EUME
2022/ 2023

Samer Frangie

Politics of the Aftermath: Tradition, Memory and Temporality in the Lebanese Left, 1969-1987

Previous Fellowships: 2016/ 2017, 2013/ 2014

is currently an Associate Professor at the Department of Political Studies and Public Administration at the American University of Beirut. He specializes in political theory, intellectual history of the Arab world, and Middle Eastern politics. His research has been published in edited books and academic journals, such as Modern Intellectual History, International Journal of Middle East Studies and the European Journal of Social Theory, among others. He is currently working on a number of international research project, including Other Universals: Theorizing from Postcolonial Locations on Politics and Aesthetics, housed at the Centre for Humanities Research at the University of the Western Cape, and Drafting and Enacting the Revolutions in the Arab Mediterranean (1950-2013) with the European Research Council. In addition to his academic work, Frangie has published a number of editorials and essays, which appeared in the Journal of Palestinian Studies, e-flux, and al-Jumhuriya. Currently, he is a senior editor at the independent media platform Megaphone News. Samer Frangie was a EUME Fellow in 2013/14 and 2016/17, and will return as an affiliated EUME Fellow in the academic year 2022/23.

2022/2023

Politics of the Aftermath: Tradition, Memory and Temporality in the Lebanese Left, 1969-1987

Politics of the Aftermath is a history of the rise and fall of the Lebanese left and its various intellectual, political and artistic afterlives. Through following different theoretical arguments that marked the development of this tradition, the proposed manuscript narrates one aspect of the historical arc that links the disappointment with the Marxist moment to our post-revolutionary present. In addition to providing a history of the present intellectual conjuncture, Politics of the Aftermath locates in this experience and its afterlives a sense of afterness that provides a different temporal grounding for a critique of the present.

2016/ 2017

Politics of the Aftermath: Tradition, Tragedy and Temporality in the Lebanese Left

Politics of the Aftermath: Tradition, Tragedy and Temporality in the Lebanese Left is a history of the rise and fall of the Lebanese left narrated through some of its intellectual, political and artistic afterlives. Starting in the mid-sixties, the narrative follows the emergence and establishment of a leftist front in the years leading to the Lebanese civil war, before zooming in on the disillusionments of the seventies and the final collapse of this revolutionary project in the eighties. The book project reads this historical arc as the history of the political and intellectual conjuncture that defined our present in an attempt to provide a different history for a changed post-revolutionary present. During his stay in Berlin, Frangie will be working on three chapters pertaining to this broad narrative. The first is an investigation of the relationship between the notions of tradition and political criticism, in an attempt to historicize the practice of criticism. The second chapter, entitled “Generations of the left”, focuses on the artistic representation of the left among post-war Lebanese Artists. As for the last chapter, “The Disembodiment of the Left”, it examines the manifold autobiographical narratives that were produced by the generation of the sixties, reading into them narratives of disembodiment following the end of the ideological age.
 

2013/ 2014

Yasin al-Hafiz’s Tragic Self: Subjectivity, Historicism and Defeat

As a EUME Fellow, Frangie will be working on the intellectual trajectory of two Arab intellectuals, Yasin al-Hafiz (1930-1978) and Abdallah Laroui (b. 1933), and their intersections in the aftermath of the defeat of 1967. This project is part of a broader book project on the transformation of political critique in the Arab world.