To Exist as a Problem

Zahi Zalloua is the Cushing Eells Professor of Philosophy and Literature at Whitman College, USA and Editor of The Comparatist. He is the co-author, with Ilan Kapoor, of Universal Politics (2021), and the author of Fanon, Žižek and the Violence of Resistance (Bloomsbury 2025), The Politics of the Wretched: Race, Reason, and Ressentiment (Bloomsbury, 2024); Solidarity and the Palestinian Cause: Indigeneity, Blackness, and the Promise of Universality, Being Posthuman: Ontologies of the Future (Bloomsbury, 2021), Žižek on Race: Toward an Anti-Racist Future ( Bloomsbury, 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 (2005).

• Introduction: A Problem of Being 1. Anatomy of the Human2. The Gift of Being (a Problem)3. Becoming ObjectConclusion: Pessimism and RepetitionBibliographyNotes

This book brings together Critical Black Studies and Palestine Studies, offering a powerful and timely intervention into this present moment of genocide and rising fascism. It focuses on how Black and Palestinian people have been constructed as problems to be dealt with, managed, and even eliminated—not only, or even predominantly, as a far right endeavour but significantly also a liberal one. The political stakes, Zahi Zalloua shows, could not be higher, requiring resistance that refuses liberal politics in favour of solidarities based on anti-colonial, anti-imperial, anti-capitalist, and antiracist sensibilities.