Abstract
This article explores the theory and practice of critique in the works of the Lebanese Communist intellectual Husayn Muruwwa (1910–1987) and his grandson Rabih Mroué (b. 1967). Husayn Muruwwa, one of the most important Arab intellectuals of the second half of the twentieth century, reinvented literary criticism and cultural critique in the 1950s and '60s. His grandson, one of the most prominent Arab visual artists, has been redefining the critical approach to visual representation since the Lebanese civil war. The article pits Husayn Muruwwa's critique based on collective hope and emancipation against his grandson's vision of an individualistic critique based on desire. It considers the critical and political writings of Husayn Muruwwa and Rabih Mroué's performances, video lectures, and interviews to explore specifically how they represent hope in relation to critique, and it ultimately suggests a participatory aesthetics that is common to both and that transcends their autobiographical statements and establishes resonances between their thought. Their approaches to critique, the article illustrates, play out as revised inheritances of both the Arab renaissance (nahda) and the national liberation movements in the 1970s. These revisions create a continuity that is critical to understanding the relationship between critique and hope in the Arab intellectual tradition.
But it was secular, if not secularist, thought that determined cultural life and continued to do so . . . until the annihilation of Beirut after the Israeli siege in the summer of 1982. Certain authors think that this marked the real end of the adventure of the nahda, understood in its broadest historical sense. There's no doubt that, up until that moment, the spirit of renaissance had been a constant presence in the Arab world.
Critique, Inheritance, and the Post-1967 Moment
It is now a historical platitude that the Arab left turned its critical gaze inward after the 1967 defeat, and many have argued that in these discourses the idea of the shaʿb (the people) as a collective to enlighten and reform was lost. The turn to auto-critique after 1967, with its focus on self-criticism after the Arab defeat by Israel, is associated with a loss of hope for potential change in the public sphere.1 What becomes of the story of iltizam (literary commitment), the Arab left's historical flirtation with critical hope for the future, and the changed political reality after 1967? Echoing Judith Butler, I ask, in a time when we have become immersed in this post-1967 auto-critique, “what is it to offer a critique?”2
In tracing the legacy of a Marxist, leftist thinker in his grandson's contemporary visual art, I argue—contrary to the dominant understanding of the inward-turning Arab left—that elements of the leftist critique of the 1950s survive and run counter to this loss of hope. This challenge to assumptions about the post-1967 moment materializes in the grandfather-grandson relationship between Husayn Muruwwa and Rabih Mroué. Muruwwa was a Marxist, Lebanese intellectual of the 1950s whose primary contribution was the application of socialist realism to Arabic literature and historical materialism to the Islamic turath (literary and cultural heritage).3 Rabih Mroué, his grandson, is a celebrated, contemporary visual artist whose work registers the shift from a collective dream of change to a private experience of loss.4 Both grandfather and grandson put forth a vision of critique as a social practice. Despite their different artistic mediums, their works question the relationship between aesthetic representation and sociopolitical critique and propose interrelated pathways toward engaging the reader or viewer. Muruwwa believed that critique should become a form of collective education that teaches the reader to identify the conditions of the present through awareness of the past. Echoing his grandfather's work, Mroué's performances unsettle the role of the writer and redefine the viewer's prescriptive rules of engagement. His work revises the conditions of legibility that make social critique possible by revisiting his grandfather's project of critique in performances that instill uncertainty in viewers and undo postwar critical complacency. While the grandfather believed critique would produce reform and instill hope in the people, the grandson produces works that compel the viewer to consider not just the need but also the desire for social and political change. Both forms of critique differently push for a faith in critical hope, a way of exposing the reader/viewer to the conditions of knowledge that shape the present. For Muruwwa, critical hope entails a critical attitude toward future possibilities, while equipping one with the tools to imagine and enact particular kinds of change. For Mroué, critical hope—or what remains of it—resides in unsettling the status quo and inviting the reader/viewer to participate in interpreting the past and projecting a different future.
I argue that critique emerges in their works as a form of inheritance. Inheritance is at the heart of Muruwwa's conception of critique: he inherits the project of critique as mass enlightenment from the Arab nahda. Muruwwa builds his understanding of critique from his definition of new realism (based on socialist realism), which he understands as a style of writing that is embedded in and dedicated to the sociopolitical context that produced it.5 For him, critique is an inherently social practice that addresses the collective and is based on a shared set of values that could be taught. Since the writer remains the arbiter of these values, Muruwwa struggles with leveling the subjective taste of the critic and the objective invective of critique. To resolve this struggle, he develops the practice of critique as method or manhaj; he espouses a militant historical materialism and a dialectical practice of reading that he argues could explain his present moment. What the grandson inherits, I argue, is the revisionism that is built into his grandfather's form of critique as it assumes, creates, and interrogates its modes. In his artistic practice, Mroué inherits critique as a process of questioning the conditions of knowledge production. By considering how critique materializes in the relationship between Muruwwa and Mroué, I do not mean that either stands for his respective historical moment. Despite the potential pitfalls and criticisms of generational thinking—its chronological focus can obscure different movements happening simultaneously—I find in this case that a generational reinterpretation of critique's function challenges the notion of the historical fixity of what comes before and what comes after.6 I argue that the grandfather's project of critique continues to materialize in his grandson's works in performances that revise the inheritance of the past as a critical practice in the present.
This article takes a two-pronged approach: first, it traces the emergence of a theory of critique from a practice of literary and cultural criticism in Muruwwa's work. This theory assumed a post-socialist consciousness while fully recognizing the absence of a socialist reality. Muruwwa uses the Arabic word naqd to refer both to applied criticism—a materialist practice of close reading that considers the sociohistorical conditions of class struggle—and also to a comprehensive form of social-political critique. Second, this essay traces what remains of the grandfather's project in his grandson's artworks: because Mroué inherits critique as a process of questioning the conditions of knowledge production, his works elaborate on Muruwwa's project of literary participation by interrogating the category of the spectator. What persists of Muruwwa's project in Mroué's works is the participatory aspect of critique, the act of inviting the reader or viewer into the interpretation process. By recentering the question of individual desire, Mroué espouses a participatory aesthetics: Mroué's works deliberately unsettle viewers by coercing them to confront the alienating chaos of non-representational art, while relinquishing any definitive historical narrative or political agenda. His works remain contingent in their particularity and do not assume a universal method such as Muruwwa's application of historical materialism to a study of the turath. While the grandfather's vision for critical hope imagined an ideal state that would come into being, Mroué's works eschew a future-oriented perspective while nonetheless carving pathways from the past into the present so as to defy the present as status quo.
By considering how critique materializes in the relationship between grandfather and grandson, I find that generational reinterpretations of critique's function challenge our sense of the division between what comes before and what comes after 1967. Mroué's art continues to work through his grandfather's critical struggles. My interest in generational thinking also comes out of my own recognition of previous generations' struggle to find a critical idiom appropriate to the condition of their contemporary moment. I echo David Scott's desire to understand criticism as a practice that heeds how “a moral-intellectual tradition speaks and listens to itself in order to recall and quarrel with itself across the existential time of its successive and overlapping generations.”7 This is precisely my own desire in this article: to listen to how this tradition continues to speak to itself across successive (Muruwwa/Mroué, Muruwwa/myself) and overlapping (Muruwwa/Mroué, Mroué/myself) generations. While Muruwwa theorized that role for the reader, Mroué performs it in his work. This form of critique is participatory in making the reader or viewer a central object of the work's interpretation but not its making. I ultimately argue that these inheritances reflect continuities in Arab critical thought across generations that reintegrate the role of the writer/artist in aspirations for social change without assuming a privileged conversion of the masses.
Muruwwa's Move to Critique and the Formation of the Critical Object
As a Communist, Husayn Muruwwa believed that, during the mid-twentieth-century revolutionary phase, “most of the people would become educated and not only a small and happy colonially affiliated upper class. These new educated people would harness the written language in order to articulate the new (experiences) of the masses.”8 To achieve this ideal state, Muruwwa spent considerable time defining the terms waqiʿiyya (realism) and maddiyya (materialism): he first encountered these terms in 1948 upon reading Marx in the works of the Arab liberal writers of the nahda (Arab renaissance).9 It was at the Second All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers in Moscow (December 15–26, 1954) that Muruwwa began developing his nazariyya naqdiyya or theory of critique in relation to socialist realism, a theory which he called “the critical movement of the new realism.”10 This form of literary criticism is naturally political since, as he observed, literature and politics ask the same question: “How should we live?”11
Muruwwa's definition of criticism (naqd) developed through his critical inheritance of the nahda, and especially the thinking of its dean of literature Taha Husayn (1889–1973), on the one hand, and through Muruwwa's adaptation of socialist realism on the other. In 1952, Muruwwa relates the term naqd (literary criticism) to Husayn's crisis (mihnat) of literature in the early twentieth century, wherein mihnat comes to stand for a cultural crisis in the present: too many books published but not enough of the “correct ‘kind’ of intellectual and literary nourishment.”12 In 1955, however, Muruwwa writes the introduction to Fi-l-thaqafah al-Misriyyah (On Egyptian Culture) by Mahmud Amin al-ʿAlim and ʿAbd al-ʿAzim Anis: their book is considered the earliest Arab formulation of literary realism. The two critics open their treatise with a polemic against Taha Husayn, who had accused their approach of being incomprehensible and irrelevant. Instead, Husayn defended literature's obligation to represent only the beautiful.13 Muruwwa praises the two critics' use of naqd to explode the category of culture (thaqafah): against its ossified definitions, they propose culture as a continuously evolving concept that is both an aesthetic reflection and a sincere representation of a people's social being.14 The cultural producer is, moreover, always situated against colonial presence.15 Here Muruwwa begins to define criticism in relation to realism and colonial struggle, building toward his materialist reading of culture. Al-ʿAlim and Anis establish an organic relationship between the image and its object, rejecting the accusation that realist critique considers only the literary work's social but not aesthetic qualities.16 They put forth an “applied” criticism that binds their socialist agendas to the larger national struggle against colonialism.17 In turn, Muruwwa's critical project binds liberation from colonial rule to literature: he argues such liberation demands a realist literature that would be accessible to all people.
Muruwwa continues to revise his inheritance of the nahda's project of cultural education when he defines his category of al-adab al-muwajjah, or directed literature, as the only viable literary object. When Muruwwa writes his own treatise on Arab realism in his 1956 Qadaya Adabiyya (Literary Issues/Causes) after attending the Congress in Moscow in 1954, he opens the book with his response to the 1955 debate organized by UNESCO in Beirut between the Marxist Raʾif Khoury and Taha Husayn. The debate turns on the question of whom the writer should address, with Khoury arguing for writing for the masses and Husayn advocating that the writer address only the elite. Muruwwa, however, changes the question from whom writers write for to whom they write about.18 While the nahda's aim (for Taha Husayn) was to cultivate the public's aesthetic taste, an effort led by the elites, Muruwwa defines literary progress as the public's immersion in the national struggle and its connection with mass movements.19 Muruwwa proposes the idea of al-adab al-muwajjah (directed literature), inspired by Lenin's translated but uncited claim that “it is impossible to live in society, and be freed from it.”20 He defines al-adab al-muwajjah as realist literature equipped with “consciousness [waʿi] and purpose [qasd] coming from . . . a scientific approach to the world the writer lives in.”21 He names his “cause” (qadiyya): all writers are bound by their societies, but that does not mean they are bound by political directives. Muruwwa extracts his definition of a directed literature from the polemic on aesthetic values, what he names jamaliyat al-fann.22 One of the purposes of his manifesto, therefore, is to provide a set of aesthetic directives in the battle waged between the new realism in literature and art and other literary styles such as naturalism and Romanticism. While Taha Husayn defines art's purpose as a duty to represent the beautiful, Muruwwa objects that such an approach could easily turn into naturalism and reinforce the status quo instead of ingraining hope in readers for a better future.23 Decades later, his grandson Mroué would similarly grapple with the ways that art can engage the audience in interpreting the past by unsettling their present complacency.
Muruwwa articulated his polemic on aesthetic values in relation to the question of freedom circulating in Arab writers' circles. Jean Paul Sartre's idea of littérature engagée came into Arabic through Taha Husayn's translation of the term as iltizam in 1946. Iltizam assumed a more flexible form between 1955 and 1965, as Verena Klemm describes, that signaled a rift between writers who stuck with a doctrinal Marxist approach and those who found this rigid correlation between sociopolitical and aesthetic objectives to be closer to ilzam (compulsion).24 Some of these problems had already emerged in the Arab adaptations of Sartre's work: Arab intellectuals translated his idea of a littérature engagée (al-adab al-multazim) into a moral orientation in which the writer's responsibility is instead his or her artistic commitment to Arab society and nationalism. In the process, they abandoned Sartre's philosophical approach to the reader's freedom. The question of individual freedom was also one of the main topics of the Second All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers in Moscow (December 15–26, 1954). Although this conference is seen as less definitive than the first one in 1934, A. N. Staif notes that it “signaled the start of the process of reassessment of the Stalinist era” by making more room for the artist's individuality in a move away from strict politics.25
Muruwwa related the question of freedom directly to the writer's ultimate freedom to revise his or her own work toward the ends of socialist realism. Listening to Konstantin Fedin (1892–1977) at the Congress, Muruwwa observes a revisionary attitude toward the question of the writer's freedom in a Communist system, and comments on how self-criticism (al-naqd al-dhati) is instrumental to the sustainability of socialist realism.26 Mistakes are bound to happen, and the writer's duty in applying socialist realism is to continue to revise their work.27 Socialist realism does not depict reality as it is but anticipates and actively depicts what will be, and this anticipation is prone to error. Muruwwa understood, as Yoav Di-Capua explains, that “the practice of Socialist Realism made philosophical sense only within the framework of Marxism-Leninism.”28 Since the Arab world was not Marxist yet, Muruwwa instead proposes new realism as the appropriate literary style for social change: “We choose to name the realism that emerges in literature from dialectical and historical materialist thought in non-socialist countries new realism.”29 Muruwwa describes the impossibility of simply importing socialist realism into Arabic literature, but he does support its capacity to speak for (if not always to) the people. Muruwwa offers samples from speeches of Soviet writers to complete his theory of Arab realism: quoting Mikhail Sholokhov (1905–1984), he justifies the writer's alignment with the Communist Party as a duty of love and emphasizes the obligation to educate the people in the ideals of socialism before these materialize in political reality.30 From these observations, he derives his local manifesto on realism: against Romanticism and existentialism, he advocates for the literary text to be an organic whole whose content must reflect its social dimension.31 Soviet literary critics found literary criticism to be equal to and just as important as literary creation in that they both complement each other in envisioning and engineering the ideal society.32
Muruwwa's theory of criticism depends on the reader as the main object of the literary work. He insists that literature and art should be “tools” (adat) used to educate people in a way that equips them with a knowledge of the laws of social evolution.33 He inherits this aspirational aesthetic project of mass enlightenment from the nahda but adapts it to his socialist vision in a way that subjects the writer's aesthetic freedom to the collective's needs: this is precisely how Muruwwa imagines resolving the preexisting paradox of changing society or its literature first. For Muruwwa, the reader of socialist realism is not only the recipient of a literary work but also the object of the entire process of societal transformation. At the Moscow Congress, Muruwwa also observes the immediate correlation between socialist realism and political reality, such that there is no distinction between the aesthetic and the extra-aesthetic.34 Against “strange Arab existentialist literature,” Muruwwa wants a realist literature that promotes hope through a shared vision and poetics of context-attuned reading.35 In the speech he gave at the Congress, he describes how Soviet literature inspires Arab progressive writers to resist both imperialism and literature that “glorif[y] individualism and decadence, and strive . . . to create works that reflect . . . the struggle of the peoples, the growth of the forces of the working masses. With such works, the progressive writers instill in the hearts of the people . . . confidence in the future.”36 Hence, Muruwwa rejects Romanticism because he finds that in the contemporary moment, the ideal put forth by advocates of Arab Romanticism has collapsed, and only reality, the state of things as they are, remains.37
Muruwwa's polemic against Arab Romanticism signals his move toward a more universal project of critique that would espouse dialectical materialism as the absolute method of reading. This polemic unfolds in his response to Egyptian writer Luis Awad's (1915–1990) attack on the Marxists' realist doctrine, which Awad saw as essentially dogmatic.38 Muruwwa retorts that “the school of socialist realism objects to the worship of both individual [al-fard] and group [al-jamaʿa] but works for the benefit of the human [al-insan].”39 Awad's claim that Romanticism is now the definitive Arab literary style is defeatist, Muruwwa argues, because it is unable to account for the totality of cultural production, unable to consider the materialist conditions of class struggle in a productive way, and unable to account for the differences between a literature for life and one for society.40 New realism, on the other hand, would promote the human (al-insan) as opposed to the individual (al-fard) as a collective ideal that would make possible common identification. Muruwwa also attacks the subjective trend in Arabic poetry as committed to the poet's personal vision and not the collective vision: poetry should address the specific human (al-insan al-khass), he writes, but this human belongs to a specific culture, nation, and struggle.41 In the wake of the 1967 defeat, Muruwwa wants the intellectual to live with the people and motivate “their revolutionary and class consciousness,” for “there must be a unity between ideas and the world.”42 Muruwwa found Romanticism and experimental Arabic poetry to be detached from both the past and the present, and as such unable to educate the reader in a historical awareness and continuity that could produce a future socialist society. Citing Mahmud al-Amin's speech from the Second Arab Writers' Congress in Damascus (September 1956), Muruwwa reiterates that it is enough for literature to materialize the positive side of one's life story.43 In doing so, it acquires what he calls “an aesthetic quality,” which combines the writer's humanist position with the objective reality being depicted.44
The reader who learns how to achieve historical awareness also learns critical hope.
An education in critical hope is only possible through realist literature, because realism does not reinforce the status quo but, as Muruwwa understands it, rather offers a hopeful outlook on the future while emphasizing the positive attributes of the present that would contribute to this future. This means that critical hope is also bound to an understanding of historical continuity. Such an education in critical hope is possible when the critic is able to demonstrate to the reader that historical progress is conditioned by two laws: general laws that apply to all human societies and specific laws that derive their efficacy and presence from the particular context.45 Muruwwa defines the primary mission of criticism (naqd) as “educating the reader in understanding literary works and revealing their hidden meanings,” improving his or her taste and aesthetic sensibility, and relating these experiences to his or her particular moment, country, and society. This method then becomes a critical directive for the author: “On this same level, objective methodological criticism would enlighten the author or poet on the true values that his work contains or lacks.”46 Yet, and against the accusation that the socialist method would apply one doctrine to all, Muruwwa insists that such a method still relies on the subjective experience of the writer and not their unique individuality: while subjective experience makes room for shared values, a focus on individuality loses sight of the collective. The subject of critique, the pupil of Muruwwa's realist criticism, will be educated enough to discern the writer's subjective interpretation in line with a common human understanding of how to belong to one's world. These conditions of legibility come to establish literature and its purpose.47 Muruwwa soon recognizes, however, that the reader might misinterpret the writer's subjective interpretation and has to concede that criticism cannot be a search for truth without a method, so he develops a manhaj (methodology), setting up what he is doing as prescriptive.48 Muruwwa defends al-maddiyya al-jadaliyya (dialectical materialism) and al-maddiyya al-tarikhiyya (historical materialism) as methods that empower a human rather than erase their individuality: in recognizing their place in the larger historical trajectory, the individual acquires a real freedom, a more noble and complete joy of existence.49 Practical literary criticism develops into a more general approach to critique that addresses larger contemporary sociopolitical issues such as mobilizing the people toward creating the ideal socialist state.
The urgent task of critique post-1967 is to speak to the present moment. From the premise that socialist realism is a condition of legibility for all literary works, Muruwwa develops his method of critique, which takes its form in his study al-Nazaʿat al-maddiyya fi-l-falsafa al-ʿArabiyya al-Islamiyya (Materialist Tendencies in Arab-Islamic Philosophy), published in 1978, an 1,800-page project that is the product of the ten years he spent in Moscow completing his PhD.50 Muruwwa considers his return to the turath a necessary intervention against the feeling of defeat post-1967 and what he describes as cultural self-negation; he writes the legacy of the turath to speak to the present.51 His turn to a study of Islamic heritage is also the last Arab attempt at reading the heritage through a materialist lens: Muruwwa's return to the turath was a way of finding a theory for the present that could stand against extremist and Islamist turns.52 He revises the tension between idealism and materialism that previously defined his literary criticism into a more general approach to the history of philosophy. In this work, Muruwwa derives a theory of cultural borrowing that forms a more universalist project of critique.
In the two-hundred-page introduction to al-Nazaʿat, Muruwwa establishes his historical materialist practice in line with Marx's claim in Theses on Feuerbach that “philosophy used to be an interpretation of the world, but now it is its transformation.”53 Muruwwa traces an affinity between idealism and materialism in the histories of Western and Arab philosophy, as he explains the difference in the historical evolution of these trends.54 Idealist and materialist trends in Arab-Islamic philosophy have always been interconnected (tashabuk), he explains, to the extent that “it is impossible to extract these trends without researching all the philosophical directions they contain.”55 Considering the overlap between these two trends critically has a twofold purpose: First, it explains the relationship of the particular example to the general law in Arab philosophical thinking. Second, this materialist and detailed study helps us understand how cultural borrowing always unfolds in specific contexts of exchange, and hence is never one-sided but always a creative act of adaptation. Muruwwa lays out how Arab philosophy in the Abbasid age, for example, negotiated its own tradition with the influx of translations of Aristotle and Plato: Arab philosophers such as Ibn Sina made Aristotle speak to their metaphysical heritage because cultural borrowings always unfold in relation to the borrowing culture's social, political, and economic conditions.56 Critique here emerges as an act of contextual appropriation and interpretation, one that seamlessly connects the legacies of the past to the present moment.
In al-Nazaʿat, Muruwwa aims to reconcile his materialist approach with the metaphysical trends that populate Arab philosophy. He is aware of the trap of an absolute idealism, however, and so he draws a distinction between bourgeois metaphysical readings of the heritage and his own materialist study. For example, the bourgeois approach, he explains, has treated the turath exclusively in its present form and repurposed it to serve presentist agendas. Muruwwa urges revolutionary Arab thought to offer solutions against such abstractions of the turath: it must rewrite the heritage from within its ideology of class struggle, against the bourgeois metaphysical approach.57 However, this rewriting cannot do away with metaphysics. Revolutionary thought must come to terms with how metaphysical trends are themselves grounded in material bases and thus borne out of contextual needs that must inevitably engage with class struggle. But Muruwwa also recognizes that forms of thought do not always map squarely onto their materialist bases or conditions. As a cultural critic with a Marxist orientation, Muruwwa admits that forms of thought enjoy a certain independence from the base, while insisting that “the relationship of reflection/refraction [al-inʿikas] between them is an already established, absolute reality.”58 In a further attempt to reconcile his Marxist education with his position as a cultural critic, he advocates adopting a clear ideological stance—for him an essentially class-based position—in producing any “knowledge” of the turath.59 Muruwwa insists on reading contradictions between different ideas in the history of the turath: he recognizes that the turath materializes in the many approaches to it, “although the heritage, as a historical fact, is one.”60 From within this approach, the site of knowledge production, the conditions that determine how the object is read, supersede the object itself.
Just as Muruwwa understood culture in his realist project, he understood the turath to be constituted by how we know it. The historical specificity of the site of knowledge production constitutes the object of knowledge. Against the presentist approach that reads the turath only in its relevance to the present—ʿasranat al-turath—he proposes another process (sayrura): seeing the present as that which carries within it the achievements of the past and the potentialities of the future in a progressive dynamic engagement (dialectic).61 In lieu of bourgeois presentism, he puts forth asala or authenticity: the authenticity of Arab thought is precisely its historicity.62 Authenticity is measured not in the object's coincidence with itself; rather, authenticity is the measure of the historical understanding of the object's transformations in sites of knowledge production. This movement of history is a spiral, not linear: Rula Abisaab describes Muruwwa's method in al-Nazaʿat as coming to terms with the “spiral” movement of history between evolution and regression. Within this continuous movement, new rituals are created and eventually dissolve to make room for new ones.63 Against a linear view of history, Muruwwa measures the success of a method (manhaj) in its closing of the gap “between the method itself and its creative application.”64 Creative application entails two things: first, applying the method specifically to a materialist reading of the turath, and second, using this historicizing method to instill consciousness and agency in the reader, in effect cultivating a critical hope that envisions the future partly through a reading of the past.65 Creative application reveals ultimately that there is no one truth: citing Lenin, Muruwwa argues that for Marxists the only “absolute truth is made up of the mass of relative truths.”66
Much as he does in defining an Arab realism, Muruwwa registers this truth as based on universal, shared human values. There is a palpable tension here between a historical materialism that would consider contradictions of class struggle and thus the specific subject of colonial history, and an idealist approach to shared human values. While he critiques Arab approaches to the turath that abstract it from its historical context, he also attacks orientalist and openly racist readings of the turath that accompanied the rise of imperialism.67 Muruwwa singles out Hegel's racism as an example: Hegel dismisses Eastern philosophy entirely because it includes religious thought, a move Muruwwa identifies as racist and bourgeois.68 But Muruwwa also employs Hegel's law of negation (qanun nafi al-nafi) to explain how materialism and idealism overlapped in the history of Arab philosophy: one needed to negate the other to occasion new philosophical forms.69
Muruwwa also attacks theories of negritude for being too localized, arguing that they should rather be based on “discovering the reciprocal connection between national and world philosophy.”70 Even though he recommends looking for the commonalities between philosophical strains, he adds that this is not to say that all these ways of thought are completely harmonious but rather that we should be looking at their distinct traits and not the differences between them. Al-falsafa al-ʿalamiyya—the philosophy coming out of dominant countries and taking on a universal aspect—does not exist outside of power structures, and Muruwwa always advocated for fighting against colonialism. However, this philosophy does suggest that there is a universal human way of thinking. Muruwwa returns to his “insan” (human) of literary criticism to affirm this universal human way of thinking—“for thinking, Eastern or Western, is a reflection of being”—that could bridge cultures.71
Muruwwa conceives of cultural borrowing outside of the superiority-inferiority dyad and renders it rather dependent on the social situation that determines this borrowing, describing it as dialectical and objective, never based on personal whims or choices.72 His method is then bound to cultural translation and borrowing, and although he does not lose sight of the particularities of the turath, he does derive a more general theory of critique here: critique becomes a reassessment of categories of knowledge production and not simply of the object itself. Critique makes possible the act of reflecting on the meaning of the object—here the entire heritage—in the present, not according to a fixed set of norms, but only through a historicizing reflection in the present moment of reading.
There persists a palpable tension between Muruwwa's practical literary criticism applied to the particular aesthetic object and a more general form of critique derived from the study of the turath. Al-Nazaʿat's main contribution, he concludes his lengthy introduction, is reading the turath through a focus on issues (qadaya) and not personalities (shakhsiyyat).73 At the 1971 Lebanese Writers' Conference on the Crisis of Criticism, Muruwwa returns to this tension when he makes a distinction between madhhabiyya (ideology) and manhaj (methodology). Literary criticism is not simply an objective methodological approach but an act of creation, he asserts, because the critic must be motivated by both ideology and the subjective ability of taste to appreciate a work of art's essence.74 But this subjective taste remains bound to a universal truth, based on commonly shared human values.75 The tension between criticism as the subjective domain of taste and critique as the objective analysis of categories of knowledge production nonetheless assumes the same subject: a reader who is instructed in a method (manhaj) of reading that brings together universal values and particular context. This method of reading cultivates a critical hope because it helps the reader examine what elements of the past and present are useful in creating improved socialist futures, while it also instructs the reader on what to leave behind. This reader also participates in the making of the ideal socialist state by receiving an education in alternative, and more hopeful, futures. This education cannot be based on individual desire, but is built on a faith in universally shared human values. The reader's conversion to a materialist grounding in history assumes that the objective invective of critique subsumes an individual's particularity within the larger and more inclusive movement of history. For Muruwwa, authenticity is the measure of the historical understanding of the object's transformations in sites of knowledge production. For his grandson, Mroué, the artistic experience is also about understanding how the object of knowledge transforms when the conditions that shape it change. Mroué revisits his grandfather's notion of historicity and shows how this notion must also transform in new sites of knowledge production in Mroué's contemporary post–civil war moment.
2. The Remains of Critique: Rabih Mroué's Visual Art
While his grandfather struggled to reconcile the universality of art and philosophy with the particularity of Arab history, Rabih Mroué rejects any claim to universality and insists instead on “art's absolute contingency.”76 Such contingency relies on the moment of performance and viewing, not on the larger national or political context of the artwork. Mroué's spectator, a particular but not a predetermined person, is thus constituted in the moment of viewing and participates in the meaning-making process. Mroué's form of critique materializes in its divergence from his grandfather's conceptions of critique's aesthetic and social function, and also in his understanding of the viewer's experience of the artwork. Mroué does not assume a spectator who can be educated in universal values, and he rejects the category of a singular truth. However, as his grandfather suggested literature should do, Mroué's lecture-performances, video art, and installations invite the spectator in as an active participant, and they thus have the potential to shape the viewer's conceptions of the future.77 Mroué's form of critique thus also revises his grandfather's notion of critical hope: while his works allow the viewer to come to terms with an absent referent, whether that be a coherent past or present, a predictable future, or individual death, they do not equip him or her with any predetermined tools for interpretation and do not promise any transformative future.
Inspired by Sartre and Brecht, Arab theater of commitment of the 1960s through the 1980s considered the viewer the target of a predetermined political message. In redefining the viewer, Mroué revisits one of Sartre's questions that motivated the iltizam discourse of the 1950s: namely, for whom should one write? This is the same question that mobilized his grandfather's attack on Taha Husayn in 1955. Mroué rewrites the adaptation of Sartre's guiding role of the writer into an obligation to undo prescribed rules of legibility. Yvonne Albers finds that Mroué's only resonance with Sartre's agenda is the artist and spectator's “shared responsibility . . . that becomes visible in the aesthetic event through a ‘moment of reflective consciousness.’”78 Mroué's works reject both an imagined spectator who is “pre-located by the artist in a specific region and cultural context” and a “factual” spectator who is oblivious to issues related to local cultural knowledge and nationality.79
In revising his grandfather's notion of a committed reader or spectator, however, Mroué continues to rework the temporality of critique in the performance-turned-multimedia installation Three Posters. Three Posters was first performed in 2002 at the Ayloul Festival in Beirut and then presented at the Tate Modern in London in 2004 as an “unedited tape by Jamal al-Sati, a fighter for Lebanon's National Resistance Front, which shows three ‘takes’ of his martyr testimony rather than the approved version that was aired on Lebanese television.”80 The performance offers a critique of the secular left's use of video to promote televised martyrdom. In his artist's statement, Mroué explains, “Because we have been conditioned to believe that a video is a recording of a moment in the past, a dead moment, the medium represents the recovery of such moments—moments that by definition have already passed.” The repetition “created in the performance helped the audience accept this idea,” since the video recovers these moments and becomes the only record available to the spectator.81 The video foregrounds an absent referent and an absent singular truth by offering us many takes of the testimony in the performance. The recording anticipates the martyr's death: “It is about a fact that will become ‘true,’ but only after finishing the recording, hence it is a record that relates to the future.”82 As a medium of representation, the video captures both a dead and a future moment, rendering its object—here the martyr—present only in his imminent absence.
While Muruwwa advocated for the relative truths of Marxist critique, Mroué showcases how the absence of a single truth across the three takes of Jamal al-Sati's video forgoes the category of truth altogether by calling attention to the subject's conflicted attitude toward death. “Jamal's repetitions,” Mroué writes, “humble us in our own artistic enterprise: they ask how an artwork can be critical of the notion of ‘truth,’ while claiming to convey ‘truth,’ at the same time being a ‘fabrication of truth.’”83 The example of Jamal extends to a reassessment of the Lebanese left in the civil war (1975–1990), because it invites “a critical and autocritical assessment of the Left's absence today in the Lebanese political arena—and in a way, declares our defeat.”84 The possessive pronoun “our” implicates Mroué-as-artist in his grandfather's project, but unlike Muruwwa, Mroué is wary of the possibility of dictating a truth. Against his grandfather's method of reading the turath through a series of relative truths, Mroué's work rejects the category of truth as an organizing principle altogether and condemns it as the reason for his grandfather's and the left's defeat. Mroué's autocritical gesture is also importantly a situated one: as per his own assertion, Three Posters is explicitly dedicated to the particular Lebanese historical context and to Jamal's conflicted desire. He stopped performing the work when it became clear that responses to the attacks on the Twin Towers in New York in 2001 “foreclosed any possibility of insisting on a Lebanese specificity.”85 Returning to Sartre's dictum that the artist and spectator share an ethical obligation to their immediate environment, the ethics of situatedness dictate the artist's responsibility and compel his guilt in this case as well.
This situatedness of the critical gesture also departs from Mroué's grandfather's universal method of reading the turath. It places a specific demand on the viewer and reconfigures the role of the artist in relation to both his individual history and collective history. Hanan Toukan draws a distinction between the 1967 generation of Arab artists and intellectuals and the post-1990s generation, in that the latter rejects and “reworks” the idea of the collective. According to Toukan, the post-1990s generation redefines the national collective “within a global art framework that encourages introspective communication between artists, prioritizes interdisciplinary knowledge exchange, raises awareness of global issues on aesthetics and politics, and provides tools to reach global audiences.”86
But Mroué's works do carry on the legacy of his grandfather's notion of the collective as the main object of cultural production. For example, Jesse Leaneagh shows how in I, the Undersigned (2007, his first solo show in the United Kingdom), Mroué “addresses the lack of accountability of those responsible for the Lebanese Civil War by offering his own striking apology.”87 After 2011, I, the Undersigned was retitled The People are Demanding (2011), inspired by the Arab uprisings.88 Mroué explains the change in the title as a direct questioning of the Arabic word shaʿb, a plural noun that demands a singular verb, and as such the noun suggests a homogenizing of the people into one mass. The performance incorporates Arabic index cards hung on shelves that relay stories about specific characters or events in the civil war. English translations of excerpts from these brief texts are projected on an intervening wall. The index cards belong to his grandfather's library, but the arrangement of the Arabic text intentionally alienates the English-speaking viewer, leaving them “in a liminal state of unknowing” (though not utterly lost, because of the text on the wall). As Eleanor Nairne describes, “the artist accentuated the process of collating information in order to tease out our suspicion, if not skepticism, toward the end product: the clean historical narrative, even his own.”89
In transforming the “I” into “the people,” Mroué restages his personal history (the particular) to suggest it is equally elusive as the assumed universal (the uprisings as historical manifestations of a people's demand for freedom). The performance becomes about more than restaging a past war in a European context, a critique leveled against him by members of the 1967 generation.90 In the performance, the artist, the represented object (stories of war), and the assumed spectator participate in the aesthetic event. The absence of a coherent and singular narrative implies that the aesthetic experience cannot provide resolution but can only foreground the tension between the particular subject and their historical situation. I argue, however, that this is not a postmodernist incredulity toward linear history as much as it is an act of working through the disillusionment with previous political and critical projects that fed off notions of universal history and socialist emancipation. I contend that Mroué reworks rather than rejects a previous notion of the collective, since his performance deliberately stages his grandfather's index cards while transforming the artist's “I” into the people. Mroué reworks both the notion of the collective and of critical hope such that, like Muruwwa, Mroué sees addressing and conceptualizing the collective as an important aim of his work; but the work does not speak to the collective with the intention of sparking a singular future act such as socialist revolution.
Mroué continues to rework the artist's responsibility in relation to the collective by collecting “nondeliberate” videos of war in Syria in The Pixelated Revolution, which he first performed at the Baryshnikov Arts Center in New York as part of the PS122's Coil Festival (organized by MoMA) in January 2012.91 A non-academic lecture, as Mroué describes it, Pixelated opens with a nod to how these low-resolution cell-phone videos—what Mroué terms “polyvalent representations”—are the only valid records of the Syrian uprising.92 The performance focuses on the encounter between the sniper's gunpoint and the camera's lens. Mroué derives a list of nineteen directives—a form of aesthetic manifesto—from these videos, focusing on the lack of intervention by the videographers in the filming and the videos' lack of demand for accountability. He records these audio directives with captions and relevant stills from the uprising. Unlike his grandfather's manifesto, which was inspired by Soviet realism's intimate connection with socialist revolution, Mroué's manifesto is derived from the actual recordings and intends to undo the correspondence between an image and its object. Mroué explains how, even at gunpoint, the cameraperson continues to film the assassin.93 Even though the videos do not intend to demand accountability, Mroué concludes, the cameraperson's defiant filming compels the viewer to ask for accountability. The filming points to how reality and fiction overlap in this moment, and only the image, not the event, can be saved in the virtual world. As Mroué explains in the lecture, “the Syrian cameraman believes that he will not be killed: his death is happening inside the image. It seems that it is a war against the image itself.”94 These images blend the fiction of film with the reality of war, leaving the cameraperson unsure of the eminent danger and the sniper intent on ending the filming more than the cameraperson's life. One important audio directive that Mroué relays to the viewer says, “Do not worry about the clarity of the image, or its quality, or its resolution. What matters is to record the event as it takes place.”95
This record is, however, deeply embedded in a specific context. Mroué's works change forms from one venue to another: they turn from performances to installations to non-academic lectures. Across all these forms, however, Mroué has insisted that he will not change the content of what he is performing when he travels—or the central concern of his works, the critical capacity of the imagined spectator. Like Toukan, Arthur Downey questions what becomes of critique in a global art market: “Is there . . . a neutral position for critique and how do we rethink the institutionalization, instrumentalization, and commercialization of cultural production while also critiquing our own complicity, as cultural producers, in this process?”96 Mroué eschews neutrality as he understands it as already a politically implicated position, but he also rejects imposing any political directive on the audience.97 From the live performance to the mediated image to the non-academic lecture, Mroué's performance of critique emerges in the modalities of shifting forms. These shifting forms also dethrone the artist since, increasingly through his work, the “people” come to occupy the position of plural subject: the work now engages multiple subjects who are neither assumed nor fully formed. His grandfather's pedagogical project of educating the collective through socialist realism, a method of reading that can be taught, is rewritten into Mroué's imagined spectator: this spectator is not predetermined nor already constituted. In engaging with the work, the spectator forms their own conclusions about the event.
But Mroué recenters the object over the spectator; he does not simply celebrate the object's loss but rather stages this loss through the context that occasioned it. Fredric Jameson has described postmodern art in the neoliberal age as endowed with an aesthetics of singularity, wherein it appears to be unique in its moment, without any connection to its past or future.98 This implies that the reproducibility of the artwork would always be a singular appearance, cut off from any definite context that would render it legible in its iterability. In other words, every time the artwork is reproduced, it always appears disconnected from a definitive historical context. Mroué's art, however, even though it changes form from video to installation to performance, deliberately resists this logic of the singular. First, it insists on the context that produced it and continues to call on that context through visual and written cues even when the work is staged in other places. Even when it changes form, his art contests any decontextualized adaptation. Second, in its iterability in different forms—from lecture to video to installation—Mroué's work continuously offers new ways to represent the past but never detaches from that past or the past of the piece itself. These shifts in form determine Mroué's most articulate stance on critique: critique unfolds precisely in that shift between multiple forms, since each configuration continues to insist on previous and future iterations and on carrying forward a responsibility to the past well into an unknown and yet promising future. In holding on to responsibility to the past, Mroué also holds on to his grandfather's critical project: like his grandfather's, Mroué's work thus cultivates a kind of critical hope in viewers, although the artist does not imagine that this process will result in some kind of singular vision for the future.
Ultimately, Mroué does not give up on his grandfather's project of instilling critical hope in readers; rather, he reformulates the terms of engagement. The reader or viewer will not hope for a stable future but rather approach instability as a form of productive critique. This approach cannot claim to reach everyone and remains illegible to many, but the point is no longer to educate the masses—the intellectual has lost that authority. The point is instead to unsettle the spectator by making the aesthetic representation the only record of reality, and compelling them not to look for its reflection of a knowable social or political reality. While Muruwwa's critical hope survives precisely in that experience of the image, Mroué's works confirm that recognizing that the image is the only historical record left frees the viewer from a search for an authentic origin, and authenticity becomes instead bound to understanding the conditions that produced the image as a historical record.
Despite the differences in their critical practices, Mroué's art thus remembers and renders legible his grandfather's project by calling attention to its contingency and legacy for a contemporary Lebanese left. Chad Elias finds that for the artists who have “inherited the legacies of the defeated Lebanese left,” restaging the past becomes a “means of resisting a melancholic attachment” to their parents' generation. Mroué's work makes possible imagining a “different future” while still acknowledging its responsibility to the past.99 Toukan also describes the disillusionment of the post-1990s generation with the optimism and “naive” faith in revolution of the post-1967 generation, but she looks for continuities between the two, calling the 1967 generation a haunting presence in the contemporary art scene. She argues that after the Naksa, the post–civil war artists continued with the previous generation's “introspective tendency,” even though they did it in different forms and with a different notion of the collective.100
While the intellectuals of 1967 approached modernity as initiating social change, Toukan argues that the contemporary generation produces art that is “self-referential and primarily concerned with critical engagement.”101 Mroué's installations' changing forms point to the artwork's fabrication and thus remind the reader (or viewer) that the conditions of knowledge production determine the object. In contrast to his grandfather, however, Mroué rejects a constituted subject or individual and does not promise liberation. While Muruwwa understood critique to be inherently ideological—hence reading the turath from the vantage point of class struggle—his grandson's approach becomes a critique of ideology since it reworks the position of the artist/critic and the idea of the collective. Mroué's works compel us to return to the particularity of the aesthetic and individual experience, urging us to carry on with critique outside of any promise for transformative social change, and toward a reckoning with the legacies of the past on both individualistic and collective registers.
Reading Muruwwa's and Mroué's approaches to critique together confirms that we might read more productively for continuities than ruptures in these generational inheritances. The post-1967 intellectual turn inward is better framed as a rewriting of previous critical projects. The possibilities of critique in the present as a social practice that still demands the participation of the reader/viewer solidify in Mroué's remembering and rewriting of his grandfather's project. Just as Muruwwa found authenticity in historicity, Mroué's works demand attention to how knowledge of the past can be achieved only through the viewer's participation in its interpretation.
3. Afterlives of Critique: Legacies of Hope Today
When asked about his grandfather's influence on him, Mroué says, “My family was influenced by [Muruwwa's] commitment to secular atheism, but my own work questions a dogmatic allegiance to the politics of the Communist Party.”102 For Muruwwa, the liberation of the reader was possible through a literary education, a reading practice that would consider the aesthetic particularities of a given text, its universal values, and its contextual situatedness. The practice of critique was the domain of the critic; critique was a translation of this literary reading into a more general consideration of how objects of knowledge become constituted and how they appear in the world. Muruwwa understood the importance of a critique for his present moment, especially in resisting the defeatist attitude to forgoing the past in mapping Arab cultural futures. His remained a hopeful but also militant outlook that saw the future unfold in a specific way, bound to predetermined political ideals. Such a project assumed liberation but could not in its moment achieve emancipation. Muruwwa was aware of this limitation, and it manifested most poignantly in his literary criticism in the tension between the open-ended category of subjective taste and the objective demand of a materialist critique. Mroué's multimedia works pick up on this limitation and express a more articulated disillusionment with a universal movement of history. However, I argue that Mroué's skepticism is not postmodern in critiquing metanarratives of social and political transformation. Rather, his works express disillusionment with, but not rejection of, previous political projects such as his grandfather's, which built on such ideas.
For Mroué, the artwork transforms from a medium of instruction to an event, but for both he and his grandfather, the artwork still demands the participation of the reader or viewer. The addressee, however, is not the same for both. Muruwwa assumes a universality even when treating specific contexts (as in reading Islamic history through the lens of class struggle). Muruwwa finds that the category of the individual threatens his political project, and he produces his theory of naqd as one that foregrounds universally shared human values instead. These values also determine his addressed subject: everyone can be taught to discern these shared values, Muruwwa finds, in the broader pedagogical project of educating the masses. Contrarily, Mroué espouses a more contingent approach, bringing the individual back to critique not as a universal subject but rather as a promise of subjective constitution in the critical enterprise of engaging with the artwork. Mroué's works capitalize on the political instability that has determined Arab reality since 1967. Mroué's changing forms draw attention to the absence of a universal truth and a political subject who can be told what to remember and how to act. Mroué repeatedly effaces himself in his performances, replacing the “I” with a collective, but as he insists in his interviews and as his work demonstrates, one erasure does not happen at the expense of the other. The “I” still matters, Mroué affirms, but only because it addresses its interlocuter.103
I argue that this reimagining of critique from grandfather to grandson allows us to reassess its role regardless of the differences in their approaches, assumptions and historical moments. Mroué's work invites us to consider hope less as the promise of a better future, the happy ending promised by socialist realism, and more in an awareness of how we are affected by a past of war and how we could become complacent in that knowledge. He challenges the viewer to consider the following question: how do we move past individual dispositions toward multiple subject positions that can participate in and imagine other better futures? Somewhere between these two figures, the universal and the particular become less absolute binaries and more promising categories that help other critics and me think through this historical moment and the promises of critical theory today. From within this intergenerational space, I heed Muruwwa's advice to avoid adopting a presentist approach and instead to think through the relevance of the past to the present. I also hear Mroué's call to recognize the failure of the nationalist project and to enter the artistic space with an openness to the past as the only pathway to a reimagined future. What I am left with, as I inherit these two complementary forms of critique, is the question of for whom a politics of hope, either in the form of action or awareness, is possible today.
Notes
The Naksa (setback) or 1967 defeat refers to the Arab defeat against Israel in June 1967, which sealed Israel's occupation of East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, as well as the Syrian Golan Heights and Egypt's Sinai Peninsula, solidifying its control over the last 22 percent of historic Palestine left over from 1948. Auto-critique here refers to the Arab intellectuals' attitude of self-criticism after the defeat. Steve Tamari describes Husayn Muruwwa's exceptional rejection of the dominant “cultural browbeating” post-1967, as he was one of the very few intellectuals who believed the June defeat to be a military and not a cultural one (“Reclaiming the Islamic Heritage,” 121). Fadi Bardawil quotes the post-1967 intellectuals' disillusionment with the youth's ability to affect complete revolution when they are still too attached to tradition and the past (“Inward Turn,” 96).
Although he was known as a moderate intellectual, in 1987, during the raging battles of the Lebanese Civil War (1975–90), Muruwwa was assassinated in his bed. According to Samer Frangie, Muruwwa's murder punctuated the death of the Lebanese left and ushered in the rise of extremism in its place. See Frangie, “Afterlives of Husayn Muruwwa.”
In 2014, he cowrote Riding on a Cloud with his brother Yasser (b. 1970), who had also been wounded in the Lebanese Civil War. Yasser was shot by a sniper, and the shot caused paralysis and aphasia. Riding on a Cloud registers their inheritance of the past from a collective dream of change to a private experience of loss.
Muruwwa turns to critique from literary criticism after the publication of Dirasat Naqdiyya (Critical Studies) in 1965. His translation of socialist realism into new realism mediates his transition to a more general form of critique in Al-Nazaʿat al-maddiyya fi-l-falsafa al-ʿArabiyya al-Islamiyya (Materialist Tendencies in Arab-Islamic Philosophy) (1978).
Elizabeth Kendall, for instance, critiques generational thinking in literary criticism because it can replace the engagement of literary innovation with a focus on age and obscure the simultaneous and varied generations that Arab writers identify with. See Kendall, Literature.
See Al-Safir (September 24, 1985), quoted in Di-Capua, “Homeward Bound,” 47. A militant literary critic, Muruwwa was editor of the two leftist Lebanese journals: Al-Tariq (The Path) (1949) and Al-Thaqafa al-Wataniyya (National Culture) (1951). For more on Muruwwa's transforming political affiliations, see Younes, “Tale of Two Communists,” 105–6, 110.
The Arab renaissance was an intellectual revival that took place from 1798 until the 1950s. In “Min al-Najaf Dakhal Hayati Marx,” Muruwwa describes his later encounter with the real Marx though Husayn Muhammad al-Shubayshi, and his turn to Marxism after the Wathba, or the 1948 Iraqi revolution against the Plymouth Accord with the British. See Muruwwa, “Min al-Najaf Dakhal Hayati Marx,” 89–101. For more historical background on Jabal Amil, see Abisaab and Abisaab, Shi'ites of Lebanon.
In Arabic, “al-haraka al-naqdiyya fi-l-waqiʿiyya al-jadida.” Muruwwa, Qadaya Adabiyya, 25.
Muruwwa develops a similar stance on the Islamic heritage.
Muruwwa, Qadaya Adabiyya, 20. Muruwwa later leaves Taha Husayn radically behind when he describes Husayn's work as a prisoner of a regressive Salafism (Al-Nazaʿat, 1:115).
Thomas Lahusen argues that socialist realism's continuous self-revision makes it into an “open aesthetic system,” as opposed to modernist accusations of its limited form. See Lahusen, “Socialist Realism.”
In Arabic, “al-naqd ʿamalan adabiyyan”; Muruwwa, Qadaya Adabiyya, 112.
In Arabic, “tathqif al-nass”; Muruwwa, Qadaya Adabiyya, 39.
Evgeny Dobrenko has compellingly argued that “Socialist Realism continually produced new symbolic capital, namely, socialism” (Political Economy of Socialist Realism, 5).
Muruwwa, Dirasat, 66. Robin Creswell's recent book City of Beginnings focuses on the Arab modernist poets' use of “human” and “individual” in promoting an art-for-art's-sake movement.
Muruwwa, Dirasat, 77, 80. For more on Awad's misreading of Husayn Muruwwa, see Istaif, “Going beyond Socialist Realism.”
Muruwwa, “Thahira Jadida,” 69. Muruwwa explains his personal opposition to the art-for-art's-sake movement of the Shiʿr group of poets (1957–70) who misrepresented his project as reducing art to propaganda. The Shiʿr group included Yusuf al-Khal and the poet Adonis, who published their journal of experimental poetry Shiʿr (Poetry, 1957–70) in Beirut strictly in a move against committed literature. Also see Muruwwa, Sirat, 111–12.
Tamari, “Reclaiming the Islamic Heritage,” 123. He cites Husayn Muruwwa's articles “Al-Haraka al-thaqafiyya al-arabiyya fi muwajahat harb khamsa haziran” (“The Arab Cultural Movement in the Face of the June 5 War”), Al-Tariq, no. 3 (June 1968): 16–33, and “Hadariyyat al-insan al-arabi” (“Civilization of the Arab”), Al-Tariq, no. 2 (March 1968): 20.
He cites Georg Lukács's argument in Studies in European Realism that the realist writer has a humanist mission to reveal deep knowledge of the rules of life and progress, historical conditions, and universal human feelings. Muruwwa, Dirasat, 105.
He died before completing the third volume.
Muruwwa's drive behind a materialist study of the heritage is best articulated in his response to the April 1974 conference in Kuwait on the crisis of civilizational progress in the Arab world. The conference's implicit question was whether to continue with critique after the defeat. Muruwwa disagrees with how the deliberators' sectarian and nationalist agendas dismiss the turn to the past as regressive. See “Azmat al-Tattawur al-Hadari al-Arabi,” 2–5.
Muruwwa, al-Nazaʿāt, 1:22.
Muruwwa, al-Nazaʿat, 1:53n1. In “Marhala Jadida fi Dirasat al-Turath al-Arabi” (“A New Phase in the Study of the Arab Heritage”) published in Al-Tariq in 1979, Muruwwa advises that a scientific study of the turath would equip the contemporary Arab liberation movement with “an intellectual, ideological and political weapon to confront the regressive weapons of psychological warfare, nihilism and cosmopolitanism, isolationism, racism, etc.” (quoted in Barhuma, al-Turath, 56). On the controversial reception of the book, see Barhuma, especially chap. 2.
Toward the end of his life, Husayn Muruwwa ran for elections in the South of Lebanon as he outlined the premise of the writer and politician as one and the same: reconciling abstract ideas with their application in real life. See Muruwwa in Al-Nidaʾ (November 20, 1984), quoted in Muruwwa, Sirat, 776–77.
Muruwwa, al-Nazaʿat, 1:197. In the introduction to Turathuna kayfa naʿrifuhu (Our Heritage, How Do We Know It) (1986), he confesses to his own “mistake” of initially reading too much into the lives of Classical writers. See Muruwwa, Turathuna, 9–15, 11.
In Arabic, he writes, “al-qudra al-dhatiyya ʿala al-tadhawwuq.” See “Nadwa fi Azmat al-Naqd al-Adabi” (“A Conference on the Crisis of Arab Criticism”) (January 1971), Al-Tariq, no. 2 (February 1971): 96 and 159 (quoted in Muruwwa, Sirat, 607–8).
“Waqiʿiyyat al-Waqiʿiyya” (“The Realism of Realism”) in the magazine Al-Wihda (Tunis, 1984), republished in Muruwwa, Sirat, 775.
Rabih Mroué rebelled against his grandfather's and his teachers' teachings at the Lebanese University, and specifically against the committed Arab theater of the 1960s and 1970s that addressed a distinctly local spectator as the central target of a political theatrical space. For example, in The Inhabitants of Images (2009), he pits his grandfather's picture against rigid images of Hizbullah martyrs. His grandfather's photo hangs on concealed, private walls, his image permanently exiled from the streets. Mroué describes the image as “absent,” referring to the “absence of their party, of our party, of the role of the Left.” Quoted in Frangie, “Afterlives,” 254.
From Sartre, “For Whom Does One Write?,” quoted in Albers, “Empty Chair,” 327–28.
This multimedia performance focused on an unedited suicide tape by a Lebanese National Resistance fighter called Jamal al-Sati. The work displays three takes of the testimony while only one was aired on the Lebanese national television station Télé Liban in 2002. In 2004, Three Posters was made into a video that reflects on the original performance (Tate Modern). For more on this performance, see Elias, Posthumous Images, 75–92.
Mroué and Hahn, “‘Thinking with an Audience,’” 133.
See Leaneagh, “Oscillating Absurdities.” Leaneagh describes the alienating effect of the installation, whereby the viewer only makes sense of it by the end of the written excerpts, which include the index cards from Husayn Muruwwa's library. Leaneagh writes, “By suspending the visitor in a liminal state of unknowing, Mroué prevented his audience from getting utterly lost in the emotive stories surrounding his family.”
Hanan Toukan has recently argued that Mroué's art promises only an “ontological exploration of emancipation” but not a real form of liberation, due mainly to its limited audience who requires a certain cultural capital to access it. See Toukan, “Liberation or Emancipation?,” 271.
