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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.

The \"happiness\" in \"'undeserved' happiness\" here should not be conflated with complacent satisfaction, with the attainment of a happy state—a view of happiness that psychoanalysis consistently questions—but should be understood instead as referring to modes of enjoyment, to unruly acts of libidinal gratification and self-cultivation incongruous with the capitalist maxim, happiness as the deserved fruits of social productivity. [...]Marcuse's formulation throws a wrench in the logic of reward and punishment that often informs the contemporary discourse of privilege, a logic that unwittingly transforms the critique of structural inequalities into a matter of individual conscience: you should be verbally punished for assuming your unearned privilege (visible in the act of calling out someone's privilege in the accusatory charge, \"your privilege is showing\"), and rewarded for confessing your given privilege (whether or not that confession leads to a deeper engagement with the structural problems at work). [...]I reread Marcuse's call for undeserved happiness along Žižekian lines as effecting a shift from privilege to fantasy: from the liberal imperative to \"check your privilege\" to the psychoanalytic injunction to \"check our fantasy.\" Because it is acknowledged as unearned, undeserved, the need for happiness can only be boldly affirmed, not \"objectively\" measured or assessed. According to ŽLžek's reading of this Lacanian notion: \"The act proper is the only one which re-structures the very symbolic co-ordinates of the agent's situation\" (2001, 85).

Quentin Meillassoux's indictment of modern philosophy had an immediate impact in continental philosophical circles, galvanizing a bold return to realism--a subject matter long deemed exhausted if not irrelevant to intellectual pursuits. Sparked by Meillassoux's call to go beyond correlationism, the movement of speculative realism, and its variant or subset, Object-Oriented Ontology, have emerged as corrective philosophical responses to the Kantian heritage. Speculative realists aim to return to the origins of modernity in the hope of critically adjusting post-Kantian philosophy's misguided trajectory and reviving its epistemic ambitions. In releasing philosophy from its \"transparent cage\" and opening the door to the \"great outdoors,\" speculative realists aim to cure modern philosophy of its perceived obsession with mediation (with language and power) and with the human. Here, Zalloua contends that the philosophical problem of the prison-house of language is better solved through an approach that embraces mediation, and that traverses the fantasy of immediate access to a glacial--hard, pure, and clear--world.

Drawing on literary theory and canonical French literature,Reading Unrulyexamines unruliness as both an aesthetic category and a mode of reading conceived as ethical response. Zahi Zalloua argues that when faced with an unruly work of art, readers confront an ethical double bind, hesitating then between the two conflicting injunctions of either thematizing (making sense) of the literary work, or attending to its aesthetic alterity or unreadability. Creatively hesitating between incommensurable demands (to interpret but not to translate back into familiar terms), ethical readers are invited to cultivate an appreciation for the unruly, to curb the desire for hermeneutic mastery without simultaneously renouncing meaning or the interpretive endeavor as such. Examining French texts from Montaigne's sixteenth-centuryEssaysto Diderot's fictional dialogueRameau's Nephewand Baudelaire's prose poemsThe Spleen of Paris, to the more recent works of Jean-Paul Sartre'sNausea, Alain Robbe-Grillet'sJealousy, and Marguerite Duras'sThe Ravishing of Lol Stein,Reading Unrulydemonstrates that in such an approach to literature and theory, reading itself becomes a desire for more, an ethical and aesthetic desire to prolong rather than to arrest the act of interpretation.

The counterterrorism policies following September 11, 2001, brought the definition and legitimacy of torture to the forefront of political, military, and public debates. This timely volume explores the question of torture through multiple lenses by situating it within systems of belief, social networks of power, and ideological worldviews. Individual essays examine the boundaries of what is deemed legitimate political violence for the sake of state security, the immediate and long-term effects of torture on human and social bodies, the visual and artistic representations of torture, how certain people are dehumanized to make it acceptable to torture them, and how we understand complicity in and the ethical boundaries of torture.

In the contemporary American landscape, the response to anti- Blackness takes many forms. Right- wing conservatives tend to minimize its structural relevance, placing anti- Blackness firmly in the past, its lingering traces ending with the Civil Rights Movement. On the whole, they adopt a colorblind ideology. The Right loves to claim Martin Luther King Jr.'s legacy, a legacy that, of course, has been rendered toothless. It is not the MLK fighting for workers' rights nor the anti- militarism MLK who lives in the Right's cultural imaginary. Rather, it is a decontextualized MLK, reduced to his aspirational vision of a future where children \"will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character,\" which the Right repeats ad nauseam. Even worse, MLK's inspiring statement perversely comes to justify a supremacist mindset underpinned by the slogan \"All Lives Matter.\" The fake universality of the slogan abstracts and distorts, covering over the power imbalances and racial inequalities in America.

Zalloua explores the concept of facelessness and its implications for critical environments, particularly in relation to the experiences of Black people and Palestinians. He discusses how Black people are often relegated to the position of the unthought, their humanity denied and their suffering ignored. He critiques Levinas's concept of the face, arguing that it fails to adequately address the plight of marginalized groups like Palestinians. He argues that Palestinians are often denied their humanity and reduced to the status of faceless others. He suggests that a politics of the faceless can help us to reimagine critical environments and challenge dominant power structures.