On revolutionary tradition: From Alaa to Kant

It is the 10th anniversary of the Arab Spring, and we can’t quite escape that substance called remembrance. Yet, eschewing facile modes of nostalgic remembrance and/or tragic lamentation, we opt for asking questions such as how the passing of time changes our understanding of the revolutionary event, what does this event and what came after tell of an Arab revolutionary tradition, and what sites of micro-politics emerged in the last 10 years, informing our conception of the broader polity of the region. In a dual invocation of the dead and the living, we aim to confront anew classical political questions on history and reckoning with the past, mobilization, organization, ideology and national identity. We also aim to explore specific areas of contestation that continue to radically redefine post-2011 politics and potentially point us to imagining certain possible futures.

Pregnant as it was of exuberant hope, revolutionary politics was also pregnant with boundless brutality, stirring a tired discursive loop of success and failure. In this series of short essays that followed a number of conversations organized by two media collectives — Mada Masr and Al-Jumhuriya — among the authors, we try to engage with the above questions, while challenging well-rehearsed and oft-repeated revolutionary or post-revolutionary narratives, eluding factional and/or national silos, and foregrounding hitherto unnoticed dynamics, themes and voices. As platforms produced in great part by the 2011 moment, we are particularly aware and wary of the fatigue and repetitiveness that Arab Spring discussions and mentions elicit among our communities of writers and journalists. This too is part of the brutal everyday that we experience as we attempt to reflect with the angel of history.

Tradition suggests the sanctification of a certain act, the repetition of it with sincere devotion. Tradition is important in a global human climate obsessed with modernization and the new. Of course, we can’t deny the furious contradiction in meaning embedded in the phrase “revolutionary tradition.” Tradition paired with revolutionary seems an obvious oxymoron, like a contained outburst. Revolution is the spirit of the new, an aversion to the familiar; tradition is repetition and routine. 

Perhaps we, revolutionaries by instinct and resolve, need the shelter offered by traditions: A place where old warriors can find refuge from the endless recriminations, doubt and accusations of failure that have come from various quarters since popular rage first exploded in the streets a decade ago, without dwelling here on their intentions, friendly or hostile, and sparring on these two fronts at once. According to their traditions, a revolution must bring measured change — visible and quantifiable — and anything else is catastrophic. 

Without dismissing this desire, which in principle is difficult to argue with, we ask a question drawing on our own traditions, those that safeguard the revolution with love and question it responsibly: Do the metrics of democratization and power, the ready-made, fixed standards of success and failure, blind us to other changes, smaller or greater, at the margins or in the core, that are still taking shape? Is there something that can be computed in material but not political terms? Are there human dividends that lay outside politics even as they are wholly enmeshed in it? Dividends that cannot be translated into the language of politics — at least until we redefine it — because they are all-encompassing, sweeping, touching human beings themselves? Is there something that needs to be unbound from the evaluation of a moment in time, which itself is still unfolding? Though the temptation to understand is overpowering, it unfurls naturally apart from the grandiosity of human action.

To examine the question of tradition, we must go back to a point at which it seems a novel, innovative breakthrough, where nostalgia can offer what imagination cannot. These are both illusions, but the former is kinder because it feels like something we lived: the past.

Finality is treason

In an essay written by Alaa Abd El Fattah and Ahmed Douma from prison, Alaa makes no bones about his fear of myth-making, and he examines the myth [of the square/the 18 days] for genuine, plain human experiences. The essay is a foundational text in every sense of the word, even though it was written in a moment of rupture and weakness beset by inertia and retreat. But it is foundational because it confronts the edifice of mythology with an alternative that challenges it because “the myth, in its attempt to erase weakness and anxiety and violence and absurdity and the anguish of pain and the fragility of the dream, opens the door to them to transmit their mystery!” The essay lays a foundation for something both less and more than a revolution: less, because it searches for meaning we might find in our everyday lives without need to revolt, lose, and see our blood made cheap in the street; more, because it is impossible to know it without our experiences dissolving into one indistinguishable mass such that we are liberated from our subjectivity, freely and publicly shedding it. 

Writing the text in 2014, Alaa expresses misgivings about the phrase “despair is treason.” He discusses and argues against it even as he understands the fear of and need for it. He wonders if there is a treason “greater than having any hope”” Later in the essay, he avers, “I will not betray the revolution with despair or with hope.” For him, treason is finality, a decisive resolution: “Our midan is the only one built on a dream and on love but people want stability, and stability needs a determining solution, which needs strength and strength kills love and disfigures the dream. The determining solution is treason. It exchanges the power of the people with what is beneath it: weapons or the Organization. It replaces the dream with what’s inferior: the roadmap or the arrangements of power or some crumbs of reform.” 

The interesting and important thing about this passage is the way the author separates the inability to bring about a decisive resolution or take power from the lack of a desire to do so. Let’s not take his apprehensions about power lightly. Coming from a political activist and a person who is paying a steep price, we cannot dismiss this critique as romanticism, or as irrational or unjustifiable. The power of the people, their action and movement—which he condenses here as the dream and love—are not manifestations of affective states, but the raw material of another truth, a different community, and a new architecture. All of this may be beyond the workings of politics and might require a revolution in our conceptualization of both politics and power. 

From Kant to Alaa

In a text published in 1798, philosopher Immanuel Kant writes in search of an occurrence that could point to humanity’s inclination for improvement, our relentless drive for something better. He wonders if it is possible to identify a historical event that demonstrates our constant readiness as moral beings to be part of a project to improve our lives. His unequivocal response is revolution (it is the French revolution on his mind at that moment in time). Speaking of that revolution, he says it “may succeed, or it may fail. It may be so filled with misery and atrocities that no right-thinking man would ever decide to make the same experiment again at such a price, even if he could hope to carry it out successfully at the second attempt. But I maintain that this revolution has aroused in the hearts and desires of all spectators who are not themselves caught up in it a sympathy which borders almost on enthusiasm, although the very utterance of this sympathy was fraught with danger. It cannot therefore have been caused by anything other than a moral disposition within the human race.”In other words, for Kant, neither the trajectory of the revolution, nor its outcome nor works is an indication of human advancement; it is the desire for a better life in and of itself that makes revolution a constructive event. It is a common, collective desire for a better life. 

That Kant sidelines the political outcome of the revolution makes it possible to consider revolutionary striving as moral striving, and this is a crucial point. Uninterested in describing the political project of the revolution, Kant portrays the masses as enthusiastically joining and sympathizing with the collective action; their zeal is genuine and authentic. Our ability as humans to gesture toward advancement and affirm our desire for it — our passionate engagement in good — is separate from whether it is within our ability to actually realize this good, or whether this is the best course of action. Revolution is advancement insofar as we are predisposed to want to improve our lives, without guarantees and despite unanticipated costs. 

The return to Kant is not a retreat to the past. Nor is it an attempt to underscore the platitude that history repeats itself. The similarities between what Kant said then and what Alaa said yesterday lie in our own relationship to the revolution, every revolution, in its importance, its magic, and its necessity, in our disorientation before it and more importantly in that paramount human lesson. In our individuality we are searching for something greater and more beautiful, and once in a blue moon we understand that when this illusion of individuality is shattered, it cracks open like a hard thing (a fixed identity forged of past experiences, pains, and ideas) and is exposed as agency (dynamic, shifting), making visible to the eye all that we share. Then it seems that the entire world is us, all of us, moving together in lockstep. 

When we put aside the crude metrics of success and failure, tradition calls on us to be dedicated to the idea — to take it on faith, not with certainty — that beyond despair and hope lies something invincible.