Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

The cross-categorization of “Islam and the West” … survived [Edward] Saïd’s intervention, first and foremost because the material basis of its continued validity persisted… Saïd, due to his own invested interest in Enlightenment humanism, fell short of fully exposing the barbarity that European capitalist modernity has perpetrated upon the world.   The West” coinvented an “Islam” best suited to serve its colonial interests by sustaining the illusion of its own civilizational superiority. This dual false consciousness was not merely a product of a sense of racial superiority; it was also a requirement of the economics of robbing continents of their wealth and wherewithal. Any and all acts of decolonization are entirely contingent on dismantling all such civilizational divides as “Islam and the West,” “the First and the Third World,” “the West and the Rest,” in all of which the ruling ideological powers of the world have robbed continents of their material and labor resources an...

The Britons who can’t afford to retire

“ Late modernity is a capitalist modernity , which, as a permanent process of rationalisation and secularisation, constantly gives rise to what  Georg Lukács  called ‘transcendental homelessness’. Modern humans have lost any spiritual sense of meaning. For Lukács, reading novels was one way of dealing with this problem. One can immerse oneself in literature and imagine a different world. Today, the growing numbers of esoteric communities and other forms of spiritual sense-making indicate there is considerable demand for transcendence. The rise of libertarian authoritarianism is also a consequence of the weakness of the left and social movements. It has often lost its anti-establishment appeal. Many people no longer see the left as sufficiently critical of the state and the media. It is no longer seen as a legitimate representative of a collective criticism of power and a productive counter-knowledge. Social movements such as  feminism  and the anti-nuclear movement h...

“As ill-defined as the term might be, in the cultural sphere the real value of the Global South is to open a space for decolonising conversations, articulating the kind of hybridity and complexity of modern identity that a nationality cannot, a conversation held far from the old imperialist orders of the Northern hemisphere. A utopian geography that may never be real but can serve a purpose.” A series of upcoming biennials promise to explore the art of the ‘Global South’

David Graeber vs Yuval Harari Related The Daw of Everything — a review

“The Inverted Consciousness of the World” The constitution of “Islam and the West” as a civilizational divide was a colonial concoction, an ideological chimera, a mode of false consciousness that centers “the West” (where capital is believed to have accumulated) and marginalizes “the Rest” (where cheap labor and raw material are thought to be located). Both capital and its abused labor and ravaged earth, however, are global and rapidly globalizing; neither has any center or periphery. This relatively recent ideological concoction, however, has been rooted in the material forces of capital, labor, raw material, and markets. At work has been the accumulated capital that required a normative center and correspondingly the dispersed labor and raw material that were at the service of that accumulated capital. “Islam and the West” was perhaps the most potent component of “the West and the Rest” that facilitated and enabled the operation of that relation of power. I have also put forward the ...

I think this is worth a read. Islam after the West

 Excerpt from Geoff Mann’s Keynesianism, Political Economy, and Revolution

The reemergence of civilizational thinking in the last two decades of the twentieth century and at the heart of capitalist modernity is a defense mechanism, a futile attempt to salvage an outdated mutation of capital and culture at the commencement of the project early in the eighteenth century. At a time when the rapid globalization of capital has dismantled the very viability of national economies, at a time when postmodernism destroyed the cultural production of national cultures, and at a time when poststructuralism has deconstructed the very metaphysics of presence at the heart of the Enlightenment and all its categorical (e.g., civilizational) constructs, retrograde forces like Samuel Huntington, Allan Bloom, or Francis Fukuyama have put up feeble resistance to moral and material forces beyond their, or anybody else’s, control. More than anything else these feckless attempts make for rather pathetic scenes to observe, when outdated good and evil no longer recognize that the chang...

Passages to Modernity in Europe and the Middle East by Isam Al-Khafaji A good book I read last year.