CUMINet commentary
Last week I reiterated some of my comments here on the excellent Danish blog CUMINet, run by Rasmus Elling. This was partly me testing the e-waters. The only comment I received was understandably disconcerted. Yet I was not implying that the possibilities for a renewal of “people power” were forever gone. I was simply trying to add to a beginning critique of the reformist faction that is long overdue. A few days later, Columbia Professor Hamid Dabashi echoed some of my points in Al-Ahram.
As Ernesto Laclau wrote in his recent book On Populist Reason, one of the problems of analyzing contentious historical moments is “the replacement of analysis with ethical condemnation. …There is nothing wrong [with condemnation]. The problem begins when condemnation replaces explanation, which is what happens when some phenomena are seen as aberrations dispossessed of any rational cause.” He goes on to say that this occurs not just with negatively connotated events, such as genocide, but also “with events that have positive emotional connotations.”
