Trials of Arab Modernity: Literary Affects and the New Political by Tarek El-Ariss (review)

Reviewed by: Trials of Arab Modernity: Literary Affects and the New Political by Tarek El-Ariss Nadia Bou Ali El-Ariss, Tarek. Trials of Arab Modernity: Literary Affects and the New Political. New York: Fordham UP. 2013. Pp. x+ 233. Tarek el-Ariss’s Trials of Arab Modernity: Literary Affects and the New Political, although a novel addition to the field of comparative literature for the scope of Arabic sources that it covers, pushes the limits of theoretical rigor and promises more than it fulfills. In a manner characteristic of postmodern and postcolonial cultural theory, the book brings forth a pastiche of Deleuze, Benjamin, Lacan, Foucault, Said, and Bhabha, amongst others, to the reading of Arabic texts. In its fervor for dismantling the “binary oppositions” (10) of colonialism and “Western modernity,” the book argues for an essentially non-critical humanist conception of modernity: modernity is characterized as a sequence of non-contingent events, ahdath, and as an “ongoing practice that both suppresses and produces literary genres and experiences” (11). Characteristic of post-1970 cultural theory, Trials of Arab Modernity is a book about [End Page 320] difference, the instability of identity, the body, sexuality, the media, and the presumed end of representation. In the book, modernity is perceived as emerging from a number of events [ahdath] rather than as innovation [hadatha]: events that are inflicted on bodies and from which emerge a series of affects loosely defined to include loss, confusion, melancholia, trauma, distortion, disgust, and other “breakdowns in the mechanisms of consciousness” (37). The author makes little effort to connect these affects to material structures of experience or to the historical conditions of capitalism that make them possible. They become the basis for the political, while universalism, morality, and collective experience are shunned as representational hegemons. The political is perceived by el-Ariss as that which is constituted through the experience of the excluded, the marginalized, the hybrid, the vulgar, and the poetic, while class, ideology, culture, and any form of universal human knowledge are seen to have no purchase on politics. The book begins from Tahtawi’s takhlis as a testimonial of the Benjaminian “shock experience” (13); it then takes us through Shidyaq’s aversions to civilization and his affects of “anxiety and collapse” (54) which lead to the disorientation and fragmentation underlying colonial trauma (103), in which affect performs an irretrievable loss. Next, it considers the “queer textuality” (120) that formulates a rebellious subjectivity (124) in present Arab societies; finally, it concludes with an account of the present encounters with the virtual and the new Arabic language that emerges from the sphere of social media. Counter-intuitively, el-Ariss reads Benjamin’s “shock experience” through Tahtawi’s writings as a mark of heroism: a willingness to be bodily scarred by the age. It is worth noting, however, that Benjamin juxtaposes his original concept of Erlebniss, immediate shock experience, to Erfahrungen, which is impartable or communicable experience. This is a strictly anti-humanist reading: for Benjamin, the task of the heroic figure is to reconstruct from Erlebniss, the world of experiential emptiness, a new communal experience that would exceed individual fragmentedness (Khatib). El-Ariss’s representation of modern Arab subjectivity as the embodiment of fragmented experiences draws out an Arab subject that is all too human in its domestication as civilization’s other. This is a move that does not fulfill the task of dismantling the East/West binary precisely because it accepts the humanist interpretation of that binary. El-Ariss wishes to unsettle the binaries of tradition/modern, east/west, by analyzing the “fantasmatic” spaces of Nahda texts (45) and identifying the “narrative within a narrative” and affect as the other level of “articulation of knowledge and power” (45). The analysis begins with a re-reading of Tahtawi’s travel narrative of Europe as an affective testimonial of the trials of bureaucratization and the redrawing of the political in the late Ottoman Empire. The main thesis of this chapter echoes the aim of the book: “modernity no longer consists in material acquisition or artifacts or social structures imported from the West, but characterizes instead the experience involved in fulfilling the ruler’s desire or...

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