A abordagem proto-fenomenológica do problema teórico da raça em Nietzsche

Abstract

This paper aims to present Nietzsche’s reflections on race in two stages. It begins by ascribing to Nietzsche a sort of race formalism, which is first characterized (in contrast to blood-based race theories, which were much more popular in his day) and then assessed (in its theoretical and normative advantages and deficiencies). Nietzsche’s race formalism allowed him to resist, on the one hand, a merely reductionist or even eliminativist position, which was to be expected given his sceptical bent and, on the other hand, to resist the ideological allure of materialist explanations and classifications, with their self-congratulatory myths of racial purity and the like. At the same time, Nietzsche’s formalism conveys a disturbingly cavalier indifference toward the peoples and tribes — not to mention the individuals — who constitute the material component of race. This indifference finds its most notorious expression in his occasional references to racial cultivation as exercises in breeding [Züchtung]. By modelling the cultivation of races on the domestication of animals, he implies that the recipients of cultural form are mere animals, antecedently lacking in meaningful culture and education. Although he decries the petty nationalism and xenophobia that motivate these rival accounts, he produces an alternative theory of racial cultivation that is similarly objectionable on moral grounds. After discussing Nietzsche’s race formalism, the paper moves on to its second stage, which addresses the close connection between race and bodily cultivation, that is, the topic of racial embodiment. What is at stake here is the unique work of acculturation, which allows some people and nations to acquire the status of a genuine race by equipping the individual bodies of their members with a trusty set of instincts, on which they may pre-reflectively rely for their most basic dispositions of embodiment. This set of instincts and dispositions constitutes the microstructure of the ‘invisible’ body, whose dynamics Nietzsche tries to describe in what the paper dubs his proto-phenomenological approach to racial embodiment.