Races

Is there race without racism? According to Kwame Anthony Appiah, the answer is yes, at least in principle. Noting that genetic disparity between races is only minimally larger than variation within these populations, he argues that 'racialism is not, in itself, a doctrine that must be dangerous"¦ Racialism is false; but by itself, it seems to be a cognitive rather than a moral problem.' For Appiah, racialism characterises the view that humans can be categorised according to various genotypical or phenotypical traits. It involves a more or less neutral, 'innocent' classification upon which the violence of racism supervenes. Yet is racialism truly as innocuous and non-violent as he suggests? Poststructuralist theory has often sought to widen our conception of violence beyond the material, concrete or physical forms it assumes. Jacques Derrida, for instance, employs the term violence to describe various quasi-transcendental conditions that reduce difference to sameness; they are quasi-transcendental because they are conditions of possibility and impossibility. For example, the 'yes' that opens any relation to alterity requires the incomplete appropriation of the other, an arrogation by virtue of which access to alterity is always indirect, mediated and partial. The passage to the other is aporetic: both open and closed, possible and impossible. Language similarly threatens singularity insofar as it depends on a system of iterability: a minimal repeatability (sameness) that is both possible and impossible because the intelligibility of every signifier is always interrupted by its difference to itself, its severance from any univocal signified.