This text was published in the Revue des Deux Mondes, June 21, 2021
The development of a new anti-racism in Europe and in USA confronts us with a troubling paradigm shift. This shift represents a challenge for humanism. We are aware of the current debates on both sides of the Atlantic on the return of race in anti-racist activism. If this activism recognizes that race is a racist construct, it nevertheless systematically invokes it. Following the Anglo-American model, in France we speak of "racialized" people, for example, which means that people find themselves reduced to their skin color, that the way they are perceived rivets them to this racial identity. The word "racialized" suggests that in a black person, the white man sees "the Black" before seeing the man. If the white man says he does not see the Black in the man but the man alone, then the new anti-racist activism sees what is called "color blindness".
To translate "color blindness", the French would say that we do not discriminate according to skin color, that color is of no concern to us. However, this idea that we do not see color, the new anti-racism considers it as a form of excuse or bad faith (the white man, from his privileged comfort, says: I do not see color, I am blind to color, I only see the man in the Black). But in truth, the White man sees color. He pretends in bad faith not to see it, so that we leave him alone with his prejudices.
This is to give back to this notion of “color blindness”,
of racial "color blindness", all its nobility
and its humanist scope that I would like to address here.
Phenomenologically, that the Black is perceived first by the non-Black for his skin color is a hypothesis that is as good as any other. The fact remains that a book very influenced by the new American antiracism, Whites, Jews and Us by Houria Bouteldja, would never have seen the light of day a decade ago. Its title announces a return of race in the name of anti-racism, and this return makes anyone who distrusts racial categories shudder, anyone who knows that race does not exist. We are faced with a double injunction, even a denial: I know that race does not exist, but still, whites are privileged. Asked to admit that race is a fiction, we must also admit its empirical reality. Thus on many American campuses, anti-bias training workshops are convened in which whites are separated from blacks. Incidentally, Jews disrupt this positive segregation: are they white, black or other? Are they oppressors or oppressed? In this binary thinking, the Jews having, we are told, socially "succeeded", we will put them, whether they like it or not, on the side of the Whites, that is to say the privileged.
These are anecdotes, but as they tend to multiply, it is legitimate to identify a new paradigm.
This return of race in the fight against domination has an origin that could be said to be more strategic than philosophical. It comes from the post-colonial academic Gayatri Spivak who called for a “strategic essentialism” in the 1980s. The argument consisted in holding that a return to race or identity was necessary to combat racism. Essentialism, here, would not be philosophical, but purely strategic and tactical.
But the new anti-racism is caught in its own trap: it now sees only the color in the face of the other man, and divides the world into black and white. It also speaks of "black lives" and "black bodies" to denounce police violence and social inequalities. These expressions, "black lives", "black bodies", must question us. They seem to reduce the person to bare, biological life. The rhetoric is not innocent. There is, in these formulas, a kind of claimed anti-humanism that seems to me to be the counterpart of racism. To put it another way, racist anti-humanism responds to an anti-racist anti-humanism. "Systemic" racism echoes a systemic anti-racism. Racism that reduced the black man to a bare life, to a reified body, responds to an anti-racism without a face, that is to say without that which, in the face, exceeds color and contours. The rhetoric of skin, of naked life, persists stubbornly in the language of antiracism, as the return of what has been repressed by centuries of dehumanization of the black man. Today it is claimed, strategically, as a weapon against racism. But does this rhetoric not risk turning against its users?
“Color blindness” condemned by the new anti-racism
would be precisely the condition of the encounter with a face
Reader ofEmmanuel Levinas, I form the hypothesis that in the face, we see what cannot be seen. After the War, the philosopher developed a thought of otherness based on the relationship to the face in the encounter with others. This notion of face remains difficult to grasp, since it is supposed, precisely, to make the grasp by the concept and phenomenology tremble. What then is the face? Is it a metaphor, or should it be understood literally? Is it the eyes, the nose, the mouth? Is the face a simple figure of speech?
One might think that it is another name for the invisible soul, or for some disembodied specter. But on the contrary, what we see in the face of others is an incarnate presence, immanent, intra-worldly, therefore, but which indicates a surpassing towards transcendence, because of its vulnerability. Indeed, the face indicates that the other I meet is mortal. Thus, in the face of the black man, the color would stop me, or I would stop at its color, were it not that every face surpasses its anatomical immanence.
There is at Proust, in the narrator's experience of Albertine's face, a moving illustration of the impossibility of fixing the face, of totalizing it. The face, in fact, always presents itself differently; it differs from itself. It is not an object placed before me, it is movement and expression. It is, for example, difficult to remember the beloved face. Through imagination, I approach it blindly, and as soon as I see it again, it does not coincide with its image. This is because the face is not an idol but an icon, it is a window onto infinity.
Thus the face is irreducible to its phenomenal appearance, to a presence that I can go around. The face is speech, it is address. Levinas would say that it is demand. This demand, this address exceeds the phenomenon of the face: skin color, features. So that the "color blindness" condemned by the new antiracism would be precisely the condition of the encounter with a face.
From the point of view of Levinas's thought, this sentence, "I do not see color," suddenly takes on a significant density. Because the face is what blinds me, not only to its pigmentation, but also to its contours, its lines, to everything that limits it. In a word, the face blinds me to its immanence, to its appearance in the world, since it makes me see beyond my vision. Consequently, authentically meeting the other man requires not seeing his color. I always meet others blindly. The face is an outstretched hand, it is, Levinas would say, speech and already an invitation. But this outstretched hand of the face can be hospitality or hostility, depending, precisely, on whether one rejects its call, its vocative. An interpellation that is not ideological, on the contrary, but personal. From person to person. The Hebrew says: "Panim el panim," face to face with others. The thought of the face is a personalism, and Levinasian ethics is above all an interpersonal relationship foreign to ideologies.
I cannot follow Levinas in his ethical radicalism, in this pathos that demands the impossible, namely renunciation, even self-sacrifice, at the call of the other. And no one is required to do the impossible. I do not like these dramatic formulations of the "me-hostage-to-the-other", nor this idea that the encounter with others is violence, that others dispossesses me. I can follow him, however, in his intuition that the face is more than its phenomenon. The new antiracism is anchored on the contrary in a reaffirmation of the phenomenon, in this case of color.
In the sixties, Levinas distinguished between a philosophy of totality and an ethics of infinity. He saw in the history of philosophy a history of being leading to a thought of the whole (Hegel as the end of the great trajectory of ontology, as the end of philosophy, as the dialectical resolution of the other in the same). On the contrary, ethics must open totality to an otherness that cannot be reduced to the same. There is a kind of challenge here for the new antiracism. Because this otherness, in order not to be reduced, must absolutely escape immanence, and therefore what I have called the face reified in its color or its features. So that skin color, "race," the recourse that this new antiracism makes to "race," even if it were a construction, can only hinder the encounter with the other. To race, which is part of the same, we must therefore oppose the trace, which is part of the other.
“Flee, flee there,” wrote Mallarmé.
Escaping is all well and good, but where to go?
It is upstream of the work that we must seek the origin of the thought of the face, a thought that takes its source in the tragic history of the century. In the 1930s, the young philosopher observed the rise of Nazism and the arrival of Hitler to power. He then published two hard-hitting essays, Some reflections on the philosophy of Hitlerism and On escape.
On Escape (1935) is a reflection on the urgency of breaking out of Heideggerian ontology. Man, says Levinas, needs something other than perseverance in being. If he does not aspire to nothingness, he nevertheless aspires to transcend the confinement in being. To escape. This text remains mysterious, because the philosopher never indicates what this escape means. "To flee, to flee there," wrote Mallarmé. To escape is all well and good, but to go where? We will not know until the thought of otherness, time and the face is developed, during and after the War. However, just before the publication of On Escape, he had published an essay that could be said to be appropriate: Some Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism, a title he would later regret, since Hitlerism is not a philosophy. Hitlerism is even the opposite of philosophy.
Since its Greek origins, philosophy has invited man to escape from his assignment to the past, from his fatum. To Nazism, philosophy opposes the hope of escaping the nightmare of racial determinism. This determinism, Levinas calls it "the riveted being". Being riveted to one's body, to one's biological destiny, such is the nightmare from which philosophical thought promises to escape. And there is in philosophy, and he will say in the great spiritualities, there is in the traditions of Athens and Jerusalem, a hope of remission. Time can be put back, the past repealed if not forgotten. This is the meaning of teshuva in the Jewish tradition, of the remission of faults in Christianity. And in philosophy, from Platonism to the Enlightenment and then in liberal individualism, it is the meaning of a reason that allows us to go beyond this riveted being, by rushing towards the universal.
The new paradigm of the anti-racist fight, as we will have understood, comes from an anti-philosophy which condemns man to the irremissibility of race and history.
