Roaming around Casablanca, one might overhear in its cafés and taxis comments such as “Praise our King for He was smart enough to save us from the Arab Spring” or “Things might not be going too well over here but at least we’re not in a war-torn country.” This negative appraisal of the Arab Spring can also be heard in family reunions, classrooms and, at its most methodical, in newspapers.

At first glance, the Arab Spring does seem like a complete disaster: when it did not lead to outright state disintegration and bloody civil war, as in Syria and Libya, it resulted in the triumph of the deep state, either through violent counterrevolution as in Egypt, or through so-called reforms that only reinforced the insidious power of the state as in Morocco. Even in Tunisia, arguably the saving grace of the Arab Spring, the young republic’s perceived inaction in bettering economic prospects breeds nostalgia for the Ben Ali dictatorship. But what if, despite all its failings, the Arab Spring remains an event to be celebrated? Going even further, what if the problem with the Arab Spring was not that it was too revolutionary, but in fact, not enough?

The key to this seemingly paradoxical notion — that the problem with the Arab Spring is not its revolutionary boldness but its lack thereof — resides in French philosopher Alain Badiou’s concept of the Event. What is an Event? Events arise when the people — or at least a considerable number of them — burst on the public scene, disrupting the political habit of their day. An Event is “the sudden creation, not of a new reality, but of a myriad of new possibilities,” Badiou tells us. These “new possibilities” are new societal structures, new modes of production or new social contracts.

Badiou presents us with a number of examples, notable among them the Paris Commune and the October Revolution in Russia, which established the working class as a political subject. One might notice something about these two instances: they both represent revolutionary failures. Indeed, the Paris Commune was violently put down by the French Third Republic, and the October Revolution soon devolved into Soviet terror. By their very nature, Events are radically contingent and, as such, can fall prey to what Badiou calls “disasters.” Events can be betrayed, hijacked and turned into terror.

Yet, these disasters do not take away from the Event. In its happening, the Event establishes a new political agent and formulates a constellation of new possibilities. The political agent may be repressed and those new possibilities betrayed, but said political subject will henceforth always be present and said possibilities always ready to be evoked.

What of the Arab Spring then? Was it an Event, a truly revolutionary happening? In Badiou’s understanding, the very real, very tragic disasters that ensued do not disqualify it. The Rabaa massacre would not annul the Evental nature of Tahrir Square just like the Bloody Week does not void that of the Paris Commune. What matters is whether the Arab Spring led to the emergence of a new political agent.

And this seems to be the case: even if it seems the Tunisian republic has defaulted on political imagination, experiencing a sobering return to the socio-economic status quo of rampant unemployment and decreasing purchasing power, Tunisians have come out of the Arab Spring scarred but with a renewed sense of agency. The emergence of new political agents is most apparent in Tunisia but isn’t exclusive to it, from Yemeni peasants rising up against their feudal lords to Libyan civilians taking Qaddafi-regime torturers into custody.

Through his optimistic appraisal of the Arab Spring, Badiou compels us to appreciate popular revolutionary agency. During the Arab Spring, secularists locked hands with Islamists, thousands marching united in chants of human dignity and fortitude in the ugly face of oppressive regimes. And so, when considering the Arab Spring, the sourness of the day after should not take away from the ecstasy of the day itself.