ABSTRACT
In this essay, I explore some of the values, exchanges and economies (moral, political and libidinal) characteristic of everyday life and official diplomacies in Libya. Through a consideration of multiple sites of estrangement and their related mediation practice, the essay engages the moral alibis, entangled yet unacknowledged relations, ontological commitments and duplicitous exchanges that made ‘Gaddafi's Libya’ possible. By patiently engaging the morally ambiguous mediation practices, violence and the bodies in pain that are erased by recognizable diplomatic regimes and discourses, I interrogate both the habitual ways of thinking about and relating to Libya and the uncritical exuberance that marks the celebration of the insurrectional present. Such a diplomatic rendition of the situation in Libya raises the ethical and political stakes of our analyses of the uprising by illustrating that there is more going on in this place than the Pan-African, Orientalist and humanitarian reductionisms tell us.
