“Rules of the revolutionary square in Tahrir” Photo by Mosa'ab Elshamy, Tahrir Square, 2011. All rights reserved. The seven-year anniversary of the 25 January Egyptian Revolution, an event that captured global attention and inspired countless movements, provides an opportune moment to reflect on the state of politics today. French philosopher Alain Badiou was among the first major intellectual figures to theorize the Egyptian and Tunisian uprisings and articulate their historical significance in his book, The Rebirth of History: Times of Riots and Uprisings (Verso, 2012). Badiou bore witness to the unfolding of May 1968 in France, an event to which he maintains fidelity. Badiou acknowledges that with Egypt, movement based politics entered a new phase in the historical process. It remains to be seen if and how the event of the Egyptian revolution can reveal clues and unlock ideas about the changing nature of politics and organization, the meaning of revolution, and notions of failure and success.
The event of 25 January 2011 has been challenged to its core, to put it mildly. Seven years on, the promise, openness, social solidarity, explosive creativity and social experimentation exemplified by Tahrir Square, but by no means limited to it, has for many been supplanted by cynicism, if not despair, crackdowns, further hardships, and retreat. Whatever the situation and mood today, the movement offered, in the words of Badiou, “a new proposition,” even if fleeting and obscure. At the same time, the movement has been supplanted by “the circle,” a cycle whereby entrenched organized groups—the Muslim Brotherhood, the military, the economic elite—fall from power only to rise again. Does this mean, as Badiou asks, that “finally, there is no novelty?”
This encounter with Alain Badiou is not an interview in the traditional sense, but rather a set of reflections, propositions and questions. He reflects on the significance of Egypt for the region and the world, of the meaning of politics, revolution and social movements. He poses questions to “us”—not only us in the small group who travelled to Paris to meet and engage in discussion with him about Egypt and broader questions about movement building, but to all of us searching for a form of progressive politics in these precarious, volatile, and unpredictable, “times of riots and uprisings.”
