Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

The best article I have read so far  about the current situation in Cuba. “When the Cuban government responded with violence to the claims of the people whose interests they are supposed to defend, it acted like any other government anywhere in the world, rather than following the socialist character that once defined the revolution. For some, this is a difficult truth to accept.” “I year for more solidarity from the global left” Related My diary of a visit to Cuba

Note: I am not doing justice to Mbembe’s arguments in the book by my selection. A full read of the text is recommended. Under what practical conditions is the power to kill, to let live, or to expose to death exercised?  Under the guise of war, resistance, or the war on terror?  Politics ... is doubly defined as a project of autonomy and as the reaching of agreement within a collective through communication and recognition. This, we are told, is what differentiates it from war... Within this paradigm, reason is the truth of the subject, and politics is the exercise of reason in the public sphere. Sovereignty is therefore defined as a twofold process of self-institution and self-limitation (fixing one’s own limits for oneself ). My concern is those figures of sovereignty whose central project is not the struggle for autonomy but the generalized instrumentalization of human existence and the material destruction of human bodies and populations.  Contemporary experiences of human destruct

Published in June 2018. It is against amnesia and absolving this or that government. How we all colluded in Fortress Europe Related In reality, “there is a  striking discrepancy between the lack  of feeling aroused  by the deaths of tens of thousands of human beings—in their majority anonymous, unrecorded by the authorities and denied the dignity of a proper burial—with that excited by, say, the 1,000 lives lost in the crossing from East to West Germany during the Cold War. There is one obvious explanation: an African, an Arab or an Afghani who drowns in the Mediterranean, in flight from war, oppression or extreme poverty, is not seen as a human being in the same way as the Germans who were trying to flee ‘communism’ and were hailed as martyrs for liberty. In that sense, the border regime is an extension of the history of colonialism and domination that Europe and the West have exercised over the rest of the world, and to which ‘the construction  of Europe’ now adds a further chapter i

The EU top court vs. Far-right 1-0 The EU’s top court has ruled that employers can in principle ban Muslim women   from wearing a headscarf or any other visible religious or political symbol.

The Society of Enmity The contemporary era is, undeniably, one of separation, hate move- ments, hostility, and, above all, struggle against an enemy. Consequently, liberal democracies—already considerably leached by the forces of capital, technology, and militarism—are now being sucked into a colossal process of inversion. Yesterday, “Negro” and “Jew” were the favored names for such objects. Today, Negroes and Jews are known by other names: Islam, the Muslim, the Arab, the foreigner, the immigrant, the refugee, the intruder, to mention only a few. The desire for an enemy, the desire for apartheid (for separation and enclaving), the fantasy of extermination—all today occupy the space of this enchanted circle... This also means accepting that there is nothing common to be shared between us and them. The anxiety of annihilation thus goes to the core of contemporary projects of separation. As it happens, the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories serves as a laboratory for a number

Close ranks, build an alternative

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 this