What needs to be resisted when faced with the shocking reports and images of the burning Paris suburbs is what I call the hermeneutic temptation: the search for some deeper meaning or message hidden in these outbursts.
[...] She is aware that Beauvoir’s claim about the factual inferiority of blacks aims at something more than the simple social fact that, in the American South of (not only) that time, blacks were treated as inferior by the white majority and, in a way, they effectively were inferior. But her criti…
the truly trenchant dimension of racism: the ‘being’ of blacks (as of whites or anyone else) is a socio-symbolic being
the essence of violence has nothing to do with ontic violence, suffering, war, destruction, etc.; the essence of violence resides in the violent character of the very imposition/founding of the new mode of the Essence – disclosure of communal Being – itself
The same principle applies to every political protest: when workers protest their exploitation, they do not protest a simple reality, but an experience of their real predicament made meaningful through language. Reality in itself, in its stupid existence, is never intolerable: it is language, its s…
