Derrida

Thanks Dasgupta Debraj for sharing this link of Jacques Derrida's 2003 talk on Racism and Deconstruction. A lucid and characteristically brilliant presentation. Some synoptic points:

For Derrida,

1 Racism is both a speech act in the performative sense and yet it's "speechless" because it addresses a blank scientific content. This is the first aporia.

2. The second aporia is the fact that it is racism that founds the notion of race and not the other way round. Racist discourse tries to naturalise something that isn't natural.

3. Deconstruction is the historical condition of racism when racism is defined as the "trace" of "another otherness of the other which does NOT appear as such"

4. The remarks on the possible collusions of racism and humanism are interesting. So are the small discussions on "state racism", "imperial racism", archeology and so on. We could think through the two formulations "racism is not political in the strict sense" and "every racism tends to be a state racism" in the political dialectic of the aporia.

5. Racism offers a "plasticity" of the theological-political case where the political and the non-political and the religious and the non-religious are mixed up.

There's of course a lot more in the talk. As Derrida says, racism is always already a reaction against racism or "post-racism". This is all the more important in our officially "multicultural" times where I think (this isn't Derrida) multiculturalism itself has become yet another racist strategy that over-emphasises "difference" and paves the way for discrimination.

https://vimeo.com/25689804