We asked Zahi Zalloua and Benjamin Davis to comment on each other’s work. This essay is the second installment of the series; another round of responses from Zalloua and Davis will be posted in the coming weeks.
To understand Zahi Zalloua’s newest book, To Exist as a Problem: Being Black, Being Palestinian, one would do well first to familiarize oneself with his previous books. I recommend Solidarity and the Palestinian Cause, which I keep on my desk to inspire conversation with students and colleagues.
For the past five or six years, Zalloua has attempted—in an indefatigable and perhaps cathartic period of productivity—to stage a dialogue between two lines of argumentation that tend not to talk to each other: the Afropessimist line, which focuses on ontology and critiques reform, humanism, and multiracial solidarity; and the humanist line, which focuses on political demands and works through legal claims, moral appeals, and a widening sense of solidarity. To Exist as a Problem is Zalloua’s most refined staging of this dialogue, a dialogue that undoubtedly serves to benefit critical theory today.
In To Exist as a Problem, Zalloua largely agrees with Afropessimists, especially in their focus on the ontological status of people. Zalloua frames his project in terms of “a problem of being,” starting by saying that he wants “to think through the ontological dimensions of the problem of racialized and racializing beings” (1). He accepts that ontological critique is helpful is to diagnose where a racialized group stands in what Fanon called “the zone of non-being,” a key term for Afropessimism. Like a humanist, however, Zalloua argues that “Wilderson and other Afropessimists reify these categories” (20). He stresses that “the ontology we have inherited is not the end of the story,” and in extending the story he turns to humanist thinkers, such as Edward Said and W. E. B. Du Bois, as well as to poets, such as Édouard Glissant, Fred Moten, and June Jordan (7).
Zalloua’s clearest statement of the book’s resonance with and departure from Afropessimism is the following: “I share the Afropessimist reticence or suspicion of posthumanism, though I depart from the Afropessimist reading by de-ontologizing and re-historicizing the zone of nonbeing and making it speak more expansively to Fanon’s wretched of the earth—to those on the receiving end of colonial or supremacist violence and erasure” (59). Here Zalloua needs to depart from Afropessimism—he needs somewhere else to turn—in order to endorse political actions motivated by a feeling of solidarity. It is this need to look elsewhere that I want to highlight.
Following Zalloua’s impressive recent corpus, the stakes of To Exist As a Problem are clear: (How) can there be solidarity between Black people and Palestinians—and perhaps more widely among “the wretched of the earth”? These stakes are especially high in practice, as Zionist organizations bombard Black communities with discursive attempts to win their support, such as the ADL’s collaboration with the NBA to label as anti-Semitic “extreme criticism of the Jewish state of Israel” or the way AIPAC spent to unseat Cori Bush in St. Louis.
Perhaps surprisingly given the longstanding collaboration between Black and Palestinian activists, the stakes are also high in theory. Zalloua’s point of departure in this regard is Frank B. Wilderson III’s (in)famous passage in Afropessimism, where he argues that Palestinian people and Black people are “antagonists.” Zalloua’s reading of this passage occurs over many pages, so I won’t reproduce it in full here, but Zalloua argues in response that “[a] corrective to Wilderson’s Afropessimist reading would argue for a settler-colonial framework that thematizes the binary relation between Native and settler” (105).
Ultimately, Zalloua reserves the book’s harshest criticism for two entities, which he takes as related: empathy and liberalism. He argues that “liberalism’s go-to solution” is empathy, which functions in a racially selective way and can serve to de-politicize a situation (22). He continues, “[W]e cannot forget that empathy by itself doesn’t open to a confrontation with Israel’s settler-colonial apartheid. It acquiesces too quickly to the demands of humanitarian reason” (54).
To begin my response, I would first de-couple empathy and liberalism.
Empathy is an emotion or an affective response. To paraphrase Stuart Hall, an emotion does not carry a necessary political connotation; it does not come with a guarantee. The problem is not empathy per se, and of course no emotion can really do anything politically “by itself.” As I see it, the problem instead is the matrix of force and unimaginative solutions—the coloniality of our forms of life and imaginaries—in which an empathetic individual finds themselves.
For instance, consider the recent general strike in Minnesota. In a 23 January 2026 op-ed, Sarah Jaffe titled her New Republic essay, “If Anyone Can Pull Off a General Strike, It’s Minnesotans.” Minnesota’s anti-ICE general strike built on sustained activist networks forged not only in the uprisings following the state murder of George Floyd, but also through older networks, including those that began during the American Indian Movement. Minnesota’s general strike also relied on a range of long-forged interfaith and multiracial networks that have dedicated their time working on the least glamorous struggles, whether visiting those incarcerated or working against the privatization of garbage collection.
Having spent most of my life in Minnesota and participated in many of these networks, I can say that when radical political struggles are scaled up in Minnesota, they are to a significant degree built on empathy. Much of this empathy connects to our weather, and in response our general concern for those left out in the cold—literally of course but also figuratively. Faith leaders ask their congregations the clichéd question that academics like to tear apart, “What would it be like to be in an immigrant’s shoes/boots?” But despite the critiques, Minnesotans have once again proven that empathy, when structured through sustained local mobilization and oriented through the lessons of past struggles—in other words, when it is in touch with ancestral knowledge—can also lead a community to a general strike.
For this reason, for me Zalloua’s critique of a particular form of humanitarian empathy goes a step too far. There are other articulations of empathy.
Second, there is the more difficult question of liberalism, which Zalloua ties to a critique of the Democratic Party, specifically how the Democrats remained Zionist through the 2024 presidential election and thus perhaps lost the race. Separating this connection between Democrats and liberalism (as a political philosophy), I want to consider Zalloua’s critique of liberalism, which he advances through several critical comments about “liberals.”
Zalloua writes, “To the chagrin of liberals, the comrade as object refuses—by consenting not to be a single being—the limited rewards of identity politics. She expresses her rage otherwise; the depersonalized comrade doesn’t make narrow particularist or identity-based demands—the preferred liberal way of racialized nonbeings to ‘exit’ this excruciating zone into the curated multiculturalist world of liberals” (115-116). In a powerful line, he summarizes this practice of camaraderie, of de-whitening or de-Zionizing, as “to become problematic,” meaning “to actively divest from the existing oppressive system and effectively break from a vicious Manichean dualism that seals the colonized and colonizer in a boundless and fruitless struggle” (123).
Thus, Zalloua shifts the object of critique from the elite or from a few bad policies to a system of colonial being; and in response, he calls for a total shift in practice following a total shift in value. Ultimately, his proposal is for those racialized as white and socialized as dominant to become “ex-white” through a practice of divestment (affective and financial, psychological and economic). This also means giving up some status as a comfortable legal subject. In his own words, “Becoming object is the zero-level of solidarity in the insurrectionist struggle against ontological walls and partitions at home and across the globe” (139).
Since Hegel and Marx’s reading of Hegel, Leftist thinkers have maintained faith in the power of the negative. The political theorist Robyn Marasco has even explained critical theory after Hegel in terms of “the highway of despair.” In this tradition, the solidarity Zalloua outlines is overwhelmingly a negative solidarity: divest, resist, refuse, problematize—even become problematic and object. He worries that liberals produce a “decaffeinated politics” (145) and calls the liberal elite, again with Democrats in mind, “the first counterinsurgency to both BLM and Palestinian solidarity movements” (147). This is an important critique of Democrats. But does it apply to liberals more generally?
It is noteworthy that some of the thinkers Zalloua draws on when he does turn to a politics of solidarity, such as Du Bois and Said, maintained a liberal vocabulary of self-determination, rights, freedom, justice, and humanity. In this tradition, several liberal organizations, such as the ACLU and Human Rights Watch, as well as the AAUP, have defended college professors and campus activists who stand with Palestine.
As I read it, the most important contribution of this book is to open a new space for a research method less of “critical pessimism,” as Zalloua calls his corrective to Afropessimism (44), and more an experimental space asking what would happen if today’s various theoretical pessimisms sustained a genuine contact with the liberal, reconstructive sides to Du Bois, Said, and others. This is the conversation the book implicitly gestures toward by way of its key figures.
In other words: What happens after we have all established our critical bona fides?
Is there anything we can build together? Is there a valuable modifier to our theory and practice besides “critical”?
Put differently, can critical politics also be reconstructive? Du Bois, Césaire, Fanon, Glissant, Wynter, and Said thought so, as I stressed in Another Humanity. Indeed, Said’s late work was dedicated to building a humanism that could sustain democratic futures.
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While a dialogue across Black humanism, Afropessimism, and critical race theory has been happening for some time in Black Studies, it is also ongoing in some legal spaces, where emphasis often falls on pragmatic paths. Rutgers Law School Center for Security, Race and Rights has been exemplary in this regard. It is harder to find such conversations in “theory” spaces, which could benefit from taking these legal debates more seriously and then suggesting how the methods could work together. Read this way, the pessimistic attention to libidinal economy and antagonism offers new openings for strategic legal and political work to make better interventions, ones more closely tied to the psychological and affective reality as it is lived amidst the coloniality of being today.
Consider for example the work of Kendall Thomas, who has always demonstrated remarkable theoretical sophistication in writing about law. In Thomas’s Derrick Bell lecture, which even cites Zalloua’s beloved Žižek, Thomas concludes by noting that “the most pressing task of the abolitionist movement is to build a constituency for a new, anti-racist vision of our body politic and a new corporal politics that not only reimagines black bodies, but recognizes and revalues black lives” (138). The professional—and, I’m arguing, political—necessity of thinking culture and law together in legal scholarship has meant that some legal theory is arguably more valuable than much academic critical theory today, because critical legal theory has offered new visions and new political paths in addition to dwelling with the negative, while critical theory has stayed at the level of theory and thus paradoxically has ceded the constructive project further and further to Eurocentric liberal solutions. It is no wonder so many of our students end up in law school and working for the very liberal institutions we taught them to critique. We have built very little else to which they can belong.
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What Zalloua leaves us with is not really an answer to his questions, which would be too positive—too “decaf”—for his tastes. Instead, To Exist as a Problem, on my reading, reveals how profoundly many of us are searching for a new political vocabulary, a new way of making sense of our lives and living in solidarity after we have established our critique of the present.
Many of us are searching for a new form of what Glissant calls “Relation,” which involves recognizing the right to opacity of others (and ourselves) while making a clear decision on how to live following Glissant’s exhortation in Poetics of Relation that “you must choose your bearing.” In my view, this new vocabulary and new practice of relation might not take as its starting point the “dismantling of… [the] racial matrix of the human,” which I support, but which remains too abstract to be a viable starting point for practice in community (152).
The Caribbean philosophers with whom Zalloua aligns his project, such as Aimé Césaire and Sylvia Wynter, noted that to live under coloniality is to live conditioned by this matrix of the human. We start from where we are, constrained by the futures we feel available to us. ‘
Amidst these constraints recently in Minnesota, the call was not to dismantle the racial matrix of the human; in the bitter cold, Minnesotans were much busier drinking coffee with neighbors than reading critical theory. In the paradoxes of today’s world, it turns out that a very different kind of caffeinated politics occurred: a liberal and empathetic vocabulary of human rights and care for our neighbors was a successful starting point to lead to a Marxist practice.
I wonder what the result would be if we turned our theoretical attention to the next question: How can we sustain the energy that created a general strike in order to make a wider intervention into a settler form of life? In other words, what happens after the strike?
In her reading of Édouard Glissant, Wynter argues that the decolonial challenge is to acknowledge and move beyond colonial norms and institutions “at the level of the assimilation of the psyche.” In response, she outlines a “call for, and praxis of” a new discourse, which is what I meant above by “a new way of making sense of our lives.”
In Wynter’s terms, Zalloua’s book offers a “call for” a new discourse, certainly. I have suggested that today it is necessary for some of our research to also offer a fallibilistic and careful, but still a say-it-with-your-chest blueprint for the “praxis of” that discourse. This would be research that proceeds not simply through negation and despair, but whose practical rigor starts from a fundamental belief, in Jordan’s words, that “we are the ones we have been waiting for.”
