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| More than 30 people have died in the latest series of protests roiling Egypt [EPA] |
Exeter, United Kingdom - Egypt is refusing to kill what I call the "revolutionary ethos". Only by grasping this dynamic, and its implication for changing politics, can we better understand the call of Tahrir Square.
In particular, the incapacity of the elites to relate and respond, much less accommodate, the revolutionary ethos is at the core of the return of Egypt's own indignés (rage-keepers) to the one site of bottom-up struggle where they fully possess the terms of the political: tipping-point politics.
From day one, the political relics that should have been swept away to history's dustbin were plotting the demise of the excluded and the containment of revolution in the Arab Middle East.
The relics from Riyadh to Damascus never looked favourably on the march of the excluded. They trembled and continue to do so at the rage, the passion, the sacrifice, the tenacity and the taking-over of public squares in many an Arab city.
In Egypt and Tunisia, containment of the Arab revolution is attempted by trying to make the revolutionary ethos submit to the democratic ethos.
Underlying this modus operandi is the assumption that the two moral attributes of these two moments are mutually exclusive. That is, the transition to democracy must be completed by terminating revolution. Terminating revolution, inevitably, implies termination of revolutionaries.
It may sound odd, but it is nonetheless true: Re-formalising politics through democratic transition is the first step towards purging revolutionaries and their moral flame - the protesters, the excluded and the Bouazizis of this world.
