Tunisia's endangered exception : history at large in the southern Mediterranean

Abstract

This article explores some facets of the relation between Tunisia’s post-independence political bequeathals and the legacy of a political memory that, today, is being sabotaged and rendered fugitive, not least through the acts of terror that have recently hit the country and crippled its tourist economy. Arguing that Tunisia’s democratic trajectories are at stake today and risk being “orphaned” of their history of reformist precedents accrued over the past one hundred and fifty years, the author reflects on the current political state of play in Tunisia and makes a case for a restored dialectic of interchange with specific luminary tenets of Tunisia’s late nineteenth and early-twentieth century enlightenment movement. The engendering of political subjectivities in post-revolutionary Tunisia and the piecing together of its multifaceted national imaginary require today what Balibar would term a «differentiation» of the change towards a non-despotic democratisation brought about in 2011.