Politics of the Wretched

Zahi Zalloua is the Cushing Eells Professor of Philosophy and Literature at Whitman College, USA. He is the co-author of Universal Politics, and the author of Solidarity and the Palestinian Cause: Indigeneity, Blackness, and the Promise of Universality, and Being Posthuman: Ontologies of the Future.

• AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: The Public Use of Ressentiment, or the Reason of the Wretched1. Exiting the Zone of Nonbeing: The Death Drive and the Inexorable Demand for More2. Reckoning with Disavowal, Or the Position of the Colonial Unthought3. Racial Ressentiment or Economic Anxiety? On The Politics of Material Interests4. Zionist Ressentiment, the Left, and the Palestinian QuestionConclusion: Living with Ressentiment BibliographyNotesIndex

One could not pick a better guide through the intellectual and political history of ressentiment than Zahi Zalloua. His account of the radical contemporary potential of ressentiment - the political affect par excellence, the primary affect of the wretched, as he reminds us - is incisive, nuanced, politically astute, intellectually dexterous, and nothing short of indispensable in our current period of crisis. Reading The Politics of the Wretched forces us to leave behind our many presumptions of the uses and values of the affective and political force of ressentiment and recognize its capacity for ontological upheaval and mutation.