The Immanent Frame

While the uprising in Egypt caught most observers of the Middle East off guard, it did not come out of the blue. The seeds of this spectacular mobilization had been sown as far back as the early 2000s and had been carefully cultivated by activists from across the political spectrum, many of these working online via Facebook, twitter, and within the Egyptian blogosphere. Working within these media, activists began to forge a new political language, one that cut across the institutional barriers that had until then polarized Egypt’s political terrain, between more Islamicly-oriented currents (most prominent among them, the Muslim Brotherhood) and secular-liberal ones.

Is there a secular body? Or, in somewhat different terms, is there a particular configuration of the human sensorium—of sensibilities, affects, embodied dispositions—specific to secular subjects, and thus constitutive of what we mean by “secular society”? What intrigues me about this question is that, despite its apparent simplicity, the path toward an answer seems not at all clear. For example, are the scholarly sensibilities and the modes of affective attunement that find expression here elements of a secular habitus? What would be indicated by calling such expressive habits “secular”?

Here I want to briefly comment on Obama’s discussion of the Israeli-Palestinian question. Two of Obama’s statements in particular have been widely celebrated as marking a new direction in American foreign policy in this area: one, that “the United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements,” and two, that the Palestinians should have “a state of their own.” These are fine sentiments indeed. They are also an almost exact reiteration of the central positions of the so-called Road Map proposed by Bush and his Quartet.