#racializing assemblages

[feelingpolitical]

The barring of subjects that belong to the Homo sapines speces from the jurisdiction of humanity depends upon the workings of racialization (differentiation) and racism (hierarchization and exclusion); in fact the two are often indistinguishable. Bare life and biopolitics are but alternative terms for racism, though a designation that attempts to conjure a sphere more fundamental to the human than race. [...] We might say, then, paraphrasing Agamben: the novelty of modern racializing assemblages lies in the fact that the biological given is as such immediately racialized, and the political is as such immediately the racialized given: Man.

Alexander G. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, And Black Feminist Theories of the Human, 72-73

the Agamben quote: “The novelty of modern biopolitics lies in the fact that the biological given is as such immediately political, and the political is as such immediately the biological given” (Homo Sacer, 148). 

[feelingpolitical]

We can say then, by way of Karl Marx: race is a mysterious thing in that the social character of racializing assemblages appears as an objective character stamped upon humans, which is presented not in the form of sociopolitical relations between humans, but as hierarchically structured races. Taken together, these factors form the basis for racializing assemblages, which although borne partially of political violence, cannot be reduced to it. [...] instances of systemic political violence moored in the law and beyond not only herald the naissance of bare life and its racialized progeny but also produce a surplus, a line of flight […] that evades capture, that refuses rest, that testifies to the impossibility of its own existence. Taking the working of flesh seriously frees and sets in motion the deviances that lay dormant in the concept of bare life and that repudiate by their very existence the equation of dominant and violence with the complete absence of subjectivity, life, enjoyment, hunger

Alexander G. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, And Black Feminist Theories of the Human, 51-52

and: "Once the flesh becomes a centrifugal factor in the theorization of political violence, racialization, and modern politics construed more broadly, we have the beginnings of habeas viscus, which, contrary to bare life and habeas corpus, does not have as its prerequisite the comparative tabulation of suffering, the suspension of racial caesuras in the state of exception, or the transcendence of the flesh" (52).