You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Slavoj Žižek's prolific comments on anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, scapegoating, popular nationalism, the refugee crisis, Eurocentrism, the War on Terror, neocolonialism, global justice, and rioting comprise a dizzying array of thinking. But what can we pull out of his various writings and commentaries on race in the contemporary world? Is there anything approaching a Žižekian philosophy of race? Zahi Zalloua argues here that there is and that the often polemical style of Žižek's pronouncements shouldn't undermine the importance and urgency of his work in this area. Zalloua not only examines Žižek's philosophy of race but addresses the misconceptions that have arisen and some of the pe...
Posthumanism is both a descriptive and a prescriptive term. Firstly, it registers a shift beginning in the late 1960s and epitomized by Foucault's “the death of Man”. Secondly, it refers to the future and a new relationship with the non-human, along with a different understanding of human exceptionalism. In Being Posthuman: Ontologies of the Future, Zahi Zalloua interrogates this future and shows that “post-” does not necessarily mean 'after' or that what comes after is more advanced than what has gone before. He pursues this line of inquiry across four distinct, yet interrelated, figures: cyborgs, animals, objects, and racialized and excluded 'others'. These figures disrupt the narrative of the 'human' and its singularity and by reading them together, Zalloua determines that it is only when posthumanist discourse is combined with psychoanalysis that subjectivity can be properly examined.
In Universal Politics, Ilan Kapoor and Zahi Zalloua argue for a negative universality rooted in social antagonism (i.e., shared experiences of exploitation and marginalization). They examine what a universal politics might look like today in the context of key global sites of struggle, including climate change, workers' struggles, the Palestinian question, the refugee crisis, Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, Political Islam, the Bolivian state under Morales, theEuropean Union, and COVID-19.
As one of the 16th century's most brilliant writers, Montaigne formed his ethical self and his eventual theories of physical and spiritual skepticism. Zalloua explores this enlightened thinker's mind. (Literary Criticism)
The Politics of the Wretched argues for ressentiment's generative negativity, prompting a shift from ressentiment as a personal expression of frustration to ressentiment as a collective “No”. Inspired by Kant and Nietzsche's philosophy, Zalloua identifies two modes of deploying ressentiment – private and public use – by substituting ressentiment for reason. This reinterpretation argues for a public use of ressentiment, for the wretched to universalize their grievances, to see their antagonism as cutting across societies, and to turn personal trauma into a common cause. A public use of ressentiment rails against the ideology of identity and victimhood and insists on ressentiment's generative negativity, its own rationality, prompting a shift from ressentiment as a personal expression of frustration to ressentiment as a collective “No”. Reframing ressentiment as a tool to oppose the evils of capitalism, anti-Blackness, and neocolonialism, it both alarms the liberal gatekeepers of the status quo and promises to energize the anti-racist Left in its ongoing struggles for universal justice and emancipation.
"Zahi Zalloua provides the first examination of Palestinian identity from the perspective of Indigeneity and Critical Black Studies. Drawing on key Palestinian voices, including Edward Said and Larissa Sansour, together with influential philosophers such as Slavoj Žižek and Achille Mbembe, Zalloua examines the Palestinian question through the lens of settler colonialism and Indigeneity. In doing so, he not only warns against the liberal approach to Palestinian Indigeneity, which reinforces cultural domination, but also argues for the universality of the Palestinian struggle. Using examples of Black-Palestinian solidarity, this urgent and timely book underscores the interlocking, global struggles for emancipation"--Back cover.
These fifteen essays by former doctoral students, now distinguished seiziemistes, of Francois Rigolot, Meredith Howland Pyne Professor of French Literature at Princeton University, represent a tribute to his qualities as professor, scholar, and person who embodies both a Montaignian esprit genereux and a Rabelaisian pantagruelisme . They pay homage to his renowned erudition and publications on all aspects of French Renaissance literature, his pedagogical skills, his support of students and colleagues, his leadership at Princeton University, and his inspirational personality. The balanced mixture of creative imagination, rigorous explication de texte, and delightful personal rhetoric that cha...
Drawing on literary theory and canonical French literature, Reading Unruly examines unruliness as both an aesthetic category and a mode of reading conceived as ethical response. Zahi Zalloua argues that when faced with an unruly work of art, readers confront an ethical double bind, hesitating then between the two conflicting injunctions of either thematizing (making sense) of the literary work, or attending to its aesthetic alterity or unreadability. Creatively hesitating between incommensurable demands (to interpret but not to translate back into familiar terms), ethical readers are invited to cultivate an appreciation for the unruly, to curb the desire for hermeneutic mastery without simul...
From Sartre to Levinas, continental philosophers have looked to the example of the Jew as the paradigmatic object of and model for ethical inquiry. Levinas, for example, powerfully dedicates his 1974 book Otherwise than Being to the victims of the Holocaust, and turns attention to the state of philosophy after Auschwitz. Such an ethics radically challenges prior notions of autonomy and comprehension-two key ideas for traditional ethical theory and, more generally, the Greek tradition. It seeks to respect the opacity of the other and avoid the dangers of hermeneutic violence. But how does such an ethics of the other translate into real, everyday life? What is at stake in thinking the other as...