The dissensual everyday: between daily life and exceptional acts in Beirut, Lebanon

In discussing how people make political use of public space from below, recent writings either emphasize the repurposing of monumental spaces, like Tahrir Square, or else look to how the poor and marginal produce facts on the ground through their everyday interactions without explicit political intentions. In the Hamra neighborhood of Lebanon’s capital, Beirut, the daily life of politicized youth was, in the years following the Arab Spring uprisings, something more than passivity and something less than constant avowed resistance. Through their dissensual everyday inhabitation they made Hamra a compelling political site that was good to fight for and in which it was good to fight. Building on attempts to affirm possibility in anthropological engagements with urban life and political activism, I suggest that such spaces, containing an experiential, embodied, and enspaced memory of radical engagements, can maintain political actors in the face of defeat and setback, and provide encouragement for future political action.