Modern state law is an expansive force that permeates life and politics. Law's histories—colonial, revolutionary, and postcolonial—tell of its constitutive centrality to the making of colonies and modern states. Its powers intertwine with life itself; they attempt to direct it, shape its most intimate spheres, decide on the constitutive line dividing public from private, and take over the space and time in which life unfolds. These powers settle in the present, eliminate past authorities, and dictate futures. Gendering and constitutive of sexual difference, law's powers endeavor to mold subjects and alter how they orient themselves to others and to the world. But these powers are neither coherent nor finite. They are ripe with contradictions and conflicting desires. They are also incapable of eliminating other authorities, paths, and horizons of living; these do not vanish but remain not only thinkable and articulable but also a resource for the living. Such are some of the overlapping and accumulative interventions of the two books under review: Sara Pursley's Familiar Futures and Judith Surkis's Sex, Law, and Sovereignty in French Algeria. What follows is an attempt to further develop these interventions by thinking with some of the books’ underlying arguments. Familiar Futures is a history of Iraq, beginning with the British colonial-mandate period and concluding with the 1958 Revolution and its immediate aftermath. Sex, Law, and Sovereignty is a history of “French Algeria” that covers a century of French colonization from 1830 to 1930. The books converge on key questions concerning how modern law and the modern state—colonial and postcolonial—articulated sexual difference and governed social and intimate life, including through the rise of personal-status law as a separate domain of law constitutive of the conjugal family. Both books are consequently also preoccupied with the relationship between sex, gender, and sovereignty. And both contain resources for living along paths not charted by the modern state and its juridical apparatus.Footnote ¹

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Sex, Law, and Sovereignty is a critical, legal, and feminist history that tracks a century of French colonial rule in Algeria. Deeply gendered, sexualized, and dependent on law, this rule mediated both legal personhood and property. Contests over the legal status of Algerians were implicated in wider conflicts about the assertion of French sovereignty over Algerian land. Colonial rule excluded Algerian men from the realm of political rights and simultaneously conscripted Algerian territory to the French universal order. On the one hand, “French fixation on men's sexual ‘privilege’ in Muslim marriage” (5) became a staple of colonial legal and political argument, enacting the exclusion of Muslim men from full French citizenship unless they renounced “Muslim law,” a law that the French themselves articulated and upheld. On the other hand, Islamic and Ottoman legalities pertaining to the title and sale of Algerian land were nullified; in their place, French civil law was extended, enabling the appropriation of the colony's richest agricultural region for European settlement. Under this new legal regime, the land would become “universal” and “French,” while Algerians would remain outsiders to the community of French citizens. Sex, Law, and Sovereignty is an account of the sexualized making of the settler colony, the remnants of which remain:

That the Muslim question remains a sexual question is evident not only in France, but in other places as well, including, more recently, in the US occupation of and withdrawal from Afghanistan.Footnote ²

Surkis's rich legal genealogy of this present points not to the sexualized and gendered justifications of settler colonialism, which is the more conventional critical intervention. Instead, we learn how French settler colonialism in Algeria extended itself by means of articulating and governing sexual difference. Affective and libidinal investments in Muslim men's sexual privilege imbued legal difference, itself a strategy of colonial rule. French colonial actors displayed fascination and repulsion toward the sexual privileges of Muslim men. This display indicated these actors’ own suppressed fantasies and desires that were projected onto Algerians. Borrowing from Lacanian parlance, Surkis identifies this French colonial fanstasmatic relationship to Muslim subjects as “extimate,” and at the core of colonial law. Avowing these repressed sexual desires as belonging to the French self would have ruptured public order and the universal subject of law: “Fixation on the other's pleasure, instead, expresses and exteriorizes those desires and thus preserves a fantasmatic sense of (masculine) wholeness or totality by establishing the other's sexual difference from the self, while simultaneously indulging in their imagined fulfillment” (16).

This fantasmatic relationship persisted even during World War I, when some 173,000 Algerian men died under the French flag. Proposals to extend citizenship at the time continued to be rejected, and colonial jurists and politicians refused to recognize the apparent legal contradiction. Conscription to the army still could not qualify the potentially polygamous subject for citizenship; the French polygamous citizen was an impossibility. Meanwhile, confronted with the sexual privileges of Muslim men, French men assumed the position of the defeated because they lacked those privileges. As for metropolitan French women, they, too, were citizens without political rights. Rather than drawing parallels between their condition and that of Muslim Algerians, imperial feminists opted to emphasize their own contributions to the colonial project and its civilizing mission.

The history of colonial law in French Algeria is the history of the production of difference between the French Civil Code, which supposedly denied French men such pleasures, and Muslim personal-status law as a space of sexual license. Under this hierarchical difference, Muslim personal status secured the superiority of the sovereign totality of French civil law—but, in being a part of French law in Algeria, it also continued to undermine it. This dual status of Muslim law as both inside and outside French law was central to the power operations of colonial critique. French colonial law both fashioned the category of Muslim law and criticized it; it ruled through it and disavowed it; it envied those it ruled (Muslim Algerians) and it denigrated them. Settler colonial rule could simultaneously subjugate women and claim to save them, affirm their subjugation and lament it. While in Surkis's account these powers are tracked in the context of French Algeria, they belong to a larger Western, civilizational project. This project, I suggest, has developed the capacity to rule and to critique simultaneously—indeed, to rule through critique. “Muslim law,” as articulated by the French, was precisely that dual medium. The non-West may rule, but it does not enjoy the powers of effective critique; it does not rule through civilizational critique.

“Polygamy” was one aspect of “Muslim law” that was at once upheld and condemned. It was also linked to efforts to acquire more Algerian land for European settlement while excluding Algerians from French citizenship (Chapter 3). While in the earlier decades of colonization, polygamy was understood as a reformable institution, it would eventually, but not inevitably, be identified as an “intractable” Quranic right. Constituted as an attribute of the indigenous Muslim (indigène musulman), polygamy became an “emblem of his inassimilable religious and legal difference, which justified exceptional legal treatment and political exclusion” (57). Settlers also mobilized polygamy as evidence of the failure of military colonial policy. Arguing against Algeria's exceptional military legal regime, they called for “legal assimilation”—a uniform application of French law, especially as it related to property. The aim was not to eliminate the privilege of polygamy, but to submit Algerian Muslims to French property law, while preserving their “personal status.” The 1873 Warnier Law accomplished precisely that: it opened up Algerian Muslim land to purchase and domination by settlers. Designed to dismantle collective and family real-estate holdings by applying the Civil Code to land, the law left Algerian “Muslim law” intact. Polygamy, and other privileges that Muslim men enjoyed, French colonialists thought, would disappear once property was reformed by extending French civil law. What began as settler opposition to exceptional military legalities culminated in new exceptions: “all those who were not French citizens should be permitted to marry according to the precepts of their religion” (86). Settlers’ liberal assimilationist arguments were not external to the ends of colonization; they were not liberal justifications serving non-liberal ends. Rather, they were the terms by which unified settler colonial sovereignty over territory was pursued.

The end of military rule and the establishment of civilian rule introduced new measures of collective punishment as well as new legislation that enabled purchase of Muslim land, thereby encouraging massive transfers of land from Muslims to European settlers. Tensions between the military and the settlers persisted (Chapter 5) but, through jurisdictional claims, settlers and their civilian law had become the vehicles of colonization. In this sense, Surkis's account may be read as illuminating the limits of any critical gaze solely focused on military power and its excesses. Her account also tells of the limits of the military/civilian distinction that posits the military as the source of violence and the civilian as politically innocent. To read this history is to begin to understand why international law's military/civilian distinction was so fraught in Algeria's anticolonial war of independence (1954–62).Footnote ³ While not part of Surkis's account, which concludes in 1930, the anticolonial violence to come nevertheless is foreshadowed by the book.

At its core, Sex, Law, and Sovereignty is about the legal making of a settler colony and the abundance of law in it. The main challenge in the making of every settler colony, from the Americas to South Africa to Algeria to Palestine, is how to transform a land with people into a land without people—and by people I mean the particular juridico-political entity, not the actual subjects. Short of killing and expulsion, what are the supplemental legal practices that facilitate the evacuation of the land, while subjects are still living on it and claiming attachments to it? What to do with the living—the indigenous population? How to reinvent them as less of the land to which they nevertheless have attachments? “French Algeria” teaches that securing colonization depends on law as much as it depends on military and police violence. Law, one may even add, is a supplement, an addition from the outside or a plentitude that enriches the force of the military. As a supplement, it also supplies what is missing and therefore is already inscribed in that to which it is added.Footnote ⁴ Law, then, does not come to military violence from the outside; military violence is not the original settler colonial force to which law is later added. By dwelling in the very fabric of life, its intimate and material dimensions, colonial law occupied Algerian land, evacuated it from earlier subjective and religious attachments, and settled in it. But the settler colony was more than evacuated land. It was also a project of abstracting Muslim lives into bodies with no landed attachments—corporalized persons who can only mark sexual and religious difference.

What to make of this transformation of Muslim subjects into corporalized signifiers of difference? At the heart of the book is an argument about the rise of personal-status law in tandem with, and as separate from, property law. This rise constituted the “Muslim family” as the locus of Algerians’ distinct legal status, and enabled the propertization of land. Colonial policy “imagined a separation of economy from religious and familial intimacy by making them subject to different laws” (117). By disaggregating collective lands and evacuating them of collective attachments, land became property, available for settler colonial appropriation. Governing Algerians would unfold through the novel site of the “Muslim family,” now the repository of intimate and religious sentiments, devoid of attachments to land. The wholly French legal category of “personal status” became the artifact of the legal division between personhood and property.

Algerian Muslims were banished from their environment and confined to the “Muslim family.” They were rebirthed as at once particular – corporealized and sexualized – and at the same time abstract, with no other attachments that defined and sustained them. To think with this history is to confront not only the means by which Algerian Muslims were excluded from French political rights and citizenship, as Surkis indeed does, but also to consider the colonial attempts to evacuate colonized subjectivity by cutting it adrift from its supporting environment. By shrinking the “law of the land” to the domain of the family,Footnote ⁵ and by extending French law to the land, a rift was introduced between land and people, turning the latter into a Muslim exception to the new French law of the land. The family became the site to which the colonized were relegated, in excess of the land; Algerians were privatized. This rift in law was a rift in life, turning the colonized into the privatized excess and the colonizers into the universal public.

The family as outside the economy and the market was not unique to French Algeria; American law also residualized the nuclear family.Footnote ⁶ But unlike in the US, in “French Algeria” the family confined its members who could no longer be members of a public body politic. They were to appear not only as mere markers of difference, but also as mere private actors. The Muslim question therefore does not only persist as a sexual question, as Surkis argues. It also persists as a question concerning the threat of Muslim appearance in the public sphere. This much is evident in contemporary debates about the hijab, mosques, public prayers, and so on.

To be sure, in Sex, Law, and Sovereignty, the effort to separate family from land and property was only that—an effort. To divide collective land into individual property, the family had to be defined, but colonial jurists were deeply confused about what constituted a family. Families and properties were intertwined after all: “The limits of the colonial state became perceptible at the very moment that these officials sought to render Algerian land and Algerian families visible to French officials” (107). The legal purification of family and property was impossible. This impossibility reveals the failure of legal practice to live up to doctrinal divisions. And yet the failures to maintain the division only heightened its pursuit, allowing for further infiltration of French civil law. Both purification and the hybridization were necessary to law's expansive colonial operations. Still, as life-colonizing as these efforts were, they also confronted their own limits: “in continually seeking to fill the loophole through administrative and bureaucratic procedure, these efforts revealed the psychic and social limits of the law as well as the totalizing fantasies that sustained its operations” (93). At issue is not only the failure of the all-capturing gaze of the code, but also its impotence when confronted with a reality that it could not capture. We are reminded that the “exclusionary fantasy of sovereignty can never be secured” (294).

The subject of Sex, Law, and Sovereignty is French Algeria, not Algeria or al-Jaza'ir, in Arabic. This gap between the two names is significant. The name French Algeria signaled the existence of another name, Algeria, even if it was also the French who formalized that name in relation to the territory they had occupied.Footnote ⁷ This difference in the names speaks to the difficulty of transforming that which settler colonies captured into that which they colonized. Naming, and all the political strategies of rule that follow, do not eradicate a past; that past continues to unsettle, as a sediment, as a place, and as struggle. In this sense, the paradox of including Algerian land in the French universal order but excluding Muslim subjects from French citizenship speaks to the impossibility of eradicating difference, to its persistence along terms other than the ones colonially fashioned. The critical gaze therefore is not merely directed at the exclusion of Algerians or at the failure of French universalism, as one reading of Surkis's book would yield. Rather, the critical intervention concerns the transformative eliminatory fantasies of the settler colonial project: the exclusion of Algerians from the realm of citizenship discloses the impossibility of turning Algeria into French Algeria. In indexing a life in excess of law's capture and citizenship, this exclusion paradoxically remained a site of possibility for anticolonialism.

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Sara Pursley's Familiar Futures: Time, Selfhood, and Sovereignty in Iraq overlaps with many questions pursued in Sex, Law, and Sovereignty, namely the ones concerned with gender; sexual difference; the rise of the family; the operations of modern law, including personal-status law; and the disciplinary operations of the citizenship regime. Pursley's history of Iraq approaches these questions through the prism not of the settler colony, but of the modern temporality of linear historical time: its circulations, its effects, the futures it has deferred, and consequently the political closures it has engendered. The book explores a number of fields in mid-twentieth century Iraq, from the educational to the agricultural to the familial, that were “charged objects of reform in the name of the nation's sovereign and developed future” (28). If there is a sense of possibility in Familiar Futures, it is pursued in relation to temporalities from other traditions, which disrupt modern, linear temporality. Along the way these traditions also unsettle the basing of modern politics on the constitution of a coherent body of citizens, and point to forms of life that are not bound to the state's future-oriented models of developmentalism. If Surkis's account concerns sexualized exclusion from imperial citizenship in the settler colony, then Pursley's is about the political and ethical loss that accompanied the gendered production of a synchronized bodily and affective experience of future-oriented citizenship.

On the most basic level, Familiar Futures is about economic development and state power in Iraq from the British colonial years into the revolutionary era. Pursley covers the violent British imperial constitution of Iraq (1914–20), educational and agrarian reforms, the role of American expertise in shaping interventions in education and family life, women's political activism, revolutionary politics, nationalist and communist practices and visions, Shi‘ite critiques of modern state power, and the revolutionary personal-status law of 1959. The book's opening, however, points to the theoretical sensibilities guiding the historical research. Foreshadowing the end of the book, we read of the military coup of July 1958 in Baghdad, and its recasting as a popular revolution. Signaling a future that had already been imagined by Iraqis, this moment divided time into the distant or the bygone era (al-‘ahd al-ba‘id) and the new revolutionary time. A few months later, in January 1959, the communist League for the Defense of Women's Rights led a march in Baghdad demanding the violent punishment of the agents of the monarchical regime of the “time gone by.” The Ministry of Development would soon reinterpret this event in a published letter in the Illustrated London News as evidence of the modernity of the July Revolution. Pursley writes, “That this statement was issued by the Ministry of Development in particular points to the new regime's engagement with a global idiom of development that indexed a nation's modernity by the status of its women” (4). The first pages, then, set the scene for the main questions of the book: the relationship between revolutionary time and gendered time, the intensified investment in girls’ and women's lives, how economic development and the gendered social reform came to trump all other visions of the good life, and how the Iraqi territorial state came to infiltrate the intimate lives of Iraqi subjects and to mold their experience of citizenship. The answers to these questions, Pursley offers, have everything to do with particular modern temporal sensibilities that came to dictate Iraqi citizens’ orientation to the future.

Futures were familiar in revolutionary Iraq, though there were different registers to this familiarity. First, the Iraqi future was familiar because it had been someone else's past or present. The 1958 Revolution and its aftermath of state capture were repetitions of the already experienced European past. Paradoxically, this familiarity colored the future with rupture, novelty, and newness. This register of the future, the register of futures past (to borrow from Reinhart Koselleck), belongs to modernity as a transformative promise.Footnote ⁸ The second register of the future is in tension with the first. Here, Iraqi futures were familiar because they were “managed repetitions of its present” (6). In the effort to overcome economic stagnation and to implement economic development, the state forcibly stagnated political protests that incited other futures. In this sense, one may add, Iraqi futures were fashioned upon the present, banning any incalculable opening that would deviate from the present and the course of economic development. The third register is most analytically central to the book. In this register, “modern futures are familiar both because they are closely linked to familial spaces and attachments and because they are made familiar through techniques of operating on subjects’ most intimate habits, capabilities and desires” (7). Futures in this register are made to be familiar through the exercise of disciplinary and biopolitical modalities of power. Taken together, these three registers refer to the modern political imaginary that Lee Edelman calls “reproductive futurism.”Footnote ⁹ This is an imaginary that defers demands for political change in the present and turns the child into the embodiment of a political future that never arrives. The result is the freezing of the present and the deferring of the future. In Pursley's argument, Iraqi women were captured by reproductive futurism: “Having been finally freed from the past, the nation's women were henceforth to be trapped in its future” (12)—a future that has never arrived.

The gendering of school time from the 1930s to the 1950s illuminates the governing operations of this orientation to the future. It also illuminates how education was the medium for reforming the family. We learn of the rise of vocational training and its differentiation around sexual axes: girls were to study home economics, and boys agriculture, commerce, and industry (Chapter 3). This gendered, and sex-differentiated, vocational training aimed at “enabling and disabling particular vocational skills and therefore futures,” as well as “certain capabilities, motivations, habits, social behaviors, and mental approaches to problems” (101). Vocational training was the means by which gendered, future-oriented citizens were cultivated: “a whole mode of being in the world, prior to and constitutive of the mode of being known as citizenship” (101). Citizens were cultivated as amenable to government in large part by technologies of rule that either oriented them to particular futures (e.g., in the case of girls, a future of domesticity and withdrawal from the public sphere) or deferred promised futures.

This cultivation was not always successful. Female education was failing to school “future mothers capable of raising agentive and governable citizens” (105). Instead, it was producing a generation who resisted marriage and domesticity, and desired to overthrow the existing political order (Chapter 4). These desires were also fostered by extended family ties and intergenerational transmission. By the 1950s, there was a widespread sense of generational crises around adolescence, girls’ education, and marriage. The state viewed these crises in relation to the larger political unrest and the rise in the popularity of the Iraqi Communist Party among the youth. It is in this context that the female adolescent subject, with its potential for deviation, became the target of intensified reform. The objective was to instill an orientation toward marriage, which was understood as “a stabilizing temporal milestone, evidence of the successful traversing of this volatile stage” (109). An expansion in the home economics curriculum, and intensified preparation of girls for future conjugal life, followed. Equally significant was the very experience of national schools (see also Chapter 2). These produced a shared generational experience and synchronized the orientation to the future. Yet if public schooling aimed to undermine intergenerational forms of affiliation, a task it failed at, it also resulted in the rapid spread of political mobilization along the axis of age. Home economics was soon found to be too theoretical; proposals were made to focus instead on “real-life learning.” Academic focus, it was argued, “had filled girls’ heads with frivolous and/or rebellious notions” (118).

The actors behind this intense interest in female education were not only local. American experts in the 1930s supported sex-differentiated education. In 1952, representatives from the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) proposed further differentiation. It was not enough that Iraqi female students were by then required to study home economics. The FAO delegation, led by a US scholar, proposed to dramatically increase the time devoted to home economics and to decrease the study of academic subjects. Meanwhile, Iraqi reformers criticized Islamic methods of learning because they failed to provide “education for real life.” This was “life” that “would contribute to the nations’ future sovereignty and economic development,” life “that moved in its own discrete time through specific psychological stages of development and according to the differences between the two sexes” (125).

What is striking about these chapters on education and the reform of the family is the extent to which “real life” became the prism and the prison of life in Iraq. Sex-differentiated vocational training was aimed at molding the aspirations of citizens for the good life. Citizenship was a disciplinary formation in so far as it privileged certain habits and obedience to the law of the state. Citizenship in turn was deeply synchronizing. By this I do not only mean the synchronization of bodies in space in a particular temporal present. This synchronization constitutive of citizenship is explicit in Pursley's account. Rather, in my reading, these reforms also evacuated time of its incalculable wonders: the novel, the unknown, the yet-to-come, the surprising.Footnote ¹⁰ Time itself became synchronized. Not in the sense that it was standardized as a matter of history,Footnote ¹¹ but in the sense that its radical openings exceeding calculation were sealed. In place of an opening in the horizon, the present time of the given self—the citizen chained to the state and its future—was extended. Still, the synchronization of time in Iraq entailed something other than sealing its indeterminate gifts; it also policed against its sediments.Footnote ¹² The gates of tradition, including the Islamic tradition, as a transmitted past and site of the cultivation of other sensibilities and forms of life unregimented by the state and its juridical apparatus, had to be closed. The present, in short, had to become not only a transitional moment between past and future, as in modern linear temporalities, but also synonymous with time itself. There would be no other times, indeed no other lives. This, to my mind, is where the devastating losses of the modern state and modern law are most intensely evident.

Like Surkis, Pursley is interested in the methods by which state sovereignty was extended. Her focus is on the exercise of sovereignty over human bodies. This exercise took different forms beginning with the British mandate period (1914–20), when sovereignty over the population was necropolitical and asserted through corporeal violence and airpower that leveled entire villages and delimited the territory of Iraq (Chapter 1). As of the 1930s, the government of subjects and the population proceeded by disciplinary and biopolitical powers, in large part through the institution of the family. These efforts were not limited to education, as described above. Land settlement was also a key site for the realization of the nuclear family. A pilot project distributed state-owned land to family farmers in order to make space for the creation of an isolated nuclear-family model (Chapter 5). The project's fate was an ecological disaster. But the model of a nuclear family, while it did not take hold in society, altered agricultural practices. In its encroachment, the state was haunted by the constant failure of its own authority and by the presence of other authorities that could trouble its own.

Perhaps it is the controversy over post-revolutionary 1959 personal status, the final episode in Pursley's account (Chapter 7), that most illuminates the bonding of the living to the state and its law, as well as the refusal of this bonding. Hailed by nationalists and communists as a major progressive legislative achievement for Iraqi women, the new personal-status law unified an otherwise plural body of law under the purview of the state. The goal was to rid Iraq of the multiplicity of juridical sources and rulings that had presumably made family life unstable; the code offered the landscape synchronicity. Against the plurality of possible relationships under the shari‘a, the new law sought to institutionalize the nuclear family, offering each member a role and reifying sexual differences. A properly modern domestic sphere, the family was made into a conjugal home less permeable to strangers. Religion was not undermined but remade by the secular state. Like in French Algeria, the shari‘a was uprooted from the public sphere, which became the sole jurisdiction of the state. Reorganized, the shari‘a was confined to the realm of the family. The family, in turn, emerged as a category in law. The shari‘a was also evacuated of its temporal fluidity, as exercised by pluralistic independent juristic reasoning, and offered fixed letters. Law itself ceased to be plural; there was no more conflict of laws. Instead, law was conflated with state law, whose quest was to establish exclusive jurisdiction over the minds and bodies, indeed the lives, of Iraqis.

Law then tied the family to the state, organized temporal horizons, and dictated familiar futures. But not all futures, in Familiar Futures, are futures past, or futures deferred, repetitive of the present, and inscribed in the bodies of citizens to bond them to the state. Pursley offers us a fourth familiar future, instances of which flash up throughout the book. One such instance is found in the writings of Shi‘i jurist Muhammad Bahr al-‘Ulum, who opposed the premise of a singular, unified family code as enacted by the secular state. He contrasted the open-endedness and non-territoriality of Islamic law to the territorialized and temporally static Iraqi personal-status law. If modern, progressive temporality is characterized, in Koselleck's theorization, by the widening gap between the space of experience and the horizons of expectation, robbing the present of actuality, for Bahr al-‘Ulum, futures are familiar “because they are near or close futures, futures that might be realizable because they remain connected to the space of experience, rather than constantly receding along the horizon of expectation” (10). Futures, under this non-modern temporality, are not detached from the present and do not constitute a waning horizon. Futures, instead, are held within the present and are attached to it. There is no widening gap separating the space of experience and the horizon of expectation.

A second such instance flashes up in the final pages of the last chapter, allowing the reader to glimpse another possibility of politics outside the bond with the modern state. Under discussion is a text by Iraqi sociologist ‘Ali al-Wardi. Published in 1962, and titled Mantiq Ibn Khaldoun (Ibn Khaldoun's Logic), al-Wardi explains that for Ibn Khaldoun, states are not permanent, but rather, in their cyclicality, rise and die. Al-Wardi links this Khaldounian narrative to the earlier Islamic conceptions of regularly repeated cycles of moral decline and revival. Iraqi history is a story of repeated struggles between the people of the state and the people of the revolution. The success of revolutionaries will soon lead to their decline. Al-Wardi turns to the actions of ‘Ali—the Prophet's son-in-law and the first Shi‘i imam—as an example of someone who wanted to die, not to rule. This reference to the past, death, and martyrdom, Pursley adds, recalls Walter Benjamin's argument that revolutionary sentiments are nourished by “the image of enslaved ancestors rather than that of liberated grandchildren” (quoted at 197): “The revolutionary martyr, according to al-Wardi, is one who has learned how to harness the powers of his unreason—since there is nothing rational about martyrdom—in order to inch the world once again toward justice, even in the face of inevitable failure” (197). While Pursley does not address this at length, al-Wardi also teaches of the conditions that bring about the collapse of states, disarming them of their inevitability. This collapse should not be equated with a finally successful revolution, which for al-Wardi would constitute the beginning of another decline. Rather, the cyclicality of collapse introduces political possibilities that refuse the certainty of the state.

A third instance of this fourth register of Familiar Futures is in the book's Epilogue. It explores a famous public monument in Baghdad's Tahrir Square, Nusb al-Hurriyya (the Freedom Monument), which was built by artist Jawad Salim to commemorate the July Revolution. One reading of this monument illustrates developmental and disciplinary conceptions of Iraqi nationhood. Another reading finds that the monument evokes multiple temporalities, often drawn from the Islamic tradition and unfolding in resistance to developmentalist reasoning and its linear temporal grain. On this second reading, the monument articulates a vertical plane of countermemory (counter to official, state memory) that “repeatedly cuts through its ‘horizontal’ plane, or ‘the progress of human freedom in its political and humanist sense’” (221). Along similar lines, but in a Khaldounian fashion, the final scene of the monument suggests that the postrevolutionary state does not inaugurate a period of timeless development but heralds the beginning of decline. In becoming civilized, the revolutionaries eventually become corrupt as the people of the state. A new people of revolution emerges. They effect an opening into a less predictable future, indeed a “vertical cut, into the only apparently seamless rationality of the disciplinary order of the developmental state” (227). This cut is a condition of possibility, not of a final revolution, not “once and for all but again and again” (227).

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We could say that the cut is one representation of the opening in time—a gift that can arrive from the time of the other that is neither planned nor frozen or deferred by the state and its law. But that is only one reading, because the cut itself seems to come from the past, or from an understanding of time as cyclical and therefore familiar and always already entailing a return. Or it could be that the cut is an interruption of the synchronizing time of the state that comes from both: from an inherited tradition or a countermemory, as well as from the incalculable gift of time or the radical opening of the future. The cut, in this case, is the site of a tentative alliance between tradition and an open future. And we may then add that the cut, in its relationship to a tradition, and in its explosion into an unpredictable future, is the space of possibility outside the people of the state—outside citizenship. It is what allows the reader to repeat with Surkis that the “exclusionary fantasy of sovereignty can never be secured.”