I. Transcending the body

Kant is widely regarded as ‘the paradigmatic philosopher of the European Enlightenment … [as] the philosopher of human autonomy, the view that by the use of our own reason in its broadest sense human beings can discover and live up to the basic principles of knowledge and action without outside assistance, above all without divine support or intervention’.Footnote ¹¹ Indeed, Kant described Enlightenment as ‘man's emergence from his self-imposed immaturity’, that is, from ‘the inability to use one's understanding without guidance from another’.Footnote ¹² At the heart of Kant's project of critical use of reason and emancipation lies a fundamental separation between knowledge, as the expression of reason, and faith, as the expression of belief. For Kant knowledge could no longer be conceived as the attempt to grasp an externally God-given order, but turned into an interrogation of the individual's rational faculties and the ensuing representations of the world and its objects we give ourselves. This idea, however, raised a fundamental question: How could an idea of knowledge grounded in the finite rational faculties of the subject determine universal frameworks of meaning, morality, and ethical behaviour? Kant's response was a remarkable epistemic inversion which can be seen as the foundation of the secular idea of knowledge. The fact that our knowledge is confined to the boundaries of experience does not mean that our knowledge is limited, but that knowledge itself is limited and that ‘these limits exist entirely within the structure of the knowing subject’.Footnote ¹³ The outcome is a secular domain of knowledge grounded in the individual's rational faculties and capable of generating universal frameworks of meaning and action.

The non self-sufficiency of this secular domain, however, was immediately visible to Kant. The main problem was one of motivation: How could the individual be compelled to comply with these universal frameworks, particularly in those cases where this compliance could harm her or impose a burden without a corresponding reward?Footnote ¹⁴ For Kant, the solution lay in bringing back faith to the domain of the secular, although not as knowledge, but as a set of ‘postulates’. A postulate of practical reason is ‘a theoretical proposition’ which is ‘not demonstrable as such’, but which should be considered true ‘insofar as it is attached inseparably to an a priori unconditionally valid practical view’.Footnote ¹⁵ This means that although Kant deemed religious beliefs such as the existence of God and the immortality of the soul to lie beyond the domain of reason (and, therefore, of proper knowledge), he believed they could be instrumentally useful to enforce the moral law through their force of moral persuasion and threat of eternal sanction. This is a key dimension of Kant's notion of ‘rational faith’. Unlike traditional religion, which acts as an external source of authority which constrains the autonomy of the individual, this ‘pure practical faith’ can act as a source of protection and inspiration for a moral life under the guidance of reason.Footnote ¹⁶

Thus, at the heart of the non self-sufficiency of the secular domain envisaged by Kant is a notion of critical emancipation as the search for universal structures. Yet, bringing this argument a step further, I want to suggest that this perspective is ultimately a reflection of a more basic metaphysical anthropology which rests on a dualistic image of human nature as the unstable ensemble of body and soul. This anthropology has been explored at length by Ian Hunter who observes how at the heart of Kant's philosophy is an anthropological conception of man as ‘homo duplex’. Man for Kant is a ‘sensibly affected rational being’ split between the ‘freedom of pure intellect’ (‘a rational nature … shared with God and the angels’) and the ‘desires of a sensuous nature’.Footnote ¹⁷ For Kant, our bodily and sensuous nature is ‘morally corrupting’, as it constrains our capacity to join ‘the world of pure, self-governing intelligences’,Footnote ¹⁸ where all concepts have the status of universal frameworks of moral and practical action. Accordingly, Kant grounds the possibility of critique and emancipation on an impulse of self-transcendence whereby the individual rises above the bodily/phenomenal/empirical world to join the noumenal world of pure intellect. According to Hunter, in order to grasp how the interrogation of our rational faculties encompasses an exercise in self-transcendence, we need to consider Kant's approach as part of the broader Christian–Platonic spiritual tradition to which it belongs. In this tradition

Following Hunter's reading of Kant, it can be observed that religion provides guidance and support for a non self-sufficient secular domain in two different ways: first, as previously discussed, by acting as a motivational force which may elicit a moral life; second, by providing the secular with an understanding of critique as a process of self-transcendence where the communion with God is replaced by the communion with our ‘higher intellect’, that is, our soul.

Two observations relevant for our analysis follow. First, the religious at the heart of this project is a purely instrumental force whose task is to sustain and provide the framework for a critical-emancipative secular domain in which human beings may be able to use their own understanding ‘without guidance from another’. Second, Kant's move contributes to ‘sacralise’ the secular domainFootnote ²⁰ in a perspective which 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,Footnote ²¹ includes thinkers such as Thomas Aquinas, René Descartes, Émile Durkheim 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.Footnote ²² Critical reasoning, resistance, 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’.Footnote ²³

However, the extent to which this intersubjective rendering of critical reason overcomes 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 ‘lifeworlds’, it ultimately requires them to transcend the background horizon of their existence and embrace the ‘unforced force of the better argument’.Footnote 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, ‘preconventional’ and ‘conventional’ moralityFootnote ²⁵ (such as those represented by traditional religious allegiances). This means that for Habermas the critical exercise of reason requires an initial moment of self-transcendence – in which a culturally and religiously situated subject becomes a disembodied transcendental self who intuitively grasps the universal procedural validity of communicative reason – followed by a 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,

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 ‘preconventional’ 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 intersubjectively valid principles. The Kantian-Habermasian approach to religion ultimately 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 condition. This account leaves us with an understanding of the body either as a source of potentially morally corrupting dispositions or as the target of external forces of domination – in both cases as a burden rather than a resource for a politics of resistance. In the next section I interrogate the limits of this conceptualisation through a critical reading of Michel Foucault's account of the body.

II. The body and resistance

In ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, Foucault describes the body as an ‘inscribed surface of events’ which is ‘totally imprinted by history’ and ‘molded by a great many distinct regimes’.Footnote ²⁷ The body is thus conceived as a site of inscription of social discipline which has no ontological existence prior to relations of power. It has no existence beyond history, no essence beyond the external regimes of truth that give it meaning, and no universality which may account for a shared humanity. For Foucault, ‘Nothing in man [sic] – not even his body – is sufficiently stable to serve as the basis for self-recognition or for understanding other men.’Footnote ²⁸ Accordingly, the body appears to be nothing else than the historical sedimentation of external mechanisms of social and political domination to which the body can offer no resistance. As David Michael Levin contends, ‘Foucault leaves us with no way to conceptualize a critical-emancipatory praxis coming from the experience of the oppressed body. The body that is unjustly punished, tortured, violated, brutalized, overworked and left to the fate of hunger, the body subject to oppressive power, can never become a subject capable of resisting it.’Footnote ²⁹

Foucault's analysis of the transformation of disciplinary practices as carried out in Discipline and Punish would appear to lend support to this argument. Here Foucault details how between the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century a remarkable transformation in the economy of punishment takes place and how torture as a public spectacle begins to disappear. The ‘gloomy festival of punishment’,Footnote ³⁰ as Foucault calls it, had a specific social function. The tortured body of the condemned – skilfully dissected, quartered, hooked, burned, and dismembered according to sophisticated techniques which aimed to maximise its suffering – was the response to a notion of crime as the violation of sovereign power and thus served to redress the injury that had been committed against the sovereign. Power manifested itself by example (my term), that is, by showing to the public what could happen to them if they were found guilty of the same offence. Hence, the devastating inscriptions onto the body of the condemned served as a mechanism of social discipline which used the body as its medium.

Towards the beginning of the nineteenth century, however, ‘the body as the major target of penal repression disappear[s]’ and thus the public spectacle of torture begins to fade away. Punishment becomes ‘the most hidden part of the penal process … it leaves the domain of more or less everyday perception and enters that of abstract consciousness.’Footnote ³¹ Foucault reports how this transformation has generally been attributed to a process of progressive humanisation, to the emergence of a new ‘collective sensibility’ which disavows the infliction of pain as a means of punishment. Hence, it could be suggested, this was a transformation made possible by the experience of the oppressed body which contributed to turn the latter into the expression of a universal and ‘sacred’ locus of humanity.

Foucault, however, is sceptical of this interpretation. He maintains that this transformation is the result of a new political economy of the body which deems the body ‘a useful force only if it is both a productive body and a subjected body’.Footnote ³² From this perspective, the disqualification of bodily pain as a means of punishment is nothing else but the effect of emerging power/knowledge regimes, the most important of which is the radical transformation in the meaning of sovereign power: from the power to take life, to the biopolitical power to make live. This does not mean that sovereign power relinquishes its power to kill, but that this power becomes part of a wider logic of power whose main goal is now to ‘incite, reinforce, control, monitor, optimize, and organize the forces under it’.Footnote ³³ Sovereign power exercises its classical right to kill bodies only against those ‘body-species’ (the other, the abnormal, the inferior races) which threaten the capacity of the ‘body-species’ under its power to grow, expand, proliferate, and produce.Footnote ³⁴

Hence, according to Foucault, the disappearance of public torture is not the outcome of a body of resistance which is ‘more than the result of the disciplinary technologies that have been brought to bear upon it’,Footnote ³⁵ but the product of many new interlocking regimes of power/knowledge whose ‘security mechanisms’ are ‘designed to maximize and extract forces’.Footnote ³⁶ These mechanisms rest on the disciplinary power of a series of institutions which begin to emerge at the beginning of the nineteenth century, such as the police, schools, workshops, barracks, and hospitals. Far from liberating the body, these institutions ‘have an immediate hold upon it, they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit signs’.Footnote ³⁷ Together with disciplinary powers, Foucault also chronicles the emergence of powers of ‘regularisation’ such as health insurance systems, hygiene rules, patterns of consumption, reproduction and education.Footnote ³⁸ These regimes are not directly enacted through disciplinary institutions, but through processes of ‘internalization of external constraints’ (to borrow Norbert Elias's phrase), which nonetheless inscribe specific orders onto the body. Disciplinary and regulatory mechanisms make the inscriptions of power more difficult to detect, but nonetheless present. These reflections appear to lend support to Levin's criticism that Foucault's body has no capacity to speak truth to power and ‘talk back to history’; it is a body incapable of opposing domination and offering resistance.

Judith Butler, however, cautions that this may be too hasty a reading. Foucault's emphasis on the concept of ‘inscription’, which presupposes a power external to the body, together with his effort to expose the external mechanisms that construct the body, should push us to consider the possibility of ‘a body which is external to its construction, invariant in some of its structures, and which, in fact, represents a dynamic locus of resistance to culture per se’.Footnote ³⁹ Butler acknowledges that Foucault clearly denies an ‘ontological independence of the body’ outside culture and discourse, yet she contends that ‘his theory nevertheless relies on a notion of genealogy, appropriated from Nietzsche, which conceives the body as a surface and a set of subterranean “forces” that are, indeed, repressed and transmuted by a mechanism of cultural construction external to that body’.Footnote ⁴⁰ Hence, Butler concludes, Foucault's notion of inscription presupposes ‘a prediscursive and prehistorical “body”’ which exists before the inscriptions of power and is endowed with a power of resistance ‘against the workings of history itself’.Footnote ⁴¹

Butler's account rests on a ‘Kantian’ reading of Foucault. She endows the body with universal and transcendental properties which make it ‘more’ than the play of power on it. This reading, though, is in many ways problematic, as it rests on the separation between ‘external’ and ‘internal’ forces, that is, between external powers which strive to inscribe their order onto the body, and the internal powers of the body that resist this inscription. This interpretation perpetuates the Kantian dualism between the empirical and the transcendental, the phenomenal and the noumenal, the body and the soul. It ultimately adopts the same Kantian logic, albeit in a reverse manner, by endowing the body with the universality that Kant reserves for the soul. Similarly, critical resistance in this account is understood as the search for universal structures which may be opposed to the making and unmaking of history. The result is that, in Butler's account, Foucault's reading of the body and resistance is eventually ‘rescued’ through a Kantian rendering.

This brings us to a central question of this article: Is there another way, which does not require a Kantian transfiguration of Foucault, in which the body may be considered to be ‘more’ than the power/knowledge regimes that invest it? Foucault's idea of critical resistance as advanced in his famous essay ‘What is Enlightenment?’ offers a blueprint for this possibility. In this short essay, which preserves Kant's spirit but not his method, Foucault argues that

Hence, it can be suggested that the possibility of the body as a source of resistance may rest on showing that if there is nothing universal and transcendental in the body, neither is there in the historical regimes of power/knowledge inscribed onto it. Far from being ‘universal, necessary, [and] obligatory’, these regimes need to be analysed in their singularity, contingency, and as ‘the product of arbitrary constraints’.Footnote ⁴³ Accordingly, for David Couzens Hoy this approach offers ‘another sense in which the body is “more” than any particular way in which it has been “socially constructed”. If the body can be shown to have been lived differently historically (through genealogy), or to be lived differently culturally (through ethnography), then the body can be seen to be “more” than what it now has become, even if this “more” is not claimed to be “universal”, or “biological”, or “natural”.’Footnote ⁴⁴

While sharing Couzens Hoy's remark, I believe that Foucault's approach accounts to more than just a method to reconsider the past and articulate a contending ‘history of the present’. Indeed, my contention is that Foucault's argument foregrounds a distinctive quest for a political imagination capable to articulate a different ‘vision of a future’.Footnote ⁴⁵ From this perspective, the possibility of the body as a source of resistance does not rest on the ontological identification of universal and transcendental properties to oppose the making and unmaking of power and history. This possibility rests on a method – that is, disclosing and making visible the inscriptions of power/knowledge regimes onto the body – as well as on a political imagination – considering these inscriptions a ‘contingency’ which ‘has made us what we are’, but does not preclude the imagination of what we could be. In the remainder of this article I will explore how this method and this political imagination contributed to make visible the invisible regime of torture in Egypt and turned the tortured body 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 torture in Egypt published just weeks before the ousting of President Hosni Mubarak in February 2011 denounced ‘an epidemic of habitual, widespread, and deliberate torture perpetrated on a regular basis by security forces against political dissidents, Islamists allegedly engaged in terrorist activity, and ordinary citizens’.Footnote ⁴⁶ The widespread and systematic use of torture in Egypt has been one of the outcomes of the emergency law that, almost uninterruptedly, has gripped the country since the rise of Mubarak to power in 1981. The emergency law originally ‘served as a major tool for Mubarak's police apparatus to crackdown on militant Islamists who posed a major threat to the regime during the 1990s’.Footnote ⁴⁷ However, it eventually led to the institutionalisation of a permanent ‘state of exception’ and endowed the police with an exceptional array of powers, including the right to ‘prohibit demonstrations, censor newspapers, monitor personal communications, detain people at will, hold prisoners indefinitely without charge, and send defendants before special military courts to which there is no appeal’.Footnote ⁴⁸ According to Ibrahim Eissa, the editor of opposition newspaper Al-Dustour, with a police force of 1.4 million (almost four times than the army), and a budget of $1.5 billion (more than the state's expenditures for healthcare), ‘Egypt has become a police state par excellence’.Footnote ⁴⁹ The dramatic figures provided by the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights (EOHR) further support this statement. During the first 25 years of Mubarak's rule, while the population almost doubled, the prisons population quadrupled, whereas the number of people who had been detained without charges for more than one year (often in secret and incommunicado) reached more than 20,000.Footnote ⁵⁰

A most striking feature of this ‘epidemic’ is that torture, originally designed to annihilate political opponents, eventually became a disciplining tool targeting virtually all segments of society, including homosexuals, women, and children.Footnote ⁵¹ Of course, the extent to which torture targets all segments of society should be carefully qualified. As Aida Seif el-Dawla has observed, ‘the majority [of torture victims] are ordinary citizens whose unfortunate paths crossed with those of the police. What they have in common is their poverty, their social marginalization, and their lack of contact with “important” people who could help them out.’Footnote ⁵² However, in a country which has been progressively impoverished by neoliberal economic policies and scarred by huge social inequalities – where more than 40 per cent of the population is estimated to live below the $2 per day threshold of poverty line; where youth make up 90 per cent of the unemployed population; and with a level of illiteracy of about 30 per cent – ‘ordinary people’ has almost become synonymous with ‘poverty’ and ‘social marginalisation’.Footnote ⁵³ In this situation, torture during Mubarak's years had become a widespread practice which served a variety of disciplining purposes, including quelling social dissent, punishing on behalf of a third party, forcing the expropriation of homes or lands, reinforcing the ‘absolute authority’ of the police,Footnote ⁵⁴ rescuing ‘Egyptian masculinity from the insecurities … of socioeconomic changes and shifting gender roles’ by targeting homosexualsFootnote ⁵⁵ and, more generally, attempting to counter the massive crisis of legitimacy of the regime by constructing docile subjects.

Foucault's argument discussed in the previous section offers an interesting perspective to analyse the case of Egypt. As was argued, Foucault identified a connection between the disappearance of torture as a disciplinary power, the emergence of a biopolitical economy of the body, and eventually the disappearance of torture as a public spectacle. In the case of Egypt under Mubarak (1981–2011) torture performed a distinctive disciplinary function, but had been nonetheless pushed into a formal domain of secrecy, with the government regularly denying torture allegations (at least until the mid-2000, as we shall see in a moment). At the same time, the political economy informing the practice of torture did not appear to respond to a biopolitical logic. While torture under Gamal Abdel Nasser (in power from 1956 to 1970) and Anwar Sadat (in power from 1970 to 1981) was mainly used to break political opponents – hence, it was employed ‘biopolitically’ as a tool supposed to protect the body politic from those who threatened it – under Mubarak it was progressively turned into a tool which targeted ordinary people and thus threatened the body politic itself. In advancing this argument, I am not suggesting that torture was ever necessary to protect the body politic of Egypt, but that Egyptian ruling elites were able to sustain a narrative whereby the persecution and torture of militant Islamists (and before them, of communists and, more generally, of political opponents) was presented as a necessary requirement for the survival of Egypt and its institutions.Footnote ⁵⁶ This narrative constructed the security of the regime and that of Egypt and its people as the same 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 community 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 supposed 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.Footnote 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’Footnote 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 contributed to overcoming the ‘dead end’ of an Egyptian opposition ‘unable to communicate with the public’, under the ‘siege of an arsenal of restrictive laws’, and locked in a ‘secularist-Islamist polarization’ which hindered ‘the possibility of reaching any meaningful consensus on critical issues’.Footnote ⁵⁹ One of the rallying points of Kefaya members was an outright denunciation of state torture through articles which often described first-hand experiences of police abuses, banners, a call for the enforcement of anti-torture laws, the creation of a movement called ‘Egyptians against torture’ and, most of all, through the publication of videos of police violence.Footnote ⁶⁰

Members of Kefaya, though, were not the only bloggers to denounce torture, as a number of Islamist bloggers, including Muslim Brothers, also contributed to circulate documents and videos of police abuses. As journalist and blogger Hossam El-Hamalawy stated following a meeting of bloggers in 2007 at the Association for Human Rights Legal Aid to coordinate a campaign against Mubarak's police torture: ‘The small audience was a microcosm of a growing rich pluralistic blogosphere. There were religious and secularists, veiled and unveiled, Copts and Muslims, leftists, liberals, Islamists and independents – all keen on ridding Egypt of its police torture epidemic.’Footnote ⁶¹ It is noteworthy to observe that the brief resume of the conference written by El-Hamalawy, an avowed secular socialist, appeared on the Muslim Brotherhood website, to which he is a regular contributor. This website has published a number of articles, documents, images and videos against torture, often as part of a collaboration with other opposition movements.Footnote ⁶²

According to anthropologist Charles Hirschkind, the images of ‘exceptional and daily acts of violence’ have contributed to ‘the experience of a collective national subject’ and to ‘the elaboration of a political discourse that cuts across the institutional barriers that have until recently polarized Egypt's political terrain, between more Islamically-oriented currents (most prominent among them, the Muslim Brotherhood) and secular-liberal ones’.Footnote ⁶³ The polarisation between secularists and Islamists has long been a central theme of Egyptian politics – one which, as Maha Abdelrahman observes, has had implications for ‘every sphere of the political and the social realms’.Footnote ⁶⁴ This polarisation should not be understood exclusively as an expression of contending political visions, but also as an instantiation of secularism as ‘an expression of the state's sovereign power’.Footnote ⁶⁵ Such a perspective draws on a recent stream of research which emphasises that ‘secularism involves less a separation of religion and politics than the fashioning of religion as an object of continual management and intervention’ to make ‘religious life and sensibility’ amenable and, I would add, useful to the requirements of state sovereignty.Footnote ⁶⁶

Secularism thus understood is the power to define the space, forms, and meanings that religion may legitimately ‘occupy in society’.Footnote ⁶⁷ This is a power that the Mubarak regime constantly ‘exploited over the last 30 years in order to ensure a weak opposition’.Footnote ⁶⁸ The regime regularly presented itself as a moderate bank against the mounting wave of allegedly radical Islamist forces such as the Muslim Brotherhood, save for supporting ultra-conservative Islamic groups, such as the Salafists, as a counterbalancing ‘Islamist alternative’ and to boost its Islamic credentials. Mubarak's strategy was part of a tradition of sovereign power's management and ‘use’ of religion for its own purposes. This includes President Nasser's decision to bring Al-Azhar University, a world centre of Islamic knowledge, under direct control of the state in order to quell the opposition of the Muslim Brothers and propagate his vision of socialism, or President Sadat's decision to amend the political parties’ law by forbidding them from carrying out any activity considered against the principles of the Sharia and national unity in order to curb any potential challenge to the regime.Footnote ⁶⁹

According to Egyptian novelist Alaa Al Aswany, such a ‘secularism’ has been a contributing factor to the decay of the Islamic tradition in Egypt, where clerics have been progressively turned into government employees who ‘select from Islam everything that supports the wishes of the ruler, however corrupt and oppressive he may be’, and state-sponsored (under Mubarak) Salafist clerics preach that ‘to disobey a Muslim ruler is unlawful even if he is corrupt, and that obeying him is obligatory even if he has stolen from Muslims and has had them whipped unjustly’.Footnote ⁷⁰ This critique echoes that of many intellectuals, journalists, and bloggers who have pointed out how, in the last years of his presidency and ‘obsessed with the “threat” posed by the Muslim Brotherhood’, Mubarak not only promoted a state-sponsored submissive vision of Islam, but saw Salafism as a useful ‘Islamist alternative’ to the Brotherhood, to the effect that he turned a blind eye to their activities and granted them concessions for satellite television channels.Footnote ⁷¹ Accordingly, the Mubarak regime played different Islamist groups against each other and, most of all, Islamists who would view ‘secularization as the eminent danger’ and secularists, who would emphasise ‘the threat of politicized religion to personal freedoms and democratic rights’.Footnote ⁷² Hence, the regime portrayed itself as the only authority which, while truly Islamic, could embrace modern and democratic values.

This analysis has two important implications for our discussions. First, by making videos and images of police abuses on ordinary people public, Egyptian bloggers 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 surface of events’Footnote ⁷³ at the mercy of the sheer power of the regime, into a source of resistance. Second, this politics of resistance centred on the body was informed by a political imagination which made possible a progressive convergence between secularists and Islamists. In this convergence, tortured bodies became the metaphor of a different kind of unity, namely a postsecular unity encompassing all Egyptians and symbolised by the body of Egypt – a body ‘abused, raped and beaten by the state’,Footnote ⁷⁴ but also capable of resisting, if only for the brief phase of the revolution and the four or five years running up to it, the secularist-Islamist fracture and the regime that fomented it.

This postsecular politics of resistance found a most vivid instantiation in the events following the death of Khaled Said, dubbed by the media as ‘the face that launched a revolution’.Footnote ⁷⁵ Khaled Said was a 28 year old from the Egyptian coastal city of Alexandria. On 6 June 2010, he was beaten to death by two plainclothes officers who seized him in an internet cafe. When summoned to the morgue the next day, Khaled's family members found themselves in front of a completely disfigured face. Khaled's head was lying on a pool of blood and showed several fractures; his nose was broken, some of his front teeth missing, and his jaw was dislocated. There was blood and bruises all over his face. His family was told that he was wanted for drug-related charges and that, after resisting arrest, he had died of asphyxiation in the attempt to swallow a bag of marijuana.Footnote ⁷⁶ Khaled's relatives managed to snap a picture of his deformed face and posted it on the internet together with the accusation that Khaled ‘was tortured to death for possessing video material that implicates members of the police in a drug deal’.Footnote ⁷⁷

The picture triggered a large outcry, with massive protests in Alexandria and Cairo at the end of June, and went viral at the beginning of July, when Wael Ghonim, a young Google executive, opened a Facebook page entitled ‘We are all Khaled Said’, which began to attract supporters in the order of thousands per day.Footnote ⁷⁸ According to HRW, one of the reasons for the unprecedented wave of protests which followed the death of Khaled Said is that many people could identify with him as victims of police violence.Footnote ⁷⁹ This emotional identification went beyond the sharing of a traumatic experience. As was written in the aftermath of his death, Khaled Said ‘was someone's son, someone's brother, someone's friend, someone's neighbour, someone's customer, and if not for what had happened, someone's future’.Footnote ⁸⁰ That is, Said was an ordinary citizen, who had by chance come across a video of police corruption. To borrow the words of a female opposition blogger named Baheyya in a 2005 post, people identified with Khaled Said because of his normalcy and because he represented ‘an entire subculture of invisible citizens in this country with first-hand experience of the state's ferocity’; men and women with ‘scarred souls and violated bodies whose stories we don't know’.Footnote ⁸¹ On the eve of the massive protests which led to the resignation of Hosni Mubarak, the Facebook page ‘We are all Khaled Said’ had reached more than 80,000 supporters. It was the first, together with the 6 April Youth Movement Facebook group, to invite Egyptians to protest on 25 January (not incidentally, National Police Day) through a Facebook event page called ‘The Day of the Revolution Against Torture, Poverty, Corruption and Unemployment’.Footnote ⁸²

Torture, to be sure, was not a ‘cause’ of the revolution, but rather one of the ‘catalysts’ which precipitated the long list of Egyptian grievances (poverty, corruption, inequality, restriction of liberties, and police brutality) by bringing the confrontation with the regime onto an almost existential level, where the tortured body made public epitomised an ultimate form of negation of life. This existential dimension culminated in the ‘exceptional existential moment’ of the revolution which, as Hussein Ali Agrama points out, saw the protesters standing ‘apart from the modern game of defining and distinguishing religion and politics’, to the effect that they ‘expressed every potential language of justice, secular or religious, but embraced none’.Footnote ⁸³ The chanting crowds in Tahrir Square – where leftists, Islamists, Muslim Brothers, communists, and liberals gathered together under ‘a collective “leadership”’Footnote ⁸⁴ and uttered slogans such as ‘Our revolution is civil; neither violent, nor religious’,Footnote ⁸⁵ – are a most powerful reminder of this exceptional postsecular sense of national unity and solidarity beyond secularist-Islamist allegiances, and beyond the power of secularism of Egyptian ruling elites to polarise political identities between contending secularist and Islamist currents and support manifestations of religiosity complacent with sovereign power.

In advancing this argument, my understanding of the ‘postsecular’ shares some ground with, but also differs from, Hussein Ali Agrama's notion of ‘asecular’.Footnote ⁸⁶ Agrama contends that the revolution was the expression of ‘a genuinely asecular power’ as the unity expressed by the protesters revealed an ultimate indifference to the secular-religious polarisation. The asecular suggests a situation in which it becomes ultimately indifferent to ask whether or not a norm is secular or religious. The postsecular, he suggests, fails to grasp this indifference as it is concerned with the emergence of new norms, and therefore it ‘fail[s] to recognize that the process of identifying and distinguishing secular from non-secular norms is part of what secularism is, and that this process is integral to its power’.Footnote ⁸⁷ I agree with Agrama's critique of a normative understanding of the postsecular. Indeed, this is precisely one of the main limits of Habermas's notion of postsecularity that I discussed in the first section of this article. My contention was that the postsecular as a normative idea of inclusion based on a cognitive and disembodied understanding of religion as a provider of moral norms for a secular domain which is not self-sustaining ultimately contributes to the reproduction of the power/knowledge regime of the secular. Similarly, I agree that the revolution was not about the emergence of new norms, but an ‘exceptional existential moment’. Indeed, the power of the tortured body to sustain a politics of resistance capable to challenge the secularist-Islamist polarisation rapidly faded after the ousting of Mubarak and this polarisation quickly re-emerged seemingly unabated.

However, it also seems to me that the notion of asecularity unwittingly relies on a Kantian understanding of critical resistance as the search for universal structures beyond the phenomenal/empirical dimension – in the case at hand, as a quest for justice beyond the secular/religious divide fomented by the Egyptian regime. Agrama contends that the Egyptian protesters were the expression of a ‘bare sovereignty’ which ‘stands prior to religion and politics’ and therefore ‘is utterly indifferent to the question of where to draw a line between them’.Footnote ⁸⁸ Although he maintains that the power of bare sovereignty ‘arises from the potentialities intrinsic to a given mode of life’, this account appears very similar to Habermas's idea that the exercise of critical reason does not require transcendental subjects but individuals grounded in experiential ‘lifeworlds’. The effect is that Agrama's asecular protesters appear to resemble Habermas's disembodied postconventional subjects.

On the contrary, the notion of postsecularity grounded in a Foucauldian idea of critical resistance that I have explored in this article, helps us grasp how the power of resistance of the tortured body made public was mobilised by situated actors – themselves the product of the power/knowledge regimes of secularism. These actors, more or less consciously, and often unconsciously, understood themselves on the secular-religious spectrum, but nonetheless found the imagination to resist its polarisation. Hence, their quest for justice as embodied by the tortured body was certainly the expression of an indifference to the secularist-Islamist polarisation. Yet, this indifference was the result of a politics of resistance carried out by emotional, embodied, and embedded subjects who, as I have tried to show in this section, established the body as a postsecular locus of resistance.