Zahi Zalloua > Quotes

“A pessimistic orientation does not seek accommodations with the system. We share the goal of the undercommons, which “is not to end the troubles but to end the world that created those particular troubles as the ones that must be opposed” (Halberstam 2013, 9). Moten and Harney don’t play the liberal game of reform; they are constantly reframing the problems at hand. What questions we ask are crucial—for bad questions yield worse answers, ones that compound the problem. On prison abolition, their intervention is decisive and reconfigures the coordinates of the debate: for them, it is “not so much the abolition of prisons but the abolition of a society that could have prisons, that could have slavery” (Moten and Harney 2013, 42). How do you abolish a society? How do you fight state power? Is anti-statism, ethical (that is, nonviolent) anarchism, the only solution? Is it a solution? Or do you dare to seize power, as with the example of Morales? A universal politics takes these questions to heart. For this reason, its skeptical negativity is put into the service of a more virtuous end: locating antagonisms, rather than settling for conflicts or pseudo-struggles. Its challenge is to sustain the antagonistic logic of class struggle, and avoid the comfort of static oppositions. The cultural Left has its enemies (Trump, Putin, Le Pen, Erdoğan, Modi, Duterte, Netanyahu, Orbán, Bolsonaro, Suu Kyi, MBS, etc.)—and, conversely, notorious leaders blame liberal media, demonizing bad press with the “enemy of the people” charge—but nothing really changes; the basic features or coordinates of the current society remain the same. Worse, the liberal capitalist system is legitimized (only in a free democracy can you, as a citizen, criticize tyrants abroad and, more importantly, express your outrage at the president, politicians, or state power without the fear of retribution) and the cultural Left is tacitly compensated for playing by the rules—for practicing non-antagonistic politics, for forgoing class insurgency and not engaging in class war (Žižek 2020f)—rewarded with “libidinal profit” (Žižek 1997b, 47), with what Lacan calls a “surplus-enjoyment” (2007, 147), an enjoyment-in-sacrifice. That is to say, cultural leftists, with their “Beautiful Souls” intact, enjoy not being a racist, a misogynist, a transphobe, an ableist, and so on. 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?”
― Zahi Zalloua, Universal Politics

“[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.”
― Zahi Zalloua, Universal Politics

“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. It is shared trauma (exploitation, dispossession, alienation, oppression) that enables political groups to forge alliances, but as chapter 4 emphasized, universal emancipation also means giving up a degree of privilege/enjoyment, especially on the part of the included. It is the curbing of enjoyment, after all, that underlies a politics of egalitarian justice, since the point is not to aspire to the lifestyle of the privileged, but to reconfigure the system to minimize “privilege” (i.e., social inequalities). This is particularly the case in our current environmental crisis, which increasingly demands making do without new wealth creation (e.g., public transit instead of personal automobiles, computers using recycled rather than new materials, etc.). As Eisenstein and McGowan state, everyone “claims to want solidarity, but few want to pay the price for it. It does not require hatred of an enemy or the willingness to kill for the collective but the self-inflicted violence of the rupture. The solidarity that forms in the rupture is a solidarity without ground because the bond that exists is nothing but the shared absence of ground” (2012, 94). 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.”
― Zahi Zalloua, Universal Politics

“What grounds a universal politics, as well as giving it its emancipatory orientation, is the part of no-part: the universal reveals itself, after all, through what is missing, in what is abjected or doesn’t belong. All of our case studies have aimed at forefronting the latter: the socioeconomically dispossessed, the migrant/refugee, the racialized Black or indigenous woman, and so forth. It is they who make evident the failures, inequities, and cruelties of the system; hence their attendant universal call for égaliberté. For, without the ethicopolitical identification with the part of no-part, without an understanding that it is the underlying social antagonism—the social division between the included and excluded—that makes the global capitalist order possible, a universal politics loses its radical edge, descending into more of the same. The example of the celebrification of #MeToo discussed earlier is a good case in point, in which the powerful take up an important social cause, resulting in the privileging of the already privileged—a “pseudo-radicalization, which fits the existing power relations much better than a modest reformist proposal” (Žižek 1999, 230). It is only when the call for égaliberté is issued by the part of no-part that it becomes an “impossible” demand—one that requires reconfiguring, rather than tweaking or reforming, the system.”
― Zahi Zalloua, Universal Politics

“What is needed today is precisely a collective response rather than an individual one. Or better yet, thinking Kant with Nietzsche, what is required in our struggle against racism is a “public use of ressentiment,” a life-affirming ressentiment in the service of anti-racism. Such ressentiment, staged as the uncompromising feeling for racial justice against the backdrop of left-liberal reformists (who promote the fantasy of action), becomes, most importantly, a collective moral feeling and consciousness, based on a shared but unacceptable condition of exclusion. In actively circumventing their particularity, society’s marginalized and racialized figures, as the “part of no-part,” can come to participate effectively in the collective emancipatory struggle for the universal—for a politics of ressentiment is universal or it is not.”
― Zahi Zalloua, Žižek on Race: Toward an Anti-Racist Future

“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.”
― Zahi Zalloua, Žižek on Race: Toward an Anti-Racist Future

“Success”—if at all—is only temporary, and idealism is always flawed and fleeting. Hence the abiding need to engage in politics.”
― Zahi Zalloua, Universal Politics

“Addressing racism as a problem of intolerance misfires. It is not about the coexistence of different racial identities. Racism is a constitutive problem of the system. This is why an antiracist movement must be anticapitalist, if the goal of the struggle is not to exact minimal concession from the system in term of recognition and reward, but actually to change the coordinates of one’s social existence. And conversely, an anticapitalist movement that brackets race/racism from an analysis will fail in its project, precisely by failing to mobilize the indignant rage of racialized bodies against the racist system. To paraphrase Walter Benjamin, every sanctioned identity politics is a sign of a failed revolution.”
― Zahi Zalloua, Universal Politics

“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.”
― Zahi Zalloua, Universal Politics

“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.”
― Zahi Zalloua, Universal Politics

“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.”
― Zahi Zalloua, Universal 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.”
― Zahi Zalloua, Universal Politics

“My refusal to subscribe to the order of power implicates and is constituted by its implicit address to others: “I need undeserved happiness” is a demand open to all, realizable by all. To paraphrase Lacan, we may reread the call for undeserved happiness as a collective injunction: “Do not compromise on your desire for happiness.” This personal and collective desire declines the demands of the liberal superego-agency and refuses to repeat privilege theory’s surveillance of happiness that leaves intact the socioeconomic situation, that is, the symbolic structure of global capitalism. Demanding undeserved happiness is a traumatic shock to the social order, throwing everything out of balance, “ruin[ing] the smooth flow of our daily lives.” It addresses rather than covers over the antagonism between the included and the excluded, and calls for a different arrangement of the Symbolic: its eventalization “introduc[es] a totally different Universal, that of an antagonistic struggle which, rather than taking place between particular communities, splits each community from within, so that the ‘trans-cultural’ link between communities is one of a shared struggle.” It de-commodifies happiness as a personal good, de-individuates or universalizes desire (and thus restructures and repoliticizes the question of happiness), making the desire for happiness (and enjoyment) both a personal and collective commitment, an attachment to a universalist project, effectively shortcircuiting the privatized rewards of privilege—unearned or otherwise.”
― Zahi Zalloua, Žižek on Race: Toward an Anti-Racist Future

“The challenge for the part of no-part, as for all of us for that matter, is not to fall into the trap of approaching the violations of (colonial) power as a victim—which only empowers the violator to either ignore or further repress you or benevolently “right” the wrongs done to you in the form of minority rights protection or identity recognition—but to use the violation as an occasion to confront your own alienation. Violations disrupt one’s “organic” unity with one’s social context or community, and while violent and disorienting, they provide one with the opportunity to extract oneself from such a context, to come to terms with one’s non-coincidence with oneself. So rather than resorting to victimhood, ressentiment, or a search for authenticity and pride (which only strengthen the hand of multicultural/identity politics, as we have seen), the point is to use the violation to become a political agent of universality—by facing one’s own antagonisms, joining forces with those who are moved to do the same, and struggling to reconfigure together the system that made the violation possible in the first place.”
― Zahi Zalloua, Universal Politics

“Žižek lays out three lines of argumentation in this regard. First, he claims that Europe has something important to offer the world—its modern emancipatory tradition, including feminism, workers’ rights, and the welfare state (1998, 1009). He readily admits this is a Eurocentric position; but his is not a run-of-the-mill kind that papers over European colonial history, seeing the continent as the flagbearer of liberal democracy and human rights. Instead, he acknowledges his inescapable European background and carries out a critique of many of its legacies (colonialism, liberalism, racism, the Holocaust, exploitation, misogyny, etc.), stating that “if the European legacy is to be effectively defended, then the first move should be a thorough selfcriticism . . . there is no room for self-satisfied arrogance” (2004b, 35). He is even unafraid of characterizing his native Slovenia as a “shitty country” for this reason (Žižek 2016a at 27:40). But nonetheless, he insists on defending and reinvigorating such left-European legacies as radical egalitarianism, universal emancipation, and justice. In this connection, he reminds 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 (see chapter 3).”
― Zahi Zalloua, Universal Politics

“What questions we ask are crucial—for bad questions yield worse answers, ones that compound the problem.”
― Zahi Zalloua, Universal Politics

“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.”
― Zahi Zalloua, Universal Politics

“Capitalism’s “universal wrong” is depoliticized and privatized: the wrong is framed as an individual shortcoming—whence the neoliberal imperative, “check your privilege.” But is individual culpabilization really enough to short-circuit society’s racist and exploitative machinery? Doesn’t the maxim check your privilege conveniently place the problem of white supremacy in the actions of others, fetishizing your self-critique? Doesn’t the call only scratch the surface, individualizing your intervention, always risking becoming an end in itself, a narcissistic exercise?”
― Zahi Zalloua, Žižek on Race: Toward an Anti-Racist Future

“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.”
― Zahi Zalloua, Universal Politics

“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.”
― Zahi Zalloua, Universal Politics

“In theorizing post-capitalism—in thinking about what comes after the system—a universal politics cannot downplay “the power of envy” (Derbyshire 2009) or engage in a fetishistic disavowal of envy. We know very well that envy is part of human nature, but we believe in utopia, that a just society will be freed of envy, that envy is really a capitalist problem. Envy is to be avowed, acknowledged as a constitutive element of human existence. To be clear: this is not to naturalize or justify envy. Quite the contrary, the avowal of envy enjoins us to politically confront it, to de-individualize envy’s hold on us—and not to transcend it (dreaming of a prelapsarian mode of plenitude, attaining the ideal of completion) nor acquiesce to its presence (normalizing its social manifestations, legitimizing the fear of Others—the “theft of enjoyment”). Envy registers first and foremost an ontological dissatisfaction, a “glitch” in us, that the current system is all too keen to exploit and manipulate. And this insight must not be lost on a universal politics.”
― Zahi Zalloua, Universal Politics

“The shared deadlock faced by all our cases is of course that created by our global capitalist order. Part of the challenge of a universal politics is precisely keeping an eye on this target, given the overwhelming ideological tendency today to focus on the symptom (climate “change,” refugee “crisis,” patriarchy, etc.) rather than the cause (market-created inequalities, unevenness, environmental destruction). The insidiousness of neoliberal capitalist universalism is that it manifests in multifarious ways—police racism and brutality as the embodiment of state violence aimed at protecting and reproducing the status quo; anti-immigrant racism as a displacement of popular revolt against austerity; Islamophobia to justify brutalizing Palestinians or invading Iraq and Afghanistan to take over their oil and gas fields; and so forth—making it difficult to connect the dots. Systemic contradictions always manifest in specific ways, and the test of a universal politics, as we have been claiming, is bringing out the universal-antagonistic dimension of each particular.”
― Zahi Zalloua, Universal Politics

“It is shared trauma (exploitation, dispossession, alienation, oppression) that enables political groups to forge alliances. But a universal emancipation also means giving up a degree of privilege/enjoyment, especially on the part of the included. It is the curbing of enjoyment, after all, that underlies a politics of egalitarian justice, since the point is not to aspire to the lifestyle of the privileged, but to reconfigure the system to minimize “privilege” (i.e., social inequalities).”
― Zahi Zalloua, Universal 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.”
― Zahi Zalloua, Universal Politics

“A pessimistic orientation does not seek accommodations with the system.”
― Zahi Zalloua, Universal Politics

“A new revolutionary grammar also begins with a cold defense of hopelessness. One of the system’s most effective tricks is the cruel lie of reform. Hope gives life to the system, prolonging its brutal existence. It breeds nostalgia. The system—with a new president, a new prime minister, and so on—will be redeemed. Liberal democracy can get a reboot. It can still deliver on its emancipatory promises. Hopelessness interrupts this postpolitical calculus. Without this sense of hopelessness, we would never demand something qualitatively different. Politics as such would be inexistent. Hopelessness opens onto pessimism, onto a critical and skeptical hermeneutics. Pessimism is a political doing; it embodies an active and vigilant disposition vis-à-vis power.”
― Zahi Zalloua, Universal Politics

“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?”
― Zahi Zalloua, Universal Politics

“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.”
― Zahi Zalloua, Žižek on Race: Toward an Anti-Racist Future

“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).”
― Zahi Zalloua, Universal Politics

“A universal politics is not only preoccupied with events and evental sites but also with the aftermath of the event. The question What comes after the system? is intimately tied to What comes after the event? Indeed, it is not an exaggeration to say that what matters more is what takes place after the traumatic eruption of the event, after the disruption of the symbolic order. The excitement of negativity can give a false sense of victory. Strikes and other mass movements are capable of shutting down a whole system. But what comes next? As Žižek rightly cautions, “The success of a revolution should not be measured by the sublime awe of its ecstatic moments, but by the changes the big Event leaves at the level of the everyday, the day after the insurrection” (2009a, 154). Fidelity to the event is the ultimate challenge of politics. After making the impossible possible, a universal politics must be alert to the system’s backlash, its capacity to strike back or co-opt. The advances brought about by events can be undone; de-eventalization is an immanent possibility. And here again the greatest threat to universal politics does not come from the populist Right but from the liberal Left, whose complicity with the system, its willingness to compromise (capitalism must be saved!), is a bigger obstacle to building an emancipatory movement, to forging a common project.”
― Zahi Zalloua, Universal Politics