The settler colonial unconscious too: Siavash Saffari, Azadeh Shabani, ‘Palestine, and the Colonial Unconscious of German Critical Theory’, Middle East Critique, 2025 | settler colonial studies blog

The settler colonial unconscious too: Siavash Saffari, Azadeh Shabani, ‘Palestine, and the Colonial Unconscious of German Critical Theory’, Middle East Critique, 2025

07Apr25

Abstract: By centering the question of Palestine, this article contributes to a decolonial critique of German critical theory à la Jürgen Habermas and the Frankfurt School. The article’s intervention is prompted by the November 2023 ‘Principles of Solidarity. A Statement’ (PoS), of which Habermas was a coauthor. Released amid a full-scale Israeli assault on the besieged Gaza Strip, which followed the October 7, 2023 Hamas-led attack in southern Israel, the PoS statement expressed unequivocal solidarity with Israel, and it defended the assault on Gaza as being ‘justified in principle’. Whereas some critics view the PoS statement’s conspicuous one-sidedness as a departure from Habermas’s universalist principles, this article argues that the statement’s neglect of Palestinian suffering aligns with the Eurocentric limitations and biases inherent in Habermas’s thought. These limitations and biases, the article contends, stem from a colonial unconscious running through successive generations of the Frankfurt School critical theory (FSCT). Recalling Edward Said’s warning that the FSCT’s silence on colonialism and imperialism undermines the tradition’s liberatory potential, the article identifies the PoS statement as marking the depletion of any such potential.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed