[Reader-list] “Racism: A Passion from Above”

[Jeebesh]

“Racism: A Passion from Above”
By Sebastian Budgen / 16 September 2010
In these tense times of increasingly explicit racism, most recently  
against the Roma in France, the French philosopher Jacques Rancière  
has made a very trenchant intervention. Speaking at a public meeting  
on “Why the Roma?” in Montreuil on 11 September, Rancière launched a  
precise attack on what he calls “left-wing intellectual racism” that  
tries to describe racism as simply a “passion of the popular classes”  
that the state can either seek or fail to channel or block, thereby  
occluding the active role of the state itself in creating, reproducing  
and intensifying racist divisions.


Unfortunately, this talk has not yet been translated, but should be  
circulated immediately. Rancière argues:

[That] this so-called critique [of the state supposedly 'exploiting',  
in an opportunistic and electoralist fashion, racist passions from  
below] renews with the presupposition that racism is a popular  
passion, a frightened and irrational reaction of backward sections of  
the population that are unable to adapt to the new mobile and  
cosmopolitan world. The state is accused of failing in its duty  
[manquer à son principe] by being indulgent to such layers. But in  
this way, this critique is confirmed in its position representing  
rationality in the face of popular irrationality.

But, Rancière argues, this is an old game:

A game which consists in opposing to popular passions the  
universalistic logic of the rational state, namely in giving a  
certificate of anti-racism to the racist state policies. It is time to  
turn the argument round and underline the complicity between the  
'rationality' of the state which carries out these measures and the  
convenient other—the conniving adversary—which it sets up as a  
bogeyman, namely the popular passions. In fact, it is not the state  
which is acting under the pressure of popular racism and in reaction  
to the so-called 'populist' passions of the extreme Right. Rather it  
is the raison d'état which is maintaining this other to which it  
confers the imaginary management of its real legislation.

Having made a number of sharp points against the law outlawing the  
burqa, Rancière concludes thus:

a lot of energy has been spent against certain figure of racism—that  
which is incarnated by the Front National—and against a certain idea  
of this racism as an expression  of the 'white trash' or  
'rednecks' (petits blancs) which represent the backward layers of  
society. A good deal of this energy has been recuperated to construct  
the legitimacy of a new form of racism: the racism of the state and  
'left-wing' intellectual racism. It is perhaps time to reorient our  
thinking and struggles against a practice of stigmatisation,  
precarisation and exclusion that today constitute a racism from above:  
a logic of the state and a passion of the intelligentsia.

http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/82-racism-a-passion-from-above

For text in french see http://www.mediapart.fr/node/92825