This article was downloaded by: [Durham University Library]

On: 12 February 2015, At: 12:47

Publisher: Routledge
Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered
office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Middle East Critique

Publication details, including instructions for authors and
subscription information:
http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ccri20

The Libyan Drawers: ‘Stateless

Society,’ ‘Humanitarian Intervention,’
‘Logic of Exception’ and ‘Traversing the
Phantasy’
a
Matteo Capasso
a
School of Government and International Affairs, University of
Durham, UK
Published online: 31 Oct 2014.

Click for updates

To cite this article: Matteo Capasso (2014) The Libyan Drawers: ‘Stateless Society,’ ‘Humanitarian
Intervention,’ ‘Logic of Exception’ and ‘Traversing the Phantasy’, Middle East Critique, 23:4,
387-404, DOI: 10.1080/19436149.2014.965881

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19436149.2014.965881

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the
“Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis,
our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to
the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions
and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors,
and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content
should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources
of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims,
proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever
or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or
arising out of the use of the Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any
substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing,
systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms &
 Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-
and-conditions
Downloaded by [Durham University Library] at 12:47 12 February 2015
 Middle East Critique, 2014
Vol. 23, No. 4, 387–404, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19436149.2014.965881

The Libyan Drawers: ‘Stateless Society,’

‘Humanitarian Intervention,’ ‘Logic of
Exception’ and ‘Traversing the Phantasy’
MATTEO CAPASSO
Downloaded by [Durham University Library] at 12:47 12 February 2015

School of Government and International Affairs, University of Durham, UK

ABSTRACT In this article I examine the Libyan case through diverse theoretical lenses. For this
purpose, I inquire into the ways Libya under Qadhdhafi previously has been investigated in order to
deconstruct the Orientalist vision of a ‘stateless society’ and to reveal the ideological interests that
the stigmatization of Qadhdhafi as a ‘mad dog’ served. By looking at the current situation, the article
inevitably interrogates the role of ‘humanitarian intervention’ and its ideological kernel that seems
to parallel the incapacity of academic scholarship to move beyond the notion of ‘statelessness.’
Then, it investigates whether a continuation of the logic of exception that seemed to characterize the
Jamahiriyya under Qadhdhafi is still present and, finally, it proposes the possible embracement of a
new radical position through the Lacanian process of ‘subjective destitution’ or ‘traversing the
phantasy,’ as elaborated by Slavoj Žižek.

KEY WORDS : Agamben; humanitarian intervention; Lacan; Libya; logic of exception; Qadhdhafi;
statelessness; subjective destitution; violence; Žižek

As the fourth anniversary of the 2011 political uprisings in several Arab countries
approaches, one question that needs to be asked is how to categorize those events: Were
they uprisings against governments that many people felt they had put up with for too long;
or were they efforts to trigger genuine revolutionary changes in affected Arab societies?1
The contradictory constellation of elements in each of the affected countries complicates
our efforts to answer this question. Undoubtedly, the case of Libya is a striking example of
a country whose initial uprising and its subsequent trajectory does not facilitate a simple
understanding of the current situation. The fall of Mu’ammar Qadhdhafi, the leader whom
the deceased Libyan artist Qays al-Hilali had transformed from ‘King of Kings of Africa’

Correspondence Address: Matteo Capasso, School of Government and International Affairs, Durham University,
Al-Qasimi Bldg, Elvet Hill Rd, Durham DH1 3TU, UK. Email: matteo.capasso@durham.ac.uk
1
Asef Bayat argues that ‘refolutions’ in the case of ‘Egypt, Yemen and Tunisia followed a particular trajectory,
which can be characterized neither as “revolution” per se nor simply in terms of “reform” measures. Instead it
may make sense to speak of “refolutions”: revolutions that aim to push for reforms in, and through, the
institutions of the existing regimes.’ A. Bayat (2013) Revolution in Bad Times, New Left Review, 80 (March–
April), pp. 47–60, p. 53.
q 2014 Editors of Middle East Critique
 388 M. Capasso

to ‘Monkey of Monkeys of Africa’2 [qarad qarawad afriqiyat ], has not yet brought a more
just order to society. Diverse reports expose a contrasting vision of Libya, where the hope
for a more just and peaceful future collides with the stark everyday reality of violence and
insecurity. On the one hand, Libyans seem to be predisposed and willing to embrace a
democratic government,3 although there is raising scepticism about the role of political
parties.4 On the other hand, parliamentary and news reports show how the country seems
to be mired in militia violence, political squabbling and lawlessness.5 In such conditions, it
is necessary to capture the points of disruption between the current political situation and
the Jamahiriyya scenario, while recognizing—at the same time—those patterns of
similarities that pervade them. It is not an attempt to redeem what history already has
demonstrated to have been a regime rife with brutality, repression and violence. In line
with Lacanian psychoanalysis, this article does not aim to provide a complete
understanding of the Libyan situation, since ‘understandings’ always must be ‘viewed as
provisional, subject to revision and indeed at times to reversal, and partial.’6 Inspired by
Downloaded by [Durham University Library] at 12:47 12 February 2015

the example of Salvador Dalı̀, who decided to reproduce the Venus of Milo with the
insertion of drawers,7 this paper also is designed to make waves, to open carefully some of
the drawers that constitute some unconscious aspects about the comprehension of Libya.
For it is necessary to abandon the obsessive nature of analyses that try to understand what
is an unsettled and dynamic moment in Libya’s history and rather to present a multiplicity
of interconnected narratives that shaped and are shaping the country.

A Stateless Society as an Orientalist Vision

One of the most problematic aspects in the extant scholarly literature about Libya is the
recurrent definition of Libya as a stateless society.8 This idea first appeared in the work of

2
http://www.artandpoliticsnow.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/Libya-Gaddafi-graffiti.jpg, accessed March
20, 2014.
3
It is crucial to stress that these reports provide neither a clear definition of democracy that they claim is
emerging among Libyans nor assume an a priori one. For example, 85 percent of Libyans simply may refer to
democracy as an umbrella term that stands for a more just and egalitarian society. In this sense, the reports do
not provide much help. See National Democratic Institute & JMW Consulting (2013) Believing in
Democracy: Public Opinion Survey in Libya. Available at: https://www.ndi.org/files/Believing-in-
Democracy-Public-Opinion-Survey-Report-August-2013.pdf, accessed October 3, 2013.
4
National Democratic Institute & JMW Consulting (November 2013) Report on Seeking Security in Libya.
Available at: https://www.ndi.org/files/Seeking-Security-Public-Opinion-Survey-in-Libya-WEBQUALITY.
pdf, accessed January 1, 2014.
5
http://www.alhurra.com/content/lybia-violence-643-killed-in-2013/242183.html, accessed January 23, 2014.
The latest death toll is more than 640 people killed during 2013 in Libya. In 2014, an internet webpage was set
up that aims to count the number of everyday deaths in Libya, since the ‘government refuses to count,’ as it is
stated in their home page (available at: http://www.libyabodycount.org/, accessed June 24, 2014). This article
comments on the closure of the oil fields by militias as a potential tool for negotiating with the government:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-24051371, accessed September 11, 2013.
6
B. Fink (2014) Against Understanding – Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key (London: Routledge),
p. 19.
7
As Dalı̀ explains cryptically about his work Venus de Milo with Drawers: ‘Freud discovered the world of the
subconscious on the tumid surfaces of ancient bodies, and Dali cut drawers into it.’ See http://thedali.org/
exhibit/venus-drawers-pompoms/, accessed May 13, 2012.
8
One can see this tendency in the work of Lisa Anderson through many other authors to Dirk Vandewalle.
 The Libyan Drawers 389

social anthropologist John Davis, Libyan Politics: Tribes and Revolution, and it was used
to describe the Libyan attitude and polity at the outset of the 1969 Al Fateh (the opening)
revolution. According to Davis, ‘The central positive notion in the Libyan image of
statelessness is kinship, especially descent: a man owes loyalty to those who share
ancestors in the male line with him.’9 In fact, ‘Qadhdhafi was liberated from conventional
notions of the state by a culture of tribal statelessness and by the failure of the colonial
authorities to create any respect for the institutions of representative government,’10 and
this ‘fact’ could explain the underlying theoretical principles of his Third Universal
Theory, and then The Green Book.
Along the same line, one can posit the understanding of stateless society, as adopted by
other scholars. For instance, in his book, A Modern History of Libya, Dirk Vandewalle refers
to it as an ‘anomaly’ that ‘one must understand how—starting with the retreat of the Ottoman
Empire from the country in the early part of the twentieth century—a multi-layered set of
Downloaded by [Durham University Library] at 12:47 12 February 2015

factors promoted the idea among Libya’s rulers that statelessness was both possible and
desirable, while oil created the permissive and enabling environment to act upon that
conviction.’11 This type of analysis needs to be contextualized within a broader political and
academic context, in which Qadhdhafi often was labelled as a ‘quixotic,’ idiosyncratic,’ ‘mad
dog,’ subject. Unfortunately, these terms and concepts are still used in many analyses that aim
to provide an understanding of the post-Qadhdhafi situation, claiming to offer a complete
description of 42 years of Libyan history.12 Moreover, to present such a political structure as
an anomaly, as something that lacks certain characteristics, I would argue, perpetuates certain
stereotypes rather than knowledge. More fundamentally, as discussed later, it makes the
academic world complicit in the formulation and re-iteration of ideological and politically
driven analyses. As noted by Hugh Roberts, ‘Words such as “authoritarianism”, “tyranny” (a
favourite bugbear of the British) and “dictatorship” have never really captured the particular
character of this set-up (the Jamahiriyya) but have instead relentlessly caricatured it.’13
I would argue it is an essential intellectual challenge to deconstruct both of these
concepts, ‘statelessness’ and ‘idiosyncratic vision,’ for two main reasons. Firstly, in order
to comprehend the current developments in Libya, it is not useful to inquire about the
presence or absence of ‘the state,’ of which no author provides any clear evidence.
Moreover, these analyses of Libya and its political structure too often are presented on the
basis of a personal aversion to Qadhdhafi’s efforts to build a country with a bureaucratic
institution, a centralized government, and a clear appearance of state. Nevertheless, his
efforts have been labelled as an idiosyncratic, if not quixotic, vision of politics. Secondly,
such an analysis allows us to avoid falling into the trap of what Adam Curtis in his 2012
film documentary about Libya defines a ‘pantomime’ world, in whose construction
Qadhdhafi, as much as Western leaders and academics, actively participated.14 Curtis

9
J. Davis (1987) Libyan Politics: Tribes and Revolution (London: I. B. Tauris), pp. 42–44.
10
Ibid. p. 58.
11
D. Vandewalle (2006) A History of Modern Libya (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 3.
12
See, for instance, R. Lemarchand (2013) Non-State Politics in Post-Qadhafi Libya, Working Papers in African
Studies, Islam in Africa Working-Group Meeting, University of Florida.
13
H. Roberts (2011) Who said Gaddafi had to go?, London Review of Books, 33(22), pp. 8–18.
14
See further A. Curtis (2012) He’s Behind You – How Colonel Gaddafi and the Western Establishment
Together Created a Pantomime World, BBC documentary available at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/
adamcurtis/posts/hes_behind_you, accessed October 24, 2012.
 390 M. Capasso

shows the creation of this ‘pantomime’ world, a simplified vision of the world that opposes
the forces of good and evil and which trivializes the understanding of the relationship
between Qadhdhafi and the West. Consequently, there is an inevitable loss of all nuanced
and self-contradictory perspectives that characterized their relationship. The latter is a
crucial aspect that one must bear in mind when it comes to the international intervention.
In fact, despite the fall of the Jamahiriyya, this obscure opposition of the forces of good
and evil, dividing ‘us’ and ‘them,’ relentlessly is pursued.15
Therefore, the first step for a more nuanced analysis of Libya is to demonstrate how
ideology functions in these previous analyses of the country. As Slavoj Žižek aptly puts it,
‘here one must bear in mind Lacan’s motto that nothing is lacking in the real: every
perception of a lack or a surplus (“not enough of this,” “too much of that”) always involves
a symbolic universe.’16 To define Libya as a ‘stateless society’ (not enough of this) or
Qadhdhafi as a ‘mad dog’ (too much of that) is an ideological statement. However, this is
Downloaded by [Durham University Library] at 12:47 12 February 2015

not a pure representational problem, as we are not simply dealing with a mistaken
representation of the Libyan structure of power that Qadhdhafi created. Rather, we need to
grasp the pre-constituted spaces of power within which certain academic analyses are
formulated. While a redefinition of the paradigms for studying power in Libya under
Qadhdhafi is fundamental, what is also at stake is the function of ideology within
academia, which, by not being recognized as a pre-political space, reiterates an ontological
arrogance that characterized what Edward Said called Orientalism.17
It is important to deconstruct the ideological sphere that hides behind a vision of the
world that prefers to label Qadhdhafi as a ‘mad dog.’18 This is not an attempt to redeem
what history already has demonstrated was a regime rife with brutality, repression and
violence. Rather it is a call for an intellectual effort to proceed along a line of analysis that
aims to capture how power and ideology—and not just the state—is exercised, practiced
and performed. Firstly, Qadhdhafi’s vision tends to be traced in opposing terms, since it is
presented as completely foolish adversity to building what in the Western world is taken
for granted as a functional element of society: the state. However, what is rarely taken into
account is Qadhdhafi’s genuine attempt to challenge what he perceived as the intellectual
and military colonial enterprise of the West in the 1970s. On this note, I want to stress that
the only moment when Qadhdhafi, as well as many other Arab leaders, began to be taken
into serious consideration by the international power structure was not when he published

15
See, for example, the BBC Four documentary, Mad Dog: Gaddafi’s Secret World and the book by A. Cojean
(2012) Le Proies: dans le harem de Kadhafi (Paris: Grasset). Although I do not question the possibility that
Qadhdhafi committed atrocious crimes, I believe these works clearly show how ideology functions in our
society. Qadhdhafi is considered only under the aspect of his derailed psychological behaviour, and there is no
attempt to investigate the Libyan constellation of practices of power. In this regard, one must highlight how the
documentary presents young sub-Saharian Africans as naively believing in the power of Qadhdhafi,
reinforcing the canon of the intellectually limited man of colour and the diabolic dimension of the Libyan
leader. Once again, this is a simplistic portrait of these dynamics.
16
S. Žižek (1994) Introduction in: S. Žižek (ed.), Mapping Ideology (New York: Verso), p. 11.
17
E. Said (1978) Orientalism (London: Penguin).
18
It is interesting to note, for example, that former American presidents often spoke of Qadhdhafi ‘in terms that
implied their support for his downfall and death.’ There is a long list of terms that have been used, which range
from ‘subhuman,’ through ‘cancer,’ to ‘egomaniac who would trigger World War III to make headlines,’ and
so on. See C. Wright (1981–82) Libya and the West: Headlong into Confrontation?, International Affairs, 58
(1), p. 16.
 The Libyan Drawers 391

The Green Book but rather when he nationalized Libyan oil. Secondly, this very
depoliticization of Qadhdhafi, its elevation into the ultimate form of madness beyond the
reach of ‘normal’ political discourse, ‘can also be a political act of utter cynical
manipulation, a political intervention aiming at legitimizing a certain kind of hierarchical
political relation.’19
In light of above, it is thus worth exploring Jason Pack’s 2013 edited volume, The 2011
Libyan Uprising and the post-Qadhafi future, which fits clearly with the claim of Libya
being a unique order of society—a stateless one—and it is framed around the discourse of
‘center-periphery.’20 After a quick, yet crucial, digression on whether the Libyan events
could be characterized as a revolution or an uprising,21 Pack describes the prevailing
power relationship in Libya since the Ottoman era as one where ‘a weak centre was forced
to grapple with a recalcitrant periphery.’22 This line of argument creates a theoretical
trajectory, which is characterized by the constant presence of a weak centre of power that
Downloaded by [Durham University Library] at 12:47 12 February 2015

struggles to monopolize the peripheral areas that refuse to submit to its authority. In the
case of the Ottoman period, for example, the Ottomans controlled the coastal towns, yet
they lacked significant authority in the hinterland. What followed was a shift ‘from the
Ottoman and Italian centre of Tripoli to alternative centres such as Benghazi and Bayda.’23
Pack stresses that similar dynamics also played out with Qadhdhafi’s coup d’état. ‘In short,
an in-depth study of Libyan history over the past 150 years reveals a critical shift of power
between the centre and the periphery. Each time the periphery dislodges the centre, it
gradually constitutes a new centre that is in turn dislodged.’24
However, what such an analysis fails to grasp is the whole process of gradual
dislodgement in which, I would argue, diverse and multiple narratives of power and
resistance struggle to win their hegemonic positions in a Gramscian sense. There is a loss
of nuanced perspectives, of that multiplicity of points of observation that this special issue
tries modestly to recover in order to produce a challenging intellectual work rather than a
policy making study. It is too simple, almost unimaginative, to affirm that Qadhdhafi has
ruled for four decades through a system based on violence and repression, with contempt
for institutions.25 On the contrary, it must be recognized that, at least the first decade of the
Al Fateh revolution led to a more equitable redistribution of wealth which, until then, was

19
S. Žižek (2001) Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? – Five Interventions in the (Mis)Use of a Notion (New
York: Verso), p. 67.
20
J. Pack (2013) The Centre and the Periphery, in J. Pack (ed.) The 2011 Libyan Uprising and the Post-Qadhafi
Future (London: Palgrave MacMillan), p.11.
21
Pack categorizes the 2011 Libyan events as an uprising rather than a revolution because the latter is considered
to ‘imply the creation of a new power structure buttressed by an alternative ideological framework.” (Ibid,
pp. 1 –2) In the footnotes, the author is inspired by the concept of revolution as it is formulated by Jack
Goldstone, who ‘foregrounds the role of ideology as legitimizing factor in revolutions.’ However, if one
follows, for instance, the arguments of Žižek (1987) in The Sublime Object of Ideology (New York: Verso) it
may be argued that ideology is always present. I sense much of the literature on revolution still bears a tacit
expectation of positive change that inevitably biases the analysis of the process in se and per se.
22
Pack, The Center and the Periphery, p. 9.
23
Ibid, p. 10.
24
Ibid.
25
Pack makes this claim in ibid. p. 10: ‘Although Qadhafi’s regime deliberately avoided building institutions, it
survived from 1969 to 2011 because it remained powerful enough to prevent the consolidation of rival power
centers.’
 392 M. Capasso

exclusively in the hands of those elites linked to the monarchy and the old colonizers. The
implementation of more socialist-inclined policies definitely allowed Qadhdhafi to
establish a consensus among the Libyan population, which possibly is still relevant in
capturing the generational division in the country.
Hence, a dichotomous understanding of power, which tries to elaborate a theoretical
trajectory in Libyan history, has severe limitations that easily can marginalize the complex
subtlety and multiplicity of processes and practices that characterized, in particular, the
Qadhdhafi regime. Its only results are autoscopic and self-referential. Although a foreign
military intervention under the NATO umbrella helped to remove Qadhdhafi, the end must
not prevent us from appreciating that the Jamahiriyya was a regime that experienced
several phases of popular consent. I contend that it is necessary to reconsider how Libyan
history has been analyzed in order to produce an understanding that is subjected to revision
of the current situation. The latter, in fact, is not so clear and crisp as many media outlets
tried to make it appear from the beginning of the first protests in February 2011. It is for
Downloaded by [Durham University Library] at 12:47 12 February 2015

this reason that we must grasp, for instance, the relationship between power and violence
that distinguishes the current Libyan scenario, and question the role of what uncritically is
accepted as NATO’s liberating and democratic military intervention.

Humanitarian Intervention: How Western Ideology Functions

On October 20, 2011, commenting on the death of Mu’ammar Qadhdhafi, Barack Obama
made the following remarks: ‘Today, the government of Libya announced the death of
Muammar Qaddafi. This marks the end of a long and painful chapter for the people of
Libya, who now have the opportunity to determine their own destiny in a new and
democratic Libya.’26 Clearly, it seems that the people of Libya are missing this
opportunity to build a new democratic future. Factious militias effectively divide up the
country, violence is endemic, and it hardly is possible to detect a person or an institution
that could claim to speak on behalf of the whole population. As a matter of fact, Libya has
had two coexisting prime ministries since May 2014.27 In light of the more-or-less
dramatic picture that emerges, although it appears so easy to blame the incapacities of the
Libyan people to forge a better future, it becomes legitimate to question whether the
humanitarian military intervention, what initially was supposed to be a no-fly zone under
the NATO umbrella has triggered a passage from dictatorship to a new and democratic
Libya.
Many scholars and experts claim that Western powers could have invested more time
and money in helping Libya to reconstruct its collapsed and absent infrastructure,
particularly after the fall of the regime.28 However, these same scholars blatantly fail to

26
http://www.whitehouse.gov/photos-and-video/video/2011/10/20/president-obama-death-muammar-qaddafi,
accessed June 23, 2014.
27
http://www.libyaherald.com/2014/05/04/libya-has-two-prime-ministers/, accessed May 4, 2014.
28
K. Mezran and F. Lamen proposes an ‘endeavor to convince the Libyan government that an international
peacekeeping presence or police force would help reassure the security situation.’ Available at: http://www.
atlanticcouncil.org/publications/issue-briefs/security-challenges-to-libyas-quest-for-democracy, accessed
September 12, 2012. It is also worth stressing that Libya in fact has entered into agreement with Interpol
for building the security environment. Available at: http://www.libyaherald.com/2014/02/26/libya-will-use-
interpol-red-notices-to-arrest-criminals-zeidan/#axzz2utxb90Tn, accessed February 28, 2014; and in this
 The Libyan Drawers 393

grasp how the humanitarian reasons underlying the foreign intervention, such as the
uprising and the sufferings of the Libyan people, are the result of a system that begets the
same crisis. Even though Libyans admit that they asked and called for intervention from
the international community, we should not forget that—most probably—Libyans who
were living in Sirte, for instance, never thought NATO should have started bombing their
city. The very presentation of the Libyan uprising as a humanitarian tragedy and the very
reformulation of the politico-military conflict in humanitarian terms were sustained by an
eminently political choice, which was the desire of the Western powers to get rid of
Qadhdhafi by supporting the ‘insurgents.’ In this way, the ‘protection of civilians’
signified the creation of a double standard: To protect civilians meant to support those
‘rebels’ who clearly and relentlessly were fighting against Qadhdhafi.
As Maximilian Forte aptly argues, in fact, the story and battle of Sirte is emblematic of
this ideological and political agenda that the Western powers adopted from the beginning
Downloaded by [Durham University Library] at 12:47 12 February 2015

of the first demonstration in Benghazi. In the last 10 years, Sirte had witnessed an
economic expansion of its urban territory due, in particular, to Qadhdhafi’s willingness to
make Sirte a central place for the Pan-African project.29 During the start of the war in
Libya, the humanitarian umbrella that was supposed ‘to protect civilians’ did not apply to
those civilians who, by being reluctant and opposed to the demands of the ‘rebels,’ decided
to remain in support of the regime. The casualties and slaughter of many civilians in
Sirte,30 who vindictively and indiscriminately began to be treated as azlam [loyalists], by
the ‘thuwwars’ [revolutionaries] was not understood as a massacre of civilians. Thus, they
were not protected as such. As Forte points out, such atrocities, ‘which the Western media
would have otherwise labelled “genocidal” if expressed by Gaddafi or his supporters,
received so little notice and even less comment from Western humanitarians who were
anxious to intervene and “save lives” in Libya, is a testament to the manufacture of a moral
dualism that could justify as much atrocity as it claimed to abhor.’31
The case of Sirte is not the only example that highlights the contradictory, dualist
approach of the ‘humanitarian’ intervention, which was supposed to ‘save lives.’ In fact, as
much as the humanitarian reasons allowed for the regime change, so these same principles
now are invalidated, as Amnesty and other international organizations reports only now

Footnote 28 continued
report by C. S. Chivvis & J. Martini (2014) Libya after Qaddafi – Lessons and Implications for the Future
(Washington: RAND), pp. 79–85. Available at: http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_
reports/RR500/RR577/RAND_RR577.pdf, accessed July 1, 2014.
29
M. Forte (2012) Slouching Towards Sirte – NATO’s War on Libya and Africa (Montreal: Baraka Books),
pp. 31–68.
30
As documented in the report by the UN Human Rights Inquiry Commission in Libya (2012) ‘The Commission
found that thuwar also used inherently indiscriminate weapons in their military offensives against cities
perceived as loyalist. Of particular concern is their conduct in Sirte. The Commission found that almost every
building exhibited damage. The most common damage and weapon debris observed was from Grad rockets,
and heavy machine-gun fire from 14.5 mm and 23 mm weapons. Dozens of buildings are uninhabitable due to
their structural integrity being compromised, with multiple walls and roofs collapsed. Numerous buildings
exhibited impacts from shells consistent with fire from 106 mm recoilless rifles and 107 mm rocket artillery,
using both High-Explosive Anti-Tank rounds and High Explosive Squash Head rounds. Although some of the
buildings were likely used by the Qadhafi forces and were therefore legitimate targets for attacks, damage was
so widespread as to be clearly indiscriminate in nature.’ Available at: http://www.ohchr.org/Documents/
HRBodies/HRCouncil/RegularSession/Session19/A.HRC.19.68.pdf, accessed April 13, 2012.
31
Forte, Slouching Towards Sirte, p. 34.
 394 M. Capasso

show, by the Libyan ‘revolutionaries’ treatment of, for instance, certain communities, such
as the Black Africans or Black Libyans. In this regard, it also must be highlighted how Italy
and the European Union, to mention only a few of those states that participated to the
humanitarian mission, keep funding—as they already were doing under Qadhdhafi—the
Libyan detention centres for those migrants and refugees who try to reach Europe, without
carefully checking if any ‘humanitarian’ abuse is being perpetrated toward them. Although
the EU used to emphasize the importance of increasing cooperation with Mediterranean
countries, it is worth noting how each European country always preferred to stipulate
bilateral agreements with Qadhdhafi in relation to migration problems. In this regard,
Paleologo points out how, for instance, Italy in 2004 ‘enacted Law no. 271, which allowed
the Ministry of the Interior to finance the construction, in third countries, of “useful
structures for controlling the irregular flows of migrants towards the Italian territory.”’32
However, that law, as the 2007 Agreement between Berlusconi and Qadhdhafi, never was
Downloaded by [Durham University Library] at 12:47 12 February 2015

implemented in respect to human rights. On the contrary, the hypocritical stance of Italy,
and, I would argue, the EU as a whole is demonstrated in the report by Thomas Hammarberg
in 2009. The commissioner for Human Rights for the Council of Europe aptly commented
that he ‘wishes to reiterate his disapproval of bilateral or multilateral agreements for the
forced returns of irregular migrants with countries with long-standing, proven records of
torture.’33 Since 2011 the EU and Italy, as Human Rights Watch (HRW) shows, ‘have
committed at least e12 million over the next four years to the centers.’34 Most probably,
some of these refugees are trying to escape from the ‘revolutionary’ violence that has
inundated Libya, but the paladins of human rights either seem not to notice or the use of the
‘humanitarian’ label is another fantasy that covers the kernel of the real ideological object.
Therefore, far from illustrating the case of a stateless country under a ruthless dictator,
the bitter truth of Libya is that the state probably was—since the start of the initial
protests—divided and thus entering a phase of civil war that is still continuing. Moreover,
Libya is also a direct result of the West’s failure to grasp the grievances and political
dynamics that sparked the initial demonstrations, and of the West’s earlier silent
diplomatic support to rehabilitate Qadhdhafi, for instance, by making Libya part of the US
rendition program. Then in 2011 the West introduced itself to its own public as a fearless
knight ready to step in to save the damsel—Libya—from the mad dictator. But what would
happen if the revolt had not occurred? Would Saif al-Islam now be a well-known scholar
of political science in a prestigious European university rather than being jealously
detained in an unknown prison in Zintan? ‘Weaponizing morality as an instrument of
warfare is not new, but it deserves a prominent place in any account of the ideological
structure of what some call “the new imperialism” and how it plastered Libya with
bombs.’35 The justification of political decisions in ethical terms is used to mask the real
political stakes and interests, which are not difficult to discern.
By calling for international intervention, the Libyan ‘insurgents’ allowed the
international community to contribute consistently and even to direct the reconstruction

32
http://www.meltingpot.org/Nuove-intese-tra-Italia-e-Libia-Ancora-sulla-pelle-dei.html#.U-HrpFV_uSo,
accessed June 22, 2014.
33
https://wcd.coe.int/ViewDoc.jsp?id ¼ 1428427, accessed June 23, 2014.
34
http://www.hrw.org/news/2014/06/22/libya-whipped-beaten-and-hung-trees, accessed June 23, 2014.
35
Forte, Slouching Towards Sirte, p. 34.
 The Libyan Drawers 395

and political future of their country, exacerbating further the conflict and disavowing the
civil war that still persists. In this exact moment when one questions the results of the
transition in Libya, it is fundamental not to forget—as Žižek aptly notes in the case of
Iraq—that those who intervene on behalf of human rights relied ‘on a precise idea of the
political and economic conditions of the post-Saddam Iraq (Western liberal democracy,
guarantee of private property, the inclusion into global market, etc).’36 It is no surprise that
many commentators hoped to see Libya becoming another oil-boosting country like those
monarchies in the Persian Gulf, whose democratic character for the West is more
represented by their longstanding alliance with the United States rather than by any
presence of a democratic government that leaves room for voices of dissent and
opposition. Therefore, I believe a parallel is maintained between the incapacity of
academic scholarship to go beyond the ‘statelessness’ dimension of Libya and the
ideological substratum that keeps driving the humanitarian intervention, which is a pièce
Downloaded by [Durham University Library] at 12:47 12 February 2015

de résistance of our capitalist, neoliberal society.

As Žižek writes, ‘one of Jacques Lacan’s outrageous statements is that, even if what a
jealous husband claims about his wife (that she sleeps around with other men) is all true,
his jealousy is still pathological; along the same lines, one could say that, even if most of
the Nazi claims about the Jews were true (they exploit Germans, they seduce German
girls . . . ), their anti-Semitism would still be (and was) pathological—because it represses
the true reason the Nazis needed anti-Semitism in order to sustain their ideological
position,’37 and the same applies to the Israeli tautological statements toward the
Palestinians. Similarly apropos the claims that ‘Qadhdhafi is a mad dog’ or ‘Libya is a
stateless society’: they still are false with regard to the position from which they are
enunciated. Once again, I am not trying to claim that Qadhdhafi was a benevolent ruler,
who did not resort to violence and brutality against its own population in order to stay in
power. The crucial point is that to stigmatize and caricature his persona and behavior is
profoundly pathological because it serves ideological purposes. The very depoliticization
of Qadhdhafi, its elevation into the ultimate form of madness beyond the reach of ‘normal’
political discourse, ‘can also be a political act of utter cynical manipulation, a political
intervention aiming at legitimizing a certain kind of hierarchical political relation.’38
For instance, it disqualifies forms of violence, such as the Israeli occupation of Palestine,
for which the Western states are responsible as minor in comparison to the ‘mad dog’
Qadhdhafi. In sum, I argue that these are ideological statements because they
systematically distort communication under the influence of unavowed social interests
(of domination, etc.). Thus, as Žižek argues, ‘a gap separates its “official”, public meaning
from its actual intention—that is to say, in which we are dealing with an unreflected
tension between the explicit enunciated content of the text and its pragmatic
presuppositions.’39

36
http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/1365-some-bewildered-clarifications-a-response-to-noam-chomsky-by-
slavoj-zizek, accessed August 26, 013.
37
S. Žižek (2006) Objet a in Social Links, in: J. Clemens & R. Crigg (eds.) Jacques Lacan and the Other Side of
Psychoanalysis: Reflections on Seminar XVII (Durham, NC: Duke University Press), p. 115 [emphasis in
original].
38
Žižek, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?, p. 67.
39
Žižek, Mapping Ideology, p. 10.
 396 M. Capasso

In such conditions, the call for an intervention inevitably allowed the West to influence
the course of action. As Forte has noted: ‘It was not up to us in the West to choose a leader
for Libya or determine on our own who stood as a “legitimate representative,” [because]
by endorsing one or another we would be justifying violence on the ground regardless.’40
When did it start to matter for the West that the Libyan people were resisting Qadhdhafi
and his regime, considering that signs of resistance were already present when, for
instance, Qadhdhafi renounced the WMD program? At that time, the West’s reaction was
completely different.

Perpetuation and Multiplication of the Logic of Exception

Since the death of Qadhdhafi, which largely was celebrated as the fall of the regime’s
legacy, Libya seems to be mired in a vicious spiral of violence that operates in a state of
Downloaded by [Durham University Library] at 12:47 12 February 2015

lawlessness despite several elections. The underlying demands of the Libyan population
that prompted the revolt have not been met yet. There is increasing dissatisfaction with the
government, and different threats are coming from federalist and Islamist movements,
which are difficult to spot among the plethora of heavily armed militias that fought during
the civil war. The latest parliamentary report (see Footnote 5) fails to consider the
continuous and random clashes and car-bombings all over the country, as well as the death
of foreign individuals, such as the incident at the American embassy in 2012, which
resulted in the deaths of four staff members.41 Libya not only experienced a very violent
civil war of six to eight months which was supported by NATO, but this civil war was not
resolved with the death of Qadhdhafi. Violence has been simmering since the period
before March 2011, when the regime responded with extreme brutality to any political
opposition, thus making violence systemic. Therefore, a closer and more critical look at
the Jamahiriyya regime and the foreign intervention can help to capture the link between
the exercise of power and the role of violence within it.
As I argued in a previous article, it is not possible to locate precisely the transformation
of the Libyan Jamahiriyya into what Giorgio Agamben terms a state of exception.42
The process was gradual, but most probably its launch was the ‘stray dogs’ campaigns in
the mid-1980s, which were designated to neutralize and make an example of the dissident
expatriates and represented a clear turn for the regime. However, this episode was
followed and preceded by many other cruder and unforgettable events, such as the Abu
Salim massacre in 1996,43 the suppression of the Islamist threat in the 1980s and 1990s,
the 2006 protests in Benghazi, and so on. What really is crucial to stress are the
neutralization of laws that Qadhdhafi put in place and the treatment of Libyans as homines

40
Forte, Slouching Towards Sirte, p. 261.
41
This protest coincided with the larger protests in the Middle East against a film ridiculing the Prophet
Muhammad that an American-Israeli in California produced and which was promoted by an extreme anti-
Muslim Egyptian Christian campaigner, Nakoula Basseley Nakoula. See http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/
features/2012/09/2012915181925528211.html, accessed September 16, 2012, and: http://www.theguardian.
com/world/middle-east-live/2012/sep/12/libya-egypt-attacks-muhammad-film-live, accessed September 13,
2012.
42
M. Capasso (2013) Understanding Libya’s ‘Revolution’ through Transformation of the Jamahiriyya into a
State of Exception, Middle East Critique, 22(2), pp. 115 –128.
43
http://www.hrw.org/news/2006/06/27/libya-june-1996-killings-abu-salim-prison, accessed April 23, 2014.
 The Libyan Drawers 397

sacri.44 However, this configuration and deployment of power ‘by which human beings
could be deprived of their rights and prerogatives so completely that no act committed
against them could appear any longer as a crime’45 become clearly visible with the death
of Qadhdhafi, which represented the reversed, yet continuing, principle of this logic.
As the Jacobins demanded the killing of the king without trial, so the rebels killed
Qadhdhafi in October 2011. In fact, Agamben writes, ‘they [the Jacobins] merely brought
the principle of the unsacrificeability of sacred life to the most extreme point of its
development, remaining absolutely faithful (though most likely they did not realize it) to
the arcanum according to which sacred life may be killed by anyone without committing
homicide, but never submitted to sanctioned forms of execution.’46 One here can adopt
another counter-intuitive comparison: The Orwellian ‘two-minutes hate sessions.’47
If under Qadhdhafi, the revolution was televised with the images of what the Libyan writer,
Hisham Matar, describes as the broadcasting of the trials of the ‘enemies,’48 one can
Downloaded by [Durham University Library] at 12:47 12 February 2015

advance the hypothesis that the YouTube footage of Qadhdhafi’s killing assumes that role.
Despite the fall of the Jamahiriyya, the perpetuation of the logic of exception remains
pervasive in Libya, and it forces us to question whether the transformation of the existing
social framework has brought a more just order of society. In fact, this can be detected in
the deployments of power of both the General National Congress and, above all, the
various independent militias. On the part of the various transitional governments, the
passage of the much-discussed Political Isolation Law,49 a sort of de-Qadhdhafication of
Libya, whose issuance was carried out under the militia’s military siege of the parliament
in Benghazi, is an emblematic example of the perpetuation of this logic. This law not only
prohibits senior figures under the former regime from political participation and public
functions, but it also criminalizes any speech or gesture that could damage the
achievements and the spirit of the February 17 revolution. There are other legislative
measures that have proceeded along this path, such as Decree 05/2014, which legalizes
‘stopping and banning the broadcasting of certain satellite TV stations.’50 Moreover, as a

44
Homo sacer is the person that one ‘is permitted to kill without committing homicide and without celebrating a
sacrifice.’ As argued in my previous article, ‘by applying Agamben’s theoretical approach, it is possible to see
how the absence of a precise legal regulation and the creation of the Revolutionary Committees (RCs)
reflected that confusion between exception and rule [...] so those expressions like ‘counter revolutionaries,
agents of the West, maladies, and stray dogs,’ which Qadhdhafi used during his speeches, led the actions and
framed the practices of the RCs in the name of a revolutionary legitimacy. Indeed, ‘enemies of the revolution’
was a ‘flexible category that expands and contracts with the needs of the moment.’ In this way, the Libyans
became homines sacri.’ Capasso, Understanding Libya’s Revolution, p. 117.
45
Ibid. p. 116.
46
G. Agamben (1998) Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press), p. 62.
47
G. Orwell (2003) 1984 (Milano: Mondadori).
48
H. Matar (2006) In The Country of Men (London: Penguin Books), pp. 179–188.
49
See link to the full text of the law: http://www.libyaherald.com/2013/05/14/political-isolation-law-the-full-
text/#axzz2roaUY6Sl, accessed May 22, 2013. There are only a few institutional figures of the new
government in Libya, who have been affected by the law: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-07-09/
libya-s-66-billion-wealth-fund-replaces-chairman-amid-probe.html, accessed July 9, 2014; and http://www.
brookings.edu/, /media/research/files/papers/2014/03/17%20libya%20lustration%20david%20mzioudet/
lustration%20in%20libya%20english.pdf, accessed March 17, 2014.
50
See link to the full text of the law: http://www.gnc.gov.ly/legislation_files/635260814004403644.pdf,
accessed January 30, 2014; and a commentary http://www.trust.org/item/20140130090006-k6kj5/, accessed
January 30, 2014.
 398 M. Capasso

HRW report shows, ‘Law 38/2012 on Some Procedures for the Transitional Period,
enacted on 12 May 2012 by the National Transitional Council, protects from prosecution
perpetrators of serious crimes if their actions were aimed at “promoting or protecting the
[2011] revolution” against Muammar Qadhdhafi.’51 This law is clearly problematic
because, on the one hand, it propagates a culture of selective justice and impunity. On the
other hand, it perpetuates the logic of exception against which the Libyans revolted,
allowing the armed militias to operate with impunity.
In fact, the violence and strategy of open confrontation employed by the militias are the
most vivid examples of the logic of exception, and they already have led to numerous
bloody clashes. For instance, the November 2013 clashes in Tripoli, where the militia from
Misrata shot at demonstrators who were calling for a halt to the militias-related violence,52
or the violence in the south of the country between Tebu and Arab militias.53 These are
only two examples of how the vicious circle of violence penetrates the everyday life of
Downloaded by [Durham University Library] at 12:47 12 February 2015

people. Furthermore, the latest report from the International Crisis Group also notes that
Law/38 2012 on ‘Special Procedures during the Transitional Period’ ‘grants immunity
from prosecution to “revolutionaries” for “military, security and civilian acts required by
the 17 February Revolution [and] committed with the purpose of leading the revolution to
victory.” The same law grants legal weight to interrogation reports and other information
collected by “revolutionaries”, legitimising the seizure, detention and interrogation of
detainees outside a legal framework.’54 The Amnesty International report also stresses this
mixture of impunity and lawlessness, which is striking in Thawarghas, where black
Libyans have been displaced from their own city: ‘Everyone living in the town of
Tawargha was driven out by anti-Gaddafi militia, who vowed Tawarghas would never be
able to return. The militia accused the Tawarghas [ . . . ] of supporting Colonel al-Gaddafi’s
government and of committing war crimes in Misratah on its behalf.’55 This also applies to
the town of Sirte.
In light of the above, the humanitarian intervention scheme, where—as Forte argues—
‘the rebels could only be divine, and their victims could only be sacrificed,’56 has provided
more fertile terrain for this logic to develop. So, the idea that Qadhdhafi had lost ‘all
legitimacy’ in Libya and he was ‘taking on his entire people and his people were all against
him was another distortion of the facts.’57 In this regard, Roberts aptly argues that:

51
Human Rights Watch (2014) Priorities for Legislative Freedom – A Human Rights Roadmap for a New Libya,
pp. 38–43. Available at: http://www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/reports/libya0114ForUpload_0.pdf, accessed
March 1, 2014.
52
See link on the clashes in Tripoli at: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/16/libya-militia-attack-
tripoli-fears-conflict, accessed November 18, 2013.
53
For instance, the clashes between Tebu and Arab tribes resulted in 86 deaths; see http://www.refworld.org/cgi-
bin/texis/vtx/rwmain?docid¼4f8550982, accessed April 13, 2012.
54
International Crisis Group (2013) Trial by Error: Justice in Post-Qadhafi Libya, p. 28. Available at: http://
www.crisisgroup.org/, /media/Files/Middle%20East%20North%20Africa/North%20Africa/libya/140-trial-
by-error-justice-in-post-qadhafi-libya.pdf, accessed April 20, 2013.
55
Amnesty International (2013) Barred from their Homes – The Continued Displacement and Persecution of
Tawarghas and Other Communities in Libya, p. 4. Available at: http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/asset/
MDE19/011/2013/en/1bdf76a5-fbf9-4264-a637-066c665c75c4/mde190112013en.pdf, accessed November 1,
2013.
56
Ibid.
57
Roberts, Who said Gaddafi had to go?, pp. 8–18.
 The Libyan Drawers 399

This profoundly undemocratic idea followed naturally from the equally

undemocratic idea that, in the absence of electoral consultation or even an
opinion poll to ascertain the Libyans’ actual views, the British, French and
American governments had the right and authority to determine who was part of the
Libyan people and who wasn’t [logic of exception]. No one supporting the Gaddafi
regime counted. Because they were not part of ‘the Libyan people’ they could not be
among the civilians to be protected, even if they were civilians as a matter of mere
fact. And they were not protected; they were killed by NATO air strikes as well as by
uncontrolled rebel units.58

On the one hand, I would argue that—as Beatrice Hibou does in the case of Tunisia—
when one lives in a state of exception:
Downloaded by [Durham University Library] at 12:47 12 February 2015

the only freedom for the ostracized individual, the only action at his disposal, is to
turn against himself, against the only thing that he still possesses: the body. [...] In an
environment that prohibits the political, the expression of freedom alone, the
expression of the political, passes through what the individual in an ultimate sense
possess: ‘naked life,’ that ‘subject needs to be at once turned into the exception and
included in the city.’59

On the other hand, there is the risk that in destroying the sovereign exceptional power that
allowed Qadhdhafi to decide on whether certain forms of life are worth living does not
signify the complete abandonment of the logic of exception. This is also clear in the case
of human rights because—as Agamben affirms—they ‘are not “protections” against
sovereign power but are in themselves mechanisms of power that are bound up from their
inception with the regulation and making of subjects.’60
In such conditions, the new homines sacri can become—and probably they already
are—black Africans, black Libyans, those individuals from Thawargha, Misrata and Sirte,
or whoever does not fit the violent production of subjects that the ‘insurgents,’ supported
by the NATO military intervention, put into place. It is true that for the ‘new and
democratic Libya’ to succeed, it ‘needs a national spirit with which all different localities
can be infused,’61 without questioning further whether the vision of Libya as a nation-state
is the best solution. However, this process has been profoundly undermined by the amount
of epistemic and structural violence that characterized the NATO military intervention and
the civil war. To unite and combine the different and competing narratives or
‘antagonisms’ (to use the term of Ernesto Laclau and Chatal Moffe)62 means to recognize

58
Ibid.
59
B. Hibou (2011) The Force of Obedience: The Political Economy of Repression in Tunisia (Cambridge: Polity
Press), p. 287.
60
S. John-Richards (2012) Asylum and the Common: Mediations between Foucault, Agamben and Esposito,
Birkbeck Law Review, 2(1), p. 26.
61
http://www.aawsat.net/2014/02/article55329325, accessed February 25, 2014.
62
Although the concept it is developed in the whole book, this passage is quite illuminating: ‘It is precisely the
polysemic character of every antagonism which makes its meaning dependent upon a hegemonic articulation
to the extent that, as we have seen, the terrain of hegemonic practices is constituted out of the fundamental
ambiguity of the social, the impossibility of establishing in a definitive manner the meaning of any struggle,
 400 M. Capasso

the fractures that were swept away in the precise moment the international community
decided to stand on the side of the insurgents, avoiding to confront the possible differences
between those groups. The articulation of a national narrative, far from being something
predetermined, is the result of a hegemonic struggle. Therefore, it is fundamental both to
recognize the unsutured character of Libyan society and to abandon the essentialism of the
totality, and thereby to allow for the affirmation of the constitutive character of social
division.63

‘Phobia’ as a ‘Subjective Destitution’

The current Libyan situation seems to reinforce the desperation of some and the thirst for
revenge of others, while the ‘new democratic future’ of the country, once again, does not
allow everyone to participate, although there are a few ‘exceptions.’ Whereas, as I stated
Downloaded by [Durham University Library] at 12:47 12 February 2015

above, a parallel is maintained between the incapacity of academic scholarship to go

beyond the ‘statelessness’ perception of Libya and the ideological substratum that keeps
driving the humanitarian intervention, the country is beset by rampant violence whereby
the logic of exception is a viable means for pursuing the interests of the multiple militias.
The situation allows for a justification of violence. The opportunities to build a more just
social order and to gain a little stability are really minimal. Thus, more than three years
after the rebels found Qadhdhafi hiding in a tunnel, they struggle to see the light at its end;
blinded by the violence, they confuse it with the light.
However, signs and hints of a society that is searching for a creative—read non-
violent—transformation are nonetheless present. An emblematic example is represented
by ‘Phobia,’64 ‘a new Libyan television series that was broadcast over the holy month of
Ramadan in 2013. The series depicts what life is like when a regime falls, a revolution is
won, and the future remains uncertain.’65 Full of raging militia fighters, corrupt politicians,
flying bullets and torture scenes, the series is precisely what Žižek, drawing upon Jacques
Lacan’s idea, calls ‘subjective destitution.’ How can a series that describes the narcissistic,
derailed turn of the revolutionary spirit in the aftermath of Qadhdhafi’s fall through a
humorous lens help to overcome the erratic and everyday violence on the ground?
According to Lacan, the ‘subjective destitution’ is the process that characterizes the end,
not the aim, of analytical treatment. Žižek applies Lacan’s concept to the social-political
field, where it entails the development of a theory by the subject, such as the artistic work
‘Phobia,’ of how the dynamics of social institutions and everyday life subtly affect the
psychology of individuals who live and work within them.66 By mocking the interaction of
thuwwars, azlams, and corrupted politicians, this series is able to ‘traverse the phantasy’

Footnote 62 continued
whether considered in isolation or through its fixing in a relational system.’ E. Laclau & C. Mouffe (2001)
Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (Verso: London), p. 170.
63
Ibid. p. 193.
64
For a quick, yet insightful, analysis about the series’ making and content, see Valerie Stocker’s article at:
http://muftah.org/libyan-phobia-dilemmas-and-challenges-of-life-after-gadhafi/#.U754wvldWsw, accessed
September 2, 2013. The different episodes are available on YouTube, see link to the trailer: https://www.
youtube.com/watch?v¼ JhOZW7-XQuY, accessed September 2, 2013.
65
http://muftah.org/libyan-phobia-dilemmas-and-challenges-of-life-after-gadhafi/#.U754wvldWsw.
66
M. Sharpe & G. Bucher (2010) Zizek and Politics: A Critical Introduction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press), p. 12.
 The Libyan Drawers 401

that holds each one of these different ideologies, to traverse that element which
supplements the impossibility of forming a One out of what is, in principle, not an unified
social system. In such a way, they ridicule the behaviour and principles of diverse groups,
thus drawing and showing subtle lines of comparison and, I would argue, calling for the
embracement of a radical critical position. This position should be one that allows
overcoming the symptomatic aspects of society, which, for instance, would mean to
abandon the logic of exception that divides, yet sustains, the diverse groups in Libya.
For example, in Episode 5, ‘Perfect World,’67 is an attempt to induce this process of
‘subjective destitution.’ As Stocker summarizes, the episode deals with the vicissitudes of
a fictive film crew that attempts to obtain official approvals: ‘each decision maker wants
the series to match his “truth,” [its own ideological phantasy, in Žižek’s terms] which
plays out in the episode as a dreamlike sequence that starkly contrasts with the surrounding
Downloaded by [Durham University Library] at 12:47 12 February 2015

reality.’68 In doing so, with a comical parody of a frenzy situation, the directors of the
series often unveil how each group inevitably is hindering the construction of a more just
order in Libya. The end of Episode 5 shows those in power, although from different
groups, sitting all together on the sofa, laughing at the screening of the final result of the
fictive crew’s drama, in which their fabricated ‘fantasy’ blatantly collapses with the
everyday reality.
Central to the series and to such a process of ‘subjective destitution’ is the realization of
two fundamental processes: The critique of ideology and the necessary link between
ideology and reality. In fact, a radical critique can be realized only by maintaining the
tension between ideology and reality, because they cannot be clearly separated from one
another. If the fundamental aim of ideological fantasy is to silence social antagonism, then
one must discover the symptom that is perceived as an intrusion to the social field, what
the ‘Jew’ was for Nazism or the ‘Palestinian’ often becomes for Israel. In the case of
Libya, being a member of the former regime is precisely one of those elements. As Garcia
and Sánchez note, ‘we traverse and subvert the phantasmatic framework that determines
the field of social meaning, the ideological self-understanding of a given society, that is to
say, precisely the framework within which the symptom appears as an external, disturbing
intrusion, and not as the point of departure of the truth of the existing social order, in
another hidden way.’69 In other words, the Libyan subject should recognize that there is no
element in society per se that confers a totality to his/her own identity, but it is always an
element that tries to erase the traces of its own impossibility. Therefore, to confront the
framework that holds the social field means to put oneself in a position of critique toward
ideology in order to come to terms with the possibility of his/her own action for
transforming society in a radical, revolutionary and more just way.

67
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v¼ vTaZOVMRl5Q, accessed September 2, 2013.
68
http://muftah.org/libyan-phobia-dilemmas-and-challenges-of-life-after-gadhafi/#.U76biPldWsw, accessed
September 2, 2013.
69
G. I. Garcı́a & C. G. A. Sánchez (2008) Psychoanalysis and Politics: The Theory of Ideology in Slavoj Žižek,
International Journal of Žižek Studies, 2(3), p. 9.
 402 M. Capasso

Conclusion
By opening some Libyan drawers, this article tried to present and meld together several
themes that emerge from the extant literature on Libya, while questioning to what extent
the humanitarian intervention has contributed positively to the country. To live under the
Qadhdhafi regime could never allow sparking a protest as similar to those that took place
in Tunisia or Egypt due to the different structure of Libyan society. Nonetheless, any
attentive scholar or analyst should not underestimate the importance of the fractures that
penetrated the social field since the start of the initial demonstration, and thus the
possibility that the resistance against Qadhdhafi was not uniform. Borrowing Alain
Badiou’s words, if what happened in Libya is to be considered as an Event, which is ‘the
sudden creation, not of a new reality, but of a myriad of new possibilities . . . [and] none of
them is the repetition of what is already known,’70 then Libya might fall under such a
theoretical premise. The fall of the Jamahiriyya is a truth-event, as Badiou puts it, because
Downloaded by [Durham University Library] at 12:47 12 February 2015

it is a portal of possibilities, some already having occurred and others not, that compels the
Libyans to decide, to rethink a new way of being. It is for this reason that I believe that
many phantasies need to be traversed, if new and more just social conditions are to
emerge, because a phantasy, which poses ‘us’ versus ‘them’—‘revolutionaries’ against
‘loyalists’—is a dangerous utopia, whose spillage is proving to be untenable and
untameable.

References
Agamben, G. (1998) Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press).
Amnesty International (2013) Barred from their homes: The continued displacement and persecution of
Tawarghas and other communities in Libya. Available at: http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/asset/MDE19/
011/2013/en/1bdf76a5-fbf9-4264-a637-066c665c75c4/mde190112013en.pdf, accessed November 1, 2013.
Bayat, A. (2013) Revolution in Bad Times, New Left Review, 80 (March–April), pp. 47– 60.
BBC Four documentary (2014) Mad Dog: Gaddafi’s Secret World. Available at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/
programmes/b03tj0n0, accessed February 3, 2014.
Capasso, M. (2013) Understanding Libya’s ‘Revolution’ through Transformation of the Jamahiriyya into a State
of Exception, Middle East Critique, 22(2), pp. 115– 128.
Chivvis, S. C. & Martini, J. (2014) Libya after Qaddafi: Lessons and Implications for the Future. (Washington:
RAND). Available online at: http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/RR500/RR577/
RAND_RR577.pdf, accessed July 1, 2014.
Cojean, A. (2012) Le Proies – dans le harem de Kadhafi (Paris: Grasset).
Curtis, A. (2012) He’s Behind You – How Colonel Gaddafi and the Western establishment together created a
Pantomime World. (London: BBC). Available online at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/posts/hes_
behind_you, accessed October 24, 2012.
Davis, J. (1987) Libyan Politics – Tribes and Revolution (London: I.B. Tauris).
Fink, B. (2014) Against Understanding – Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key (London: Routledge).
Forte, M. (2012) Slouching Towards Sirte – NATO’s War on Libya and Africa (Montreal: Baraka Books).
Garcı́a, G. I. & Sánchez, C. G. A. (2008) Psychoanalysis and Politics: The Theory of Ideology in Slavoj Žižek,
International Journal of Žižek Studies, 2(3), pp. 1 –16.
Hibou, B. (2011) The Force of Obedience: The Political Economy of Repression in Tunisia (Cambridge: Polity
Press).
Human Rights Watch (2014) Priorities for Legislative Freedom: A Human Rights Roadmap for a New Libya.
Available at: http://www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/reports/libya0114ForUpload_0.pdf, accessed March 1,
2014.

70
http://www.lacan.com/thesymptom/?page_id¼ 1031, accessed March 24, 2014.
 The Libyan Drawers 403

International Crisis Group (2013) Trial by Error: Justice in Post-Qadhafi Libya. Available at: http://www.
crisisgroup.org/, /media/Files/Middle%20East%20North%20Africa/North%20Africa/libya/140-trial-by-
error-justice-in-post-qadhafi-libya.pdf, accessed April 20, 2013.
John-Richards, S. (2012) Asylum and the Common: Mediations between Foucault, Agamben and Esposito,
Birkbeck Law Review, 2(1), pp. 13 –16.
Laclau, E. & Mouffe, C. (2001) Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics
(London: Verso).
Lemarchand, R. (2013) Non-State Politics in Post-Qadhafi Libya. Working Papers in African Studies. Islam in
Africa Working-Group Meeting, University of Florida.
Libya Body Count (2014). available at: http://www.libyabodycount.org/, accessed June 24, 2014.
Matar, H. (2006) In The Country of Men (London: Penguin Books).
National Democratic Institute & JMW Consulting (August 2013). Believing in Democracy: Public Opinion
Survey in Libya. Available at: https://www.ndi.org/files/Believing-in-Democracy-Public-Opinion-Survey-
Report-August-2013.pdf, accessed October 3, 2013.
National Democratic Institute & JMW Consulting (November 2013). Report on Seeking Security in Libya.
Available at: https://www.ndi.org/files/Seeking-Security-Public-Opinion-Survey-in-Libya-WEBQU-
Downloaded by [Durham University Library] at 12:47 12 February 2015

ALITY.pdf, accessed January 1, 2014.

Obama, B. (2011) President Obama on the death of Muammar Qaddafi. Available at: http://www.whitehouse.gov/
photos-and-video/video/2011/10/20/president-obama-death-muammar-qaddafi, accessed June 23, 2014.
Orwell, G. (2003) 1984 (Milano: Mondadori).
Pack, J. (Ed.) (2013) The 2011 Libyan Uprising and the Post-Qadhafi Future (London: MacMillan).
Roberts, H. (2011) Who said Gaddafi had to go? London Review of Books, 33(22), pp. 8–18.
Said, E. (1977) Orientalism (London: Penguin).
Sharpe, M. & Bucher, G. (2010) Žižek and Politics: A Critical Introduction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press).
UN Human Rights Inquiry Commission in Libya. (2012). Available at: http://www.ohchr.org/Documents/
HRBodies/HRCouncil/RegularSession/Session19/A.HRC.19.68.pdf, accessed April 13, 2012.
Vandewalle, D. (2006) A History of Modern Libya (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Wright, C. (1981–82) Libya and the West: Headlong into Confrontation? International Affairs, 58(1), pp. 13–41.
Žižek, S. (1987) The Sublime Object of Ideology (New York: Verso).
———. (1994) Introduction, in: S. Žižek (Ed.) Mapping Ideology (New York: Verso).
———. (2001) Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? – Five Interventions in the (Mis)Use of a Notion (New York:
Verso).
———. (2006) Objet a in Social Links, in: J. Clemens & R. Crigg (Eds) Jacques Lacan and the Other Side of
Psychoanalysis: Reflections on Seminar XVII (Durham, NC: Duke University Press).
———. (2013) Some Bewildered Clarifications: A Response to Noam Chomsky. Available at: http://www.
versobooks.com/blogs/1365-some-bewildered-clarifications-a-response-to-noam-chomsky-by-slavoj-zizek,
accessed August 26, 2013.

Links to online sources:

http://www.artandpoliticsnow.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/Libya-Gaddafi-graffiti.jpg, accessed March 20,
2014.
http://www.alhurra.com/content/lybia-violence-643-killed-in-2013/242183.html, accessed January 23, 2014.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-24051371, accessed September 11, 2013
http://www.atlanticcouncil.org/publications/issue-briefs/security-challenges-to-libyas-quest-for-democracy,
accessed September 12, 2012.
http://thedali.org/exhibit/venus-drawers-pompoms/, accessed May 13, 2012.
http://www.libyaherald.com/2014/02/26/libya-will-use-interpol-red-notices-to-arrest-criminals-zeidan/
#axzz2utxb90Tn, accessed February 26, 2012.
http://www.libyaherald.com/2014/05/04/libya-has-two-prime-ministers/, accessed May 4, 2014.
http://www.libyabodycount.org/, accessed January 23, 2014.
http://www.hrw.org/news/2014/06/22/libya-whipped-beaten-and-hung-trees, accessed June 22, 2014.
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2012/09/2012915181925528211.html, accessed September 16, 2012.
 404 M. Capasso

http://www.meltingpot.org/Nuove-intese-tra-Italia-e-Libia-Ancora-sulla-pelle-dei.html#.U-HrpFV_uSo,
accessed June 22, 2014.
https://wcd.coe.int/ViewDoc.jsp?id¼1428427, accessed June 23, 2014.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/middle-east-live/2012/sep/12/libya-egypt-attacks-muhammad-film-live,
accessed September 13, 2012.
http://www.hrw.org/news/2006/06/27/libya-june-1996-killings-abu-salim-prison, accessed April 23, 2014.
http://www.hrw.org/news/2014/06/22/libya-whipped-beaten-and-hung-trees, accessed June 23, 2014.
Political Isolation Law (full text), http://www.libyaherald.com/2013/05/14/political-isolation-law-the-full-text/
#axzz2roaUY6Sl, accessed May 22, 2013.
http://www.trust.org/item/20140130090006-k6kj5/, accessed January 30, 2014.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/16/libya-militia-attack-tripoli-fears-conflict, accessed November
18, 2013.
http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/death-toll-south-libya-tribal-clashes-hits-68-21637628, accessed
April 14, 2012.
http://www.refworld.org/cgi-bin/texis/vtx/rwmain?docid¼4f8550982, accessed April 13, 2012.
http://www.aawsat.net/2014/02/article55329325, accessed February 25, 2014.
Downloaded by [Durham University Library] at 12:47 12 February 2015

Decree 05/2014 (full text), http://www.gnc.gov.ly/legislation_files/635260814004403644.pdf, accessed January

30, 2014.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-07-09/libya-s-66-billion-wealth-fund-replaces-chairman-amid-probe.
html, accessed July 9, 2014.
http://www.brookings.edu/, /media/research/files/papers/2014/03/17%20libya%20lustration%20david%
20mzioudet/lustration%20in%20libya%20english.pdf, accessed March 17, 2014.
http://muftah.org/libyan-phobia-dilemmas-and-challenges-of-life-after-gadhafi/#.U754wvldWsw, accessed Sep-
tember 2, 2013.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v¼JhOZW7-XQuY, accessed September 2, 2013.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v¼vTaZOVMRl5Q, accessed September 2, 2013.
http://www.lacan.com/thesymptom/?page_id¼1031, accessed March 24, 2014.