The

The Hello and welcome to politics theory other.

My name is Alex Doherty and my guest today is Nihal El Asa.

As Israel's genocide in Gaza escalated in the autumn of last year,

there was much speculation as to whether we would see mass uprisings in the Arab states of the

region, and especially in Egypt, where in 2011 the US client state of Hosni Mubarak was overthrown,

only to then be followed by a counter-revolution that brought Abdel Fata El-Cisi to power,

who was ruled with an iron fist since 2014.

Yet although there have been major Palestine protests in the region and other acts of solidarity,

we have not seen the kinds of uprisings that many hoped for.

In a recent article for Parapraxis titled Left Wing Melancholia,

the Arab political subject,

Nihal Al-Assar takes up this question and argues that repression and the threat of violence alone

cannot be the sole explanations for the relative lack of public tumult.

In our conversation, we talked about the Arab Spring and the kind of political subject

it brought into being, the profound effects of the counter-revolution

that destroyed the hopes that so many had invested in the Arab Spring. And we also talked about

how the demoralisation of the Arab publics of the region is critical to the regime of capital

accumulation in the Middle East and Israel's central role in that process. Nihal El-Assah is an Egyptian writer and researcher living in London.

Nihal's work has appeared in Parapraxis, Art Review, and Protein magazine, amongst other venues.

So the title of your article is Left Wing Melancholia, the Arab political subject.

And I suppose one quite obvious point that occurred to me when I was reading the article

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