We asked Zahi Zalloua and Benjamin Davis to comment on each other’s work. This essay is the first installment of the series; Davis’s response will appear next Tuesday, followed by another round of responses from each of them.
Reading Another Humanity honestly felt like I spent three days in a fruitful dialogue with Ben Davis. I see much in his book that I admire and share, particularly his unflinching refusal to stay silent in the face of moral and political horror, crystalized in the prevailing forces of anti-Blackness and anti-Palestinianness in our inhumane world. Responding to such a catastrophic world (where the catastrophic is of course differently allocated and distributed) is not a luxury but a necessity.
Toward that end, Davis turns to humanism in an effort to harness its powers, enlisting a set of humanists (Du Bois, Glissant, Wynter, Said, and Arendt) who have leveraged the human (and human rights) for world-expanding ethical and politics projects. Davis doesn’t make this move naively. He is all too aware of humanism’s murderous legacy, and the traps of using the master’s/colonizer’s tools. But Davis insists that we should not be seduced by pure concepts. All concepts come with an inherited set of meanings. Our humanist task is to deploy concepts for emancipatory ends, to divest them from coloniality and reinvest them in projects of liberation.
Davis’s point of departure is not unlike that of Frantz Fanon, who finds himself astonished by Europe’s disastrous history: “When I look for man in European lifestyles and technology I see a constant denial of man, an avalanche of murders” (236). Davis invites us to consider a reimagined humanism as a counter to this dehumanizing colonial gaze, as the affirmation of that racialized other’s humanity, the seeds of “another humanity.”
Staying with Fanon, I can stage my difference from Davis’s approach in relation to the first pages of Black Skin, White Masks. Fanon rhetorically asks why he is writing this book. His first thought: “Striving for a New Humanism.” A “new humanism” promising an anti-colonial humanism, a universal humanism, an anti-anti-Black humanism. But the optimism of this humanism to come is met with a chilling realization, that Black existence is ensnared in, or banned to, the “zone of nonbeing”:
There is a zone of nonbeing, an extraordinarily sterile and arid region, an incline stripped bare of every essential, from which a genuine new departure can emerge. In most cases, the black man cannot take advantage of this descent into a veritable hell (xii).
While another humanity might lie beyond the domain of nothingness, Fanon insists that in most cases this new humanism/humanity is unavailable when it comes to Black being.
Yes, Fanon will return to the idea of a “new man [un homme neuf]” (239), another humanity, at the very end of The Wretched of the Earth: “For Europe, for ourselves, and for humanity, comrades, we must turn over a new leaf, we must work out new concepts, and try to set afoot a new man.” This is Fanon beautifully tying universality and solidarity together, including Europeans and non-Europeans, welcoming class and race defections from the camp of the oppressors. This struggle for another humanity is inseparable from the project of decolonization, which, as Fanon tells us on the opening page of the Wretched, is “a program of complete disorder” (2).
Here we can draw a stark contrast between Israel’s Western desire to finish the colonial project of modernity and Palestinians’ anti-colonial desire for liberation by returning to the unfinished project of decolonization. Another humanity must feed a program of disorder, whose ambition is nothing short of transforming the order of the colonial world. Ontological upheavals (internal and external) are not negotiable.
So where do humanists stand? Are they comrades in this decolonial struggle? Davis would say yes, at least potentially, if these humanists take up the cause for another humanity. Or are they the gatekeepers of humanity, faithful guardians of colonial modernity’s racial matrix of the human? Are they agents of invention or its prohibitors? We do well to recall Fanon’s statement: “I must constantly remind myself that the real leap consists of introducing invention into life” (Black Skin, 204).
And to link this train of thought back to the zone of nonbeing, exiting the zone of subhumanity must mean something other than entering the zone of being and joining the ranks of the murderous. To exit the zone of nonbeing, the zone of being must cease to be. We cannot forget that the coloniality of being generates the zone of nonbeing: the human and its others (the not-quite-human and the nonhuman). But the zone of nonbeing potentially produces the colonial regime’s gravediggers, announcing the existing humanism’s downfall and an end to its ontological apartheid. What disable enables: “a genuine new departure can emerge.” Another humanity can erupt. But this new humanity will have to be at war with the zone of being.
And in fighting this war I find a psychoanalytical register helpful for theorizing the possibility of such radical transformation and/as invention. But my point of departure here is resolutely anti-humanist, another humanity that paradoxically avows its inhumanity. Slavoj Žižek highlights Jacques Lacan’s inventive move in shifting from Louis Althusser’s theoretical anti-humanism to a “practical anti-humanism.” If Althusser promoted the former, in principle, he, in practice, preached the nurturing of humanist feelings in the self’s quotidian existence:
Lacan accomplishes the passage from theoretical to practical anti-humanism, that is, to an ethics that goes beyond the dimension of what Nietzsche called the “human, all too human,” and confronts the inhuman core of humanity. This does not only mean an ethics which no longer denies, but fearlessly takes into account the latent monstrosity of being-human, the diabolical dimension which exploded in phenomena usually covered by the concept-name “Auschwitz”—an ethics that would be still possible after Auschwitz, to paraphrase Adorno. This inhuman dimension is for Lacan, at the same time, the ultimate bedrock of ethics (In Defense of Lost Causes, 166).
Cruelty is constitutive of being human. Non-European cruelty has been racialized (the wretched belong to another species) whereas European cruelty has been repressed or disavowed (we are innocent; when we are violent we are simply reacting to the wretched’s cruelty). But cruelty is not exclusively a European problem nor is it a non-European problem.
In its genocidal campaign against the Palestinian people, Israel has, in Orientalist fashion, projected cruelty exclusively onto Arab bodies, Indigenous beings deemed nothing more than cruel brutes, phobic objects, to be exterminated.
Avowing this monstrosity invites a reckoning with human identity, with our very “nature,” our demystified nature. Another humanity, or the possibility of an ethics after Gaza, would have to put front and center the monstrosity of being human. If colonization de-civilizes and dehumanizes the colonized and the colonizer, as Aimé Césaire argues, this monstrous dehumanization creates the conditions for insatiable cruelty, for its violent explosion.
The colonizer treats the colonized “like an animal,” and in the process “tends objectively to transform himself into an animal” (Discourse on Colonialism, 41). Can a new humanist ethics face “the inhuman core of humanity”? For the non-European, contra Adorno, humanism was barbaric well before Auschwitz—Western humanism flourished at the same time that chattel slavery and colonialism expanded.
But what exactly follows from Gaza, from Palestine, from the world’s inability to put an end to Zionist Palestinocide? Is the message don’t treat humans like animals (and, I must add, don’t treat animals like animals—a posthumanist rejoinder)? Or does the moral rot go deeper?
I agree with Davis and Paul Gilroy that we should avoid ontologizing the color line, and refuse to treat it as a permanent feature of social reality, separating white humanism from the Black and blacked nonhumans. But I don’t think that history and politics ought to be too neatly separated from ontological pursuits and analysis. Historical and political developments have ontological ramifications; we can historicize ontology and talk about the ways historical and political racial formation come to have life-stultifying ontological effects.
The white/Zionist gaze is felt ontologically by the colonized Palestinian. Is it enough to say, with Sylvia Wynter, that the figure of the Zionist is another “over-representation” of the human, that what we need is another humanity, a decolonized and decolonizing ideal of humanity? Gaza, I think, invites a more pessimistic meditation and orientation. Gaza discloses the cruelty of being human—the inhumanity of our humanity—crystallized by the Zionist entity’s brazen carnage and erasure of Palestinian worldhood. The human is a cruel animal—and that cruelty often provokes repression or disavowal.
At the same time, psychoanalysis tells us more about being human; it makes the more provocative observation that this “inhuman dimension” functions as “the ultimate bedrock of ethics.” Lacan is referring here to the death drive, to what is in us more than us—to what is capable of sabotaging the operations and reproduction of our being, of our identity in a racialized world. From the standpoint of humanism, the death drive can only appear as a scandal, “true evil,” as Žižek says (Violence: Six Sideways Reflections, 87). The death drive derails humanist reason and its strict adherence to the pleasure principle.
The death drive discloses an unruly humanity, indexing an anti-ethics ethics, so to speak, that can be harnessed or called upon. The death drive makes symbolic suicide possible; it creates the conditions for race and/or class defections. Acting against your self-interest (jeopardizing your academic career, for example) is precisely what Davis and Edward Said repeatedly call attention to. Academics register the injustices visited on the Palestinians, and “yet say little or nothing in public” (The Question of Palestine, xxii; Another Humanity: Decolonial Ethics from Du Bois to Arendt, 196, 227). Self-censorship and intellectual cowardice in the face of a new McCarthyism are precisely what must be resisted. The failure of parrhesia—not practicing fearless speech—is the failure of another humanity, the failure of invention.
Psychoanalysis, in its Lacanian bent, delineates the faultlines. It is not after securing your comfort or adjustment in the world. Psychoanalysis casts decolonizing the mind in a more radical light. It addresses the enemy; it confronts the Zionist settler with a fundamental choice: Reiterate your whiteness and keep committing (slow or accelerated) genocide (and thus fulfill the project of colonial modernity in West Asia—that is, the elimination of the Indigenous Palestinians) or kill the settler within (as with dreadful whiteness, settlerism is not your destiny).
Žižek disagrees with my call:
Some of my Palestinian colleagues (like Zahi Zalloua) think that, since the Jews are the colonizers there, the only solution is that they should commit a symbolic suicide: they should radically transform their symbolic identity, abandon their traditional link to the promised land and fully assume their lack of roots. The problem I see with this idea is that caught as they are in a genocidal mania, they (the Zionist Jews) are already doing this, committing a symbolic suicide, i.e., abandoning the most precious part of their symbolic legacy (Liberal Fascisms, 59-60).
Žižek confuses matters unnecessarily. Zionist leaders and cheerleaders have aggressively excised alternative traditions of being Jewish, deeming anti-Zionist Jews, for instance, as self-hating or anti-Semitic. But excising other Jewish values from Israeli identity is hardly an expression of symbolic suicide. Zionism has been interpellating its nationals in a genocidal campaign against the Indigenous Palestinians since Israel’s birth in 1948. After Gaza, Zionist Jews are doubling down on their supremacist, imperialist, and colonial identity.
Zionism is an effect and an agent of European coloniality. A Zionist symbolic identity—fantasized as “the muscular Jew” surpassing “the weak Jew” of the diaspora—is the problem standing between an existing “colonial humanity” and “another humanity” to come. If the latter has any chance of emerging, the former must be unsettled at its core.
Will a coercive Zionism destroy the rich legacy of Judaism? Maybe. Žižek cites liberal Zionist Yuval Noah Harari for an alternative assessment of Zionism’s ills but does so in a way that completely eclipses the colonial situation and by extension the anti-colonial struggle of the Palestinians:
Judaism has survived, it has become the world champion in surviving catastrophes. But it has never faced a catastrophe like we are dealing with right now, which is a spiritual catastrophe for Judaism itself. The worst-case scenario that we are facing right now—we can still prevent it—is the potential of an ethnic cleansing campaign in Gaza and the West Bank resulting in the expulsion of two million, maybe more, Palestinians. From there, the establishment of Greater Israel, the disintegration of Israeli democracy and the creation of a new Israel based on an ideology of Jewish supremacy. The worship of what were completely anti-Jewish values for the last two millennia (Quoted in Liberal Fascisms, 60).
In the struggle for another humanity will Jewish values address the coloniality of Israel or will they work to introduce another “settler move to innocence” (another Zionism bereft of any care for Palestinian liberation)?
More generally, Harari’s liberal Zionism may denounce “Jewish supremacy” and “ethnic cleansing,” but fails time and again to face Zionist settler colonialism (the cause of Palestinocide). Lamenting Israel’s “spiritual disaster” is insufficient (does he feel any responsibility for Israel’s contribution to this humanity?). His rhetoric impedes rather than spurs the emancipatory project of another humanity. As Davis would stress, we cannot afford sidetracking the Palestinian question.
Anti-colonially speaking, another humanity requires the decolonization of the Israeli mind: a reckoning with actually existing Zionism, which must open to Palestinian liberation. My ask is not merely to “abandon their traditional link to the promised land and fully assume their lack of roots”; pace Žižek, anti-Zionism is not exclusively a Jewish affair; it is part and parcel of what Said called “democratic criticism.” Today anti-Zionism means more than ever the fight against imperialism and coloniality, a universal struggle in the service of racial justice and another humanity (elements of the “Jewish tradition” harnessed by philosophers like Judith Butler, can, of course, be deployed toward that end).
Symbolic suicide—shedding your moral and moralizing liberal Zionism and becoming anti-Zionist in the name of Palestinian liberation—requires what George Yancy names “un-suturing”: rebelling against your colonial privilege, your socially sanctioned humanity, the enactment of a “collective wounding” (Black Bodies, White Gazes: The Continuing Significance of Race in America, 354). This is repair with teeth. Repair follows “being un-sutured.” You wage war against the current reality/humanity. “Living otherwise,” as Davis insists throughout his book, demands sacrifice, a willingness to give up the privileges and rewards of the zone of being (where a dominant and crushing version of humanism is the ruling ideology) and to identify with the dispossessed Palestinians in the zone of nonbeing. De-Zionizing is a way of practicing the human by undoing the murderous human, your murderous humanity. This is my plea to supplement Benjamin Davis’s decolonial ethics with an anti-colonial politics of the death drive.
