The Meaning of Life After Savagery: Gaza/Palestine as Decolonial Categorical Imperative

This paper engages with Hamid Dabashi’s After Savagery: Gaza, Genocide, and the Illusion of Western Civilization (2025) to argue that the ongoing genocide in Gaza constitutes an epistemic and moral rupture. For Dabashi, this requires a fundamental decolonial reorientation of philosophy and politics. It posits that Gaza, as the focal point of contemporary colonial violence, exposes the “metaphysics of barbarism” that underlies Western civilization’s universalist claims (Dabashi, 2025). Moving beyond critique, the essay explores how Dabashi reframes Palestine as an epistemic world and site for a liberatory poetics. Its core contention is that Gaza generates a new categorical imperative: an absolute obligation to think, witness, and act from the perspective of the most brutalized (Dabashi, 2005). This imperative calls for decolonizing thought, building planetary solidarity, and freeing memory, paving the way for a post-Western consciousness. The meaning of life after savagery, therefore, is to be rebuilt from this imperative, with Gaza as its non-negotiable starting point.