civilisation, democracy, justice and the rights of man

rc-am rcollins at netlink.com.au
Thu Apr 8 23:17:44 PDT 1999



>From "Racism and Nationalism" Etienne Balibar --- in Balibar and
Wallerstein (1991) _Race, Nation, Class_.

"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



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