Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

How treating students as customers turns the idea of meritocracy into a joke

Depth and substance vs shallowness

How did the West usurp the rest? Abstract: Traditional explanations of the “ rise of the West ” have located the sources of Western supremacy in structural or long-term developmental factors internal to Europe. By contrast, revisionist accounts have emphasized the con- junctural and contingent aspects of Europe ’ s ascendancy, while highlighting intersocietal conditions that shaped this trajectory to global dominance. While sharing the revisionist focus on the non-Western sources of European develop- ment, we challenge their conjunctural explanation, which denies differences between “ West ” and “ East ” and within Europe. We do so by deploying the idea of uneven and combined development (UCD), which redresses the short- comings found on both sides of the debate: the traditional Eurocentric focus on the structural and immanent characteristics of European development and the revisionists ’ emphasis on contingency and the homogeneity of Eurasian societies. UCD resolves these proble

" The suicide attacker, as Richard Boothby has written, short-circuits this relationship between master and slave. The uneven dialectic is based on the formula: your freedom or your life. But it is uneven because, if you choose the former, you can't have either. In a suicide attack, the attacker abruptly proves willing to give up her life to end the stand-off; turning her corporeality, her body, into a weapon. Jacqueline Rose made the point, writing about suicide attackers some years ago, that every such attack is "an act of passionate identification -- you take your enemy with you". Which could be interpreted as meaning, you take a bit of their whiteness, their being, with you. You claim a share of being, seemingly always precarious, always endangered, through death. Lone wolf suicide attackers may not kill many people compared to the apparatuses of military full-spectrum dominance, or militarised policing. But they evoke a particular horror because they upend the

"Brexit reinforces Britain's imperial amnesia"

Eurocentric modernism

" The essay seems to vacillate between the urge to expose the hypocrisy or mendacity of power in its use of humanitarianism as char- ter for invasion and domination, a critique that might still leave a (liberal) concept of the human intact, and a drive to expose a deeper, constitutive, and unredeemable involvement of the very concept of the human (and in particular, the suffering human) in the violence of geopolitical power. Repeatedly, though not consistently, Asad’s essay reaches for this sense of a deeper crisis of the modern concept of the human and its wider constellation rather than its (cynical, partial, and hypocritical) manipulation by power. But whether or not he subscribes to any version of the posthuman paradigm currently in vogue remains utterly unclear... Throughout the essay, as in much of Asad’s writing, one gets the sense that there are only these two sociocultural realities (and modes of thinking) in the world: the liberal-secular-modern (which is im

  A few interesting things in this narrative ,   but why does it avoid to mention the global capitalist system as the context?

This is about one among the hundreds of thousands of victims of that "secular leader, the lesser evil" who has not been included in the Western regime change, and supported by a few liberals and leftists worldwide.

Mosul's children were shouting beneath the rubble. Nobody came.

" [Y]ou don’t bring about major political change simply by changing people’s minds. It’s their interests that need to be assailed, not their opinions. " Universities can’t get critical leverage in a situation of which they have become an integrated part, any more than a Picasso hanging in the lobby of the Chemical Bank can make an implicit comment on finance capitalism. By and large, academic institutions have shifted from being the accusers of corporate capitalism to being its accomplices. They are intellectual Tescos, churning out a commodity known as graduates rather than greengroceries." — Terry Eagleton Terry Eagleton was forced to retire from his post as John Edward Taylor Professor of English Literature at Manchester University in July 2008 Death of the intellectual

Yet in 2015, only eighty-one thousand workers participated in strikes, and only 170,000 days were lost to labor action.  These figures  represent the fewest strikers and the second-smallest loss to productivity since records began in 1893.  “The legal framework works against workers,” argues Chris, an IWW organizer. “It’s tailored toward management, but also toward compromise. If you reject that framework, then you can operate in a way that is actually really effective.” The rise of the unorganizable

" To be sure, Miéville, like everyone else, concedes that it all ended in tears because, given the failure of revolution elsewhere and the prematurity of Russia’s revolution, the historical outcome was ‘Stalinism: a police state of paranoia, cruelty, murder and kitsch’. But that hasn’t made him give up on revolutions, even if his hopes are expressed in extremely qualified form. The world’s first socialist revolution deserves celebration, he writes, because ‘things changed once, and they might do so again’ (how’s that for a really minimal claim?). ‘Liberty’s dim light’ shone briefly, even if ‘what might have been a sunrise [turned out to be] a sunset.’ But it could have been otherwise with the Russian Revolution, and ‘if its sentences are still unfinished, it is up to us to finish them." The Russian Revolution: What's Left?