Here's a rough translation of Ranciere's excellent comments. I'm still working on my French, so anyone can email me if there are any big errors; it's probably a bit clunky! Racism: a passion from above

Jacques Rancière, 11 septembre 2010

I’d like to add some reflections around the notion of ‘state racism’
to our meeting’s agenda. These reflections run against a widespread
interpretation of measures that our government has recently taken, from
the law on the veil to the expulsions of the Roma. This interpretation
detects [voits] an opportunism that is exploiting racism and
xenophobia for electoral gain. This supposed critique reinforces the
assumption that racism is a popular passion,  the frightened and
irrational reaction of retrograde layers of the population, that can’t
adapt to the new mobile and cosmopolitan world. The state is accused of
failing in its duty by showing indifference towards these populations.
But this accusation only reinforces the state’s position as the face of
rationality that must be presented to popular irrationality.



This conceit, adopted by the ‘Leftist’ critique, is exactly
the one that the Right has used over the past two decades to implement a
number of racist laws and decrees. All these measures have been taken
under the same argument: there are problems of delinquency and various
nuisances caused by immigrants and the undocumented [clandestins]
that may provoke racism if we fail to enforce good order. So it must
submit these delinquencies and nuisances to the universality of law so
they do not create racist disturbances.

It’s a game that has been played, on the Left and the Right, since
the Pasqua-Méhaignerie laws of 1993. It consists in opposing the
universal logic of the rational state to popular passions, in order to
give the state’s racist policies a certificate of anti-racism. It is
time to turn this argument around and mark the bond [solidaritie] between the state ‘rationality’ that controls these measures and the other—that adversary accessory—conveniently given as a repoussoir,
the popular passion. In fact, it is not the government that acts under
the pressure of popular racism and in reaction to the so-called
‘popular’ passions of the extreme-right. The state’s aim [raison d’Etat] is to maintain this other to whom it entrusts the imaginary determination of what it actually legislates.

I proposed, 15 years ago, the term cold racism to designate this
process. The racism that we have in today’s case is a cold racism, an
intellectual construction. It is primarily a creation of the state. We
have discussed the relationship between the state of law and the police
state. But it is the very nature of the state that it is a police state,
an institution that fixes and controls identities, places and
displacements, an institution in permanent struggle against any surplus
to the count of identities that may take place, that is to say it also
struggles against that excess on the logic of identity that constitutes
the action of political subjects. This work is rendered more insistent
by the world economic order. Our states are less and less able to thwart
the destructive effects of the free circulation of capital on the
communities under their care. They are even less capable for having no
desire to [Ils en sont d'autant moins capables qu'ils n'en ont aucunement le désir].
They then fall back on what is in their power, the circulation of
people. They take as their specific object the control of this other
circulation and the national security that these immigrants threaten as
their objective, that is to say more precisely the production and the
management of insecurity. This work is increasingly becoming their
purpose and their means of legitimation.

This use of the law satisfies two essential functions: an ideological
function that provides a subjective figure who is a constant threat to
security; and a practical function that continually rearranges the
frontier between inside and outside, constantly creating floating
identities, making those who are inside susceptible to falling outside.
The legislation on immigration was initially intended to create a
sub-category of French people, making floating immigrants who were born
on French soil and to French parents fall into the category. The
legislation on illegal immigration is intended to make legal
‘immigrants’ fall into the undocumented category [cela a voulu dire faire tomber dans la catégorie des clandestins des «immigrés» légaux.].
It is the same logic that has allowed the recent use of the notion of
‘French of foreign origin’. And it is that same logic that is today
aimed at the Roma, creating, against the principle of free circulation
in the European space, a category of Europeans who are not truly
Europeans, just as there are French who are not truly French. In
creating these suspended identities the state isn’t embarrassed by the
contradictions, like those we have seen in the measure concerning
‘immigrants’. On one side, it creates discriminatory laws and forms of
stigmatisation founded on the idea of universal citizenship and equality
before the law. This then punishes and/ or stigmatises those whose
practices run against the equality and universality of citizenship. But
on another side, it creates within this citizenship discriminations for
all, like that distinguishing the French ‘of foreign origin’. So on one
side all French are the same and troubled [gare] by those who are not, on the other all are not the same and troubled [gare] by those who forget this!

Today’s racism is thus primarily a logic of the state and not a
popular passion. And this state logic is primarily supported not by, who
knows what, backwards social groups but by a substantial part of the
intellectual elite. The last racist campaign wasn’t at all organised by
the so-called ‘populist’ extreme-right. It was directed by an
intelligentsia that claims to be a Leftist, republican and secular
intelligentsia. Discrimination is no longer based on arguments about
superior and inferior races. They argue in the name of the struggle
against ‘communitarianism’, universality of the law and the equality of
all citizens before the law and the equality of the sexes. There again,
they are not embarrassed by so many contradictions; these arguments are
made by people who otherwise make very little of equality and Feminism.
In fact, the argument mostly creates an essential relation [l’amalgame requis]
for identifying the undesirable: thus the relation between migrant,
immigrant, backward, Islamist, chauvanist and terrorist. The recourse to
universality in fact benefits its contrary: the establishment of a
discretionary state power that decides who belongs and who doesn’t
belong to the class of those who have the right to be here; the power,
in short, to confer and remove identities. That power has its correlate:
the power to oblige individuals to be identifiable at all times, to
keep themselves in a space of full visibility before the state. It is
worth, from that point of view, returning to the solution that the
government found to the juridical problem posed by the banning of the
burqa.  It was, as we have seen, difficult to make a law specifically
aimed at a few hundred people of a particular religion. The government
found a solution: a law carrying a general ban on covering one’s face in
public spaces, a law which at the same time was aimed at a woman
wearing the full veil and a protestor wearing a mask or scarf. The scarf
thus becomes a common symbol of the backward Muslim and the terrorist
agitator. This solution then, adopted, like many measures on
immigration, with the benevolent abstention of the ‘Left’, is the
formula given by ‘republican’ thought [c'est la pensée «républicaine» qui en a donné la formule].
Let us remember those furious diatribes of November 2005 against those
masked and hooded youths who took action night after night. Let us also
remember the beginning of the Redeker affair, the philosophy professor
menaced by an Islamic ‘fatwa’. The starting point of Robert Redeker’s
furious anti-Muslim diatribe was … a ban on the thong at the Paris-Plage.
In that ban, enacted by the mayor of Paris, he detected a measure of
complaisance toward Islamism, towards a religion whose potential for
hatred and violence was already manifest in the ban on public nudity.
The beautiful discourse on republican secularism and universality is
finally reduced to the principle that we should be entirely visible in
public places, whether paved or beach.

I conclude: a lot of energy has been spent against a certain figure of racism—embodied in the Front National—and a certain idea that this racism is the expression of ‘white trash’ (‘petite blancs‘)
and represents the backward layers of society. A substantial part of
that energy has been recuperated to build the legitimacy a new form of
racism: state racism and ‘Leftist’ intellectual racism. It is perhaps
time to reorient our thinking and the struggle against a theory and a
practice of stigmatisation, precariatisation and exclusion which today
constitutes a racism from above: a logic of the state and a passion of
the intelligentsia.
wrongarithmetic.blogspot.com.