Toward a Global Idea of Race

Borderlines #27

by Denise Ferreira da Silva

In this far-ranging and penetrating work, Denise Ferreira da Silva asks why, after more than five hundred years of violence perpetrated by Europeans against people of color, is there no ethical outrage? Rejecting the prevailing view that social categories of difference such as race and culture operate solely as principles of exclusion, Silva presents a critique of modern thought that shows how racial knowledge and power produce global space. Looking at the United States and Brazil, she argues that modern subjects are formed in philosophical accounts that presume two ontological moments— historicity and globality —which are refigured in the concepts of the nation and the racial, respectively. By displacing historicity’s ontological prerogative, Silva proposes that the notion of racial difference governs the present global power configuration because it institutes moral regions not covered by the leading post-Enlightenment ethical ideals—namely, universality and self-determination. By introducing a view of the racial as the signifier of globalit y, Toward a Global Idea of Race provides a new basis for the investigation of past and present modern social processes and contexts of subjection. Denise Ferreira da Silva is associate professor of ethnic studies at University of California, San Diego.

Genres: Race, Philosophy, Theory, Nonfiction, Academic, Politics, Research

352 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2007

Reviews

[david · Rating 5 out of 5]

A desperately urgent book that, in the lineage of Frantz Fanon and Sylvia Wynter, is a devastatingly brilliant and difficult read--a crucial text for what Du Bois calls "the Problem of the future world." (253)

By taking apart the intellectual architecture of Descartes, Locke, and Hegel, it attempts to give an account of modern ontology as a category of being articulated through Man.
She suggests that modern epistemology institutes the "transparent I"--the subject whose ontology is never questioned in the post-Euro Enlightenment; the "transparent I" is always figured against its racialized others who condition the being of the modern subject--the transparent I. The racial others to the transparent I occupy a space within the horizon of obliteration and engulfment into this political-intellectual regime. In response, she argues compellingly that race must be understood beyond an analytic of injury that falls neatly within the regime of the liberal state and its dual strategies of engulfment and obliteration. And thus suggests an engagement with 'representation that is not prisoner to its terms' of being--that is a contra-ontology. (35)

[Shut_Descartes_Down · Rating 5 out of 5]

I first read this text a couple of months ago and it has not left my mind since. I return to it almost daily. Her "analytics of raciality" is far more than just a mere corrective to Foucault's turgid "analytic of finitude," but a complete fissure in the reading of the history of modern thought. The canon is far more vicious than even the most skeptical critics have made it out to be, and da Silva is taking no prisoners. In sum, the book is about "science," and the way it configures modern modes of subjectivity, with the aid of the humanist academic disciplines; philosophy, anthropology, and sociology. How, specifically, does "science" signify and create forms of being? and how is this related to contemporary manifestations of racialised violence and subjugation? Modern representation was never simply about "universal" scientific truth, but always secured, through the disciplines (and, of course, by the barrel), the writing of white-supremacy-as-European-particualrity. This book is excellent for those looking to extend (if not lightly critique) Sylvia Wynter's conceptualisation of Man2, but this background reading is not needed at all, for the book stands on its own as a mighty force.

The Western canon institutes not just the oft-aggrandised, self-productive juridical moment of "transparency," but simultaneously, and necessarily figures the "affectable I," that is, "the one emerging in other global regions, the kind of mind subjected to both exterior determination of the 'laws of nature' and the superior force of European minds." (p. 117) This analytic, raciality, is the metaphysics of modern representation.

Da Silva shows thereby that the passage from Foucault's "classical" episteme into a modern, universal Man is effected only on accord of a global raciality. As a product of racial knowledge, "the universal" should thus not be coopted for liberatory purposes. Universality always, if through the metaphysical back door, reinvokes the transparent (or transcendental) "interior-temporal 'I'," simultaneously a moment of racial domination. Race and universality are therefore totally coconstitutive, a point she charges, perhaps excessively, to much of the contemporary "minority discourse." In short, "[R]acial subjection does not result from excessive strategies of power," she writes, "but is an effect of the analytics of raciality, the politico-symbolic apparatus that has produced... global/historical subjects, the white transparent (national "I") and his affectable "others." (p. 219)

She covers A LOT of ground, and this works to her strength, even if some of the individual treatments of philosophers are slightly dubious. But who cares if she, for instance, collapses Kant's pure forms of intuition into the pure concepts of the understanding, when her charge is ultimately against his figuring of a self-productive "interiority" as the reinvented (transcendental) subject, which he most certainly does!! For da Silva to link the material with the symbolic so intricately and yet so clearly poses such a serious challenge to "disciplinarity" and Western knowledge that I am surprised this work is not more readily taken up. Or perhaps that should not come as a surprise, as the "critical" Euro-N. American landscape are still balking over Foucault... yawn !

Her engagement with the canon is deep, but necessary, and I was largely able to follow without being familiar with all the works covered. SO in conclusion, it is a tricky read, but totally groundbreaking, for her ode to Cedric Robinson in the acknowledgments was not in vein. A true masterpiece!

[Miguel · Rating 5 out of 5]

My argument in this book is that modern representation can sustain transparency, as the distinguishing feature of post-Enlightenment European social configurations, only through the engulfment of exterior things, the inescapable effect of scientific reason’s version of universality, while at the same time postponing that “Other” ontology it threatens to institute. (p. 259)

[nico · Rating 5 out of 5]

there's a pit of obliteration everyone stares at petrified and mesmerized in bewilderment and denise jumps into it dragging everyone downwards its bowels cutting through all modern episteme/ontology with a knife that reads "THE RACIAL, THAT MODERN SIGNIFIER THAT DELIMITS ALL THE MURDERS" (261)

sociological excellence, among many things one the most powerful continuation of fanon's thought