Saturday, March 13, 2010

"We are looking for a route that will connect critical discourses

that have evolved in partial context, in order to make them useful for a yet-to-be-constituted, global, progressive left. We will not be satisfied with the realists' maxim: The enemy of my enemy is my friend - as this will not support global solidarity in a meaningful way. We also suspect that the splintering of the Left along the lines of discrete "identities" has run its course as a progressive form of critique, at least in its Western form, where identity politics now threatens to work to the advantage of anti-immigration nativism rather than the protection of cultural minorities. In its Islamist form, "identity politics" is indeed a powerful force, a constituency within civil society of over a billion people, connected in a global network of mosques. But those who desire (or fear) the crafting of this public into a uniform Islamist, global view do a disservice to the richness of debate that informs Islam, which not only allows critical thinking but requires it as a duty. If there are Islamist politicians who think they can count on supprt from a monolithic, unquestioning Muslim bloc, then these politicians are no less cynical and their motives are no less manipulative than their Western counterparts.
-Susan Buck-Morss, "Can There Be a Global Left?," in Thinking Past Terror: Islamism and Critical Theory on the Left, p. 102

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