Zahi Zalloua, "The Politics of the Wretched: Race, Reason, and Ressentiment" (Bloomsbury, 2024)
41:08 Share

What if there were a medicine that could heal almost anything? That would be great. But they didn't want you to know about it. Sorry, who's they? Some people are following me and I brought my tortoise. From executive producers Mike Judge and Greg Daniels and co-creators Joe Bennett and Steve Healy comes an animated comedy thriller about what it takes to change the world. Common Side Effects. New episodes Sundays at 11.30pm on Adult Swim. Now streaming on Mac.

Call 1-800-NEXT-STEP or text NEXTSTEP to 53342.

♪♪♪

Get the Carl's Jr. app, join my rewards, and get the free Carl's Jr. Hangover Burger all day on February 10th. Limit one for my rewards member. Only at participating restaurants on February 10th while supplies last. Visit carlstr.com slash freeburgerday for terms. Welcome to the New Books Network. Welcome back to the New Books Network. I'm your host, Ruben Nuenhuis.

Today I'm talking with Zahi Zalua about his recent book, The Politics of the Wretched, Race, Reason, and Resentiment, published by Bloomsbury in September 2024. The Politics of the Wretched argues for resentment's generative negativity, prompting a shift from resentment as a personal expression of frustration to resentment as a collective no. No.

Inspired by Kant and Nietzsche's philosophy, Zalua identifies two modes of deploying ressentiment, private and public use, by substituting ressentiment for reason. This reinterpretation argues for a public use of ressentiment, for the wretched to universalize their grievances, to see their antagonism as cutting across societies, and to turn personal trauma into a common cause.

The public use of Résentiment rails against the ideology of identity and victimhood and insists on Résentiment's generative negativity, its own rationality prompting a shift from Résentiment as a personal expression of frustration to Résentiment as a collective no.

Reframing Ressentiment as a tool to oppose the evils of capitalism, anti-blackness, and neocolonialism, it both alarms the liberal gatekeepers of the status quo and promises to energize the anti-racist left in its ongoing struggles for universal justice and emancipation. Zahi is Cushing Eels Professor of Philosophy and Literature and a Professor of Indigeneity, Race, and Ethnicity Studies at Whitman College and editor of The Comparatist.

Additionally, he has been on NBN three times in the past for some of his recent books, Solidarity and the Palestinian Cause.

Being Post-Human, and Zizek on Race. Welcome back to the New Books Network, Zahi. ZAHI Well, to start off, can you tell us at a high level, what is your goal with this book? I think perhaps a great place to begin is with the title of the book. So to set the context, why The Wretched, who are The Wretched, and what is important about the politics of The Wretched? ZAHI Right, right.

So the choice wretched is meant to evoke Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, in French, Les Dénis de la Terre, which literally means the damned of the earth. The wretched for me is a creature of an unjust social order. It stands for the radically excluded, for the world's surplus humanity, the disposable, or simply those beings who don't matter, those beings who have been made not to matter.

So it is important that we understand the wretched as a historical being, not some timeless or eternal other. In my ongoing dialogue, critical dialogue with the Afro-pessimists, my use of the notion of wretched allows me to avoid the forced choice between the colonized and the slave. The wretched points to the afterlives of both slavery and colonialism. The politics in the title

is an attempt to articulate a reason that informs a number of movements, including Black Lives Matter, which I see troubling the race or class imperative. Like, you have to choose between the two. Who's more important? For me, an anti-colonial left refuses to separate race from class and vice versa.

And there's also a reason behind this politics, at work behind the actions of the wretched. They're not some irrational beings who act violently without purpose or vision. So it was important for me to link race, reason, and ressentiment. Great. Thanks. Well, a crucial concept you develop all throughout the book is tied to one with Nietzschean roots, ressentiment.

However, you make a distinction between a private use of ressentiment and a public use of ressentiment. So Nietzsche speaks of ressentiment in a negative light. And while you agree with much of Nietzsche's thought, you differ from him in that you think ressentiment is something to cultivate.

Can you help us understand where you agree with Nietzsche on Ressentiment, where you differ from him, and perhaps briefly stage the problem that warrants making the distinction between private and public use of Ressentiment? Perfect. Yes. So the distinction that I introduced between the private use of Ressentiment and the public use of Ressentiment is a result of thinking Nietzsche would Kant or giving Kant a kind of Nietzschean twist.

Nietzsche offers a devastating critique of ressentiment. So for Nietzsche, ressentiment fueled the slave revolt. It gave us slave morality. It gave us the grammar of good versus evil.

Contemporary discussions of ressentiment often repeat Nietzsche's critical assessments. Wendy Brown, for example, in her influential book States of Injury, looks at the ways identity politics grounds itself or attaches itself to a wounded identity. Identity politics for Brown comes at a cost. It moves away from a more emancipatory project. Others

contrasts ressentiment with what they see as a more generative passion, like anger, drawing on Audre Lorde's defense of anger as a just response to racism, to anti-blackness. So in that equation, ressentiment aligns with hatred in the context of Audre Lorde. Audre Lorde sees hatred

Hatred as a desire to destroy the other, whereas anger is a desire to transform the other. Others still look at a drawn Holocaust survivor, Jean Améry, who reclaims ressentiment as a refusal to forgive and forget in the context of a post-war Germany, where there was a cultural push to move on, forget,

the evils of the past or just consider Nazism as a dark chapter in Germany's history. So Amélie stressed this refusal to play along. So in my work, I say with ressentiment, but I propose to rethink it in light of Kant's important distinction that he makes in What is Enlightenment between the private and public use of reason. The private use of reason is when you practice

when you follow rules in a given context. So let's say you're a soldier. You display the private use of reason when you follow the orders of your superior. But let's say you strongly disagree with the rules that you're being asked to obey. You don't stop doing what you're asked to do, but you must be allowed an outlet to address a larger audience. You can write as if you were a scholar addressing questions that transcend your particular situation.

Without the public use of reason, we could never become an enlightened subject for Kant. So for me here, the private use of ressentiment represents what Nietzsche and Wendy Brown criticize. It is a ressentiment that both reifies your identity and yearns for revenge, for the destruction of the other. Identity politics introduces divisions on the left that are not generative, fueling a depoliticized politics of blame and victimhood.

So here the contrast now with the public use of ressentiment, it points us in a different direction. It harnesses the negativity of the ressentiment, underpinning the refusal in the name of a collective or universal cause. The wretched who practice the public use of ressentiment hunger for solidarity, for a collective response to their plight. So that's the difference here between a Nietzschean vision of ressentiment, which is very slavish and really stresses you.

The public use of ressentiment always moves towards the other, a collective will. It's not about me or my own particular group. Okay. So is it fair to say it's kind of starting with solidarity in mind? It's looking at some grievance against a universal and then working towards the other, just beyond the individual. Absolutely. And it keeps ressentiment's bite. That's why I don't want to get rid of

the Nietzschean context. I'm exiting the orbit, but still having in mind this bite of ressentiment. So if public ressentiment, the public use of ressentiment becomes too adapted to the circumstances, the private use will keep its bite. It keeps reminding you of that anger, that kind of unruly anger

But in its full development, right, in its effective politicization, it moves away from the self, from one's own identity. Okay. In your first chapter, one of the things you explore a bit is Frantz Fanon's concept, zone of non-being.

You write, quote, the zone of non-being in principle holds that the promise of radical change, it is deliberating experience of no longer being rooted in your social self. But by becoming a quasi-permanent condition, it prevents black folks in most cases from taking advantage of its ontological and political possibilities, end quote. Can you unpack what is going on here? Yeah, yeah. So Fanon's notion of the zone of non-being plays a really big part in my analysis, because

And the idea here is really an existentialist one. If or when your social ego dissolves, for a variety of reasons, you become aware of your radical freedom. You're free to become someone else so you can posit a new project and new horizon. The problem that Fanon observes is that black folks typically only experience the first part. The racist white gaze destroys their subjectivity, the being of black people, so they cannot take advantage of their ontological dispossession.

But Fanon depicts the zone of non-being as a quasi-permanent condition, not a completely permanent situation. The political questions that emerge from this reading of the zone of non-being are twofold. First, how do you exit the zone of non-being? And second, what or who do you become?

Can you free yourself from the paradigm of the human? So for me, there's always a kind of duality between the human and the wretched. The dominant paradigm of the human excludes the wretched but needs the wretched to define itself. So when Fanon talks about this new humanism to come, it can't be just a mere updated humanism. It has to be radically rewritten. Okay.

My next question is about fetishist disavowal. The basic formula of this, so to speak, is it's for one to say, I know very well that blank, but all the same, da-da-da. So you point out that white people can employ fetishist disavowal to overlook resentment. Could you perhaps walk us through how this works and perhaps illustrate with a contemporary example? Sure, sure. Um,

So it's particularly white liberals who are prone to the logic of fetishes. You can look at today's liberal Zionists. They know very well that the Israeli military is committing genocide in Gaza. But all the same, they believe in the idea of democratic and Jewish Israel. So they believe in a post-Netanyahu Israel.

The fetishist's eval allows you to neutralize any disturbing new knowledge. My country is racist. My country is committing genocide. So here, fetishist's eval is great at preventing a crisis of identity. It helps depoliticize your situation and knowledge. So if ressentiment has any kind of

traction, Fetishist's avow contains it. The new knowledge does not transform you. Right. Yeah, and I think there's so many examples of this.

It could be anything, you know, in the U.S. with the recent inauguration of Trump. I know very well Trump is, but all the same. Yeah, I still believe in America's greatness. You know, because then Trump becomes the exception, right? He is the embodiment of anti-blackness, Islamophobia. He becomes all.

He exhausts how we think of evil, how we think of problems. So white liberals become happy because now they have a clear target of who is anti-black, right? They disavow their own complicity in an anti-black America. Yeah. So one of the takes in, one of your takes in this book is that the question of which is more primary, race or class, which you've already alluded to in your

earlier. It's not a great question, and it compounds problems by creating divisions on the left rather than providing useful direction. So you look at two case study movements as you explore this overall question, Black Lives Matter and the Gilets Jaunes or Yellow Vest movement in France. So I have some questions related to these movements and the private-public resentment

Perhaps to start off, I wonder if you could just set the stage and explain how you see Rizantamon coming through in both these movements. Right, right. So Black Lives Matter produces a lot of anxiety in the U.S., right? The fact that the movement emerged under black president Obama is often forgotten. You almost automatically think that Trump produces Black Lives Matter. No, it came into existence under Obama. And you can see that

A kind of conflict emerges, a tension, a friction between Black Lives Matter and the Democratic Party. And this could be seen how the Democratic Party has constantly sought to capitalize on black rage, to win elections. In essence, you use black folks and their experience as a tool to win elections.

So here we can keep in mind when Hillary Clinton was running against Trump in the 2016 election, she wanted the endorsement of BLM activists. But BLM leadership told them, no, how can we support you? Why would such a movement support a party that is basically similar to the Republican Party? Wall Street Democrats and Wall Street Republicans share the same values, more profits for the rich.

Democratic leaders just do a better job hiding their racism, their anti-blackness. So what interests me in the BLM movement is their commitment to Palestine, their solidarity with Palestinians. The phenomenon of BLM renders problematic the division between race and class, especially when BLM chapters articulate their movement as part of a global resistance to racial capitalism.

White liberals and black elite prefer that BLM remains a local issue, an issue that could be contained with identity politics divorced from the critique of global capitalism from the settler invasion in Palestine.

So there's a belief among many on the left that if you're concerned with race, with anti-blackness, with Islamophobia, that you must be for identity politics. No, right? Anti-colonial theorists like Aimé Césaire and Fanon never believed that you can and should or should separate race from class and give up on a vision of universal politics.

So BLM is a counter to simplistic leftist critique that treats anti-blackness as an epiphenomenal problem that would disappear once class antagonism is addressed, once the revolution happens. Such leftist critique fail to really understand the ways in which anti-black libidinal economy underpins white civil society, that people don't simply act according to their economic interests.

there is a white enjoyment in not being black, in needing black bodies to stand for the other of the human. And this is the point that Afro-pessimists continue to make. And the left cannot ignore by simply saying class comes first, that what really matters are class divisions. So in a different geographical context, the Gilets Jaunes movement is similar to BLM insofar as activists believe that there's something rotten in the global system.

And they're right, but the movement is not a monolith. The Gilets Jaunes activists are mostly white, who are suffering and experiencing the negative effects of global capitalism, really for the first time. They should be turning to the left for an articulation of their voices, but it is the far right that has mostly capitalized on their ressentiment, which takes the form often of a private use of ressentiment. But one can think more critically.

of this kind of logic. So here the ressentiment that is clearly expressed in the slogan, "La France pour les Français," racist logic, France for the French people, Germany for the Germans, the far right has been quite efficient in trafficking in nostalgia

for basically white times. So here, the Gilets Jaunes have a potential. They're angry economically, so they're pointing to global capitalism, but it's the right that has capitalized on that anger. But this is not a done deal, right? That there is possibilities here to see the Gilets Jaunes as opening to universal politics. And there's an instance when a new movement,

came into being the Gilets Noirs, so kind of black vests, people seeking to block France's immigration policies or expulsion from the state. And you saw Gilets Jaunes activists joining them. So in that moment, the Gilets Jaunes basically blocked what the fascists meant.

Marine Le Pen was doing trying to get them, they decided were actually the most marginalized in France. And there, there's a possibility of kind of collaboration. There's a possibility of solidarity that could emerge in the Gilets Jaunes. It's still an imminent possibility, but the right has done a more effective job in trying to channel that anger against migrants. Right. Okay.

Thanks for setting up that stage and pointing to the points of resentment coming through. Work management platforms. Endless onboarding, IT bottlenecks, admin requests. But what if things were different? We found love.

Monday.com is different. No lengthy onboarding. Beautiful reports in minutes. Custom workflows you can build on your own. Easy to use, prompt-free AI. Huh. Turns out you can love a work management platform. Monday.com, the first work platform you'll love to use.

My dad works in B2B marketing. He came by my school for career day and said he was a big ROAS man. Then he told everyone how much he loved calculating his return on ad spend.

I guess I might have a couple of follow-up questions related to that. So it's

In one place in the book, you briefly engage with the term, not your own, but the term elite capture. You point out that the black elite may not want to actually ally with the heart of Black Lives Matter because their elite position puts them in the status quo. So to me, the word capture implies a shift or a change.

And from this, I want to understand more about the relation and movement between private and public uses of resentment. So more broadly, of course, than just the black elite, could you speak to what's going on behind the scenes for individuals who flip positions or change positions? Yeah. I mean, there's a kind of conversion that happens when...

When your identity becomes open to the public use of ressentiment, right? And this conversion is precisely what a decolonization demands.

And here we have to think of decolonization of the mind as an act of self-violence, that you must resist what seems to be in your interests, right? If I cozy up to power, I, my group, can secure some rewards, right? At least in the short term. But cozying up to power is a losing strategy. So in my book, I talk about the ways that

that you can block your interpolation to join this kind of pro-white France. And the fact, in a sense, take up the cause of

Right. I mean, it's hard to describe the GD zone as wretched because they're mostly white, mostly have benefited from the French structure. But even global capitalism now is no longer doing damage. And the global south is hitting the global north. And some people are feeling that that pain.

So how do you respond to that pain? You can pursue a fascist option, which is Marine Le Pen's model, or you can join up with people like the Gilets Noirs trying to resist fascism

a system that is fundamentally unjust. Right. And, okay, so you mentioned conversion process, and actually that kind of leads into the next question I want to ask, focused on the Gilets Jaunes. So maybe at one point in your book, you write this, quote, the challenge for the left is clear. It needs to reclaim its commitment to the forgotten, to those left behind in the Macron regime.

by the president of the rich. It needs to rechannel this suspicion, the giligence emphatic no, which for the most part bears the mark of private use of resentment, into an emancipatory end, end quote. So I guess you mentioned that there's a conversion process, and I'm wondering, can you, maybe, what are some ways that the left can meet this challenge? Is it more in the individual to the

I don't know, kind of realize what they should move towards? Or is there also stuff that people already in the left can do to help cultivate this change? Sure. I mean, it depends where you start. And I think even if you're already marginalized, there's also kind of decolonization of your mind. So when, you know, when Fennel was talking about decolonization of the mind, he didn't only have the colonizer in mind, he had the colonized as well.

So let's say you're part of the wretched and you have the lure of identity politics in front of you. It may be very tempting to take that lure and see other wretched groups as your competition for recognition.

So here you'll be in the realm of the private use of ressentiment. If you truly adopt the public use of ressentiment, then your no, your refusal will align with a more collective response. So even if your own interests...

are at stake, or if you make yourself vulnerable. So if you're, you know, if you're part of the Gilets Jaunes, if you're a white person part of the Gilets Jaunes, and you stand with blacks in France, if you stand with, you know, North Africans in France, you expose yourself to Islamophobia, right? It's as you put yourself at risk, but it's for a cause. And this is, for me,

in illustration of the public use of ressentiment because you don't give up on the no. The negativity remains, but it's channeled differently. Yeah. And, you know, I guess one thing that I've been becoming more aware of recently is just the enjoyment that takes place in the psyche of those on the political right, whether they identify nominally as on the right or not. Yeah. So,

With identity politics, you can get a lot of enjoyment from the exclusion that takes place. And I guess...

I'm wondering, do you see a danger of private resentment overpowering public use of resentment? Maybe someone has leftist inclinations. Yeah. But then there's enjoyment at stake. And yeah, can you convert the other way and prevent that? Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, enjoyment is always tricky when talking about politics. And for the longest time, right, there's a kind of desire to contain emotions, to contain affect, and really stress the kind of cognitive elements. And this is Wendy Brown's concern about ressentiment.

So here for me, and I step back and I try to look at racial capitalism, how it relies on a logical division and scapegoating for its survival and reproduction. So there's a kind of enjoyment in blaming, let's say if you're under kind of a Nazi, a Nazism, a Nazi Germany, there's a kind of enjoyment to scapegoating the figure of the Jew, right? There's a kind of enjoyment and...

isolating and fetishizing this menace. Because if we get rid of this menace, then Germany would be harmonious once again. So this kind of labor cannot ignore the enjoyment that comes with constructing your enemy. So you're doing for the duty of Germany, but you're also getting pleasure out of it. And for Zizek and others, it's crucial for understanding the deployment of Nazism.

So you can look at enjoyment as well through the perspective of identity politics. And since you enjoy your identity, you enjoy your partial recognition in politics. But for me, right, if you look at the enjoyment and the public use of ressentiment, I look at it more from the figure of the feminist killjoy. Because there is a kind of enjoyment in making people who are powerful uncomfortable.

And this enjoyment is not a kind of narcissistic enjoyment. It's an enjoyment that introduces trouble within power. So for me, you know, the public use of ressentiment aligns with the feminist killjoy logic. Okay. Your final chapter talks about the Palestinian cause and Zionist resentment. And it takes a special look at...

New anti-Semitism. One of the recurring themes that comes up is that of the victim or the victimization, victimhood. I wonder if you could unpack some of the complexities behind victimization that relate to Zionist resentment and how the public in the West is more and more dissatisfied with the media's portrayal of Palestinians. Right. And which is the crucial question that speaks to the contemporary media.

And I was constantly adding to this chapter as Gaza genocide was happening. So Zionist ressentiment for me is a ressentiment that is tied to a loss of moral authority. Zionists inside and outside Israel have constantly represented Israel as a beacon of democracy, as a Western state, as a villa in the jungle. So this narrative went more or less unquestioned for over seven decades.

Now there's a new generation of U.S. voters marked by the Black Lives Matter movement who don't see Israel as a democratic state. They see it for what it is, and more importantly, for what it does. It is a genocidal settler state and an apartheid regime. So Zionists express their private views of ressentiment and their desire for a time when they were seen by the Western world as a source of moral and political authority.

Of course, Israel still gets this preferred treatment by Western leaders from both parties in the U.S., but a younger generation of voters see Israel as a brutal and racist settler state.

Zionists believe that they can win back their authority, stolen by the anti-colonial left, by demonizing Palestinians and as well their supporters, by weaponizing the charge of anti-Semitism against those who dare challenge an illegal occupation and the genocide of Palestinians. So the anti-colonial left becomes the primary target of violence

for the most part, bogus charge of a new anti-Semitism. Sadly, Améry is one of the first Zionists to charge the left with the label of new anti-Semitism. His dogmatic commitment to Zionist Israel betrayed the critical dimension of his own ressentiment

So here, in my vision, in the book, I articulate how Amélie regresses to the private use of ressentiment to its crudest manifestation. And now a younger generation of Jewish voters who boldly disidentify with the state of Israel are being viciously targeted. Why? Because they believe that the Holocaust cry, never again, also applies to Palestinians.

So this is why we have to kind of push back against this new anti-Semitism and introduce an actual one that describes what's going on, which what Zizek and others have called a Zionist anti-Semitism, right? An anti-Semitism that targets Jews who don't identify with Israel and call themselves hating Jews or traitors to their religion.

So anytime you generalize what a Jewish person is, you're flirting with anti-Semitism, right? And it's for the most part, design a side that does, that weaponizes the charge of anti-Semitism. To wrap up, I want to talk about the plurality of political positions. At one point in the book, I was struck by something you said. It was kind of a side point, but it, it, um,

is kind of the context behind this question. You're giving some examples of whitewashing history. So, for example, a version of liberal whitewashing history might be to say that colonialism had

positive effects. Sure, there's exploitation, but it also introduced culture and medicine. Don't blame. So he proceeded to say, quote, to talk about the afterlife of slavery and neocoloniality infuriates white supremacists and worries liberal Democrats, quote. However, to talk about these things, it's crucial and important for public use of Rizantamon because it

you need to consider the associate historical context. And I guess the question that I'm trying to get to is, do you have advice for how to deal with the plurality of political positions, especially in countries where it's just so much more polarized? What do you envision as the engagement between these positions? And I guess to kind of

put it in not really the form of a joke, but let's say that a wretched person, a white supremacist, and a liberal Democrat all walk into a bar. What happens? That's a great question. And, you know, in answering your question, you know, to think about the view that says, well, colonialism also brought civilization to the colonized. You know, it wasn't all bad. They got something out of it.

You will find no liberal will say this publicly. Supremacists will, right? Because supremacists have to deal with the fact that you had slavery, you had colonialism, but then you want to limit its impact and its afterlife. Where the liberal agrees with the supremacist is like, okay, America is great. America is a free society. Everybody's equal. There is no hunger to fully engage, you know,

United States as a racial project, right? You know, the fact that Black Lives Matter exists as a movement points to its non-realization. So I think your question about the three figures entering the bar is going to help us crystallize what could happen. So,

I would say, you know, every activist or scholar would like at some level to reach the other side, right? To convince others by debating ideas, right? You don't want to be only preaching to the choir. So what could happen at this bar, right? Things could go south very quickly. But let's say they get started talking. The liberal Democrats will present themselves as the moderate, occupying the golden mean between the two extreme positions.

The white supremacists will yearn for the good old days before feminism and critical race theory. The wretched will be the one who rejects both the past and the present. So we know that the liberal Democrat will argue for reform. The wretched and supremacists will agree that the existing system must change, that we must change the coordinates of the system. But whereas the supremacist is drawn to fascism,

and looks only to improve his lot, the wretched cuts through liberal ideology and is able to articulate and address the actual antagonism at the source of our misery. And in doing so, she, the wretched, will improve the lot of all three and maybe even prevent the destruction of our environment. So, you know, a miracle could happen. You could have that scenario. Yeah, well...

I guess we've got to keep trying to have that happen. Yeah, I mean, you know, Zizek has this wonderful formulation that he borrows from Agamben, the courage of hopelessness. And he says this, right, you have to take the position of the hopeless, right? You have to see things in its bleakest possibility to move to a different regime, to a different system, to a different horizon. So it takes courage to be hopeless, right?

Yeah. Well, thank you so much for that. I guess the final question we usually like to ask our guests is, are there any new books that you're working on or any research? What's up next for you? No. So, you know, whenever I finish a book, I always have a feeling that

that I need to say more. So I have a book coming out this July. The title is Fanon, Zizek, and the Violence of Resistance. So that's coming out in July with Bloomsbury. And I'm currently working on a new book, which looks at the ways black and Palestinian solidarity becomes a problem, how each

single being becomes a problematic, becomes a problem for both liberals and supremacists. So that's my new project, which is a continuation of what I've been thinking about. Looking forward to that very much. Well, I think we've taken enough of your time, Zahi. Thank you so much. Thanks, Ruben.