Disappointed Hope: Reimagining Resistance in the Wake of the Egyptian Revolution

• In Event: Disappointed Hopes: Reclaiming the Promise of Resistance

Abstract

Ten years after the Arab Spring uprisings in Egypt, little seems to be left of the hopes they engendered. Many activists themselves remember the uprisings with a sense of profound disappointment. The problem, however, is that the widespread sense of disappointment has come to be seen – in the words of Nesrine Malik – as “a repudiation of the very notion of protest.” In other words, the sense of disappointment over a particular instance of failed resistance can lead into a sense of the failure of resistance as such – which in turn calls for hierarchical forms of governance to offset the inherently flawed character of political engagement by the people. Yet might not the sense of disappointment bear within itself the seeds of a new hope to resist again and differently in the future? Against the fatalist narratives of the Arab Spring, I propose to explore the politically transformative potential of disappointment, specifically its ability to reconfigure the resisters’ horizon of hope.

To that end, I theorise disappointment as an existential feeling that manifests itself as a way of being in the world and reframes our perception of the possibilities for political action. I argue that the resisters’ disappointment can lead to what Ernst Bloch called “educated hope:” a hope embodying the fundamental, existential human impulse to imagine a life otherwise, which however has undergone the learning experience of disappointment and is aware of the unpredictability of the future. On this account, a lapse into cynical despair in the wake of failure constitutes the mere other side of naïve optimism, as it likewise stems from an unwillingness to make oneself vulnerable to disappointment. Disappointed hope, on the other hand, incorporates the awareness of the contradictions, complexities, and uncertainties of social and political change into the very mode of imagining an otherwise. Thus, I propose, disappointment can reconfigure the resisters’ horizon of hope along the following three axes: 1) it can unhinge the utopian impulse from the pre-defined goal and direct it towards a persistent, ever-reborn striving for greater freedom and justice; 2) it can redirect the energies towards a practice-oriented negotiation of the concrete possibilities and limitations of political action; and 3) it can lead to an openness towards the genuinely new that is predicated upon the willingness to bear the risk of failure.

I look for the practical articulation of disappointed hopes in the selected first-hand account of the Arab Spring uprisings in Egypt, Cairo: Memoir of a City Transformed, written by a prominent Egyptian activist and writer, Ahdaf Soueif. The memoir aptly shows how deep disappointments over the lack of social and political change did not mark the end of activism but inspired a new hopefulness about the however ambiguous potentials of political action in the present. The resisters’ disappointed hopes reimagine resistance as a constant process of revivifying, reconfiguring and diversifying the forms of revolutionary praxis in response to failure, while refusing the lure of fatalism.

Author

• Masa Mrovlje, University of Vienna