Asef Bayat: Despair is neither surprising nor peculiar to Egypt. Almost all post-revolution moments are marked by an ecstatic exhilaration followed by a deep disappointment and demoralization. Hegel’s celebrated work, “The Phenomenology of Spirit” (1807), has been described as a historical philosophical mourning for the earlier defeat in the French Revolution. Scores of Russian revolutionaries attempted suicide when Stalin ascended to power, and a spate of despair overtook Iranian revolutionaries once the war with Iraq raged and the revolution under the Islamist state took a repressive turn. It is certainly an understatement to say that revolutions are never calm and clean episodes of transformation; they are marred by inherent paradoxes that make strife and unrest the enduring features of their history. The great revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg goes so far as to suggest that revolution is the only form of “war” in which the ultimate victory can be prepared only by a series of defeats. […] The fact is, Egypt and its revolutionary counterparts have experienced an “event,” in the sense of Alain Badiou, an extraordinary social happening that has impregnated these lands with open-ended possibilities. And it is here, in this realm of possibilities, that resignation and disengagement shed their relevance, whereas revolutionism finds new landscapes. Things, in other words, are far from over. Certainly the counter-revolution remains adamant to regain the state apparatus, monopolize the media, restrain civil society, and re-establish repressive rule, perhaps more stubborn than its pre-2011 version. And in this it is likely to rest on a survival ideology that blends national chauvinism with, on the one hand, neoliberal globalism, and on the other, a conservative religiosity and moral politics of the Salafi sort that it supposedly disdains. But this new regime has to govern a citizenry that has been significantly transformed. Large segments of the urban and rural poor, industrial labor, an impoverished middle classes, marginalized youth and women, have experienced, however briefly, rare moments of feeling free, engaged in unfettered spaces of self-realization, local self-rule, and collective effervescence. As a consequence, some of the most entrenched hierarchies were challenged. Women’s extraordinary public presence threatened patriarchal sensibilities, and their public harassment produced one of the most genuine movements in the nation’s recent history. Revolutionary youths charged their elders with apathy and complicity, at the same time that they gained the respect and recognition of the older generation for their own remarkable activism and sacrifice. Workers demanded accountability from their bosses, students from their mentors, and citizens from the moral and political authorities. There were times when communal solidarity resurrected ingeniously in the midst of well-organized sectarian bloodshed. These subaltern citizens all lived through revolutionary moments in which what was right seemed wrong, and what wrong seemed right. The memories of those extraordinary episodes and the moral resources they generated have become part of the popular consciousness. They could serve as the normative foundation to imagine and build a good society of inclusive social order that is concerned with solidarity, egalitarian ethos, and social justice. More here.