"Universalizing Capital, Foreclosing Necro-Imperialism, and Žižek’s Liberal Zionist Response to the Gaza Genocide” with Jamil Khader

Biography: Dr. Jamil Khader is a Palestinian-American scholar of English literature, literary theory, and cultural politics whose work explores how stories shape our understanding of power, identity, and justice. Across a career spanning institutions in the Middle East and the United States, he has cultivated a distinctive intellectual voice—bringing together Marxist critique, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and anti-colonial thought to interrogate the entanglements of culture, power, and global inequality. He earned his Ph.D. in English literature from The Pennsylvania State University and served as  Dean of Research at Bethlehem University in Palestine and as Editor-in-Chief of the Bethlehem University Journal.  He currently serves as Associate Professor of English at Bethune-Cookman University, an HBCU in Florida. Dr. Khader is the author of two books and numerous academic and public-facing essays.Show Notes: Our conversation centers on Khader’s recent article, “Universalizing Capital, Foreclosing Necro-Imperialism, and Žižek’s Liberal Zionist Response to the Gaza Genocide.” Published in Middle East critique In it, Khader offers a rigorous immanent critique of Slavoj Žižek’s writing on the Gaza genocide. Khader tracks how Žižek repeatedly shifts the explanatory ground away from settler colonialism and necro-imperial political economy, and toward moral equivalence, “tragic” framing, and the language of liberal Zionism. We talk through Zizek’s three strategies of foreclosure that Khader calls the—mythic, geographic, and ethical—and how these moves can render Palestinian political subjectivity unintelligible, even inside theories that claim emancipation as their horizon.Along the way, we get into the larger stakes: Western Marxism and its limits, the problem of universality, the role of organization and praxis, and why thinking from Palestine isn’t a narrowing of theory—but an insistence that universality must be rebuilt from the standpoint of those made disposable under empire.Links: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/19436149.2025.2602098https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11841-020-00799-0