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Hamid Dabashi, "After Savagery: Gaza, Genocide, and the Illusion of Western Civilization" (Haymarket, 2025)
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- [00:00]
A
Limu Imu and Doug. Here we have the Limu Emu in its natural habitat, helping people customize their car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual. Fascinating. It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug. Uh, Limu is that guy with the binoculars watching us. Cut the camera. They see us. Only pay for what you need@libertymutual.com Liberty Liberty. Liberty. Liberty Savings vary unwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and affiliates. Excludes Massachusetts. This episode is brought to you by Jack Daniels. Jack Daniels and music are made for each other. They share a rhythm in the craft of making something timeless while being a part of legendary nights. From backyard jams to sold out arenas, there's a song in every toast. Please drink responsibly. Responsibility.org, jack Daniels and Old Number 7 are registered trademarks. Tennessee Whiskey, 40% alcohol by volume. Jack Daniel Distillery, Lynchburg, Tennessee. At New Balance, we believe if you run, you're a runner, however you choose to do it. Because when you're not worried about doing things the right way, you're free to discover your way. And that's what running is all about. Run your way@newbalance.com Running welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:31]
B
Hello, my name's Joseph Williams and this is the New Books Network podcast. Today, my guest in the studio is Hamid Dabashi speaking to us from New York City on the subject of his recent book After Savagery, Gaza, Genocide and the Illusion of Western Civilization. Hello Hamed, thank you so much for being here.
- [01:53]
A
Thanks Joe. Thanks for having me.
- [01:54]
B
Okay, so I think maybe it might be a good place to start by putting this conversation in context of some recent developments in the world. And as we speak, on 10th of October, the first stage of a ceasefire in Gaza has been approved. Do you have any thoughts or comments you wish to make on that?
- [02:17]
A
Well, first of all, happy to see that we get up in the morning and there is no additional death toll, that hopefully this slaughterhouse of Gaza has been given a few days of relief. I'm constitutionally suspicious of any so called ceasefire in which Netanyahu is part of the deal. He has repeatedly violated any agreement with anybod, particularly Palestinians. But at this stage, a couple of days after the announcement by the US President, if indeed we have witnessed two days or so, I'm not sure if this is the case that we get up in the morning around the globe and there is no additional death toll in this genocide. It's good to not have more Palestinian children and mothers and fathers slaughtered. But what exactly the consequence of this quote unquote ceasefire is remains to be seen.
- [03:35]
B
Sure. Thank you. On that note then, actually perhaps that leads us then onto the book itself with the title after Savagery, Gaza, Genocide and the Illusion of Western Civilization, which is a very evocative, powerful title. Perhaps we could start then to discuss the book proceeding from the title. Could you unpack that title for us a little bit? And what was it you're trying to communicate here?
- [04:00]
A
Like everybody else, Joe, around the globe over the last two years, I have woken up every day with additional number of Palestinians being slaughtered, indiscriminately killed, in fact deliberately targeted, children in particular in their tens of thousands. Particularly targeted is one of the most atrocious acts of savagery that has happened over the last two years in our history, on our watch. And given the digital nature of the information landscape in which we are 247 in the at the receiving end of this news, there is no other word that describes what happened other than savagery. And with that title I really plan and then additional subtitle. I had hoped to put the entirety of our moral landscape, not just the thing that calls itself the west, including if you read the book, Arabs, Muslims, people around the globe. What precisely is the moral subconscious of our humanity? How do we live? What do we accept as being acceptable? What is normal is the issue of this book, this sumud falatila falatila of innocent, vulnerable, helpless human beings that just managed to put together a number of boats and try to bring food to starving children. It is viciously and deliberately and fearlessly by Israeli army is stopped and interrogated. And then this ministers in the cabinet of Netanyahu, they flaunt the power, the pure, the rude and crude power that they have over the very definition of our humanity. There is no other word than savagery. So it is not that I'm particular about the term civilization. The term civilization has been compromised for a long time. But in the book I'm really in search of finding a way of how our humanity, how our being on this fragile earth is possible. And my ultimate point of contention is that there is no possibility of a moral being, moral existence, except that it should start from the rubbles of Gaza. That's the ground zero of our existence. We have to start there and build from there.
- [07:00]
B
Sure, yes. So as you've talked about here, the book is really interrogating some of the philosophical and intellectual foundations of a system, of a mentality, of an ideology, which normalizes and legitimizes what you've described as savagery. And specifically one intellectual Tradition which you constantly turn to criticize in the book is the Critical Theory tradition, especially the Frankfurt School and in particular Theodore Adorno. And one of the criticisms which you repeatedly make, one of the kind of foundational premises of the book is the ethnocentric, ethnocentric, Eurocentric nature of a lot of that thought, a lot of that critical thinking, and it's kind of marginalization and almost perhaps dehumanization of non European subjects. So could you expand upon that a little bit and perhaps explain some of the implications that arise from that critique?
- [08:01]
A
Good question, Joe. I'm particularly critical of Frankfurt School and Critical Theory because in a way I'm a product of it, I'm part of it, I have been conversant with it and as a result I have expected much from it. And when Jurger Habermas, the senior most German and European philosopher, came out at the beginning of this, and without blinking of an eye, just denounced any criticism of Israel to be anti Semitic, when Jewish colleagues, friends, students, human beings are at the forefront of in fact opposing this genocide, you would have expected more from Habermas, you would have expected more from Critical Theory. But it has failed. It has failed. And I'm not the first one to notice the blindest part of its Eurocentricity. Even at the time of Adorno, Horkheimer themselves, they were justly preoccupied with the aftermath of the Jewish Holocaust and what had happened to Europe. I mean, beginning with the dialectic of Enlightenment. Adona and Horkheimer, they're sitting there, they run away from the Nazi Germany, they are in California sitting and talking and thinking what happened to the Enlightenment? What was the end result of enlightenment if it ended up in Auschwitz? So they had perfectly legitimate preoccupation with the Jewish Holocaust. However, it was also at a time in the 1960s, soon after that of the anti war movement, of the American civil rights movement, of the civil revolutionary uprisings in Europe and the heightened understanding of the colonial condition. This is the time that Fanon is writing. But people like Fanon were entirely outside the radar of people like Adorno and Horkheimer. So historically it is necessary for us to remember that at the time that the Jewish Holocaust happened, as M. Cesair correctly put it, the reasons that European were aghast was not that Holocaust happened, but that happened to themselves because Holocaust was happening in Asia, Africa and Latin America, but nobody was paying attention to it. The Belgians were slaughtering people in Congo and the rest of the Germans were doing it in Namibia. The British were doing it In India, the French were doing it in North Africa, but nobody was paying attention, nobody was theorizing it. So I'm not, you know, finding faults with Adorno and Horkheimer, but I'm using it as a kind of self criticism to begin to build on it. What they missed, I'm not the first one to have noticed this. Critical thinkers before me have also done so and have also brought attention to the particularity of the colonial condition. But we have never had, Joe, a condition in which the entire history of European colonialism is just in a nutshell in Gaza, staged. And instead of giving people like Habermas a reason to pull back and think what is being done? What is this? Is this the result of the self reflections after the Holocaust to allow and justify and excuse yet another Holocaust being perpetrated on another people, then what would be the lessons from the European Holocaust and The slaughter of 6 million human beings just because they were Jews? As a result? There is no lesson. So in a very limited way, I have done my best in this book to bring us back, in fact bring the Jewish Holocaust and the Palestinian Holocaust together and renew our thinking about a kind of redemption and deliberation and liberation from that kind of savagery that no longer thinks that some lives are more important than other lives. There is no criticism of this Israeli slaughter in Gaza without simultaneously denouncing the loss of innocent human lives in Israel in any context. So paying particular attention to Gaza doesn't mean neglecting that equally innocent lives have been lost on the other side, but in fact is to break this binary, break this an eye for an eye or hundred eyes for one eye or 1000 eyes for another for one eye. As Gandhi rightly said, the idea of an eye for an eye will leave nobody with any eye. So it is a moment of pausing, Joe, perhaps for us to think, pull back from Gaza, fixated on Gaza, but not in a vindictive way, not in a way or you did this, we did that, we should have not done that, I think is a. Is a failing way of thinking. But to bring the entirety of humanity overcoming east, west, north, south, this and that, and begin with the fragility of the earth on which we live. It is not accidental that the single most famous Greta Turnberry, a young child who has been preoccupied with environmental calamities, was equally concerned, has been equally concerned with the plight of the Palestinians and the starvation of human beings in Gaza. The two are related. So it has been while I have been mourning, particularly mourning the horror of Gaza. But I have also used the occasion of Gaza to transcend this false binary between east, west, north, south. This human being has more value than other human beings. So if I go to the heart of European philosophy, Hegel, Kant, Levinas, Habermas, et cetera, it is by way of seeing in what particular way we can hopefully, morally, ethically, imaginatively, philosophically, begin to transcend the blindest spots of European philosophy towards which I have no animosity. As I have always said, I'm a product of it. I'm a product of a number of things, but equally of European philosophy. So, yeah, that is the context. Sure.
- [14:52]
B
Thank you. Yeah. One thing that you've touched on there, which again is another kind of central foundation of your argument in the book, is a criticism, a rejection of the claim that the European Holocaust of Jews couldn't be considered in the same category of catastrophe, of atrocity as acts of European colonial violence in other parts of the world. And you break that down, and you not only break that down, but then you kind of also expand that position to say that actually the European Holocaust and the genocide in Gaza have got to be located in the same sort of impulses and the same sort of mentality and worldview. So could you. Before I ask the next question, is there anything you'd like to respond to? There was anything you'd like to describe.
- [15:44]
A
A bit more, As I say in the book, Joe, I understand the particular period in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust for Jewish philosophers, Jewish historians, to be particular about the Holocaust, that there is something specific about the this particular atrocity. I completely understand. I even understand a critical position on part of some Jewish scholars and Jewish philosophers to think don't come near Holocaust. This is a unique phenomenon. Lots of atrocities have happened around the globe, but this is very specific. I understand it, but I'm not limited or trapped by it. My position is that we have to bring the horrors of Holocaust into the context of global atrocities that have happened, not to diminish its significance, but actually to increase the universalities of its implications. So if I talk about the horrors that European colonialism have done in Africa or in Asia or in Latin America is not to create a pantheon or a gallery of look at all of these human atrocities. But who can go to Native Americans, the generations of Native Americans, Americans have been slaughtered by European colonialism, who can go to generations of African Americans transatlantic slavery, or to Armenian genocide, or to genocide in Sudan, any number of horrors of an atrocities that I say yours is not as important as that which has happened somewhere else, which is My tribe. I've tried my best, taking advantage of the historical, geographical and cultural position in which I as a human being am located, to transcend European tribalism. If there is something wrong with European tribalism, then my task is not to posit yet another tribalism. For it, no, is only if Arabs and Muslims or Africans or Asians are killed, then we should be up in arms. We need to transcend tribalism. If I find fault with European philosophical tribalism, which I do, then it would be ludicrous for me to posit yet another tribalism. So in what particular way do we transcend tribalism? And if I suggest right now, today, 2023 to 2025, for duration of two horrid years, again, assuming that this ceasefire will stay. Gaza has been the epicenter of our humanity. Before that, there have been any number of other atrocities in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Sudan, in any number of other places. So if we pull back and look at all of that, what are humans doing to humans? What has happened to our humanity? This is at a time that in fact the very texture of our humanity, by virtue of the rise of this artificial intelligence. And people have to trust your name, Joe Williams, that this is actually not AI generated, that you are a human being sitting in a room. I'm a human being sitting in a room. And we're having a spontaneous conversation around a book that I have written and you have read the Only Way that I Think. And I keep repeating that to my students right now, Human collectivity, the fact that my publisher tells me Joe Williams wants to talk to you, so I write an email to you. So you say, yes, let's set up an appointment. Namely, human to human connection is the only way for us to secure some sort of sanity for our species survival beyond these wanton cruelties. I mean, I have no idea what happens in the minds of people like and Benjamin Netanyahu. And I hope to my dying day I never decipher the savagery of these kinds of thinking that happens in a person like that. And is not just Netanyahu or just his cabinet is an entirety of a trapped imagination that I always say 7 million Israelis must be able, must be allowed, must be promoted to imagine themselves beyond the particularities of this horrible ideology of genocidal Zionism. What decent human beings, Israeli, Jewish or any other, can live with themselves knowing that they have committed this horrid atrocity? So it is, yes, it is very particular on Gaza, but it uses the particularity of Gaza for beginning to think in different terms and come up with different universality that is legitimately universal and does not distinguish by color, by race, by gender, by geographical location, et cetera.
- [21:03]
B
So, yeah, you've touched on some of the central themes which occur throughout the book, especially the claims to universality in European philosophy and certain intellectual traditions which you feel should be contextualized, historicized, relativized, and so on. Because in certain ways, I sense that you feel that the conceptual frameworks which we're using to try and make sense of what's happening in Gaza are inadequate, are incapable of capturing the reality because of their specificity, what's specific being framed as the general, the universal, and so on. And specifically, you think that we need to kind of revise the terms in which we're kind of trying to make sense of some of these things. Fear, specifically Arabic and Palestinian concepts such as Nakba catastrophe, intifada uprising, and Shumud resistance. Could you then perhaps discuss a little bit about the practical implications of that, of incorporating those specifically Palestinian concepts and how that might affect our understanding of what's going on?
- [22:09]
A
First, you have to realize that the much celebrated, and perhaps at times even legitimately celebrated achievement of philosophical universalism, of European Enlightenment has always had a blind spot. And what I bring to the conversation is both acknowledging the good that has been done in the aftermath of European Enlightenment and yet the darkest spots, as colleagues have put it, of the same enlightenment. I quote, you Remember in page 24 of the preface a passage from Immanuel Kant in his observation on the feelings of the Beautiful and the Sublime, in which he says, and I quote him directly, father Labat reports that the Negro carpenter whom he reproached for haughty treatment towards his wives answered, you whites are indeed fools, for first you make great concessions to your wives. We put the misogyny of it aside for now. And afterward you complain when they drive you mad. And it might be. And the end of quote. And Immanuel Kant. Immanuel Kant is not a joke. He's the father of Enlightenment. He's the man who wrote verses of clerem. What is Enlightenment? He is the man with whom, with his famous three critiques, we sort of put the architecture of our thinking and knowing subjects together. And then he adds, it might be that there were something in this which perhaps deserved to be considered. But in short, this fellow was very black from head to foot. A clear proof that what he said was stupid. I mean, you cannot clean up this in European philosophy. I mean, I always immediately add, you don't throw baby in bath water. You don't say, I'll stop reading Immanuel Kant because he's a racist bastard. No, I have not stopped reading Kant. I have not stopped reading Hegel. I have not certainly stopped reading Habermas. I continue to read because I don't think these things all should be. But at the same time, you cannot disregard these passages. What is the implication of this passage? The implication of this passage are all of those sentences that I cite, chapter and verse from Israeli authorities, from their president down to everyone, that Palestinians are not human beings, they're animals. So you first, you dehumanize them. Which is precisely the way that the Nazi Germanies were treating their, the German citizens. First, they dehumanize them. So when the slaughter of the Jewish Germans or Europeans happen, nobody sort of thinks they're not human, so they might as well. The same is with Palestinians. First you dehumanize them. There are insects. As the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman put it, they're insects. And then you slaughter them. What do you do with insects? They're nuisances. So the issue is to go to the troubled spots of European philosophy, which is the crowning achievement of European civilization, and look at these passages and say, what is this? What are we supposed to do with this passage? So the first thing we do, we do not throw baby and bathwater together. We don't stop reading European philosophers. The second thing we do, we see, so we do surgical precision. In terms of why this happened. This happened because the rise of European philosophy in the so called Enlightenment period coincided with European colonialism. So the entirety of the globe is not part of the understanding of European conception of humanity. What do we do? We bring it into the context. So it's a two way street. As I say, you particularize the European penchant for universalism and you universalize what has been exoticized and particularized in any number of ways of thinking in Asia, Africa, Latin America, what have you, you bring them together. And then not in a way that now you say, oh, let me teach a course on Islamic philosophy or Latin American philosophy, or African philosophy. No, those are all necessary and wonderful things to do. But the critical juncture where we are, Joe, at this moment requires a different way of thinking. Our very humanity or the very fragility of the earth on which we live and then on which we witness this kind of ghastly, horrendous disregard for human decency of any sort then requires for us to go, pull back, sit back, think in the privacy of our own moral consciousness, in the Publicity of our presence in the world, and think where we go from here. So that's the project.
- [27:26]
B
Okay, thanks. Yeah. The word used at the end, project is very interesting because the book isn't simply a critique, it's a set of proposals. These critiques, they have practical applications and so on and so on about how do we reconcile these dissonances, these blind spots, and so on and so on in our schools of thought. And one aspect of the book which I found very interesting, which maintains a productive critical dialogue with the Frankfurt School, was the aesthetics dimension, the role of art and cultural expression. If I understand the argument correctly, you feel that art and cultural expression has a vital role in humanizing sections of humanity which have been excluded, which have been marginalized, and so on and so on. It's fear kind of engaging with art from the periphery on its own terms and seeking to understand those cultural forms that we can start to remedy Some of the issues and the blind spots you've talked about then. So could you explain a little bit about the significance of art and culture then in this project? Yeah.
- [28:35]
A
I remember years ago, I was part of a team that we were putting together a Palestinian Film festival here in New York, at Columbia, where I teach. And subsequently we took our Palestinian Film Festival to Palestine. We took it to Ramallah, to Nablus, Nazareth, and even Gaza. At the time, one of the major Palestinian filmmaker, Ilia Suleiman is his name, had made a film called Yadun Elahiya, Divine Intervention, and was being submitted for Academy Awards. And one of the issues that I remember emerged was any film being nominated for an Academy Award had to first be screened in the country of origin. So where is the country of origin is Palestine. But Palestine, at the time when this was happening, when I was in Jerusalem, we wanted to screen a Palestinian film in Jerusalem. We had to go to ymca, in a lobby with foldable chairs and such to show a film. There was no cinema in Palestine at the time. There is no to show a Palestinian film. So this paradox. Is Palestinian cinema part of world cinema? I just finished a piece on the idea of world cinema or world literature, or world music or world philosophy. In what way we can talk about all of these if an entire humanity, namely Palestinians, do not have a place in it? So when we read Ghassan Kanafani, or when we read any number of poets, Mahmoud Darwish, novelists, filmmaker, artists, et cetera, where do we place them? In what particular way? If we cannot place them Mahmoud Darwish, then there is nothing wrong with Mahmoud Darwish there is something wrong with the categories that we have created. And the result is that. Why is aesthetic very important? Because it is one of the most traumatized nations. And the kind of cinema, for example, that they create in my work in Palestinian cinema, I call it traumatic realism. It is traumatic because at the very epicenter of it is the issue of Nakba, of dispossession of 1948. And then I extrapolate from that that in fact there is no national cinema without a national trauma. And I go around the world, Cuba, Iran, China, anywhere, that first you have a national trauma, on the basis of which, because the enormity of the trauma cannot be expressed in political treatises or scholarship, then you turn to art. Art, as a result, at the very heart of it is a trauma, is a national, collective trauma. So the point as a result is to. In couple of chapters in the book, as you notice, I'm trying to look at the specific cases of Palestinian poets or dramatists or artists or painters or filmmakers, etc. And see in what particular ways the. Their aesthetic terms, the terms with which they are engaged, does not dovetail with the way we understand world cinema. Last month, for example, there was a film in Venice Film Festival that people were impressed by it and they gave it a standing ovation for 22, 23 minutes or so forth. Another major Palestinian filmmaker, Emily Djasser in Toronto, has just come up with a new film, was very positively received. Thousands of American artists, filmmakers, directors, producers from Hollywood have signed a document expressing their solidarity with Palestinians. So, but these are all gestures which are good gestures. For me, the real event is this teenager, Besson Auda in Gaza, who had a camera, just one of these iPhones in her hand and produced a series of videos titled this is Besan from Gaza. I'm still alive. Now, this is predicated on a digital revolution that has happened that with an iPhone like this, you can record horrors that are happening, send it to the Internet and communicate it with the rest of the world. So there are two things happening, at least. One is this horrendous act of savagery and genocide that is happening for two years right in front of people, in our face. And one is a digital revolution that has happened that has both its positive and negative sides. The two have to come together for us to have a new conception of aesthetics, aesthetics that remains true for a sublimation of our horrors into hope and aspiration and trust in the world to come, but at the same time remains true and grounded in reality and not in delusion.
- [34:05]
B
Great. Thank you so much. So we're almost out of time here. Just a couple of minutes left. Are there any final comments you'd like to make about the book or the broader context before we go?
- [34:17]
A
I'm happy, Joe, for this conversation. And the book is being received. Translations into Korean, Japanese, Arabic, Persian, Italian, et cetera are happening. It is not because what I have said. It is because of the spirit of the time that requires these kinds of conversations. Always with malice towards none. We will be defeated right off the bat if we begin by demonization of anybody, any group. Jews, Israelis. It just cannot happen. That cannot be the predicate of our emerging conversation. We need to be precise in our analysis, in our understanding, in our hopes. Despair, chapter and verse. Somebody reviewed the book and said the book is heavily footnoted. Of course, this has to be heavily footnoted. It. Because we cannot just speculate, predicated on our ideologies or convictions. So I'm happy and thank you for giving me the time for this conversation. I hope it was. It would be of some interest to your viewers.
- [35:28]
B
Great. Yeah. Thank you very much for your time. Hamid. It was a pleasure to talk.
- [35:32]
A
Pleasure, man. Thank you. Sa.