The Argument here redefines Marx’s class struggle in the terms of a “politics of being”: that is, one waged over what is to be the descriptive statement of the human, about whose master code of symbolic life and death each human order organizes itself. It then proposes that it was precisely because of the above political dynamic—which underpinned the Darwinian Revolution, making it possible—that it was also compelled to function as a half-scientific, half-mythic theory of origins, at least as it had to do with the human.
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Dorothy Roberts on Race as a Political Category

Like citizenship, race is a political system that governs people by sorting them into social groupings based on invented biological demarcations. Race is not only interpreted according to invented rules, but, more important, race itself is an invented political grouping. Race is not a biological category that is politically charged. It is a political category that has been disguised as a biological one.

Dorothy Roberts - Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-first Century

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    Decolonial thinking presupposes de-linking from the web of imperial knowledge … A common topic of conversation today, after the financial crisis on Wall Street, is ‘how to save capitalism’. A decolonial question would be: ‘Why would you want to save capitalism and not save human beings? Why save an abstract entity and not the human lives that capitalism is constantly destroying?
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Walter Benjamin, notes for the Arcades Project from Paris Arcades, Hatje Cantz 2012
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    Decolonization requires us to exercise our sovereignties differently and to reconfigure our communities based on shared experiences, ideals, and visions. Almost all Indigenous formulations of sovereignty – such as the Two Row Wampum agreement of peace, friendship, and respect between the Haudenosaunee nations and settlers – are premised on revolutionary notions of respectful coexistence and stewardship of the land, which goes far beyond any Western liberal democratic ideal.
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» Foucault and the Black Panthers

This paper unearths the relation between French philosopher Michel Foucault and the US Black Panther Party (BPP). I argue that Foucault’s shift from archaeological inquiry to genealogical critique is fundamentally motivated by his encounter with American‐style racism and class struggle, and by his engagement with the political philosophies and documented struggles of the BPP. The paper proceeds in four steps. First, I assess Foucault’s biographies and interviews from the transitional period of 1970–72 that indicate the fact and nature of this formative encounter. Second, I turn to some of the writings of BPP leaders and to the theme of politics and war as they articulated it. Third, I address this same theme of politics as war as it gets taken up and rearticulated by Foucault between 1971 and 1976, with an eye to the degree to which the philosophies and struggles of the Black Panthers silently, yet profoundly, inform Foucault’s genealogical work. I conclude by raising some ethical and political questions pertaining to the criteria of truthful speech in scholarly discourse.

Brady Thomas Heiner, Foucault and the Black Panthers

(Source: thatneedstogo)

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Edward Said-The World, The Text, and the Critic (1983)

The critic’s attitude to some extent is restorative in a similar way; it should in addition and more often be frankly inventive, … finding and exposing things otherwise lie hidden beneath piety, heedlessness, or routine. Most of all, I think, criticism is worldly and in the world so long as it opposes monocentrism in the narrowest as well as the widest sense of that too infrequently used notion… Monocentrism is when we mistake one idea as the only idea, instead of recognizing that an idea in history is always one amongst many. Monocentrism denies plurality, it totalizes structure, it sees profit where there is waste, it decrees the concentricity of Western culture instead of its eccentricity, it believes continuity to be given and will not try to understand, instead, how discontinuity as much as continuity is made. 

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    Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well. Where thinking suddenly stops in a configuration pregnant with tensions, it gives that configuration a shock, by which it crystallizes into a monad.
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Sun Ra - Negroes Are Not Men from The Wisdom of Sun Ra: Sun Ra’s Polemical Broadsheets and Streetcorner Leaflets (2006)
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    The Argument here redefines Marx’s class struggle in the terms of a “politics of being”: that is, one waged over what is to be the descriptive statement of the human, about whose master code of symbolic life and death each human order organizes itself. It then proposes that it was precisely because of the above political dynamic—which underpinned the Darwinian Revolution, making it possible—that it was also compelled to function as a half-scientific, half-mythic theory of origins, at least as it had to do with the human.
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    It is worthwhile to point out in passing here that there are amazing resemblances between the Muslim population that emerges in twentieth-century Europe and the Negro population of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America. I mean precisely their constitution as an essential disposable population whose presence threatens liberal democracy. This is indicative of the tremendous force of the American system to extend itself to any and all localities on the planet
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    In sum, “person” is not co-extensive with “human” because to be human is neither necessary nor sufficient for personhood. Non-human entities exist that count as persons while human entities exist that do not count as persons. Not all humans have been granted the moral status to which their presumptive personhood should have entitled them.
Charles W. Mills - The Political Economy Of Personhood
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The reason why I’m not a philosopher in the classical sense of the word – maybe I’m not a philosopher at all, and in any case I’m not a good philosopher – is, that I’m not interested in the eternal, I’m not interested in what does not change, I’m not interested in what stays the same beneath the iridescent surface of appearances, I’m interested in the event. The event has hardly been a philosophical category, except maybe for the Stoics, for whom it raised a logical problem. Again it was Nietzsche, I think, who first defined philosophy as an activity that leads to an understanding of what’s happening, of what’s happening right now. In other words, we are pervaded by processes, movements and forces, which we don’t know, and it is doubtlessly the philosopher’s task to be a diagnostician of these forces, to diagnose contemporary reality.

A conversation between Michel Foucault and Moriaki Watanabe
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jsmooth995: ”..neither the term Orient nor the concept of the West has any ontological stability; each is made up of human effort, partly affirmation, partly identification of the Other. That these supreme fictions lend themselves easily to manipulation and the organization of collective passion has never been more evident than in our time, when the mobilizations of fear, hatred, disgust and resurgent self-pride and arrogance—much of it having to do with Islam and the Arabs on one side, “we” Westerners on the other—are very large-scale enterprises.”  Orientalism by Edward Said (1978)
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