Abstract

Abstract The present paper argues that the new racisms in contemporary advanced industrial societies are of a nature that does not lend itself to a multi‐cultural project that relies on the public/private distinction; the latter is based on the same problematic that underlies new racisms. It is further argued that the unsatisfactory public/private distinction characteristic of western societies is concomitant to the spatio‐temporal contradictions of capitalist development, an instant of which is also, on a more general level, the phenomenon of migration.