Sade's revenge: Racial neoliberalism and the sovereignty of negation susan searls giroux

Patterns of Prejudice

Volumn 44, Issue 1, 2010, Pages 1-26

  Giroux, Susan Searls ^a  

^a MCMASTER UNIVERSITY   (Canada)

Author keywords

Antiracialism; Antiracism; David theo goldberg; Marquis de sade; Neoliberalism; Race; Racism; Sadism; Sovereignty; Terror; The threat of race; Violence

Indexed keywords

EID: 77951625003     PISSN: 0031322X     EISSN: 14617331     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/00313220903507594     Document Type: Article

References (67)

1. Quoted in Simone de Beauvoir, 'Must we burn Sade?' [1955], in Marquis de Sade, The 120 Days of Sodom and Other Writings, comp. and trans. from the French by Austryn Wainhouse and Richard Seaver (New York: Grove Press 1966), 58.
2. The racially coded nature of such terms is perhaps obvious. The term 'special interest group' is invoked to contrast with the rugged hyperindividualism of 'real' white Americans, and functions symbolically as a challenge to the privileges and 'hand-outs' allegedly bestowed on minority groups. In other words, the championed individualism and work ethic of 'real' Americans serve implicitly as a binary to 'race', reinventing a racial logic that serves, with stunning hypocrisy, the interests of white populations anxious to guard their advantages.
3. David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on Racial Neoliberalism (Oxford and Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell 2009), 84 (subsequent page references will appear parenthetically in the text).
4. For a comprehensive analysis of the US government's practice of torture, including its torture of children, see Henry A. Giroux, Hearts of Darkness: Torturing Children in the War on Terror (Boulder, CO: Paradigm 2010 forthcoming).
5. Achille Mbembe, 'Aesthetics of superfluity', Public Culture, vol. 16, no. 3, 373-405 (378).
6. I borrow the term 'racial delirium' from Mbembe, 'Aesthetics of superfluity', 380-3.
7. Exemplifying the paranoia, even delirium, associated with the 'inverted' threat of race, Sarah Palin wrote on her Facebook page: 'The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome [sic] will have to stand in front of Obama's "death panel" so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their "level of productivity in society" whether they are worthy of health care', quoted in Timothy Egan, 'Palin's poison', New York Times (blog), 9 August 2009, at http://egan.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/09/palins-poison/?em (viewed 14 October 2009).
8. Dedrick Muhammad, 'Obama and the harsh racial reality', Counterpunch, 28 May 2009.
9. In The Threat of Race, Goldberg elaborates on the relationship between racial redlining, residential segregation and the legitimating discourse of security. Redlining refers to the colour-coding of 'residential security maps' developed in 1936 by the Home Owners' Loan Corporation; redlined neighbourhoods referred to those neighbourhoods 'lacking homogeneity' and were characterized by 'detrimental influences in a pronounced degree' issuing from the infiltration of an 'undesirable population' (quoted 72). From the 1930s on, these maps 'became the basis... for denying mortgage loans by government and private banks especially to black home seekers and in black neighborhoods', which in turn fuelled 'racial residential segregation', urban abandonment 'and ultimately capital flight, thus hyper-concentrating racial poverty' (73). The practice continues in today's gated communities, which are 'essentially privatized modalities of redlining' (73).
10. Michael Powell, 'Bank accused of pushing mortgage deal on Blacks', New York Times, 6 June 2009.
11. Gregory D. Squires, 'Scapegoating Blacks for the economic crisis', Poverty & Race, vol. 17, no. 6, November/December 2008.
12. Joseph E. Stiglitz, 'Wall Street's toxic message', Vanity Fair, July 2009.
13. See, for example, the call issued in response to Obama's executive order by the Center for Constitutional Rights, 'Close torture loopholes in the Army Field Manual', available at http://ccrjustice.org/get-involved/action/close-torture-loopholes-armyfield-manual (viewed 15 October 2009).
14. David Johnston and Charlie Savage, 'Obama reluctant to look into Bush programs', New York Times, 11 January 2009.
15. Judith Butler, 'Uncritical exuberance' (blog), 5 November 2008, available at www.indybay.org/newsitems/2008/11/05/18549195.php (viewed 15 October 2009).
16. David Roediger, 'Obama's victory and the future of race in the United States', Counterpunch, 10 November 2008.
17. Roger Simon on NBC's Meet the Press, 11 February 2007.
18. quoted in Peter Hart, 'Obamamania: how loving Barack Obama helps pundits love themselves', Extra!, March/April 2007.
19. Chris Matthews, 21 January 2007, quoted in Hart, 'Obamamania'.
20. For an expansive analysis of this lexicon, see David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State (Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell 2002), 212-19.
21. For a brief yet clarifying summary of this history, see Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 2-4.
22. For a detailed accounting of the racial definition of modern morality and subjectivity, see David Theo Goldberg, Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning (Oxford: Blackwell 1993), 14-40.
23. for a more elaborated analysis of racial state formation, see Goldberg, The Racial State, 14-34.
24. on the colour-blind or post-racial state and its celebrated 'end of racism' thesis, see Goldberg, The Racial State, 200-38.
25. Michel Foucault, 'Society Must Be Defended': Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-76, ed. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana, trans. from the French by David Macey (New York: Picador 2003), 254.
26. Ibid., 260.
27. Goldberg, The Racial State, 155.
28. Achille Mbembe, 'Necropolitics', Public Culture, vol. 15, no. 1, 2003, 11-40 (28, 29).
29. Ibid., 32.
30. Ibid., 18, 19.
31. Ibid., 19.
32. Georges Bataille, Literature and Evil, trans. from the French by Alastair Hamilton (London: Calder and Boyars 1973), 106-7.
33. Mbembe, 'Necropolitics', 19.
34. Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death & Sensuality [1957], trans. from the French by Mary Dalwood (San Francisco: City Lights 1986), 167.
35. David Martyn, Sublime Failures: The Ethics of Kant and Sade (Detroit: Wayne State University Press 2003), 52.
36. Zymunt Bauman, Liquid Love: On the Frailty of Human Bonds (Cambridge: Polity 2003), 133.
37. Étienne Balibar, We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship, trans. from the French by James Swenson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 2004), 126.
38. Ibid., 131-2 (emphasis in the original).
39. Sade, 120 Days of Sodom and Other Writings, 191.
40. Bataille, Literature and Evil, 110.
41. Chris Hedges, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of the Spectacle (New York: Nation Books 2009), 92.
42. Goldberg, Racist Culture, 24.
43. Maurice Blanchot, 'Sade', introduction to Marquis de Sade, The Complete Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom, and Other Writings, comp. and trans. from the French by Richard Seaver and Austryn Wainhouse (New York: Grove Press 1966), 70.
44. Goldberg, The Racial State, 40.
45. Quoted in Beauvoir, 'Must we burn Sade?', 16.
46. Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason [1961], trans. from the French by Richard Howard (New York: Vintage 1973), 209-10.
47. Ibid., 210.
48. For further details of Derrida's criticism, see James Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault (New York: Simon & Schuster 1993), 119.
49. Foucault, 'Society Must Be Defended', 258.
50. Quoted in Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 351.
51. Sheldon Wolin, Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 2008), 9.
52. Talal Asad, On Suicide Bombing (New York: Columbia University Press 2007), 2.
53. Blanchot, 'Sade', 40.
54. Ibid., 56.
55. Ibid., 65.
56. Ibid., 54.
57. Ibid., 56.
58. Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London: Verso 2009), 177-8.
59. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment [1944] (New York: Herder and Herder 1972), 81.
60. Goldberg, Racist Culture, 60.
61. Quoted in Blanchot, 'Sade', 59.
62. Chris Hedges, 'America the illiterate', Truthdig (online magazine), 10 November 2008, at www.truthdig.com/report/item/20081110_america_the_illiterate (viewed 16 October 2009).
63. Sade, The 120 Days of Sodom, 200.
64. Butler, 'Uncritical exuberance'.
65. Hedges, 'America the illiterate'.
66. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism [1951] (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1973), 476.
67. Ibid., 474.