-Analysis-
CAIRO — As pro-Palestine demonstrations have escalated in universities in the United States and Europe, we can feel the heart of the world beating again. A sense of hope has reemerged, telling us that it may be possible to not only find a new formulation of justice, but to imagine that we are meant to survive on this earth and must stop hating ourselves to the point of no return.
The young people free us from our embarrassment, allowing us to hear the voice that is absent from the world.
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No matter how much our lives experience waves of consumption and deprivation, the world is always bound to bounce back in the form of restorations, sudden uprisings, and simply the desire for a better life.
This time, the heart is emerging in the so-called first world, the world of the developed, the exploiter, the colonizer. It acquires the integrity of pure devotion to the cause, regardless of its interest or the extent of harm it could cause to those students leading it.
In times of crisis, there is always someone who represents this pure part of life and imagination, and speaks with the depth and serenity of the voice that is absent.
Of course, there is no specific time or place where this heart was born. Perhaps it transcends the concept of time, and becomes one of the foundations of existence.
Students always surround this circle of holiness, because they maintain this limit of self-denial and risk, purity and desire to turn the tables on everyone. Ahead of others, they detect signs of the return of this heart. They quickly respond to this hidden call that comes from the depths of history. They still have a need in this world that they must fulfill.
Filling a void
Recently, this heart was restored after the Vietnam War, through the student revolution in 1968 in France. From there it spread to the rest of the world’s universities and squares, which would be filled with barricades and smoke bombs. This ancient conflict – barricades and smoke bombs against the pure heart – always accompanies the birth of this pure and sublime type of rejection.
“It was not an opportunity for imagination, but rather a dose of realism,” French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, one of the participants in the May 1968 student revolution, once wrote.
It was simply what reality should be.
The world of 1968 was divided into two fronts: governments on the one hand, and this young voice on the other hand rejecting the government. This revolution appears to be an exception. It is not, even if it lasted for such a relatively short in time. Rather, it was simply what reality should be. It’s living as if under a better law, which is not always represented, but always ready to surprise us and emerge from the heart of darkness.
Today’s campus demonstrations fill a void since the liberation movement in the 1960s, meeting in a rare historical point.
Saving the meaning of life
Beyond waking the buried secrets of youth, these student protests are an expression of collectiveness, which is perhaps the most important thing such movements can do. It can begin to look like white blood cells coming together to defend the human body against its enemies.
The students carry wild desires against society, capitalism, and the systems under which they live.
These defensive ties between those advocating on the global margins will in the future present ways of living that conflict with the highly authoritarian and alienated general context, and perhaps through them new collective modes of living among them will be achieved: Intellectual cells spread throughout the world, after the sit-ins end sooner or later, and each team will carve the statue of hope that we all dream of.
Everything that happens is a sign of the birth or resurrection of a new heart to the world.
With this birth, like history itself, there are no clear boundaries among its ages, between death and life, but rather continuous overlapping and mixing, until the vision becomes clear and the new, temporary, improvised and highly realistic world appears just as Gilles Deleuze described.
One of the most important features of this world will be the recovery of the other voice within it.
Indeed, these protests, regardless of their differences, are not just about the issue of freedom for Palestine — but rather, a collective defense of the true meaning of life. The students carry wild desires against society, capitalism, and the systems under which they live. They are searching for a better society that can embrace their dreams.
“The students have returned”
I met many of the May 68 generation in France, after their societies entered the belt of consumption and surrendered to the status quo. Most of them had long, white beards, as if they were hiding within them the code of undying liberation, along with a clear tone of defeat and regret that their work was incomplete.
I also met many members of the Egyptian student movement in 1972, to whom (revolutionary singer) Sheikh Imam sang, “The students have returned, Uncle Hamza, once again to seriousness.”
The participants often look back later with anger and cynicism in search of that lost hope, that illusion. And they return again to a darker reality.
There is a distance between the past of 1968 in France and the 1972 generation of the student movement in Egypt. Still, the motive was the same, and the desire to restore this forgotten heart and extract it from the darkness was the goal in both cases.
Mass physical revelation
Perhaps the student demonstrations in the U.S. and Europe carry — in part — the form of a celebration, almost a carnival, with intimate rituals among the protesters. The authoritarian conditions are overturned, the souls are opened and everything that is strange within them is exposed as a kind of revelation.
One of the witnesses of the student revolution in May 1968 writes in his diary: “The walls of the Latin Quarter became a repository for the new mentality. It was no longer limited to books, but rather it was exhibited in a democratic way on the street level and available to everyone. The superficial mingled with the deep. The traditional with the salons. And how quickly the barriers in people’s minds vanished.”
Within this timeless present, there is still a space for expression and for proposing new forms of life choices.
