For Asad
On the Intellectual Legacy of Asad Haider
The magnificent blue of Sydney harbor is flitting past the ferry window. Ominous smoke from distant but not distant enough bushfires drift through the sky. It is December 2019. On my phone I am reading Asad Haider’s essay On Depoliticization. The language he was employing was familiar to me, these terms “closure” and “sequence” in relation to radical politics. I had been taking a course with Asad at The New School where I just completed the first semester of a master’s degree. Asad’s course had dedicated three weeks to the work of Sylvain Lazarus. This was the main reason I had taken the course, although there was the minor allure of Asad’s intellectual celebrity. In a full circle moment, I had only discovered Lazarus because of Viewpoint Magazine, which Asad had founded in 2011. A banner notification for an email appeared on my phone. From: Asad. Subject: Final Paper. “This is more the sufficient for our purposes: A.” I think he gave everyone an A in that class.
Asad Haider passed away on December 4, 2025. As of writing, it is the end of January. It has been difficult for me to write about Asad’s passing. It is difficult for several reasons, but one reason is the depth by which his passing has struck me. Asad and I were friends certainly, but Asad had older, dearer friends. And our friendship was marked by the slight awkwardness that lingers between teacher and student. Asad, in his characteristically humble and disarming way, would have dismissed this, not as false but as irrelevant.
It has been difficult for me write about Asad’s passing for another reason: because the effect it had on me does not seem to be equivalent to our friendship. There is a self-indulgent guilt complex here, feeling bad about feeling bad to ensure one continues to feel bad. Yet there is a reality to it. Old friends and family can and should pour out tributes, but I did not know Asad when he was in grad school. I did not organise with Asad or grow up with him or sit on any editorial collective with him. I took a class with him, sent him dozens of emails, read some books with him, interviewed him, and once or twice or thrice drank a million beers with him.
What has become apparent from the tributes that have emerged since he passed is that he had remarkable influence on contemporary leftists and thinkers. Those who knew him only virtually, via emails and Zoom, those who only knew his name or reached out with an email; and those who only knew him via his writings—we all seem to be experiencing one form of grief or another. One of the striking things about Asad was his sheer generosity. I had a lengthy email correspondence with him, he would read articles and pitches, suggest edits, point me in useful directions. In return I had very little editorial advice to offer him.
This was not pure altruism; Asad and I shared an interest in the works of Lazarus, the thinker who preoccupied him so much in the final years of his life. Yet I was the measly graduate student, who did not bare any fruit in pursuing a PhD. It sometimes felt absurd we were friends at all: I knew little about the history of organizing and radical politics in the US; my Marx was patchy, my Althusser even more patchy. Even though it seemed like Asad had known everything forever, he seemed to be able to recall his own days of ignorance and treated others with an extraordinary amount of grace.
This did not mean he minced words. If he was feeling nice, he would calmly suggest an avenue of investigation for you. If he was agitated, he would urge one upon you. Attending a talk at Columbia University by Etienne Balibar on Reading Capital I asked Asad afterwards what he had thought of the introductory speaker, one whose name I’ll leave out of this remembrance. Asad exploded: “that man was complete charlatan. Nothing he said about Reading Capital was true.”
What, I think, allowed Asad and I to become friends was that we shared an idea that we needed to think through radical politics more deeply. That we needed to turn to the much-maligned heterodox figures of Marxism: Althusser, Badiou, Lazarus. In 2020, amidst the pandemic, I joined a reading group Asad had started precisely to seriously study these figures. That reading group never got to Lazarus, but we read about a decade’s worth of Althusser, and then about a decade’s worth of Badiou’s writing.
What was it that made Lazarus appealing to Asad’s work? He had always remained clear eyed about the toll of organizing and was fond of invoking the endless process of radical meetings, where everyone gets a turn to speak through the most convoluted systems of proceduralism imaginable. Furthermore, Asad’s work on racial politics and the Black Panther Party in the US had led him to a renewed interest in the difficulties of emancipatory politics. In an earlier edition of Mistaken Identity, before they removed Trump from the subtitle, there is no mention of Lazarus. Yet you can hear the later formulations there, in embryonic form, in these writings. In his discussion of Black nationalism and Amiri Baraka’s political journey—which amazingly, impossibly, begins with a discussion of Rachel Dolezal and Philip Roth’s The Human Stain—he notes that the “almost paradoxical result of [Black] nationalism’s political victories was the incorporation of its parallel institutions into a more multi-coloured mainstream.” In this sentence there is a hint, however slight, that success and failure may not be the most pertinent categories to understanding the history of radical politics.
It would be easy in thinking through the collapse of Black nationalism or the agony of DSA meetings to revert to an account of insufficient Marxist discipline and theory. Our mistakes are errors in practice or errors in analysing the conjuncture. The descent into proceduralism of various activist groups is part of a failure to produce the correct kind of organization. Such solutions have been offered time and time again, after anything perceived as a failure. Ernest Mandel, writing after May 68, saw the failures of the student movement to induce a truly communist France as the surest sign that political action without a party is impossible. Never mind, then, that the French Communist Party were precisely the ones that bargained with De Gaulle to restore order to the streets.
Asad was after a different explanation of the history of radical movements and the corresponding intellectual output. He was, and this is part of the generosity that defined his personality, willing to concede that often these movements did win. Communist states were established, Black nationalism did shift racial politics in the United States in a more positive direction, and May 68 did nearly bring France to a halt. If the criteria for success is final and total victory, then all our movements will be, by necessity, a failure until they succeed. And this will make our history impossible to live and to enact.
There was a further problem. To be a radical is to attempt to see things from the viewpoint of emancipation. Liberals have rights, conservatives have law and order, but the left has emancipation. And if emancipation is to mean anything, it must be self-emancipation. It is a truism that if one is to think emancipation one must necessarily invoke domination. In this framework the first step to emancipatory politics is to think differently, to decide to do something about the situation. If that first step is to be properly part of an emancipatory politics that it must be one generated by the intellect and thought of people to imagine otherwise, to obtain a prescriptive relationship with reality. In other words, for there to be emancipatory politics, it must be the case that people think.
This phrase, “people think”, belongs to Lazarus. It is fundamental to his thought. To defend this proposition without lapsing into elitist discourse, without returning to the paradox of emancipation, requires a complex intellectual apparatus which Lazarus erects in his Anthropology of the Name. For Lazarus politics is singular, sequential, and rare. People think is a proposition that must be understood properly in interiority, subjectively and away from the functions of the state. Emancipatory politics proceeds in what he calls modes that come to lapse leaving behind the emancipatory potential of a particular moment of people’s thought.
Lazarus is difficult, and one thing Asad did for us was attempt to bring his concepts and ideas into our discourse. His essays like On Depoliticization and Socialists Think are attempts to use Lazarus without descending into the arcana of his theoretical apparatus. Yet it is clear Asad had been working with this problematic for a long time. As his discussion of Black Nationalism and Baraka continues in Mistaken Identity:
Nationalism did, at one time, appear as a potentially revolutionary ideology. The construction of new parallel institutions mobilized a general antagonism against a social structure based on the systematic exclusion of black people. The possibility of overcoming the marginalization of the black working class provided an objective, albeit tenuous, basis for the unity between the intellectual leadership and the grassroots base. But the mainstream incorporation of the parallel institutions, marked by the electoral success of the black elite, demonstrated the capacity of the capitalist state to absorb the nationalist challenge.
There is a lot of language here Asad would have most likely abandoned, including the final lines about capitalist absorption of the nationalist challenge. Yet the tenor of the above quote, in which a movement is successful but for a time, is the animating impulse of Lazarus’ work. Here Asad is attuned to something close to Lazarus’ logic of emancipation and lapsing modes. This is an attempt to reorient his own work, yes, but it is also an attempt to reorient his fellow radicals, to get past debates about old politics and go in search of new modes of politics.
In his eulogy for Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida talks at length about their intellectual friendship. It is strange text to read, for Deleuze and Derrida seem to share little else but the letter ‘D’ and the epithet ‘post structuralist’. Yet in this eulogy Derrida confesses how much he learnt from Deleuze. He learnt from reading Deleuze, from talking to Deleuze, from being with Deleuze. And after Derrida accounts for all he has gained from Deleuze and the nature of their relationship he tells us that now he will “wander all alone in this long conversation we were supposed to have together.” Asad Haider was the greatest and most generous communist of his generation. In his passing we have all felt, regardless of distance, this sense that we will suddenly have to wander all alone. This explains, in part, the collective shock. We have lost a fellow traveler and a guiding light. We still live in an era where we are confronting the closure of the party-form, radical politics at the state level and indeed many other experiments in doing something about the situation. We are still in search of new modes of politics. This confrontation and this search we must now do with what Asad has bequeathed to us, for he can no longer wander alongside us. We would, however, do his memory an injustice to deny ourselves our own capacity for invention and thought.