Against Exceptionalism

Bibliographic Data

ID20249289
AuthorsZahi Zalloua (0000-0001-8231-2136, Whitman College, corresponding author)
Year2024
Volume13
Issue2
Pages50
Publication date2024-03-12
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueHumanities (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2076-0787 • E-ISSN: 2076-0787
PublisherMDPI AG (PUBLISHER • IT)
DOI10.3390/h13020050
OpenAlexW4392697670
LanguageEN
Citations received4
References cited19

In this article, I question the logic informing paradigms of trauma that ontologize and essentialize events, such as the Holocaust and chattel slavery, making them unique, incomparable exceptions that encapsulate or inaugurate the violence of Western modernity, while standing outside and above the order they found. In an effort to avoid the urge to rank that follows almost effortlessly from such ontologization, I mobilize the appeal to the universal undergirding the works of Slavoj Žižek and that of Frantz Fanon. Both Fanon and Žižek read racial trauma and racist violence in light of the eviscerating ontological effects of an imperialist capitalism that divides the world and segregates its peoples. Rather than opting for identity politics, however, these thinkers argue against ontologizing and exceptionalizing victims, in favor of elaborating a politics based on their concrete universality

Aesthetics · Appeal · Capitalism · Epistemology · Exceptionalism · Identity politics · Modernity · Political science · Politics · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · The Holocaust · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Law · Philosophy · Posthumanist Ethics and Activism · Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, and Politics · Psychology

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