This paper offers a reading of Butrus Al-Bustānī’s “Khiṭab fī al-hayʾa al-ijtimāʿiyya" (1869), in order to offer a reflection on the social logic that undergirds it, and which it simultaneously invents and advances, which it propels, outwardly, at the world. This paper focus on four interlocking terms in al-Bustānī's text--"social body," "al-hayʾa al-ijtimāʿiyya"; "abstraction," al-tajrīd"; "the individual," "al-fard"; and "simplicity," "al-basāta"--in order to address the ways in which this text re-articulates and reorganizes a sense of relation and of being. What is advanced, in al-Bustānī, is, all at once, a reflection on language (language is to be simple, and it is to be a means for communication); on relation (beings, in sociality, are to be "individuals," which relate to each other in the controlled and regulated form of a "social body"); and on judgment ("individuals" are to be judging beings, who abstract from their learned social and historical forms, from "dhawq," taste, and "'āda," "custom," in order to make a determination in relation to an object). And all of this is to occur in relation to an outward press, at the "illiterate," "al-umiyyīn," and the "common people," "'umūm al-ahali," who are, now, conscripted to become abstract judging subjects--subjects for a social logic of abstraction. If, in the dictionary of al-Fīrūzābādī, the "group" is likened to a pomegranate, in al-Bustānī the field of beings is to be understood as a "social body," a combination and articulation of multiplicity which draws into a new, proper, and stabilizing order the unruly and unsanctioned motion of "the masses," "al-jumhur." If this text forms concepts, then, it does so as it sends them at the world and the beings it sustains; and if, as it does so, al-Bustānī's text translates--because it coerces a rendering of the world in a particular way, altering the sense of words as it does so--we may also notice that it stalls and indetermines the categories it privileges, and, therefore, that this text gives us to understand the world differently, and anew.

The Nahda giant Butrus al-Bustani (d. 1883) left us an anonymous testimony of his account of the civil war of 1860, its possible causes and potential effects. In Nafir Suriyya, a series of eleven broadsheets distributed in Beirut in the immediate wake of the carnage in Mount Lebanon and Damascus, the horrified author grapples with the event he witnessed, and he is failing to find adequate words, concepts and meanings for it. Al-Bustani was palpably dwarfed by the magnitude of the event and the fear that it might become structure. My paper, too, grapples. It grapples with the connections al-Bustani made in Nafir Suriyya between, the contingent materiality of civil war – the most uncivil of human experiences and menacing spectre of collapse hovering over society – and the Nahda realm of thought, language and learning that so promised progress and peace. I interrogate Bustani’s frantic yet hesitant attempts at conceptualizing – in good-faith – what had just happened in the summer of 1860: Were his the first steps to overcome the conflict’s sectarian causes and avoid them in the future? Or has al-Bustani’s text, rather, ended up solidifying, malgré lui-même, this violent event into the structure of sectarianism that we think we know today? Perhaps his faith in the emancipatory powers of words, concepts and abstraction exposes the limits of language inherent in all our critical intellectual work.

In the post-colonial moment it has become crucial to develop a global concept of civil war. The failures of post-colonial states in various locations (from Bengladesh, to Iraq to Lebanon) is co-incident to the emergence of civil war as an over-arching form in the past century. The post-colonial world can now instruct the ‘western’ world whose future past is not far behind. As much as we would like to think that the 19th century was an age of revolution, it is crucial to acknowledge that the time after it has been underlined by civil wars as the sole horizon of politics. Civil war seems to be a return of the repressed, in the wake of closures of political horizons in the post-modern context. In this talk, I will argue that the logic of sacrifice, or the violence of sacrifice, is what underpins capitalist inclusion. A return is necessary to Butrus al-Bustani’s incisive diagnosis of the phenomena of civil war, al-harb al-ihliya, as a form constituted by the exclusion of difference for the sake of the self-same. In 1860, Bustani provides a diagnostic of sacrificial violence that proves to be instructive for cycles of repetition that continue to plague Lebanon and the Middle East. Bustani’s attempted to understand fraternal animosity, neigbourliness, and the logic of sacricfice that underly the modern social contract. In my reading of Bustani, I will interrogate the mechanisms of disavowal and identification that are at play in the conversion of violence into the logic of capitalist exchange.