[no subject]

An interesting piece of philosophical (and literary) writing on the
subject of intolerance and discrimination (including racial
discrimination) and how it functions in Western society, can be
found in Plateau 7 of _A_Thousand_Plateaus_, Vol. 2 of
_Capitalism_and_Schizophrenia_ by Deleuze and Guattari. Here, they
distinguish between *exclusive* forms of intolerance of the us/them
type (our clan vs. others) and the European/Christian White
(supremacist) heritage of internalized intolerance and selection
which they call *the abstract machine of faciality*. Exclusive
forms of intolerance are clearly presented as being by far less
harmful than those of the 'systemic' variety. I cannot do justice
in a brief space to the complexity of their argument, but I shall
permit myself a short quote, by way of enticing readers to
investigate this idea further, esp. as Deleuze and Guattari's
analysis of Western racism may also further or clarify the debate
being held on this *listserv* of what has been called SYSTEMIC
EVIL.

"European racism as the white man's claim has never operated by
exclusion, or by the designation of someone as Other: it is instead
in primitive societies that the stranger is grasped as an 'other.'
Racism operates by the determination of degrees of deviance to the
White-Man face, which endeavours to integrate nonconforming traits
into incresingly eccentric and backward waves, sometimes tolerating
them at given places under given conditions, in a given ghetto,
sometimes erasing them from the wall, which never abides alterity
(it's a Jew, it's an Arab, it's a Negro, it's a lunatic...). From
the viewpoint of racism, there is no exterior, there are no people
on the outside. There are only people who should be like us and
whose crime it is not to be....Racism never detects the particles
of the other; it propagates waves of sameness until those who
resist identification have been wiped out (or those who only allow
themselves to be identified at a given degree of divergence.) It's
cruelty is equaled only by its incompetence and naivete." (ATP,
178)


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