Exhausting aesthetic critiques of the authoritarian present in Egyptian literature from Ṣunʿallāh Ibrāhīm to Muḥammad Rabīʿ

Abstract

In this article, I outline a trajectory of aesthetic critique of the authoritarian present in Egypt from Ṣunʿallāh Ibrāhīm’s novellas Tilka al-rāʾiḥa and 67 to Muḥammad Rabīʿ’s ʿUṭārid, from the disappointments and defeats of the Nasser era to the despair of the postrevolutionary present. This trajectory of critique emerges from progressive time’s collapse upon the present and is rooted in aesthetics of exhaustion and disgust. I read Ibrāhīm’s physiological and sexualized aesthetics as political and social critique and show how Rabīʿ intensifies them by charging them with violence. I argue that Rabīʿ’s subsumption of past and future into ʿUṭārid’s apocalyptic hellscape expresses the totalizing nature of authoritarian violence. Lastly, I argue that Rabīʿ’s aestheticization of violence is the culmination of a critical project whose origins I trace back to Ibrāhīm.