Saladdin Ahmed

Great critical theorists from Marx and Engels to Adorno and Horkheimer not only came from the margins but also stayed faithful to the plight of the marginalized. They refused to compromise about the struggle for equality and tried to universalize its emancipatory essence. From Marx to Benjamin, critical philosophers who showed fidelity to the cause were denied a career in European universities and made impoverished, stateless, and homeless. Marginalization and critical theory are inseparable; yet, today, Marxism is institutionalized, and the Frankfurt School's Critical Theory is gentrified. Critical Theory from the Margins, however, revives the Critical Theory that endorses criticism, aiming to negate dominant regimes of truth. It is unapologetic in its fidelity to the universalist struggles of the minoritized. In that spirit, Saladdin Ahmed shows that capitalism imposes a totalitarian social mode of existence and neoliberalism perpetuates fascism as a class of ideology across nationalist and religious movements. This book, then, is both a theorization and an argument in favor of the application of the episteme of the silenced as the essence of the critical education necessary for achieving universal emancipation.

Iraqi Kurds have been involved in a liberation movement since the very beginning of the establishment of the Iraqi state by European colonizers. With the proliferation of communism in the 1960s and 1970s among liberation movements in the third world, the Kurdish liberation movement also adopted popular Marxist, Leninist and Maoist jargons. However, after the 1991 Kurdish uprising successfully liberated some areas of Kurdistan, the leftist rhetoric almost completely disappeared in the dominant Iraqi Kurdish discourse. I argue that, even from the 1960s to the 1980s, the adoption of Marxist rhetoric by the Iraqi Kurdish leadership was inauthentic; it was neither rooted in nor tailored to Kurdistani society. Moreover, unlike the Kurdish liberation movements in Turkey and Syria, as well as Iran to some degree, the Kurdish movement in Iraq failed to recognize gender equality. Thus, while Kurdish women in Turkey and Syria took active roles in the liberation movement, their counterparts in Iraq remained marginalized.

In an era of digital surveillance cameras and drones, it is extremely important to understand the preoccupation of modern governments with unlimited spatial transparency, in addition to the ways in which this fixation underlies prevailing spatial technologies of power. We have increasingly become objects of the gaze of power in an extended space that is coming to resemble a surface on which everything is completely visible, identifiable, and eliminable. I argue that today’s spatial technologies of power have built upon principles of panopticism to produce a unified space that can best be described as totalitarian. To grasp the totalitarian features of the produced space, a re-consideration of Foucault’s concept of panopticism and its contemporary applications will prove helpful. In brief, panopticism is a method of rendering power both all-seeing and all-knowing for the purpose of achieving unlimited control over social space. My article is divided into three main sections: a return to the model of the Panopticon, an analysis of the principles of panopticism in light of Foucault’s account, and a concluding discussion of the increasingly totalitarian space in which we find ourselves.

We live today within a system in which state and corporate power aim to render space flat, transparent, and uniform, for only then can it be truly controlled. The gaze of power and the commodity form are capable of infiltrating even the darkest of corners, and often, we invite them into our most private spaces. We do so as a matter of convenience, but also to placate ourselves and cope with the alienation inherent in our everyday lives. The resulting dominant space can best be termed totalitarian. It is space stripped of uniqueness, deprived of the “spatial aura” necessary for authentic experience. In Totalitarian Space and the Destruction of Aura, Saladdin Ahmed sets out to help us grasp what has been lost before no trace remains. He draws attention to that which we might prefer not to see, but despite the bleakness of this indictment of reality, the book also offers a message of hope. Namely, it is only once we comprehend the magnitude of the threat to our spatial experience and our own complicity in sustaining this system that we can begin to resist the totalizing forces at work.

I begin and conclude the article by arguing that culturalisation has contributed significantly to the decline of the Left and its universal ideals. In the current climate of public opinion, ‘race’ is no longer used, at least openly, as a scientific truth to justify racism. Instead, ‘culture’ has become the mysterious term that has made the perpetuation of racist discourse possible. ‘Culture’, in this newracist worldview, is the unquestioned set of traits continually attributed to the non-White Other, essentially to de-world her Being and de-individualise her personhood. In other words, ‘culture’, as it is used in the old anthropological sense, is the magic incantation with which the Other is demonised, mystified, and/or ridiculously oversimplified. I focus on the phenomenon of ‘culturalisation’ as a common new-racist method of de-politicising the Other’s affairs and surrounding socio-political phenomena. The article is an attempt to discredit the paradigm of ‘culture’ as a pseudo-concept used commonly in cultural racism. This cultural racism routinely assumes ‘culture’ to be a natural given almost exactly as the pseudo-scientific paradigm ‘race’ was (and is still) used in some discourses of biological racism. If mentality X attributes categorical differences to different groups of people based on A and A is assumed to be natural, ahistorical, and/or metaphysical, then X is a racist mentality. Obviously, A does not have to be skin-color or ‘blood’ in order for X to be racist.

Some fashionable leftist movements and populist intellectuals habitually blame the sources of information for public ignorance about the miserable state of the world. It could be argued, however, that the masses are ignorant because they prefer ignorance. A mass individual is politically apathetic and intellectually lazy. As a result, even when huge amounts of information are available, which is the case in this epoch, the masses insist on choosing ignorance. It is true that there is not enough information about what has happened in a place such as Darfur, but the masses choose not to access even the amount of information that is available. The great majority of people in China, Iran, and America, despite the fact that they have varying amounts of access to various types of “knowledge,” still tend to be misinformed. It seems that a mass individual is curious only about what directly affects his/her own personal life. I will explore the connection between mass mentality and the culture industry in order to capture the essential role of the former in the latter. I will also argue that a mass individual is the source of fascism although fascism as a phenomenon needs a mass culture in which to flourish

Most Western scholars define Sufism as the spirituality of Islam or the mystical version of Islam. It is thought to be the inward approach to Islam that emerged and flourished in the non-Arab parts of the Islamic world. Most scholars like William Stoddart think that Sufism is to Islam what Yoga is to Hinduism, Zen to Buddhism, and mysticism to Christianity.1 In this essay, I will shed light on the major lines and elements in the philosophy of Sufism. I will try to give a concrete account of Sufism by introducing its major features within the relevant Islamic tradition and history

Ignorance is a necessary condition for life. The will to truth is against the will to power. There is a contradiction between understanding and strength, or knowledge and action. In other words, knowledge prevents life. The more you know, the less you are capable of action. Life is there to be lived not to be known. In my paper, I try to show the contradiction between wisdom and life in Nietzsche’’s writings. I especially concentrate on Beyond Good and Evil and, to a lesser degree, some of his other works. I will show how this very contradiction makes Nietzsche’’s own project of overman impossible. Is the overman a wise person or a strong person; a sage or a hero; a philosopher or a king? The overman cannot be both wise and strong, and hence, the philosopher-king is a paradoxical term. In the end of my essay, I suggest a solution to the problem within the Nietzschean understanding of philosophy.