The Banalization of Racial Events

Denise Ferreira da Silva

Theory & Event, Volume 20, Number 1, January 2017, pp. 61-65 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/646842

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The Banalization of Racial Events

Denise Ferreira da Silva

A commentary on “The Time of the Political” by Wendy Brown, Theory &

Event, Vol. 1, No. 1 (1997)

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/32438

R
eturning to Wendy Brown’s “The Time of the Political” remind-
ed me of Hannah Arendt’s comments on Eichmann’s affect, in
the postscript of her report: “Eichmann was not Iago and not
Macbeth … he had no motive at all (…) He merely, to put the matter
colloquially, never realized what he was doing. (…) He was not stupid.
It was sheer thoughtlessness (…) that predisposed him to become of
the greatest criminals of that period.”1 More precisely, Brown’s and Ar-
endt’s seemingly different takes on “the banal” refers to the workings
of separability,2 as both rest on a double distinction, one which places
racial subjugation outside of the ‘proper’ domain of political theory.
Explicitly, this distinction appears as racial matters are placed in a mor-
al (social or cultural) terrain, where affectability (emotions and attach-
ments) rules; implicitly, however, it refers to a deep layer of modern
thought, in which raciality functions among the conditions of possi-
bility for articulating the proper subject of the Political as a self-deter-
mined (self-regulated or self-transparent) existent, while affectability
is attributed to everything (bodies, minds, places, and more-than-hu-
mans) that is not white/European. These deeper layers explain why,
Brown’s 1997 piece lists the beating of Rodney King, the OJ Simpson
trial, and the Hill-Thomas hearings among the ‘banal events’ that do
concern ‘proper’ political theorizing.
Let me begin through Arendt’s comments on Eichmann and his
crime. While recognizing that “the Final Solution” was a crime that
could only be perpetrated with the use of state apparatus, The Jeru-
salem court insisted on treating agents of the Nazi state (such as Eich-
mann) as “human beings” and, as such, liable to criminal charges. The
statement in the verdict that “in politics, obedience and support are
the same thing” indicated that he was found guilty because he did not
disobey orders not because he obeyed them.3 A few pages later, com-
menting on the Jerusalem court’s argument that “manifestly criminal
orders must not be obeyed,”4 Arendt shows why Eichmann’s “sheer

Theory & Event Vol. 20, No. 1, 61–65 © 2017 Johns Hopkins University Press
62  Theory & Event

thoughtlessness” and his defence that he was a mere “tiny cog” in

the Nazi state machinery would not exculpate him. In simple Kantian
terms, Eichmann was found guilty of not acting on the principle of
human dignity because he decided to act as a (dehumanized/thought-
less) functionary, as a cog in Hitler’s machinery of evil. By treating
Eichmann as a rational moral agent, that is, with free will (self-deter-
mination)—with the capacity to make moral judgements and decide
accordingly—the Jerusalem court displaced affectability onto the Nazi
state.
The Third Reich, however, has become an exception “in the heart
of Europe,” a polity defined by its moral outlook (a criminal state) and
not its political stance (a modern sovereign/self-determined power).
Hence because he obeyed criminal orders from his bureaucratic supe-
riors, Eichmann failed to act as a rational moral agent. This apparent
Kantian paradox—in that the (moral) subject of decision is self-deter-
mined and the (political) functionary of the modern bureaucracy is af-
fectable—disappears if we recall the depth of raciality’s work. For, as
Sylvia Wynter reminds us, the kind of rationality to which Kant attri-
butes dignity and self-determination, said to be exclusive to the modes
of being human found in Europe, should extend to mental (moral and
intellectual) and juridical and economic configurations. In so far as he
obeyed the orders of the Nazi state, Eichmann behaved like a Kan-
tian rational being (as his “thoughtlessness” suggests), and as such
as the kind of human being found only in Europe. Now the problem
is that raciality also accounts for how, in the aftermath of WWII, the
Third Reich was singled out as a pathological exception; a racist state
as opposed to the other rational ones. Put differently, “prejudice” and
“evil,” instead of the “acts of state,”5 have become the chosen causes
for the “unprecedented” massacres that would add the crime of geno-
cide (and crimes against humanity) to the books of international law.
How does this concern “The Time of the Political”? The distinc-
tions organizing Brown’s piece are between “everyday (banal) events”
versus movement (expressive of conditions), “reading events” versus
theorizing “conditions and possibilities”, and “hubristic pundit” ver-
sus “political theorist.” The view of the Political that privileges liberty
(another figuring of self-determination) offers her—as well as much
of contemporary political theory—limited tools for the analysis of the
global present, in particular in regards to the persistence of colonial and
racial violence. Let me bring it home by commenting on the everyday
events that are grabbing our imagination now, as we endure anoth-
er “media-driven” US Presidential race and its lousy politics. Among
the many developments of today is the increased attention to police
killing of unarmed black persons and a movement, Black Lives Matter,
which is very different than the ones that Brown identifies as repre-
sentative of what is worthy of political theorizing. My concern here is
 da Silva | The Banalization of Racial Events  63

with whether a political theory toolbox that carries on the basis of the
distinctions she makes will be capable of capturing, to use her words,
“the conditions and possibilities” for political existence that Black Lives
Matter signals. This is a movement that has responded precisely to the
ubiquity of scenes of state violence - police officers executing black
persons in the streets of Black America, on TV, and in social media.
Thinking of how the double distinction I mention above—the one
operated by raciality—guides Brown’s distinctions, the ‘proper’ politi-
cal theory she pledges in the 1997 piece cannot appreciate the theoreti-
cal value of racial matters. The first distinction (moral versus political)
immediately renders them undeserving of the kind of significant work
Brown found missing in those who, like the authors of the pieces pub-
lished in Toni Morrison’s volume on the Thomas-Hill hearing, were
“reading [banal] events.” The second distinction (self-determination
versus affectability) exposes deeper implications of the kind of “dis-
tance” and “indirection” Brown asked from political theorists twenty
years ago. Let me return to Arendt. Immediately after the comments on
Eichmann’s thoughtlessness, Arendt addresses the question of the na-
ture of the crime committed by the Third Reich and/through its func-
tionaries. For her, the concept of genocide does not adequately capture
the ‘Final Solution’ (“which all agree is unprecedented”) “for the sim-
ple reason that massacres of whole peoples are not unprecedented”
as “the centuries of colonization and imperialism provide plenty of
examples of more or less successful attempts of that sort.” Instead, she
proposes “administrative massacre,” a term related with British impe-
rialism in India, because it has “the virtues of dispelling the prejudice
that such monstrous acts can be committed only against a foreign na-
tion or a different race.” The Jewish people were not the only victims in
the Holocaust, she points out, and possibly in “ a not-too-distant future
men may be tempted to exterminate all those whose intelligence quo-
tient is below a certain level.”6 Since, according to Arendt, the British
did not carry out ‘administrative massacres in India,’ she likely would
not find the term “genocide” adequate to name the crime perpetrated
as “administrative massacres” even if the orders given to the British
soldiers explicitly told them to kill only non-Europeans living in the
subcontinent. In any event, at first, in this passage, she seems open to
attending to colonial and racial violence. Unfortunately, however, this
comes in the form of a gesture that signals the irrelevance of the racial
as a political concept (in both its pre and post-Enlightenment figura-
tions), and the negation of the many ways in which it was deployed in
justifications of “administrative massacres” in India, the Congo Free
State, the Americas, Palestine, and all other moments when a raison
d’état (self-preservation) has been deployed to justify colonial and ra-
cial violence as well as other modalities of racial subjugation (includ-
ing those that rest on arguments of Blacks’ intellectually inferiority,
which was recently rehearsed by US Supreme Court Justice Scalia).
64  Theory & Event

A similar gesture of negation occurs in Brown’s 2006 Regulating

Aversion, in which she finds tolerance doing the same work of the tools
of raciality but again does not consider the implications. According to
Brown, tolerance has now become the pervasive moral descriptor of
liberal democracies as it “produces and positions subjects, orchestrates
meanings and practices of identity, marks bodies and conditions polit-
ical subjectivities.”7 Since 9/11, she offers, “questions of tolerance as a
domestic governmentality producing and regulating ethnic, religious,
racial and sexual subjects [must] be supplemented with question about
the operation of tolerance in and as a civilizational discourse distin-
guishing Occident from Orient, liberal from nonliberal, regimes, “free”
from “unfree” peoples.”8 She seems to suggest that the apparatus of
tolerance has replaced racial difference and cultural difference as the
signifier of western (white/European) distinctiveness. How could it?
Let me explain: if the pair tolerant/intolerant does the work Wynter
has attributed to the pairs ‘rational/irrational’ and ‘selected/deselect-
ed by evolution,’9 one of two outcomes has to be the result: (a) it has
become a tool of raciality, which rewrites racial subjects now under
the terms of whether or not they embrace liberal pluralism, in which
case the task of the political analysis would be to show how it recon-
figures that which was produced by previous iterations, or (b) even
though it has the same effects of production of subjects, tolerance has
nothing to do with raciality because the latter has no relevance to the
political analysis. Reading Brown’s 1997 piece and her 2006 book, it is
evident that raciality for her has no analytical import as she sees ‘racial
subjects’ as an effect of something that is not itself political, but which
becomes political only when presented in the recognizable forms such
as the Civil Rights Movement rather than in ‘banal” events such as the
beating of Rodney King (and the revolts that followed the acquittal of
the officers), the Hill-Thomas hearings, or the OJ Simpson trial.
What I find in the distinctions organizing Wendy Brown’s 1997
piece is a banalization of racial events resulting from political theory’s
(of the left, center, and right) commitment to a conception of the Polit-
ical that re-produces the deeper distinction between self-determined
and affectable subjects. For contemporary political theory the racial
may belong to the (Moral) matter (namely, prejudices, beliefs, or merely
evil); it has nothing to offer to the form of the Political, which it identi-
fies with the ‘rational,’ the civilized’ (evolved or selected by evolution),
and so on. Today’s ‘banal events’—police killings and black revolts re-
call the stakes of this incapacity to consider the racial as constitutive of
the onto-epistemological “conditions” and “possibilities” for the very
events, institutions, and concepts—democracy, markets, ethnic differ-
ence, subjectivity—liberal and left political theory finds worthy of at-
tention. What would a political analysis that is not uncomfortable with
Arendt’s ‘prejudices’ and Brown’s ‘banal events’ offer to political the-
 da Silva | The Banalization of Racial Events  65

ory? Among other things, it would expose how these everyday events
rehearse the racial grammar of the liberal democratic state at work,
that is, a political (affectable) subject emerging in the scene of oblitera-
tion (police killing of unarmed black persons) in a sentence without a
(self-determined) subject: Black Lives Matter.

Notes
1. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, (New York: Penguin Book, 1976), 287.
2. For a discussion of how separability operates as an onto-epistemological
pillar in modern thought, see Denise Ferreira da Silva, “On Difference Without
Separability.” 32nd Bienal de São Paulo—Incerteza Viva. Catalogue. Edited by Jo-
chen Volz and Júlia Rebouças (São Paulo: Fundação Bienal de São Paulo), 57–65.
3. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 279.
4. Ibid., 292.
5. Arendt discussing the fact that the Holocaust “took place within a ‘legal
order’,” she notes that acts of state was rejected by the Nuremberg tribunal
because it would make it impossible to prosecute all involved in the Holocaust,
include Hitler. Here she also considers ‘raison d’état’ as a possible justification
but immediately dismiss self-preservation noting that “as he may have learned
from the history of Jewish policy in the third Reich—in a state founded upon
criminal principles, the situation is reversed” (Ibid, 290).
6. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 288.
7. Wendy Brown, Regulating Aversion (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2006) 4
8. Ibid., 6.
9. See generally Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/
Truth/Freedom -Towards the Human. After Man. Its Overrepresentation-An
Argument”—CR: The New Centennial Review, Vol 3, No. 3 (2003): 257–337.