Subjection

Who counts as a subject of justice? Whose interests and needs deserve consideration? When it comes to struggles for economic redistribution, cultural recognition, or political representation, who exactly belongs to the universe of those entitled to make justice claims on one another?

Cet entretien entre Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak et Etienne Balibar a été réalisé le 25 janvier 2010 à la librairie du Merle Moqueur, dans le XXe arrondissement de Paris.

Never has a revolution that seemed so lacking in prospects gathered momentum so quickly and so unexpectedly. The Egyptian Revolution, starting on January 25, lacked leadership and possessed little organization; its defining events, on Friday, January 28, occurred on a day when all communication technologies, including all internet and phones, were barred; it took place in a large country known for sedate political life, a very long legacy of authoritarian continuity, and an enviable repressive apparatus consisting of more than 2 million members. But on that day, the regime of Hosni Mubarak, entrenched for 30 years and seemingly eternal, the only regime that the vast majority of the protesters had ever known, evaporated in one day.

Tunisia and Egypt were both model countries. They were success stories. Tunisia had reaped much Western praise. Former French president Chirac spoke about the Tunisian “economic miracle” that allowed the regime to feed and house the people and to give them health and education. What else, he added, should the people want? President Sarkozy declared two years ago that the space for freedom was expanding in Tunisia. The former US secretary of defense Rumsfeld praised Tunisia as a “successful country” because it created an “environment that is hospitable to investment, enterprise and to opportunity for their people.” A senior State Department official commended Tunisia for its “impressive economy and social structure.”

Since January 14^th, when Ben Ali “scarpered”, since February 10^th, when Mubarak resigned, a feeling of joy and a powerful raising up of hope has animated the struggles of Tunisians, the Egyptians, Arab intellectuals and militants – and all those who have, for a long time, stood by them - for dignity, freedom, justice, democracy in their countries, at great cost.

In 2011, Ali Abdallah Saleh will celebrate thirty three years as head of the Yemeni state. Since 1990, following the unification of Yemen, his power has extended to the southern provinces, which, after the British troops left in 1967, were incorporated into the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen, governed by a Socialist regime allied to the USSR. The Unity Constitution, adopted by referendum in 1991, provided for a multiparty system, organized an electoral system and press freedom. For those reasons, unlike its neighbors, Yemen, sole republic in the Arabic peninsula, saw a rich civil society and political life flourish thanks to its regional distinctive characteristics, its diverse historical customs and its ideological influences spanning from Marxism to Islamism, in their numerous variations.

The Egyptians' long silence continued, but the deep and essential elements of their makeup were activated on 25 January. This reached its climax on that sacred Friday when the Egyptians became one. All in One. Just as the ancient Egyptian texts describe how the limited individual passes over into a limitless universe.

Political earthquakes have shaken the Arab World over the last two months. The December jasmine revolution in Tunisia, the Nile revolution in Egypt and the subsequent resignations of Bin Ali and Mubarak, have emphasized the importance of the Arab region on the world map and restored pan Arabism and the "elegance" of being Arab.

When the Egyptian Uprising of 2011 began, we heard media pundits, friends, and colleagues milling about in search of apt metaphors to describe the mass protests and revolution in Egypt. In so far as “history” was mobilized in these discussions, it was generally as repetition or analogy. Hence: the Berlin Wall; Tiananmen Square; the first Palestinian Intifada; the Iranian Revolution; the Paris Commune; and the French Revolution, as well as Egypt’s own 1919 and 1952 revolutions. But do these vivid comparisons conceal more than they reveal?

It was not just a revolution against the political regime with its rooted dictatorship, oppression and corruption; a regime based on alliances between money, crime and power mafias as clearly revealed by its strenuous attempts to endure and not be overthrown. It was also a revolution against the religious institutions and discourse supporting the regime sustainability, whether directly through associated movements, institutions and personalities or indirectly through independent actors sharing the regime refusal of the revolution.

Suddenly, voluntary servitude transformed into an intense passion for life and for freedom. But by what miracle, and with what alchemy, does the mystery of ancestral submission dissolve and the flower of joyful disobedience bloom?

Colonized and racially subordinated subjects enter the realm of ethics as violence, and that phenomenon becomes their appearance. They are obligated, in other words, not to appear. Colonialism, understood in these terms, is tragic in the Hegelian sense of a conflict between two conceptions of right. The settlers see themselves as having a right to the land; however it was originally obtained, the transactions by which the generation of settlers facing the indigenous or anti-colonial fighters acquired their possessions was part of a legal and as far as they are concerned just system. They thus have a right to their possessions in the colony. The indigenous or prior inhabitants argue, however, that the land was stolen from them through acts of conquest or trickery. They therefore have a right to its repossession. Even if the settlers decide to give the land back, there is a deeper ethical argument that even that act of good will isn’t their right.