Extinction is terminally thumped. To be human is to hasten our own extinction through otherizing imagination---deconstruction solves.

If the archive were to be destroyed, would anything of ‘man’ remain? Art gives man the ability to imagine himself as eternally present, beyond any particular epoch or text, and yet also places this eternity in the fragile tomb of a material object: ‘Even if the material lasts only for a few seconds it will give sensation the power to exist and be preserved in itself in the eternity that coexists with this short duration’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 166). ‘Man’ as a race (as a unified body imagining himself as a natural kind) is essentially tied to extinction: for man is at once an ex post facto or metaleptic positing of that which must have been there all along, awaiting eternal expression. At the same time ‘man’ is also that being who hastens extinction in general by imagining himself as a single tradition solely worthy of eternal life, stamping the world with his own image. This unified humanity that has become intoxicated with its sense of self-positing privilege can only exist through the delirium of Race, through the imagination of itself as a unified and eternal natural body:

All delirium is racial, which does not necessarily mean racist. It is not a matter of the regions of the body without organs ‘representing’ races and cultures. The full body does not represent anything at all. On the contrary, the races and cultures designate regions on this body—that is, zones of intensities, fields of potentials. Phenomena of individualization and sexualization are produced within these fields. We pass from one field to another by crossing thresholds: we never stop migrating, we become other individuals as well as other sexes, and departing becomes as easy as being born or dying. Along the way we struggle against other races, we destroy civilizations, in the manner of the great migrants in whose wake nothing is left standing once they have passed through. (Deleuze and Guattari 2004a, 94)

Racial delirium is not only a passage through differential flux from which identity emerges; it also entails that ‘we destroy civilizations’— affirming the potentiality of reducing any produced culture or tradition to ruins. Man exists above and beyond any particularity; as one grand racial unity, he is that through which cultural distinction emerges. If racial delirium occurs as an affirmation of the possibility of anything becoming extinct, racism is a neurotic grip on survival. Racism—including, and especially, the affirmation of ‘man’—is a repression of racial delirium; racial delirium would open up to all the differences and intensities beyond any unified or generic ‘man.’ By contrast, racism affirms one great unity—the properly human—in which various kinds might be seen to differ by degree, being more or less human. Humanity is always a virtual production or fabrication that posits itself as ultimate actuality, occluding the differentials from which it emerges.