Notes for a Critique of the ‘Metaphysics of Race’

Abstract

Two questions frame this response to Amin’s article ‘The Remainders of Race’. It first introduces an epistemological question that recognizes the impossibility of separating ontology and epistemology in modern thought and asks why contemporary studies of racial subjugation so infrequently consider the concept of race’s onto-epistemological function. The second, methodological, question necessarily follows. Acknowledging that ‘the what of race’ cannot be separated from the ‘how of race’ makes it crucial to ask why the former is no longer considered in most analyses of the latter. There follows a mapping of the context of emergence of political-symbolic strategies that carve out racial difference and cultural difference as human (moral) attributes. The article shows that, rather than an extraneous notion or a referent of a natural (god-given) human attribute, the concept of race is the modern ethico-political device that refigures the workings of scientific universality in political and ethical texts. What this does is to enable the argument that, instead of manifestations of human ‘sorting’ instincts, the operatives (juridical, economic and symbolic) of raciality proliferating in the global present consist of biopolitical architectures, mechanisms and procedures designed and assembled with the main tools of racial power/knowledge, namely racial and cultural difference.