ABSTRACT
“Al-sha’b yurīd isqāṭ al-niẓām” (The people want the downfall of the regime). This was the brave battle cry with which the Egyptian people brought down the corrupt, oppressive regime of Hosni Mubarak. Any reading of the extraordinary events that shook Egypt and the Arab world since 2011 must take stock of the central place of desire as an irruptive, revolutionary force that pervades the social, by turns producing and altering the real. In this chapter I will propose a reading of the work of Alaa Al-Aswany as a means of investigating the operation of desire as an unpredictable political force. 1 Al-Aswany’s complex fictions return repeatedly to the nexus between the intimate and the public to underline the subversive character of the personal within the political: the world changes one relationship at a time. One constant in his complex urban fables is the use of desire as a means of opposing oppression, of throwing a spanner in the works of a brutal state apparatus.
