A simple question In January 2013 I published on the Al Jazeera website the playfully titled essay “Can Non-Europeans Think?” The essay soon emerged as one of the most popular pieces I have written in my academic career. It went viral on the Internet, to the degree that a polemical essay on philosophical thinking can go viral. It received more hits than anything I had ever written on that website. It had touched a nerve and people began to read and reflect on it far beyond my own limited reach or expectation when I wrote it. That piece is now the title of this book, which points to a mode of thinking I have marked as beyond the limits of the condition called “postcoloniality.” This book comes together, in effect, as a declaration of independence, not just from the condition of postcoloniality, but from the limited and now exhausted epistemics it had historically occasioned. Here you will perhaps have detected a cautious searching for the paths ahead, for a condition and urgency of thinking beyond coloniality, beyond postcoloniality, and thus above all beyond the explicit or implicit presence of a European interlocutor looking over our shoulder as we write.

“Fuck you, Walter Mignolo!” With those grandiloquent words and the gesture they must have occasioned and accompanied, the distinguished and renowned European philosopher Slavoj Žižek begins his response to a piece that Walter Mignolo wrote in conversation with my essay “Can Non-Europeans Think?” Žižek is quite eloquent and habitually verbose: “Okay, fuck you, who are these bloody much more interesting intellectuals…? Let’s say I was not overly impressed.”

Žižek can have his Fanon all to himself. There is plenty of Fanon left for others.

And there precisely was the rub! Soon after the publication of my essay, Santiago Zabala, a research professor of philosophy at the University of Barcelona, responded to it. He did so in the belief that I had written it in response to a piece of his and thus felt obligated to reciprocate. This response to my essay, though quite welcome, seemed a bit odd to me, for I had not written it in response to his, but rather had just used something he had written earlier as a hook on which to hang my argument. He appeared to have taken offense at my essay, thought I was accusing him (and by extension other European philosophers) of Eurocentricism, and in turn took the fact that I had mentioned the eminent Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci as an indication that I was completely out to lunch, accusing him of something with which I was myself afflicted! It was a very bizarre response indeed to a charge I had never made. In general I find the charge of Eurocentricism punishingly boring, have no interest in the inflated argument, and consider the entire diction of Zabala’s piece rather juvenile, akin to the schoolyard pissing contest I had left behind in my high school back in Iran decades ago. Of course Europeans are Eurocentric, just as our Molla Nasreddin famously thought (in jest) that where he had nailed the rein of his mule was the center of the universe – and why shouldn’t they believe this, the Europeans or Molla Nasreddin? I was not addressing Zabala, or any other European philosopher for that matter. But he thought I was.

Soon a comrade of Zabala, Michael Marder, joined forces with his European brother and wrote another piece against me in Al Jazeera, in which he too read my piece as addressed to Zabala and thought of it as somewhat comical. Marder’s objection was that I had ignored the fact that the philosophers Zabala had cited were all “counter-hegemonic” and thus quite radically subversive, and by virtue of which honorific title they were on my side of the false divide. Again, he could read my piece in whatever way he wished, including this outlandishly silly reading, but what greatly amused me was that these young European philosophers were so self-conscious of being “European philosophers” that they felt obligated to come out gang-like and defend themselves against the colored boy who had dared to piss on their territory. My late mother used to remark that as soon as you pick up the stick the cat that has just stolen something runs away. You may not have intended to hit anyone, but the cat knew he was a thief. At any rate, I was not adressing Zabala or Marder. I was in fact addressing no European philosopher at all. But whenever something happens anywhere around the world they think it has something to with them. It does not. And that precisely is the point: people like me are no longer interested in whatever it is they fancy to be “hegemonic” or “counter-hegemonic” in Europe and for Europeans. We have been to much greener pastures. Yet these belated defenders of the dead interlocutor they call “the West” were not up to speed with where we were. We (by which I mean we colored boys and girls from their former colonies) were mapping a new topography of the world (our world, the whole planetary disposition of the globe we are now claiming as ours) in our thinking and scholarship; while they were turning their ignorance of this body of work into a critical point of strength for their philosophical arguments – just as their forebears did with our parents’ labor, abused and discarded it. They did not know we had told their Žižek to go enjoy himself long before he said to our Mignolo “Fuck you!”

It was at this point that Walter Mignolo wrote his learned piece in direct response to my essay, in which he returned my question as an answer. Mignolo’s was the first essay I took seriously, for in it he began to address in earnest the issues I had raised. My essay had occasioned many other responses, among them – and perhaps the most poignant so far as the substance of my argument is concerned – the magnificent piece by Aditya Nigam, “End of Postcolonialism and the Challenge for ‘Non-European’ Thought.” The advantage of Nigam’s piece was that he was deeply informed by my work in general, and to the degree he engaged with my argument did so from within my work. Nigam’s piece made a critical point very clear to me: that folks like Zabala and Marder really have no clue about my or anyone else’s work beyond their European nose, for they had no interest or reason to do so. Mignolo, Nigam and I are part of a generation of postcolonial thinkers who grew up compelled to learn the language and culture of our colonial interlocutors. These interlocutors have never had any reason to reciprocate. They had become provincial in their assumptions of universality. We had become universal under the colonial duress that had sought to provincialize us.

It was in direct response to Walter Mignolo’s essay that Žižek had started with that superlative opening and then proceeded to make his case as to why he does not take anything non-Europeans say seriously. I will leave Mignolo to fend for himself, for he is more than capable of doing so when dealing with Žižek. My task here is no longer to defend or fortify the arguments in my essay “Can Non-Europeans Think?” For, whatever it is worth, it stands on its own two feet. Instead I am far more interested in the curious question of whether or not European philosophers can actually read something and learn from it – rather than assimilate it back into what they already know. It is in this context that I wish to ponder what it is that brings a European thinker to use such expletives when confronted by something that a Mignolo or a Nigam or a Dabashi might say.

To read forward

Why should Europeans not be able to read, even when we write in the language they understand? They cannot read because they (as “Europeans,” caught in the snare of an exhausted but self-nostalgic metaphor) are assimilating what they read back into that snare and into what they already know – and are thus incapable of projecting it forward into something they may not know and yet might be able to learn. Historical conditions are the bedrock of ideas. The world at large, and the Arab and Muslim world in particular, is changing; these changes are the conditio sine qua non of new ideas that are yet to be articulated – precisely in the same manner that the myth of “Europe” or “the West” was born and began to generate ideas. My central argument over the last few decades has been that the condition of coloniality has occasioned a mode of knowledge production across the colonial world – from Asia to Africa to Latin America – that today we know and examine in the moment we designate as “postcolonial.” In my books on the Arab revolution and the Green Movement in Iran I have argued that, as evidenced in these revolutionary uprisings, the modes of knowledge production in the postcolonial register – militant Islamism, anticolonial nationalism, and Third World socialism – have in fact exhausted themselves. European thinkers like Žižek and Zabala, important and insightful as they are in their own immediate circles, are out of touch with these realities, and to the degree that they are they cannot come to terms with their unfolding particularities in terms immediate to their idiomaticities. For them “Philosophy” is a mental gymnastics performed with the received particulars of European philosophy in its postmodern or poststructuralist registers – exciting and productive to the degree that they can be. But unless and until those defining moments are structurally linked, thematically moved and conceptually compromised, and thus epistemically violated, they will have very little or nothing to say about the world that is unfolding in front of us.

Žižek claims Fanon all to himself by way of dismissing Mignolo:

Now let’s go back to Mignolo, what Mignolo proposes is thus a version of Baudrillard battle cry… “Forget Foucault”…. Forget Europe, we have better things to do than deal with European philosophy, better things than endlessly deconstructing. He explicitly includes deconstruction. This is endless narcissistic self-probing, [and] we should simply step out. The irony here is that this battle cry did not hold for Fanon himself, who dealt intensively [with European philosophy] and was proud of it. The first obscenity seems to me how dare he to quote Fanon! Fanon is my hero, that’s why I defend him against soft guys like Homi Bhabha, who wrote long texts trying to neutralize, normalize Fanon. No, he didn’t really mean it, with killing and violence; he meant some sublime gesture where there is no blood and nobody is really hurt and so on. Let’s face it, Fanon dealt extensively with Hegel, psychoanalysis, Sartre, even Lacan. My third reaction would have been: When I read lines like Mignolo’s, I reach not for the gun but for Fanon.

Žižek can have his Fanon all to himself. There is plenty of Fanon left for others. But Fanon on himself? Really? What is that supposed to mean? That we dark folks had our Fanon so we had better sit down and be quiet. Fanon was horribly wrong in his essay “Unveiling Algeria” and totally blinded to the nature and function of veiling in Muslim urbanity. So now what? We Muslims had better shut up and be happy that Mr Žižek has read his Fanon. I agree with Žižek’s criticism of Bhabha, whose useless bourgeois postmodernism I cannot stand. But why is Professor Žižek acting like a rookie graduate student regurgitating these names? So what if Fanon had read and engaged with Hegel? The entire world seems to have been cathected for Žižek with the name Fanon, where we colonized folks had our say, and so we had better shush – or, as he so eloquently puts it, “Fuck off!”

The point, however, is not to have any exclusive claim on Fanon, or to fetishize him (or any other non-European thinker for that matter) as a frozen talisman for Europeans to cite to prove they are not philosophically racist. The point is not to dismiss but to overcome the myth of “the West” as the measure of truth. Žižek claims:

I am a man and what I have to recapture is the whole past of the world, I am not responsible only for the slavery involved in Santo Domingo, every time man has contributed to the victory of the dignity of the spirit, every time a man has said no to an attempt to subjugate his fellows, I have felt solidarity with his act. In no way does my basic vocation have to be drawn from the past of peoples of color. In no way do I have to dedicate myself to reviving some black civilization unjustly ignored. I will not make myself the man of any past. My black skin is not a repository for specific values. Haven’t I got better things to do on this earth than avenge the blacks of the 17th century?

This is all fine and dandy – for Žižek. He can make any claim he wishes. All power to him. But the point is the singularity of the world, his world: he claims that as a European he is responsible not just for slavery but also for fighting injustice. He is absolutely right. But so is the “black man” he just buried alive and relegated to the seventeenth century. He asserts prophetically that he is “a man.” One hopes he means this not just anatomically. But he is not the only man, either in body or as archetype. The “black man,” as he puts it, is also a man, a different man, in flogged body and in denied archetype. The black and brown person – male and female – also has a world, a contemporary world, the world that Žižek occupies. Žižek is absolutely right that he has a total claim on this world that he occupies, and over which he and his philosophical precursors have presided. But what about a non-European – made “non-European” by virtue of “the European”? Can she also have a claim on this world, and in a philosophical or artistic or revolutionary move claim for herself the colonial and the postcolonial, the European and the non-European, heritage and thereby transcend the world that Žižek claims exclusively for himself, placing herself in some other world, a different worldliness beyond Žižek’s European imagination? Of course she can, without waiting for Žižek’s permission, acknowledgement, or even recognition. The world we inhabit, planet Earth, has many imaginative geographies; that of Žižek and all his fellow Europeans is only one such geography. The point is that they are utterly blinded to the possibility of these alternative geographies – both historical and contemporary.

Other people are also entitled “to recapture” – as, of course, is Žižek – a world beyond their imagination. Žižek is correct that “In no way does my basic vocation have to be drawn from the past of peoples of color.” But those very “people of color” (as he categorizes them, according to his prerogative) do not only have a past; they also have a present, and a future. Žižek is blinded to that present unless he assimilates it backward into his present, and is indifferent to that future unless he gets (singularly) to define it. He is unconditionally correct that “In no way do I have to dedicate myself to reviving some black civilization unjustly ignored.” But a “black civilization” unjustly ignored is peopled by other people, by other thinking people, kicking people, people who talk, and talk back, and talk past Žižek. He is entirely entitled to say “I will not make myself the man of any past” – and he should not, as no one should. But the people of color he just buried alive in their past are also living and breathing a present of which he seems to be blissfully ignorant. He is, of course, pulling my colored beard when he says, “My black skin is not a repository for specific values.” But mine is, and I am a living repository of not just “values” but universes, emotions, words, sentiments, rebellions that he and all his Horatios have not yet dreamt of in their philosophy.

Žižek and his fellow philosophers are oblivious to those geographies because they cannot read any other script, any other map, than the colonial script and the colonial map with which Europeans have read and navigated the world; conversely they cannot read any other script or map because they are blinded to alternative geographies that resistance to that colonialism had written and navigated. The condition is exacerbated any time people around the world rise up to assert their geography as the ground zero of a world historical event. At these times Žižek and his followers are all up and about trying to read the world back into what they already know. There is a new condition beyond postcoloniality that these Europeans cannot read, hard as they try to assimilate it back into the condition of coloniality. The task is not a mere critique of neo-Orientalism, which always is commensurate with immediate and short-sighted political interests, but to overcome “Europe” as an idea and make it behave as one among any number of other exhausted metaphors, neither less nor more potent, organic, or trustworthy. Europe was “the invention of the Third World,” as Fanon fully realized – both in material and normative senses of the term. I have already argued that we need to change the interlocutor with whom we discuss the terms of our emerging worlds. We should no longer address a dead interlocutor. Europe is dead. Long live Europeans. The Islam they had invented in their Orientalism is dead. Long live Muslims. The Orient they had created, the Third World they had crafted to rule and denigrate, have disappeared. If only those who still see themselves as Orientals would begin to decolonize their minds too.

Young European philosophers like Zabala and Marder, who think that as Europeans they own the world of ideas, feign the authority of their colonial forebears as if anything anyone says anywhere in the world is about them. History has started anew globally – from the Green Movement in Iran to the Arab Spring, to Indignados in Europe, to Occupy Wall Street in the US, to massive protests in Brazil. These uprisings will generate their own regimes of knowledge, not despite the reactionary and counterrevolutionary forces launched against them but precisely because of them. The anthropology of these revolutions is the first discipline that has been torpedoed into nullity. It is the very idea of “Europe” that is today most suspect and dispensable. Europeans as people, too, have reentered history, if European philosophers old and young were to let them go, and let them be, and learn from them new words. From modernity to postmodernity, from structuralism to poststructuralism, from constructivism to deconstructionism, European philosophers chase after their own tails; and what was called ‘postcolonialism’ in and of itself was the product of a European colonial imagining that wreaked havoc on this earth and finally ran aground. We are no longer postcolonial creatures.

The condition of coloniality that had given intellectual birth to us – from Césaire through Fanon to Said – has run its course. That episteme is no longer producing any meaningful knowledge. We are free, but not aimless; liberated, but not futile. This “we” is no longer we folks in the global South, for some of us have migrated to the global North chasing after their capital in search of jobs, as their capital has gone positively transnational and chases after our cheap labor in the global South. So this “we” is no longer color-coded or continental and includes all those disenfranchised by the global operation of capital whether in the north or south of planet Earth, or deep into cyberspace, or else flown into outer space, and those richly privileged by the selfsame operation. In its originary modernity this globalized capital was made mythically “European.” It no longer is. It has been de-Europeanized, freed from its overreaching fetishes. Rich Arab, Indian, Russian, Chinese, Latin American, or African entrepreneurs, mafia states, deep states, garrison states, Israeli warlords, and mercenary murderers of Isis are part and parcel of a worldly reality that has for ever dispensed with the myth of “the West.”

Orientalism then and now

In what way have we actually transcended our forebears, colonial and postcolonial, modern and postmodern? Where exactly is it that we stand and think, and upon what leveled ground is it that Mignolo, Nigam and I can invite Žižek, Zabala, and Marder kindly to drop their guards and join us and let us think and play together?

In a piece I wrote for Al Jazeera in July 2012, I took the New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof to task for a series of cliché-ridden pieces he wrote on Iran following a quick visit. Soon an article appeared in the Jerusalem Post taking me to task for abusing the term “Orientalism” and using it to bully Mr. Kristof. In this piece, the author, Seth J. Frantzman, asserts that “the term ‘orientalism,’ or more specifically the accusation that someone is an ‘orientalist,’ should be deracinated from discourse” – adding that the term has become “nonsensical in its application.” He believes that in criticizing Orientalist clichés we in fact are blinding the world: “This is an attempt to make the world ignorant, so that only the Iranian scholar can tell others about Iran, and only the Chinese communist party official can explain China to outsiders. We are supposed to rely on the Islamists of Mali to explain why they are destroying the ‘false idols’ present in the Sufi tombs of Timbuktu” – thus effectively and not so subtly equating “the Iranian scholar” with the Chinese communist and the Mali Islamist terrorists. (Does that equation ring a bell with a certain mass murderer in Norway?)

One can, of course, experience a certain passing pleasure in making it onto a Zionist’s blacklist, as I did long before this Jerusalem Post figure knew of my name from the book his soulmate David Horowitz wrote on the 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America. But so far as this particular “Iranian scholar” is concerned (now that with a keystroke the Jerusalem Post columnist has stripped me of my American citizenship altogether – for quite obviously a “Hamid Dabashi” cannot be an American, while a Seth J. Frantzman can at one and the same time be both an “American” citizen and an “Israeli” settler colonist – a racist assumption that of course is not “Orientalism”), in the very same piece in which I criticized Nicholas Kristof I also praised his New York Times colleague Roger Cohen’s reporting from Iran. So I am quite obviously not in the business of silencing anyone, including non-Iranians, from saying anything (sensible or inane) about Iran, or anywhere else for that matter.

Yet, despite its sophomoric tone and flawed logic, Seth J. Frantzman’s piece does indeed have a legitimate point, namely the pervasive abuse of the term “Orientalism” in journalistic writings – though, ironically, his own piece fits perfectly within the realm of such dilettante abuses.

Much to Edward Said’s chagrin to his dying day, both his book and the concept of “Orientalism” have been not just duly influential but also widely abused – and that abuse continues apace today. Said never tired of trying his best to correct these erroneous readings of his groundbreaking idea. However, the abuse eventually took the form of a fetishized trope. There are people today who think the very term “Arab Spring” is an Orientalist invention, evidently oblivious to the fact that the term “Spring of Nations” was also used for the European revolutions of 1848. A comment marking the non-violent disposition of the Arab Spring when it was initially launched, is enough to provoke accusations of Orientalism, or, worse, of “self-Orientalization.” Indeed, believe it or not, there are even bloggers who consider any comparison between the Iranian and Egyptian revolutions a case of Orientalism!

At the root of the problem is the fact that Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) has now assumed the status of the proverbial ‘classic’: a book that everyone cites but scarcely anyone reads. But just because the term “Orientalism” has been systematically misused by its detractors and admirers alike, or in effect turned into a term of abuse people hurl at anyone and everything they don’t like, it does not mean that one of the most powerful analytical concepts of the last century ought to be categorically avoided, disregarded, or indeed “deracinated from discourse,” as the Jerusalem Postcolumnist instructs us to do. Quite the contrary: precisely on account of such abusive dilettantism, the term needs incessant theoretical re/articulation. Persistent theorization will not prevent people from abusing it in one way or another, of course, but it might help the rest of us avoid the confusion such misuse is bound to generate.

Contrary to Mr. Frantzman’s confusion and that of many others – both “Orientals” and “non-Orientals” – the critique of Orientalism was a critique of a mode of knowledge-production, and most certainly not that of any race or people or culture. The mode of knowledge production called “Orientalism” was commensurate with the European imperial project; the fortunate fact that scholars ranging from Abd al-Rahman al-Jabarti to V.G. Kiernan, Bernard S. Cohn, Anwar Abd al-Malik, and Talal Assad had addressed the relationship between empire and knowledge production before Edward Said (or even Michel Foucault) shows that the tradition of this critique has had a much deeper epistemic history, of which both those who abuse the term and those who are incensed by it seem to be blissfully ignorant. Entirely independent of the Said/Foucault trajectory, that history can be traced back, as I have demonstrated in Post-Orientalism: Knowledge and Power in Time of Terror (2008), to a vast and variegated tradition in the sociology of knowledge, whose genealogy includes Karl Marx (1818–1883), Max Scheler (1874–1928), and George Herbert Mead (1863–1931). There is more to “Orientalism” – and to the organic relationship between knowledge and power – than can be conceived of by a New York Times or a Jerusalem Post journalist.

If we unpack the term “Orientalism,” and are attentive to Said’s dismantling of it in his classic study, the evolving historical symbiosis between knowledge and power becomes clear. This reading helps provide an insight into the terms of the new regime of knowledge of which I have been writing since the rise of the Arab revolutions in 2010 – the premiss that may enable Europeans and non-Europeans alike to move onto the same page, and there to overcome the condition of coloniality that has made one unable to think and the other unable to read the idioms of an emerging world.

Knowledge and power

So where do we get together to think through our fragile worldliness, so that “the European” is finally demythologized and stripped of the remnants of colonial and imperial arrogance; so that when he or she philosophizes with me (the Muslim, the Oriental, the Third World intellectual, or any other term used to mark and alienate me), it is no longer as an Obama or a Hillary Clinton, or as NATO sending drones over the primitive Taliban? It is long overdue that Europeans exit the certainty of their mythical self-philosophizing and re-enter history. They must come down off their high horses and fat Humvees and stop philosophizing me, and instead kindly consider philosophizing with me. The moment they dismount they will see me, Walter Mignolo, and Aditya Nigam waiting, with laptops open.

But where exactly will be the location of this historic rendezvous? Let’s take a detour.

“Orientalism” has today become a journalistic cliché. The problem with journalistic uses and abuses is that writers tend to fetishize the term without taking the trouble to learn and convey what it means, and how as a concept it may have an organic life and evolve. Towards the end of my Post-Orientalism (a book whose existence has yet to be registered by the Jerusalem Post) I argue that the modus operandi of knowledge production we know categorically as “Orientalism,” and that was the subject of Edward Said’s magisterial critique, has by now dissolved into a degenerative phase I have identified as “endosmosis,” or disposable knowledge – knowledge no longer predicated on any enduring episteme. This proposition is predicated on an active historicization of “Orientalism” beyond the immediate theorization of Edward Said, which was primarily a literary-critical take on the crisis of representation embedded in the relation between knowledge and power.

As a mode of knowledge-production, I argue, Orientalism is not a fait accompli, a closed and circuited project. It was the product of a particular moment in the history of European colonialism, and as a result changes and falters with the fate of imperialism. Thus I have sought to formulate a historically more nuanced conception of Orientalism. The current, post-9/11, condition I identified as an amorphous mode of knowledge production, or a case of epistemic endosmosis, in which the aggressive formation of a field of public knowledge about Muslims is no longer conducive to the reversed formation of a sovereign (European or American) and all-knowing (Kantian) subject.

The transmutation of classical Orientalism to Area Studies and thence into disposable knowledge produced at US and European think tanks, I propose, was coterminous with the rise of an empire without hegemony. This epistemic endosmosis – or interested knowledge manufactured in think tanks and percolating into the public domain – is, I suggest, conducive to various modes of disposable knowledge production, predicated on no enduring or coherent episteme, but in fact modeled on disposable commodities that provide instant gratification and are then disposed of after one use only.

This is “fast knowledge” produced on the model of “fast food,” with plastic cups, plastic knives, plastic forks, bad nutrition, false satisfaction. The US invades Afghanistan and these think tanks produce a knowledge conducive to that project; then the US leads another invasion of Iraq and these think tanks begin producing knowledge about Iraq, with little or no connection with what they had said about Afghanistan, or what they might say about Iran. There is little or no epistemic consistency among the three – for these forms of knowledge are produced under duress (with tight deadlines) and are entirely disposable. You throw them out after one use.