"Just as racist movements represent a paradoxical synthesis of the contradictory ideologies of revolution and reaction, which, in certain circumstances, is all the more effective for being paradoxical, so theoretical racism represents the ideal synthesis of transformation and fixity, of repetition and destiny. The 'secret', the discovery of which it endlessly rehearses, is that of humanity eternally leaving animality behind and eternally threatened with falling into the grasp of animality. [...]
It would therefore be very wide of the mark to believe that theoretical racism is incompatible with any form of transcendence... On the contrary, racist theories necessarily contain an aspect of sublimation, an idealisation of the species, the privileged figure of which is aesthetic; this is why that idealisation necessarily culminates in the description and valorization of a certain type of man, demonstrating the human ideal, both in terms of body and of mind... The aestheticisation of social relations is a crucial contribution of racism t the constitution of the projective field of politics. Even the idealisation of the technocratic values of efficiency presupposes anaesthetic sublimation. [...] And the symbolic reversal which, in the socialist tradition, has, by contrast, valorized the figure of the worker as the perfect type of future humanity, as the 'transition' from the extreme alienation to extreme potency, has been accompanied, as we know, by an intense aestheticisation and sexualisation, which has allowed us to ask what elements of racism re-surfaced historically in 'socialist humanism'." --------------------------------------------
>From an Interview with Richard Beardsworth: Nietzsche and the Machine
Journal of Nietzsche Studies 7 (1994), 7-66
Jaques Derrida:[...]in the determination or behaviour of each citizen or
singularity there should be present, in some form or other, the call
to a world democracy to come, each singularity should determine itself
with the sense of the stakes of a democracy which can no longer be
contained within frontiers, which can no longer be localised, which
can no longer depend on the decisions of a specific group of citizens,
a nation or even of a continent. This determination means that one
must both think, and think democracy, globally. This may be something
completely new, something that has never been done, for we're here
talking of something much more complex, much more modest and yet much
more ambitious than any notion of the universal, cosmopolitan or
human. I realise that there is so much rhetoric today - obvious,
conventional, reassuring, determined in the sense of without risk -
which resembles what lm saying. When, for example, one speaks of the
United Nations, when one speaks in the name of a politics that
transcends national borders, one can always do so in the name of
democracy. One has to make the difference clear, then, between
democracy in this rhetorical sense and what lm calling a "democracy
to come". The difference shows, for example, that all decisions made
in the name of the Rights of Man are at the same time alibis for the
continued inequality between singularities, and that we need to invent
other concepts than state, superstate, citizen, and so forth for this
new International. The democracy to come obliges one to challenge
instituted law in the name of an indefinitely unsatisfied justice,
thereby revealing the injustice of calculating justice whether this be
in the name of a particular form of democracy or of the concept of
humanity. This democracy to come is marked in the movement that has
always carried a present beyond itself, makes it inadequate to itself,
"out of joint" (Hamlet); as I argue in Specters of Marx, it obliges us
to work with the spectrality in any moment of apparent presence. This
spectrality is very weak; it is the weakness of the powerless, who, in
being powerless, resist the greatest strength.
--- new Derrida sites at: http://www.lake.de/sonst/homepages/s2442/jd.html http://www.cas.usf.edu/journal/fobo/jd.html http://www.cee.hw.ac.uk/~johnm/Archive/jd.html