On Hamid Dabashi’s Civilizational Ethics – a Critique

A sharp critique of Hamid Dabashi’s After Savagery: Gaza, Genocide, and the Illusion of Western Civilization

The first essential question arises: What, exactly, is the West? Is it a set of institutions? A ruling class? States? Ideologies? Or is it a civilizational essence? The book offers no clear answer. Instead, it moves through sweeping formulations that turn the West into a spectral totality — a ghostly abstraction that, precisely when it should point its finger at concrete structures, replaces them with metaphors.

The result is a perilous slippage: the real machinery that produces, distributes, and normalizes violence disappears, replaced by a single icon — “white civilisation.” But who constructs this civilization? Who fights within it? What contradictions tear through its interior?

Here lies the book’s central flaw: its analysis does not explain power; it assigns essence. Instead of asking which institutions, with what budgets and through what processes, generate this violence, it asks: to which civilization does this violence belong?

Here we must speak of “Orientalism in Reverse.” This is the point at which a writer appears to critique the West but in fact reproduces the same Orientalist geometry, only with inverted signs. The West becomes a unified demon; the East, an innocent without agency. The result is the erasure of contracts, budgets, and local collaborators in the cycles of war, the war industry, and siege economies.

What disappears from view is the political economy of war.