- Deleuze and Race by Arun Saldanha and Jason Michael Adams
By Arun Saldanha and Jason Michael Adams, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013. 307 pp.; ISBN: 978-0748669592.
Deleuze and Race is the first collection of articles to focus on the themes of race and racism in Gilles Deleuze. Deleuze’s works have been used to theorize sexual difference, but remain largely untapped as a resource for work on racial difference and racism. Crucial to dialogue with critical philosophy of race, the authors succeed in working at the intersections of Deleuze’s philosophy with anthropology, politics, history, aesthetics, gender, and race studies. Indeed, these authors faithfully translate the philosophical concepts of representation, facialization, immanence, and affective becoming for application in the critique of race. That they do so by exploring such intersections makes Deleuze and Race a particularly impressive compilation. The anthology suggests that Deleuze offers an alternate reading of race than the reading that comes out of the Hegelian and Sartrean influences. It is perhaps because of the stronghold that these influences retain on philosophy of race that Deleuze has not yet been initiated into the race studies canon. These articles, however, frame Deleuze as an indispensible voice for the critique of racism, colonialism, and neocolonial late capitalism. Deleuze’s work is a break with Hegelian dialectics, and a serious attempt to go beyond its oppositions. Thus the anthology intends to provide a deeper voice to critical philosophy of race. [End Page 344]
In the “Pre-face,” Nick Nesbitt shows one of the clearest examples of what a Deleuzean reading of race can do for the Haitian Revolution. Historically, the Haitian Revolution may be seen as a “celebration [that] tends to be articulated teleologically in terms of [liberal] contemporary values such as autodetermination, multiculturalism and tolerance for the Other” (1). However, from a critical Deleuzean perspective, the Haitian Revolution addresses “a priori, transcendental determinations” that reveal processes of subjection and exploitation, and the potential of escape (ibid.). Deleuze’s critique of Kant through “transcendental empiricism” (which both critiques the transcendental subject and questions its creation of the empirical object) is responsible for this critical potential. Indeed, according to Nesbitt, Deleuze’s “transcendental empiricism” offers the theoretical tools for a dis-identification from the representational thinking that creates racial stratification and the teleological framework that governs racism (2).
Arun Saldanha’s introduction, “Bastard and Mixed-Blood Are the True Names of Race,” continues Nesbitt’s focus on Deleuze’s critique of representationalism. For her, the power of Deleuze stems from Deleuze’s biological materialism. Because Deleuze’s materialism is not reductive Saldanha finds it crucial to contemporary understandings of the function of racism. Biology and the body must be thought through an immanentist-materialism. This immanentist materialism would be better able to grasp “how bodies are materially differentiated into hierarchies in the first place” (7). It is through this understanding that a critique of the universalism that dismisses the singularities of bodies can occur. Thus, a “universalism would derive its impetus not by transcending but literally passing through the cluttered corporalities of race” (ibid.).
Claire Colebrook’s concern is with the concept of the face in A Thousand Plateaus. An elaboration on the difference between Levinas’s philosophy of the face and Deleuze’s concept of facialization here provides the reader with a starting point to grounding a Deleuzean ethics. The problem is, racism stops at the face as a representation of humanity—with “the White Man face” being the model of representation. We must, rather, go through the face as a singularity and pass humanity as historically defined. She writes, “If racial delirium occurs as an affirmation of the possibility of anything becoming extinct, racism is a neurotic grip on survival” (39). We must fight the face as an activity of unity and as the persistence of a representational thinking.
A number of extremely strong articles in the collection also focus on Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of facialization as the teleological [End Page 345] framework of racism. For instance, Simone Bignall’s “Dismantling the White Man Face” explains how “the process of facialization describes the dynamic emergence of a dominant system...