Nick Eppert

ABSTRACT This article includes Nicholas Anthony Eppert's English translation of the introduction from Claude-Olivier Doron's L'homme altèrè: races et dégénérescence, published in French in 2016. Inspired by a Foucauldian methodology, Doron provides a novel way to approach the historiography and philosophy of race and racism. Rather than focusing on traditional ways to conceptualize race, through alterity, and racism as emerging from polygenist theories that saw races as issuing from different origins and thwarting the idea of the unity of the human species, Doron argues that race is originally linked to theories of degeneration, and can be expressed through the concept of alteration. This allows him to envisage how discursive practices of race and racism and apparatuses of power that seek to govern race operate under theories of monogenism, which take the human species as a singular unity, and under the juridico-legal and metaphysical banner of “humanity” or “the universal.”

This paper is a contribution to the ongoing studies revolving around the fields of Afro-Pessimism and Non-Philosophy. It is focused mostly on a short essay that Francois Laruelle wrote in 1989 called "The Concept of Generalized Analysis or 'Non-Analysis" that eventually became part of a larger work called Theorie des Etrangers, while also drawing on the latter for support. The focus is set not in terms of exegesis or commentary but in tandem with the work of Frank Wilderson III to borrow from both of their works and formulate a move from the "White restrained Unconscious" to the " generalized Unconscious". In the first section I articulate Laruelle and Wilderson's critiques of the common-sense image of the Unconscious. And in the second section I make the move from the White restrained Unconscious to the generalized Unconscious by arguing that the former is embedded within a metaphysical sovereignty of desires that excludes desires. The "White restrained Unconscious" is constituted by what Laruelle calls a "half loss" or a loss which loses itself. For this reason the generalized Unconscious cannot appear within it, for it is an absolute loss, or what Laruelle calls the Joui-sans-Jouissance. The White generalized Unconsicous blocks loss out by a transference mechanism. The opening up of the White restrained Unconscious to the generalized Unconscious which is its Identity in the last instance can only be done by "ending the World". Using Jared Sexton's notion of the "social life of social death" I show that this desire to end the world allows for a seeing from perspective of the "One" which is the subject position of the Non-Analyst and allows for a dualysis of the desires of the White restrained Unconscious.