Quotes from Zahi Zalloua

Politicizing Islam means seeing it not as a collection of clearly definable values or "customs," but rather a contested terrain of lived practices and contingent interpretations. Making place for the secular, in particular, remains a significant challenge, especially given that much of the "Muslim world" is secular, albeit increasingly stifled by the Islamic revival.

We must remind] those who are too quick to engage in critiques of Eurocentrism that the very conceptual tools they use are part of (what these same critics identify as) the European philosophical tradition, evidence precisely of these tools' subversive universality.

As we have been claiming, the global capitalist order cannot be (and to date has not been) defeated with local or national resistance; what we need instead is an even more combative universalism, or what we've been calling universality, in the form of transnational governance bodies such as the EU.

But a universal politics must not make false promises either: after capitalism comes plenitude, the absence of alienation, and communal harmony: postpolitical 2.0. No. Antagonism is a constitutive element of our being. We are strangers, neighbors, and even enemies to ourselves. Post-capitalism will not be envy-free, ressentiment-free. A more just society predicated on the disavowal of symbolic castration (lack), envy, or ressentiment is a recipe for failure of the worse kind.

Perhaps the idea of a leftist transnationalism is pie in the sky, but the fact is that Europe is in crisis, and if the Right can successfully exploit it (and has!), so can the Left. The future of Europe, in this sense, is an open question; it can turn toward a retrograde nostalgia for European "greatness," or it can equally open up a space for a radically alternative vision.

Success"—if at all—is only temporary, and idealism is always flawed and fleeting. Hence the abiding need to engage in politics.

The unavoidable implication is that the struggle for emancipation is a never-ending one—it always fails; it always falls short of its objective. Reaching a destination inevitably brings with it killjoys and spoilers, making for new struggles. But this should come as no surprise since universality, after all, is about the very absence of meaning—impossible to reach, possess, or fully realize. Struggle, struggle again, struggle better.

The undercommons "cannot be satisfied with the recognition and acknowledgement generated by the very system that denies a) that anything was ever broken and b) that we deserved to be the broken part.

Exploitation is capitalism's most effective naturalized violence, a systemic violence experienced by most of the world, and yet rarely recognized as a form of violence, or a form of violence that you can do something about: We know that capitalism is bad, ruthless even, but we don't believe anything else is better. Capitalism or the Gulag? We choose the former each time.

The challenges of a universal politics are double: first, to block the system's revival, the return to its exploitive and naturalizing machinery; second, to gesture to a life after the system, a life that is more just and egalitarian, but not without lack or alienation (a difficult pill for the Left to swallow—given its dream or fantasies of direct democracy, unalienated labor, and harmonious coexistence).

A negative universal politics, after all, aims at facing and working through our deadlocks, which always already confront us, even after "success." There is no triumph after victory, only more work, more struggle, more failure. "Success"—if at all—is only temporary, and idealism is always flawed and fleeting. Hence the abiding need to engage in politics.

Blaming Trump and the rise of the alt-right for antiblackness conveniently forgets that BLM came into existence during the "golden age" of the Obama presidency.

A universal politics thus cannot and must not denigrate sites of resistance that do not align immediately with the workers' struggle. Quite the contrary, it takes as axiomatic the shift from one revolutionary agent to "proletarian positions": "an explosive combination of different agents" is the path for a "new emancipatory politic." The challenge is how to unify these proletarian positions around a common struggle.

A passion for the commons revives the stakes of politics.

Without self-violence, without the will to unplug from the system and its rewards, critique will only ever be the semblance of critique, reform without transformation.

If subaltern voices are to be made visible in a fashion that parts ways with the cultural Left's humanist playbook of empathetic imaginings, a new revolutionary grammar is needed. Indeed such a grammar requires constructing new bonds of solidarity, based not on common enemies or goals but, as just underlined, loss and peril.

A pessimistic orientation does not seek accommodations with the system.

Hating the haters, the morally repulsive, the fascists of the world, is indeed an endless source of libidinal satisfaction for "woke" liberals. But what changes does it actually produce?

What questions we ask are crucial—for bad questions yield worse answers, ones that compound the problem.

Ideology critique or antiracist thinking is not simply about determining the truth or falsity of a given matter but also about evaluating its framing, packaging, or staging for comprehension. Ideology critique must not settle for discerning the truth or falsehood of facts.

Preaching tolerance and respect for alterity while ignoring capitalism's systemic violence produces a toothless anti-racism, an anti-racism only comfortable with blaming the type of behavior witnessed in the events of Charlottesville. This type of anti-racism is never sufficient to produce meaningful change.

Privilege theory typically only sees social structures as the sum of their individual parts, their individual consciences. At its base level, it provides you with the fantasy of intervention and action; it offers you criticism without critique . For the proponents of privilege theory, social change follows the gradual and predictable path of reform.

Privilege theory, we might say, "wants social change with no actual change." Rather than addressing the social antagonisms immanent to capitalism, it misapprehends the framework (and its enablement of racism).