One of the constant points of reference for Heidegger when he interrogates the field of human activity is that he lets himself be guided by the Greek language and therefore by the immediate relation with pragma and pragmata, that is to say, with things insofar as they are useful and utilisable. He also translates praxis by Handlung, which is distinguished by the presence of the hand (der Hand) insofar as it manipulates and utilises things. This reduction of praxis to a preoccupation with things insofar as they are manipulable and usable is manifest in Being and Time, notably in §15, where Heidegger writes that ‘the Greeks had an appropriate term for “things”, pragmata, that is, that with which one has to do in taking care of things in association (praxis)’. In referring praxis immediately to pragmata, however, Heidegger is perhaps led to deny praxis any autonomy with respect to poiesis: the latter appears to be the central category through which human activity is understood, at least insofar as that activity is undertaken and conducted in a manner that could be described as inauthentic. According to Heidegger, this reduction of praxis to poiesis is not his doing, but that of metaphysics itself, insofar as it naively returns to a meaning of action as the quality through which human beings relate to the world productively as a world of things that are useful and manipulable, that is, to things produced which are capable of being used in order to further production. Hence, according to Heidegger, the analysis of this productive comportment is the analysis of a comportment that has determined the history and orientation of western metaphysics, and the totality of this history, up to today, that is to say, up to the epoch of the achievement of metaphysics in the world of technology, the world of the productive control of the being of everything.

Marx positions himself, as we have seen, in the point of view from which human beings are seen as naturally active and productive. As natural beings and therefore as part of nature they are beings that deploy a precise and determined vital activity. Considering human beings as part of nature does not deny them all activity, but on the contrary makes it possible to understand that they can express the activity of the whole because they are part of it. In this sense, there cannot be, for either Marx or Spinoza, a natural being that would not be active. Sharing Spinoza's fully affirmative and positive concept of nature, there exists for Marx no real passivity: what is called passivity is nothing other than a privation of activity, a diminished activity, just as falsity and error can only be for Spinoza a privation of knowledge. Passivity does not actually exist in itself; it exists only relative to those that experience it as they are determined to act by something other than them-selves and confer, on that which determines them, the capacity to act on them and through them. This is the case, for example, with the relationship between ‘the activity of individuals’ and their ‘forms’ or ‘modes of exchange’. The problem is to comprehend how individuals can passively endure the relations they enter into with others, how these relations can be relations of passivity, and thus how they are nothing other than the forms of relation through which they are active.

An initial explication consists in saying that this distinction between the activity of individuals and their modes of exchange does not initially exist in a given historical epoch, but that it eventually appears, signifying each time the end of an epoch and its passage to a new period. In other words, initially the modes of exchange and relations of production always correspond to the productive forces and to the state of their development, the former appearing as natural conditions for the deployment of the latter.

The way in which Spinoza initially poses the social nature of humanity in the Scholia of Proposition 35 of Part IV of the Ethics can at first appear troubling: although people are most often a nuisance to each other, nevertheless, Spinoza explains, most are not able to live solitary lives and have need of others. Everything transpires as if human beings admit their nature as social animals as a kind of concession: you have make do with others, deal with them, even if deep down you cannot help but harbour a secret hope of doing without them. Humanity would thus be such that its social nature appears to be a nuisance – something that, even as part of its essence, takes the form of a constraint that must be endured, since one cannot make do without it and must make the best of a bad hand. In short, at first sight, human beings have a bad consciousness of their own nature as social and socialised beings. This is derived from the fact that, if human beings, insofar as they are essentially part of nature, are beings in and through the relations they enter into with other parts of nature, and notably with other people, those relations are primarily relations that they endure. In other words, the passions are not understood by Spinoza to be the antithesis of sociality, as a rebellious element that must be tamed and disciplined in order to institute sociality; on the contrary, the passions are in themselves and by themselves sociality. There is certainly the possibility of socialising through reason, but, here and now, the fact is that it is not by reason that human beings are socialised, but through the passions, and this to the extent that passionate life is, like reason, engendered in each person by their effort to persevere in their being. The passions (joy and sadness, love and hate, hope and fear) socialise just as much and more surely than reason, the only difference being that socialisation through the passions does not lead human beings to the necessary mutual accord, but actually leads them to the reverse, to a social life marked by conflict and opposition. Being powerless in common is still a manner of being assembled and making society: it is the actual manner in which human beings are in fact made into society.

i

In 1583, Niccolò Circignani (1516–1596) was commissioned to paint a martyrdom cycle of thirty-four frescoes for the chapel of the Venerable English College in Rome. The murals, along with the chapel, have since been destroyed; however, they were memorialised in a series of engravings by Giovanni Battista Cavalieri (1525–1601) and published the following year in folio as Ecclesiae Anglicanae trophaea (Rome, 1584). Cavalieri's lavish illustrations recount the history of the Catholic church in England through the heroic deaths of its martyrs, beginning with St Alban (d. ca. 305?), protomartyr Anglorum of Roman Britain, and ending with the contemporary incidents of martyrdom from the English Mission. The images are awash in violence, vividly depicting mutilations, decapitations, and executions. Three of them are dedicated to the hanging, drawing, and quartering of the English Jesuits Edmund Campion (1540–1581) and Alexander Briant (1556–1581), and English College alumnus Ralph Sherwin (1549/50–1581) just a few years earlier. They had been caught trying to convert Elizabethan England back to Catholicism and paid for it with their lives. Yet they had not completely failed their mission: the engraving depicting their torture bears the inscription ‘Horum constanti morte aliquot hominum millia ad Romanam Ecclesiam conversa sunt’ (Fig. 10.1). The message is clear: it was through witnessing the Catholic martyrs’ defiance against death that thousands of Protestants had been converted to the Catholic Church. Martyrdom through public torture, theatrum crudelitatum, was part of the machinery of conversion.

Decades later, another theatre of cruelty would play out within the College walls, this time in the form of an academic comedy featuring as its protagonist a square desperate to be converted into a circle, and willing to endure torture in the process. With geometric shapes and instruments as its characters, the play seems innocuous enough. However, it is surprisingly effective in throwing into relief changing attitudes not only towards martyrdom but also towards instruments during a pivotal period for natural philosophy in the early seventeenth century.

ii

Blame Not Our Author has survived in a small quarto manuscript in the Archives of the English College. As its title page is missing, its date and author remain unknown. Its modern editor has named it from the opening lines of the

prologue and dated it to sometime between 1613 and 1635 based on watermark, inscriptions, and internal evidence.

Jan David launches his catechetical emblem book Veridicus Christianus (True Christian; Antwerp: Jan Moretus, 1601) with five chapters on the nature of human sin, chief amongst which is the sin of idolatry (Fig. 7.1). Following chapter 5, he appends a complementary series of ten chapters on heresy, the most heinous form of idolatry, and on the chief means of combatting its pernicious effects – namely, anti-heretical image-making. Heresy must needs be challenged by recourse to images, argues David, and to shore up this point he traces the lineage of anti-heretical image-makers back to Moses, who was taught by God to construe leprosy as a typus haereseos (image of heresy), and then to Christ, who renewed the Mosaic image by substituting for it the more vivid parabolic image of a ravening wolf in sheep's clothing. My chapter examines David's bipartite notion of the heretical image, its body and soul, as a prelude to exploring the fundamental opposition he adduces between heretical and anti-heretical image-making. I begin by perusing David's conviction that heresy itself operates or, better, propagates through images. His account of the heretical image can be seen to arise from the parallel he draws between heresy and idolatry. Thereafter, the paper shifts focus to the topic of orthodox image-making. What sorts of defensive image must the good Christian devise to make incontrovertibly evident the heretic's modus operandi, which involves razing the edifice of faith and then building a counter-edifice from these spolia? And how do such images, more particularly David's emblems on heresy, purport to contravene heresy's pernicious effects?

The Veridicus Christianus consists of one hundred emblems, each subsuming four components: a titulus (title or motto), inscribed above the pictura (pictorial image); the pictura proper, overlaid with Roman capitals that correspond to loci textuales in the adjacent prose commentary; epigrammatic couplets written in Latin, Dutch, and French scripts, the first line in the form of an interrogatio (question), the second, of a responsio (response); and the prose commentary that embeds the pictura and constitutes the bulk of the chapter. The chapters centre on the picturae, closely responding to them, as well as amplifying and explicating their imagery. Designed and engraved by Theodoor Galle, with the assistance of his brother Cornelis, the plates vary in kind: some appear performatively to illustrate a moral precept or point of doctrine conveyed by the narrative mottos and epigrams;

In All's Well That Ends Well, ‘the end is immanent’ from its opening as its mourning-attired characters enter the stage discussing death. Of course, for theatregoers, the play's end is immanent even before it begins. Through his proverbial and metatheatrical title, Shakespeare positions his audience to adopt an end-oriented hermeneutic. We read All's Well's characters and plot in view of the comic and romantic resolution that its title signals. Does Shakespeare's play achieve this end? By its ambiguous dénouement, ‘we don't know’. Gadamer phrases an apt response for us.

Ends absorbed the attention of many people in Shakespeare's Protestant England. Theology, specifically the Christian doctrine of last things – eschatology – informed this preoccupation. Eschatology shapes a way of reading for the interpreting self and a way of reading the interpreting self that incorporates epistemological, interpersonal, ethical and psychological dimensions of human being. The doctrine permeates All's Well's end-oriented hermeneutic. Act 2, scene 4 offers a glimpse of how eschatological ideas may have inflected people's day-to-day reading of ‘the progress of an individual life’ (to borrow Frank Kermode's phrase). The fool Lavatch jestingly describes the Countess as ‘very well indeed, but for two things. […] One, that she's not in heaven, whither God send her quickly! The other, that she's in earth, from whence God send her quickly!’ (II.iv.8–12).

Self-knowledge and morality are inseparable in, and central to, Troilus and Cressida – Shakespeare's caustic, ironic, genre-bending take on both the Trojan legend and the famous, ill-fated love affair of his titular characters. Via its less than savoury characters (to follow the play's frequent metaphorical allusions to taste), Troilus offers viewers and readers a sceptical, at times contemptuous, perspective on humans as ‘self-interpreting animals’, as Charles Taylor describes us. The play exudes moral suspicion as its characters’ self-regarding misreadings of themselves contort their being towards both the other characters and the exigent moral questions within the hermeneutical situations they inhabit. Shakespeare certainly does not follow Aristotle's injunction that poets should represent classical heroes as ‘good men’, even as they expose their faults. Shakespeare's Achilles, Homer's hero, comes across as anything but ‘good’ and the same can be said for nearly all the mythological figures now relocated onto the late Elizabethan stage. Troilus's audience could well take up Montaigne's words to ask of Homer's warriors and Chaucer's sympathetic protagonists: ‘what is there in thee, thou shouldest so much glory of?’

Ironically, there is nothing to glory of in Troilus's legendary characters. Shakespeare, it seems, draws upon the theologically informed, dominant and pessimistic anthropology of his day to engender doubt about these characters, and what they might represent about the interpreting self. He had done so in Hamlet. Hamlet, one could say, takes its audience to the edge of elegy as early modern Protestant accounts of the Fall's impact on human subjectivity inform Shakespeare's figuring of hermeneutical tragedy.

In acknowledging the inconclusiveness of his ‘reading’ and ‘observations’, Much Ado's Friar serves as an emblem of Shakespeare's dramatic representations of the interpreting self. This book draws on an intellectual history that connects the Reformation to modern hermeneutics to argue that the sources of the Shakespearean selves (to borrow the title of Charles Taylor's well-known book) whom we moderns find so relevant to our own self-perceptions and experiences can be found, first of all, at the heart of the playwright's theologically full culture. Hans-Georg Gadamer, modern philosophical hermeneutics’ leading light, asks about the origins of ‘our effort to understand’: ‘Why are we interested in understanding a text or some experience of the world, including our doubts about patent self-interpretations?’ Jean Grondin, cited in my third epigraph, captures the basic consensus that the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation must feature in responses to Gadamer's inquiry.

The Reformation was the most significant impetus behind a refiguring of how people know and ensuing sense that to be human is to understand through interpretation. This chapter examines how this ‘hermeneutic revolution’, with its emphasis on interpretation as ontology, developed out of Luther's ‘reforming acts’ and the theological ideas which both drove and emerged from these acts. But first, I will take us to the end of the story – to a sketch of Shakespeare's theologically full world and the interpreting self living within it. The weight of scholarly work done in recent years has (thankfully) relieved me of the need to contend for the relevance to Shakespeare of religion and the Reformation. Instead, I will highlight key aspects of the playwright and his contemporaries’ hermeneutical experiences, experiences connected to the Reformation's role in relocating sense-making into the domain of individual being.

Hamlet needs to know. So does Hamlet's audience. Is he a coward? Hamlet's problem represents one of countless occasions in Shakespeare's plays in which their characters’ fortunes are bound up with their acts of interpretation. We could take up the words of the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer and describe these characters’ ‘experience of the world’ as ‘hermeneutical’. In turn, Shakespeare's characters and the worlds they occupy compel interpretations. Our experience of them is hermeneutical.

Describing his dramas this way brings Shakespeare close to the spirit of our time. We share with him, it seems, the assumption that to be human is to be an interpreter who seeks understanding, but does not always arrive at it. Understanding is at once the mode of being ‘of human life itself’ and ‘always interpretation’. So wrote Gadamer, whose groundbreaking work in the later twentieth century continues to demarcate the field of modern philosophical hermeneutics and whose influence is felt across the humanities today. Gadamer's insistence (alongside his teacher Martin Heidegger) that interpretation is basic to being – hermeneutics’ ‘so-called ontological turn’ away from method – echoes through present-day conceptions of selfhood. It seems a given, at least in the historical and cultural context out of which I write, that the modern self is what I call an ‘interpreting self’. Otherwise put, we are always striving to know from within a ‘hermeneutical situation’, that is, ‘a standpoint that limits the possibility of vision’. The entirety of our living embodies a tension. We are ‘opened’ toward knowing, yet inevitably delimited by our ‘finitude and historicity’.

When discussing Syria's general situation in Aleppo City by late 2011, interlocutors often used the term fawda to refer to surrounding events in the country, a term that has wide-ranging connotations, extending from a small kerfuffle to mayhem and chaos. With almost a full year of unrest, fawda was no longer an abstract term that expressed uncertainty. Rather, it reflected a reality that people were living with on a day-to-day basis. Between 2011 and 2013, I spent an extended period of time accompanying Hovsep in Aleppo and later in Beirut after he left Syria. At the time, he was a student at the University of Aleppo. ‘The revolutionaries called it the University of Revolution’, with continuous anti-government rallies that reached ‘at least 10,000 students when the UN observers were in the country’. Based on his experiences, fawda was related to both the Assad rule's willingness to use violence to suppress demonstrations, and of protest dynamics by anti-government student activists.

The pattern of these events was predictable: protesters rallied, security forces attacked and detained a number of students, then another anti-government rally took place, and then government supporters responded to the new protests because ‘government supporters knew that these demonstrations were going to take place … they were always ready to mobilise too’.

Between 2010 and 2011, public squares from Morocco to Bahrain witnessed millions of people huddled together chanting in unison: ‘The people. Want. To topple the system’ [Al-sha’b. yourid. Isqat al-nizam]. Despite the specificities of each country that witnessed protest movements during the Arab Spring, the famous slogan came to be the sonar symbol of the historic protests across the MENA region. By proclaiming the nizam (system or regime) as public enemy, the masses of the Arab Spring expressed their perceived, felt and experienced challenge of maintaining a functional distinction between government policy and state institutions, or state officials and state institutions. The term ‘regime’, as the go-to word choice as translation for nizam, garnered popularity and common usage in literature and public vernacular to denote both government and state precisely for expressing the difficulty of contesting governments without having to challenge the state, or contesting public officials without having to challenge the public institutions they occupy. For protestors, meaningful political change seemed to require more than a mere change of government personnel.

More recently in the United States and in response to the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and a long line of innocent African-American individuals murdered at the hands of law enforcement officers, the Black Lives Matter protests similarly expressed that meaningful change requires more than mere change of law enforcement officers. Demands such as ‘defund the police’ redefined social justice in the United States in abolitionist terms to address systemic flaws rather than merely demand holding specific law enforcement officers guilty of police brutality accountable for abuse of power. Protestors across the Middle East, North Africa and North America over the past decade voiced that so long as oppression is systemic, change in personnel will not yield a meaningful outcome. It is in this context that abolitionist platforms received a growing public appeal and rallying capacity internationally.

The idea of abolition, within its nineteenth-century classical as well as derivate contemporary repertoires of abolitionist slogans voiced over the past fifteen years, fundamentally rejects the notion of the state as an unquestioned field of power to be taken as a given. From an abolitionist perspective, the modern state is the product of hierarchical and unavoidably oppressive relations of power, and not the end point of human collective progress or the product of an evolutionary political process.

This chapter tracks processes of continuity and change with regards to the institutional architecture of state capture from the rule of Hafez Assad in 1970 until the militarisation of the Syrian uprising in 2012. The informality of the Assad rule – arrangements that fall outside the scope of state institutions – play a crucial role in reproducing state capture. The chapter shows how the formality of state capture and its formative institutional arrangements in Syria gave prominence to actors and processes outside the formal realm of the state to reinforce the Assad rule.

The Institutional Architecture of State Capture

The transitional period of thirty-seven days between Hafez Assad's death on 10 June 2000 and Bashar Assad's inauguration as president on 17 July 2000 encapsulates, with great precision, the institutional features of state capture in Syria. Upon the death of his father, Bashar Assad came to power in July 2000 through a constitutional amendment that changed the age requirement for presidential candidates. Under the second title (‘The Powers of The State’) of the 1973 constitution presiding at the time, Article 83 stipulated that ‘the candidate for the presidency must be an Arab Syrian, enjoying his civil and political rights and be aged forty years at least’. The constitutional process for bringing about the amendment that lowered the age requirement was also laid out in the same 1973 constitution. Constitutional amendments required a proposal by one third and approval by two thirds of the People's Assembly (majlis al-sha’b or the Syrian parliament). The person overseeing the process of constitutional change after Hafez Assad's death was defence minister Mustafa Tlass who owed his position to Hafez Assad and had a vested interested in maintaining the status quo. The very same evening of Hafez Assad's death on 10 June 2000, the People's Assembly introduced the amendment to change the age threshold to thirty-four, Bashar Assad's age. Vice President Abdel Halim Khaddam announced the decision the next day. Khaddam, who had served as vice president since 1984, was assigned Minister of Foreign Affairs in 1970 by Hafez Assad. Every aspect of the transition of power that took place between 10 June and 17 July of the year 2000, from previous president Hafez Assad, to vice president Khaddam, to the new president Bashar Assad, was predetermined by institutional arrangements introduced by Hafez Assad after he seized the state in 1970.

The devolution of the monopoly of violence and the shrinking of the state's regulatory capacity have repercussions that are beyond the military field. The prominence of the religious field illustrates this reality. This chapter looks at the socio-economic place and political role of religion as an institutional domain under conditions of state atrophy. The religious domain witnessed significant transformations in the variety of functions it fulfilled. At the same time, the capacity and presence of religious actors increased, in terms of fulfilling socio-economic and political functions.

The prominence of the religious domain is connected to institutional developments in other domains. The endowment of structuring, regulating and mobilising functions to religion in Syria after the year 2000 materialised through its expansion in public services such as aid, relief and other forms of municipal services, while the state's civic (citizenship-based modelling of political community) and developmental (equitable economic development and social welfare) functions continued to diminish. The devolution in state functions was not initiated by the state atrophy witnessed after 2011. Devolution of socio-economic public functions, from state institutions towards private interest, was underway in economic and religious forms since the neoliberal changes after the year 2000. The reconfiguration of the religious field throughout the Syrian conflict is therefore the outcome of the intersection of two sets of conditions: (1) neoliberal modes of government between 2000 and 2011 and (2) state atrophy under conditions of armed conflict since 2011. The first represents government policy to withdraw the state from public functions without compromising its regulatory capacity over other domains and the latter constitutes a period of significantly diminished capacity in service provision. Despite the fact that the two periods represent distinct processes of state atrophy, they nevertheless yielded comparable outcomes. Both periods led to a singular and uni-directional trajectory of a more limited role for the state and an increased role for the religious field in public functions. This translated to a growing strategic significance of religion for the Assad rule.

The specific roles of individual religious actors and organisations in government-controlled and opposition-controlled areas are too vast to be covered in a single chapter. The aim here is to identify shifts in institutional roles rather than present a comprehensive review of the religious domain per se.

The undermining of ‘non-democratic’ systems of government does not necessarily lead to the rise of democratic ones. Similarly, the undermining of hierarchical state systems does not automatically lead to the rise of egalitarian systems. Systemic change depends upon institutional transformations. The military outcome of the conflict in Syria favours the Assad rule and the country's circumstances will inevitably evolve towards conflict abatement. As military contests transition towards low-intensity cycles of violence, the institutional ecology of war is likely to be increasingly formalised. Institutional arrangements after 2021 are a direct extension of what preceded them. In other words, the decline in the incidences of violence in Syria marks the end of open conflict but also indicates the continuation of war through other means.

Distinctions between periods of active armed conflict and post-conflict circumstances are premised on a presumed point of rupture or transition in patterns of conflict and violence. What could be commonly considered to be an imminent post-conflict phase in Syria is, in fact, characterised by patterns of continuity in relation to dynamics of war prior to military abatement. The question of whether any form of national unity will be restored is uncertain as militarisation can still manifest through geographically limited relapse to territorial contests, insurgency movements, expanded involvement of regionally active state-actors and military forces. What is certain, however, is that processes and efforts of power consolidation incentivise the avoidance of high-intensity cycles of violence and a relapse to open conflict, especially when resources and support run low. This encourages the formalisation of emergent hierarchies.

The Future of the State

Institutional transformations between 2011 and 2021 reveal a great deal about the role of the state going forward, specifically in relation to the public domain. The public functions of the state have been continuously undermined. This decline in public functions is in fact a decline in the regulatory functions of the state towards other domains – sometimes due to compromised regulatory capacity during conditions of war and sometimes by design on behalf of the ruling establishment. The public domain stands for the domain controlled by the state, but remaining at the general service of a given population.

Civilian agency during state atrophy did not express itself in sectarian terms alone despite processes of sectarianisation and the consolidation of sect-based organisations in the military and religious domains. Often dismissed as inconsequential, civilians and civilian organisations were actively involved in efforts of community protection during the conflict. Community protection efforts by civilians at the local level are also expressions of civilian agency that often defied and sometimes reinforced processes of sectarianisation. Either way, political action did not stem from sectarian predispositions or objectives alone. Despite its discursive prevalence, sectarianism was not a primary organising principle for collective mobilisation in efforts of community protection.

Community protection efforts by civilians stemmed in response to local conditions of state atrophy and security threats. This chapter provides a documentation of such examples in Deir Hafer and Kasab, and focuses on four main variables that shaped the nature and outcome of civilian com-munity protection efforts: (1) modalities of violence against civilians, (2) organisational capacity of civilian community organisers, (3) their local autonomy and (4) social trust within the areas examined. The chapter answers the following key questions: (1) What are the range of threats and shocks that civilians confront under conditions of state atrophy as witnessed in Deir Hafer and Kasab? (2) What strategies for community protection were employed by civilians in an attempt to protect themselves and their communities from dynamics of state atrophy? (3) What conditions limited civilian efforts of community protection? Based on the two divergent case studies, the chapter depicts variations in local circumstances, patterns of community mobilisation throughout the conflict and variables that eventually undermined efforts to resist, cope and adapt to rapidly shifting institutional landscapes.

Strategies of civilian community protection in Kasab and Deir Hafer include negotiating for safe spaces, bargaining with armed groups (state and non-state actors), developing norms of civilian non-collaboration to resist militarisation against other communities, assisting in procurement and distribution of relief and creating civilian-led bodies to adjudicate disputes amongst civilians as well as between civilians and armed actors. The experiences of these two communities reflect the broader range of threats experienced by communities across the country since the onset of violence.