Ahmed Abdel Halim, The Body in Egypt: From Politics to Consumption (Gossor Publishing and Translation House, 2024).
Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?
Ahmed Abdel Halim (AAH): The idea of the book arose from my interest in writing about the body and its relationship to surrounding spaces. It explores the political, intellectual, and organizational state of paralysis that has afflicted Egyptian society due to the oppression of the current regime. From here, I attempted to answer the question: How did Egypt reach this state of authoritarianism? This is done through engaging with the body and its multiple representations, invoking the historical context of the authoritarian “right of ownership” philosophy in Egypt over the bodies of citizens. It examines how its sovereignty and policies began, utilizing and isolating citizens’ bodies for the preservation of authority and dominance, with a focus on the post-2013 authoritarian system. This is based on a wealth of theoretical narratives witnessing and interpreting this authoritarianism, aiming to explore various perspectives regarding politics, mass consumption, and their intertwined and contrasting interactions on the body.
J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?
AAH: After 3 July 2013, the authoritarian system in Egypt focused on body control, by dividing the body into different categories: killing, disappearance, or isolation (imprisonment) for the “opposing body”; industry, training, and preparation for the “subordinate body,” serving as a tool to activate exceptions; co-optation reserved for the “supportive body”, to either align it or at least maintain its neutrality; and blame and warning for the “surplus body.” Throughout my research and reading, particularly influenced by the ideas of Khalid Fahmy and Timothy Mitchell, I observed politics in the body since the inception of the modern state in Egypt, especially the current authoritarian policy, which has been more centered on the body than its predecessors.
This centrality made politics a distant, desiccated space, avoided by all out of fear for the body. This is because approaching politics correlates inversely with the destruction of the body, either by its death, disappearance, isolation, mutilation (torture), or even its engineering (i.e., its demolition and reconstruction), as seen within the prison space. Over the past years and up to now, political discourse in Egypt has been preoccupied with “prison.” Government statements deny the existence of political prisoners or even promise to release them, while political and human rights groups demand their release. Prison is nothing but a confined, monitored, engineered, and reproduced body, and thus politics resides in the body. Politics itself, through various tools, becomes consumptive. Consumption manifests itself through the body, in its appearance and utilization. Hence, I attempted to dissect and read the intersections between politics and consumption, as the body transitions between them through its various representations.
My perspective, analysis, and reading stemmed from practice, my own lived experience as a former prisoner. By “practice,” I mean selfhood, embodied in real-life experiences, from protest, imprisonment, surveillance, exile, and then reading and discussion, and other “selfhood” practices where the body has been an active agent in all these scenes. I termed this selfhood “practice” because it is not an individual selfhood that solely concerns me, but rather a selfhood that has ventured beyond and has gathered communal selfhoods with it. Over the past years, I conducted dozens of interviews with former prisoners or people who had dealings with the security establishment in Egypt, resulting in numerous dialogues and testimonies on various subjects. I attempted to preserve this communal selfhood to become primarily a social history inseparable from the political history of post-2013 authoritarianism. These testimonies, which I consider testimonies of life in its political, social, intellectual, and psychological dimensions, not only chronicle what happened but also help to analyze the indirect or “unannounced” methodology of this authoritarianism about owning the right to the body. Analyzing the speeches and statements of the supreme authoritarian leader and thinker, Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, were also crucial to answering the question of how authoritarianism works. This is a starting point for a more aware and expansive understanding of the Egyptian state and its historical relationship with the bodies around it—the basic body always, and the political one in special cases.
Regarding the structure of the book, in the first chapter, I laid out a preamble to contextualize in the history of modern Egypt the relationship between authority and its citizens’ bodies. I dealt with the authority as if it were a production tool with vital internal parts, assisting it in survival and dominance, defined by the French philosopher Michel Foucault as “biopower.” From here, I discussed (historically, philosophically, and practically) how this interaction occurred, focusing on post-2013 authority, as its policy (and sovereignty, as described by Giorgio Agamben) combined the management of all bodies, dividing them into the four body types I mention above. I moved on to clarify what discrimination and exception mean within oppression, which the authority activates against various segments of society. Such authority operates by activating a state of exception against the political body, by killing, concealing, and imprisoning it. I subsequently analyze the representations of what comes after this exception, specifically post-imprisonment, and how the exit of Egyptian “oppositional” bodies from prison becomes harder than their entry into prison, and how those who are released enter a new orbit that the authority employs and closely supervises with the aim of subjugating their bodies and monopolizing any thought or practice that might emanate from them.
In the second chapter, I discuss the lost identity of authority. It is neither an extension of Nasserism, Pan-Arabism, nor nationalism, nor Sadatism or Mubarakism, nor even Pharaonicism. Rather, it takes what suits it from all previous Egyptian authoritarian narratives, and its primary identity lies in exceptionality, an ideological, mental, narrative, and practice that justifies its authority and thus its survival and dominance over governance. I read the representation of this exceptionality in the monopolization of non-politically active cultural spaces, specifically through television, as well as artistic spaces and educational/pedagogical spaces like governmental and private schools.
In the third chapter, I explore the direct manifestations caused by authority, affecting hundreds of thousands of opposing Egyptians, especially the youth among them. I discuss the transformations of feelings and thoughts within years of imprisonment, then move on to outside prison and even outside Egypt (i.e., exile), to see a portion of the youth (those belonging to the Muslim Brotherhood) and how these stages of manifestations affect them. I move from the specific to the general, to observe the trends and paths of youth inside or outside of Egypt with little to no political interest. I also discuss the exceptional situation within opposition groups, concerning the philosophy of authority in dealing with Islamists as adversaries of power, and their future in social life, including politics, as well as inside Sisi's authoritarian prisons. I turn to the manifestations of consumption and its rise against the potentials of politics, its thought, organization, and practices, and even the transformation of politics itself into a consumptive policy. Here, I use the example of the Egyptian opposition, especially those residing outside Egypt, to observe and analyze how they have become a functional, consumptive opposition in terms of organization, thought, and practice—not a solid, reformist, or revolutionary cultural opposition. I also look at the concept of political self and its transformations from the real to the virtual, and the manifestations of this transformation on the nature of politics in the current Egyptian scene and its future. I include a question about how the body transitioned from being a political body to a consumptive body. And finally, instead of a conclusion, I attempt to discuss what is to come regarding the visibility of authority in Egypt, after President Sisi's dominance over governance until 2030.
J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?
AAH: The book is my fifth authored work and the fourth focusing on body-related themes. Previously, I published a short novel titled Dancing Bodies (Umam Foundation: Beirut, 2021), which explored the movement and formation of the body within prison. Also, my book Who Owns the Right to the Body: A Reading of Prison Life (Umam Foundation: Beirut, 2022) delved into the various images of the body formed as a result of the experiences of prison life. Additionally, I published the book Representations of Egyptian Society: Self, Body, and Identity (Dar Riyad al-Rayis: Beirut, 2023). This discusses and interprets the manifestations and changes that have occurred in Egyptian society in various domains, such as technology (social media), cinema, media, neoliberalism, and urbanism. Therefore, my new book complements those domains, engaging with the realm of politics and its authority in Egypt.
J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?
AAH: Anyone interested in politics in Egypt, especially post-2013, as well as those interested in the body and its relationship to politics in Egypt. This includes research communities, academia, politics, human rights, and others. I particularly hope readers will be those who do not belong to any specific category but are Egyptian citizens dealing with political and security authority and perhaps have experienced actions on their bodies by the authorities in Egypt.
J: What other projects are you working on now?
AAH: Currently, I am working on writing a novel titled The Subordinate and Suleiman: Chatter in Exile, through which I attempt to elucidate the relationship over the past decades in Egypt between the marginalized (the subordinate), as described by Antonio Gramsci, and the authoritarian head of state, the philosopher, who “understands everything.” This is done through a narrative style that is satirical, playful, and revolves around the tales of the marginalized, as well as tales of politics, imprisonment, exile, love, sex, power, suicide, death, consumption, and other concepts and representations.
Excerpt from the book (from Chapter 3, pp. 246-248, translated from Arabic to English)
It is not just suppression that dries up the political interest among people; alongside it, the technological revolution and the exposure of lives have also worked to change people's attitudes towards politics. In other words, political or revolutionary action and their intersections for reform and political change were the only way out for various age groups, whether they were invisible, marginalized, or non-marginalized. Currently, these groups find in the exposure of their lives a gateway to transition from the "marginalized" corner to the center of social recognition. Since birth, these people have not received any social recognition, neither from the state nor from its social or cultural institutions. Most of them are attributed to the subaltern, as described by the Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci, meaning those who do not have intellectual or organizational affiliations and mostly follow the state and its authoritarian circles as their primary locus in political decision-making. Therefore, the broadcasting of their daily lives, and their existence, even if accidentally, as a "trend", gives them an unparalleled opportunity of a strategic, revolutionary social act. They cling to it, like Mohammad the janitor, or Haitham "Wegz al-Ghalaba," and hundreds of others who struggle for recognition. This is to transition from an "invisible" life to social recognition amidst different groups present in the virtual space, to know them, interact with them, and even love them. This implicitly represents what German philosopher Axel Honneth considered a form of striving for integration and visibility, through the presentation of these daily lives to the public, who begin to see them, know them, and talk about them. Likewise, overcoming marginalization by earning money through YouTube views or Facebook ads and appearances on various television programs becomes a strategic alternative for them, and the screen replaces the party headquarters and political work.
This also intersects with the rise of individualism as a philosophy and practice, focusing on the self, the "body," and restricting its existence and survival to achievement, within what is known as the "society of burnout," where individuals struggle with time, mental, and psychological burnout for an achievement that is never satisfactory at a certain point. The myth of the hero invented and promoted by capitalism, or what Professor of Psychology Bryan Little called the "myth of the lone hero" who everyone races to reach, not out of genuine creativity in a particular field, but out of a distorted individualism and extreme narcissism, desiring to be admired by everyone in an obsession with it. This, in turn, dismantled work within collective organization, meaning working for the community/others, not just working for oneself. Therefore, many adopted the slogan "we don't need organization and politics and its woes," especially if authority manages life through suppression, and since self-representation often takes shape through representing one's own body, its ideal existence. This creates another contradiction to political existence, where exceptional politics eliminates the body, by killing it, imprisoning it, or absorbing it. Hence, the obsession with preserving the body, as it is a "symbolic capital" for the self, and its absence means the absence of the self under the dominance of individualism and its system.
This was portrayed into reality through surveys conducted by a group of researchers in 2016 under the auspices of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation and in cooperation with a group of partners, following interviews with nine thousand young people from eight Arab countries, including Egypt, Jordan, Bahrain, Lebanon, Palestine, Yemen, Tunisia, and Morocco, in addition to the "refugees" in Lebanon, regarding their interests and views on several issues, including interest in politics in all its dimensions. The overall percentage was that 18% of young people in general are interested in politics. In Egypt, the percentage was only 23%, reflecting the indifference of most young people in Egypt towards politics and everything related to it. This apathy was primarily a result of the suppression of the post-2013 authoritarianism, which dashed the dreams of Egyptian youth for change, reform, and political participation, and even interest in politics altogether.
Here, the body has taken on its representation in consumption rather than in politics. Relationships that were once based on ethical, intellectual, cultural, and political ties have transitioned to being founded on consumer behaviors, materialistic approaches, and brand affiliations. Human relationships themselves have been replaced by the pleasure of consumption, which has also provided psychological, social, and symbolic status in lieu of them. From a historical-political perspective, diving into all pleasures can be analyzed as being "manufactured from desperation," born out of the difficult circumstances many have experienced, whether wars, armed conflicts, failed revolutions, or severe repression through authoritarian regimes, especially if people emerged from those events with disappointing results and dismal failures, as has recently happened in many countries, such as the continued dominance and occupation of Palestinian land by the Zionist entity, the Lebanese Civil War from 1975 to 1990, the Syrian revolution that began in March 2011, and the January 2011 revolution in Egypt. All these events left a negative psychological impact on Arab societies, attracting them to various consumer spaces within multiple psychological, social, and urban settings.
Furthermore, politics and its bodies and vocabularies have shifted from their usual places to consumption arenas, from political work headquarters and street spaces to entertainment and nightlife venues. Lebanon is an example of this transition, what the Lebanese sociologist Samir Khalaf calls the transition "from the battleground to the playground." In the midst of Lebanon's political stagnation governed by sectarianism and its multiple authoritarianisms, which have led the country and its people to a state of economic, political, and cultural deterioration, some bodies have become accustomed to entertainment as an essential part of consumer lifestyles. Politics accompanies them in rhythmic vocabularies, songs, and tunes that insult authoritarianism, and bodies dance in closed spaces unseen by authoritarianism, expressing emotional dissent that doesn't change the political reality but temporarily satisfies the self with the taste of protest, consumer protest. This does not mean that real political work in Lebanon, Egypt, or other authoritarian regimes is easy; it is incredibly difficult. However, this is the cost of change and its obstacles. Authoritarianism, deeply entrenched and rigid, is difficult to uproot through long-term political and revolutionary work.