He’s treated as a theorist whose theories frame other intellectuals. Again, I wanted to avoid this re-inscription of who’s the theorist, who’s the local intellectual, who’s the person you cite to frame other people, and who are the people who are framed.

Historically this is not accurate. Edward Said was in conversation with and friends with some of the intellectuals who I discussed in the book, such as Sadiq Jalal al-Azm, or Fawwaz Traboulsi, who was a good friend of his and also his translator into Arabic. He translated Out of Place; he also translated the late works that Said published. So there is a particular implicit ideology in deciding who’s the Arab intellectual and who’s not, and who’s the theorist, that I wanted to implode from the inside by showing that these analytical frames are themselves complicit in reproducing this colonial divide. 

This is politically very important, especially since Arab thought has been, for at least a hundred years, produced from the Arab world, and in Arabic, and from outside the Arab world, and in languages other than Arabic. We can think of people like Mikhail Naimy and Khalil Gibran, and all these early authors that were in the States for a long time producing in Arabic and in English, but we could think about the Palestinian diaspora after ‘48 and the Lebanese diaspora, and more recently, the Syrian diaspora after the Syrian revolution in 2011. Arab thought is at times exilic, at times diasporic, at times produced from home. 

So I was trying to think through this question of a multiplicity of languages and a multiplicity of places without these pitfalls that I just described. That was a very long answer to your question, but these are the headings I’m working with: the question of history, the question of politics, and the question of theory. 

JA: That was an excellent exposé into all of those things, thank you for taking the time. 

While listening to you, I couldn’t help but reflect on this notion of the intergenerational conversation. As you mentioned, you’re excavating the works of a previous generation, and I’m sitting here as the person from the next generation, the post-war generation, being born right after the war ended. 

[Abdelhameed] Sharara, who’s one of the co-founders of Socialist Lebanon, and Ahmad Beydoun both saw former comrades of theirs leave left-wing causes to join sectarian groups, or maybe just retreat altogether from politics. In other words, from what I understood, political sectarianism trumped class-based solidarity, which was the underpinning of this whole worldview. This is something that I’ve seen in films like We Were Communists: one of the ex-Communists ended up joining Hezbollah; another one ended up joining the Lebanese Forces. 

Based on your own experience, having gone through these archives for the past decade or so, what are your reflections based on those readings of the Lebanese New Left’s archives on how you would assess the current dynamics today? Do you see some similarities? Some echoes maybe? Some radical differences? Or maybe a mix of all three?

FB: That’s a great question, but I want to ask you what you mean by “dynamics today?” That would give me a clearer perspective of how to answer your question. There are multiple routes one can exit from leftist militancy. I want to try and relate my historical work in the past to what you mean by the “dynamic.”

JA: Absolutely. I’ll give a bit of background to situate it a bit more concretely. I was one of the early organizers of the 2015 You Stink! movement (I left at some point to do my studies abroad). In the more recent uprising, I was just documenting, researching, doing a bit of journalism here and there. In between, I found those four years to be really pivotal to me and many of my friends around me (usually activists who are as experienced as I am if not more so). There’s always this tension that I feel: we have this unease when it comes to sectarianism. We don’t fully know what to do with it; it’s the elephant in the room most of the time. 

The 2019 uprisings were the first time (though we saw a little of it in 2015 as well as 2011-12) that I saw so many people, so openly and so confidently, chant stuff like Ash-shab yurid isqat an-nizam [The people want the downfall of the regime] or Kellon ya3ne kellon [All of them means all of them], and have explicit anti-sectarian messaging. And even with that explicit anti-sectarian messaging, we immediately started seeing, within the first month, after attacks by sectarian party supporters—how would I describe it? We became more afraid, more timid when it comes to openly calling these people by name: the warlords, the sectarian oligarchs. Other people might have a different interpretation of course, but from where I was standing we started feeling, maybe subconsciously, that we were alienating too many people by naming Nasrallah, naming Berri, naming Geagea. 

When I was reading your book, I couldn’t help but see some parallels. Different times, different contexts; there are certain shocks that are not the same—the Nakba isn’t the same as the dissolution of the union between Egypt and Syria, and isn’t the same as ‘67, isn’t the same as the civil war. And for the same reasons, it isn’t the same as the 2011 uprisings obviously. But as someone who is Lebanese, part Palestinian, and who has followed Syria closely—there is always in the back of my mind this feeling that we are being overwhelmed by structures, ideologies, ways of being, ways of interpreting the world—all of these things combined—and we, the new ones, the new generation, haven’t really had much time to learn from the previous generation’s mistakes (mainly because we don’t know them, we haven’t read about them; some have, most haven’t). 

Ao that is where I’m coming from with this and what my positionality is as someone who grew up in post-war Lebanon and is now studying post-war Lebanon (which inevitably includes the war itself and a bit of the pre-war, but not as much). You’re digging through the archives of the 1960s as someone who was of the 1970s and 1980s generation, and here I am of the 1990s and early 2000s generation reading that book, and I have a sinking feeling there’s a bit of a circular motion happening. 

Did that make sense in terms of contextualization?

FB: Yeah, thank you so much, Joey. This is very helpful. I hear what you are trying to get at; as you mentioned it is a huge question that is an elephant in the room. One of the big questions, and not only a Lebanese or an Arab question, that a lot of Marxists have dealt with across generations, in Lebanon mostly takes the form of sectarian solidarities, and also regional and kinship and family loyalties. The focus on just sectarianism occludes other infranational solidarities and loyalties. It is the question of the status of attachments that are not considered to be emancipatory attachments in a revolutionary project. What is the status of nationalism? In the Marxist tradition this question took the form of nationalism versus class solidarities. In our Lebanese case, most of the time it is the question of sectarianism.

And this generation tried to deal with it in very different ways. Is it possible to have a political project that is not predicated on assuming that everyone who is part of this project is going to be secular? As you mentioned, from an activist perspective the dilemma is very trenchant. If you want to interpellate the largest number of people possible into the political program that you’re advocating, where are the lines you draw between accommodating certain subjectivities, attachments, and solidarities and where you say, I can no longer accommodate these attachments, subjectivities, and solidarities, because if I do, they’re gonna overtake my project. Do you get what I’m trying to say?

JA: Yeah, absolutely. 

FB: The last part of the book is about Ibn Khaldun and Gramsci because it’s a question you can think through with Gramsci: How can you create a counter-hegemony to the hegemony that the system is putting forward? And how can you, in doing that, not come across as someone who is being disrespectful of particular forms of attachments that people have?

What do we mean by sectarianism? is a very fraught question. Do we mean it as a kind of belonging into a community that fashions people’s subjectivities? Do we mean a certain political identity? Do we mean participating in a clientelist system? These are not all the same. Sometimes they map onto each other, but sometimes they don’t. And the question of subjectivity should be thought through not as an on-off switch but rather as a spectrum of potentialities that can be activated in one way or another, like the question of hegemony. 

This is something we saw very clearly in the trajectory that unfolded starting October 17, 2019: you can have people change, and then you can have people regress in the other direction. So the question is very difficult to deal with. For the generation I dealt with, in order to become part of these Marxist groups, these militant intellectuals and militants had to leave the initial communities. They had to leave the political parties that were hegemonic in their own political communities. If they are a Christian from Mount Lebanon, they would have to say, Okay, I am not joining the Phalangists, I’m not joining the Ahrar, I’m not joining any of these parties, I’m joining the Lebanese Communist Party, or the Organization of Communist Action in Lebanon. 

Some of these militants ended up rejoining their communities. Some of them ended up converting ideologically to an Islamist position—which is not the same thing; for some of these people it entailed a personal religious conversion. Roger Assaf for example, the famous playwright. There are different trajectories that people have. Sometimes people move back to the folds of the communities they had left for a secular ideological project; sometimes they move from one ideological project to another. But the fascinating insight of this 1960s generation is that they were dealing with sectarian loyalties in the very crucial space of organizing in factories, at the point of production.

And there, the crucial insight they developed is that these forms of solidarities are very malleable, that you could sort of marshal them for the workers’ interests—but also they could be marshalled against the workers’ interest. So there’s a particular resilience to these forms of sectarian attachment, and there’s also a form of non-teleology that’s inscribed into them. The only thing you can be sure of is that when you’re dealing with them, their force is going to be reproduced whether you push them towards an emancipatory project or not. 

I’ll give you a very small example of a way they could enter into relations of production. Let’s say workers in a factory are from a particular sect, but the foreman who is responsible for them is from a different sect. Or the owner of the factory is giving different wages to people from different villages or different sects. Then you can have workers mobilize for their own rights, but that mobilization for their own rights could be articulated on these forms of sectarian solidarity. If you’re thinking in terms of workers getting their own rights, this could be “a good thing.” Yet what’s happening is the form itself is what’s being reinscribed. 

There’s two ideas I’m trying to push. One is that we have to be clear about what we mean when we talk about sectarianism. And how is this different from being secular or being religious? It’s important not to conflate sectarianism with religious subjectivity, because they’re not the same. Also, we could think about the question of sectarianism as a personal attachment to a particular way of life, or a political identity that sees furthering the interest of the sect as its main goal and sees other sects as “threatening” that, and sectarianism as part of a patronage and clientelistic system. 

In thinking about these three things, the main question is: is there a possibility to develop a political language that will interpelate people from different sects and bring them together without necessarily having the grievances that this political project is pushing forward seem, to another sect, to be a sectarian project? That’s a tall order.

It’s very tricky. The pessimistic side of the equation is that you see that these sectarian forms are very resilient across history. You can fill them with different content: you can be sectarian politically, arguing for a welfare state; you can be a neoliberal and articulate your neoliberal agenda with a sectarian formulation. There is a resilience to it, which I think is what you meant by “structure.” If we want to do an analogy from a very different register, we can think about Orientalism, as a structure of racialization and inferiority, as having a very similar kind of resilience that can take on board anything and digest it. For example, you can have a Darwinian Orientalism, a Freudian Orientalism, or a Liberal Orientalism; you can have an Orientalism does pink-washing or green imperialism. But there is a structure there that can reproduce itself and take on board different positions. 

Sectarian attachments also have this resilience, but to succumb to a culturalist position, to say that we are doomed to repetition because of our culture, is the negation of politics. It’s a metaphysical position that’s not warranted, even though historically these forms have been very resilient. It’s basically saying that there’s no end in sight, and it’s impossible to even think of a political project that would not be divided according to these lines, or that would not lead to the forms of violence that these divisions sometimes lead to in terms of communal and civil strife.

The answer is in trying to think through different forms of political practice. I don’t think a better theory will save us, but I think maybe a theory that comes out of thinking about political practice and trying things out in a very dialectical way would be helpful. What you said about your activist years rings true to me as someone from a different generation, a generation of students and universities interested in the question of the left and in having a conversation with different generations, but also people from different sects and from different regions, so that we might not end up reproducing the ideological sectarian contraption, where you could say something like the majority of the right would be Christian and the majority of the left would be Muslim, or something of that sort. 

This is the problem: when the ideological agenda becomes articulated on a communal constituency, it’s the communal constituency that’s going to overcome the ideological agenda.

JA: You’re giving me a lot to think about. Is there anything you wanted to say that I didn’t ask?

FB: You had also asked me about why I think it’s important to say that these thinkers moved away from the language game of comparing Arab and Islamic values with Western ones.

If you look at a lot of work done by postcolonial thinkers or ideologists—the Arab ones not excluded—the West always appears as an ideological question, whether it is modernization thinkers who want to get rid of whatever they think is “backwards” culture, or the opposite, nativists who think that we need to go back and recapture our authenticity against modernity which is a project of westernization in disguise. The thinkers I’m working with were not operating on this ideological register of Us versus Them, authenticity versus modernity, Our values / Their values, foreign versus non-foreign. They were interested in developing something I’m interested in thinking about, and that people in the South Asian context like Partha Chatterjee has thought about, which is: How do you move away from the discourse of ideological values into trying to develop a critical social or political theory of the operations of power in the post-colony?

You can either play the ideological game and say Our values / Their values, or you can play the epistemological-critique-of-Orientalist-discourses game, whereby you say, This theory is Eurocentric and it cannot understand our society or our politics. But I think that’s a very boring game. It’s been done and it’s very easy, it doesn’t take much critical thought to come up with. You just put this thing into the machine and it comes out directly. The more interesting question is: after you do the negative critical labor of saying Western or “universalist” social or political theory is not adequate to conceptually apprehend the realities we’re living through—Fine, okay, that’s the negative. Then the positive one is: can we develop a critical idiom of the operations of power in our societies? 

Why do I say power? Because I want to move away from culture. I want to get a sense of whether we can develop conceptual tools that adequately diagnose the multiplicity of the operations of power in our societies. For example, Waddah Charara attempted to think through the logics of subjugation that are at the heart of communal civil wars, which are the opposite of Gramsci and hegemony: you do not seek to win over your enemy ideologically, you just seek to either subjugate them or destroy them. You don’t want to convert them. You’re not interested in re-forming their subjectivity, you’re just interested in having their leader, whoever their leader is, be subjugated to you. But how the leader deals with his or her subjects is up to them. 

So it’s trying to think with these thinkers—it’s not necessarily to adopt their theories and to say This is the theory now! but  it is to try and move away from these two registers I outlined in the beginning. One is the register of ideology and value, the West and Us, and the second one is Western theory does not work. If it does not work, then the question is, what works? Can we try and develop something that works?

JA: Thank you very much, this has been a very interesting conversation. Thank you so much for your time. 

FB: Thank you, Joey. Thanks again for your interest and for reading the book, and for thinking about these questions intergenerationally. That makes three generations that will be thinking about them. Thanks so much.