Das Ding: Object Aesthetics in Lebanese Literature. Abstract The Arab Spring in Lebanon was accompanied by a wave of cultural and aesthetic innovation manifest in new literary forms. Comic books, graphic novels, and children’s books documented the collapse not only of traditional political structures, but also the rise of a new literary aesthetic intent on capturing the individual’s alienation from existing political and social structures. The works of authors like Ahmed Naji and Hilal Chouman, representing a new trend in Lebanese literature, broke with the old paradigms of modern Arabic literature. In this paper I analyze the literary aesthetic of objects in the Arab Spring literature. Using Martin Heidegger’s logical analysis of “The thing”, I argue that the new, revolutionary aesthetics of Lebanese cultural production in reflect a collapse of the logic of “The Thing” both as an essential part of the individuals material relationship with his surroundings, and his understanding of works of art. The new aesthetic of Lebanese literature is apparent in the transformation of the object as a signifier of distinct social structure into one that pointed towards absence, emptiness, disassociation and confusion. As objects emptied of their meaning through war and social upheaval accumulated in the collective spaces of urban landscapes transformed through conflict, Arab Spring cultural production forged innovative intersections between the textual and the visual through the production of new literary mediums and aesthetics which offered a new paradigm for the individual to understand the signification of objects. A close reading of the recent works of Lebanese authors reveals an attempt to both to draw attention to the transformation of object-signifiers and construct paradigms for “healing” individuals disassociated with the breakdown of the logical system of “The Thing”, by creating works of art which functioned as therapeutic physical objects, meant to re-associate the individual to the new reality of their surroundings.

Literary textbooks in Iraqi secondary schools still use the Arab modernists’ nomenclature “decadent age” to describe the postclassical period. Many Arab modernists have stigmatized that period in the Muslim world, deeming it a stagnant period devoid of any scientific, cultural and literary developments and unable to give birth to innovation. In return, Arab medievalists such as Muhsin Al-Musawi have formulated a counter-argument against the modernists by highlighting the cultural output, specifically, the peak in book manufacturing during that period. One of the premises of Musawi’s counter-argument involves the applicability of the European notion of the “the republic of letters”, ie. a “commonwealth of learners” wherein medieval scholars and artists laid the foundation for the European Renaissance, to the Arab postclassical period. Likewise, an Arabo-Kurdish novelist, Jan Dost, engages with the so-called “decadent age” by tracing the humanist footprints of the post-classical era in his fiction. He depicts the construction of knowledge in vivid scenes, detailing the labor that precedes book inscription and the social and scholarly interactions within the community of calligraphers, ink-makers, book shoppers, etc. I argue that Dost’s portrayal of the large-scale cultural output of this period echoes the European notion of “the republic of letters” and supports the premise of Musawi’s argument against Arab modernists’ assumptions. However, Dost also addresses the question of how to account for separating religion from the construction of knowledge, whereas Musawi does not. Dost’s novels encourage the reader to question why Islamic post-classical output coincided with European cultural production without ultimately producing the same outcomes of success and happiness in many aspects of human enterprise. Although Dost appreciates the corpuses and cultural activity that furnished post-classical scholars with information, he, at the same time, alludes to its failure to cultivate an Islamic or Eastern renaissance, and ascribes this failure to an increasingly narrowed vision of the construction of knowledge, fueled by dogmatic clergy, rigid fanaticism and intolerance in Eastern society. Hence, Dost implies that the cultural output filtered through the lens of religious formalism could not lead to enlightenment.

Modern Arabic drama has been constructed in orientalist scholarship as an “importation from the West”; an instrumental appendix of modernity to substantiate the European primary institution of cultural and theatrical production. However, emerging critical studies have drawn attention to repressed evidence of authentic aesthetic strategies specific to Arab dramatic traditions and forms. The work of playwrights like Tayeb Saddiki in Morocco, Abdelkader Alloula in Algeria and Sa’dallah Wannus in Syria demonstrate a political anxiety to recast an original literary modus operandi. Tayeb Saddiki (1938-2016), trained in the French theatrical tradition, and a disciple of Molière, was particularly experimental in revalidating the artistic value of such dramatic classical techniques as halqa genre (open-air circle performance), classical maqamat (assembly) and l’bsat (social satire). In this paper, I examine Tayeb Saddiki’s distinct contribution in refashioning a postcolonial self-reflexive, syncretic, and open-ended Arab theatre that dismantles binary opposition between “modern” and “indigenous” dramatic traditions, and most significantly that rehabilitates the double bind of dramatic performance. Saddiki’s hybridized theatre is not only to entertain but also to create a space for the thinkable/ unthinkable. With thirty-two plays in Arabic and French, and the direction of more than eighty performances in the Arab world, Tayeb Saddiki’s impact remains his ability to transpose not only innovative dramatic devices, but also an inter-textuality and inter-performativity that promote an inter-play of reasons. From one of his first plays recasting a 16th century poet, Diwan Sidi Abder-rahman Al-Majdub (1966), to Maqamat Badia Ezzamane El-Hamadani (1971), all the way to his most engaging dramatic reinvention of the 10th century philosopher, Abu Hayyan Al-Tawhidi (2004), Tayeb Saddiki fuses new dramatic technique with trans-historical philosophical ideas. Ultimately, my argument shows how Saddiki has reconceived an Arab theatre that theorizes the idea of radical difference as a modernizing mode for a trans-national site of textual and theatrical practice.