Dominio razzista ed etica del passante. L'antropologia critica di Achille Mbembe

Abstract

This paper discusses Achille Mbembe’s critique of racial segregation taken as the descriptive and theoretical ground for a critical anthropology. Mbembe’s most important works On the Postcolony (2000), Critique de la Raison Nègre (2013), and Politiques de l’intimité (2016) are read as a coherent system aimed at unfolding the philosophical meaning of different forms of racial segregation. Race is outlined as a principle of separation whose broader meaning lies in forcing the multi-layered human experience into rigid categories, thereby achieving the objectifying of humans. Mbembe’s books also show the sharpening of a peculiar methodological approach aimed at reconciling a universal philosophical perspective with the concreteness of the phenomena of race analysed from the first-person-perspective. My claim is that such an approach is (1) strongly compatible with the genetic phenomenological description and (2) highly significant with respect to the ethical implications of the theory. These go from the appeal to an ethic of reparation and restitution to the original outline of an “ethics of the passer-by”.