Race

Jacques Derrida’s explicit intervention into race was a minor, occasional and possibly even inadequate gesture. The art exhibition itself was, or aimed to be, highly specific at a historical or strategic level: the exhibition was in response to the South African government’s policy of apartheid, which was officially instituted in 1948 and was gradually dismantled in the 1990s but which was still ongoing at the time of the exhibition. The accusation directed at Derrida in response to ‘Racism’s Last Word’: after a translation and publication of the short piece Anne McClintock and Rob Nixon wrote a criticism of Derrida’s approach and suggested that he looked beyond the text. He would have been mindful of a whole series of hard political facts that would render his approach clumsily monolithic, as though a scholar such as Derrida focused on ‘Western metaphysics’ could really have nothing to say about race in any meaningful way.