10.13135/2036-542X/7960
The paper examines the phenomenon of emancipation, not in terms of changes in personal status and rights, not in terms of changes in social structures and structures of power, but in terms of the anthropological metaphysics found at the core of the emancipatory effort. Having first traced this matter in the history of the concept of emancipation and secondly explored it phenomenologically in the Tunisian Revolution, the paper concludes by pointing to a fundamental difference between the traditional notions of emancipation and its recent manifestation in Tunisia; a difference, namely, between the human being as possessing and producing, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, as a primarily responsive being. This being–responsive at the same time sheds new light on the concept of freedom and how the experience of freedom and of being human guides the project of emancipation.
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2036-542X
7960
1
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Rasmus Dyring
Trópos
Responsiveness
A Spectacle of Disappearance: 
Text.Serial.Journal
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8
Monografica
2015-07-15
2023-07-30
2015-07-15
2023-07-30
11-33
1
Rasmus Dyring
2015/07/15
10.13135/2036-542X/7960
11
2036-542X
1
Responsiveness
33
A Spectacle of Disappearance: 
https://ojs.unito.it/index.php/tropos/article/download/7960/6690
8
                                                       trópos • anno VIII • numero 1 • 2015 – ISBN 978-88-548-8594-3
                                                            DOI 10.4399/97888548859432 – pag. 11-33 (giugno 2015)




                                        A Spectacle of Disappearance
                        On the Aesthetics and Anthropology of Emancipation

                                                                                    R D



   : The paper examines the phenomenon of emancipation, not in terms of
      changes in personal status and rights, not in terms of changes in social struc-
      tures and structures of power, but in terms of the anthropological metaphysics
      found at the core of the emancipatory effort. Having first traced this matter
      in the history of the concept of emancipation and secondly explored it phe-
      nomenologically in the Tunisian Revolution, the paper concludes by pointing to
      a fundamental difference between the traditional notions of emancipation and
      its recent manifestation in Tunisia; a difference, namely, between the human
      being as possessing and producing, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, as a
      primarily responsive being. This being–responsive at the same time sheds new
      light on the concept of freedom and how the experience of freedom and of
      being human guides the project of emancipation.

   : Philosophical Anthropology, Tunisian Revolution, Emancipation, Exis-
      tential Anthropology, Responsiveness.



. Introduction: The Question of Emancipation as the Question of the
   Human Being
                                Alle Emanzipation ist Zurückführung der menschlichen Welt, der
                                Verhältnisse, auf den Menschen selbst.
                                                                                M : 


Let this formula from Marx’s Zur Judenfrage be the guiding slogan of this
essay. In the same text Marx instructs us that, when examining the phe-
nomenon of emancipation,
   [e]s genügte keineswegs zu untersuchen: Wer soll emanzipieren? Wer soll emanzip-
   iert werden? Die Kritik hatte ein Drittes zu tun. Sie mußte fragen: Von welcher Art der
   Emanzipation handelt es sich? Welche Bedingungen sind im Wesen der verlangten
   Emanzipation begründet? (M : )

  Hence, instead of focusing on the emancipated and the emancipators,
however justified or urgent their particular causes might be, the question to

                                                                                                                
      Rasmus Dyring


ask is that about the kind of emancipation and the metaphysical conditions
and commitments it carries. Now, if we are correct in assuming with our
slogan that all emancipatory efforts refer back somehow to the human
being as such; if emancipation is always a matter of making the world a
place for human beings to dwell qua human beings, it immediately places
at the core of the question of emancipation the question of the human
being. Hence, when asking the question of the kind of emancipation the
inquiry should not be limited to an examination of the societal structures
that appear to obstruct or further the realization of human freedom; the
structures within which a person or group of persons are elevated to a
higher level of liberties and rights, or the structures that are destroyed in
order that a new structuring of society more in tune with (what is presumed
to be) humanity proper may arise. Heeding the anthropological “essence”
of emancipation, the task should be that of investigating how emancipatory
phenomena might expose — perhaps only in short glimpses and through
the tight cracks in the (structural) walls — the being of human beings and
how this exposition, this experience of being human, might inspire, perhaps
even ground, the emancipatory effort of Zurückführung of the world auf den
Menschen selbst.
    In what follows I will do two things; first, sketch a short genealogy that
will show how emancipation has traditionally been cast in the image of “the
hand”: the hand possessing the power to give and take freedom, and in turn,
the hand that destroys bondage and produces freedom. These schemata share
the basic understanding that the problem of human freedom is ultimately
a matter for human beings to handle: freedom is within the grasp of human
hands. Secondly, I shall focus on the importance to the emancipatory effort
of experiences of freedom that impose upon human beings only to withdraw
beyond the grasp of human hands: experiences of freedom that expose the
human being, not as possessor, not as fabricator, not even primarily as
actor, but as a being that is characterized existentially by a non–substantive
being–responsive. To this end I will undertake a phenomenological analysis
of the political posture of self–immolation assumed by Mohamed Bouazizi ,
who, as it turned out, thereby instigated the Tunisian Revolution. As one
commentator of the events in Tunisia observes:

     This revolution in Tunisia is a typical example of the self–mobilisation of ordi-
     nary people for their own emancipation, independent of a vanguard party or
     self–proclaimed revolutionaries. The iteration of the Tunisian revolution in other
     parts of Africa and the Middle East is fast becoming a pattern that speaks volume
     about the nature of st century revolutions. (C )

    . Elsewhere I have analyzed Bouazizi’s act within a framework of “the concerted praxis of
being human” and in particular as an instance of so called “provocative action.” Cfr. D 
                                                       A Spectacle of Disappearance      


    The expectation in turning to the Tunisian Revolution is thus that it might
grant us a particularly clear view of the very event whence the emancipatory
effort arose; a view not too cluttered by ideological preparations and retrospec-
tive justifications. Focusing on Bouazizi’s self–immolation at the initiation of
the emancipatory process, the present approach in some respects mirrors an-
thropologist Victor Turner’s approach to the process of rites de passage: Instead
of merely noting that a neophyte through a ritually mediated process went
from one structural state with certain rights and duties to another, Turner
zeroed in on the very liminal phase betwixt and between the clearly defined
structural states. Here he found that the liminal phase exhibits an endogen type
of “unstructured” social organization (T , ). The hypothesis
to be pursued throughout this essay is that the phenomenon of emancipa-
tion as Zurückführung — as the transpositioning–back — of the world onto
the ground of the properly human must be traced into the abyssal depths
of such liminal experiences of human community.


. A Short Genealogy of Emancipation

.. Ex Manus Capere

The concept of emancipation has its origin in early Roman Law. Here
it specifically designated the process by which the head of a family, the
paterfamilias, set free a family member, most often a son (filiusfamilias),
from his supreme paternal authority, his patria potestas. It is important to
note that this process was significantly different from that of freeing a slave,
which in Roman Law was termed manumissio. However, both these terms
play on the word manus, hand. Missio manu is literally the “the sending away
by the hand”, whereas emancipatio, with its etymological roots in mancipatio
(transaction of property), from manus + capere, to take, designates a taking
out of the fatherly hand — ex manus capere — of the son by the father
(M : , ). Add to this picture that a woman by marriage
comes to be in manu of her husband; she is submitted to a “power as
absolute and unrestrained as that of a father over his children in respect of
his patria potestas, or of a master over his slaves by reason of the dominica
potestas.” (M : ) The Paterfamilias qua husband, qua father and
qua owner of the estate held in his hand a power that was supreme to the
extent of ruling over the life and death of the members and the property (in
casu the slaves) of the estate (M : ) .

   . This power was increasingly limited during the Imperial age. This, however, is not of
importance to greater picture painted in this section (cfr. M : )
     Rasmus Dyring


    On the authority of the patria potestas, the paterfamilias could sell a son
into slavery and he could set a son free from his authority. However, given the
sons agnatic status — i.e. that he was related by blood to the family “empire”
— definitively separating the son from the patria potestas and the rights
and privileges inhering in the agnatic relation was not a straight–forward
matter (M : ). Upon selling his son into slavery (or, as it were,
pledging him to another master) the son would remain agnatically tied to
the family and return in potestas of the farther, and to his former status and
privileges, if he was eventually to be manumitted by the person to whom
he was sold/pledged. The slave (by birth or capture), on the other hand,
since he was without such agnatic status, citizenship and liberty in the eyes of
Roman Law, and hence merely and literally a thing (res), a piece of property,
could be manumitted immediately at the will of the master, and as freedman
acquire the legal statuses of liberty and citizenship with the former owner
remaining merely related to the him as patron (M : ,). If a
father were to manumit his son, like he would manumit a slave, the son
would immediate return in potestas of the father due to the strength of the
agnatic tie. However, a legal path for the definitive severance of the agnatic
tie was provided: according to early Roman Law selling a son three times
would break the claim of the patria potestas on him and at the same the son’s
recourse to the family privileges. By the procedure of mancipatio — a mode
of transferring the ownership of certain types of property (res mancipi) such
as immobile property, farming equipment and slaves — the father would sell
his son three times to a person who by agreement with the father would
manumit the son immediately and hence send the son back in potestas of
the father. However, after the third sale, which legally freed the son from
the patria potestas, instead of the other person manumitting the son from
his ownership, the father would buy back the son in order to manumit him
himself, thereby becoming the patron of the now freed son (Melville : ,
). No longer alieni juris, i.e. under the authority of another, but juris sui,
autonomous, the son is now in a position to attain for himself the potestas of
an estate by marrying and establishing a family (M : ).
    In summary, the original schema of emancipation is that of a supreme
ruler that possesses the autonomous power (juris sui) to take out of his
hand — ex manus capere — a portion of this power to allow a person
otherwise in potestas, and hence, alieni juris, to become himself juris sui.
Curiously, this transferal of autonomous power was only legally possible
by transforming those whose freedom was in question into a certain type of
thing that could be owned and sold, and hence, be taken in hand only to be,
in turn, taken out of the hand (ex manus capere). Early Roman emancipation
is thus conditioned by an anthropology of the possessing human being, and,
derived from this notion, the human being as a thing that can be owned.
                                                                A Spectacle of Disappearance          


.. A Bill of Lading for the Delivery of Freedom

In the eighteenth and nineteenth century, when the concept of emanci-
pation became explicitly tied to the question of slavery, the relationship
between the possessing hand and the matter of freedom was still at its
core.
    During the American Civil War, on January , , Abraham Lincoln
finalized the so called Emancipation Proclamation that made public that the
slaves in the rebelling southern states, in the eyes of the U.S. government,
were free. The Proclamation has since been criticized for expressing “all
the moral grandeur of a bill lading,” the subtext of this critique being that
Lincoln only freed the slaves in order to enlist them in the Union army
(H : , cfr. B ). Hence, the critique goes, emancipa-
tion of the slaves was not a moral matter, but a question of military logistics,
and the text of the Proclamation manifests just this. However, for Lincoln
the problem of the abolition of slavery could not be solved simply by taking
presidential action on moral outrage without committing at the same time
the more destructive crime of acting in violation of the U.S. constitution.
The particular quandary in which Lincoln found himself, was to balance, on
the one hand, the fundamental metaphysico–anthropological intuition of
the Declaration of Independence, “that all men are created equal, that they are
endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these
are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” and, on the other hand, the
Fifth Amendment stating that “No person shall be. . . deprived of life, liberty,
or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken
for public use, without just compensation.” Hence, while the slave qua
human being was unalienably free sub specie aeternitatis (and Lincoln, as is
evident, for instance, by his attempts already in the late ’ies at abolishing
slavery in Washington D.C, believed this to be true), the slave qua de facto
property could not be expropriated from an owner without “due process of
law.” (cfr. F : )
    The text of the Emancipation Proclamation echoes the winding legal path
— not unlike the winding legal path of the ceremony of emancipatio in early
Roman Law — that Lincoln had to travel in order to emancipate the slaves
without violating the constitution:

    . . . on the first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred
    and sixty–three, all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a

     . Cfr. transcription of the Declaration of Independence: www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/decla-
ration_transcript.html
     . Cfr. transcription of the Bill of Rights: www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/bill_of_rights_tran-
script.html
      Rasmus Dyring


     State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall
     be then, thenceforward, and forever free. . . 

    First of all, the Proclamation pronounces as free only the slaves in the
states “in rebellion against the United States”, not the slaves in the loyal slave
states, and it makes no appeals to grand moral ideas such as those expressed
in the Declaration of Independence. The reason for this narrow scope, and the
implicit lack “of moral grandeur,” was that the U.S. Government, without
being in violation of the Fifth Amendment, could confiscate the property of
those who threatened and conspired against the Union, and made use their
property in this endeavor. Because the slaves, just like other kind of property,
such as the guns and horses, was used in the war effort by the southern
Confederacy, the Union was constitutionally justified in expropriating this
property without “due process of law” or “just compensation.”
    As it was the case two millennia earlier, emancipation in the case of
American slavery, hinged on the legally acknowledged being–property of
those whose freedom was in question: only by recognizing the slave not as
a free human being, but as property, was it possible within the legal frame-
work to deliver the slaves from their bondage. This at the same time testifies
to the relative weight of the metaphysico–anthropological frame–of–mind
that grounds this legal framework; namely that the individual “pursuit of
happiness”, that in the Fifth Amendment is protected in terms of the right of
private property (in casu the property of the slave owner), outranks individ-
ual liberty (in casu the liberty of the enslaved human being). As a historian
of law points out , the characterization of the Emancipation Proclamation
as “a bill of lading” is actually, in the light of this legal balancing act, quite
accurate: “A bill of lading was the key legal instrument that guaranteed the
delivery of goods between parties that were far apart and may never have
known each other.” (Finkelman : ) Lincoln, a skilled, former railroad
lawyer, drew up “a carefully crafted, narrow document: a bill of lading for
the delivery of freedom. . . ” (F : )

.. Emancipation as the Production of the Freely Producing Human Being

Alongside this traditional notion of emancipation that crystallized in pro-
cesses of delivery of liberty modelled on legal processes of transaction of
property and was grounded in an anthropological metaphysic of the pos-
sessing human being — in Antiquity, the paterfamilias, in modernity, with

     . Cfr. transcription of the Emancipation Proclamation: www.archives.gov/exhibits/fea-
tured_documents/emancipation_proclamation/transcript.html
     . Finkelman, however, takes issue with the hypothesis that the lack of moral grandeur in the
text should be a sign of a lack of moral commitment as regards Lincoln himself.
                                                        A Spectacle of Disappearance        


Locke, the self–possessing individual — a new schema of emancipation be-
gan to emerge with the growing power of the bourgeoisie in the city–states
of the Renaissance and culminated in the American and French revolutions;
namely emancipation not as a legally sanctioned process by which those in
power hand out liberties to those not yet of their status, but emancipation
as self –emancipation, as the more or less violent struggle of the “unfree”
against the prevailing organization of society and the structures that prevent
their liberation.
    Prepared in Enlightenment philosophy and epitomized in the American
and French Revolutions, the notion of the possessing human being, while
still taking center stage, showcases a quite drastic metaphysical transforma-
tion: self –emancipation appeals (at least retrospectively) to the possession
not of arbitrarily acquired property and privileges, but to an inalienable
possession of rights inherent in individual human life qua human. For Marx,
the recognition of this apotheosis of the possessing human being becomes
a cornerstone in his critical thinking in general and, in particular, in his
critique of the kind of political emancipation most notably found in the
bourgeois–revolutions in North America and France.
    While political emancipation — i.e. the elevation of the formerly pow-
erless to an institutionalized level of political power — is certainly great
progress, Marx writes, “sie ist zwar nicht die letzte Form der menschlichen
Emanzipation überhaupt, aber sie ist die letzte Form der menschlichen
Emanzipation innerhalb der bisherigen Weltordnung.” (M : , em-
phasis added) The political emancipation is hence merely a restructuring
within an order that as such is the root of human unfreedom. But what
Marx here calls Weltordnung essentially boils down to the anthropological
question; because if all emancipation is the Zurückführung of the world auf
den Menschen selbst, the differences between political and properly human
emancipation will be found in the kind of human experience that guides and
grounds this Zurückführung.
    With the bourgeois–revolutions, feudal society was resolved into its
human ground. But since the agentive apex of this revolutionary distillation
was the bourgeoisie, the human residue that remained was the human qua
bourgeois, the individual, der egoistische Mensch.

   Die droits de l’homme erscheinen als droits naturels, denn die selbstbewußte Tätigkeit
   konzentriert sich auf den politischen Akt. Der egoistische Mensch ist das passive, nur
   vorgefundne Resultat der aufgelösten Gesellschaft, Gegenstand der unmittelbaren
   Gewißheit, also natürlicher Gegenstand. (M : )


   Hence, the possessing human being that we find apotheosized in the
notions of unalienable human rights has its ground in this experience of a given
    Rasmus Dyring


natural human being. But emancipation must be more radical than this; it
must transcend not just the societal structures, but just as much this given
human being itself, if it is to break the shackles of (self–imposed) structural
imprisonment: “Die politische Revolution löst das bürgerliche Leben in seine
Bestandteile auf, ohne diese Bestandteile selbst zu revolutionieren und der
Kritik zu unterwerfen.” (M : )
    This revolutionary human emancipation hinges, on the one hand, on the
critical acknowledgement that the “natural” human being is historically pro-
duced in the furnaces of the productive forces and their societal organization
and, on the other hand, on the revolutionary reorganization of the relations
of production so as to make possible the production of the new, free human
being — der kommunistische Mensch. This happens only when the human
being “in seinem empirischen Leben. . . Gattungswesen geworden ist, erst
wenn der Mensch seine ‘forces propres’ als gesellschaftliche Kräfte erkannt
und organisiert hat. . . ” (M : ) With this becoming Gattungswesen,
becoming “species–being”, becoming communal, the destructive socioeco-
nomic forces, that in the capitalist–bourgeois society was created “aus dem
Aufeinander–Wirken der Menschen” and which “ihnen bisher als durchaus
fremde Mächte imponiert und sie beherrscht haben,” are brought under
communal “Controle und bewusste Beherrschung. . . ” (M : ) This
matter, however, is now no longer merely a question of societal structures,
but of “eine massehaften Veränderung der Menschen,” of an anthropoge-
nesis in which subjects do not create themselves like Nietzsche, and later
Foucault, would have it: the emancipatory anthropogenesis is a process in
which “die Individuen allerdings einander machen, physisch und geistig. . . ”
Thus, with the human being’s becoming communal, that is, positing the
“Gesellschaft als Subjekt” the question of emancipation becomes a matter
of the “Selbsterzeugung der Gattung.” (M : –) Human emanci-
pation is grounded — has its mode of Zurückführung — in the communal
creation of a communal being. Human freedom, on this account, lies in the
self–identity, the non–alienation, the unalienability of a communally created
human substance.
    Hence, with Marx’s radicalization of emancipation we find at the same
time a radical shift in the guiding anthropological metaphysics: rather than
the possessing human being with the potestas to take out of hand a portion
of that power, or that takes out of the hand of an illegitimate power what
is unalienably his or her possession qua human, Marx finds at the basis of
emancipation the producing human being, the homo faber, whose hands have
constructed the societal structures of unfreedom, but who, by the same
token, has the (gesellschaftliche) power also to destroy these structures and
build a new society and a new human being, in short produce freedom. While
this transformation is quite drastic, human freedom is still — if not more
                                                   A Spectacle of Disappearance   


than ever, since this freedom now transcends radically human being as such
in its physical and spiritual entirety — exclusively in human hands.


. Toward an Existential Aesthetics of Emancipation

Having now traced in the history of emancipation anthropological meta-
physics of the possessing and the producing human being, both intimately
tied up with a metaphysic of the power of human hands, the task of this sec-
tion is to explore, by way of a phenomenological analysis of the event that
sparked the Tunisian Revolution, an exposition of human freedom in the very
initiation of the emancipatory effort and indicate how this exposition, that
is at the same time an imposition — something that is not within the grasp
of human hands, but that encroaches in human experience with an abyssal
pathos — is that which existentially brings within the realm of possibility
the ensuing “structural” emancipation. Hence, the perspective pursued in
the events of the Tunisian Revolution differs fundamentally from both the
original and the modern notions of emancipation in the way it foregrounds
as conditions of the emancipatory effort registers of human existence that
remain withdrawn from and beyond the grasp of human hands.
    It might be objected that this strict focus on the initiatory event — Bouaz-
izi’s self–immolation — in its relative, analytical isolation (in its phenomeno-
logical reduction, if you will) runs the risk of succumbing to the temptation
of “presentism”; the tendency, as a scholar in Tunisian history puts it, “to
seek causation and meaning in the very recent past.” (C–S :
, emphasis added) However, in focusing on the very phenomenon of
Bouazizi’s self–immolation, the following analysis does not purport to say
anything about causality and the historical and cultural conjunctions that
structure social reality. Instead, the perspective laid on Bouazizi’s act sets out
to trace an experience of freedom that cut into social reality and cast it in a new,
potentiated light. This is not to suggest something like a radical historical
break between a past of bondage and future of liberty, but rather the much
subtler hypothesis of a phenomenological modification in the political imaginary
of those on whom this event made an inexorable impact: a modification
that transformed grievances despairingly suffered in the face of a seem-
ingly limitless authoritarian power into motives toward radical sociopolitical
change that suddenly appeared possible.

.. Impossibility and Invisibility

The new, Hannah Arendt writes, “always happens against the overwhelming
odds of statistical laws and their probability, which for all practical, everyday
      Rasmus Dyring


purposes amounts to certainty; the new therefore always appears in the
guise of a miracle.” (A : ) This characterization of the advent of
the new resonates well with many descriptions of the events that transpired
in Tunisia and subsequently spread throughout North Africa and the Middle
East in the wake of Bouazizi’s act of self–immolation. The unfolding of the
revolution, sociologist Guessoumi writes,
     was unforeseeable and even inconceivable for most political analysts. . . Prior to
     Bouazizi [i.e. prior his and a number of subsequent instances of self–immolation
     mirroring Bouazizi’s act], it was nearly impossible to imagine such experiences
     crystallizing into a revolution, because there had been no clear indications in Tunisia
     of there being a general revolutionary tendency. (G : )

    This absence of “a general revolutionary tendency” can be spelled out
more concretely in terms of an absence of the active, collective movements
otherwise commonly associated with revolutionary or quasi–revolutionary
uprisings. Firstly, neither the banned communist party (PCOT), nor politi-
co–religious or nationalist movements appear to have played any decisive
role in the very early mobilization. Hence, initially no “vanguard parties”
played any instrumental parts in preparing and coordinating an impend-
ing revolt (K : ). Secondly, while students, alongside
all other individuals participating, played major roles in the initial phases
of the uprising, there was no collective coordination facilitated by student
movements (K : ). Finally, the workers’ union (UGTT)
did play a role in the initial mobilization, but the ambiguity of the reaction
of the UGTT toward the early uprisings only emphasizes the contours of
the extremely decentralized nature of the uprisings. Whereas the leadership
of the UGTT was pro–regime and thus sought to mediate between the
revolting forces and the government in order to salvage the prevailing struc-
tures of power, there was a widespread cooperation between local branches
of the workers’ union and the protesters in politicizing and radicalizing
further the protests (K : ). In sum, it goes for all three
organizational domains that any mobilizing role played, was played after the
fact of Bouazizi’s self–immolation and the spontaneously formed protest
movements.
    This absence of a “general revolutionary tendency” prior to Bouazizi’s
act hence indicates two things. First, on the level of the ordinary politi-
cal imaginary, there were no clearly realizable alternatives to the prevailing
order. There was no revolutionary intelligentsia ready to provide tenable
blueprints, itineraries, infrastructure for the mobilization of social move-
ments. Secondly, the radical sociopolitical change that prior to Bouazizi’s act
seemed “unforeseeable” and “inconceivable” in the perspective of political
analysis, was despairingly impossible from the perspective of ordinary lived
                                                     A Spectacle of Disappearance      


experience — it was, existentially speaking, the lived experience of profound,
political powerlessness. As a journalist reported from Bouazizi’s impoverished
hometown roughly a month after the latter’s self–immolation and a little
over a week after President Ben Ali had fled the country; “[p]eople in Sidi
Bouzid use the words ‘impossible’ or ‘miracle’ to describe the events of the
last month.” (F )
    Beside this twofold factor of sociological improbability and existential
impossibility, there is another factor at play in constituting the peculiarity of
the circumstances in which the Tunisian Revolution began; namely that it
in an important sense seemingly erupted out of nowhere. As one reporter
put it,
   This is where an Arab revolution began, in a hardscrabble stretch of nowhere. If
   the modern world is divided into dynamic hubs and a static periphery, Sidi Bouzid
   epitomizes the latter. The town never even appeared on the national weather
   forecast. (C )

    There is a clear pattern in the escalation of the protests that echoes this
pattern of “dynamic hubs and a static periphery” — yet, with the incep-
tion of the revolts this pattern was turned on its head. During Ben Ali’s
presidency, the governorate of Sidi Bouzid (of which Bouazizi’s hometown
carrying the same name is the principal town) along with its neighboring
governorates that together make up the internal, western part of the coun-
try had been systematically neglected to the advantage of the easternmost
governorates with their bigger cities and coastal regions that sustain the
lucrative tourism industry. This nation–wide asymmetry in socioeconomic
and political standing was carried to the point where — sedimented in the
“official state sociopolitical language” — the governorates of central Tunisia
were “collectively labeled ‘areas of darkness’.” (S : ) Again, like
the sociological improbability of sociopolitical change from an existential
perspective was experienced as despondent impossibility, what from the
perspective of the official bureaucratic jargon derogatorily was called areas
of darkness was experienced as profoundly demoralizing political invisibility
by those dwelling in these neglected, dark areas.

.. Making a Spectacle of Disappearance

It was in the heart of this darkness, this space of sociopolitical dis–appearance,
that the sparks of the Tunisian Revolution first flew. On the December ,
, around noon, Bouazizi, in a last desperate act, assumed a political
posture that somehow embodied the strength to cut through the veil of
political invisibility. Earlier that morning Bouazizi — a young man of , who,
without the prospect of more steady and financially rewarding employment,
      Rasmus Dyring


supported much of his family as an unlicensed fruits and vegetable vender
— had had a run–in with a municipal inspector, who confiscated his goods.
Humiliated and indignant, Bouazizi went to the local municipal building
to demand his property back. When he was turned away, he went to the
local governor’s office demanding an audition, but was rejected also here
(F ).
    What this story indicates — this story, that started with what locals called
a “seemingly routine confrontation” — is how being a dweller in the areas
of darkness was not merely a matter of structural inequality and institution-
alized corruption, but equally and immediately an existential matter that
crystalized poignantly in everyday experiences of powerlessness and politi-
cal invisibility; experiences here concretized in the despairing impossibility
of even “being seen” by the local representatives of Ben Ali’s central govern-
ment in distant Tunis (F ). In an Arendtian conceptual framework
such areas of darkness (but this goes as well for all other registers of Tunisian
public life equally under the sway of Ben Ali’s authoritarian security appa-
ratus) are extreme symptoms of the systematic, strategic dismantlement
of a genuinely political public realm. Such political pathologies are not only
dangerous due their de facto annulment of the liberties associated with a
free public realm, but more foundationally because the public realm, ac-
cording to Arendt’s politics of existence, is the institutional correlate of
what ontologically is the space of appearances in which alone human beings
are properly free to appear before each other as political beings and be seen
and acknowledged as such (A : ). Like world for Heidegger
is the clearing (Lichtung) in which Being presences (anwest) and beings
become unconcealed (unverborgen) in their Being, so the space of appear-
ances for Arendt is the clearing in which alone the humanity of human
beings can come to presence; systematically depriving people of the (ontic)
possibilities of their being–political in this sense of standing forth as singular
beings among a plurality of equally singular beings, in an ontological per-
spective amounts to systematically depriving people of the possibility of
“practicing” fully their humanity (A : , H : , cfr.
D ).
    What happened next that fateful day in December is usually granted no
more than two sentences and a couple of dozen words in most newspaper
reports, despite the fact that it was indeed this event in its singularity that
formed that occasion in response to which a revolutionary pathos swept
across large parts of the world:

     Sometime around noon, in the two–lane street in front of the governor’s high gate,
     the vendor drenched himself in paint thinner then lit himself on fire. A doctor at
     the hospital where he was treated said the burns covered  percent of his body.
                                                        A Spectacle of Disappearance       


   By the time he died on Jan. , protests that started over Mr. Bouazizi’s treatment in
   Sidi Bouzid had spread to cities throughout the country. (F )



    Bouazizi had shown no signs of depression and left no statements behind
that can positively disclose his final thoughts and motivations. Some —
among them members of Bouazizi’s family — explain his acts with reference
to the humiliation he suffered in his encounter with the authorities, and
emphasize the especially humiliating aspect that it was a female inspector
that confiscated his goods (and allegedly slapped him in public in the process)
(Fahim , International Crisis Group Report n.  –  April  p. , note
), others point to the “fact” that he was an unemployed college graduate
(which he was not) as a main source of frustration (A , F
, K : ), while others still ascribe to Bouazizi himself
a (proto–revolutionary) political project of dignity — he is here held to have
anticipated the mantra of what subsequently was called the Revolution of
Dignity (J : ). However, whereas the answers to the question of
Bouazizi’s true motives and intentions can only be conjecture, the meaning
of his act as it appeared can be approximated phenomenologically.
    What above all seems clear in this lack of clarity, in the contradictions
and the confusion regarding Bouazizi’s status, motivations and intentions,
is that Bouazizi’s act as it originally appeared cannot be ascribed any explic-
itly programmatic (let alone revolutionary) content: it was not akin to, for
instance, the deeds of revolutionaries dying for “the cause”, nor to modern
acts of terrorism that, for their effect, hinge on a manifest relation to an
explicit political program. Strictly speaking, Bouazizi’s act did not manifest
anything specific — with his act, Bouazizi did not strike up a political pro-
gram for a generation of despairing youths to act out. Rather than being the
manifestation of something the political meaning of which was apparent,
Bouazizi, with his act of self–immolation, made a spectacle of disappearing,
thereby leaving behind, in the midst of the areas of sociopolitical darkness,
a highly visible, open space.
    Given the prevailing circumstances of sociopolitical invisibility, the spec-
tacle of disappearance did not leave an open space in the world simply by
virtue of Bouazizi “withdrawing” himself from it; the act of disappearance
of itself somehow generatively and originarily called forth this new space
of appearances. The final two sections below attempt to trace the origin
of this new space; first, with reference to the manner in which Bouazizi’s
“disappearance” made apparent the limit of the authoritarian power that
had otherwise seemed limitless, and secondly, with reference to the manner
in which this liminal experience was shared between a growing plurality of
spectators who were called forth in the spectacle.
       Rasmus Dyring


.. The Outermost Possibility of Powerlessness

From its birth in Ancient Greece, philosophy has been preoccupied with
death — the limit at which mortals are utterly powerless — and more specif-
ically with the relation of the powerlessness inherent in mortality to the
problematics of human freedom. Whether this preoccupation found its ex-
pression in Aristotle’s questions of the possibility of the eudaimonic autarchy
of those not yet at life’s end, in Stoic practices of ataraxia in the face of that
over which one has no power, or much later, in Hegel’s ideas of a struggle
to death for recognition, in Kierkegaard’s thinking of the proto–ethical deci-
siveness of death, in Heidegger’s question of the existential wholeness of a
being–toward–death, these conceptions of the relationship between death and
freedom most often share an emphasis on how the possibility disclosed at
the limit of death has its ontological anchor point somehow in the individual
existence.
    Much in this vein, Foucault points to the ultimately private character of
death. In his exploration of the historical changes in configurations of insti-
tutionalized power, Foucault traces a basic structural transition from power
as the sovereignty that implies the right to dispose over and of individual
lives, i.e. to inflict death, toward power as the management of life as such,
of biological survival — biopower (F : ). However, from the
perspective of either of these schemata of power, death as such withdraws
beyond the grasp of institutionalized power, beyond the grasp of societal
structures. This becomes particularly evident in the phenomenon of suicide:

     It is not surprising that suicide — once a crime, since it was a way to usurp the
     power of death which the sovereign alone. . . had the right to exercise — became,
     in the course of the nineteenth century, one of the first conducts to enter into the
     sphere of sociological analysis; it testified to the individual and private right to die,
     at the borders and in the interstices of power that was exercised over life. (F
     : –)

    Whether power is defined in terms of the right to kill or in terms of
the management of life, the limit of death interlaces institutionalized power
that can only attempt to evade the lacerating force of death, never conquer
it: “death is power’s limit, the moment that escapes it; death becomes the
most secret aspect of existence, the most ‘private’.” (F : ,
emphasis added)
    By facing death in the middle of the street, in plain view of by–passers
and employees at the governor’s office, in front of this official building that
at once manifested the presence of (authoritarian) power and at the same
time manifested the exclusion of the people of Sidi Bouzid from (political)
power, from a genuinely political space in which to stand forth, Bouazizi’s
                                                           A Spectacle of Disappearance       


act brought this limit–of–death, that is correlatively the limit–of–power, into
the common experience of those watching; the limit of death in Bouazizi’s
case — although irredeemably and singularly the threshold of his existence —
was thus transformed from being an ultimately “private” matter into being
a truly public thing: a thing shared by everyone, yet possessed by no one.
    These communitary and expropriative characteristics of what is here ex-
posed is traceable in three directions; in its relation to Bouazizi, in its relation
to the regime, and in its relation to the spectators of the spectacularly ex-
posed limit–of–power. Firstly, dying by his own hand, Bouazizi usurped the
power over his own destiny from out of the hands of the Tunisian paterfa-
milias, Ben Ali; in a fleeting moment he was juris sui. However, the limit of
Ben Ali’s authority as it was hereby exposed to the world, and the experience
of a possibility of freedom beyond the constraints of authoritarian power
that correlate with the experience of this limit, was not thereby in Bouazizi’s
command. The limit–of–power that was exposed, that was set–out in plain
view in Bouazizi’s act, was from its very outset; from the minute Bouazizi
lid himself on fire, beyond his hand — Bouazizi disappeared (and) this limit
shone forth in the spectacle of his disappearance.
    Secondly, the exposed limit–of–power was beyond the hand of Ben Ali
— indeed, Bouazizi was himself in a sense untouchable. Once out in the
open, Ben Ali had no choice but to respond somehow to the imposition
of this limit embodied in Bouazizi’s posture of self–immolation that was
clearly encroaching on his authority; yet given the circumstances — that
Bouazizi made a spectacle of taking his own life, not of attacking or agitating
against the regime — Ben Ali could not possibly touch on the root of
the matter and denounce Bouazizi himself as a usurper and a criminal;
Bouazizi was structurally beyond the hand of Ben Ali. Hence, the latter had
to somehow quarantine or hide what was exposed in the episode. Standing
beside Bouazizi’s bed, at the hospital where his burns were treated, Ben Ali
in a TV–transmission on December , , sought to strip Bouazizi’s act
of any political significance first by calling it an isolated act of a desperate
man, and secondly, by attempting to bring those acts of protest, that in
response to Bouazizi’s act had evidently found a highly potentiated space
outside or rather, in a rift in the fabric of authority, back within the domain
of authority by denouncing these acts as the opportunist deeds of extremists
and terrorists (G : , S : ).
    The rift that Bouazizi’s act opened in that fabric of authority that had
most recently appeared seamless and limitless was only torn wider open
     . The conjunction is here in parenthesis in order to indicate the simultaneity between the
disappearance and the exposition without, however, suggesting a causal connection: Bouazizi’s act
was not the cause of the exposition, merely an occasion for something already interweaving power
to shine forth.
      Rasmus Dyring


during the ensuing weeks of protest, despite (or rather due to) the regime’s
efforts in the way of damage control and violent suppression of the protests.
Ben Ali on January , , in a final desperate attempt at covering up this
rift in which the limit–of–power was exposed, tried to appeal to the Tunisian
People by promising them a sort of “emancipation” that with the one hand
grants a number liberties, while the other hand demands acceptance of the
legitimacy of the prevailing order. Thus, Ben Ali promised not only “to
reduce the prices of basic commodities and foodstuffs — sugar, milk, bread,
etc.” He also promised “full freedom for the media, in all its forms, and
not shutting down internet sites, and rejecting any form of censorship on
them. . . The field is open, from this day onward, for freedom of political
expression, including peaceful demonstrations. . . ” At the same time, Ben
Ali made the case that political change required order to be restored and
his own political leadership: “I reiterate to you, in all clarity, that I will work
to promote democracy and to put pluralism into effect.” Ben Ali’s speech
only incited the protesters and the next day he fled the country.

.. The Liminal Experience of Freedom and Community

This brings us to the third direction in which the communitary and expropriative
characteristics of the exposition of the limit–of–power can be traced; namely
in its relation to the plurality of spectators. When Bouazizi made a spectacle of
disappearing, not only did his posture force Ben Ali’s apparatus of power into a
defensive, reactive position; it, in a more primordial sense, demanded a response
from anybody within its reach. Those on whom this spectacle impacted — at
first those in the immediate vicinity, soon after those in similar circumstances
of sociopolitical darkness for whom the spectacle burned enticingly bright,
and finally, with the large scale dissemination through various media, also the
generally better off eastern Tunisian city dwellers — whatever their concrete
answers to the situation would turn out to be, eventually found themselves in
a situation in which they could not not respond.
    Bernhard Waldenfels spells out this type of responsive inexorability by
distinguishing between two modes of responding: on one level there is
answering in a narrow sense, which means to directly address a matter in
question and on a more primordial level there is responding as the mode
in which one originarily registers that one has been addressed, the mode
in which one finds oneself to have been “placed on demand” and that
having to answer somehow to the situation is given as an inexorable fact. As
Waldenfels puts it

    . “The Last Official Address by Tunisian President Zine el–Abidine Ben Ali, January , ”,
Translation by Tony Badran.
                                                              A Spectacle of Disappearance        


    Das Antworten beginnt nicht mit dem Reden über etwas, es beginnt überhaupt
    nicht mit dem Reden, sondern mit dem Hinsehen und Hinhören, das eine eigene
    Form der Unausweichlichkeit aufweist. Den Imperative ‘Höre!’ kann ich nicht
    hören, ohne auf sie zu hören. Das Verbot ‘Hör nicht auf mich!’ führt zu dem
    bekannten double bind: Wie immer man darauf reagiert, man macht es verkehrt.
    Selbst das Weghören setzt ein Hören, das Wegsehen ein Sehen voraus. . . Dem
    Anspruch, der sich fordernd an mich richtet, entspricht ein Antworten (response),
    das auf Angebote und Ansprüche des Anderen eingeht und nicht bloß Wissens– und
    Handlungslücken füllt. (W : )

    Bouazizi’s spectacle of disappearance showcases such an inexorable force.
The behold! of the spectacle — like Waldenfels’ listen! — emplaces those
simply registering it in the imperative sphere of the spectacle before any
contemplation and interpretation of what is being demanded, what is in the
process of unfolding, is even possible. Merely seeing the spectacle, merely
becoming–spectator, is to have submitted already to the demand emerging
in the spectacle. And, as worked out above, what was exposed in Bouazizi’s
spectacle of disappearance was not at Bouazizi’s bidding. While Bouazizi
obviously took in hand his own death, that which urgently demanded a
response — that to which Ben Ali could not not respond — was not as such
Bouazizi’s death, but that exposition of the limit–of–power that per definition
is at the bidding of no one, but from the outset withdrawn beyond the
reach of any attempt at appropriation. Hence, in the face of this demand
everyone is, in a sense, alieni juris; everyone is at the bidding of an alien
— i.e. expropriative and unappropriable — force, before one can possibly
begin figuring out how and what to answer to it “juris sui”.
    If this analysis is correct, the emancipation of the Tunisian People began
neither at the hands of individuals, nor with the communal production of
communal being; the emancipation began in an unassumable elsewhere. It
began with “something” unexpectedly taking out of human hands (ex manus
capere) the initiative. That is, with the Zurückführung of those watching into
a place where they shared with a plurality of equally ex–manci–pated specta-
tors, the experience of having been called upon by this “something” — the
spectacular exposition of the limit–of–power — that was beyond their grasp,
to which they could do nothing but respond. Hence, the emancipatory
initiation that lies in the exposition of the limit–of–power was equiprimordially
the exposition of community taking place at this limit.
    The character of this experience of being brought to the limit–of–power
echoes Victor Turner’s findings in his exploration of the liminal period
in rites de passage. According to Turner, the liminality that characterizes
such a being betwixt and between clearly defined states of social structure
    . The term liminality and the analytical isolation of the transitory liminal phase in the ritual
process Turner adopts from Arnold van Gennep’s Rites of Passage ( []).
     Rasmus Dyring


amounts to more than merely being in a vacuum; it entails a primordial
“unstructured” mode of being together. Communitas, as Turner calls it,
“breaks in through the interstices of structure, in liminality. . . It dissolves the
norms that govern structured and institutionalized relationships.” (Turner
: ) As such, liminal communitas is the positive phenomenal correlate
of the negation of social structure, or in the idiom developed above, of
the limit–of–power. Furthermore, the liminal experience of communitas “is
accompanied by experiences of unprecedented potency,” “the feeling of
endless power,” of a “regenerative abyss.” (T : , ) It is “the
Nay to all positive structural assertions, but. . . in some sense the source of
them all. . . a realm of pure possibility whence novel configurations of ideas
and relations may arise.” (T : )
    However, the similarities between Turner’s liminality and the liminal
experience in the face of the limit–of–power ends with Turner’s character-
ization of communitas as the appearance of a “generic bond,” as “’total’
communion with one another,” as something at the root of each person’s
being that is profoundly “communal.” (T : , , , ) The
community exposed in Bouazizi’s spectacle of disappearance was rather
a plurality of singular beings being exposed to “something” that was not
of a common, already and profoundly possessed, origin. In that respect it
recalls Nancy’s intuition that community is not based in a common being; in
something like Marx’s Gattungswesen, or Durkheim’s societal substratum
of the Social, or a communitarian essence, or any notion of human nature.
In community, Nancy writes, “there is no communion of singularities in a
totality superior to them and immanent to their common being.” (N
: ) Rather, what is shared in community is that which lacerates “the
communal fabric,” that which pierces the immanence of communal life
and exposes life (individual as well as communitary) to the limits of life.
That which constitutes community is the simultaneous appearance — or
compearance, as Nancy would have it — of finite, singular beings, who have
nothing else but their existential finitude — that is, as it were, their de-
ferred non–being, nothingness — in common (N : ). But this
was exactly what Bouazizi’s spectacle of disappearance originarily brought
into plain view; as argued above, the limit–of–power is the politically salient
phenomenal refraction of the experience of the limit–of–death.
    This newly formed political gathering was obviously not authorized,
but Ben Ali could not definitively strike it down, not even with brute force,
because it had its roots in this abyssal elsewhere beyond the limit–of–power,
at once spectacularly illuminated, yet draped in Bouazizi’s untouchability.
Once a plurality of “first responders” was called forth in this new space of
appearances, spectators immediately became actors:
                                                         A Spectacle of Disappearance         


   The protests in Sidi Bouzid were small at first, starting soon after the fire seared Mr.
   Bouazizi’s clothes to his body and burned off his lips.
       Bilal Zaydi, , saw the vendor’s relatives and friends outside the governor’s
   office that afternoon, throwing coins at the gate. “Here is your bribe”, they yelled.
   Over the next day and half the protests grew and the police “started beating
   protesters, and firing gas”, he said. Mr. Zaydi, a high school student, slept during
   the day, and then he and his friends would take on the police at night.
       At the same time, news of the unrest was spread on the Internet by people like
   Shamseddine Abidi, a –year old interior designer who posted videos and updates
   to his Facebook page. A journalist from Al Jazeera was one of Mr. Abidi’s Facebook
   friends, and quickly the Arabic channel, almost alone, carried the news abroad.
       “I did my best”, Mr. Abidi said. “It’s a miracle.”
       Labor leaders said their members quickly joined the demonstrations, which
   grew violent in the face of increasingly brutal police retaliation. Dr. Ali Ghanmi,
   who works at the hospital in Sidi Bouzid, said the number of patients doubled
   during the unrest, injured from beatings or bullets. Two men who had been shot
   died of their wounds. (F )


    The early protests in the areas of darkness were spurred on by the facts
of social injustice (“here is your bribe!”) and of the brute force hammering
down on those at the front lines. However, following Ben Ali’s televised
“bedside”–speech on December , , it became increasingly clear that
the laceration of the fabric of authority housed not only an opportunity
for venting frustrations and making known socioeconomic grievances; the
possibility of a radically new, as yet undefined, but certainly different, soci-
etal organization began to make itself emphatically felt (G : ,
K : ). As Arendt writes with reference to the American
and the French revolutions — but it applies equally here — “the revolution-
ary pathos of an entirely new beginning was born only in the course of the
event itself.” (A : ) This pathos of freedom, Arendt specifies,
“came to the fore only after they [the revolutionary events] had come. . . to
a point of no return.” (A : , emphasis added) Hence, the pathos
of radical novelty, and the freedom implicit herein, arise with the disclosure
of that point where a “return” becomes impossible, at that threshold where
a new necessity emerges; a necessity that positively put, is the limit–of–power,
the limit where the new possibility of the future impossibility of l’ancien
régime emerges.
    The revolutionary pathos of novelty and of freedom is, existentially speak-
ing, the mode of emplacement, of Befindlichkeit, in which the limit–of–power
“comes over,” “assails,” and phenomenologically modifies the experience
shared in the community of those inexorably called into the imperative sphere
of its spectacular exposition (cfr. H : §): “The sentiment of
injustice and humiliation felt by the lumpen proletariat of the interior [areas
of darkness],” gave way at this point of no return, at the limit–of–power, to
    Rasmus Dyring


a shared pathos of freedom that gathered a manifold of local, self–mobilizing
uprisings in a nationwide distributed network of emancipatory, revolutionary
action (G : , cfr. also K : ).


. Concluding Remarks: Emancipation in the Prism of the Homo Re-
   spondens

The kind of emancipation traced in the Tunisian Revolution differs radically
from the traditional notion of emancipation as it was originally found in
Roman Law and perpetuated every time the question of freedom is posed
in terms of those in power handing out liberties to those who do not (yet)
have a share in power. But it differs also from human emancipation as Marx
imagined it; Tunisian society does not seem to be heading in the direction
of communism in any form. If anything, emancipation in Tunisia seems
closer to the political emancipation of the bourgeois–revolutions of the
Enlightenment. However, the task of this essay was not to determine the
trajectory of the transformations in social structure, but, in response to the
anthropological essence of emancipation indicated by Marx, to investigating
how emancipatory phenomena might expose the being of human beings and
how this exposition relates to the emancipatory effort.
    In this respect, emancipation in Tunisia showcased an entirely different
anthropology than either of the schemata of emancipation genealogically
explored; whereas human freedom in both traditional emancipation, in
the universalism of human rights, and in Marx’s human emancipation was
within the reach of human hands — be they the hands of the possessing hu-
man or the producing human — the emancipatory initiation in the Tunisian
Revolution points in the direction of an imposing pathos of freedom in-
finitely beyond the reach of human hands. If this is true, emancipation as
Zurückführung der menschlichen Welt. . . auf den Menschen selbst takes on a
whole new meaning. Rather than being a revolutionary reduction of soci-
ety to a common human substance (Gattungswesen) that henceforth freely
(re)produces itself in accordance with itself, the emancipatory Zurückführung
is now an existential event (in casu Bouazizi’s spectacle of disappearance) in
which human beings, at the “hands” of an expropriative and unappropriable
force to which they cannot not respond, are emplaced at the limit–of–power
from which a simultaneous experience of community and radical possibil-
ity arises. The anthropology that phenomenally comes to the fore in the
initiation of the Tunisian revolution is one of the homo respondens — the
being that exists in responding, whose freedom begins elsewhere than in the
individual existence (cfr. W : , : ff ). Enlightenment
philosophy was right; human freedom is inalienable, but not because the
                                                   A Spectacle of Disappearance   


individual human being possesses freedom sub specie aeternitatis. Ontologi-
cally speaking, freedom is inalienable because it cannot be possessed in the
first place.


Acknowledgements

The thoughts presented in this essay have been developed in fruitful dis-
cussion with several colleagues at Aarhus University, Denmark. I would to
thank in particular Line Ryberg Ingerslev, Kasper Lysemose and Thomas
Schwarz Wentzer from the research project “Existential Anthropology –
Inquiring Human Responsiveness” (Supported by a grant from the Danish
Research Council (FKK), –).


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                                                A Spectacle of Disappearance   


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