Postsecular resistance, the body, and the 2011 Egyptian Revolution

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Postsecular resistance, the body, and the 2011 Egyptian Revolution

LUCA MAVELLI

Review of International Studies / Volume 38 / Issue 05 / December 2012, pp 1057 ­ 1078DOI: 10.1017/S0260210512000472, Published online: 

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Review of International Studies (2012), 38, 1057–1078 6 2012 British International Studies Associationdoi:10.1017/S0260210512000472

Postsecular resistance, the body, and the 2011

Egyptian Revolution

LUCA MAVELLI*

Abstract. At the heart of the notion of the postsecular is an implied and largely under-theorisedidea of resistance against the pathologies of modern secular formations. This is most notablyexemplified by Jurgen Habermas’s highly influential approach which argues that these pathol-ogies can be resisted through a cooperative cognitive effort of secular and religious con-sciousnesses. This article contends that this understanding overlooks more embodied formsof resistance to the effect that it curtails our capacity to conceptualise postsecular resistance ininternational relations. Following a contextualisation of Habermas’s approach in the broaderKantian tradition to which it belongs, the article develops a contending Foucauldian readingof the body as a locus of resistance and uses this framework to analyse some of the events lead-ing to the 2011 Egyptian revolution. The focus is on the publication of images and videos ofpolice abuses by Egyptian bloggers and independent media as a practice of resistance to thewidespread and systematic use of torture. The emotional response to these images, it will beargued, contributed to unite Egyptians despite longstanding fractures, most notably that betweensecularists and Islamists, thus turning the body from an ‘inscribed surface of events’ into a post-secular locus of resistance. The article concludes by highlighting the main implications of thisanalysis for future research agendas on the postsecular in international relations.

Luca Mavelli is a Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at the University of Kent.His research focuses on questions of secularity, postsecularity, security, and political violencein international relations. He is the author of Europe’s Encounter with Islam: The Secular andthe Postsecular (Routledge, Interventions Series, 2012) and has contributed articles to theEuropean Journal of International Relations, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, andthe Journal of Religion in Europe. Luca holds a PhD from the University of Wales, Aberystwyth,and has held positions at the Universities of Canterbury (New Zealand), Queensland (Australia),Surrey, and Sussex.

Introduction

This article explores the question of the body for the notion of postsecular resistance,

how this perspective can provide a framework for analysing some of the events lead-

ing to the 2011 Egyptian revolution, and some of the implications of this analysis

for future research on the postsecular in international relations. An underlying idea

of resistance lies at the heart of contemporary postsecular theorising. This is most

1057

* Initial work on this article was made possible by an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellowship Grant (PTA-026-27-2645) and the hospitality of the Department of International Relations at the University of Sussex,both of which are gratefully acknowledged. For their suggestions and insightful comments, I wouldlike to thank Mariano Barbato, Pinar Bilgin, Antonio Cerella, Joe Camilleri, Kimberly Hutchings,Mustapha Pasha, Fabio Petito, Armando Salvatore, Nida Shoughry, Harmonie Toros, Kees Van DerPijl, Erin Wilson, and the two anonymous reviewers. An earlier version of this article was presented atthe conference ‘The Postsecular in International Politics’, 27–8 October 2011, University of Sussex.

notably exemplified by Jurgen Habermas’s recent work which has contributed to

spur the debate on the postsecular.1 For Habermas, the postsecular stands for

a normative ideal of inclusion of the moral intuitions of faith which springs fromtwo different sets of issues. First, the emergence of increasingly pluralistic societies,

where a growing number of citizens are bearers of religious convictions, calls for

the elaboration of new frameworks of public engagement and civic coexistence.

Second, the crisis of secular consciousness, characterised by a progressive fragmen-

tation of values and an underlying incapacity to address pressing ethical and political

questions (such as abortion, euthanasia, and social justice) calls for new sources of

moral inspiration and interpretation.2

The postsecular is thus an attempt to rescue a ‘pure practical reason’ which ‘canno longer be so confident in its ability to counteract a modernization spinning out of

control armed solely with the insights of a theory of justice’, and to oppose the dis-

ruptive forces of ‘markets and administrative powers’ which ‘are displacing social

solidarity’.3 As Mariano Barbato points out, the postsecular for Habermas is the

use of ‘religious semantic potential’ to oppose ‘the pathologies of neo-liberal modern-

isation and globalisation’.4 Similarly, Paul Cloke and Justin Beaumont describe the

postsecular as ‘an expression of resistance to prevailing injustices under neoliberal

global capitalism, and an energy and hope in something that brings more justice forall citizens’.5

According to Habermas, this postsecular idea of resistance is grounded in a shift

from traditional to more reflexive forms of secular and religious consciousnesses

capable of questioning their own limitations and recognising the reciprocal validity

of their respective arguments. For Habermas, the postsecular is thus a form of resis-

tance grounded in the mind: it is the outcome of a cooperative cognitive effort of

secular and religious citizens, both conceived as the expression of a postconventional

consciousness capable of reflecting upon itself and using religion in a way that mayhelp us ‘express our best moral intuitions without tearing down the bridges to secular

languages and cultures’.6

This account of postsecularity has received three main criticisms. First, it restates

the primacy of secular reason, as it requires that for religious arguments to have a

space in the institutional public sphere, they be ‘translated’ into a secular language.

Second, it rests on an instrumental notion of religion which reduces the latter to a

set of cognitive choices and to a function in a broader process of social reproduction,

where religion’s main (and somehow paradoxical) task is to address the crisis of an

1 Jurgen Habermas, ‘Religion in the Public Sphere’, European Journal of Philosophy, 14:1 (2006), pp. 1–25; Jurgen Habermas, ‘Notes on a Post-Secular Society’, signandsight.com (18 June 2008), available at:{http://www.signandsight.com/features/1714.html/} accessed 17 April 2011; Jurgen Habermas, BetweenNaturalism and Religion: Philosophical Essays (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008); Jurgen Habermas andJoseph Ratzinger, The Dialectics of Secularization: On Reason and Religion (San Francisco: IgnatiusPress, 2007); Jurgen Habermas et al., An Awareness of What is Missing: Faith and Reason in a Post-secularAge (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011).

2 Habermas, ‘Notes on a Post-Secular Society’.3 Habermas, Between Naturalism and Religion, pp. 211, 111.4 Mariano Barbato, ‘Conceptions of the Self for Post-secular Emancipation: Towards a Pilgrim’s Guide

to Global Justice’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 39:2 (2010), pp. 547–64, p. 549.5 Paul Cloke and Justin Beaumont, ‘Geographies of Postsecular Rapprochement in the City’, Progress in

Human Geography, DOI: 10.1177/0309132512440208 (18 April 2012), p. 6.6 Jurgen Habermas, ‘Transcendence from Within, Transcendence in this World’, in Eduardo Mendieta

(ed.), The Frankfurt School on Religion: Key Writings by the Major Thinkers (New York, Routledge:2005), p. 305. See also Habermas, ‘Religion in the Public Sphere’, p. 15.

1058 Luca Mavelli

instrumental secular reason that has been ‘sundered from faith’.7 Third, and con-

sequently, this perspective neglects religion as tradition, practice, lived experience,

and mode of subjectivation in which the relation with transcendence is not necessarily‘subordinate to ulterior ends’.8

In this article I want to focus on a fourth and, it seems to me, largely neglected

dimension of Habermas’s account, namely the cognitive view of resistance that char-

acterises his notion of postsecularity. My contention is that this approach ignores

more embodied forms of resistance to the effect that it substantially curtails our

capacity to conceptualise and understand postsecular resistance in international rela-

tions. In advancing this argument, my goal is not to question Habermas’s account

per se, but to interrogate the broader European tradition of secularity to whichHabermas belongs and which has in Immanuel Kant its original philosophical formu-

lation. Hence, in the first section of the article, I discuss how an instrumental idea

of religion as a crucial provider of moral norms for a secular domain which is not

self-sustaining is a central feature of Kant’s idea of rational religion. This idea,

I will argue, crucially rests on a dualistic image of human nature as the unstable

mixture of body and soul, which in turn supports an idea of critique and emancipation

as a process of transcendence of the body. In this perspective, critical resistance – the

exercise of critique aimed at ‘emancipatory resistance to domination’9 – stands forthe search of universal and immutable structures through ‘the freedom of pure intel-

lect’ to oppose the making and unmaking of power and history which inscribe their

regimes of domination onto our ‘morally corrupting’ bodily and sensuous nature.

In the second section, I interrogate this rendering of the body, asking whether the

body should be conceived solely as the historical sedimentation of external mechanisms

of social and political domination. Through a critical reading of Michel Foucault, I

question this view and the underlying Kantian understanding of critical resistance

as the search for universal categories to oppose the making of power and history.Accordingly, I advance the possibility of the body as a source of resistance and

suggest that this may rest on a genealogical interrogation of the body. This politics of

resistance involves disclosing and making visible the inscriptions of power/knowledge

regimes onto the body, and considering these inscriptions a ‘contingency’ which ‘has

made us what we are’, but does not preclude the imagination of what we could be.10

In the third section, I discuss how this perspective can shed light on some events

leading to the 2011 Egyptian revolution. In particular, I will focus on the response to

the widespread and systematic use of torture during the last years of the Mubarakregime. Since the mid-2000, images and videos of torture and police brutality have

been posted on the internet by Egyptian bloggers and given further resonance by

independent media, with the effect that they contributed to make visible the inscrip-

tions of power/knowledge regimes onto the body. This politics of resistance, I will

7 Adrian Pabst, ‘The Secularism of Post-Secularity: Religion, Realism, and the Revival of Grand Theoryin IR’, in this Special Issue. See also Fred Dallmayr, ‘Post-Secularity and (Global) Politics: A Need forRadical Redefinition’, and Antonio Cerella, ‘Religion and Political Form: Carl Schmitt’s Genealogy ofPolitics as a Critique of Habermas’s Post-Secular Discourse’, both in this Special Issue.

8 On this latter point see Austin Harrington, ‘Habermas and the ‘‘Post-Secular Society’’ ’, EuropeanJournal of Social Theory, 10:4 (2007), pp. 543–60, p. 546.

9 David Couzens Hoy, Critical Resistance: From Poststructuralism to Post-Critique (Cambridge: MITPress, 2004), p. 2.

10 Michel Foucault, ‘What is Enlightenment?’, in Michel Foucault and Paul Rabinow, The FoucaultReader, (London: Penguin, 1991), p. 46.

Postsecular resistance 1059

contend, acquired a specific postsecular dimension as it saw the convergence of secu-

larist and Islamist opposition forces, thus cutting across a polarisation which has

long characterised Egyptian politics. This case will highlight the limits of a cognitiveunderstanding of postsecular resistance. In the case of Egypt, I suggest, a postsecular

rapprochement between secularists and Islamists was not just triggered by forms of

reasoned interaction and reflexive engagement between secular and religious actors,

but also by the emotional response to the images of the tortured body which con-

tributed to an experience of collective national unity.

In the conclusion, I will highlight the main implications of this analysis for future

research agendas on the postsecular in International Relations, including the neces-

sity to develop a more substantive engagement with the body as a locus of resistance,practice, and lived experience, and an understanding of the challenges to secular

formations in non-Western settings.

I. Transcending the body

Kant is widely regarded as ‘the paradigmatic philosopher of the European Enlighten-

ment . . . [as] the philosopher of human autonomy, the view that by the use of ourown reason in its broadest sense human beings can discover and live up to the basic

principles of knowledge and action without outside assistance, above all without

divine support or intervention’.11 Indeed, Kant described Enlightenment as ‘man’s

emergence from his self-imposed immaturity’, that is, from ‘the inability to use

one’s understanding without guidance from another’.12 At the heart of Kant’s project

of critical use of reason and emancipation lies a fundamental separation between

knowledge, as the expression of reason, and faith, as the expression of belief. For

Kant knowledge could no longer be conceived as the attempt to grasp an externallyGod-given order, but turned into an interrogation of the individual’s rational faculties

and the ensuing representations of the world and its objects we give ourselves. This

idea, however, raised a fundamental question: How could an idea of knowledge

grounded in the finite rational faculties of the subject determine universal frame-

works of meaning, morality, and ethical behaviour? Kant’s response was a remark-

able epistemic inversion which can be seen as the foundation of the secular idea of

knowledge. The fact that our knowledge is confined to the boundaries of experience

does not mean that our knowledge is limited, but that knowledge itself is limited andthat ‘these limits exist entirely within the structure of the knowing subject’.13 The

outcome is a secular domain of knowledge grounded in the individual’s rational

faculties and capable of generating universal frameworks of meaning and action.

The non self-sufficiency of this secular domain, however, was immediately visible

to Kant. The main problem was one of motivation: How could the individual be

compelled to comply with these universal frameworks, particularly in those cases

where this compliance could harm her or impose a burden without a corresponding

11 Paul Guyer, ‘Immanuel Kant’, in Edward Craig (ed.), Concise Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy(London: Routledge, 2000), p. 432.

12 Immanuel Kant, ‘An Answer to the Question: ‘‘What is Enlightenment?’’ ’, in Hans Reiss (ed.), Kant:Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991 [orig. pub. 1784]), p. 54.

13 Michel Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the College de France 1981–1982, (NewYork: Picador, 2005), p. 26.

1060 Luca Mavelli

reward?14 For Kant, the solution lay in bringing back faith to the domain of the

secular, although not as knowledge, but as a set of ‘postulates’. A postulate of practical

reason is ‘a theoretical proposition’ which is ‘not demonstrable as such’, but whichshould be considered true ‘insofar as it is attached inseparably to an a priori uncon-

ditionally valid practical view’.15 This means that although Kant deemed religious

beliefs such as the existence of God and the immortality of the soul to lie beyond

the domain of reason (and, therefore, of proper knowledge), he believed they could

be instrumentally useful to enforce the moral law through their force of moral

persuasion and threat of eternal sanction. This is a key dimension of Kant’s notion

of ‘rational faith’. Unlike traditional religion, which acts as an external source of

authority which constrains the autonomy of the individual, this ‘pure practical faith’can act as a source of protection and inspiration for a moral life under the guidance

of reason.16

Thus, at the heart of the non self-sufficiency of the secular domain envisaged by

Kant is a notion of critical emancipation as the search for universal structures. Yet,

bringing this argument a step further, I want to suggest that this perspective is ulti-

mately a reflection of a more basic metaphysical anthropology which rests on a

dualistic image of human nature as the unstable ensemble of body and soul. This

anthropology has been explored at length by Ian Hunter who observes how at theheart of Kant’s philosophy is an anthropological conception of man as ‘homo duplex’.

Man for Kant is a ‘sensibly affected rational being’ split between the ‘freedom of

pure intellect’ (‘a rational nature . . . shared with God and the angels’) and the ‘desires

of a sensuous nature’.17 For Kant, our bodily and sensuous nature is ‘morally cor-

rupting’, as it constrains our capacity to join ‘the world of pure, self-governing intel-

ligences’,18 where all concepts have the status of universal frameworks of moral and

practical action. Accordingly, Kant grounds the possibility of critique and emancipa-

tion on an impulse of self-transcendence whereby the individual rises above thebodily/phenomenal/empirical world to join the noumenal world of pure intellect.

According to Hunter, in order to grasp how the interrogation of our rational faculties

encompasses an exercise in self-transcendence, we need to consider Kant’s approach

as part of the broader Christian–Platonic spiritual tradition to which it belongs. In

this tradition

the metaphysician activates the higher intellect he shares with God, thereby participating in theself-authenticating principles of an intellect that creates what it thinks. Doubtless it will seemodd to many that the voice of Kantian reason should sound so similar to the voice of God. Butthis will seem the less so the more we understand that the exercise through which Kant listensto reason is in fact a version of that through which Christian–Platonists attuned themselves tothe emanations of the divine intellect.19

Following Hunter’s reading of Kant, it can be observed that religion provides guidance

and support for a non self-sufficient secular domain in two different ways: first, as

14 Emmet Kennedy, Secularism and its Opponents from Augustine to Solzhenitsyn (New York: PalgraveMacmillan, 2006), p. 138.

15 Immanuel Kant, ‘Critique of Practical Reason’, in Mary J. Gregor and Allen W. Wood (eds), PracticalPhilosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999 [orig. pub. 1788]), p. 238.

16 Ibid.17 Ian Hunter, ‘The Morals of Metaphysics: Kant’s Groundwork as Intellectual Paideia’, Critical Inquiry,

28:4 (2002), pp. 908–29, pp. 911, 910.18 Ibid., p. 912.19 Ibid., pp. 923–4.

Postsecular resistance 1061

previously discussed, by acting as a motivational force which may elicit a moral life;

second, by providing the secular with an understanding of critique as a process of

self-transcendence where the communion with God is replaced by the communionwith our ‘higher intellect’, that is, our soul.

Two observations relevant for our analysis follow. First, the religious at the

heart of this project is a purely instrumental force whose task is to sustain and provide

the framework for a critical-emancipative secular domain in which human beings may

be able to use their own understanding ‘without guidance from another’. Second,

Kant’s move contributes to ‘sacralise’ the secular domain20 in a perspective which

celebrates the soul as the emanation of the divine intellect which can advance the

project of critical emancipation, and understands the body as a source of potentiallymorally corrupting dispositions which can hinder this project.

Kant’s rendering of the body is part of a broader tradition of European secularity

which, as I have discussed elsewhere,21 includes thinkers such as Thomas Aquinas,

Rene Descartes, Emile Durkheim and, crucially for our discussion, Jurgen Habermas.

In the remainder of this section I want to advance a reading of Habermas’s ‘theory of

communicative action’ as an attempt to overcome the body-soul dualism at the heart

of Kant’s ‘philosophy of consciousness’. According to Habermas, once ‘linguistically

generated intersubjectivity gains primacy’ the tension between the ‘the extramundanestance of the transcendental I and the intramundane stance of the empirical I’ – that

is, the tension between the soul and the body – disappears.22 Critical reasoning, resis-

tance, and emancipation no longer rest on a process of transcendence of the body

whereby individuals listen to the voice of reason as if they were listening to the voice

of the divine. The Kantian ‘purism of pure reason’ – which paradoxically relied on a

‘religious’ notion of knowledge – is replaced by the paradigm of communication

guided by the intersubjective ‘force of the better argument’ in which the critical use

of reason is ‘the disposition of speaking and acting subjects to acquire and use fallibleknowledge’.23

However, the extent to which this intersubjective rendering of critical reason over-

comes the body-soul dualism is questionable for at least two reasons. First, this

process privileges abstract reason (however mediated by an intersubjective process

of communication) over experiential knowledge and lived experience. Although it

does not involve transcendental selves but individuals grounded in experiential ‘life-

worlds’, it ultimately requires them to transcend the background horizon of their

existence and embrace the ‘unforced force of the better argument’.24 Second,Habermas deems this process of transcendence a presupposition and not an outcome

of the intersubjective process of communication. To be able to participate in this

process, the individual must have already embraced a ‘postconventional morality’,

that is, the desire to be guided by the superior force of communicative reason against

the externally-sanctioned and unreflective experiential dimensions of, respectively,

20 Pabst, ‘The Secularism of Post-Secularity’.21 Luca Mavelli, Europe’s Encounter with Islam: The Secular and the Postsecular (Abingdon: Routledge,

2012).22 Jurgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987), p. 297.23 Ibid., p. 314.24 Jurgen Habermas, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990),

p. 160.

1062 Luca Mavelli

‘preconventional’ and ‘conventional’ morality25 (such as those represented by tradi-

tional religious allegiances). This means that for Habermas the critical exercise of

reason requires an initial moment of self-transcendence – in which a culturally andreligiously situated subject becomes a disembodied transcendental self who intuitively

grasps the universal procedural validity of communicative reason – followed by a

reflective validation of this intuition.

Compared to Kant’s, Habermas’s perspective rests on a more nuanced, but no

less dualistic account of human nature in which the embodied, experiential, and sensory

dimension is completely subdued to a postconventional idea of subjectivity which

actualises (in an intersubjective declension) the Kantian disembodied transcendental

idea of the subject. In this perspective, Habermas’s notion of postsecularity is thelatest instantiation of a postconventional morality in which standing back from one’s

own religious allegiances and letting oneself be guided by the ‘uncoerced force of

the better argument’ means also rescuing what may be good of one’s own religious

tradition and instrumentally using this potential to advance the secular project of

modernity. This potential, however, is for Habermas exclusively semantic and almost

completely overlooks religion as lived experience, practice, mode of subjectivation,

or community of believers. As Austin Harrington observes,

Habermas almost always speaks only of semantic contents of religion and almost never ofreligious forms: almost always of message, rarely of medium. Religious message offerspotential for discursive redemption, but religious form, it seems, is peripheral and inessential.This seems entirely to leave out of consideration the non-discursive or semidiscursive aspects ofreligious life, bound up with ritualized action and gesture, music, song, visual representation,and the sensuous space and event of worship. None of these elements play any accountablerole in the programme. It would seem that a purely language-analytic, proposition-theoreticaccount of the sensory resources of religious life cannot do justice to the sensuous, experientialand emotional dimensions of religious life that are so important for religious expression andarticulation.26

Hence, the analysis carried out in this section suggests that just like Kant called for a

shift from ‘traditional religion’ which constrains individual autonomy to a ‘rational

religion’ capable to inspire and compel to a moral life, and postulated this shift on a

process of transcendence of the senses, so Habermas calls for a shift from ‘precon-ventional’ and ‘conventional’ forms of religious allegiance (grounded in the fear of

external sanction and unreflective loyalties) to a postsecular idea of religion as the

expression of a ‘postconventional morality’. The postsecular as an ideal of critique,

emancipation, and resistance thus rests on a disembodied rendering of religion. This

requires a process of self-transcendence in order to grasp the pure semantic potential

of the religious message which may contribute to the identification of universally inter-

subjectively valid principles. The Kantian-Habermasian approach to religion ulti-

mately rests on a process of transcendence of the body which is instrumental foran understanding of critique, emancipation, and resistance as part of the search for

universal structures to oppose to the fluctuation of our empirical, embodied con-

dition. This account leaves us with an understanding of the body either as a source

25 Richard Shapcott, Justice, Community and Dialogue in International Relations (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2001), pp. 120–2. See also Kimberly Hutchings, ‘Moral Deliberation and PoliticalJudgment: Reflections on Benhabib’s Interactive Universalism’, Theory, Culture and Society, 14:1(1997), pp. 131–41. For a contending view see Andrew Linklater, ‘Dialogic Politics and the CivilizingProcess’, Review of International Studies, 31:1 (2005), pp. 141–54.

26 Harrington, ‘Habermas and the ‘‘Post-Secular Society’’ ’, p. 552.

Postsecular resistance 1063

of potentially morally corrupting dispositions or as the target of external forces of

domination – in both cases as a burden rather than a resource for a politics of resis-

tance. In the next section I interrogate the limits of this conceptualisation through acritical reading of Michel Foucault’s account of the body.

II. The body and resistance

In ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, Foucault describes the body as an ‘inscribed surface

of events’ which is ‘totally imprinted by history’ and ‘molded by a great many distinct

regimes’.27 The body is thus conceived as a site of inscription of social discipline whichhas no ontological existence prior to relations of power. It has no existence beyond

history, no essence beyond the external regimes of truth that give it meaning, and no

universality which may account for a shared humanity. For Foucault, ‘Nothing in

man [sic] – not even his body – is sufficiently stable to serve as the basis for self-

recognition or for understanding other men.’28 Accordingly, the body appears to

be nothing else than the historical sedimentation of external mechanisms of social

and political domination to which the body can offer no resistance. As David

Michael Levin contends, ‘Foucault leaves us with no way to conceptualize a critical-emancipatory praxis coming from the experience of the oppressed body. The body

that is unjustly punished, tortured, violated, brutalized, overworked and left to the

fate of hunger, the body subject to oppressive power, can never become a subject

capable of resisting it.’29

Foucault’s analysis of the transformation of disciplinary practices as carried out

in Discipline and Punish would appear to lend support to this argument. Here Foucault

details how between the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth

century a remarkable transformation in the economy of punishment takes place andhow torture as a public spectacle begins to disappear. The ‘gloomy festival of punish-

ment’,30 as Foucault calls it, had a specific social function. The tortured body of

the condemned – skilfully dissected, quartered, hooked, burned, and dismembered

according to sophisticated techniques which aimed to maximise its suffering – was

the response to a notion of crime as the violation of sovereign power and thus served

to redress the injury that had been committed against the sovereign. Power mani-

fested itself by example (my term), that is, by showing to the public what could

happen to them if they were found guilty of the same offence. Hence, the devastatinginscriptions onto the body of the condemned served as a mechanism of social dis-

cipline which used the body as its medium.

Towards the beginning of the nineteenth century, however, ‘the body as the

major target of penal repression disappear[s]’ and thus the public spectacle of torture

begins to fade away. Punishment becomes ‘the most hidden part of the penal process . . .

it leaves the domain of more or less everyday perception and enters that of abstract

27 Michel Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, in Foucault and Rabinow (eds), The FoucaultReader, p. 87.

28 Ibid.29 David Michael Levin, ‘The Embodiment of the Categorical Imperative: Kafka, Foucault, Benjamin,

Adorno and Levinas’, Philosophy and Social Criticism, 27:4 (2001), pp. 1–20, p. 5.30 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage, 1995), p. 8.

1064 Luca Mavelli

consciousness.’31 Foucault reports how this transformation has generally been attrib-

uted to a process of progressive humanisation, to the emergence of a new ‘collective

sensibility’ which disavows the infliction of pain as a means of punishment. Hence, itcould be suggested, this was a transformation made possible by the experience of the

oppressed body which contributed to turn the latter into the expression of a universal

and ‘sacred’ locus of humanity.

Foucault, however, is sceptical of this interpretation. He maintains that this

transformation is the result of a new political economy of the body which deems the

body ‘a useful force only if it is both a productive body and a subjected body’.32

From this perspective, the disqualification of bodily pain as a means of punishment

is nothing else but the effect of emerging power/knowledge regimes, the most impor-tant of which is the radical transformation in the meaning of sovereign power: from

the power to take life, to the biopolitical power to make live. This does not mean that

sovereign power relinquishes its power to kill, but that this power becomes part of a

wider logic of power whose main goal is now to ‘incite, reinforce, control, monitor,

optimize, and organize the forces under it’.33 Sovereign power exercises its classical

right to kill bodies only against those ‘body-species’ (the other, the abnormal, the

inferior races) which threaten the capacity of the ‘body-species’ under its power to

grow, expand, proliferate, and produce.34

Hence, according to Foucault, the disappearance of public torture is not the

outcome of a body of resistance which is ‘more than the result of the disciplinary

technologies that have been brought to bear upon it’,35 but the product of many

new interlocking regimes of power/knowledge whose ‘security mechanisms’ are

‘designed to maximize and extract forces’.36 These mechanisms rest on the disciplinary

power of a series of institutions which begin to emerge at the beginning of the

nineteenth century, such as the police, schools, workshops, barracks, and hospitals.

Far from liberating the body, these institutions ‘have an immediate hold uponit, they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform

ceremonies, to emit signs’.37 Together with disciplinary powers, Foucault also chroni-

cles the emergence of powers of ‘regularisation’ such as health insurance systems,

hygiene rules, patterns of consumption, reproduction and education.38 These regimes

are not directly enacted through disciplinary institutions, but through processes of

‘internalization of external constraints’ (to borrow Norbert Elias’s phrase), which

nonetheless inscribe specific orders onto the body. Disciplinary and regulatory mecha-

nisms make the inscriptions of power more difficult to detect, but nonetheless present.These reflections appear to lend support to Levin’s criticism that Foucault’s body has

no capacity to speak truth to power and ‘talk back to history’; it is a body incapable

of opposing domination and offering resistance.

Judith Butler, however, cautions that this may be too hasty a reading. Foucault’s

emphasis on the concept of ‘inscription’, which presupposes a power external to the

31 Ibid.32 Ibid., p. 26.33 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume 1 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), p. 136.34 Michel Foucault, ‘Society Must Be Defended’: Lectures at the College de France, 1975–76, trans. David

Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), pp. 239–63.35 Couzens Hoy, Critical Resistance, p. 61.36 Foucault, ‘Society Must Be Defended’, p. 246.37 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 25.38 Foucault, ‘Society Must Be Defended’, pp. 243–51.

Postsecular resistance 1065

body, together with his effort to expose the external mechanisms that construct the

body, should push us to consider the possibility of ‘a body which is external to

its construction, invariant in some of its structures, and which, in fact, represents adynamic locus of resistance to culture per se’.39 Butler acknowledges that Foucault

clearly denies an ‘ontological independence of the body’ outside culture and discourse,

yet she contends that ‘his theory nevertheless relies on a notion of genealogy, appro-

priated from Nietzsche, which conceives the body as a surface and a set of sub-

terranean ‘‘forces’’ that are, indeed, repressed and transmuted by a mechanism of

cultural construction external to that body’.40 Hence, Butler concludes, Foucault’s

notion of inscription presupposes ‘a prediscursive and prehistorical ‘‘body’’ ’ which

exists before the inscriptions of power and is endowed with a power of resistance‘against the workings of history itself ’.41

Butler’s account rests on a ‘Kantian’ reading of Foucault. She endows the body

with universal and transcendental properties which make it ‘more’ than the play of

power on it. This reading, though, is in many ways problematic, as it rests on the

separation between ‘external’ and ‘internal’ forces, that is, between external powers

which strive to inscribe their order onto the body, and the internal powers of the

body that resist this inscription. This interpretation perpetuates the Kantian dualism

between the empirical and the transcendental, the phenomenal and the noumenal,the body and the soul. It ultimately adopts the same Kantian logic, albeit in a reverse

manner, by endowing the body with the universality that Kant reserves for the soul.

Similarly, critical resistance in this account is understood as the search for universal

structures which may be opposed to the making and unmaking of history. The result is

that, in Butler’s account, Foucault’s reading of the body and resistance is eventually

‘rescued’ through a Kantian rendering.

This brings us to a central question of this article: Is there another way, which

does not require a Kantian transfiguration of Foucault, in which the body may beconsidered to be ‘more’ than the power/knowledge regimes that invest it? Foucault’s

idea of critical resistance as advanced in his famous essay ‘What is Enlightenment?’

offers a blueprint for this possibility. In this short essay, which preserves Kant’s spirit

but not his method, Foucault argues that

criticism is no longer going to be practiced in the search for formal structures with universalvalue, but rather as a historical investigation into the events that have led us to constituteourselves and to recognize ourselves as subjects of what we are doing, thinking, saying . . .And this critique will be genealogical in the sense that it will not deduce from the form ofwhat we are what it is impossible for us to do and to know; but it will separate out, fromthe contingency that has made us what we are, the possibility of no longer being, doing, orthinking what we are, do, or think.42

Hence, it can be suggested that the possibility of the body as a source of resistance

may rest on showing that if there is nothing universal and transcendental in the

body, neither is there in the historical regimes of power/knowledge inscribed onto

it. Far from being ‘universal, necessary, [and] obligatory’, these regimes need to be

39 Judith Butler, ‘Foucault and the Paradox of Bodily Inscriptions’, The Journal of Philosophy, 86:11(1989), pp. 601–7, p. 602.

40 Ibid., p. 607.41 Ibid.42 Foucault, ‘What is Enlightenment?’, pp. 45–6.

1066 Luca Mavelli

analysed in their singularity, contingency, and as ‘the product of arbitrary con-

straints’.43 Accordingly, for David Couzens Hoy this approach offers ‘another sense

in which the body is ‘‘more’’ than any particular way in which it has been ‘‘sociallyconstructed’’. If the body can be shown to have been lived differently historically

(through genealogy), or to be lived differently culturally (through ethnography),

then the body can be seen to be ‘‘more’’ than what it now has become, even if this

‘‘more’’ is not claimed to be ‘‘universal’’, or ‘‘biological’’, or ‘‘natural’’.’44

While sharing Couzens Hoy’s remark, I believe that Foucault’s approach accounts

to more than just a method to reconsider the past and articulate a contending ‘history

of the present’. Indeed, my contention is that Foucault’s argument foregrounds a

distinctive quest for a political imagination capable to articulate a different ‘visionof a future’.45 From this perspective, the possibility of the body as a source of resis-

tance does not rest on the ontological identification of universal and transcendental

properties to oppose the making and unmaking of power and history. This possi-

bility rests on a method – that is, disclosing and making visible the inscriptions of

power/knowledge regimes onto the body – as well as on a political imagination –

considering these inscriptions a ‘contingency’ which ‘has made us what we are’, but

does not preclude the imagination of what we could be. In the remainder of this

article I will explore how this method and this political imagination contributed tomake visible the invisible regime of torture in Egypt and turned the tortured body

into a postsecular body of resistance.

III. The postsecular body of the Egyptian revolution

The last of a long list of Human Rights Watch (HRW) reports on torture in Egypt

published just weeks before the ousting of President Hosni Mubarak in February2011 denounced ‘an epidemic of habitual, widespread, and deliberate torture per-

petrated on a regular basis by security forces against political dissidents, Islamists

allegedly engaged in terrorist activity, and ordinary citizens’.46 The widespread and

systematic use of torture in Egypt has been one of the outcomes of the emergency

law that, almost uninterruptedly, has gripped the country since the rise of Mubarak

to power in 1981. The emergency law originally ‘served as a major tool for Mubarak’s

police apparatus to crackdown on militant Islamists who posed a major threat to the

regime during the 1990s’.47 However, it eventually led to the institutionalisation of apermanent ‘state of exception’ and endowed the police with an exceptional array of

powers, including the right to ‘prohibit demonstrations, censor newspapers, monitor

personal communications, detain people at will, hold prisoners indefinitely without

charge, and send defendants before special military courts to which there is no

43 Ibid., p. 45.44 Couzens Hoy, Critical Resistance, p. 63.45 Michel Foucault, ‘Dialogue with Baqir Parham’ (Spring 1979), in Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson,

Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 2005), p. 185.

46 Human Rights Watch (HRW), ‘Work on Him Until He Confesses’: Impunity for Torture in Egypt (NewYork: HRW, 2011), p. 2.

47 Ahmed Zaki Osman, ‘Egypt’s Police: From Liberators to Oppressors’, Almasry Alyoum (24 January2011), available at: {http://www.almasryalyoum.com/en/node/304946} accessed 12 October 2011.

Postsecular resistance 1067

appeal’.48 According to Ibrahim Eissa, the editor of opposition newspaper Al-Dustour,

with a police force of 1.4 million (almost four times than the army), and a budget of

$1.5 billion (more than the state’s expenditures for healthcare), ‘Egypt has become apolice state par excellence’.49 The dramatic figures provided by the Egyptian Organi-

zation for Human Rights (EOHR) further support this statement. During the first 25

years of Mubarak’s rule, while the population almost doubled, the prisons popula-

tion quadrupled, whereas the number of people who had been detained without

charges for more than one year (often in secret and incommunicado) reached more

than 20,000.50

A most striking feature of this ‘epidemic’ is that torture, originally designed to

annihilate political opponents, eventually became a disciplining tool targeting virtuallyall segments of society, including homosexuals, women, and children.51 Of course, the

extent to which torture targets all segments of society should be carefully qualified.

As Aida Seif el-Dawla has observed, ‘the majority [of torture victims] are ordinary

citizens whose unfortunate paths crossed with those of the police. What they have in

common is their poverty, their social marginalization, and their lack of contact with

‘‘important’’ people who could help them out.’52 However, in a country which has

been progressively impoverished by neoliberal economic policies and scarred by

huge social inequalities – where more than 40 per cent of the population is estimatedto live below the $2 per day threshold of poverty line; where youth make up 90 per cent

of the unemployed population; and with a level of illiteracy of about 30 per cent –

‘ordinary people’ has almost become synonymous with ‘poverty’ and ‘social marginal-

isation’.53 In this situation, torture during Mubarak’s years had become a widespread

practice which served a variety of disciplining purposes, including quelling social

dissent, punishing on behalf of a third party, forcing the expropriation of homes

or lands, reinforcing the ‘absolute authority’ of the police,54 rescuing ‘Egyptian

masculinity from the insecurities . . . of socioeconomic changes and shifting genderroles’ by targeting homosexuals55 and, more generally, attempting to counter the

massive crisis of legitimacy of the regime by constructing docile subjects.

48 Aida Seif El-Dawla, ‘Torture: A state policy’, in Rabab El-Mahdi and Philip Marfleet (eds), Egypt:The Moment of Change (London: Zed Books, 2009), pp. 120–35, p. 120.

49 Saad Eddin Ibrahim, ‘Egypt’s Unchecked Repression’, Ikhwanweb (20 August 2007), available at:{http://ikhwanmisr.com/article.php?id=13834} accessed 12 October 2011. See also John R. Bradley,Inside Egypt: The Land of the Pharaos on the Brink of a Revolution (New York: Palgrave, 2008), p. 140.

50 Ibrahim, ‘Egypt’s Unchecked Repression’. See also Alaa Al Aswany, On the State of Egypt: WhatCaused the Revolution (London: Canongate, 2011), p. 159: ‘Torture in Egypt is not the work of errantor rogue officers, it is a permanent and systematic policy applied by the state, and there have beenmore victims of torture in the Mubarak era than in any other period of Egyptian history.’

51 HRW, Behind Closed Doors: Torture and Detention in Egypt (New York: HRW, 1996); Charged withBeing Children: Egyptian Police Abuse of Children in Need of Protection (New York: HRW, 2003); In aTime of Torture: The Assault on Justice In Egypt’s Crackdown on Homosexual Conduct (New York:HRW, 2004); ‘Work on Him’. See also Forum of Independent Human Rights Organizations, ‘JointReport’ (November 2009), available at: {http://eipr.org/en/report/2010/02/05/501/504} accessed 18October 2011. This is not to mention Egypt’s major role in the US and other European countriesrendition programme, which has turned Egypt in a primary torture destination. See HRW, BlackHole: The Fate of Islamists Rendered to Egypt (New York: HRW, 2005).

52 El-Dawla, ‘Torture’, p. 122.53 Joel Beinin, ‘Workers’ Protest in Egypt: Neoliberalism and Class Struggle in 21st Century’, Social

Movement Studies, 8:4 (2009), pp. 449–54; Adam Hanieh, ‘Egypt’s Uprising: Not Just a Question of‘‘Transition’’ ’, The Bullet (14 February 2011), available at: {http://www.socialistproject.ca/bullet/462.php} accessed 18 October 2011; Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, andModernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).

54 Forum of Independent Human Rights Organizations, ‘Joint Report’.55 Nicola Pratt, ‘The Queen Boat Case in Egypt: Sexuality, National Security and State Sovereignty’,

Review of International Studies, 33:1 (2007), pp. 129–44, p. 137.

1068 Luca Mavelli

Foucault’s argument discussed in the previous section offers an interesting per-

spective to analyse the case of Egypt. As was argued, Foucault identified a connec-

tion between the disappearance of torture as a disciplinary power, the emergence of abiopolitical economy of the body, and eventually the disappearance of torture as a

public spectacle. In the case of Egypt under Mubarak (1981–2011) torture performed

a distinctive disciplinary function, but had been nonetheless pushed into a formal

domain of secrecy, with the government regularly denying torture allegations (at

least until the mid-2000, as we shall see in a moment). At the same time, the political

economy informing the practice of torture did not appear to respond to a biopolitical

logic. While torture under Gamal Abdel Nasser (in power from 1956 to 1970)

and Anwar Sadat (in power from 1970 to 1981) was mainly used to break politicalopponents – hence, it was employed ‘biopolitically’ as a tool supposed to protect the

body politic from those who threatened it – under Mubarak it was progressively

turned into a tool which targeted ordinary people and thus threatened the body politic

itself. In advancing this argument, I am not suggesting that torture was ever necessary

to protect the body politic of Egypt, but that Egyptian ruling elites were able to sustain

a narrative whereby the persecution and torture of militant Islamists (and before

them, of communists and, more generally, of political opponents) was presented as

a necessary requirement for the survival of Egypt and its institutions.56 This narrativeconstructed the security of the regime and that of Egypt and its people as the same

thing.

This narrative began to collapse in the mid-2000s, when the ‘invisible’ disciplinary

apparatus of torture began to be exposed in all its bare brutality by a growing com-

munity of bloggers. They started to post on the internet images and videos of police

abuses, thus making visible the invisible inscriptions of sovereign power onto the

body by revealing how those being targeted were not just political opponents who

supposedly threatened the regime, but ordinary people whom the regime was sup-posed to protect. These images were picked up by the independent media and thus

given further resonance, with the effect of triggering a national debate which forced

the government press to report the news and the government to defend itself from the

accusation of torture.57

Some of the bloggers who posted images and videos of tortured bodies were

loosely connected to the Egyptian movement for change, also known as Kefaya

(Enough!). This is a ‘cross-ideological force’58 established in 2004 which demanded

the end of Mubarak’s regime and the implementation of democratic reforms, andwhich managed to bring together a vast array of Egyptian opposition forces, from

Muslim Brothers to secular leftists. According to Manar Shorbagy, Kefaya con-

tributed to overcoming the ‘dead end’ of an Egyptian opposition ‘unable to commu-

nicate with the public’, under the ‘siege of an arsenal of restrictive laws’, and locked

56 For a journalistic account of this argument see Al Aswany, ‘On the State of Egypt’, pp. 162–3.57 One of the first cases of torture made public which shocked Egyptians was that of Emad al-Kabir,

a minibus driver from Cairo, who in 2006 intervened to calm an argument between his cousin and apolice officer. Al-Kabir was beaten in the street and then in the police station, where he was filmedwhile being sodomised with a stick. The footage of his torture {http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=5f8d5d16c5} was circulated by the police among his fellow drivers to intimidate them, and eventuallypublished by blogger Wael Abbas on his blog Misr Digital {http://misrdigital.blogspirit.com/} and onYouTube in November 2006.

58 Manar Shorbagy, ‘The Egyptian Movement for Change – Kefaya: Redefining Politics in Egypt’,Public Culture, 19:1 (2007), pp. 175–96, p. 175.

Postsecular resistance 1069

in a ‘secularist-Islamist polarization’ which hindered ‘the possibility of reaching

any meaningful consensus on critical issues’.59 One of the rallying points of Kefaya

members was an outright denunciation of state torture through articles which oftendescribed first-hand experiences of police abuses, banners, a call for the enforcement

of anti-torture laws, the creation of a movement called ‘Egyptians against torture’

and, most of all, through the publication of videos of police violence.60

Members of Kefaya, though, were not the only bloggers to denounce torture,

as a number of Islamist bloggers, including Muslim Brothers, also contributed to

circulate documents and videos of police abuses. As journalist and blogger Hossam

El-Hamalawy stated following a meeting of bloggers in 2007 at the Association for

Human Rights Legal Aid to coordinate a campaign against Mubarak’s police torture:‘The small audience was a microcosm of a growing rich pluralistic blogosphere.

There were religious and secularists, veiled and unveiled, Copts and Muslims, leftists,

liberals, Islamists and independents – all keen on ridding Egypt of its police torture

epidemic.’61 It is noteworthy to observe that the brief resume of the conference

written by El-Hamalawy, an avowed secular socialist, appeared on the Muslim

Brotherhood website, to which he is a regular contributor. This website has published

a number of articles, documents, images and videos against torture, often as part of a

collaboration with other opposition movements.62

According to anthropologist Charles Hirschkind, the images of ‘exceptional and

daily acts of violence’ have contributed to ‘the experience of a collective national

subject’ and to ‘the elaboration of a political discourse that cuts across the institu-

tional barriers that have until recently polarized Egypt’s political terrain, between

more Islamically-oriented currents (most prominent among them, the Muslim Brother-

hood) and secular-liberal ones’.63 The polarisation between secularists and Islamists

has long been a central theme of Egyptian politics – one which, as Maha Abdelrahman

observes, has had implications for ‘every sphere of the political and the social realms’.64

This polarisation should not be understood exclusively as an expression of contending

political visions, but also as an instantiation of secularism as ‘an expression of the

state’s sovereign power’.65 Such a perspective draws on a recent stream of research

which emphasises that ‘secularism involves less a separation of religion and politics

than the fashioning of religion as an object of continual management and interven-

tion’ to make ‘religious life and sensibility’ amenable and, I would add, useful to the

requirements of state sovereignty.66

59 Ibid.60 Nadia Oweidat et al., The Kefaya Movement: A Case Study of a Grassroots Reform Initiative (Santa

Monica:RAND Corporation, 2008), pp. 21–2.61 Hossam El-Hamalawy, ‘Bloggers and Rights Activists Against Torture Meeting’, Ikhwanweb (18 March

2007), available at: {http://www.ikhwanweb.com/article.php?id=2118} accessed 12 October 2011.62 Negar Azimi, ‘Bloggers, Kifaya and Ikhwanweb Against Torture’, Ikhwanweb (2 February 2007),

available at: {http://www.ikhwanweb.com/article.php?id=2542} accessed 12 October 2011.63 Charles Hirschkind, ‘New Media and Political Dissent in Egypt’, Revista de Dialectologıa y Tradiciones

Populares, LXV:1 (2010), pp. 137–54, pp. 138–9.64 Maha M. Abdelrahman, Civil Society Exposed: The Politics of NGOs in Egypt (London: I. B. Tauris,

2004), p. 108.65 Hussein Ali Agrama, ‘Secularism, Sovereignty, Indeterminacy: Is Egypt a Secular or a Religious State?’,

Comparative Studies in Society and History, 52:3 (2010), pp. 495–593, p. 500.66 Ibid., p. 499. See also Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford:

Stanford University Press, 2003), and William E. Connolly, Why I Am Not A Secularist (Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press, 1999).

1070 Luca Mavelli

Secularism thus understood is the power to define the space, forms, and meanings

that religion may legitimately ‘occupy in society’.67 This is a power that the Mubarak

regime constantly ‘exploited over the last 30 years in order to ensure a weak opposi-tion’.68 The regime regularly presented itself as a moderate bank against the mount-

ing wave of allegedly radical Islamist forces such as the Muslim Brotherhood, save

for supporting ultra-conservative Islamic groups, such as the Salafists, as a counter-

balancing ‘Islamist alternative’ and to boost its Islamic credentials. Mubarak’s strategy

was part of a tradition of sovereign power’s management and ‘use’ of religion for its

own purposes. This includes President Nasser’s decision to bring Al-Azhar University,

a world centre of Islamic knowledge, under direct control of the state in order to

quell the opposition of the Muslim Brothers and propagate his vision of socialism,or President Sadat’s decision to amend the political parties’ law by forbidding them

from carrying out any activity considered against the principles of the Sharia and

national unity in order to curb any potential challenge to the regime.69

According to Egyptian novelist Alaa Al Aswany, such a ‘secularism’ has been a

contributing factor to the decay of the Islamic tradition in Egypt, where clerics have

been progressively turned into government employees who ‘select from Islam every-

thing that supports the wishes of the ruler, however corrupt and oppressive he may

be’, and state-sponsored (under Mubarak) Salafist clerics preach that ‘to disobey aMuslim ruler is unlawful even if he is corrupt, and that obeying him is obligatory

even if he has stolen from Muslims and has had them whipped unjustly’.70 This

critique echoes that of many intellectuals, journalists, and bloggers who have pointed

out how, in the last years of his presidency and ‘obsessed with the ‘‘threat’’ posed by

the Muslim Brotherhood’, Mubarak not only promoted a state-sponsored submissive

vision of Islam, but saw Salafism as a useful ‘Islamist alternative’ to the Brother-

hood, to the effect that he turned a blind eye to their activities and granted them con-

cessions for satellite television channels.71 Accordingly, the Mubarak regime playeddifferent Islamist groups against each other and, most of all, Islamists who would

view ‘secularization as the eminent danger’ and secularists, who would emphasise

‘the threat of politicized religion to personal freedoms and democratic rights’.72

Hence, the regime portrayed itself as the only authority which, while truly Islamic,

could embrace modern and democratic values.

This analysis has two important implications for our discussions. First, by mak-

ing videos and images of police abuses on ordinary people public, Egyptian bloggers

not only contributed to unchain a sense of moral indignation and human solidaritybeyond the secularist-Islamist polarisation, but enacted a politics of resistance centred

on the body. By forcing the tortured body back into the public domain, images and

videos of abuses contributed to disclosing and making visible the inscriptions of

power/knowledge regimes onto the body, thus turning the body from an ‘inscribed

67 Asad, Formations of the Secular, p. 210.68 Hirschkind, ‘New Media and Political Dissent in Egypt’, p. 139.69 Dina Shehata, Islamists and Secularists in Egypt: Opposition, Conflict & Cooperation (Abingdon: Routledge,

2009).70 Al Aswany, On the State of Egypt, p. 153.71 Ahmed Hashim, ‘The Egyptian Military, Part Two: From Mubarak Onward’, Middle East Policy,

XVII:4 (2011), pp. 106–28, p. 122; Salma Shukralla and Yassin Gaber, ‘What Was Religion Doing inthe Debate on Egypt’s Constitutional Amendments?’, Ahram Online (22 March 2011), available at:{http://english.ahram.org.eg/News/8267.aspx} accessed 18 October 2011.

72 Hirschkind, ‘New Media and Political Dissent in Egypt’, p. 139

Postsecular resistance 1071

surface of events’73 at the mercy of the sheer power of the regime, into a source of

resistance. Second, this politics of resistance centred on the body was informed by

a political imagination which made possible a progressive convergence between secu-larists and Islamists. In this convergence, tortured bodies became the metaphor of a

different kind of unity, namely a postsecular unity encompassing all Egyptians and

symbolised by the body of Egypt – a body ‘abused, raped and beaten by the state’,74

but also capable of resisting, if only for the brief phase of the revolution and the four

or five years running up to it, the secularist-Islamist fracture and the regime that

fomented it.

This postsecular politics of resistance found a most vivid instantiation in the

events following the death of Khaled Said, dubbed by the media as ‘the face thatlaunched a revolution’.75 Khaled Said was a 28 year old from the Egyptian coastal

city of Alexandria. On 6 June 2010, he was beaten to death by two plainclothes officers

who seized him in an internet cafe. When summoned to the morgue the next day,

Khaled’s family members found themselves in front of a completely disfigured face.

Khaled’s head was lying on a pool of blood and showed several fractures; his nose

was broken, some of his front teeth missing, and his jaw was dislocated. There

was blood and bruises all over his face. His family was told that he was wanted for

drug-related charges and that, after resisting arrest, he had died of asphyxiation inthe attempt to swallow a bag of marijuana.76 Khaled’s relatives managed to snap a

picture of his deformed face and posted it on the internet together with the accusa-

tion that Khaled ‘was tortured to death for possessing video material that implicates

members of the police in a drug deal’.77

The picture triggered a large outcry, with massive protests in Alexandria and

Cairo at the end of June, and went viral at the beginning of July, when Wael Ghonim,

a young Google executive, opened a Facebook page entitled ‘We are all Khaled

Said’, which began to attract supporters in the order of thousands per day.78 Accord-ing to HRW, one of the reasons for the unprecedented wave of protests which

followed the death of Khaled Said is that many people could identify with him as

victims of police violence.79 This emotional identification went beyond the sharing

of a traumatic experience. As was written in the aftermath of his death, Khaled

Said ‘was someone’s son, someone’s brother, someone’s friend, someone’s neighbour,

someone’s customer, and if not for what had happened, someone’s future’.80 That

73 Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, p. 83.74 Yasmine Rifaat, ‘Blogging the Body: The Case of Egypt’, Surfacing: An Interdisciplinary Journal for

Gender in the Global South, 1:1 (2008), pp. 52–72, p. 66.75 Brian Ross and Matthew Cole, ‘Egypt: The Face that Launched a Revolution’, ABC News (4 February

2011), available at: {http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/egypt-face-launched-revolution/story?id=12841488&singlePage=true} accessed 5 October 2011.

76 Jennifer Preston, ‘Movement Began With Outrage and a Facebook Page That Gave It an Outlet’,The New York Times (5 February 2011), available at: {http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/06/world/middleeast/06face.html?pagewanted=all} accessed 5 October 2011, Ernesto Londono, ‘Egyptian Man’sDeath Became Symbol of a Callous State’, The Washington Post (9 February 2011), available at:{http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/02/08/AR2011020806360.html} accessed5 October 2011.

77 Al Jazeera, ‘Police killing sparks Egypt protest’ (14 June 2010), available at: {http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2010/06/201061415530298271.html} accessed 5 October 2011.

78 {http://www.facebook.com/ElShaheeed} (Arabic version); {http://www.facebook.com/elshaheeed.co.uk} (English version); see also {http://www.elshaheeed.co.uk/}.

79 HRW, ‘Work on Him’, p. 1.80 Amro Ali, ‘Egypt’s Collision Course With History’, ON LINE opinion (9 July 2010), available at:

{http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/print.asp?article=10663} accessed 17 October 2011.

1072 Luca Mavelli

is, Said was an ordinary citizen, who had by chance come across a video of police

corruption. To borrow the words of a female opposition blogger named Baheyya in

a 2005 post, people identified with Khaled Said because of his normalcy and becausehe represented ‘an entire subculture of invisible citizens in this country with first-

hand experience of the state’s ferocity’; men and women with ‘scarred souls and

violated bodies whose stories we don’t know’.81 On the eve of the massive protests

which led to the resignation of Hosni Mubarak, the Facebook page ‘We are all

Khaled Said’ had reached more than 80,000 supporters. It was the first, together

with the 6 April Youth Movement Facebook group, to invite Egyptians to protest

on 25 January (not incidentally, National Police Day) through a Facebook event

page called ‘The Day of the Revolution Against Torture, Poverty, Corruption andUnemployment’.82

Torture, to be sure, was not a ‘cause’ of the revolution, but rather one of the

‘catalysts’ which precipitated the long list of Egyptian grievances (poverty, corruption,

inequality, restriction of liberties, and police brutality) by bringing the confrontation

with the regime onto an almost existential level, where the tortured body made

public epitomised an ultimate form of negation of life. This existential dimension

culminated in the ‘exceptional existential moment’ of the revolution which, as

Hussein Ali Agrama points out, saw the protesters standing ‘apart from the moderngame of defining and distinguishing religion and politics’, to the effect that they

‘expressed every potential language of justice, secular or religious, but embraced

none’.83 The chanting crowds in Tahrir Square – where leftists, Islamists, Muslim

Brothers, communists, and liberals gathered together under ‘a collective ‘‘leader-

ship’’ ’84 and uttered slogans such as ‘Our revolution is civil; neither violent, nor

religious’,85 – are a most powerful reminder of this exceptional postsecular sense of

national unity and solidarity beyond secularist-Islamist allegiances, and beyond the

power of secularism of Egyptian ruling elites to polarise political identities betweencontending secularist and Islamist currents and support manifestations of religiosity

complacent with sovereign power.

In advancing this argument, my understanding of the ‘postsecular’ shares some

ground with, but also differs from, Hussein Ali Agrama’s notion of ‘asecular’.86

Agrama contends that the revolution was the expression of ‘a genuinely asecular

power’ as the unity expressed by the protesters revealed an ultimate indifference

to the secular-religious polarisation. The asecular suggests a situation in which it

becomes ultimately indifferent to ask whether or not a norm is secular or religious.The postsecular, he suggests, fails to grasp this indifference as it is concerned with

the emergence of new norms, and therefore it ‘fail[s] to recognize that the process

of identifying and distinguishing secular from non-secular norms is part of what

81 Baheyya, ‘Remeber Them’, Baheyya: Egypt Analysis and Whimsy (1 June 2005), available at: {http://baheyya.blogspot.com/2005/06/remember-them.html} accessed 12 October 2011.

82 John D. Sutter, ‘The faces of Egypt’s ‘‘Revolution 2.0’’ ’, CNN (21 February 2011), available at:{http://www.cnn.com/2011/TECH/innovation/02/21/egypt.internet.revolution/index.html} accessed 6October 2011.

83 Hussein Ali Agrama, ‘Asecular Revolution’, The Immanent Frame (11 March 2011), available at:{http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2011/03/11/asecular-revolution/} accessed 18 October 2011.

84 Asef Bayat, ‘Egypt, and the Post-Islamist Middle East’, Open Democracy (8 February 2011), availableat: {http://www.opendemocracy.net/asef-bayat/egypt-and-post-islamist-middle-east} accessed 18 October2011.

85 Ibid.86 Agrama, ‘Asecular Revolution’.

Postsecular resistance 1073

secularism is, and that this process is integral to its power’.87 I agree with Agrama’s

critique of a normative understanding of the postsecular. Indeed, this is precisely one

of the main limits of Habermas’s notion of postsecularity that I discussed in the firstsection of this article. My contention was that the postsecular as a normative idea

of inclusion based on a cognitive and disembodied understanding of religion as a

provider of moral norms for a secular domain which is not self-sustaining ultimately

contributes to the reproduction of the power/knowledge regime of the secular. Simi-

larly, I agree that the revolution was not about the emergence of new norms, but an

‘exceptional existential moment’. Indeed, the power of the tortured body to sustain a

politics of resistance capable to challenge the secularist-Islamist polarisation rapidly

faded after the ousting of Mubarak and this polarisation quickly re-emerged seem-ingly unabated.

However, it also seems to me that the notion of asecularity unwittingly relies on

a Kantian understanding of critical resistance as the search for universal structures

beyond the phenomenal/empirical dimension – in the case at hand, as a quest for

justice beyond the secular/religious divide fomented by the Egyptian regime. Agrama

contends that the Egyptian protesters were the expression of a ‘bare sovereignty’

which ‘stands prior to religion and politics’ and therefore ‘is utterly indifferent to

the question of where to draw a line between them’.88 Although he maintains thatthe power of bare sovereignty ‘arises from the potentialities intrinsic to a given mode

of life’, this account appears very similar to Habermas’s idea that the exercise of

critical reason does not require transcendental subjects but individuals grounded in

experiential ‘lifeworlds’. The effect is that Agrama’s asecular protesters appear to

resemble Habermas’s disembodied postconventional subjects.

On the contrary, the notion of postsecularity grounded in a Foucauldian idea of

critical resistance that I have explored in this article, helps us grasp how the power

of resistance of the tortured body made public was mobilised by situated actors –themselves the product of the power/knowledge regimes of secularism. These actors,

more or less consciously, and often unconsciously, understood themselves on the

secular-religious spectrum, but nonetheless found the imagination to resist its polari-

sation. Hence, their quest for justice as embodied by the tortured body was certainly

the expression of an indifference to the secularist-Islamist polarisation. Yet, this indif-

ference was the result of a politics of resistance carried out by emotional, embodied,

and embedded subjects who, as I have tried to show in this section, established the

body as a postsecular locus of resistance.

Conclusion

This article has explored the questions of the body and resistance for the concept of

postsecularity. Taking the cue from Habermas’s highly influential account, the article

argued that this perspective is part of a broader tradition of European secularity

which has in Immanuel Kant its seminal and most systematic formulation. This tradi-tion rests on a metaphysical anthropology of human nature as the unstable ensemble

of body and soul; it conceptualises critical resistance as a process of transcendence of

87 Ibid.88 Ibid.

1074 Luca Mavelli

our embodied nature, that is, as the search for universal and immutable structures

through the freedom of reason; it acknowledges that the ensuing secular domain

lacks the moral resources which may make it self-sufficient and thus postulates anotion of rational religion instrumental for the perpetuation and reproduction of the

secular. Accordingly, the resulting idea of postsecularity rests on a conceptualisation

of the body as the expression of a ‘morally corrupting’ sensuous nature, that is, as

belonging to the phenomenal and empirical dimension which makes the body a site

of inscription of external regimes of domination.

In order to challenge this account of postsecularity, this article explored and

articulated a Foucauldian perspective of critical resistance centred on the body. In

this approach, resistance is no longer the search for universal and transcendental struc-tures to oppose the making and unmaking of power and history, but the endeavour

to understand and disclose the inscriptions of power/knowledge regimes of domina-

tion onto the body, and to imagine these inscriptions as ‘contingencies’ which ‘have

made us what we are’, but do not rule out the possibility of different ways of being.

The third section of the article discussed how the endeavour to reveal and make

visible the inscriptions of sovereign power onto the body was at the heart of the

politics of resistance against torture in Egypt. The argument was advanced that this

politics of resistance was marked by a postsecular political imagination as it saw theprogressive convergence of secularist and Islamist opposition forces. This political

imagination eventually contributed to a collective national experience as most vividly

epitomised by the chanting crowds in Tahrir Square. These crowds brought together

all segments of Egyptian society across the secularist-Islamist spectrum and challenged

a longstanding and encompassing polarisation of Egyptian politics and the power of

secularism of Egyptian ruling elites to foment it.

The understanding of postsecularity advanced in this article thus differs from that

put forward by Habermas. Postsecularity is not a normative ideal resting on post-conventional subjects, whose aim is to instrumentally use the moral intuitions of faith

in order to resist the pathologies of secular modernity and rescue this project, but a

form of critical resistance postulated on embodied and embedded subjects which

challenges the secular/religious divide and the secular as a power/knowledge regime.

This account does not rest on a notion of religion as a normative and disembodied

set of cognitive choices, but as a multidimensional concept which encompasses tradi-

tion, practice, emotions, lived experience, and embodied modes of subjectivation,

and which is constantly reconstituted, contested, struggled over, and resisted by avariety of forces – including, most prominently, sovereign power.

This, to be sure, does not mean that Habermas’s account should be discarded. As

Charles Hirschkind and Marc Lynch have shown in the case of Egypt, resistance to

the regime through digital activism has contributed to create a space of convergence

for secularist and Islamist bloggers which has resulted in ‘practices of public reason

and dialogue’ and forms of ‘critical engagement’.89 These practices offer a very vivid

instantiation of the postsecular cooperative cognitive effort theorised by Habermas

in which secular and religious consciousnesses acknowledge their limitations andrecognise the reciprocal validity of their truth claims. Habermas’s lens, however, fails

89 Hirschkind, ‘New Media and Political Dissent in Egypt’, pp. 139, 149; Marc Lynch, ‘Young Brothersin Cyberspace’, Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP) 245 (Winter 2007), {http://www.merip.org/mer/mer245/young-brothers-cyberspace}.

Postsecular resistance 1075

to grasp the more visceral, emotional, and embodied dimension of postsecular resis-

tance centred on the tortured body which spilled over from the circumscribed com-

munity of bloggers and political activists to the Egyptian society as a whole, and inwhich postsecular resistance was not the use of a certain moral teaching of religion to

cure a distortion of secularism, but rather the attempt to challenge and transcend the

very secular/religious divide in the name of a different idea of justice. This ‘excep-

tional existential moment’, as Agrama describes it, which for a limited but momen-

tous period of time challenged the longstanding fracture of secularists and Islamists

in Egypt, has several potential implications for future studies of the postsecular in

international relations.

To start with, the Egyptian case shows the limits of a cognitive account ofpostsecularity. This, in turn, is a reflection of a dominant European tradition – as

discussed in the first section of the article – which conceives of religion as a dis-

embodied and cognitive moral perspective. The limits of this tradition and of its

postsecular political imagination are clear in the numerous controversies that, from

the Rushdie Affair to the publication of the so-called Danish Cartoons portraying

the Prophet Mohamed, have been surrounding Islam in Europe.90 Among them

figures prominently the controversy over the headscarf. This has been characterised

by a widespread European understanding of the veil as a symbol of submission, ofallegiance to an entity other than the sovereign state, and as a means of proselytism –

hence, by an overall incapacity to consider the veil as the expression of an embodied

form of religiosity, as ‘the means both of being and becoming a certain kind of

person’91 and thus ‘not a sign intended to communicate something, but part of an

orientation, of a way of being’.92 However, the necessity of a postsecular imagination

capable to consider this embodied, practical, and experiential dimension of faith

clashes with the cognitive understanding of religion sustained by the power/knowledge

regime of European secularity. The apprehension for any attempt at reconsideringthe boundary between the secular and the religious, the rational and the emotional,

is well summarised by Habermas: ‘[Once the] boundary between faith and knowledge

becomes porous, and once religious motives force their way into philosophy under

false pretences, reason loses its foothold and succumbs to irrational effusion’.93

As discussed in the introduction to this Special Issue, such a secular bias has

centrally informed International Relations scholarship (IR), to the effect that religion

had virtually disappeared from its radar screen. Although the 1990s post-positivist

turn has created the epistemological conditions for a new interest in religion andIR94 a full appreciation of the visceral, emotional, and embodied idea of postsecularity

as advanced in this article requires that the limits of the rationalist assumptions and

90 Mavelli, Europe’s Encounter with Islam.91 Saba Mahmood, ‘Feminist Theory, Embodiment, and the Docile Agent: Some Reflections on the

Egyptian Islamic Revival’, Cultural Anthropology, 16:2 (2001), pp. 202–36, p. 215.92 Talal Asad, ‘Trying to Understand French Secularism’, in Hent de Vries and Lawrence E. Sullivan

(eds), Political Theologies: Public Religions in a Post-Secular World, (New York: Fordham UniversityPress, 2006), p. 501. The case of the headscarf has been compounded by a gendered portrayal of Muslimwomen as vulnerable subjects in need of protection. See Peter Morey and Amina Yaqin, FramingMuslims: Stereotyping and Representations after 9/11 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011);and Luca Mavelli, ‘Between Normalisation and Exception: The Securitisation of Islam and the Con-struction of the Secular Subject’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 41:2 (2013, forthcoming).

93 Habermas, Between Naturalism and Religion, p. 243.94 Luca Mavelli and Fabio Petito, ‘The Postsecular in International Relations: an Overview’, in this

Special Issue.

1076 Luca Mavelli

social scientific methods that inform the discipline be further reconsidered. In this

perspective, the question of the postsecular crosses paths with another surprisingly

neglected area of inquiry in IR, namely the study of emotions in world politics.Although not specifically aimed at addressing this debate,95 this article was none-

theless an attempt to explore some of the roles that emotions played in the 2011

Egyptian revolutions and how an embodied understanding of postsecular resistance

in a non-Western setting could prove a particularly insightful lens to this end. The

analysis carried out in this article thus suggests two potential research avenues for

future research on the postsecular in international relations.

First, although dominant, the Kantian-Habermasian perspective is not the only

tradition of European secularity. William Connolly, for instance, has pointed in thedirection of a minor European tradition centred on the thought of Baruch Spinoza

whose ‘metaphysical monism’ challenges the mind/body dualism by considering them

as expression of the same substance.96 This perspective, Connolly contends, advances

an idea of ethics not as the search for universal categorical imperatives, but as an

embodied-spiritual cultivation of ethical dispositions and resists ‘the thin intellec-

tualism that grips secularism – that is, the idea that thinking can be separated from

its affective dimension and that exercises of the self and collective rituals merely

represent or symbolize beliefs’.97 The challenge for scholars of postsecularity in inter-national relations is thus to move beyond the Kantian-Habermasian ‘cognitive’ tra-

dition of secularity by considering the conceptual resources of contending European

secular traditions sensitive to the role of emotions, and how these traditions may

be ‘harness[ed] for radical purposes’98 such as devising modes of subjectivity beyond

the mind/body dualism or disclosing the power/knowledge inscriptions of existing

secular formations.

Second, the argument advanced in this article invites to look beyond the Euro-

pean canon and reflect upon the postsecular question in non-European settings. Thisleads to another key implication of my analysis, namely that the question of the post-

secular cannot be considered an exclusive concern of Western-European societies

which, as Habermas maintains, ‘at some point have been in a ‘‘secular’’ state’.99 To

be sure, there is no doubt, as Joseph Camilleri and Mustapha Pasha point out in this

Special Issue that ‘secularism is a distinctly European or Western project’100 and that

‘[e]xtant conceptions of secularity, secularisation or secularism inevitably find their

originary impetus in Protestant Christian settlements negotiated within European

cultural spaces and within specific histories.’101 Yet, it is also the case that the historiesof the ‘Western’ and ‘non-Western’ worlds are ‘connected’ and that secularism is an

important ‘derivative discourse’ in the Islamic world, where it ‘acquired a familiar

currency in shaping models to banish religion from politics’102 and, as I have dis-

95 For an excellent overview, see Roland Bleiker and Emma Hutchison, ‘Fear no More: Emotions andWorld Politics’, Review of International Studies, 34:S1 (2008), pp. 115–35.

96 William E. Connolly, Europe: A Minor Tradition, in David Scott and Charles Hirschkind (eds), Powersof the Secular Modern: Talal Asad and His Interlocutors (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006),p. 83.

97 Ibid., p. 84.98 Andrew Linklater, The Transformation of Political Community: Ethical Foundations of the Post-Westphalian

Era (Oxford: Polity, 1998), p. 5.99 Habermas, ‘Notes on a Post-Secular Society’.

100 Joseph A. Camilleri, ‘Postsecularist Discourse in an ‘‘Age of Transition’’ ’.101 Mustapha Kamal Pasha, ‘Islam and the Postsecular’.102 Ibid.

Postsecular resistance 1077

cussed in this article, in fostering expressions of religiosity complacent with sovereign

power. Although this process of disciplining religion could be described as an almost

universal corollary of the process of state formation, these reflections suggest theimpossibility of a single, undifferentiated understanding of the postsecular for the

international system and the necessity to interrogate the contextual issues that under-

pin the postsecular question starting with an investigation of the specific forms and

practices of secularity.

From the perspective of an investigation of Egyptian secular formations, it could

be argued that the power of secularism of the Mubarak regime to foster expressions

of religiosity complacent with sovereign power cannot be considered in isolation

from a more general crisis of the Islamic tradition as marked by a progressive discon-nection between dogma and conduct. This critique, originally formulated at the end

of the nineteenth century by scholars such as Mohamed Abduh, has been repeatedly

voiced by Egyptian novelist Alaa Al Aswany in a series of newspapers articles

published in the months before the January 2011 uprising in the opposition press.103

In these articles, Al Aswany draws a specific connection between the fact that in

Islam ‘rituals have become an end in themselves instead of a means to improve and

chasten oneself ’ and the widespread and systematic use of torture in Egypt. It is

astonishing, he writes, to think that in the ‘human slaughterhouses’ of State Securitypremises ‘there is always a prayer room where the torturers can perform their prayers

at the appointed times . . . Those responsible for wrecking the lives of these wretches

and their families are Muslims who are rarely without calluses on their foreheads

from regular praying and who never feel that what they are doing makes them any

less religious.’104 The incapacity of Islam to offer resistance against this violence is

a product of a ‘permanent and systematic policy applied by the state’ as well as of

an Islam which ‘has been transformed into a package of measures a Muslim has to

complete without necessarily having any effect on his or her conduct of life’.105

These remarks provide an indication of the complex, different, and multifaceted

issues surrounding the postsecular question and how the latter cannot be reduced to

a normative ideal of inclusion of the moral intuitions of faith. As I have attempted to

show in this article, the postsecular involves rethinking our understanding of subjec-

tivity beyond the mind/body dichotomy; our understanding of the boundary between

the secular and the religious as the product of multiple regimes of power and knowl-

edge, rather than a natural divide; and our understanding of the international, in a

perspective which acknowledges the European genealogy of secularity, but is alsocognisant of the challenges to secular formations in the so-called ‘Islamic world’.

Ultimately, the postsecular offers a new critical edge to reconsider the very categories

of critique and resistance by interrogating and questioning the boundary between the

secular and the religious, turning this boundary into a space in which new forms of

embodied political agency and imagination may be observed.

103 Al Aswany, On the State of Egypt.104 Ibid., p. 152.105 Ibid.

1078 Luca Mavelli