Transparent “I” and affectable others: the analytics of raciality in the (re)production of the modern subject

Abstract

Homo Modernus: towards a global idea of race  is the epicenter of Denise Ferreira da Silva’s counter-ontology of modernity. Through a Foucaultian excavation of the modern episteme, the author shows that racial violence, as intuited by Fanon, is fundamental in the production of the subject. Hegel’s transparency thesis establishes man as self-consciousness and self-determined by his interiority unfolded in time. In contrast, racial subalterns are produced as affectable things determined by spatial exteriority. The analytics of raciality, which emerges in the scientific version of reason with the sciences of life, man and society, establishes the continental and epochal border between transparency and affectability, recombining the signifiers of nation, race and culture. After this onto-epistemic description, the sociology of race relations is subjected to criticism, showing that the “logic of exclusion” reproduces and disregards the “logic of obliteration”, which presumes the annihilation of affectability. Finally, it articulates the national narratives of the United States and Brazil in the contemporary global configuration established by the analytics of raciality. The Brazilian national subject is the “mestiço”, a European with African fragments, whose access to transparency is conditioned on the erasure of non-white affectability. The book, written more than twenty years ago but only now translated into Portuguese, is as a classic of radical black thought, placing pertinent reservations on post-modern and post-colonial thought. Relating this work with more recent interventions by the author, we conclude by reflecting on the critical and emancipatory possibilities that she proposes.

Keywords:
modernity; colonialism; racial violence; sociology of race relations; Brazilian social thought