were in fact the impoverished tradition of instrumental reason, possessive individualism, and lack of social consciousness that the members of the Frankfurt School and other European Marxists were criticizing from within. It would have taken a radical cosmopolitanism far in advance of what was possible at the time for both sides (German Jewish and Arab Muslim) to join forces in a critique of Western reason in its impoverished, (neo-)liberal, instrumentalized form. But the very thought of such an alliance, an attack launched from both within and without, suggests the power that a new Left in a global public sphere might begin to have today. To accomplish a global critique, however, it is the object criticized that must have priority, not the discursive model. If Western-centrism is to be avoided, Islam-centrism is only its other, not the theoretical solution. But just as clearly from the global perspective, the rejection of Western-centrism does not place a taboo on using the tools Enlightenment (as well as those of Islam) for original and creative application. To cite the Moroccan historian, Muhammad 'Abid al-Jabiri, who, as a leading critic of Orientalist discourses and Eurocentric world views, nonetheless makes eclectic use of Western concepts from Kant, Freud, Foucault, Marx, and others: "I do not limit myself to the constraints present in the original frameworks, but often utilize them with considerable freedom....We should not consider these concepts molds cast in iron, but tools to be used in each instance in the most productive way...."[8]
-Susan Buck-Morss, "Can There Be a Global Left?," in Thinking Past Terror: Islamism and Critical Theory on the Left, p. 98-99
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