An important intervention that opens up the problematic conceptualization of identity and ethical relationships in theories of cosmopolitanism to the alternative notion of negative universal politics and its corollary empty subject. Drawing principally on the work of the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj %Zi%zek, Kapoor and Zalloua demonstrate the importance of this universal politics through various case studies that envision a common solidarity of the excluded around the concurrent double struggle against domination and exploitation. They also prove the continued relevance of %Zi%zek's ideas to contemporary leftist struggles. A must-read for concerned political theorists, cultural studies scholars, philosophers, and leftist activists.
Ilan Kapoor is a Professor of Critical Development Studies at the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change, York University, Toronto. His research focuses on psychoanalytic and postcolonial theory and politics, participatory development and democracy, and ideology critique. He is the author of The Postcolonial Politics of Development (2008), Celebrity Humanitarianism: The Ideology of Global Charity (2013), and Confronting Desire: Psychoanalysis and International Development (2020); and editor of the collected volume, Psychoanalysis and the Global (2018).
Zahi Zalloua is the Cushing Eells Professor of Philosophy and Literature, Professor of French and Interdisciplinary Studies at Whitman College, and Editor of The Comparatist. He is the author of Being Posthuman: Ontologies of the Future (2021), Zizek on Race Toward an Anti-Racist Future (2020), Theory's Autoimmunity: Skepticism, Literature, and Philosophy (2018), Continental Philosophy and the Palestinian Question: Beyond the Jew and the Greek (2017), Reading Unruly: Interpretation and Its Ethical Demands (2014), and Montaigne and the Ethics of Skepticism (2003). He has also published articles, edited volumes, and special journal issues on globalization, literary theory, psychoanalysis, and cultural and trauma studies.
