Of the Virus and Its Variants: On Resentment, Racism and ‘Wokeism’

Taking its starting point from the 2022 French controversy surrounding ‘deconstruction’, this article asks what a responsible response, worthy of the name, would have looked like for Jacques Derrida. Far from refuting the notion of a ‘virus’ which was used to denigrate deconstruction (amidst the COVID-19 pandemic), he reflected on it in his philosophical work from ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’ (1968) onwards. Indeed, resentment itself has become one of the virus’s most harmful variants. This affect, which flares up in current debates on ‘wokeism’ via a whole variety of symptoms (anger, envy, jealousy, virilism), plays a ‘predominant role’ in what takes the form of a ‘politics of resentment’. The question is then examined in light of Toni Morrison’s short story, Recitatif, as reread by the novelist and essayist Zadie Smith. While Morrison’s story exemplarily deconstructs racism and any polarized ‘black and white’ interpretation of these racial categories, Smith’s reading looks for clues in order to stop the play of overly labile identifications and reduce the literary text’s ambiguity. Resentment is thus implemented in the reading itself, showing how these issues can affect the interpretation of a given literary work. Derrida’s meditation on the ethics of and in reading reveals itself to be most relevant here, reminding us that the response/responsibility at stake ‘in the task of deciphering, reading, and writing’ has implications that go ‘beyond categories, biases or prescriptions.’