Jamil Khader: “Liberal Politics and the Challenge of White Supremacy: Anti-anti-Eurocentrism and the Question of Identity Politics”

‘Liberal and leftist commentators thus need to draw the ultimate radical conclusion from this anti-anti-Eurocentric position: The struggle for racial justice must be grounded in a dialectical materialist understanding of “the gap” between the particular and the universal which, according to the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, not only destabilizes identity from within, but also serves as the foundation for a true universality. Žižek’s crucial point here is that identities should be taken up on the promise of actualizing this immanent universal dimension that was opened up precisely through the brutal history of genocide, slavery, colonialism, internment, etc.’