Past the end, not yet at the beginning

Egypt today sits at a temporal disjuncture of revolutionary potential-already past a form of politics that has been overthrown but not yet near its replacement. This means both a contraction of time as the pace and intensity of revolt, in a society now all but ungovernable, regularly upends institutional planning and calculation; it also means that previously stable instruments of rule are rendered unviable. That is, more than simply an acceleration of time, what defines this period is a non-reformist desire for a radical break with the past. More than anything else it was the Muslim Brotherhood-led government's failure to recognize the character of this time that spelled its end. By relying on the very same-that is, its predecessor's-instruments and mechanisms of subjection (security, torture, paternalism) they failed to realize that something fundamental had shifted in the relationship between subject and authority. No doubt the risks after 'June 30th' are real and grave; the potential of the army consolidating a hold it never relinquished over institutional politics has grown. Yet the flurry of talk about coups, legitimacies, legalities and electoral politics misses the temporal specificity of this disjuncture and implicitly raises, yet again, the false choice between Liberals and Islamists. Part of the impasse, this paper argues, is our dependence on a politics of alterity that while rightly occupied with debunking European conceits of universalism and correcting historical narrative, leaves us unable to think outside the shadow of the figure of 'the West'. Yet to recognize the experimentation with new and concrete universalities in which Egypt leads us all, we need to urgently forget 'the West'; not simply to provincialize it, but to really forget it .