Zahi Zalloua
Violence, Resistance, and Disruption in Fanon and Žižek
In a novel pairing of anti-colonial theorist Frantz Fanon with Marxist-Lacanian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, Zahi Zalloua explores the ways both thinkers expose and disrupt the violence of political structures. This foray advances an anti-racist critique, describing how ontology operates in a racial matrix to produce some human bodies that count and others that do not. For Fanon and Žižek, the violence of ontology must be met with another form of violence, a disruptive and resisting violence that delegitimizes the logic of the symbolic order and troubles its collective fantasies. Whereas Fanon begins his resistance to ontology by exposing its historical linkages to Europe’s destructive imperialist and colonialist procedures, Žižek premises his work on the refusal to accept the totality of ontology. Because of these different points of intervention, Fanon and Žižek together offer a powerful alternative to the liberal anti-racist paradigm whose propensity for identity politics silences the cry of the dispossessed and forecloses radical disruption. Avoiding contemporary separatist temptations and breaking with a sentimentalist non-violent futurology that announces more of the same, Fanon and Žižek point in a different direction, one that frames disruptions to racist and colonial ontologies in inventive ways, eschewing identitarian thought in favor of cross-racial solidarity, a collective struggle for freedom and equality.
Biography
Zahi Zalloua is Cushing Eells Professor of Philosophy and Literature and Director of Indigeneity, Race, and Ethnicity Studies at Whitman College. He is also editor of The Comparatist. His teaching and scholarship engage critical Black studies, the posthuman, and the Palestinian question. His most recent works include To Exist as a Problem: Being Black, Being Palestinian (forthcoming); Fanon, Žižek, and the Violence of Resistance (2025); The Politics of the Wretched: Race, Reason, and Ressentiment (2024); Solidarity and the Palestinian Cause: Indigeneity, Blackness, and the Promise of Universality (2023); Being Posthuman: Ontologies of the Future (2021); Žižek on Race: Toward an Anti-Racist Future(2020); Theory’s Autoimmunity: Skepticism, Literature, and Philosophy (2018); and Continental Philosophy and the Palestinian Question: Beyond the Jew and the Greek (2017).
This event is presented by the Department of English, with support from the Department of Philosophy, the Center for Humanities and Digital Research (CHDR), and the College of Graduate Studies (CGS).
Read More