What sets this book apart from several others that reflect on the Syrian situation is the author’s level of involvement extending to a personal experiencing of the subject-matter under study. Those who read in English may have encountered Haj-Saleh through his 2016 study, The Impossible Revolution. Before being a scholar, he is an activist, who was incarcerated without trial for sixteen years during the 1980s and 1990s. The Atrocious and Its Representation is his grappling with the abstractions of evil: the macabre violence that has marked the Syrian uprising which had degenerated into a full-blown Civil War (2012–2019). Several studies cover the political, the political economy, even the socio-political aspects of that civil war and its underpinning crisis. But the ontological dimensions remain largely overlooked, showcasing the author’s coverage of an important gap.
The author’s key proposition is that unless Syrians consider exploring through art their collective pain and misery – that is, all that which they have been subjected to mostly since March 2011 – they will remain forever inhibited by the atrocious, the exceptional brutality with genocidal proportions unleashed unto them. Only representations in cinema, sculpture, painting, drama, poetry and fiction can undo the atrocious. The book targets the specifics that cripple Syrians from putting their experience of the atrocious in art. Haj-Saleh notes that the poison can be traced primarily in language. Over the centuries, Arabic usage has been emptied from its capacity for rendering experience translucent. Expressive failures (not occasional failures of expression) spill over all facets of life, ending in the industrial production of the Atrocious.
The author theorises after the genocide took place. Writing from that perspective, Haj-Saleh becomes a reformist, more concerned with rebuilding the largely destroyed Syrian psyche and broken polity. In his opinion, the psyche and polity need to slowly steer away from affect in order to regain historical agency. Both the prologue and introduction are enticing as they demarcate the knowledge gained from the book not only apart or different but importantly opposed to the knowledge produced by experts of the Syrian crisis, confiding that element which guarantees true knowledge lies in a first-hand experience of the atrocious (p. 13). The hardcore of The Atrocious lies in two sections, each one comes in four chapters.
The first section: ‘The Production of the Atrocious’ starts with ‘Love, Torture, Rape and Genocide’. This chapter defines the atrocious as the collapse of limits or a condemnation into a privacy-lacking space. That collapse and condemnation apply equally in love and rape. But wherein the erasure of borders in love propagates towards the infinite, the same erasure in rape fetishises the body and reduces the victim into the status of a slave. That erasure spells genocide. The second chapter ‘Political Relations of Torture’ addresses the political economy of the Assadist state rooted in the intensification of evil through torture at an industrial scale. The author teases the question often overlooked, that of the point from torture. Torture here seeks the destruction of human bonds since the victim turns into a thing while the torturer fantasises himself a god. That explains why torture remains a fundamental evil whose raison d’être facilitates the cancelling of politics in order to defeat time and last in power. Torture becomes thus the degenerate’s policy, not any despot’s plan, to ensure the afterlife of political madness through the massive engineering of slaves.
‘The Destructive Delirium: Saydanya, the Racist Transition and Genocide’, or chapter three, focuses on the killing factories such as Tadmur and Saydanya. Carceral spaces like Saydanya and Tadmur are spaces where Assadism assumes a larger than death significance, perhaps a significance that is terribly difficult for a non-Syrian to register. They fuel the Assadists’ sadistic lust, not for power as such, but far worse, for defeating time or eternalising the seizure of power. A typical Assadist torturer is inventive in inflicting pain on his victims. Thus, the Assadist just cannot do otherwise. Sectarianism facilitates Assadist extraction of cheap loyalty. Indeed, loyalty to the Alawite sect ensures the massive reproduction of apolitical lives (p. 87). Torture facilitates the Assadists drives towards genocide; it explains how people are eliminated, physically or metaphorically. Meanwhile, the world cannot see the Assadists for what they are because they sell their credentials in fighting terrorism to international actors who are themselves Islamophobic. And that explains why international actors cannot register the genocide, even when they see it.
Chapter four: ‘A Grave for All Men: Alterations of Syrians’ Death and Changes in their Lives’ underlines the heavy toll of the Assadist genocide on Syrians. This chapter is particularly painful as it points out to how the atrocious end of the victims impinges on the living, again eroding the barriers between a survival that is itself barely distinguishable from extinction. Far worse than with Agamben’s Homo Sacer (p. 87), in Assadist Syria it has become a luxury to die in one piece or ‘enjoy’ one marked grave that can be frequented by loved ones to grieve. Only grieving allows the smooth transition to a post-loss phase.
The second section ‘The Representation of the Atrocious’ concerns itself with the undoing the Atrocious. It begins with ‘Mapping the Atrocious’ or registering the Atrocious capacity for initiating its antithesis. Noting the dialectical substance of the Atrocious, Haj-Saleh defines the latter as that entity which destroys forms (p. 121), or the mechanical propagation of the formless. That artistic teasing paves the way towards regaining a simulation of normality from surviving, not yet overcoming, the Atrocious (p. 131).
‘Staring at the Atrocious’ or the second chapter addresses the ethicality of checking testimonies of the atrocious: publishing photos, diffusing videos or even recreating them in works of art. Haj-Saleh fairly considers those arguments in favour and those against. More than casting their bourgeois biases, those who stand against publishing testimonies of the atrocious are postmodernists; they carry out living exclusively inside texts (p. 146). Those in favour call for instituting a novel reality, beginning with a national memory free from all censorships. Therefore, the archive of the Atrocious will carry out its purifying effects for the sake of an Assadist-free Syria.
Chapter three: ‘Trauma and Words: On Representing the Tragic and the Tragedy of Representation’ initially looks like a tautology, but it is not. Here representing the world equals its remaking (p. 159). But realism – the author notes – cannot be the adequate mode of representation. Experience of the atrocious cannot be marginal. Rendering the experience of torture through art can disarm the original (p. 162). Always recall that the Atrocious take place in an incarcerating framework (both linguistic and cultural) where Islamists preach the killing of human creativity for the sake of protecting God’s creativity (p. 167). Failure of representation fires back by the intensification of pain through a surplus of violence. That is why a society that fails to represent remains stuck in immediacy and reaction (p. 180).
‘Expressing: Words, Violence and Tears’ seeks to answer what takes place when words fail, as they often do (p. 191). Inner-talk, a byword for emancipatory thinking, proves its limits because of an excessive experience similar with the Atrocious. Broken or asphyxiated expressions can result from physical torture from the predominance of clichés and truisms. Clichés and truisms in Arabic usage are predominant because they are anti-experimental. Thus, examining through art how clichés and truisms are vibe is never a luxury (p. 202). Only representation will undo the numbing effects of clichés, setting a process of reversing the Atrocious.
Reading The Atrocious is a ghastly endeavour, particularly if one chooses to examine the wealth of materials placed in the footnotes. Frédéric Lenoir’s film Le cri étouffé (2017) along with the documented fact collected from websites such as www.syriauntold.com will shake the unconvinced to take Haj-Saleh’s theoretical grappling less as an intellectual luxury and more of undertaking with life-or-death consequences.
The first part simply ushers in unprepared readers into the monster’s snares or Dante’s Inferno. For once galvanised, no reader can emerge seeing the world with his former anaesthetised self. The second part is more technical but no less ambitious. Representations is presumed to open what otherwise will remain a closed temporality. The latter finds comfort in clichés and truisms. The author provides solid evidence how the Arabic language, through affinities with the patrimonial have incarcerated authentic human experience.
Indeed, it is the trust in representation where readers note Haj-Saleh’s penchant for the palliative. He notes a quagmire but he fails to see it for what it is: a mode of production. The atrocious becomes an immanent logic whereby value (not just profit) can be extorted through the industrialisation of chaos. Forgoing the Hegelian law of necessity, the one that tips the balance of Assadism in transitioning from possibility to actuality results in a narcissistic vision blinding us to the obligation of reversing, never reforming that immanent logic. In reading Haj-Saleh’s The Atrocious, European sociologists will not only have the chance to note how Syrians well before the events of 2011 and ever since the rise of Assadism in 1970 have been served little beyond the state of exception. Still, this Assadism cannot be a sociopolitical given. It is after all an existential dynamics, leveraged through a clichés-burdened language.