This article is a response to Robert Bernasconi’s critical philosophy of race. I start by speaking of the specific style in which life and philosophy are related in his work. I argue that he devises a political phenomenology which considers the lived experiences of racialization and inquires into their historical conditions, which have become “practico-inert” in facticity. Bernasconi’s thesis that the history of race is not determined by racial essentialism and his account of race as a border concept call for (...) an expansion of the notion of race that will better serve the cause of the global fight against racism. (shrink)

Although much attention has already been paid to Kant’s ideas on race, more research is needed to determine the sources that he used to support his portrayal of non-white races. A comprehension of the intellectual context gives us the opportunity to see the way in which Kant wished to contribute to discussions on inheritable human characteristics and the inferiority of certain races. This article will emphasize the relevance of the views of Joseph Priestley and Alexander Wilson for Kant’s hypothesis on (...) the relation between phlogiston and the black race. This allows us to comprehend the methodology that Kant prescribed for natural history and its consequences for his understanding of the inferiority of the black race. (shrink)

This article traces the hidden race-religion constellation in Europe. The term “race-religion constellation” refers to the connection or co-constitution of the categories of race and “religion.” Specifically, the term “race-religion constellation” is used to refer to the practice of classifying people into races according to categories we now associate with the term “religion.” This calls for a consideration of European history and forms of racism in Europe, such as anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. This article aims to provide an alternative non-secularized or (...) biological account of the origins of the socially constructed category of race in Europe. The alternative story begins in the sixteenth century, when the category of “religion” as a means for classifying peoples was both constructed and politicized. In tracing this alternative story, this article seeks to outline a framework for a critical philosophy of race focused on a European religion line that intersects with Du Bois's color line. (shrink)

Castoriadis explains racism as a mode of hatred of the other and as a feature of the self-institution of heteronomous societies built on ethnocentrism. At the level of the psychical human being he identifies two forms of racist fixation on others: hatred of the other as the flip-side of self-love and as the other side of self-hatred, which he analyses, respectively, as a mode of pseudo-reasoning and as unconscious desire. We argue that attention to the ontology that underpins the modern (...) European subject’s epistemological deployment of racism in the context of coloniality reveals the limits and a blindspot of Castoriadis’s analysis. (shrink)

In the fight against racism, philosophy has to interrogate caste in its own histories and current decolonial consensus. Caste has been evading its interrogation as the oldest race theory and racist practice, which continue to oppress the lower-caste peoples who constitute the majority population of the Indian subcontinent. Caste and race are species of the hypophysics of man, which consecrates scaled intrinsic value in human nature through the notion of “being born as” by “being born to.” They are analogues in (...) having the same denigrate-dominate function of exploiting by including as born inferior. However, caste and race are also homologues since the hypophysics of caste has been at the origins of the hypophysics of race from at least the eighteenth century, culminating in the “Aryan doctrine” of the Nazis, now being revived. Caste was the empirical, conceptual, and textual resource for Europeans as it showed that large groups could be dominated as well as excluded through the self-designated superiority, supplied by the Brahminical texts, of the oppressing group. Rather than a colonial construct, caste is the oldest racism, which in colonial times devised new calypsologies—ways to mask itself against rising anticaste thought and politics. Postcolonial and subaltern theories disguise caste’s racism as “religion,” “culture,” and subaltern subjectivity, while some sociologists have denigrated Dalit scholarship as unacademic and emotional. The homologies of caste are still dangerously regnant today. (shrink)

In this paper I address the questions posed to me by Bret Davis, Zeynep Direk, and Charles Mills, by focusing on, first, the eurocentrism of academic philosophy in the West and strategies to overcome it; secondly, the interface of critical philosophy of race and global politics, especially as the latter touches on Islamophobia; and, thirdly, the role of critical philosophy of race in challenging the complacency of philosophy departments in the face of the discipline’s long-standing complicity with racism.