Postsecular resistance, the body, and the 2011 Egyptian Revolution

Author(s): LUCA MAVELLI

Source: Review of International Studies , DECEMBER 2012, Vol. 38, No. 5, The
Postsecular in International Relations (DECEMBER 2012), pp. 1057-1078
Published by: Cambridge University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/23355167

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Review of International Studies (2012), 38, 1057-1078 © 2012 British International Studies Association
doi.10.1017/S0260210512000472

Postsecular resistance, the body, and the 2011

Egyptian Revolution
LUCA MAVELLI*

Abstract. At the heart of the notion of the postsecular is an implied and largely un
idea of resistance against the pathologies of modern secular formations. This is m
exemplified by Jürgen Habermas's highly influential approach which argues that
ogies can be resisted through a cooperative cognitive effort of secular and
sciousnesses. This article contends that this understanding overlooks more em
of resistance to the effect that it curtails our capacity to conceptualise postsecular
international relations. Following a contextualisation of Habermas's approach in
Kantian tradition to which it belongs, the article develops a contending Foucau
of the body as a locus of resistance and uses this framework to analyse some of th
ing to the 2011 Egyptian revolution. The focus is on the publication of images
police abuses by Egyptian bloggers and independent media as a practice of resi
widespread and systematic use of torture. The emotional response to these ima
argued, contributed to unite Egyptians despite longstanding fractures, most notably
secularists and Islamists, thus turning the body from an 'inscribed surface of even
secular locus of resistance. The article concludes by highlighting the main implic
analysis for future research agendas on the postsecular in international relations.

Luca Mavelli is a Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at the Univer

His research focuses on questions of secularity, postsecularity, security, and polit
in international relations. He is the author of Europe's Encounter with Islam: The
the Postsecular (Routledge, Interventions Series, 2012) and has contributed ar
European Journal of International Relations, Millennium: Journal of Internationa
the Journal of Religion in Europe. Luca holds a PhD from the University of Wales, A
and has held positions at the Universities of Canterbury (New Zealand), Queenslan
Surrey, and Sussex.

Introduction

This article explores the question of the body for the notion of postsecular resistance,
how this perspective can provide a framework for analysing some of the events lead
ing to the 2011 Egyptian revolution, and some of the implications of this analysis
for future research on the postsecular in international relations. An underlying idea
of resistance lies at the heart of contemporary postsecular theorising. This is most

Initial work on this article was made possible by an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellowship Grant (PTA-026
27-2645) and the hospitality of the Department of International Relations at the University of Sussex,
both of which are gratefully acknowledged. For their suggestions and insightful comments, I would
like to thank Mariano Barbato, Pinar Bilgin, Antonio Cerella, Joe Camilleri, Kimberly Hutchings,
Mustapha Pasha, Fabio Petito, Armando Salvatore, Nida Shoughry, Harmonie Toros, Kees Van Der
Pijl, Erin Wilson, and the two anonymous reviewers. An earlier version of this article was presented at
the conference 'The Postsecular in International Polities', 27-8 October 2011, University of Sussex.

1057

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1058 Luca Mavelli

notably exemplified by Jürgen Habermas's recent work which

spur the debate on the postsecular.1 For Habermas, the posts
a normative ideal of inclusion of the moral intuitions of faith
two different sets of issues. First, the emergence of increasingly
where a growing number of citizens are bearers of religious c
the elaboration of new frameworks of public engagement an
Second, the crisis of secular consciousness, characterised by a p
tation of values and an underlying incapacity to address pressing e
questions (such as abortion, euthanasia, and social justice) calls
moral inspiration and interpretation.2
The postsecular is thus an attempt to rescue a 'pure practical
no longer be so confident in its ability to counteract a modernizat
control armed solely with the insights of a theory of justice', a
ruptive forces of 'markets and administrative powers' which '
solidarity'.3 As Mariano Barbato points out, the postsecular f
use of 'religious semantic potential' to oppose 'the pathologies o
isation and globalisation'.4 Similarly, Paul Cloke and Justin Be
postsecular as 'an expression of resistance to prevailing injusti
global capitalism, and an energy and hope in something that bring
all citizens'.5
According to Habermas, this postsecular idea of resistance is
from traditional to more reflexive forms of secular and relig
capable of questioning their own limitations and recognising th
of their respective arguments. For Habermas, the postsecular is th
tance grounded in the mind: it is the outcome of a cooperative
secular and religious citizens, both conceived as the expression of a
consciousness capable of reflecting upon itself and using religio
help us 'express our best moral intuitions without tearing down th
languages and cultures'.6
This account of postsecularity has received three main criticism
the primacy of secular reason, as it requires that for religious
space in the institutional public sphere, they be 'translated' int
Second, it rests on an instrumental notion of religion which re
set of cognitive choices and to a function in a broader process of s
where religion's main (and somehow paradoxical) task is to add

Jürgen Habermas, 'Religion in the Public Sphere', European Journal of Philos

25; Jürgen Habermas, 'Notes on a Post-Secular Society', signandsight.com (18 J
{http://www.signandsight.com/features/1714.html/} accessed 17 April 2011; Jü
Naturalism and Religion: Philosophical Essays (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008
Joseph Ratzinger, The Dialectics of Secularization: On Reason and Religion
Press, 2007); Jürgen Habermas et al., An Awareness of What is Missing: Faith and
Age (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011).
Habermas, 'Notes on a Post-Secular Society'.
Habermas, Between Naturalism and Religion, pp. 211, 111.
Mariano Barbato, 'Conceptions of the Self for Post-secular Emancipation: To
to Global Justice', Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 39:2 (2010), p
Paul Cloke and Justin Beaumont, 'Geographies of Postsecular Rapprochement
Human Geography, DOI: 10.1177/0309132512440208 (18 April 2012), p. 6.
Jürgen Habermas, 'Transcendence from Within, Transcendence in this World
(ed.), The Frankfurt School on Religion: Key Writings by the Major Thinkers
2005), p. 305. See also Habermas, 'Religion in the Public Sphere', p. 15.

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 Postsecular resistance 1059

instrumental secular reason that has been 'sundered from faith'.7 Th

sequently, this perspective neglects religion as tradition, practice, live
and mode of subjectivation in which the relation with transcendence is no
'subordinate to ulterior ends'.8
In this article I want to focus on a fourth and, it seems to me, largely
dimension of Habermas's account, namely the cognitive view of resista
acterises his notion of postsecularity. My contention is that this app
more embodied forms of resistance to the effect that it substantiall
capacity to conceptualise and understand postsecular resistance in inte
tions. In advancing this argument, my goal is not to question Haberm
per se, but to interrogate the broader European tradition of secular
Habermas belongs and which has in Immanuel Kant its original philoso
lation. Hence, in the first section of the article, I discuss how an instr
of religion as a crucial provider of moral norms for a secular domain
self-sustaining is a central feature of Kant's idea of rational religio
I will argue, crucially rests on a dualistic image of human nature as t
mixture of body and soul, which in turn supports an idea of critique and
as a process of transcendence of the body. In this perspective, critical res
exercise of critique aimed at 'emancipatory resistance to domination'9
the search of universal and immutable structures through 'the freedom o
lect' to oppose the making and unmaking of power and history which ins
regimes of domination onto our 'morally corrupting' bodily and sensuous
In the second section, I interrogate this rendering of the body, asking
body should be conceived solely as the historical sedimentation of externa
of social and political domination. Through a critical reading of Mich
question this view and the underlying Kantian understanding of criti
as the search for universal categories to oppose the making of power
Accordingly, I advance the possibility of the body as a source of re
suggest that this may rest on a genealogical interrogation of the body. Th
resistance involves disclosing and making visible the inscriptions of power
regimes onto the body, and considering these inscriptions a 'contingency'
made us what we are', but does not preclude the imagination of what we c
In the third section, I discuss how this perspective can shed light on so
leading to the 2011 Egyptian revolution. In particular, I will focus on the
the widespread and systematic use of torture during the last years of
regime. Since the mid-2000, images and videos of torture and police b
been posted on the internet by Egyptian bloggers and given further
independent media, with the effect that they contributed to make visible
tions of power/knowledge regimes onto the body. This politics of res

Adrian Pabst, 'The Secularism of Post-Secularity: Religion, Realism, and the Revival of
in IR', in this Special Issue. See also Fred Dallmayr, 'Post-Secularity and (Global) Polit
Radical Redefinition', and Antonio Cerella, 'Religion and Political Form: Carl Schmitt's
Politics as a Critique of Habermas's Post-Secular Discourse', both in this Special Issue
On this latter point see Austin Harrington, 'Habermas and the "Post-Secular Socie
Journal of Social Theory, 10:4 (2007), pp. 543-60, p. 546.
David Couzens Hoy, Critical Resistance: From Poststructuralism to Post-Critique (C
Press, 2004), p. 2.
Michel Foucault, 'What is Enlightenment?', in Michel Foucault and Paul Rabinow
Reader, (London: Penguin, 1991), p. 46.

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1060 Luca Mavelli

contend, acquired a specific postsecular dimension as it saw the

larist and Islamist opposition forces, thus cutting across a pola
long characterised Egyptian politics. This case will highlight the li
understanding of postsecular resistance. In the case of Egypt, I sug
rapprochement between secularists and Islamists was not just trigg
reasoned interaction and reflexive engagement between secular
but also by the emotional response to the images of the tortu
tributed to an experience of collective national unity.
In the conclusion, I will highlight the main implications of this
research agendas on the postsecular in International Relations,
sity to develop a more substantive engagement with the body as a
practice, and lived experience, and an understanding of the c
formations in non-Western settings.

I. Transcending the body

Kant is widely regarded as 'the paradigmatic philosopher of the

ment ... [as] the philosopher of human autonomy, the view th
own reason in its broadest sense human beings can discover and
principles of knowledge and action without outside assistance
divine support or intervention'.11 Indeed, Kant described Enlig
emergence from his self-imposed immaturity', that is, from
one's understanding without guidance from another'.12 At the hea
of critical use of reason and emancipation lies a fundamental
knowledge, as the expression of reason, and faith, as the expr
Kant knowledge could no longer be conceived as the attempt to
God-given order, but turned into an interrogation of the individu
and the ensuing representations of the world and its objects we
idea, however, raised a fundamental question: How could an i
grounded in the finite rational faculties of the subject determ
works of meaning, morality, and ethical behaviour? Kant's res
able epistemic inversion which can be seen as the foundation o
knowledge. The fact that our knowledge is confined to the bounda
does not mean that our knowledge is limited, but that knowledge
that 'these limits exist entirely within the structure of the knowi
outcome is a secular domain of knowledge grounded in the in
faculties and capable of generating universal frameworks of meani
The non self-sufficiency of this secular domain, however, was i
to Kant. The main problem was one of motivation: How could
compelled to comply with these universal frameworks, particu
where this compliance could harm her or impose a burden with

11 Paul Guyer, 'Immanuel Kant', in Edward Craig (ed.), Concise Routledge En

(London: Routledge, 2000), p. 432.
12 Immanuel Kant, 'An Answer to the Question: "What is Enlightenment?" ',
Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991 [orig. pub. 1
13 Michel Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de
York: Picador, 2005), p. 26.

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 Postsecular resistance 1061

reward?14 For Kant, the solution lay in bringing back faith to the do
secular, although not as knowledge, but as a set of'postulates'. A postulate
reason is 'a theoretical proposition' which is 'not demonstrable as such
should be considered true 'insofar as it is attached inseparably to an a
ditionally valid practical view'.15 This means that although Kant deem
beliefs such as the existence of God and the immortality of the soul
the domain of reason (and, therefore, of proper knowledge), he believ
be instrumentally useful to enforce the moral law through their for
persuasion and threat of eternal sanction. This is a key dimension of K
of 'rational faith'. Unlike traditional religion, which acts as an extern
authority which constrains the autonomy of the individual, this 'pure pra
can act as a source of protection and inspiration for a moral life under th
of reason.16
Thus, at the heart of the non self-sufficiency of the secular domain en
Kant is a notion of critical emancipation as the search for universal str
bringing this argument a step further, I want to suggest that this perspe
mately a reflection of a more basic metaphysical anthropology whic
dualistic image of human nature as the unstable ensemble of body a
anthropology has been explored at length by Ian Hunter who observe
heart of Kant's philosophy is an anthropological conception of man as 'hom
Man for Kant is a 'sensibly affected rational being' split between the
pure intellect' ('a rational nature ... shared with God and the angels') an
of a sensuous nature'.17 For Kant, our bodily and sensuous nature is '
rupting', as it constrains our capacity to join 'the world of pure, self-gove
ligences',18 where all concepts have the status of universal frameworks of
practical action. Accordingly, Kant grounds the possibility of critique
tion on an impulse of self-transcendence whereby the individual ris
bodily/phenomenal/empirical world to join the noumenal world of pu
According to Hunter, in order to grasp how the interrogation of our ratio
encompasses an exercise in self-transcendence, we need to consider Ka
as part of the broader Christian-Platonic spiritual tradition to which
this tradition

the metaphysician activates the higher intellect he shares with God, thereby part
self-authenticating principles of an intellect that creates what it thinks. Doubtles
odd to many that the voice of Kantian reason should sound so similar to the voi
this will seem the less so the more we understand that the exercise through whi
to reason is in fact a version of that through which Christian-Platonists attuned
the emanations of the divine intellect.19

Following Hunter's reading of Kant, it can be observed that religion provi

and support for a non self-sufficient secular domain in two different way

14 Emmet Kennedy, Secularism and its Opponents from Augustine to Solzlienitsyn (New
Macmillan, 2006), p. 138.
15 Immanuel Kant, 'Critique of Practical Reason', in Mary J. Gregor and Allen W. Wood
Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999 [orig. pub. 1788]), p. 238.
16 Ibid.
17 Ian Hunter, 'The Morals of Metaphysics: Kant's Groundwork as Intellectual Paideia', Critical Inquiry,
28:4 (2002), pp. 908-29, pp. 911, 910.
18 Ibid., p. 912.
19 Ibid., pp. 923-4.

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1062 Luca Mavelli

previously discussed, by acting as a motivational force which may e

second, by providing the secular with an understanding of crit
self-transcendence where the communion with God is replaced b
with our 'higher intellect', that is, our soul.
Two observations relevant for our analysis follow. First, th
heart of this project is a purely instrumental force whose task is to s
the framework for a critical-emancipative secular domain in which
be able to use their own understanding 'without guidance from
Kant's move contributes to 'sacralise' the secular domain20 in a
celebrates the soul as the emanation of the divine intellect which can advance the
project of critical emancipation, and understands the body as a source of potentially
morally corrupting dispositions which can hinder this project.
Kant's rendering of the body is part of a broader tradition of European secularity
which, as I have discussed elsewhere,21 includes thinkers such as Thomas Aquinas,
René Descartes, Emile Dürkheim and, crucially for our discussion, Jürgen Habermas.
In the remainder of this section I want to advance a reading of Habermas's 'theory of
communicative action' as an attempt to overcome the body-soul dualism at the heart
of Kant's 'philosophy of consciousness'. According to Habermas, once 'linguistically
generated intersubjectivity gains primacy' the tension between the 'the extramundane
stance of the transcendental I and the intramundane stance of the empirical I' - that
is, the tension between the soul and the body - disappears.22 Critical reasoning, resis
tance, and emancipation no longer rest on a process of transcendence of the body
whereby individuals listen to the voice of reason as if they were listening to the voice
of the divine. The Kantian 'purism of pure reason' - which paradoxically relied on a
'religious' notion of knowledge - is replaced by the paradigm of communication
guided by the intersubjective 'force of the better argument' in which the critical use
of reason is 'the disposition of speaking and acting subjects to acquire and use fallible
knowledge'.23
However, the extent to which this intersubjective rendering of critical reason over
comes the body-soul dualism is questionable for at least two reasons. First, this
process privileges abstract reason (however mediated by an intersubjective process
of communication) over experiential knowledge and lived experience. Although it
does not involve transcendental selves but individuals grounded in experiential 'life
worlds', it ultimately requires them to transcend the background horizon of their
existence and embrace the 'unforced force of the better argument'.24 Second,
Habermas deems this process of transcendence a presupposition and not an outcome
of the intersubjective process of communication. To be able to participate in this
process, the individual must have already embraced a 'postconventional morality',
that is, the desire to be guided by the superior force of communicative reason against
the externally-sanctioned and unreflective experiential dimensions of, respectively,

20 Pabst, 'The Secularism of Post-Secularity'.

21 Luca Mavelli, Europe's Encounter with Islam: The Secular and the Postsecular (Abingdon: Routledge,
2012).
22 Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987), p. 297.
23 Ibid., p. 314.
24 Jürgen Habermas, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990),
p. 160.

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 Postsecular resistance 1063

'prcconventional' and 'conventional' morality25 (such as those represen

tional religious allegiances). This means that for Habermas the critica
reason requires an initial moment of self-transcendence - in which a c
religiously situated subject becomes a disembodied transcendental self who
grasps the universal procedural validity of communicative reason - fo
reflective validation of this intuition.
Compared to Kant's, Habermas's perspective rests on a more nuanced, but no
less dualistic account of human nature in which the embodied, experiential, and sensory
dimension is completely subdued to a postconventional idea of subjectivity which
actualises (in an intersubjective declension) the Kantian disembodied transcendental
idea of the subject. In this perspective, Habermas's notion of postsecularity is the
latest instantiation of a postconventional morality in which standing back from one's
own religious allegiances and letting oneself be guided by the 'uncoerced force of
the better argument' means also rescuing what may be good of one's own religious
tradition and instrumentally using this potential to advance the secular project of
modernity. This potential, however, is for Habermas exclusively semantic and almost
completely overlooks religion as lived experience, practice, mode of subjectivation,
or community of believers. As Austin Harrington observes,

Habermas almost always speaks only of semantic contents of religion and almost never of
religious forms: almost always of message, rarely of medium. Religious message offers
potential for discursive redemption, but religious form, it seems, is peripheral and inessential.
This seems entirely to leave out of consideration the non-discursive or semidiscursive aspects of
religious life, bound up with ritualized action and gesture, music, song, visual representation,
and the sensuous space and event of worship. None of these elements play any accountable
role in the programme. It would seem that a purely language-analytic, proposition-theoretic
account of the sensory resources of religious life cannot do justice to the sensuous, experiential
and emotional dimensions of religious life that are so important for religious expression and
articulation.26

Hence, the analysis carried out in this section suggests that just like Kant called for a
shift from 'traditional religion' which constrains individual autonomy to a 'rational
religion' capable to inspire and compel to a moral life, and postulated this shift on a
process of transcendence of the senses, so Habermas calls for a shift from 'precon
ventional' and 'conventional' forms of religious allegiance (grounded in the fear of
external sanction and unreflective loyalties) to a postsecular idea of religion as the
expression of a 'postconventional morality'. The postsecular as an ideal of critique,
emancipation, and resistance thus rests on a disembodied rendering of religion. This
requires a process of self-transcendence in order to grasp the pure semantic potential
of the religious message which may contribute to the identification of universally inter
subjectively valid principles. The Kantian-Habermasian approach to religion ulti
mately rests on a process of transcendence of the body which is instrumental for
an understanding of critique, emancipation, and resistance as part of the search for
universal structures to oppose to the fluctuation of our empirical, embodied con
dition. This account leaves us with an understanding of the body either as a source

25 Richard Shapcott, Justice, Community and Dialogue in International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2001), pp. 120-2. See also Kimberly Hutchings, 'Moral Deliberation and Political
Judgment: Reflections on Benhabib's Interactive Universalism', Theory, Culture and Society, 14:1
(1997), pp. 131-41. For a contending view see Andrew Linklater, 'Dialogic Politics and the Civilizing
Process', Review of International Studies, 31:1 (2005), pp. 141-54.
26 Harrington, 'Habermas and the "Post-Secular Society" p. 552.

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1064 Luca Mavelli

of potentially morally corrupting dispositions or as the target

domination - in both cases as a burden rather than a resource f
tance. In the next section I interrogate the limits of this conceptu
critical reading of Michel Foucault's account of the body.

II. The body and resistance

In 'Nietzsche, Genealogy, History', Foucault describes the body as a

of events' which is 'totally imprinted by history' and 'molded by
regimes'.27 The body is thus conceived as a site of inscription of s
has no ontological existence prior to relations of power. It has
history, no essence beyond the external regimes of truth that giv
universality which may account for a shared humanity. For F
man [sic] - not even his body - is sufficiently stable to serve
recognition or for understanding other men.'28 Accordingly,
be nothing else than the historical sedimentation of external m
and political domination to which the body can offer no r
Michael Levin contends, 'Foucault leaves us with no way to con
emancipatory praxis coming from the experience of the oppre
that is unjustly punished, tortured, violated, brutalized, overwo
fate of hunger, the body subject to oppressive power, can nev
capable of resisting it.'29
Foucault's analysis of the transformation of disciplinary pra
in Discipline and Punish would appear to lend support to this argu
details how between the end of the eighteenth and the beginni
century a remarkable transformation in the economy of punishm
how torture as a public spectacle begins to disappear. The 'gloom
ment',30 as Foucault calls it, had a specific social function. Th
the condemned - skilfully dissected, quartered, hooked, burne
according to sophisticated techniques which aimed to maximise
the response to a notion of crime as the violation of sovereign pow
to redress the injury that had been committed against the sov
fested itself by example (my term), that is, by showing to th
happen to them if they were found guilty of the same offence. H
inscriptions onto the body of the condemned served as a mech
cipline which used the body as its medium.
Towards the beginning of the nineteenth century, however
major target of penal repression disappear[s]' and thus the public s
begins to fade away. Punishment becomes 'the most hidden part of
it leaves the domain of more or less everyday perception and ente

27 Michel Foucault, 'Nietzsche, Genealogy, History', in Foucault and Rabi

Reader, p. 87.
28 Ibid.
29 David Michael Levin, 'The Embodiment of the Categorical Imperative: Ka
Adorno and Levinas', Philosophy and Social Criticism, 27:4 (2001), pp. 1-20,
30 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: V

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 Postsecular resistance 1065

consciousness.'31 Foucault reports how this transformation has generally b

uted to a process of progressive humanisation, to the emergence of a n
sensibility' which disavows the infliction of pain as a means of punishmen
could be suggested, this was a transformation made possible by the experi
oppressed body which contributed to turn the latter into the expression o
and 'sacred' locus of humanity.
Foucault, however, is sceptical of this interpretation. He maintain
transformation is the result of a new political economy of the body whic
body 'a useful force only if it is both a productive body and a subjec
From this perspective, the disqualification of bodily pain as a means of
is nothing else but the effect of emerging power/knowledge regimes, the
tant of which is the radical transformation in the meaning of sovereign p
the power to take life, to the biopolitical power to make live. This does no
sovereign power relinquishes its power to kill, but that this power becom
wider logic of power whose main goal is now to 'incite, reinforce, control
optimize, and organize the forces under it'.33 Sovereign power exercis
right to kill bodies only against those 'body-species' (the other, the a
inferior races) which threaten the capacity of the 'body-species' under
grow, expand, proliferate, and produce.34
Hence, according to Foucault, the disappearance of public torture
outcome of a body of resistance which is 'more than the result of the
technologies that have been brought to bear upon it',35 but the prod
new interlocking regimes of power/knowledge whose 'security mec
'designed to maximize and extract forces'.36 These mechanisms rest on the
power of a series of institutions which begin to emerge at the begi
nineteenth century, such as the police, schools, workshops, barracks,
Far from liberating the body, these institutions 'have an immediate
it, they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks
ceremonies, to emit signs'.37 Together with disciplinary powers, Foucault
cles the emergence of powers of 'régularisation' such as health insura
hygiene rules, patterns of consumption, reproduction and education.38 Th
are not directly enacted through disciplinary institutions, but through
'internalization of external constraints' (to borrow Norbert Elias's ph
nonetheless inscribe specific orders onto the body. Disciplinary and regula
nisms make the inscriptions of power more diificult to detect, but nonethe
These reflections appear to lend support to Levin's criticism that Foucault
no capacity to speak truth to power and 'talk back to history'; it is a b
of opposing domination and offering resistance.
Judith Butler, however, cautions that this may be too hasty a reading.
emphasis on the concept of 'inscription', which presupposes a power ex

31 Ibid.
32 Ibid., p. 26.
33 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume 1 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), p. 136.
34 Michel Foucault, 'Society Must Be Defended': Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-76, trans. David
Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), pp. 239-63.
35 Couzens Hoy, Critical Resistance, p. 61.
36 Foucault, 'Society Must Be Defendedp. 246.
37 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 25.
38 Foucault, 'Society Must Be Defended', pp. 243-51.

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1066 Luca Mavelli

body, together with his effort to expose the external mechanisms t

body, should push us to consider the possibility of 'a body wh
its construction, invariant in some of its structures, and which, in
dynamic locus of resistance to culture per se'.39 Butler acknowle
clearly denies an 'ontological independence of the body' outside cultu
yet she contends that 'his theory nevertheless relies on a notion of
priated from Nietzsche, which conceives the body as a surface
terranean "forces" that are, indeed, repressed and transmuted b
cultural construction external to that body'.40 Hence, Butler co
notion of inscription presupposes 'a prediscursive and prehistor
exists before the inscriptions of power and is endowed with a p
'against the workings of history itself'.41
Butler's account rests on a 'Kantian' reading of Foucault. She
with universal and transcendental properties which make it 'mor
power on it. This reading, though, is in many ways problematic
separation between 'external' and 'internal' forces, that is, betwe
which strive to inscribe their order onto the body, and the inte
body that resist this inscription. This interpretation perpetuates th
between the empirical and the transcendental, the phenomenal
the body and the soul. It ultimately adopts the same Kantian logic, a
manner, by endowing the body with the universality that Kant rese
Similarly, critical resistance in this account is understood as the sea
structures which may be opposed to the making and unmaking of h
that, in Butler's account, Foucault's reading of the body and resi
'rescued' through a Kantian rendering.
This brings us to a central question of this article: Is there an
does not require a Kantian transfiguration of Foucault, in which
considered to be 'more' than the power/knowledge regimes that inv
idea of critical resistance as advanced in his famous essay 'What
offers a blueprint for this possibility. In this short essay, which pres
but not his method, Foucault argues that

criticism is no longer going to be practiced in the search for formal struct

value, but rather as a historical investigation into the events that have led
ourselves and to recognize ourselves as subjects of what we are doing, thi
And this critique will be genealogical in the sense that it will not deduce f
what we are what it is impossible for us to do and to know; but it will sep
the contingency that has made us what we are, the possibility of no longe
thinking what we are, do, or think.42

Hence, it can be suggested that the possibility of the body as a s

may rest on showing that if there is nothing universal and tra
body, neither is there in the historical regimes of power/knowle
it. Far from being 'universal, necessary, [and] obligatory', these

39 Judith Butler, 'Foucault and the Paradox of Bodily Inscriptions', The Journ
(1989), pp. 601-7, p. 602.
40 Ibid., p. 607.
41 Ibid.
42 Foucault, 'What is Enlightenment?', pp. 45-6.

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 Postsecular resistance 1067

analysed in their singularity, contingency, and as "the product of a

straints'.43 Accordingly, for David Couzens Hoy this approach offers '
in which the body is "more" than any particular way in which it has b
constructed". If the body can be shown to have been lived differentl
(through genealogy), or to be lived differently culturally (through e
then the body can be seen to be "more" than what it now has become,
"more" is not claimed to be "universal", or "biological", or "natural".'4
While sharing Couzens Hoy's remark, I believe that Foucault's appro
to more than just a method to reconsider the past and articulate a contend
of the present'. Indeed, my contention is that Foucault's argument fo
distinctive quest for a political imagination capable to articulate a diff
of a future'.45 From this perspective, the possibility of the body as a sour
tance does not rest on the ontological identification of universal and t
properties to oppose the making and unmaking of power and histor
bility rests on a method - that is, disclosing and making visible the in
power/knowledge regimes onto the body - as well as on a political i
considering these inscriptions a 'contingency' which 'has made us wha
does not preclude the imagination of what we could be. In the remain
article I will explore how this method and this political imagination c
make visible the invisible regime of torture in Egypt and turned the tort
into a postsecular body of resistance.

III. The postsecular body of the Egyptian revolution

The last of a long list of Human Rights Watch (HRW) reports on tort
published just weeks before the ousting of President Hosni Mubarak
2011 denounced 'an epidemic of habitual, widespread, and deliberate
petrated on a regular basis by security forces against political dissiden
allegedly engaged in terrorist activity, and ordinary citizens'.46 The w
systematic use of torture in Egypt has been one of the outcomes of th
law that, almost uninterruptedly, has gripped the country since the rise o
to power in 1981. The emergency law originally 'served as a major tool for
police apparatus to crackdown on militant Islamists who posed a major
regime during the 1990s'.47 However, it eventually led to the institutional
permanent 'state of exception' and endowed the police with an excepti
powers, including the right to 'prohibit demonstrations, censor newspaper
personal communications, detain people at will, hold prisoners indefin
charge, and send defendants before special military courts to which

43 Ibid., p. 45.
44 Couzens Hoy, Critical Resistance, p. 63.
45 Michel Foucault, 'Dialogue with Baqir Parham' (Spring 1979), in Janet Afary and Kevin
Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism (Chicago
Chicago Press, 2005), p. 185.
46 Human Rights Watch (HRW), 'Work on Him Until He Confesses': Impunity for Tortur
York: HRW, 2011), p. 2.
47 Ahmed Zaki Osman, 'Egypt's Police: From Liberators to Oppressors', Almasry Alyo
2011), available at: {http://www.almasryalyoum.com/en/node/304946} accessed 12 Octo

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1068 Luca Mavelli

appeal'.48 According to Ibrahim Eissa, the editor of opposition n

with a police force of 1.4 million (almost four times than the ar
$1.5 billion (more than the state's expenditures for healthcar
police state par excellence'.49 The dramatic figures provided by
zation for Human Rights (EOHR) further support this statemen
years of Mubarak's rule, while the population almost double
tion quadrupled, whereas the number of people who had b
charges for more than one year (often in secret and incomm
than 20,000.50
A most striking feature of this 'epidemic' is that torture,
annihilate political opponents, eventually became a disciplining t
all segments of society, including homosexuals, women, and chi
extent to which torture targets all segments of society should b
As Aida Seif el-Dawla has observed, 'the majority [of torture
citizens whose unfortunate paths crossed with those of the poli
common is their poverty, their social marginalization, and their
"important" people who could help them out.'52 However, in
been progressively impoverished by neoliberal economic p
huge social inequalities - where more than 40 per cent of the po
to live below the $2 per day threshold of poverty line; where you
of the unemployed population; and with a level of illiteracy
'ordinary people' has almost become synonymous with 'pover
isation'.53 In this situation, torture during Mubarak's years had
practice which served a variety of disciplining purposes, in
dissent, punishing on behalf of a third party, forcing the e
or lands, reinforcing the 'absolute authority' of the police
masculinity from the insecurities ... of socioeconomic chang
roles' by targeting homosexuals55 and, more generally, atte
massive crisis of legitimacy of the regime by constructing doci

48 Aida Seif El-Dawla, Torture: A state policy', in Rabab El-Mahdi and Ph

The Moment of Change (London: Zed Books, 2009), pp. 120-35, p. 120.
49 Saad Eddin Ibrahim, 'Egypt's Unchecked Repression', Ikhwanweb (20
{http://ikhwanmisr.com/article.php?id=13834} accessed 12 October 2011
Inside Egypt: The Land of the Pharaos on the Brink of a Revolution (New Y
50 Ibrahim, 'Egypt's Unchecked Repression'. See also Alaa Al Aswany, On
Caused the Revolution (London: Canongate, 2011), p. 159: 'Torture in Egypt
or rogue officers, it is a permanent and systematic policy applied by the
more victims of torture in the Mubarak era than in any other period of Eg
51 HRW, Behind Closed Doors: Torture and Detention in Egypt (New York
Being Children: Egyptian Police Abuse of Children in Need of Protection (
Time of Torture: The Assault on Justice In Egypt's Crackdown on Homo
HRW, 2004); 'Work on Him'. See also Forum of Independent Human Rig
Report' (November 2009), available at: {http://eipr.org/en/report/2010/
October 2011. This is not to mention Egypt's major role in the US and
rendition programme, which has turned Egypt in a primary torture de
Hole: The Fate of Islamists Rendered to Egypt (New York: HRW, 2005).
52 El-Dawla, 'Torture', p. 122.
53 Joel Beinin, 'Workers' Protest in Egypt: Neoliberalism and Class Strug
Movement Studies, 8:4 (2009), pp. 449—54; Adam Hanieh, 'Egypt's Uprisi
"Transition"', The Bullet (14 February 2011), available at: {http://www
462.php} accessed 18 October 2011; Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: E
Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).
54 Forum of Independent Human Rights Organizations, 'Joint Report'.
55 Nicola Pratt, 'The Queen Boat Case in Egypt: Sexuality, National Secur
Review of International Studies, 33:1 (2007), pp. 129-44, p. 137.

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 Postsecular resistance 1069

Foucault's argument discussed in the previous section offers an inter

spective to analyse the case of Egypt. As was argued, Foucault identifi
tion between the disappearance of torture as a disciplinary power, the emer
biopolitical economy of the body, and eventually the disappearance of
public spectacle. In the case of Egypt under Mubarak (1981-2011) torture
a distinctive disciplinary function, but had been nonetheless pushed in
domain of secrecy, with the government regularly denying torture all
least until the mid-2000, as we shall see in a moment). At the same time, th
economy informing the practice of torture did not appear to respond to a
logic. While torture under Gamal Abdel Nasser (in power from 19
and Anwar Sadat (in power from 1970 to 1981) was mainly used to bre
opponents - hence, it was employed 'biopolitically' as a tool supposed to
body politic from those who threatened it - under Mubarak it was pro
turned into a tool which targeted ordinary people and thus threatened the
itself. In advancing this argument, I am not suggesting that torture was ev
to protect the body politic of Egypt, but that Egyptian ruling elites were ab
a narrative whereby the persecution and torture of militant Islamists
them, of communists and, more generally, of political opponents) was
a necessary requirement for the survival of Egypt and its institutions.56 Th
constructed the security of the regime and that of Egypt and its people as
thing.
This narrative began to collapse in the mid-2000s, when the 'invisible' disciplinary
apparatus of torture began to be exposed in all its bare brutality by a growing com
munity of bloggers. They started to post on the internet images and videos of police
abuses, thus making visible the invisible inscriptions of sovereign power onto the
body by revealing how those being targeted were not just political opponents who
supposedly threatened the regime, but ordinary people whom the regime was sup
posed to protect. These images were picked up by the independent media and thus
given further resonance, with the effect of triggering a national debate which forced
the government press to report the news and the government to defend itself from the
accusation of torture.57
Some of the bloggers who posted images and videos of tortured bodies were
loosely connected to the Egyptian movement for change, also known as Kefaya
(Enough!). This is a 'cross-ideological force'58 established in 2004 which demanded
the end of Mubarak's regime and the implementation of democratic reforms, and
which managed to bring together a vast array of Egyptian opposition forces, from
Muslim Brothers to secular leftists. According to Manar Shorbagy, Kefaya con
tributed to overcoming the 'dead end' of an Egyptian opposition 'unable to commu
nicate with the public', under the 'siege of an arsenal of restrictive laws', and locked

56 For a journalistic account of this argument see Al Aswany, 'On the State of Egypt', pp. 162-3.
57 One of the first cases of torture made public which shocked Egyptians was that of Emad al-Kabir,
a minibus driver from Cairo, who in 2006 intervened to calm an argument between his cousin and a
police officer. Al-Kabir was beaten in the street and then in the police station, where he was filmed
while being sodomised with a stick. The footage of his torture {http://www.liveleak.com/view?
i=5f8d5dl6c5} was circulated by the police among his fellow drivers to intimidate them, and eventually
published by blogger Wael Abbas on his blog Misr Digital {http://misrdigital.blogspirit.com/} and on
YouTube in November 2006.
58 Manar Shorbagy, 'The Egyptian Movement for Change - Kefaya: Redefining Politics in Egypt',
Public Culture, 19:1 (2007), pp. 175-96, p. 175.

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1070 Luca Mavelli

in a 'secularist-Islamist polarization' which hindered 'the poss

any meaningful consensus on critical issues'.59 One of the rally
members was an outright denunciation of state torture through a
described first-hand experiences of police abuses, banners, a call f
of anti-torture laws, the creation of a movement called 'Egypt
and, most of all, through the publication of videos of police violen
Members of Kefaya, though, were not the only bloggers to
as a number of Islamist bloggers, including Muslim Brothers,
circulate documents and videos of police abuses. As journalist a
El-Hamalawy stated following a meeting of bloggers in 2007 at
Human Rights Legal Aid to coordinate a campaign against Muba
'The small audience was a microcosm of a growing rich plura
There were religious and secularists, veiled and unveiled, Copts and
liberals, Islamists and independents - all keen on ridding Egypt
epidemic.'61 It is noteworthy to observe that the brief resum
written by El-Hamalawy, an avowed secular socialist, appe
Brotherhood website, to which he is a regular contributor. This w
a number of articles, documents, images and videos against tortur
collaboration with other opposition movements.62
According to anthropologist Charles Hirschkind, the images
daily acts of violence' have contributed to 'the experience of
subject' and to 'the elaboration of a political discourse that cut
tional barriers that have until recently polarized Egypt's politi
more Islamically-oriented currents (most prominent among them,
hood) and secular-liberal ones'.63 The polarisation between secu
has long been a central theme of Egyptian politics - one which, as
observes, has had implications for 'every sphere of the political an
This polarisation should not be understood exclusively as an expres
political visions, but also as an instantiation of secularism as 'a
state's sovereign power'.65 Such a perspective draws on a recen
which emphasises that 'secularism involves less a separation of
than the fashioning of religion as an object of continual manag
tion' to make 'religious life and sensibility' amenable and, I wou
requirements of state sovereignty.66

59 Ibid.
60 Nadia Oweidat et al., The Kefaya Movement: A Case Study of a Grassroots Reform Initiative (Santa
Monica:RAND Corporation, 2Ö08), pp. 21-2.
61 Hossam El-Hamalawy, 'Bloggers and Rights Activists Against Torture Meeting', Ikhwanweb (18 March
2007), available at: {http://www.ikhwanweb.com/article.php?id=2118} accessed 12 October 2011.
62 Negar Azimi, 'Bloggers, Kifaya and Ikhwanweb Against Torture', Iklnvanweb (2 February 2007),
available at: {http://www.ikhwanweb.com/article.php?id=2542} accessed 12 October 2011.
63 Charles Hirschkind, 'New Media and Political Dissent in Egypt', Revista de Dialectologia y Tradiciones
Populäres, LXV:1 (2010), pp. 137-54, pp. 138-9.
64 Maha M. Abdelrahman, Civil Society Exposed: The Politics of NGOs in Egypt (London: I. B. Tauris,
2004), p. 108.
65 Hussein Ali Agrama, 'Secularism, Sovereignty, Indeterminacy: Is Egypt a Secular or a Religious State?',
Comparative Studies in Society and History, 52:3 (2010), pp. 495-593, p. 500.
66 Ibid., p. 499. See also Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2003), and William E. Connolly, Why I Am Not A Secularist (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1999).

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 Postsecularresistance 1071

Secularism thus understood is the power to define the space, forms, a

that religion may legitimately 'occupy in society'.67 This is a power that
regime constantly 'exploited over the last 30 years in order to ensur
tion'.68 The regime regularly presented itself as a moderate bank against
ing wave of allegedly radical Islamist forces such as the Muslim Bro
for supporting ultra-conservative Islamic groups, such as the Salafist
balancing 'Islamist alternative' and to boost its Islamic credentials. Mubar
was part of a tradition of sovereign power's management and 'use' of rel
own purposes. This includes President Nasser's decision to bring Al-Azha
a world centre of Islamic knowledge, under direct control of the sta
quell the opposition of the Muslim Brothers and propagate his visio
or President Sadat's decision to amend the political parties' law by fo
from carrying out any activity considered against the principles of
national unity in order to curb any potential challenge to the regime.69
According to Egyptian novelist Alaa Al Aswany, such a 'secularism
contributing factor to the decay of the Islamic tradition in Egypt, wher
been progressively turned into government employees who 'select from
thing that supports the wishes of the ruler, however corrupt and oppre
be', and state-sponsored (under Mubarak) Salafist clerics preach that
Muslim ruler is unlawful even if he is corrupt, and that obeying him
even if he has stolen from Muslims and has had them whipped un
critique echoes that of many intellectuals, journalists, and bloggers who
out how, in the last years of his presidency and 'obsessed with the "thre
the Muslim Brotherhood', Mubarak not only promoted a state-sponso
vision of Islam, but saw Salafism as a useful 'Islamist alternative' to t
hood, to the effect that he turned a blind eye to their activities and gra
cessions for satellite television channels.71 Accordingly, the Mubarak
different Islamist groups against each other and, most of all, Islam
view 'secularization as the eminent danger' and secularists, who wo
'the threat of politicized religion to personal freedoms and democra
Hence, the regime portrayed itself as the only authority which, while t
could embrace modern and democratic values.
This analysis has two important implications for our discussions. First, by mak
ing videos and images of police abuses on ordinary people public, Egyptian blogger
not only contributed to unchain a sense of moral indignation and human solidarity
beyond the secularist-Islamist polarisation, but enacted a politics of resistance centred
on the body. By forcing the tortured body back into the public domain, images and
videos of abuses contributed to disclosing and making visible the inscriptions of
power/knowledge regimes onto the body, thus turning the body from an 'inscribed

67 Asad, Formations of the Secular, p. 210.

68 Hirschkind, 'New Media and Political Dissent in Egypt', p. 139.
69 Dina Shehata, Islamists and Secularists in Egypt: Opposition, Conflict & Cooperation (Abingdon: Routledge,
2009).
70 Al Aswany, On the State of Egypt, p. 153.
71 Ahmed Hashim, 'The Egyptian Military, Part Two: From Mubarak Onward', Middle East Policy,
XVII:4 (2011), pp. 106-28, p. 122; Salma Shukralla and Yassin Gaber, 'What Was Religion Doing in
the Debate on Egypt's Constitutional Amendments?', Ahrain Online (22 March 2011), available at:
{http://english.ahram.org.eg/News/8267.aspx} accessed 18 October 2011.
72 Hirschkind, 'New Media and Political Dissent in Egypt', p. 139

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1072 Liica Mavelli

surface of events'73 at the mercy of the sheer power of the regim

resistance. Second, this politics of resistance centred on the bod
a political imagination which made possible a progressive conve
larists and Islamists. In this convergence, tortured bodies becam
different kind of unity, namely a postsecular unity encompassing
symbolised by the body of Egypt - a body 'abused, raped and beate
but also capable of resisting, if only for the brief phase of the rev
or five years running up to it, the secularist-Islamist fracture
fomented it.
This postsecular politics of resistance found a most vivid in
events following the death of Khaled Said, dubbed by the med
launched a revolution'.75 Khaled Said was a 28 year old from th
city of Alexandria. On 6 June 2010, he was beaten to death by two
who seized him in an internet cafe. When summoned to the mo
Khaled's family members found themselves in front of a completel
Khaled's head was lying on a pool of blood and showed several f
was broken, some of his front teeth missing, and his jaw was
was blood and bruises all over his face. His family was told that
drug-related charges and that, after resisting arrest, he had died o
the attempt to swallow a bag of marijuana.76 Khaled's relatives
picture of his deformed face and posted it on the internet toge
tion that Khaled 'was tortured to death for possessing video materi
members of the police in a drug deal'.77
The picture triggered a large outcry, with massive protests
Cairo at the end of June, and went viral at the beginning of July,
a young Google executive, opened a Facebook page entitled
Said', which began to attract supporters in the order of thousands
ing to HRW, one of the reasons for the unprecedented wave
followed the death of Khaled Said is that many people could id
victims of police violence.79 This emotional identification went
of a traumatic experience. As was written in the aftermath o
Said 'was someone's son, someone's brother, someone's friend, so
someone's customer, and if not for what had happened, someon

73 Foucault, 'Nietzsche, Genealogy, History', p. 83.

74 Yasmine Rifaat, 'Blogging the Body: The Case of Egypt', Surfacing: An Interd
Gender in the Global South, 1:1 (2008), pp. 52-72, p. 66.
75 Brian Ross and Matthew Cole, 'Egypt: The Face that Launched a Revolution'
2011), available at: {http://abcnews.go.com/Biotter/egypt-face-launched-revolut
singlePage=true} accessed 5 October 2011.
76 Jennifer Preston, 'Movement Began With Outrage and a Facebook Page T
The New York Times (5 February 2011), available at: {http://www.nytimes.com
middleeast/06face.html?pagewanted=all} accessed 5 October 2011, Ernesto Lo
Death Became Symbol of a Callous State', The Washington Post (9 Februa
{http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/02/08/AR2011
5 October 2011.
77 Al Jazeera, 'Police killing sparks Egypt protest' (14 June 2010), available at: {http://english.aljazeera.
net/news/middleeast/2010/06/201061415530298271.html} accessed 5 October 2011.
78 {http://www.facebook.com/ElShaheeed} (Arabic version); {http://www.facebook.com/elshaheeed.
co.uk} (English version); see also {http://www.elshaheeed.co.uk/}.
79 HRW, 'Work on Him', p. 1.
80 Amro Ali, 'Egypt's Collision Course With History', ON LINE opinion (9 July 2010), available at:
{http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/print.asp?article=10663} accessed 17 October 2011.

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 Postseciilar resistance 1073

is, Said was an ordinary citizen, who had by chance come across a vide
corruption. To borrow the words of a female opposition blogger named
a 2005 post, people identified with Khaled Said because of his normalcy
he represented 'an entire subculture of invisible citizens in this countr
hand experience of the state's ferocity'; men and women with 'scarr
violated bodies whose stories we don't know'.81 On the eve of the mass
which led to the resignation of Hosni Mubarak, the Facebook pag
Khaled Said' had reached more than 80,000 supporters. It was the fir
with the 6 April Youth Movement Facebook group, to invite Egyptian
on 25 January (not incidentally, National Police Day) through a Face
page called 'The Day of the Revolution Against Torture, Poverty, Corr
Unemployment'.82
Torture, to be sure, was not a 'cause' of the revolution, but rather
'catalysts' which precipitated the long list of Egyptian grievances (poverty
inequality, restriction of liberties, and police brutality) by bringing the co
with the regime onto an almost existential level, where the tortured
public epitomised an ultimate form of negation of life. This existenti
culminated in the 'exceptional existential moment' of the revolution
Hussein Ali Agrama points out, saw the protesters standing 'apart from th
game of defining and distinguishing religion and polities', to the effec
'expressed every potential language of justice, secular or religious, b
none'.83 The chanting crowds in Tahrir Square - where leftists, Islam
Brothers, communists, and liberals gathered together under 'a collec
ship"'84 and uttered slogans such as 'Our revolution is civil; neither
religious',85 - are a most powerful reminder of this exceptional postsec
national unity and solidarity beyond secularist-Islamist allegiances, and
power of secularism of Egyptian ruling elites to polarise political ident
contending secularist and Islamist currents and support manifestations of
complacent with sovereign power.
In advancing this argument, my understanding of the 'postsecular'
ground with, but also differs from, Hussein Ali Agrama's notion of
Agrama contends that the revolution was the expression of 'a genuin
power' as the unity expressed by the protesters revealed an ultimate
to the secular-religious polarisation. The asecular suggests a situation
becomes ultimately indifferent to ask whether or not a norm is secular or
The postsecular, he suggests, fails to grasp this indifference as it is con
the emergence of new norms, and therefore it 'fail[s] to recognize tha
of identifying and distinguishing secular from non-secular norms is

81 Baheyya, 'Remeber Them', Baheyya: Egypt Analysis and Whimsy (1 June 2005), availab
baheyya.blogspot.com/2005/06/remember-them.html} accessed 12 October 2011.
82 John D. Sutter, 'The faces of Egypt's "Revolution 2.0"', CNN (21 February 2011
{http://www.cnn.com/2011/TECH/innovation/02/21/egypt.internet.revolution/index.ht
October 2011.
83 Hussein Ali Agrama, 'Asecular Revolution', The Immanent Frame (11 March 2011), available at:
{http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2011/03/ll/asecular-revolution/} accessed 18 October 2011.
84 Asef Bayat, 'Egypt, and the Post-Islamist Middle East', Open Democracy (8 February 2011), available
at: {http://www.opendemocracy.net/asef-bayat/egypt-and-post-islamist-middle-east} accessed 18 October
2011.
85 Ibid.
86 Agrama, 'Asecular Revolution'.

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1074 Luca Mavelli

secularism is, and that this process is integral to its power.87 I

critique of a normative understanding of the postsecular. Indeed,
of the main limits of Habermas's notion of postsecularity that I d
section of this article. My contention was that the postsecular
of inclusion based on a cognitive and disembodied understand
provider of moral norms for a secular domain which is not self-su
contributes to the reproduction of the power/knowledge regime o
larly, I agree that the revolution was not about the emergence of
'exceptional existential moment'. Indeed, the power of the torture
politics of resistance capable to challenge the secularist-Islamist
faded after the ousting of Mubarak and this polarisation quick
ingly unabated.
However, it also seems to me that the notion of asecularity unw
a Kantian understanding of critical resistance as the search for
beyond the phenomenal/empirical dimension - in the case at h
justice beyond the secular/religious divide fomented by the Egypt
contends that the Egyptian protesters were the expression of
which 'stands prior to religion and politics' and therefore 'is ut
the question of where to draw a line between them'.88 Althoug
the power of bare sovereignty 'arises from the potentialities intri
of life', this account appears very similar to Habermas's idea
critical reason does not require transcendental subjects but ind
experiential iifeworlds'. The effect is that Agrama's asecular p
resemble Habermas's disembodied postconventional subjects.
On the contrary, the notion of postsecularity grounded in a
critical resistance that I have explored in this article, helps us
of resistance of the tortured body made public was mobilised
themselves the product of the power/knowledge regimes of secula
more or less consciously, and often unconsciously, understood
secular-religious spectrum, but nonetheless found the imagination
sation. Hence, their quest for justice as embodied by the tortured
the expression of an indifference to the secularist-Islamist polaris
ference was the result of a politics of resistance carried out by em
and embedded subjects who, as I have tried to show in this sec
body as a postsecular locus of resistance.

Conclusion

This article has explored the questions of the body and resistance for the concept of
postsecularity. Taking the cue from Habermas's highly influential account, the article
argued that this perspective is part of a broader tradition of European secularity
which has in Immanuel Kant its seminal and most systematic formulation. This tradi
tion rests on a metaphysical anthropology of human nature as the unstable ensemble
of body and soul; it conceptualises critical resistance as a process of transcendence of

Ibid.
Ibid.

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 Postsecular resistance 1075

our embodied nature, that is, as the search for universal and immutab
through the freedom of reason; it acknowledges that the ensuing sec
lacks the moral resources which may make it self-sufficient and thu
notion of rational religion instrumental for the perpetuation and reprodu
secular. Accordingly, the resulting idea of postsecularity rests on a concep
of the body as the expression of a 'morally corrupting' sensuous natur
belonging to the phenomenal and empirical dimension which makes th
of inscription of external regimes of domination.
In order to challenge this account of postsecularity, this article e
articulated a Foucauldian perspective of critical resistance centred on
this approach, resistance is no longer the search for universal and transce
tures to oppose the making and unmaking of power and history, but t
to understand and disclose the inscriptions of power/knowledge regim
tion onto the body, and to imagine these inscriptions as 'contingencies
made us what we are', but do not rule out the possibility of different way
The third section of the article discussed how the endeavour to reveal and make
visible the inscriptions of sovereign power onto the body was at the heart of the
politics of resistance against torture in Egypt. The argument was advanced that this
politics of resistance was marked by a postsecular political imagination as it saw the
progressive convergence of secularist and Islamist opposition forces. This political
imagination eventually contributed to a collective national experience as most vividly
epitomised by the chanting crowds in Tahrir Square. These crowds brought together
all segments of Egyptian society across the secularist-Islamist spectrum and challenged
a longstanding and encompassing polarisation of Egyptian politics and the power of
secularism of Egyptian ruling elites to foment it.
The understanding of postsecularity advanced in this article thus differs from that
put forward by Habermas. Postsecularity is not a normative ideal resting on post
conventional subjects, whose aim is to instrumental^ use the moral intuitions of faith
in order to resist the pathologies of secular modernity and rescue this project, but a
form of critical resistance postulated on embodied and embedded subjects which
challenges the secular/religious divide and the secular as a power/knowledge regime.
This account does not rest on a notion of religion as a normative and disembodied
set of cognitive choices, but as a multidimensional concept which encompasses tradi
tion, practice, emotions, lived experience, and embodied modes of subjectivation,
and which is constantly reconstituted, contested, struggled over, and resisted by a
variety of forces - including, most prominently, sovereign power.
This, to be sure, does not mean that Habermas's account should be discarded. As
Charles Hirschkind and Marc Lynch have shown in the case of Egypt, resistance to
the regime through digital activism has contributed to create a space of convergence
for secularist and Islamist bloggers which has resulted in 'practices of public reason
and dialogue' and forms of 'critical engagement'.89 These practices offer a very vivid
instantiation of the postsecular cooperative cognitive effort theorised by Habermas
in which secular and religious consciousnesses acknowledge their limitations and
recognise the reciprocal validity of their truth claims. Habermas's lens, however, fails

89 Hirschkind, 'New Media and Political Dissent in Egypt', pp. 139, 149; Marc Lynch, 'Young Brothers
in Cyberspace', Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP) 245 (Winter 2007), {http://
www.merip.org/mer/mer245/young-brothers-cyberspace}.

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1076 Luca Mavelli

to grasp the more visceral, emotional, and embodied dimension o

tance centred on the tortured body which spilled over from the
munity of bloggers and political activists to the Egyptian society
which postsecular resistance was not the use of a certain moral teach
cure a distortion of secularism, but rather the attempt to challenge
very secular/religious divide in the name of a different idea of
tional existential moment', as Agrama describes it, which for a l
tous period of time challenged the longstanding fracture of seculari
in Egypt, has several potential implications for future studies of
international relations.
To start with, the Egyptian case shows the limits of a cognitive account of
postsecularity. This, in turn, is a reflection of a dominant European tradition - as
discussed in the first section of the article - which conceives of religion as a dis
embodied and cognitive moral perspective. The limits of this tradition and of its
postsecular political imagination are clear in the numerous controversies that, from
the Rushdie Affair to the publication of the so-called Danish Cartoons portraying
the Prophet Mohamed, have been surrounding Islam in Europe.90 Among them
figures prominently the controversy over the headscarf. This has been characterised
by a widespread European understanding of the veil as a symbol of submission, of
allegiance to an entity other than the sovereign state, and as a means of proselytism -
hence, by an overall incapacity to consider the veil as the expression of an embodied
form of religiosity, as 'the means both of being and becoming a certain kind of
person'91 and thus 'not a sign intended to communicate something, but part of an
orientation, of a way of being'.92 However, the necessity of a postsecular imagination
capable to consider this embodied, practical, and experiential dimension of faith
clashes with the cognitive understanding of religion sustained by the power/knowledge
regime of European secularity. The apprehension for any attempt at reconsidering
the boundary between the secular and the religious, the rational and the emotional,
is well summarised by Habermas: '[Once the] boundary between faith and knowledge
becomes porous, and once religious motives force their way into philosophy under
false pretences, reason loses its foothold and succumbs to irrational effusion'.93
As discussed in the introduction to this Special Issue, such a secular bias has
centrally informed International Relations scholarship (IR), to the effect that religion
had virtually disappeared from its radar screen. Although the 1990s post-positivist
turn has created the epistemological conditions for a new interest in religion and
IR94 a full appreciation of the visceral, emotional, and embodied idea of postsecularity
as advanced in this article requires that the limits of the rationalist assumptions and

90 Mavelli, Europe's Encounter with Islam.

91 Saba Mahmood, 'Feminist Theory, Embodiment, and the Docile Agent: Some Reflections on the
Egyptian Islamic Revival', Cultural Anthropology, 16:2 (2001), pp. 202-36, p. 215.
92 Talal Asad, 'Trying to Understand French Secularism', in Hent de Vries and Lawrence E. Sullivan
(eds), Political Theologies: Public Religions in a Post-Secular World, (New York: Fordham University
Press, 2006), p. 501. The case of the headscarf has been compounded by a gendered portrayal of Muslim
women as vulnerable subjects in need of protection. See Peter Morey and Amina Yaqin, Framing
Muslims: Stereotyping and Representations after 9/11 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011);
and Luca Mavelli, 'Between Normalisation and Exception: The Securitisation of Islam and the Con
struction of the Secular Subject', Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 41:2 (2013, forthcoming).
93 Habermas, Between Naturalism and Religion, p. 243.
94 Luca Mavelli and Fabio Petito, 'The Postsecular in International Relations: an Overview', in this
Special Issue.

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 Postsecular resistance 1077

social scientific methods that inform the discipline be further reconsid

perspective, the question of the postsecular crosses paths with another
neglected area of inquiry in IR, namely the study of emotions in wo
Although not specifically aimed at addressing this debate,95 this articl
theless an attempt to explore some of the roles that emotions played i
Egyptian revolutions and how an embodied understanding of postsecula
in a non-Western setting could prove a particularly insightful lens to t
analysis carried out in this article thus suggests two potential research
future research on the postsecular in international relations.
First, although dominant, the Kantian-Habermasian perspective is no
tradition of European secularity. William Connolly, for instance, has po
direction of a minor European tradition centred on the thought of Bar
whose 'metaphysical monism' challenges the mind/body dualism by consider
as expression of the same substance.96 This perspective, Connolly contends,
an idea of ethics not as the search for universal categorical imperative
embodied-spiritual cultivation of ethical dispositions and resists 'the th
tualism that grips secularism - that is, the idea that thinking can be separa
its affective dimension and that exercises of the self and collective rit
represent or symbolize beliefs'.97 The challenge for scholars of postseculari
national relations is thus to move beyond the Kantian-Habermasian 'co
dition of secularity by considering the conceptual resources of contending
secular traditions sensitive to the role of emotions, and how these trad
be 'harness[ed] for radical purposes'98 such as devising modes of subjectivity
the mind/body dualism or disclosing the power/knowledge inscriptions
secular formations.
Second, the argument advanced in this article invites to look beyond the Euro
pean canon and reflect upon the postsecular question in non-European settings. This
leads to another key implication of my analysis, namely that the question of the post
secular cannot be considered an exclusive concern of Western-European societies
which, as Habermas maintains, 'at some point have been in a "secular" state'.99 To
be sure, there is no doubt, as Joseph Camilleri and Mustapha Pasha point out in this
Special Issue that 'secularism is a distinctly European or Western project'100 and that
'[e]xtant conceptions of secularity, secularisation or secularism inevitably find their
originary impetus in Protestant Christian settlements negotiated within European
cultural spaces and within specific histories.'101 Yet, it is also the case that the histories
of the 'Western' and 'non-Western' worlds are 'connected' and that secularism is an
important 'derivative discourse' in the Islamic world, where it 'acquired a familiar
currency in shaping models to banish religion from politics'102 and, as I have dis

95 For an excellent overview, see Roland Bleiker and Emma Hutchison, 'Fear no More: Emotions and
World Polities', Review of International Studies, 34:S1 (2008), pp. 115-35.
96 William E. Connolly, Europe: A Minor Tradition, in David Scott and Charles Hirschkind (eds), Powers
of the Secular Modern: Talal Asad and His Interlocutors (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006),
p. 83.
97 Ibid., p. 84.
98 Andrew Linklater, The Transformation of Political Community: Ethical Foundations of the Post- Westphalian
Era (Oxford: Polity, 1998), p. 5.
99 Habermas, 'Notes on a Post-Secular Society'.
100 Joseph A. Camilleri, 'Postsecularist Discourse in an "Age of Transition'".
101 Mustapha Kamal Pasha, 'Islam and the Postsecular'.
102 Ibid.

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1078 Luca Mavelli

cussed in this article, in fostering expressions of religiosity comp

power. Although this process of disciplining religion could be desc
universal corollary of the process of state formation, these re
impossibility of a single, undifferentiated understanding of th
international system and the necessity to interrogate the contextu
pin the postsecular question starting with an investigation of the
practices of secularity.
From the perspective of an investigation of Egyptian secular fo
be argued that the power of secularism of the Mubarak regime to
of religiosity complacent with sovereign power cannot be con
from a more general crisis of the Islamic tradition as marked by a
nection between dogma and conduct. This critique, originally f
of the nineteenth century by scholars such as Mohamed Abduh, h
voiced by Egyptian novelist Alaa Al Aswany in a series of ne
published in the months before the January 2011 uprising in the
In these articles, Al Aswany draws a specific connection betwe
Islam 'rituals have become an end in themselves instead of a m
chasten oneself' and the widespread and systematic use of tor
astonishing, he writes, to think that in the 'human slaughterhous
premises 'there is always a prayer room where the torturers can p
at the appointed times ... Those responsible for wrecking the lives
and their families are Muslims who are rarely without calluse
from regular praying and who never feel that what they are doin
less religious.'104 The incapacity of Islam to offer resistance ag
a product of a 'permanent and systematic policy applied by th
an Islam which 'has been transformed into a package of measu
complete without necessarily having any effect on his or her cond
These remarks provide an indication of the complex, different,
issues surrounding the postsecular question and how the latter
a normative ideal of inclusion of the moral intuitions of faith. As
show in this article, the postsecular involves rethinking our under
tivity beyond the mind/body dichotomy; our understanding of th
the secular and the religious as the product of multiple regimes of
edge, rather than a natural divide; and our understanding of th
perspective which acknowledges the European genealogy of sec
cognisant of the challenges to secular formations in the so-c
Ultimately, the postsecular offers a new critical edge to reconside
of critique and resistance by interrogating and questioning the bo
secular and the religious, turning this boundary into a space in wh
embodied political agency and imagination may be observed.

103 Al Aswany, On the State of Egypt.

104 Ibid., p. 152.
105 Ibid.

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