On Race, Time, and Utopia

New book review for CounterPunch

My latest piece for CounterPunch is a review of philosopher William M. Paris’s book Race, Time, and Utopia: Critical Theory and the Process of Emancipation, published earlier this year (January 28, 2025) by Oxford University Press. Here is a short excerpt, but please check out the full review if you can:

Professor Paris does not pull punches in his criticism of such “racial fetishism,” this perversion of being dominated socially by our own bad idea. He writes, “The inverted world of racial fetishism is one where history dominates the present and represses the utopian temporality of the ‘not-yet’ by reifying racial categories and relationships of domination.” Elevating race into this special position not only blinds us in the present, it limits the possibilities for the future. Here, Paris draws on Frantz Fanon (1925-1961), whose work describes a “descent into a real hell” that then opens the way to a fuller understanding of one’s place in the world. Fanon wrote, “There is a zone of nonbeing, an extraordinarily sterile and arid region, an utterly naked declivity where an authentic upheaval can be born.” Ernesto de Martino perhaps wrote similarly that those living in conditions of insecurity are always “exposed to the risk of a ‘crisis of presence.’” For Paris, this can be a space of utopian capacity and meaningful distance from the past. The book’s arguments connect the zone of nonbeing to Sartre’s nothingness, a state preceding the various social practices making claims on our bodies and our time. This state of nonbeing or nothingness may remind some of the work of German philosopher Max Stirner (1806–1856), whom Marx was famously at pains to dress down in The German Ideology.

Happy Friday, everyone, and I hope you enjoy the long weekend.

Thank you,

Dave