To Exist as a Problem

This book brings together Critical Black Studies and Palestine Studies, offering a powerful and timely intervention into this present moment of genocide and rising fascism. It focuses on how Black and Palestinian people have been constructed as problems to be dealt with, managed, and even eliminated—not only, or even predominantly, as a far right endeavour but significantly also a liberal one. The political stakes, Zahi Zalloua shows, could not be higher, requiring resistance that refuses liberal politics in favour of solidarities based on anti-colonial, anti-imperial, anti-capitalist, and antiracist sensibilities. * Dr Lana Tatour, UNSW Sydney, Australia *
To be born to perish, yet to challenge a fate. To live in eternal insecurity, to have the courage to live with the anxiety of the menacing Other... that's what the signifiers of Palestinian and blackness, and those who don't exist standfor. To not be, and not be, that's where the impossible happens, precisely where ontology breaks down ,and thinking and doing become one. It is from this crack that political subjectivity emerges, and it is precisely where a politics of emancipation becomes actual. This book is faithful to the acutest political insight of psychoanalysis: don't ever enjoy not being a problem. * Nadia Bou Ali, Associate Professor and Director of Critical Humanities for the Liberal Arts, American University of Beirut, Lebanon *
Zahi Zalloua’s extraordinary and unflinching text dares to flip the ontological script and refuses obfuscatory narratives and mythopoetic tropes of white/colonial “innocence.” There is no “Black problem” or “Palestinian problem.” The problem is the existence of an anti-Black/anti-Palestinian racist episteme, a twisted racist libidinal economy, and a white supremacist/colonial monster whose insatiability for lynched, raped, broken, decimated, and genocided bodies of Black and Palestinian peoples knows no end. In the loving and prophetic spirit of James Baldwin, Zalloua ethically demands that the white supremacist/colonial monster faces itself, daring to ask itself: Who/what is the real problem? To truly face that question is to un-suture, and to confront a regime of one’s own making whose existence, whose very identity, means the ontological erasure of Black/Palestinian peoples. That being the case, Black death and Palestinian death are necessary for white supremacist/colonial life. Without problematic conflation or unnecessary incommensurability, Zalloua envisions Black/Palestinian existence, a standing forth, a collective ontological resistance, despite the world-making machinations of white supremacist/colonial logics. * George Yancy, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Philosophy at Emory University, USA, and author of Until Our Lungs Give Out: Conversations on Race, Justice, and the Future (2023) *