Metaracial: Hegel, Antiblackness, and Political Identity

by Rei Terada

A formidable critical project on the limits of antiracist philosophy.

Exploring anxieties raised by Atlantic slavery in radical enlightenment literature concerned about political unfreedom in Europe, Metaracial argues that Hegel's philosophy assuages these anxieties for the left. Interpreting Hegel beside Rousseau, Kant, Mary Shelley, and Marx, Terada traces Hegel's transposition of racial hierarchy into a hierarchy of stances toward reality. By doing so, she argues, Hegel is simultaneously antiracist and antiblack. In dialogue with Black Studies, psychoanalysis, and critical theory, Metaracial offers a genealogy of the limits of antiracism.

231 pages, Paperback

Published May 12, 2023

Reviews

[J]

Besides the first, the key chapter is the perhaps the 7th, Terada preempts criticism of herself as a Beautiful Soul, one that evolves from Hegel’s critique of Kantian morality in simply being more moral, which comes with some qualitative change (not teleological, not racist, taking seriously the unknowability of blackness, etc.). Unfortunately this doesn’t make so much a claim than insulate her argument from any criticism so that any criticism of the book becomes antiblack. Sorry, but we have to get our hands dirty if we want to construct the way we relate to one another, fighting the losing fight isn’t all that noble, I’d rather not sit around and wait for the Event. Underlying the argument is Derrida’s logic of the supplement and I wish this was more explicitly clear. I like the move away from identitarian politics, but Terada does this by arguing we can’t be quick to assert blackness as something empirical (so it’s anti-identity and yet asserts particularity, Edelman somewhat reformulates this and makes it a bit better in Bad Education). However, this fundamentally requires an obsession with particularity over universality. Universality gets a bad rap, and rightfully so considering its association with French Republicanism (why can’t we look elsewhere for universality is unknown to me). Universality here is always infected by a remainder and particularity, obviously the focal point here is blackness but the final chapter’s critique of McGowan suggests the same for Jewishness in regard to the Nazis. Whenever we assert an unknowability of difference ungirding reality and assert cause and effect are ambiguous in the origins of slavery or the Jew re Nazi history (Jew’s became the enemy as a way to fight against communists, hence the Nazi’s were against universality as such, not “universality through Jewishness,” this reading can only come after the fact and with revisionist history or an outright dismissal of it; Nazi’s forwarded the term equity over equality, y’all), we end up taking a position absolutely opposed to what historians have to say about the matter (thanks Derrida). This allows one to transpose historical problems into ontological ones. This is problematic, yet, we apparently cannot argue with it or fall into antiblack logic. To its credit it’s the most developed critique of left-Hegelians that aren’t standard Marxist ones, which makes it super valuable!

And, with regard to the first chapter, Phenomenology is an invitation, it doesn’t actively create an enemy or even rely on one operating in the background (which Terada seems to only get through reading the lectures on world history through the sub-Saharan African that is left behind and Hegel’s views on war, w/ regard to both of these I suppose I’m an apologist on the first matter and think Hegel isn’t correct within his own system of thought regarding war and our relationship to the nation so…). Only by making the Lectures the key to Phenomenology is Terada able to assert antiblackness in the dialectical method. Sorry, but someone can only be left behind in the dialectic if we are already looking for it and read it into the text. To be overly reductive, Terada asserts that those who don’t agree with the reality Hegel puts forward are left behind. But it’s not as if Hegel presumes people just go about in everyday life and through self-negation are able to get to Absolute Knowledge. Instead, the problem really only arises for those who have read Hegel, have read left-Hegelians, and from there on continue to invest themselves in particularity. This isn’t someone “left behind,” it’s someone with a different perspective that disagrees, precisely someone who disagrees with dialectics in general. Since the disagreement can roughly be mapped onto one of the dialectics in the Phenomenology, in this case the Beautiful Soul, and because Hegel clearly criticizes the position the reader (Terada) takes up, does not mean you fall out of reality or are metaracialized by the Hegelian method. To be overly naive I simply don’t understand why deconstructive logic isn’t hegemonic in its particularity. Why is Hegel’s system (here explicitly open since its critiquing left-Hegelians) hegemonic but not deconstruction? Deconstruction is much less open to contingency than Hegel, sorry. (And perhaps is the most “metaracial” in fact). Hegel doesn’t have enemies or those left out, in fact left-Hegelians can only have adversaries, unlike Derrida. Terada knows the issue here is one of the Beautiful Soul who fights for ideals and refuses to act, hence the emphasis on the Beautiful Soul in the 7th chapter and her reading of Niethammer’s and Hegel’s letters as completely opposed in chapter 8 (they’re extremely close friends, like seriously, wtf? I can’t imagine someone reading my emails to close friends and doing this lol) is also revealing. To see one as being left out, the “bad slave,” who for the antiracist is now a “stance,” fundamentally, incommensurably, rejects dialectics from an external perspective and ironically props up an enemy itself, which Terada herself hints at but this simply attempts to assert a new sort of complicity outside Hegel’s so-called “system” and falls back into making his system one that is totalizing. I would assert that this goes against reading against blackness as empirical and so points out a contradiction Terada can’t maneuver through (look at the Frankenstein chapter). Footnote (109n9) on the conversation between Edelman and Warren is pretty interesting to see how Terada tries to get out of the tension between history and ontology, which Edelman is right to point out are conflictual yet held together by afropessimism. Sorry, again, you must get your hands dirty, you have to make a choice, in holding them together you inevitably fall into contradiction. It’s a useful contradiction to think through, and even admirable, but rejecting politics isn’t going to save us.

Overall, refreshing to read a non-Marxist critique of left-Hegelians. Now I wish some Deleuzians would hop in the fray and give me more to read!