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This thesis inquires into anti-humanist trends in Lebanese literature of the civil war and post-war period by examining the limit concept of the animal in three novelistic works: Beirut Nightmares [Kawābīs Bayrūt] (1976) by Ghādah Sammān, Yalo (2002) by Elias Khoury, and The Tiller of Waters [Ḥārith al-miyāh] (1998) by Hudá Barakāt. Marking a departure in previous critical work done on this body of literature, which has been dominated by trauma theory as an analytical framework, this thesis employs an innovative synthesis of narrative theory and affect theory to describe how the authors utilize narrative to humanize the war experience, thereby mitigating the effects of contingency and fragmentation on the narrative subject. After the collapse of the state, the human being is separated from its political form, leaving it perilously exposed to acts of violence. It may also, however, carry out aggressions on its fellow man with impunity. Both of these terrible aspects of man’s nature in wartime are understood conventionally as exposing a beast within man, since they radically undermine the precepts of moral value and self-sovereignty that constitute the pillars of humanism. Through acts of “composition” the first person narrators of these novels strive to insulate their affective core from participating in ambient currents of violence, which are viewed as a kind of contamination understood as “becoming-animal.” While implicating the subject in a participation that is other-than-human, these animal becomings are also, following Deleuze and Guttari, ways of attaining a new vitality and escaping the hierarchical symbolic power of logos. Use of this animal figure allows the authors to rethink the human in ways that does not assume a fixed humanist ontology. For Sammān, the animal represents a principle of vitality that allows her protagonist to overcome human sources of inertia, such as melancholic memories or ingrained habit, thereby preserving the authentic voice of the writerly self. For Khoury and Barakāt, the animal permits them to foreground the figure of the subaltern who stands in a minoritarian relation to logos. They also propose a post-humanist ethos of co-presence based on the affective subject’s receptivity and vulnerability; its capacity to both affect and be affected. / text

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This project takes popular organizations in mid-twentieth century Lebanon as its focus. These socio-political groupings were organized at the grassroots, made up of young men, and included scout organizations, social justice movements, student clubs and workers' associations. Employing a cultural history approach, the dissertation examines the cultural productions of these types of groups, ranging from group anthems to uniforms, letters of the rank and file to speeches of leaders. With these primary sources, it captures the cultures that took shape around five main actors in the field of street politics: the Lebanese Communist Party, the Syrian Social Nationalist Party, the Kata'ib Party, the Najjadeh Party and the Progressive Socialist Party. And as these groups condoned and committed acts of sectarian violence in the 1958 War and the Lebanese Civil War of 1975-1990, this dissertation also investigates the distinct cultures that formed around these groups during wartime. In the end, I argue that both inside and outside of moments of conflict, popular organizations cultivate and mobilize multiple, interactive identities to make sense of their actions, sectarian or otherwise. Moreover, I find that a critical site to explore these complex processes is their routine practices grounded in duty, strength and honor. Part I of the dissertation examines identity formation within these five groups, and the physical and symbolic spaces they produced in Beirut during the 1920s-1950s. Informed by Pierre Bourdieu's theories on social life, this historical background shows how organizational attempts to project uniqueness, win over recruits, and make partisan, often sectarian, claims over the whole Lebanese nation created boundaries between these groups. Also, the lives of individuals within these groups, regardless of the group's distinct vision for Lebanon, were colored by cultures of discipline and defense, working to normalize practices linked to violence. In Part II the dissertation takes up the two historical events of social mobilization and conflict in which these groups participated: the 1958 War (where the Kata'ib, once a nationalist scout group, serves as the focus for the investment in sectarianism) and the Two-Year War of 1975-1976 (where the Lebanese National Movement - specifically the Lebanese Communist Party, once a workers' association, and the Progressive Socialist Party, once a social justice movement - serve as the focus for the investment in anti-sectarian frames). First, through investigating the changing positions of these popular organizations throughout these two wars, the dissertation argues that these groups are active agents in producing sectarian violence, adding nuance to past characterizations of conflict in Lebanon. Second, by capturing the quite seamless shift towards practices of violence, it finds that the quotidian and routine also lay at the center of violence. Finally, by analyzing the textual and visual productions of these groups leading up to and during war, the dissertation finds that multiple and interacting identities, such as national, populist (i.e., fulfilling the needs of people and winning their support in a particular locality) and sect are mobilized to perform violence. Accordingly, sectarian violence, as it emerged in the mid-twentieth century, is sectarian because these groups defined it in sectarian (and antisectarian) terms, not because the violence was rooted in immutable sectarian differences. Collectively, “Winning Lebanon: Popular Organizations, Street Politics and the Emergence of Sectarian Violence in the Mid-Twentieth Century” seeks to bring the local level and the cultural into the study of conflict, and add nuance to the understanding of sectarianism and sectarian violence in Lebanon and the broader Middle East.

This study was designed to determine (a) the extent of the coverage in total wordage; (b) the direction and intensity of the articles; and (c) the impression conveyed by each newspaper toward the two main parties of the war. The findings show that (a) The New York Times devoted nearly twice as many words to the war as The Times of London; (b) the majority of the articles were neutral; (c) The New York Times was more favorable to the leftists and was as favorable to the rightists as The Times of London; and (d) the two newspapers were consistent in direction, and all deviation from neutrality remained within the limits of mild intensity.

La Guerre Civile libanaise (1975-1990) fut notamment marquée par l’enlèvement de militaires mais aussi de civils. Depuis la loi d’Amnistie de 1991, nous examinerons précisément les répercussions sur la santé psychique de familles d’enlevés, grâce à des entretiens non directifs et la collecte de récits poétiques comme épistolaires, selon la lecture du TAT. La justice transitionnelle est une prospective de reconstruction du Liban. Elle permettrait de lever le voile d’ignorance sur le sort des disparus, pour faciliter le processus de deuil. Mais pour l’heure, les familles souffrent du silence de l’Etat qui enterre l’histoire du Liban, ceci tant que le sort des disparus demeurera inidentifiable. En dépit de ce silence qui annihile toute entreprise de séparation psychique entre les familles et les disparus, condamnant ainsi les mères libanaises à la répétition infinie du trauma, à l’instar de Pénélope tissant et détissant sans cesse les liens du linceul de Télémaque, celles-ci peuvent réaccoucher d’elles-mêmes ; et se tourner, en pleine conscience, vers un avenir, une destinée propre, via le processus du « deuil paradoxal ». Ce concept, loin d’abonder dans le sens de l’évitement ou du déni des disparus, consiste en une réapparition du moi des mères, dans l’opération psychosomatique de procéder au deuil, non de leurs proches, mais du traumatisme qui les avait de prime abord anéanties, jusqu’au vide dépressif. C’est, paradoxalement, grâce à leur fonctionnement limite que les mères des disparus libanais vont pouvoir opérer ce « retour » à leur moi qu’elles imaginaient perdu. / The Lebanese Civil War (1975 - 1990) has been mainly remarkable as far as the kidnapping of soldiers as much as of civilians is concerned. Up to the 1991 Amnesty Law, we will precisely examine the consequential effects on psychic health on rapted families thanks to non guiding interwiews, and the gathering poetical or written accounts, according to the reading of TAT.The transitional justice is a prospective for the rebuild of Lebanon. It could help to clear the mist about the missing's fate, to help people to go out of mourning. But at the present time, the families are enduring the silence of the State, that is burying and forgetting the history of Lebanon, that the missing's fate will remain unestablished for ever. In spite of this silence that destroys any attempt of psychic breaking up between the families and the missings, blocking up that way the Lebanese mothers in the perpetual repetition of the trauma, like Penelope doing and undoing her work that consisted in weawing the shroud of Telemaque's father- in - law, they can deliver of herselves; and decide to look at a future, an own destiny, through the process of "paradoxal nourning".This concept,far from avoiding or denying the missings, consists in a new coming out of the mother's ego, in the psychosomatic way to initiate mourning not of the next of kin, but the traumatism that had prostrated them first up to the depressive emptyness. Paradoxically, bringing the mothers of Lebanese missings to their extreme limits will next allow them to get back to their ego that they imagined as lost for ever at first.

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