The New York Times best-selling book exploring the counterproductive reactions white people have when their assumptions about race are challenged, and how these reactions maintain racial inequality. In this “vital, necessary, and beautiful book” (Michael Eric Dyson), antiracist educator Robin DiAngelo deftly illuminates the phenomenon of white fragility and “allows us to understand racism as a practice not restricted to ‘bad people’ (Claudia Rankine). Referring to the defensive moves that white people make when challenged racially, white fragility is characterized by emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and by behaviors including argumentation and silence. These behaviors, in turn, function to reinstate white racial equilibrium and prevent any meaningful cross-racial dialogue. In this in-depth exploration, DiAngelo examines how white fragility develops, how it protects racial inequality, and what we can do to engage more constructively.

This work is a collective reflection on the modern self as a narrative. Modernity as a metamorphic conglomeration of permeating discourses, new practices and institutional forms, a historical unfolding of centrifugal and centripetal discursive dynamics of regulation and normalization offers limitless grounds for a critical investigation. The modern self, both as the revelation of the inner self and as a reflection of the collective, arises from the dialogical interplay within the intersubjective communicative space of social discourse. The bestiary proposed in this series of articles attempts to rethink the spectacle consisting of modern dichotomies by which the self is declined along ontological, metaphysical, and ethical premises: the real and the ideal, the said and the unsaid, the rational and the irrational, the bound and the free, the familiar and the exotic, the universal and the particular, self and world. The reader is therefore encouraged to engage in a multiple reading of the articles presented in this collection. As individual scholarly pieces of inquiry, these articles provide thoughtful insights into the inexhaustible topic of modernity and the modern subject–they tell stories of the past, the present, and of a prospective future. As academic works, however, they also reflect and/or unsettle disciplinary paradigms and scholarly practices, from which they acquire legitimacy and visibility; they conform, apply, reconfigure and/or experiment with new grounds by borrowing from an eclectic mix of various thinkers, their tools, and their axiomatic propositions that constitute their theoretical and critical apparatus. This exercise is ultimately an introspective journey in which we are placed not only as the spectator–the one who gazes through the bars–but also the spectacle–the beast subject to the gaze–finding itself in a predicament of which the subject, itself, is the architect.

Le développement massif des pratiques d’agir avec et de vivre ensemble, instrumentées par les réseaux socionumériques, ainsi que l’usage abondant de l’expression « web social » et de ses dérivés peuvent être vus comme les indices d’une nouvelle étape de l’industrialisation numérique de la culture et du symbolique qui s’empare désormais du social. Afin d’en préciser les effets et les dynamiques, l’ouvrage propose une approche du social comme un construit en mouvement fait d’associations entre êtres (humains, techniques, symboliques, etc.). Il analyse les dispositifs socionumériques en tant que « machines d’écritures », puis il se penche sur des collectifs mus par des buts communs et articulés par des plateformes dédiées. En mettant ainsi en tension l’analyse des dispositifs et celle des pratiques, ce livre collectif dresse un tableau contrasté de la pharmacologie numérique du vivre ensemble.