Destroying the revolutionary genie: state violence and counter-revolutionary trauma in Egypt

In this paper, I argue that from the moment of its arising, the Egyptian state has not only sought to destroy the object of revolutionary politics as such, but rather its very potentiality. That is, the Egyptian state not only sought to wipe revolutionary activists from the streets, but also rather to destroy the revolutionary genie - the very potential of revolutionary transformation ever occurring again. And the way in which it sought to achieve this goal was through the multileveled infliction of traumatic violence that shifted activists’ existential structure of being in the world away from possibility and hopefulness towards one of utter impossibility and total demoralisation. Drawing on life story interviews with Egyptian activists, this paper thus traces how activist’s lifeworlds were destroyed through the infliction of traumatic violence, that consisted of the relentless infliction of deadly violence, the colonisation of the public sphere, and neoliberal rationalism. It was through such multileveled traumatic violence that activists’ capacity to manifest themselves in the world and to partake in creative collective self-becoming was curtailed, and the revolution ultimately destroyed. Importantly, we can neither understand the existential nor the political depth of this traumatic violence so long as we hold on to the epistemologically deeply problematic concept of PTSD and the parameters of cognitivist trauma theory. Instead, I argue that what we need is a critical theoretical account of traumatic violence as traumatic status subordination. Here, I explicitly draw on the philosophies of Jurgen Habermas, Nancy Fraser and Rahel Jaeggi and argue that in trauma, the everyday presupposition of being of equal value and worth – as a human being – in relation to another is deeply and violently betrayed. As this intersubjective equality is broken, our lifeworld – and the ways in which we make sense of our self, the world, and others – collapses, flinging us into bouts of existential disorientation, atomisation and speechlessness. And so, as the horizon of the lifeworld collapses, the very potentiality of meaning-making is swept from underneath our feet, making us tumble down a hole of dark nihilism. It is precisely in this state of nihilistic demoralisation, I argue, where the Egyptian military state, fearful of the revolution’s radical potential, wanted activists to be. And it is precisely this destruction that accelerated under the rule of Abdel Fattah el Sisi, who wanted to stamp out the revolution once and for all.