John Harfouch

John Harfouch’s article revisits Palestinian intellectual Fayez Sayegh’s critique of Zionism on the fiftieth anniversary of UN Resolution 3379, which labeled Zionism a form of racism. Drawing on Sayegh’s speeches and writings, the piece frames the “Palestine Problem” as the systematic de-development and dispossession of Palestinian society through territorial expansion, discriminatory laws, and exclusion from economic, educational, and technological development. Sayegh argued that Zionist racism justified these practices and that genuine liberation required both armed resistance and diplomatic struggle intertwined with broader anti-imperial and non-aligned efforts. The review situates Sayegh’s thought within colonial, imperial, and global politico-economic contexts.

Abstract: I argue that Orientalism continues to construct Arabs as subjects that cannot suffer violence, particularly the violence of torture. Beginning with Edward Said’s observation that Orientalists constructed ‘Arabs’ in the nineteenth -century as inorganic, metallic, and mineralized beings, I trace these themes through various sites in and around Guantanamo Bay. One finds the tropes of Orientalism in the Bybee memo as well as in the diary of Mohamedou Ould Slahi. Through these three distinct but related moments, one finds that Orientalism continues to produce Arabs as inorganic entities beyond death and thereby immune to violence and specifically the violence of torture. Insofar as imperialism has co-opted the language of non-violence by constructing its enemies as inviolable, one must recognize the Orientalized Arab as a receptor of limitless ‘non - violent’ hostilities.

As everyone here knows, any criticism of Zionism is always met with accusations of antisemitism. This leads one to ask, what exactly is the relationship between Zionism and antisemitism? In answering this question, our guide will be the writings of Palestinian philosopher named Fayez Sayegh, who wrote in 1960, “if anti-Jewishness did not exist, Zionists would have to create it.”1 Of course, this claim clashes with the commonsense idea that Zionism and the Israeli state are strict antidotes to antisemitism. Why does Sayegh say this? What evidence does he have to support it? And what might his answers mean for the IHRA definition of antisemitism?

The following conversation examines the role of the university in our present moment and examines the necessity of anti-colonial praxis in the academy. The dialogue takes as its starting point the long history of white, heteropatriarchal capitalist supremacy that has oriented the institutional production of knowledge and considers its present permutations in such practices as diversity initiatives in teaching and hiring. The discussants in turn reflect on their own approaches and strategies for enacting liberatory pedagogy in light of the contingent, historical, and material limitations of higher education today.

The notion of racial blood in Gobineau's Essai sur l'inégalité des races humaines is not deployed in a strictly physiological manner. Gobineau refers to blood in a number of passages designating a spiritual and historical substance accounting for the unity of a people. This use of the term cannot be discredited by a chemical or genetic analysis of the material blood because Gobineau is not engaged in a classification of physical body types but rather a historical explanation of civilizations’ progress and degeneration. The blood refers to more than a mere biological trait. And the term is deployed in an attempt to comprehend one's physical, psychical, social, political, and, above all, historical ways of being.

The notion of racial blood in Gobineau’s Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines is not deployed in a strictly physiological manner. Gobineau refers to blood in a number of passages designating a spiritual and historical substance accounting for the unity of a people. This use of the term cannot be discredited by a chemical or genetic analysis of the material blood because Gobineau is not engaged in a classification of physical body types but rather a his-torical explanation of civilizations’ progress and degeneration. The blood refers to more than a mere biological trait. And the term is deployed in an attempt to comprehend one’s physical, psychical, social, political, and, above all, historical ways of being.

John Harfouch’s new book, Another Mind-Body Problem: A History of Racial Non-Being, argues that Immanuel Kant, widely considered the most influential philosopher of the modern period, is the first to claim the lives of non-white people are redundant and worthless. He articulates this through a metaphysics of minds and bodies that ultimately transforms the meaning of philosophy’s mind-body problem. A mind-body problem in the Kantian tradition is not a problem of how minds and bodies interact or brain states give rise to consciousness. Rather, the problem is one of how a union of minds and bodies regenerates without reason, or of how a oneness repeats its own nothingness. Born without reason, the non-white world is a kind of human waste that can be eliminated without consequence. Accordingly, a properly understood history of the mind-body problem reckons with the problem of genocidal violence. Following this transformation of the mind-body problem from the late sixteenth century through Descartes’s writings and into the eighteenth century, Harfouch argues in Another Mind-Body Problem that philosophy has not understood its most canonical and long-standing problem and must now change who is hired and funded to solve it.

ABSTRACT. This essay addresses the interpretation of Descartes’ understanding of the mind-body relationship as a substantial union in light of a statement he makes in the Passions de l’âme regarding the role of the blood and vital heat. Here, it seems Descartes cites these corporeal properties as the essential dispositions responsible for accommodating the soul into the human fetus. I argue that this statement should be read in the context of certain medical texts with which Descartes was familiar, namely those of Jean Fernel and William Harvey. Reviewing Fernel’s comments on substantial union, one finds that the soul joins the body on the basis of a celestial spirit that not only bears the vital heat, it also directs the generation of the body. Similar to Harvey, Descartes locates these properties in the blood itself, although, in contrast to Harvey, Descartes reduces these processes to matter and motion. Finally, I highlight the role this heat plays in Descartes’ embryological writing, contrasting it with that of Fernel. I conclude that although Descartes makes various comments supporting a reading of the mind-body relation as a substantial union, his physiological writings on generation and his idea of ‘life’ contradict this interpretation.

I argue that while recognition is important for Middle Eastern and North African philosophers in academia and society, recognition alone should not define the anti-colonial movement. BDS provides a better model of engagement because it constructs identities in order to bring about material changes in the academy and beyond. In the first part of the essay, I catalog how MENA thought traditions have been and continue to be suppressed within the academy and philosophy in particular. I then sketch one possible path to better representation in philosophy by reading Fayez Sayegh’s analyses of Zionist colonialism and Palestinian non-being. In the second half of the essay, I argue that BDS is among the premier anti-colonial movements on American campuses today because it is a materialist anti-racist movement. Insofar as that movement is often shunned and prohibited, an anti-colonial society offers a membership in exile.

The scientific and philosophical approach to pain must be supplemented by a hermeneutics studying how racism has complicated the communication of pain. Such an investigation reveals that not only are non-white people seen as credibly speaking their pain, but also pain “science” is one of the ways races have historically been constructed. I illustrate this through a study of Frantz Fanon’s clinical writings, along with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century slave-owners’ medical manuals and related documents. I suggest that, with this history, what philosophers understand as the problem of pain is best framed as the problem of colonial violence.

The mind-body problem in philosophy is typically understood as a discourse concerning the relation of mental states to physical states, and the experience of sensation. On this level it seems to transcend issues of race and racism, but Another Mind-Body Problem demonstrates that racial distinctions have been an integral part of the discourse since the Modern period in philosophy. Reading figures such as Descartes, Leibniz, and Kant in their historical contexts, John Harfouch uncovers discussions of mind and body that engaged closely with philosophical and scientific notions of race in metaphysics and the philosophy of mind, in particular in understanding how the mind unites with the body at birth and is then passed on through sexual reproduction. Kant argued that a person’s exterior body and interior psyche are bound together, that non-White people lacked reason, and that this lack of reason was carried on through reproduction such that non-Whites were an example of a union of mind and body without full being. Charting the development of this phenomenon from sixteenth-century medical literature to modern-day race discourse, Harfouch argues for new understandings of Descartes’s mind-body problem, Fanon’s experience of being ‘not-yet human,’ and the place of racism in relation to one of philosophy’s most enduring and canonical problems. “Harfouch has written an important book on the intersection of race and the Western construction of the mind-body problem … This book is a significant resource for theorists dealing with race and decolonization issues, but it is more significant for the critique of philosophy itself and the continued teaching of mind-body issues. Readers will need some knowledge of philosophy, but the volume is in general accessible. It should be required reading for scholars of philosophy. Harfouch establishes a logically strong argument and makes a unique contribution to the field.” — CHOICE

Eric Voegelin’s writings on the historical development of the concept of race in the early 1930s are important to philosophy today in part because they provide a model upon which scholars can further integrate modern philosophy with the critical philosophy of race. In constructing his history, Voegelin’s methodological orientation depends on the centrality of both Kant’s work and the problem of the mind–body union to the concept of race. This essay asks how one might hold these premises if Kant seems to reject the dominant approach to the mind–body union in the mid-eighteenth century, physical influx, and then go on to publish several essays on race that do not thematize that doctrine in any way. I argue that Kant’s racial union of mind and body cannot be understood as an interaction in space, as his contemporaries had presumed. Rather, the union must be approached as a repetition in time. In this way, Kant’s four racial categories are not merely a part of the mind–body problem, but instead each is a veritable mind–body union. This permits the conclusion that ‘race’, as Kant understood it, is a viable solution to the mind–body problem

I claim that a genealogy of the philological racism known as ‘orientalism’ should include Leibniz as a founding figure. This argument is framed and motivated by recent publications that seek to exclude Leibniz from the history of race and racism by arguing that he insists on a linguistic, rather than ‘racial,’ schematic of human diversity. A survey of nineteenth-century race theory reveals that this distinction is not only specious, but these recent defenses only further implicate Leibniz in the linguistic tradition that is orientalist racism.

This paper argues that certain orientalist writings authorize the genocide of Arab peoples precisely by establishing the conditions for the impossibility of Arab death. Of particular import to this analysis is the nineteenth century philological work of famed orientalist Ernest Renan, who argues that Arabs are psychically inorganic because their language has never demonstrated the organic historical development characteristic of European peoples. The historico-logical impossibility of killing Arab peoples is essential not only if philosophers are going to grasp the rationale of the ongoing and often casual murder of Arabs, but also if scholars of race hope to comprehend the specificities of biopolitical racism, orientalizing racism, historical racism, animalizing racism, and so on.

Deutscher's reading of Darwin states that future generations are conditioned by the work of natural selection over long periods of time, whereby the random variations that are most favorable to the local conditions prevail over those organisms that are less well adapted. The work of this selection of the favorable varieties is not a human responsibility; rather, it lies in the hands of “chance.” However, I believe that, by prioritizing competition between organisms in the process of natural selection, Darwin in fact ends up subscribing to a kind of evolutionary progress. Because Darwin subscribes to a kind of evolutionary progress whereby the “better” varieties push the lower forms into extinction, one cannot say that natural selection is random but, rather, that it follows a general trajectory of improvement. The fact that nature proceeds slowly in this fashion must be read alongside Darwin's comments on race as well as the numerous times he explicitly advocates Galton's eugenic program in The Descent of Man

The Cambridge Foucault Lexicon is a reference tool that provides clear and incisive definitions and descriptions of all of Foucault's major terms and influences, including history, knowledge, language, philosophy and power. It also includes entries on philosophers about whom Foucault wrote and who influenced Foucault's thinking, such as Deleuze, Heidegger, Nietzsche and Canguilhem. The entries are written by scholars of Foucault from a variety of disciplines such as philosophy, gender studies, political science and history. Together, they shed light on concepts key to Foucault and to ongoing discussions of his work today.