Mahdi ʿAmil (1936–87) was, with Husayn Muruwwa (1910–87), one of the most prominent intellectuals of the Lebanese Communist Party (LCP). ʿAmil, whose real name was Hasan Hamdan, was born in 1936. He received a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Lyon and taught at the Lebanese University. As a theoretician of the LCP, which he joined in 1960, ʿAmil was considered instrumental in the party's Second Congress in 1968. During his career, he provided a theoretically elaborate application of Marxism to the Arab world, one that meshed Althusserian influencesFootnote ¹ with conceptualizations of the periphery inspired from dependency theory.Footnote ² Frequently criticized for his overly theoretical rhetoric and analysis and his unwavering commitment to the party line, Mahdi ʿAmil nonetheless remains one of the most original thinkers of the LCP, and his work introduces some nuances into the prevalent claim that Arab communist parties failed to produce any worthwhile theoretical contribution.Footnote ³ But despite his prolific intellectual production and the almost yearly commemorations of his work in the party's journal al-Tariq, there is a sense of difficulty when attempting to draw the contours of his politico-intellectual project, beyond the broad categorization of Arab Marxism.Footnote ⁴ This difficulty is not simply attributable to ʿAmil's esoteric Marxist lingo or to the historical distance between our present and his but rather to the sense of “crisis” that permeates the study of contemporary Arab political thought. In other words, part of the difficulty of capturing ʿAmil's intellectual project stems from the historiographical models that dominate the study of Arab intellectual history.

Whether at an intellectual or political level, the historiography of political thought in this part of the world seems to be structured around themes of crises and disappointments, taking the form of a continuously unfulfilled promise, as seemingly alluded to in Ibrahim Abu-Rabi's characterization of ʿAmil's work as an “Unfinished Project.”Footnote ⁵ This “narrative of crisis,” to use Israel Gershoni's words, has tended to assume that modernist intellectual traditions in the Arab world are nonexistent or, at best, “second-hand,” derived traditions that are politically irrelevant, turning Arab intellectuals into isolated markers of this crisis and making it difficult to grasp their intellectual projects.Footnote ⁶ Even though Gershoni restricts this “narrative of crisis” to the study of Arab modernist traditions in the 1930s and the alleged “crisis of orientation” of their main intellectuals, a similar trope can be seen in subsequent histories of Arab political thought, especially following the 1967 defeat. This is illustrated, for example, in Ajami's description of Arab modernists' intellectual production as “a chronicle of illusions and despair, of politics repeatedly degenerating into bloodletting, of imagined transformations followed by despair.”Footnote ⁷

This narrative is not the sole purview of “Orientalist” histories such as those described by Gershoni. A similar trope can be seen at work in narratives influenced by postcolonial theory, even though these transpose the “crisis” at an epistemological level: the unfulfilled promise is not located in the failure of Arab intellectuals to hold steady their journey toward modernist goals but instead is inscribed into the very nature of modernity in the periphery as a forever-deferred moment, a “waiting room,” to use Dipesh Chakrabarty's imagery.Footnote ⁸ Arab intellectuals' understanding of modernity, itself inherited from the colonial and Orientalist narratives according to such postcolonial accounts, has condemned them to a restless back and forth between epistemological and political oppositions posited by Western scholarship, unable to escape the waiting room. Despite their claimed opposition to the Orientalist, colonial, or Western narrative, Arab intellectuals, by relying on the same conceptual architecture, by establishing “their challenges to it in the very narrative and discursive terms that it has itself proposed and invented,” have ended up reproducing the Orientalist or colonial discourse, ensuring “their participation in the very same conceptual and discursive system (of modernity) against which they seek to define themselves as oppositional.”Footnote ⁹ The thesis of a perverse form of “auto-orientalism,”Footnote ¹⁰ despite reversing the moral coordinates of the story, has nonetheless participated in the reproduction of the “narrative of crisis” as the main structure for capturing Arab political thought and has difficulty grasping the various intellectual projects beyond their roles as markers of a crisis. Modernist intellectual traditions in the Arab world, according to this trope, remain derivative of a more authentic tradition, unable to bridge the formative rupture of the colonial encounter.

The dominance of the “narrative of crisis” has weakened the development of approaches that might capture the specificities of Arab political thought, outside of its failed encounter with a Western totality. And this has taken the form of a “flattening of the geology” of Arab intellectual fields, which are reduced to a mere appendage of a more “central” theoretical or Western field of intellectual production. When looked at as a series of crises pertaining to the inability to bridge the formative rupture, Arab political thought loses any specificity or positive character, and its contextualization becomes an unnecessary endeavor, because the conclusion of the process is already known. Discussing the idea of traveling theory, Walter Mignolo asks about the “ratio between geohistorical location and knowledge production.”Footnote ¹¹ This ratio, for the “narrative of crisis,” seems to be skewed toward a geographical intellectual division of labor, whereby peripheral fields act solely as receptacles of Western theories, to be evaluated based on their capacity to apply preexisting knowledge, with the notion of crisis looming over the conclusion of the process.

In view of the limitations of this narrative, Gershoni calls for a better contextualization of Arab intellectual production, a recognition of the substantial dimensions of the various intellectual moves made by these thinkers, and the location of such moves in their fields of both production and reception.Footnote ¹² David Scott makes a related argument. Commenting on the antiessentialist reading of anticolonial authors, he writes: “These critics have sometimes assumed that the questions to which the anticolonial nationalists addressed themselves . . . were the same as the ones that organize their own contemporary concerns and preoccupations.”Footnote ¹³ By flattening the distinctions between fields of intellectual production under the assumption of perennial questions to which answers are to be provided, these critics portray peripheral intellectuals as stuck in an always-already outdated theoretical frame. In a similar vein as Gershoni, Scott proposes the notion of a “problem-space” as capturing the “situated-ness” of intellectual production and political intervention. A problem-space refers to a “discursive context, a context of language . . . a context of argument, and therefore, one of intervention. A problem-space, in other words, is an ensemble of questions and answers around which a horizon of identifiable stakes (conceptual as well as ideological-political stakes) hangs.”Footnote ¹⁴ This concept aims to salvage the specificities of the historical, political, and theoretical contexts of interpretation from their reduction to variations on the themes of a metafield posited theoretically. The point of such an exercise is to excavate not only the answers but also the questions that these intellectuals were trying to answer, as a way to understand the structural constraints of the field in which they were intervening and the projects they were developing.Footnote ¹⁵

Recapturing the problem-space of intellectual production is a way to grasp the conceptual environment in which this production is taking place, as a way to understand its stakes, challenges, and constraints. This methodological insight provides us with a starting point for capturing ʿAmil's intellectual project, beyond the simple characterization of “Arab Marxism.” Contextualizing ʿAmil in his multilayered problem-space opens up the sociological grounding of his intellectual production while providing a different take on his overall Marxist project. And this approach allows us to think differently about the question raised by Mignolo regarding the fate of theory when it travels through the “colonial difference,” by historicizing the travel itself across different intellectual fields and thus avoiding seeing it as the encounter between two fully formed totalities.Footnote ¹⁶

ON THE DOUBLE DISLOCATIONS OF ARAB MARXISM: ʿAMIL'S INTELLECTUAL PROJECT AND THE TRANSFORMATIONS OF A PROBLEM-SPACE

Mahdi ʿAmil's work emerges as both determined by the encounter of Marxism with the Arab world and a reflection on this encounter. He writes, “With each of our theoretical and political steps, we stumble upon obstacles and difficulties,” concluding that “it appears that the theoretical tools that we use, and which are essential for the production of any form of knowledge—the Marxist concepts—are themselves the main obstacles blocking the production of a Marxist theory and a scientific understanding of our problems.”Footnote ¹⁷ This recognition is the starting point of his intellectual journey, which can be read as an attempt to provide an appropriate adaptation of Marxism to the realities of the Arab world and in particular of the Lebanese social formation. ʿAmil was not alone in this endeavor; the history of Marxism in the Arab world is replete with such reflections. While many of these attempts were simply rhetorical calls for an Arab Marxism without any theoretical grounding, one serious attempt of thinking through this adaptation was presented in the 1960s by Abdallah Laroui, a Moroccan historian and philosopher for whom a historicist reading of Marx was the most appropriate framework for adapting this ideology to the Arab world.Footnote ¹⁸ An alternative formulation of this adaptation of Marxism would be provided by the various waves of Islamic leftism, which tried to excavate Marxist and socialist truths from the Arab-Islamic past. ʿAmil's attempt can be read as an alternative to these two options, rejecting the dissolution of the Arab world into the teleological framework of historicist Marxism and the dilution of the revolutionary character of Marxism in the name of fidelity to the Arab past.

The entry point of ʿAmil's Arab Marxism is his notion, broadly taken from Lenin and Mao Zedong, of the “structural distinction of the universal” (tamyīz al-kawniyya). This adaptation of Marxism is achieved through the bridging of two sets of oppositions. The first pertains to the general problem for Marxism of the relation between theory and political practice, resolved by ʿAmil through the political praxis of a communist party and the acquiring of a new class consciousness.Footnote ¹⁹ He writes, “Theoretical practices, insofar as they are necessarily class practices, acquire their revolutionary dimension once they become practices undertaken from the perspective of the proletariat, and hence, party practices in their becoming.”Footnote ²⁰ By transitivity, theory, class, the proletariat, and the party are equated and united, providing the resolution of the first opposition. The second opposition is more peculiar to the context of the periphery and refers to the interplay between the universal and the specific, or more prosaically to the relation between the West and the Arab world. ʿAmil frames this question through the material coordinates of the law of unequal development:

For Laroui, as noted previously, historicism was the answer; Marx was read as the theorist of capitalist development rather than the theorist of revolutionary change. To avoid such a “liberal” conclusion, and in line with Althusserian Marxists' distrust of any Hegelian tendency, ʿAmil—in an intellectual move akin to that of dependency theory—introduces the idea of a Colonial Mode of Production (CMOP) (namaṭ al-intāj al-kūlūniyalī) as the master key to unlock the mystery of capitalism's universality and its variable effects.Footnote ²² A CMOP represents a colonial formation, or a capitalist formation whose development is governed by the structural relations of dependency with the imperialist center, combining the Althusserian notion of “articulations” with a broadly defined dependency framework. The universal and the specific are united in a material structure of dependence, neutralizing any dimension of Marx that could support theses of the bourgeois class as a vanguard, the capitalist system as a progressive system, or the West as a historical guide. The CMOP restricts Marx, as the theorist of capitalist development, to the West, while enabling a Marxist reading of the periphery as the geographical contemporary of the West rather than its historical past. And this approach allows a theorist like ʿAmil to collapse the crises of the local bourgeoisie, the CMOP, and global capitalism, seeing in them different instantiations of the same crisis, a reading that avoids the paternalistic implications of the historicist articulation, as he would write in al-Nazariyya fi al-Mumarasa al-Siyasiyya, first published in 1979.Footnote ²³

This project was developed by ʿAmil in a very specific historical conjuncture. That is, the project of adopting Marxism to the Arab world was not the result of the encounter between two totalities—theory and periphery—but rather was a historically specific project of adopting a certain reading of Marxism to the shifting Lebanese and Arab problem-spaces. ʿAmil's project gains its coherence and consistency when read as part of this problem-space and as a response to its challenges, questions, and constraints. The peculiarity of ʿAmil's problem-space was its multilayered nature, the interlaying of fields with different temporalities and stakes, a sign of the limited autonomy of the intellectual field in the 1970s Lebanese context. The first layer was the political field. At this level, ʿAmil as the theoretician of the LCP was intervening in a Lebanese and to some extent an Arab political field, primarily characterized by the aftermath of the 1967 defeat and the Lebanese civil war. The former event triggered the radicalization of some Marxist circles, disillusioned by the so-called revolutionary Arab regimes and encouraged by the rise of the “Palestinian revolution.” As for the Lebanese civil war, it represented for ʿAmil, the theoretician of one of the war's main players, a social, political, and regional struggle, uniting the socioeconomic dimension of Marxism with the struggle against imperialism.Footnote ²⁴ Moreover, it was a confirmation of the impossibility of reform in Lebanon, especially after the failure of the timid modernizing policies of President Fuad Shehab in the early 1960s. Questions about the identity of the country, the nature of its sectarian political system, and the possibility of a secular alternative were high on the political agenda. But these “domestic” issues formed only one part of the story. The other part was provided by the regional component of the war, especially the growing regional division over the Palestinian question. To many Lebanese leftists, including ʿAmil, the war represented an extension of the struggle of the Arab national liberation movements and the Palestinian resistance, especially after the Second Congress of the LCP.Footnote ²⁵

For ʿAmil, the events of the political field were filtered through the Lebanese intellectual field, which was structured at the beginning of the war by the opposition between the intellectuals of the Christian nationalist forces and those of the radical forces, the latter divided between Baʿthists, Nasirists, and other Arab nationalists and various brands of Marxists and socialists.Footnote ²⁶ The debates between the two opposed groups centered on the identity of Lebanon, the nature of its political system, and its role in the Arab–Israeli conflict. Within the radical camp itself, one of the main lines of contention was between nationalist ideologies and Marxism, especially in relation to the social dimension of the political struggle. And, as we will see, debates raged between Marxists over the appropriate adaptation of Marxism to the Arab world and conceptualizations of the war, sectarianism, and the masses. ʿAmil's “local” intellectual and political fields were continuously ruptured by the logic of a third field, a Western theoretical field shaped by developments in French philosophy and Marxist theory, especially the work of Louis Althusser, Nicos Poulantzas, and Yves Lacoste. The sporadic interventions of ideas and notions developed in a different context might be the hallmark of the peripheral field of intellectual production.Footnote ²⁷ Even though ʿAmil was not intervening in this Western field—his position in the periphery depriving him of the “credentials” to do so—he was continuously playing on the homologies between the two intellectual fields, the Lebanese and the Western, double mapping his positions and those of his opponents into both of them.

What characterizes ʿAmil's problem-space, for the argument of this paper, is its structure as a multilayered space composed of the relationships between different fields and the continuous negotiations of their different stakes and temporalities. More precisely, this problem-space is characterized by the relation of the local intellectual field with the local political field on one hand and with the Western theoretical field on the other. Such multilayering, and the weak autonomy of the intellectual field, provides a glimpse into the conditions of intellectual production in the periphery. It is in such a context that ʿAmil developed his project of an Arab Marxism. Marxism in this multilayered problem-space functioned as a form of “border thinking,” to use Mignolo's term, a “critical reflection on knowledge production from both the interior borders of the modern/colonial world system . . . and its exterior borders.”Footnote ²⁸ For ʿAmil, Marxism represented one perspective on the social world among other competing visions and a principle of unification of the various fields that composed his problem-space; in the latter sense, it worked indirectly as a means of reflecting on the conditions of intellectual production in the periphery.Footnote ²⁹ In other words, Arab Marxism was simultaneously a political theory requiring the importation of Marxist concepts into the Arab world and a sociological reflection on the intellectual field in the Arab world. Seen from the perspective of this multilayered problem-space, Marxism became a way of bridging the constitutive ruptures of modern Arab political thought while unifying the coordinates of the political struggle, which explains part of its popularity in the periphery.Footnote ³⁰ And this double nature of Arab Marxism helps to explain the gap in Arab thought left by the demise of Marxism, one of the last politically relevant attempts to provide a comprehensive theorization of the Arab world and its relation with the West.

To return to ʿAmil's problem-space, and introducing a diachronic dimension to the story, this context was not an unchanging one. Rather, the problem-space was being transformed in a manner that made ʿAmil's project harder to sustain. Two centrifugal forces were gradually tearing apart this politico-theoretical field, rendering the task of unification that Marxism was supposed to fulfill more precarious. The first was the increasing questioning of the political purchase of Marxism, taking the form in Lebanon of a growing “nihilism” and a detachment from Marxism caused by the civil war. This local flight from Marxism had already started globally; in France, for instance, it took the form of an “anti-totalitarian moment.”Footnote ³¹ The prospect of uniting theory and political practice looked bleak in the 1980s, amidst the sectarian “transformation” of the war and the global questioning of Marxism. The second dislocation pertains to the emergence of a new register of criticism in the West, one that did not fit clearly into the existing debates in the Arab world: the postmodern and postcolonial moment, expressed in the controversy surrounding the publication of Edward Said's Orientalism. It became harder to sustain a tight homology between the various fields—in particular, it was increasingly difficult for an Arab Marxist to simultaneously double map political positions in a local and a theoretical field—and the seeds were sown for a separation between part of the Western discourse of resistance and the concerns of intellectuals in the periphery. These developments forced ʿAmil to chart a tortuous path through a shifting geology of intellectual and political fields, taking him from a defense of structuralism to an almost voluntarist understanding of the class struggle and from a critique of the culturalist representation of the Arab world to a critique of the critique of the representation of the Orient. The rest of the paper will investigate ʿAmil's attempts to unify his disparate fields, looking first at the relation between theory and politics in his writings and then at the homologies between his local production and his global concerns.

HISTORICISM, STRUCTURALISM, AND CLASS STRUGGLE: VOLUNTARIST STRUCTURALISM AS PRAXIS

The tortuous path across shifting and changing fields charted by ʿAmil's project was also an attempt to preserve a unity across their different stakes. This “unifying” role of ʿAmil's Arab Marxism can be seen in his strategic use of theories, as a way to conceptualize entry points for political interventions, thus bridging the gap between the intellectual and political fields. For instance, his structuralist conception of sectarianism, an application of Nicos Poulantzas' work on ideology and the state, gains a particular political dimension in relation to the alternative approaches to sectarianism in Lebanon. These include the primordialist definition held by some segments of the political and intellectual class, often influenced by Michel Chiha, and the historicist alternative proposed by some of ʿAmil's Marxists contemporaries. Rejecting, like many of his Marxist contemporaries, the essentialist understanding of sectarianism, the edge of ʿAmil's critique would be in his response to Marxists (illustrating the deep apprehension of Althusserians toward historicist deviations in Marxism). By relying on a historicist understanding of sects, these Marxists ended up, often unwillingly, endorsing capitalism as a solution to the perceived dominance of precapitalist formations.Footnote ³² While presented as criticisms of the sectarian system, such approaches, according to ʿAmil, tend to reproduce the solidity of sectarianism instead of pointing to the possibility of transcending it. As Firro noted in his review of Masʿud Dahir's al-Judhur al-Tarikhiyya li-l-Masʾala al-Taʾifiyya 1697–1861, one of the prime representatives of this trend: “instead of laying bare ‘the roots of confessionalism,’ Dahir has come up with somewhat wishy-washy results which in many ways are close to the primordialist approach represented by ‘la diversité est notre destin.’”Footnote ³³ Such a historicist conceptualization of sectarianism reflects a tendency to read Marx as the theorist of capitalist modernization who lays bare the secrets of the West's success. Marx, with his conceptual apparatus of backwardness, precapitalist formations, stagist development, and teleological historicism, becomes the theorist of the transition to a liberal capitalist society or an apologist of imperialism, a reading popularized by Said's handling of Marx as an Orientalist.Footnote ³⁴ The potentiality in Marx for this kind of reading represents one of the main obstacles to the adaptation of Marxism to the Arab world, according to ʿAmil, and overcoming it requires a purging of such liberal conclusions from Marxism.

Against the historicist bent of these Marxist readings, ʿAmil deploys a structuralist reading of sectarianism, one that recaptures its contemporaneity and rejects the thesis of precapitalist structures. In his view, any social phenomenon should be traced back to the material basis of the current social formation and not to a past social formation, introducing a distinction between the history of a certain phenomenon and that of its social formation. In particular, sectarianism does not have a history independent of the history of the colonial social formation: “the sectarianism of the 17th century, 18th century, or 19th century . . . is not the same as the sectarianism of the current Lebanese social formation.”Footnote ³⁵ The danger of a historicist analysis of sectarianism—for example, one that links it to the millet system, the system of foreign privileges, the tribal structure, or the Khaldunian thesis of ʿasabiyya—rests in its historical anachronism, or the conflation of the history of the emergence of this structure with its history after its formation. Such a conflation supports the thesis of the persistence of precapitalist formations (in this case, sectarianism) and thus the notion of the progressiveness of capitalism. In contrast, ʿAmil relocates sectarianism in the present capitalist mode of production, which in Lebanon is also a colonial mode. Sectarianism becomes the form that the political system of bourgeois domination takes, working as a “political relation of class dependency that links the masses—or part of them—to the bourgeoisie in a relation of sectarian political representation.”Footnote ³⁶ The function of sects and sectarianism, in this reading, is to impede the formation of the masses into an independent political force capable of challenging the domination of the bourgeois class.Footnote ³⁷

ʿAmil's structuralist reading connects capitalism to sectarianism and opposes the claim that sectarianism reflects the failure of capitalism to displace precapitalist relations of production, an intellectual move that allows him to preempt the thesis of the progressiveness of capitalism. The political implications of this move are in its rejection both of reformist politics, especially after the failure of the Shehab experiment, and of any historical readings of sectarianism that might make its abolition an arduous task. These two rejected alternatives were united in their assumption that capitalism could play a progressive role in modernizing the social structure. Against this assumption, ʿAmil writes that the establishment of the Lebanese social formation as a colonial formation occurred as the global capitalist mode of production entered its crisis phase with the transition to imperialism. The social formation in Lebanon is thus a formation “in crisis,” which explains why the emerging colonial bourgeoisie did not have an antagonistic relationship, in the manner of the European bourgeoisie, with the previously dominant classes but rather adopted an “accomodationist” attitude toward the religious ideology of these classes.Footnote ³⁸ This reading breaks the relation of tutelage that might exist between the Arab world and Europe, implied in the historicist narrative, by driving a wedge between their historical experiences. Through this structural difference, ʿAmil is able to dislodge Europe and its agents—capitalism and the bourgeoisie—from their universal role as historical guides, replacing them with a different understanding of the universal, which is mediated by the law of unequal development. In opposition to the general law of capitalist development leading to the destruction of precapitalist relations, the CMOP tends to reproduce these relations. The bourgeoisie in this context cannot be credited with any of the progressive pretensions of the European bourgeoisie. The “class impotence” of the Lebanese bourgeoisie is apparent in its inability to fulfill many of the functions performed by its European counterpart, such as the unification of society under its class leadership or the establishment of a viable form of democracy.Footnote ³⁹ ʿAmil writes that while “the bourgeois state . . . in a capitalist social formation (in Europe, for instance) is a unifying factor in this formation . . . the ‘sectarian’ state, as the colonial bourgeois state, is a factor of fragmentation of the Lebanese colonial social formation.”Footnote ⁴⁰

ʿAmil deployed structuralism as an intellectual move that had political and theoretical purchase in a field dominated by historicist readings and their political inertia, providing a way to link domestic factors, such as sectarianism, with external relations of dependency and to transcend what he saw as a false debate between the social and the national dimensions of the struggle for national liberation.Footnote ⁴¹ Yet ʿAmil's appeal to structuralism and his reliance on Althusser and Poulantzas were not unconditional. A certain danger existed in structuralism pertaining to its inability to theorize social change and potentially leading to its own forms of political quietism or nihilism. In his quest for a Marxist theory that could act as a guide for political action in the Arab world, ʿAmil found that structuralism, despite its deconstructive potential with respect to historicism, was incapable of theorizing the role of political action in revolutionary transformation. This genetic weakness of structuralism was at the root of ʿAmil's discomfort with his Althusserian training, a discomfort that was expressed early in his writings. In Fi Tamarhul al-Tarikh, written around 1972, ʿAmil addressed the Marxist question of the “stages of history” and criticized structuralism, especially the writings of Etienne Balibar, Althusser's most prominent student and collaborator.Footnote ⁴² ʿAmil's main point of contention with structuralism lies in its failure to explain structural breaks, ruptures, and the possibility of the “radically new.” Social formations in Balibar's conception, according to ʿAmil, have only two moments: a period of formation and one of reproduction, occluding the third moment of rupture. This is due to the fact that Balibar is located in a social formation that is successfully reproducing itself; ʿAmil writes, “Thought only sees in reality what a specific formation shows it.”Footnote ⁴³ Structuralism generalizes the period of reproduction, portraying it as a mechanical, almost natural, process and ignoring its grounding in the process of class struggle. This generalization is especially problematic in the periphery, where the requirements of social change are pressing.

The concern with the political potency of theory drew a wedge between ʿAmil and the French theoretical field, especially after developments in the latter during the 1970s and 1980s. But the problem of political relevance also threatened his project in his own intellectual field, which was being transformed by the impact of the civil war. The two initial sides in the war—the Lebanese Front, representing the main Christian parties, and the Lebanese National Movement, an alliance of leftist and nationalist parties with the Palestinian resistance—might have fit ʿAmil's model. But this early clarity was complicated by the internal splintering of both sides and the increasing dominance of the sectarian question over all other issues, a development that was hardly theorizable in class terms, even for the main ideologue of the LCP. As the war turned into a series of sectarian massacres, it quickly lost its “progressive” dimension. Starting in 1975, with the killing of some 200 Muslim civilians by members of the Phalange party, the practice of violently homogenizing the sectarian composition of areas would become prevalent, culminating in the massacres of Christians by the Druze Progressive Socialist Party in 1983. Far from pitting two ideological sides against one another, the war became “the crucible in which . . . sects were reproduced.”Footnote ⁴⁴ The descent into forms of sectarian violence would be lived as a turning point by many intellectuals, often from leftist backgrounds, as they started voicing concerns about the nature of the war or even openly rejecting it along with the various theories that supported or legitimized such wars. Yasin al-Hafiz was an early critic of the “radical legitimation” of what was in reality a sectarian conflict. He wrote in 1976, “We are against the war because it is not . . . a nationalist war against isolationism, or a class struggle against privileges, or a progressive and secular war against a conservative minority . . . we are against it because it is a sectarian war.”Footnote ⁴⁵

The intellectuals who lost faith in the revolutionary rhetoric of the prewar and early war period are dubbed the “nihilist trend” (al-tayyār al-ʿadmī) by ʿAmil, who read them as the local instantiation of a more global questioning of the possibility of political change.Footnote ⁴⁶ They were “nihilistic” because they expressed their rejection of the war in a language drawing on the everyday and the aesthetic as registers that were imagined to offer grounds from which to escape the increasing sectarianization of Lebanese society. For ʿAmil, nihilistic thought, by equating all sides, ends up opposing a vague notion of “lived experience” to science and knowledge and questioning the basis of critique itself.Footnote ⁴⁷ It implied that there were no differences between the various warring parties and hence no way of categorizing them as progressive/reactionary forces or left-wing/right-wing parties. This equation of the “progressive” with the “reactionary” forces and the subsequent inability to take sides threatened the principles of classification posited by Marxism. Against this type of analysis, ʿAmil would reassert the “meaning” of the war and the persisting validity of the divisions between progressive and reactionary while arguing that any questioning of this distinction necessarily played into the hands of the bourgeoisie.

ʿAmil's application of Marxist theory to the Lebanese case, as a special case of the periphery, aimed at devising a revolutionary theory, that is, a conceptualization of the periphery that bridged the gap between theory and practice. But if the project of uniting these two dimensions could be resolved theoretically, it was gradually losing its popularity in the various intellectual fields in which ʿAmil was engaged. The turn away from revolutionary Marxism, which might have been radical in the Western field, was for ʿAmil a form of capitulation to the reproduction of a bourgeois order. In the 1980s, this global turn, combined with the local distancing from radical theory spurred by the civil war, made ʿAmil's project of a unifying theory more and more precarious. The different trends of discontent with Marxism might have had different histories in the various fields in which they were taking place, but they were all theorized as part of a similar trend by ʿAmil, a trend that questioned not only Marxism but also the possibility of a unifying theory. Faced with such a disintegration, ʿAmil was forced to uphold difficult, sometimes hopeless, positions, if he was to sustain a belief in the working class's potential to act as the revolutionary class rather than splinter into sectarian groups. In response, he oscillated between a position of historical determinism, which regarded a proletarian revolution and the demise of the bourgeoisie to be inevitable, and a position of voluntarism, which linked those results to the growing political role of the working class, seen as the mover of history. In a theoretical system that had initially served as a broad structuralist framework, ʿAmil reintroduced class struggle as a guarantee for the revolution, a patching of the theory that often bordered on untheorized forms of voluntarism.

AGAINST CULTURALISM

If the transformation in the intellectual field led ʿAmil to slide from structuralism toward upholding the centrality of the class struggle, in order to maintain the unity of the political and the theoretical, then another transformation forced him to rethink the second tenet of his Arab Marxism: the relation between the specific and the universal as a ground for the unification of the local and global intellectual fields. In his critiques of the various positions that questioned the applicability of Marxism to the Arab world, culminating in his scathing review of Edward Said's Orientalism, ʿAmil was forced to engage with the question of the universality of knowledge. Among the trends whose only commonality lay in their rejection of Marxism, ʿAmil includes the Lebanese “bourgeois” intellectuals, chiefly Michel Chiha, whose idea of Lebanon's exceptionalism is read by ʿAmil as an ideological mystification. By asserting the essential difference of this country, and as such its uniqueness, Chiha's conceptions conclude with the impossibility of theorizing Lebanon, including in any Marxist terms.Footnote ⁴⁸ Marxism might be a valid theory for understanding other societies, Chiha is read to be saying, but Lebanon's social structure makes it impermeable to any form of theorization that does not start from its exceptionality. According to ʿAmil, a similar claim was made from an opposite political position by supporters of the “nationalist ideology” (al-īdiyūlūjiyya al-qawmiyya), meaning Arab nationalism. Despite its apparent opposition to imperialism, the author warns, the Arab nationalist trend displayed an opposition to Marxism, which objectively allies its supporters with the imperialist axis. The tense relation between Marxism and Arab nationalism was reflected in the debate between the “national” and the “social” dimensions of liberation movements.Footnote ⁴⁹ Marxism, according to the “nationalist ideology,” was a Western theory unsuitable to the realities of the Arab world; it fostered divisions through its focus on social struggles and eschewed the national question.Footnote ⁵⁰ A more vocal position was articulated by the “Islamic bourgeois trend” (al-tayyār al-būrjwāzī al-mutaʾaslim), under the influence of the Iranian Revolution of 1979.Footnote ⁵¹ Described by al-Azm as an “Islamanic trend,” its main argument was that neither secular nationalism nor revolutionary communism would provide the Arab world with its salvation, which could only be secured through a return to a more authentic popular political Islam.Footnote ⁵² This trend recoded the radicalism of Marxism in a nativist Islamic discourse, arguing that the Iranian Revolution was an “authentic” revolution that occurred after all the models of Westernization, including “populist Marxism,” had demonstrated their bankruptcy. In this vision, Marxism becomes an extension of liberal thought, an “ideological reserve” for the colonial Western project.Footnote ⁵³

In the face of these developments, ʿAmil defends the “Western” roots of Marxism against what he saw as an emerging parochialism by pointing to the conceptual flaws of the quest for authenticity.Footnote ⁵⁴ These arguments had already been deployed in ʿAmil's 1974 Azmat al-Tatawur al-Hadari fi al-Watan al-ʿArabi, which deals with the idea of Arab “backwardness” in the context of a critique of a conference held in Kuwait. In this book, ʿAmil develops various themes that would become central components of postcolonial criticism, including a critique of the progress–backwardness binary, a discussion of the colonial potential of historicism, a deconstruction of essentialist notions of Arab civilization, and a critique of the position of the West in the theoretical imagination of peripheral intellectuals. According to ʿAmil, the dominant logic at the Kuwait conference was that “the crisis of the Arab world resides in its ‘backwardness’ and that the reason for this ‘backwardness’ is the persistence of the past in the present, remaining identical to itself without difference or change. Hence, the crisis is a crisis of ‘Arabic civilization.’”Footnote ⁵⁵ Against this narrative, ʿAmil deploys a materialist analysis that stresses the centrality of the colonial rupture, rejecting any historical interpretation of the present of the Arab world that does not start from the imperialist moment. “The causes of the ‘backwardness’ are not ‘historical,’” writes ʿAmil. He continues:

This critique leads ʿAmil to relocate the crisis from the Arab world to its representation, a hallmark of the post-Orientalism turn. But even though ʿAmil might have shared some of the tenets of this turn, he would remain wary of the antirationalist turn that he detected in Orientalism. His response to Said's intellectual move, published in 1985, conformed, at least in tone, to those of many other Arab modernist intellectuals who saw in Said's intervention at best a mixed blessing, freeing Arab representations from Orientalist prejudice while potentially condoning a return to some form of nativism.Footnote ⁵⁷ For ʿAmil, Said's move was dangerous on three levels: as a critique of Marxism as Orientalism, as a critique of the role of knowledge and its relation to power, and as a potential buttress for culturalist claims against “Western theories.” The entry point for ʿAmil's critique is what he saw as Said's underlying conception of the West as a self-consistent, coherent, and unified entity, which ʿAmil links to essentialist and Orientalist readings of the Arab world. When the West, Orientalism, and the dominant classes are conflated or posited as an inseparable whole, any Western thought becomes an Orientalist thought. This move reproduces the bourgeoisie's desire to conflate its particularistic culture with culture in general, turning its class perspective into a Western perspective and negating any possible contradictions or oppositions to its own thought.Footnote ⁵⁸

ʿAmil raises what has become a common critique of Said's methodological assumptions, namely, that they reproduce the main tenets of Orientalism and its essentialist oppositions. Said's critique “arises out of the soil of Orientalist thought, since all he did was to confirm this dichotomy by reversing it, through claiming that the Orient was the self and the West the Other.”Footnote ⁵⁹ But then ʿAmil takes a radical turn, accusing Said of rejecting reason in favor of some form of aesthetic Romanticism. Said, according to ʿAmil, not only reproduced the oppositions of Orientalism but also imparted on them a qualitative distinction. By opposing emotion and reason, Said seems to restrict the latter to the West, and thus to the Western bourgeois classes, while positing the former as the only authentic way to access the East. It is this purported opposition that renders Marx ambiguous, torn between “the sufferings of the Orientals” and the “necessity for historical change.” In the Saidian framework, “Marx exits the structure of Orientalist thought when he uses his heart,” writes ʿAmil, “yet he comes back to it, falling into its structure, when he uses his mind.”Footnote ⁶⁰ This opposition forces Said into an antirationalist corner—reducing any theoretical act to an act of violence and denying the possibility of a scientific and hence universal knowledge, leaving only art and intuition as possible nodes of resistance—a position that ʿAmil traces from Nietzsche through Foucault to Said.Footnote ⁶¹ The process of knowledge production becomes, in ʿAmil's reading of Said, a process of transformation of pretheoretical, prediscursive instincts into a discourse that is administered, domesticated, and enmeshed in the reproduction of “official” knowledge.Footnote ⁶² This vision transforms resistance to imperialism into an individual ethical and moral, even aesthetic, endeavor, devoid of any reference to the materiality of the relation of exploitation.Footnote ⁶³ “It is not strange then that cultural structuralism, which characterizes the thought of Michel Foucault, would meet Nietzschian nihilism on a common ground,” concludes ʿAmil. “Rationalistic imperialism reconciles itself with antirational nihilism in asserting the unity of reason, and hence, the rejection of revolutionary reason, which is the contradiction of the dominant reason.”Footnote ⁶⁴

ʿAmil's rejection of culturalism, which is to be expected in view of his materialist ideology, led him to a critique of Said as the “radical” version of this conservative ideology. Said was located in a position diametrically opposed to the position he held in the Western academic field as one of the main protagonists of the cultural left, a contrast that, for ʿAmil, would break the preexisting homology between intellectual fields. Said, in this view, “traveled” to the Arab intellectual field as a variation on “nationalist thought,” in the sense that nationalism reduces thinking to its geographical location. And in his “anti-rationalism,” Said condoned, with all the weight of the Western academic field, the nativist trend that ʿAmil was trying to resist in the Arab world. Said clearly did not intend these implications of his work and definitely would have opposed such a reading of his thesis. But this disjuncture between the politics of the production and that of the reception of Orientalism illustrates the breakdown of the homologies between fields that had sustained previous “progressive” trends, a breakdown against which ʿAmil was reacting. His harsh reception, and that of other critics of Said, reflects the differing stakes in the field of reception and in the political purchase of theoretical interventions. Moreover, ʿAmil's response to Said illustrates the growing disjuncture between the post-Marxist radical theorizations in the Western academic field and what counts as radical in the Lebanese and Arab fields of intellectual production. ʿAmil's whole project was to develop a Marx for the periphery, by deploying the notion of CMOP as a way to escape the historicist reading of Marx. But when faced with the critique of Said, he had to revert to a defense of the same historicist Marx he had tried to deconstruct earlier, in an effort to confront what he saw as a dangerous relativism. ʿAmil's project of an Arab Marxism that would be an overarching theoretical intervention in multiple fields became harder to sustain in a post-Marxist era than they had been when the homologies provided the possibility, or at least the illusion of the possibility, of a global discourse of resistance.

THEORY IN THE PERIPHERY

Gershoni writes that the proponents of the “narrative of crisis” thesis attributed the failure of Arab intellectuals to interiorize the modernist agenda to a personal flaw, a “failure to demonstrate integrity, resoluteness, and courage.”Footnote ⁶⁵ Such personalized interpretations fail to capture the situated-ness of such intellectual projects and to engage in the theoretical labor of adaptation that they require; they assume the existence of perennial answers, judging intellectuals based on whether they resolutely uphold such answers. The work of Mahdi ʿAmil illustrates the complex work of adaptation, entailed by the multilayered fields in which he was intervening. On one level, ʿAmil's project was a project of thinking theoretically the periphery from the periphery, with everything such a project entails in terms of the adaptation and transformation of theory. As Mignolo has hinted, traveling theories reach their “limits” once the point of arrival or the field of reception is “tainted by the colonial difference.”Footnote ⁶⁶ From this perspective, ʿAmil, like many other intellectuals in the periphery, was engaged in probing the limits of theory transposed to a radically different context. Such transposition imposed a certain “reflexivity” on the use of theory, a reflexivity that was rooted in the multilayered problem-space.

But to avoid reading ʿAmil as the encounter of two totalities, theory and the periphery, the diachronic moment of his project needs to be engaged. ʿAmil was intervening in a specific problem-space that was gradually being transformed in ways that challenged his attempt to unify the formative structural rupture of his initial project. If the project of an Arab Marxism was an attempt to bridge various problematics, then the transformations of the 1980s, on both the political and the intellectual levels, made the project harder to sustain. The homologies between the various fields that ʿAmil was trying to span became looser with time, threatening the whole project of a global discourse of political and theoretical resistance. These changes transformed ʿAmil from the theorist of a revolutionary war to the defender of a losing ideology. On 18 May 1987, ʿAmil became a martyr of this ideology, assassinated by those who would later become the primary upholders of radicalism in the Arab world.

Reading ʿAmil more than two decades after his assassination and almost four decades after he began his intellectual career raises questions regarding the insights to be gained from such an endeavor. Our present and ʿAmil's present are not the same; his concerns and ours have diverged, and our theoretical landscape makes his interventions sound outdated. Returning to Scott, part of the task of recovering the problem-space of such authors is the recognition that our present is not theirs: “Today nation and socialism do not name visionary horizons of new beginnings any of us can look toward as though they were fresh thresholds of aspiration and achievement to be fought for and progressively arrived at.” Scott continues, “To the contrary, they name forms of existing social and political reality whose normative limits we now live as the tangible ruins of our present, the congealing context of our postcolonial time.”Footnote ⁶⁷ These “ruins of our present” render any appropriation of ʿAmil's political positions impossible to sustain, but this recognition does not exhaust his critical purchase for our present.

Scott's reading of C. L. R. James' Toussaint Louverture provides some insights into how we might reappropriate the critical purchase of ʿAmil's interventions. According to Scott, the critical value for our present of James' Toussaint does not lie in the latter's revolutionary message, one that we cannot relate to anymore. Rather, it lies in Toussaint's instantiation of the “modern colonial intellectual,” confronted by alternatives that were “at once absolute and impossible” and that made him able to choose “neither a return to slavery nor a San Domingo without France.” Confronting the modern as a tragic condition, we can find bridges with Toussaint: “There is no overcoming this ambiguous inheritance of enlightenment. There is only the everlasting negotiation with it. For us, no less than for Toussaint, it is a permanent part of what it means to be a conscript of modernity.”Footnote ⁶⁸ From a similar perspective, ʿAmil might be outdated as a guide for revolutionary change, and his language might sound reminiscent of older times. But his challenges and dilemmas, his attempts, often bordering on the tragic, at maintaining a semblance of unity in his various fields of intervention, and his intellectual effort to produce a theoretical understanding of politics from the Arab world, are still ours. The relation between intellectual work and political intervention in the Arab world and the structural dependency of Arab political thought on developments in the Western tradition are still relevant questions. ʿAmil provided an answer to these questions, albeit one that failed. But in this failure, in this “crisis,” we can see reflections of our own present, of our own questionings. And from that perspective, ʿAmil can still be a useful guide.