Contenu du sommaire : Le racisme après les races

We observe many signs of the fact that the category « racism » not only has profoundly changed its meaning, but could also have reached the limits of its historical validity, both as an instrument of theoretical analysis, and as an instrument of progressive politics. The failed World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and related Intolerance in Durban (2002) was a striking indication in this respect. As a consequence, we can no longer proceed in our struggle against extreme discriminations and violence without critically revisiting the origins and meaning of our notion of « racism ». The term was coined in the 30's in its current use, but it was not before the 1950 and 1951 Declarations on race and racism, issued under the aegis of UNESCO and the UN, that it named a scientific paradigm. The article examines its logical function (to give a unitary description of the phenomena of anti-Semitism, colonialist subjection, and colour segregation), its ethical prerequisites (the « humanist » principle of the indivisibility of the Human Species), its epistemological consequences (a Copernican Revolution in the field of anthropology, and finally the alternative conceptualizations that – right from the beginning – confronted its research program with a different problematic of the community, notably in Antelme, Primo Levi, Fanon and Arendt.

The article re-addresses the question of the relation between Darwinism and the biological sciences, taking as its starting-point the precise chronology of the successive inquiries carried out by Darwin into the question of races, in connection with the various aspects of his theory of natural selection. It argues that the writings of Darwin do not share any uniform aim, nor do they come under a single epistemological category. Darwin adopts a number of divergent approaches, as he addresses a series of issues : the debate between monogenesis and polygenesis ; the characterisation of human races, as practised since Kant ; the question of craniometrics, so important in physical anthropology in his day ; the classification of mental faculties ; the role of selection for reproductive purposes in the differences between the sexes ; the universality of the expression of emotions, and so on. What emerges from the inquiry is a more complex portrait than is customary in the controversies about the scientist's « social Darwinism », real or imaginary. Darwin is neither the purveyor of a Hitlerian racism nor the protagonist of a natural antiracism directly stemming from this theory.

In recent years, Frantz Fanon has become a major figure for theorists and artists working on the connections between race, representation, colonialism, and humanism in the English speaking world. It is not the case in France where the debate around race remains heavily indebted to an abstract universalism which tends to obscure the long history of race's presence in French thought. Looking at the figure of the slave, Françoise Vergès explores its presence and absence in Fanon's Black Skin, Whites Masks, and in French philosophical and cultural discourse. She reads this presence/absence as a symptom of the incapacity to integrate race as essential in the elaboration of political discourse, and as a wish to deny how the imperial and colonial past continues to shape political life. This denial feeds the illusion that France has been disconnected from its imperial past, reducing racism to the machinations of strictly economic life. Françoise Vergès argues that we need to reintegrate the figure of the slave if we wish to go beyond race as a symbolic marker and explores what anti-colonialits thinkers used to call a new post-racial humanism.

The paper discusses « race » and « ethnicity » as political identities, imposed through the force of the colonial law, and reproduced in the postcolonial period. In Africa, non-natives were tagged as races, governed under civil law (a discriminating but single law), whereas natives were said to belong to tribes, each of them under its supposedly customary law, suited to its separated cultural essence. The challenge now is to distinguish our notion of political community from that of cultural community, separate the discourse on political rights from that on cultural or historical origins, create a single political community and citizenship from diverse cultural and historical groups and identities.

Until a relatively recent period, colonial history had focused on the study of the colonized, and, if some attention was dedicated to the colonizers, only the role men played in the process was deemed fit to require attention, thus arbitrarily assigning to the women of colonization contradictory features. More recent researches in women anthropology and sociology set out to analyze the image and agency of the white woman in the colonies. According to the ideological needs of the moment, as well as the different challenges opposed to the colonial rule, supposed needs, wills, political and ideological features were ascribed to these women, including racism. A closer scrutiny tends to show that one could draw a parallel between the different ways racial problems were dealt with, and the definition of the role of women in the colonization, varying according to the different demands of the imperial project. This could be explained by the ambiguous status of women in this period of history : they were both subordinates in colonial hierarchies and agents of empire in their own right.

Racism and Preference for Sameness : About Cultural Cloning in Everyday Life. Over the past two decades we have come to the understanding that different forms of discrimination merge and reinforce each other. But (converging) discriminations are also indicative of normative preferences for imagined perfections consisting of a combination of such characteristics as : masculinities, whiteness, Europeanness, physical abilities, high intelligence. The concept of cultural cloning is useful to analyze and explain the taken-for-granted desirability of certain types, the oftenunconscious tendency to comply with normative standards, the fear to deviate from peers. In focusing on normative preferences for sameness as instruments of cultural cloning the paper shifts the emphasis away from an exclusive differentialist approach – where difference and how to incorporate diversity are the focus of attention – towards the deeper, less articulated, problem of only scarcely contested sameness.

The period we are living through is one of restoration, reminiscent of the 1930s. In a bellicose atmosphere that has proved conducive to an unstable reassertion of imperialism, we have seen a renewed dramatisation of questions of demography and migration, leading to an ethnicisation of social and political relations. Though Europe actually has a structural need of a migrant labour-force, its States have instituted a differential management in dealing with questions of race, depending on the origins of the migrants and the nature of the jobs involved. The result has been to reduce vast numbers of migrants to the condition of illegal, clandestine workers, while operating as a powerful factor in the aggravated exploitation of labour and, in some instances, as a factor in the collective criminalisation of migrants. What Europe's former Nation-States are thus witnessing, is the emergence of a citizen-foreigner duality which both occludes and perverts the structure of class relations.

This article reads Adornos's Minima Moralia as an ethical critique of capitalism as a form of life. Negativistic in his approach Adorno reflects, at the same time, on the difficulty of establishing a positive standard for this critique. Reading Minima Moralia through the lenses of the contemporary debate I hold that his approach undermines the alternative between liberal abstinence towards ethical questions and paternalistic theories of the good life in a fruitful way.

The genesis of Axel Honneth's ethics of recognition shows that it represents the attempt to critically rejuvenate historical materialism through an emphasis on the normative dimensions and the anthropological preconditions of social interaction. By making explicit this project to redefine a theory of praxis, the exact theoretical stance and the full practical potential of Honneth's social theory can be stressed. However, by contrast to its initial formulation, the mature theory of recognition appears to have interpreted praxis in a narrow interpersonalist sense. This is especially evident for the spheres of socialisation and labour. The last part of the article argues that the initial definition of the project could have been taken in a more materialist direction. This would define the second marxist horizon of the ethics of recognition, one of fruitful future developments.

How are we to understand the idea of a « political theatre », an idea which can be traced back to Erwin Piscator, the communist stage-director ? How indeed, now that the very meaning of « the political » appears to have undergone a sea-change, so that it encompasses a series of heterogeneous practices and modalities, and when the event of October 1917 no longer suffices to signpost the perspectives of struggle ? Such a question assumes a particular resonance in the theatre of Alain Badiou. Badiou's political and philosophical engagement stands out from any ordinary, routine grammar of political or revolutionary discourse. His theatre bears the implicit traces of this rupture with the ordinary expectations of the political and the revolutionary. Badiou's play, Ahmed le subtil, thus appears to enact a singular gesture, offering as it does the example of a militant theatre bound by its pledged fidelity to the emancipatory event (such as the 1984 labour strike in the Talbot factory). This fidelity resists any thematic capture on the part of the « capitalist-parliamentary » regime, while also exceeding the frame of an explicitly militant theatre.

Isaac Joshua. Envisaging Socialism as Being of the Possible. The second volume of the work by Tony Andréani, Socialism is (of) the Future, has considerable merit, i. e. daring to make proposals. The author passes in review various socialist models and focuses on that of associative socialism : In such a society companies are self-managed. The banks (self-managed) play an essential part, as the financial markets have been abolished. Numerous « social goods » are supplied free of charge. Democratic and incentive planning guides the important choices. This model has the considerable advantage of learning from « really existing socialism ». The reserves it gives rise to concern the maintenance of a capitalist sector, the continued opening on the capitalist world, and the capacity of the companies easily to obtain production means and labour forces. The question of socialism as a political power is treated but remains open to debate. On the tight-rope between maintaining the ideal and accepting reality, Socialism is (of) the Future is an essential tool