Race/Caste: Contemplating Universal Emancipation

…although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming of it.

—Helen Keller¹

In her book Universal Emancipation: Race beyond Badiou, Elisabeth Paquette works out an assemblage by which she creatively resists Alain Badiou's politics of indifference towards the very idea of race. The taxonomy of race lingers as a vigorous sustained absence in Badiou's works because he finds both generic and particularistic understanding of race detached from the knowledge of Beings he seeks to nurture. While the substance of Being for Badiou stands as a dynamic expanse synthesizing diverse entities into a differential singularity—or "oneness" as one may call it—he views race as a state-constructed abstraction or what Mbembe calls "a nonbeing."² Further, Badiou does not view race merely as antagonistic to the creative equation he sets up between Being and Event. Rather, he views it as a form of ontological enclosure that stultifyingly borders the constitutive expanse of Beings.

First, for Badiou, any engagement with particularities such as race is problematic because it entails thinking through a panoply of anthropogenic or onto-theological mechanisms riddled with binaries and dialectics. Second, he believes that only a new grammatology devoid of binarisms and dialectical formulations can produce the affects necessary to create a universal consciousness of "indifference" towards the very idea of race. Third, Badiou believes that his politics of indifference towards racial particularities will foreground the primacy of Events in creating subject positions rather than showcasing anthropogenic historical sites as the arboreal or originary source of such creations.

Paquette, on the other hand, does not disengage with Badiou's take on race but goes on to establish an equation of disjunctive relationality with it. Paquette seeks to reconstitute the conceptual borders of race to destabilize the reductive state logic that produces these categories in the first place. Moreover, by subjecting the existing racial categories to a reconstructive critique, she problematizes Badiou's refusal to engage with racial categories in any form. Paquette agrees with Badiou's positioning of race as an abstraction constructed and sustained by the state, but she also argues that the preservation of racial particularities eventually makes way for overcoming them. Paquette argues that Badiou's way of dispensing with the idea of race stands as an equally abstract theoretical exercise difficult to translate into praxis. So, as a critical rejoinder to Badiou's politics of racial indifference, Paquette stages an activist engagement with the historical genealogy of race. An engagement of this kind lays the ground for her to creatively represent the futility of anthropogenic historicity of racial categories in the face of the dynamics of living.

In Chapter One, Paquette shows why Badiou cultivates a universal consciousness of indifference towards racial categories. Paquette demonstrates that it is Badiou's commitment to universal emancipatory politics that makes him put forward racial particularities as operational mechanisms of the state for surveilling and controlling us. However, she stresses that if Badiou approaches the idea of racial particularity as null and void, it is because he finds it divorced from his idea of Being. Badiou approaches Being in terms of its ethico-political bindings with truth that an Event foregrounds in the form of a "disclosure" or what Martin Heidegger calls aletheia.³ Moreover, for Badiou, by its occurrence, an Event produces a sense of loyalty towards the truth it foregrounds and inspires us to turn to this truth in the creation of a universalist emancipatory politics.

In Chapters Two and Three, Paquette excavates the palpable traces of Jean-Paul Sartre's conceptualization of race nestled in Badiou's indifference towards racial particularities. However, she diverges from Sartre, who subordinated racial emancipation to the class struggle (53). In these chapters, Paquette connects with the ideas of Césaire, Fanon, Du Bois, and Jeffers about race to consolidate her disjunctive engagement with Badiou. Contra Badiou, Paquette desires creative or perverse overcoming of these categories by conserving race. It is only by...