Race vs. class? : Conceptum sacer or the bare life of concepts

Résumé 0

To question “the return of race in the humanities and social sciences” in a context marked by a particularly disturbing polemic, and a semantic and ideological war played out on a media, political, partisan, academic and intellectual scale, it is necessary to return to the genealogy of the critical analytical tools mobilised to think about social relations, and to historicise the displacements and renewals of the frameworks used to analyse the processes of racialisation in social science research. Far from erasing “class” and social antagonisms, the contemporary research on racisms has largely enriched the literature on historical materialism, but also the conceptualisations of ideology. It has also helped put back the objectification of late capitalism, of inequalities and injustices, of social stratifications proper to neoliberalism at the heart of socio-historical, political, philosophical, cultural, and aesthetic studies.