Fadi A. Bardawil 
(University of North Carolina / EUME Fellow 2010/2011)

Chair: Jonathan Sheehan
(University of California at Berkeley / Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg 2015/2016)

Abstract
The capacity of advanced industrial societies to contain social change is at the heart of Marcuse’s Introduction to One-Dimensional Man. Capitalist developments, in Marcuse’s account, managed to alter the function and structure of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, sapping the revolutionary potential of the later by integrating them, through indoctrination and manipulation, into a totalitarian system. In light of this diagnosis, Marcuse posits, “there is no ground on which theory and practice, thought and action meet” (xlv). In his paper, Bardawil will begin by revisiting the demise of the Arab left to highlight the disappearance of the people as the historical agent of revolutionary transformation not through its integration but its dissolution into its infra-national sectarian, ethnic, and religious components, that may have supra-national ties and attachments. In brief, if Marcuse’s account of the demise of the working class still rests on the grounds of the social, Bardawil examines this demise and its consequence through the rise of the question of ‘culture’. These political developments in the Arab world – starting from the late 1970’s roughly – were coupled with the criticism of Enlightenment’s universalism in the North American academy and the rise of the post-colonial studies as a practice of cultural critique which honed in on the politics of theory of this older generation of Marxists. These political and theoretical developments Bardawil argues have not only resulted in the absence of a ground where theory and practice meet, but also in a fracturing of the ground of criticism. Our world is not only characterized by differing standards of critique and notions of what constitutes power, resistance and emancipation, but also by the capacity of theories to generate different political effects and be appropriated by a multiplicity of actors for their own ends.

Fadi A. Bardawil, an anthropologist by training, is Assistant Professor of Contemporary Arab Cultures in the department of Asian Studies at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. His research examines the traditions of intellectual inquiry, practices of public criticism, and modalities of political engagement of contemporary Arab intellectuals, both at home and in the diaspora.  In doing so, he takes the international circulation of critical theory, as an anthropological object, by tracking its translations, analytical uses, and political appropriations.
Currently, he is completing In Marxism’s Wake: The Disenchantment of Levantine Intellectuals, a book that examines the ebbing away of Marxist thought and practice through focusing on the intellectual and political trajectories of a generation of previously militant, public intellectuals.  He just finished an essay on Talal Asad’s work focusing on questions of the anthropologist’s positionality, modes of intellectual inquiry, and spaces of intellectual intervention that will introduce an extensive interview he conducted with him titled “The Solitary Analyst of Doxas: An Interview with Talal Asad,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Vol. 36, no. 1 (May, 2016). His writings have appeared, and are forthcoming, in the Journal for Palestine Studies (Arabic edition), Boundary 2, Jadaliyya, Kulturaustausch, and al-Akhbar daily (2006-2011).