Struggles over the meaning of words constitute the political crisis itself

Evidence

Marsafi understood the political crisis within which he wrote as the attempt by particular groups to give particular meanings to words, such as liberty and injustice. The liability of these words was to be misused and misinterpreted. Like all words, they carried the risk of being placed out of context, or spoken in the wrong sense. This verbal liability was not the result of the prevailing political disorder, but the symptom and nature of the crisis. There was no analytic separation in this approach between writing and politics, or between theory and practice. Every political act was an interpretation of words, and thus a textual act, a reading. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 430

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the reader’s earlier material on how language and interpretation function as infrastructure — words as the medium politics happens in, not labels for pre-existing objects. — connects to: Organic and political traumas blur because both are blows against meaning — Catherine Malabou, The New Wounded: From Neurosis to Brain…, 4366; Political discourse redefines contested terms so opposition becomes definitionally impossible; Seeking correct definitions is itself politically subversive — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 514 (+2 more)
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how far this Marsafi position (politics as textual interpretation) anticipates post-structuralism, and whether 19th-century Islamic scholarship was already doing what Derrida is credited with.