Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

“Many terrorist organisations, pilloried as such in the course of recent history, have ceased to be pariahs and become legitimate interlocutors. The Irish Republican Army (IRA), the Algerian National Liberation Front, the African National Congress (ANC) and many others have been by turns described as ‘terrorists’, a word which serves to depoliticise their struggle, to present it as a confrontation between Good and Evil. Each time the Palestinians rebel, the West, – so prompt to glorify the resistance of the Ukrainians – speaks of terrorism. In 1967, following the Israeli aggression, General de Gaulle spoke these premonitory words: ‘Now Israel is organising, on the territories it has conquered, an occupation which will necessarily involve oppression, repression, and expulsions. If they encounter any resistance, they will call it terrorism…‘ Contrary to what many Israelis claim (…) this is not a ‘unilateral’ and ‘unprovoked’ attack. The fright which Israelis are experiencing just now...

In the postcolony, wherein a particular form of power rages, wherein the dominant and the subjugated are specifically linked in one and the same bundle of desire, enthusiasm for the end is often expressed in the language of the religious. One reason why is that the postcolony is a relatively specific form of capture and emasculation of the desire for revolt and the will to struggle.  The enthusiasm for origins thrives by provoking an affect of fear of encountering the other—an encounter that is not always material but is certainly always phantasmatic, and in general traumatic. Indeed, many are concerned that they have preferred others over themselves for a long time. They deem that the matter can no longer be to prefer such others to ourselves. Everything is now about preferring ourselves to others, who, in any case, are scarcely worthy of us, and last, it is about making our object choices settle on those who are like us. The era is therefore one of strong narcissistic bonds. In t...

I hear now and then that this or that person is on the left, this or that university is leftist, Le Parti Socialiste Français and the Spanish Socialist Party are socialists, etc.  The term " left" has become very loose and misleading over the last decades, and the blurring of the distinction has been deliberate.  What it means to be on the left

" Sabsay invokes Wendy Brown’s understanding of liberal rights as  that which we cannot not want . In her most recent book, Brown persuasively argues that neoliberalism undermines the very bases of liberal democracy, which, however, she insists, should remain the point of departure for those who oppose neoliberalism in order to bring about what liberalism promises but never delivers.  I find this an inadequate framework, let alone an ideal political agenda to resist neoliberalism. Brown is not blind to the horrific record of liberal democracy on the question of race, gender, class, and governance more generally, but she still believes that liberal democracy carries “the language and promise of shared political equality, freedom, and popular sovereignty,” to which we must strive. I have always been wary of this dominant academic and intellectual preference for the language and promise of liberalism. For example, would Brown or any American liberal ever be able to overcome thei...

The sweatshop feminists

I make it clear in the book (something I also made clear in my previous book  Desiring Arabs  in the context of post-1967 Arab intellectual debates) that the failure to take political economy seriously in relation to debates about “women in Islam” and the attendant privileging of the idea of cultural determinants can be historicized in terms of the end of the cold war era. Once the USSR was eliminated, the global public sphere becomes dominated by the ideas of West European and US Human Rights and other “development” NGOs, in addition to the expansion of the purview of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund to encompass all of Eastern Europe and the disintegrated Soviet republics (not to mention post-Apartheid South Africa and the post-Oslo yet-still-occupied Palestinian territories). It is then that the liberal language of rights achieves something like global hegemony and questions of political economy recede, almost disappear, in the framing of the problem of “...

Protests erupt in the Egyptian city of Port Said

" The ceremony was followed by a panel discussion about trade union rights in the Middle East in which I participated, together with three people who've been featured in LabourStart campaigns: Nermin Al-Sharif, head of the Libyan Dockers’ and Seafarers’ Union, victim of an assassination attempt. Kamal Abbas, founder of the Cairo-based Centre for Trade Union and Workers Services, arrested numerous times by the authorities for his work. Mahdi Abu Dheeb, president of the Bahrain Teachers Association, just released after five years in prison."