Abstract
THE DEFINITIONAL PRESUPPOSITIONS OF AN UNDEFINABLE: "RACISM" The definitions of the French lexeme racism were built up through early descriptions of national socialism, in which racism was established as a State ideology. Because of their co-inscription in the general vocabulary, « racism » and «Nazism» have in common certain semantic effects: being the objects of a similar reprobation — even of violent rejection —, they usually appear as hetero-designations, aiming at disqualifying Anyone else supposedly concealed. The defining discourses about racism involve two distinct ideological nuclei appearing according to two metaphorical main lines: «rank» and «blood». These main lines tally with two racisms: inegalitarian racism and differentialist racism. In auto-referential racism, the fact of preserving one's own purity and self-identity constitutes the categorical imperative. In altero-referential racism, it is the hierarchic scale which is to be unreservedly respected. Two distinct logics are derived from it: the domination and the exploitation of the «inferior» (inegalitarian racism), and the extermination of the «impure» («puristic» racism of identity). Three kinds of anti-racist discourses can be distinguished, according to the relationship established between «race» and «racism»: disinvolvement from the scientificity granted to racial anthropology and racist ideology, the impugnment of the concept of race in order to unlegitimate racism, the inseparability of the representations centered on race and racism, these representations involving common unconscious functionings. It is possible to build up a model by synthetizing the discourses which, in defining racism (1932-1983), are rejecting it. This idealtype turns out to throw light rather on the structures of antiracist ideology than on the structures of racism.