Stain Removal questions, the premise that subjects originate as ethically neutral or “unmarked” beings, proposing instead that they enter the world already expressive of inheritable genealogies of value. Such value does not attach to or “stain” subjects, but configures them as differentiated and recognizable beings through embodied affiliations like race. This revision provides ethics as the study of value (whether as metaethics or value theory) better explanations for not only the “prejudgment” of racialized beings but of all differentially valued subjects through its hypothesis of “evaluativ ... More

Stain Removal questions, the premise that subjects originate as ethically neutral or “unmarked” beings, proposing instead that they enter the world already expressive of inheritable genealogies of value. Such value does not attach to or “stain” subjects, but configures them as differentiated and recognizable beings through embodied affiliations like race. This revision provides ethics as the study of value (whether as metaethics or value theory) better explanations for not only the “prejudgment” of racialized beings but of all differentially valued subjects through its hypothesis of “evaluative perception.” On this view, evaluation does not succeed perception as a secondary interpretation but is present at the origin of representation. Stain Removal thus challenges prevailing theories of subject formation that begin by positing an unvarnished human whose existence precedes all qualitative associations of value and genealogy. Accordingly, it critiques the view that ethical and racial assessments fasten to the individual born innocent and unmarked, indelibly scarring and staining it with artificial social interpretations. Furthermore, the book casts doubt on “progressive” moral approaches that seek to rescue the subject from unjust evaluative judgments it accrues within genealogies like race by attempting to recover—through a process of “stain removal”—the originally pristine version of the self purportedly residing beneath these accretions of false social meaning. In contrast, Stain Removal contends that no such “uncolored” being struggles under these ethical and racial stains, offering instead that such legible marks—inheritable, criminal, and mythic—are what bring subjects into recognizable, embodied existence.