filamentosmovimentos

"We are always confronted with other people at basic-level social categories appropriate (*?) to our culture: for us today, the famous age, size, gender, race, and class system. (Here it is important to say that racialized perception need not entail racism, nor should gendered perception entail sexism, and so on. Nor need it entail a belief in race as a natural kind. Nor need we deny that people often mistaken racial attributions.) So, we never see another subject (*another embodied actively affective subject); instead, we see, for example, a middle-aged, small, neat, fit, professional black woman or an elderly, patrician, tall white man, ... (...) our political cognition habits in our bodies politic is such that no one has ever perceived a "subject" or an "other": we can posit such a creature, but that's a refined political act of overcoming our immediate categorization process, by which we perceive racialized and gendered persons to construct an abstraction (*a dangerously pacified abstraction) we can call a nongendered and nonracialized member of an intersubjective community or humanity or some such. While this might be a worthy ethical ideal for which we can strive (for an ethics of interactive attention, however, not to neutralize difference*), it is not what we perceive at first glance."



excerpt from Protevi, John "Political Affect: Connecting the social and the somatic"
(2450/3332)


* comment by Catarina