Postwar Culture

Complete with biographical data.

Mustapha Khayati was born on ### in ###, Tunisia.

He pursued his post-secondary studies in Strasbourg and Paris, where he attended lectures by the philosopher and renowned translator of Hegel's Phenomenology of the Spirit Jean Hippolyte, the Marxist sociologist Henri Lefebvre, and the philosopher and epistemologist Georges Gusdorf. Khayati's involvement with the Tunisian Student Union and the Strasbourg Student Union (AFGES) during these years already announces the main axes of his intellectual work and political activism - notably the critique of the capitalist heritage underlying Western democracy, the critique of communist bureaucracy and party dictatorship, and the advocacy of workers' collective self-regulation/self-governance in postcolonial North-African societies and countries of the Near and Middle East.

In 1966, Mustapha Khayati was one of the main figures responsible for what came to be known as the "Strasbourg Scandal" - a series of events of civil disobedience at the University of Strasbourg, which followed the take-over of the AFGES Council by students supporting the anti-institutional agenda of the Situationist International. In the months preceding the "Strasbourg Scandal," Khayati had drafted the pamphlet On Student Poverty in close collaboration with the council of the S.I.; on November 22, 10 000 copies of the pamphlet - printed with funds of the National Student Union of France - were distributed. On Student Poverty thoroughly analyzes the succumbing of the student to the laws and customs of modern consumer culture. It pleads for a new kind of revolution - one that does not reproduce the shortcomings of the Soviet Revolution and its gloomy culmination in Stalinism.  

as a consequence of which the AFGES is closed by court order (N.B.: see the journal Situationist International, no. 11).

Mustapha Khayati had been acquainted with Guy Debord and the other core members of the I.S. since 1964.

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In 1969, Khayati joined the newly formed Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a Palestinian Marxist-Leninist militant organization, whose headquarters were in Jordan. He resigned from the Situationist International during the 8th Conference (September 26 through October 1, 1969) in Venice. In his resignation note, he wrote that, in accordance with I.S. thought and practice, he opposes a "double appartenance" (double affiliation), that - in view of the imminent crisis unsettling the Arab world - he rather feels obliged to  serve the latter cause.

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In 1979, Mustapha Khayati earned a doctorat in history from the University Paris I with a thesis entitled Histoire des Perses d'ath-Tha'âlibî. He completed a postdoctoral thesis (these de doctorat d'Etat) in political sciences at the University Paris VIII, entitled La représentation du politique dans la culture arabe classique. From ## to ##, he held a teaching position at the Institut d'etudes politiques (literally Institute of Political Studies) in Aix-en-Provence, France.

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