Diacritics 49.4: Black Resistance

A REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY CRITICISM

BLACK RESISTANCE

Editor

andrea bachner

Managing Editor

hannah miller

Editorial Board

oliver aas

kevin attell

andrea bachner

debra castillo

naminata diabate

grant farred

paul fleming

peter gilgen

cary howie

patricia keller

sophia léonard

philip lorenz

arturo r. mautino

tracy mcnulty

natalie melas

jonathan monroe

timothy murray

simone pinet

enzo traverso

claudia verhoeven

Advisory Board

emily apter

branka arsic´

bruno bosteels

marina brownlee

pheng cheah

tom conley

jonathan culler

laurent dubreuil

mary gaylord

fredric jameson

eleanor kaufman

richard klein

philip e. lewis

alberto moreiras

paul north

karen pinkus

joan ramon resina

alessia ricciardi

hortense spillers

ashley thompson

geoff waite

cary wolfe

yan haiping

DIACRITICS

BLACK RESISTANCE

Editor: Linette Park

2021  >>  VOLUME 49  >> NUMBER 4

4 Introduction: Black Resistance linette park

10 Rethinking the Black Will: The Cosmological Body, Nihilism, and Resistance calvin warren

20 On Black Aesthesis rizvana bradley

54 Untranslatability, Resistance linette park

76 Refusing to Vanish: Despair, Contingency, and the African Political alírio karina

100 On Revolutionary Suicide david marriott

134 IMAGES lynette yiadom-boakye

Diacritics: A Review of Contemporary Criticism

Volume 49, number 4 (2021)

ISSN 0300-7162

© 2022 by Cornell University

All rights reserved.

Diacritics: A Review of Contemporary Criticism—Issue

Winter 2021—is published quarterly in spring, summer, fall, and winter by The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2715 N. Charles Street, Baltimore, MD 21218-4363, USA. Periodicals postage paid at Baltimore, Maryland 21233-9651, and at additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to diacritics, The Johns Hopkins University Press, Journals Division, 2715 N. Charles Street, Baltimore, MD 21218-4363.

Permissions. No portion of this journal may be reproduced by any process or technique without the formal consent of the publisher. Copies for personal or internal use may be made on the condition that the copier pay a fee of $8 per copy through the CCC, 222 Rosewood Dr., Danvers, MA 01970, for copying beyond that permitted by Section 107 or 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law. This consent does not extend to other kinds of copying, such as copying for general distribution, for advertising or promotional purposes, for creating new collective works, or for resale. (0300-7162/12) $8. Direct all other permissions requests to Permissions Manager at the address above or visit www.press.jhu.edu/cgi-bin/permissions.cgi.

Subscription Prices. Institutional rate per year is $135; individual rate is $40. An individual electronic subscription is $45. Print subscribers in Canada or Mexico, please add $12 postage; all other countries, add $14.60. Prepayment is required for shipment or access.

Send subscription inquiries, orders, and business correspondence to:

The Johns Hopkins University Press Journals Division

P. O. Box 19966

Baltimore, MD 21211-0966

Phone (410) 516-6987

Toll free (800) 548-1784 (US and Canada only)

Fax (410) 516-6968

email jrnlcirc@press.jhu.edu

https://www.press.jhu.edu/journals/diacritics/

Diacritics is a member of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals. This publication is designed by Rick Rawlins/Work, Boston, MA, and printed by The Sheridan Press, Hanover, PA. The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of ANSI-NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

IMAGE: TO REASON WITH HEATHEN AT HARVEST, 2017

Oil on canvas 78 3/4 x 51 3/16 inches

© Lynette Yiadom-Boakye. Courtesy of the artist, Jack Shainman Gallery, New York and Corvi-Mora, London.

INTRODUCTION: BLACK RESISTANCE

“Blackness” and “resistance”: two words that often defy what is commonly understood about their conditions, meanings, terms, and articulations. Alone or together, these terms raise a host of questions about the value and limits of their representation, practice, and the traditions that subtend them. At the time of collating this special issue in 2020, what many observed as a “racial reckoning” took place in the U.S., in the form of protests against racialized state-sanctioned violence and black death at the hands of law enforcement. However, as the contributors of this special issue attest to in different ways, the precarity of black life has always and continues to pose a complex historico-political and psychical question concomitant to the gratuity of antiblackness—the long-standing history and disavowal of antiblackness that prefigure the symbolic semblances of civil society, the nation state, art and culture, law, and politics, in the United States and globally. If, with the staggering daily evidence of antiblackness, black resistance forces us to rethink the relations between politics and the political, slavery and policing, race and desire, or even perception and aesthetics, it also forces us to rethink the signs and contexts that position blackness as something that is forced to “work” or be put to “work” insofar as its enslavement ramifies, supports, and uncovers a “white” sovereign truth. To that end, the essays featured in this special issue ask what are the paths of reading and critique that enable an intervention in—and consequently, a resistance to—the existing axioms and dominant modes of thought that determine both the impasses and the possibilities for black resistance. It is only fitting then that the essays that follow discern a productive tension on the question of black resistance—a remark that can also be tracked both by the essays’ contiguities with and challenges to one another.

Calvin Warren’s essay, “Rethinking the Black Will,” introduces these concerns by raising a series of questions on the relation between the black will and resistance. If political and philosophical discussions of resistance are indexed by continental notions of will, how can black resistance be figured without undergoing the gratuity of antiblack “onticidal” violence? For Warren, the black body is inextricable from the targeting of such metaphysical violence since “the anatomy of black remnants is unpresentable within onto-metaphsical schemes, leaving the black nihilist in search of a discourse, endlessly falling into a bottomless, conceptual abyss.”1 And the silencing of this perpetual violence ought to throw light on the limits in which black resistance can be understood. However, we see its repetition in a deferential kind of interpretation whereby this limit is elided. As Warren observes, the European subject’s “will to power” cannot be actualized, thought, or made intelligible without blackness’ enslavement as a solution to the philosophical crisis of the will. To that extent, notions of the black will, resistance, and, for that matter, desire, cannot be construed as isomorphic to those concepts articulated by continental European thought. This is made sharply acute as Warren provides a close reading of Hortense Spillers’s watershed essay, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book” alongside the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche. In doing so, Warren telescopes in further critical questions on the split between the black will and what he describes as the “cosmological body” to explore how this fracture, nonetheless, persists to characterize elements of the Black Radical Tradition.

Linette Park is a Visiting Assistant Professor in African American Studies at Emory University. Her research interests include black critical theories/ black studies, carceral studies, gender and sexuality studies, psychoanalysis, philosophy of law, visual art and film, and the afterlife of slavery and lynching in the U.S. Her first monograph is under advanced contract with Stanford University press for the series Inventions: Black Philosophy, Politics, Aesthetics. Email: linette.park@emory.edu

For Rizvana Bradley as well, the violence of representation—as it is inextricably tied to and preserved by a racial regime of aesthetics—signals the insidiousness of an antiblack metaphysical violence that underwrites not only these dimensions, but also notions of the body and desire. From the outset of her essay “On Black Aesthesis,” Bradley brings to the fore a question contemporaneous with our times: who, as spectator and consumer, can furnish the images and signs of blackness and antiblackness? What are the ontological and aesthetic conditions that can afford blackness to resist the perpetuity of such violence—if any? And, to that effect, can blackness ever resist “being captive to this punitive regime of picturing . . . by which it is violently regulated, and within which it is constantly forced to appear”?2 Bradley scrutinizes a contemporary moment of white protest during the COVID-19 pandemic where blackness, via an image of the enslaved body, is yet again instrumentalized as a sign for white corporeal sovereignty. Bradley reveals that the appropriation of blackness into a sign has a double effect: it procures blackness’ enslavement to a racial regime of aesthetics simultaneously as it undergoes a disfigurement under its visual politics. At the same time, such calls are not isolated to this moment. The photograph, in its longstanding tradition as a testament of a “white” sovereign truth, signals the relation between affectability and a “specific history of the emergence of the immunological body—a body . . . contoured by the principle of sovereignty and propriety.”3 Bradley traces the abstraction and the ways in which blackness becomes dissimulated in the production of aesthetics and its intellectual tradition within continental thought, by reading closely the works of Hortense Spillers, Calvin Warren, Saidiya Hartman, and Frantz Fanon against Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jacques Rancière, and Jean-Luc Nancy, among others. As such, Bradley asks, can the “proper” body only come into being insofar as it is “in appositional relation to that grammar within which blackness may only appear as an aberration or mistranslation?”4

The question of what enables the translation into the language of resistance and as resistance proper is also at the center of Linette Park’s essay, “Untranslatability, Resistance.” Following the first two court cases to interpret an anti-lynching statute in the State of California— cases which have translated the statute’s original legislative intent from anti-lynching to “self-lynching”—, Park points to a paradox wherein the untranslatability of blackness girds a violence of reason and partial truth that sustains a juridical imaginary in and out of the courtroom yet also imbues and overdetermines blackness with (non-)meaning only to qualify black resistance as a criminal act. Here, too, the question of whose will and agency are privileged in the constitution of the subject and their resistance is central. In tracing how both the court and law enforcement privileged a notion of “lawful custody” and protection of the police that mirrors the statute’s latent desire to strengthen the securitization of the state, Park does not argue for reform, that is improving the representation on which legal interpretation relies. Drawing from thinkers including Walter Benjamin, Saidiya Hartman, and Jacques Lacan, Park shows both that blackness is ante legem and that antiblack terror is inscribed yet illegible in the juridical archive of lynching violence. In doing so, she suggests that the racialized legal defendants face an antagonistic juridical corner where, in fact, the state weaponizes the

statute against them (and, indeed, fails to protect them). Resistance, in this sense, can never be on the side established by the whiteness of law and its legal rhetoric, but is that which remains untranslatable to representational orders of law and language.

Alírio Karina’s essay, “Refusing to Vanish,” illustrates the stakes of puncturing the relation between representation and historicity in their close reading of V.Y. Mudimbe’s works, The Invention of Africa and The Idea of Africa. Karina places together Mudimbe’s examination of the history of African discourses and its development into a modern order of knowledge and power, and what they see as an irreconcilable and ongoing political and epistemic despair in a post-independence African context. These twin concerns, Karina argues, make all the more urgent Mudimbe’s theory of politics and contingency—“of resistance, response, claim, seizure”5—against a range of enclosures (epistemic, political, theological, material). And yet the discursive tapestry of African life cannot be made into a generalized theory of autonomy. As Karina explains, “blackness . . . is not a phenomenon outside of history, emerging from but perpetually subordinated to it, but rather something whose seeming perpetuity is actively produced.”6 With this in mind, Karina shows how the “real” and “myth” are more than an apparent binary in service of anthropological discourse (though they are this as well), but in fact are interdependent, mutually informing one another in the labor of incorporating Africa into Western discourse and order. Turning to Mudimbe’s critique of representation in the Négritude movement and formulating an analysis of Athi-Patra Ruga’s artwork, Karina offers us a reading of black resistance in the face of “silent discourses,” that is, the spaces and axioms of language through which black life is turned into a “worked object” for colonial vision. Indeed, what resists the onto-political condition of blackness which Fanon has described as “mort à bout touchant”?7 David Marriott’s essay, “On Revolutionary Suicide,” powerfully takes up such a question in his radical rereading of the philosophy of Huey P. Newton. In Marriott’s essay, Newton’s notion of a “resistant death”—one that he explains as “a death defined by its afformation, or by its vir (virility), capacity, passion or power”8—is shown to be indissociable from a reactive social death. The wager of black resistance proposed by Newton, Marriott tells us, is greater than a liberal or moral event, even more pronounced than such outcomes; it is a drive, an afformation as a will to power, that upends all common understandings to and beyond a comprehension of resistance and revolution, life and death. For Marriott then, the focus is less on the historical and political formation of the Black Panther Party and proper definitions of sovereignty, sacrifice, and will; rather, his essay serves as an extensive meditation on and deconstruction of black resistance and power. At the same time, Marriott does not operationalize a neat opposition between continental political thought and its Others. Instead, we see why Nietzsche deeply influences Netwon’s notion of “will to power,” but in the sense that a will to power “goes beyond the metaphysics of energy or will.”9 In tracing Newton’s investment in the thought of Nietzsche and Fanon, Marriott also critically examines notions of suicide, sacrifice, death, and sovereignty in the writings of Georges Bataille and Achille Mbembe to bring into sharp relief how Newton’s development on the notions of revolutionary suicide and resistance (and reaction) challenge their political tradition and their legacies.

Finally, the issue features the paintings of British artist and writer Lynette YiadomBoakye, whose work reflects both the fragility and depths of descension as magnified in the question of black resistance. In composing the figures in her paintings, YiadomBoakye resists notions of capturing real subjects. Yiadom-Boakye has described her approach as “the difference between working from a person that we’re trying to capture then actually trying to invent one.”10 She adds that “people are tempted to politicize the fact that I paint black figures, and the complexity of this is an essential part of the work. But my starting point is always the language of painting itself and how that relates to the subject matter.”11 Yiadom-Boakye’s paintings, and equally her textual approach to painting, reflect then not only the political nature of black resistance, which refuses a dominant language of politics and the political, but also the evanescence of invention that lies within such refusal and resistance. The precarity of blackness, as a problem in the rhetoric of representation and language, makes clear that such dilemma simultaneously occupies the violent intimacies of a wanton historical and psychopolitical complex. But it also suggests a necessary reorientation to the question of black resistance, an approach that must be no less than an invention as Yiadom-Boakye illustrates for us here. The essays and art assembled in this special issue put such an approach to and analyses of invention into light, illumining black critical theories as they unfold and radically interrupt the grounds through which blackness and resistance have been thought together—which nonetheless remains one the most crucial encounters in theory and praxis today.

The precarity of blackness, as a problem in the rhetoric of representation and language, makes clear that such dilemma simultaneously occupies the violent intimacies of a wanton historical and psychopolitical complex.

Notes

I would like to thank Karen Pinkus, Hannah Miller, and the Jack Shainman Gallery for their work and support in making this project possible. I am also deeply grateful for the editorial support and guidance of Diane Berrett Brown, David Marriott, Erin Trapp, and Derek Woods during various stages of this project. The idea for this special issue originated from the panel “Rethinking Black Resistance” at the American Studies Association Conference in Honolulu, Hawaii (2019). My appreciation goes to the participants—Axelle Karera, David Marriott, and Calvin Warren—and audience members for their questions and comments.

1 Warren, “Rethinking the Black Will,” 13.

2 Bradley, “On Black Aesthesis,” 23.

3 Bradley, 24.

4 Bradley, “On Black Aesthesis,” 24.

5 Karina, “Refusing to Vanish,” 92.

6 Karina, 88.

7 Marriott, “On Revolutionary Suicide,” 106.

8 Marriott, 101.

9 Marriott, 107.

10 Tate, “Lynette Yiadom-Boakye Studio Visit.”

11 Jack Shainman Gallery, “Lynette YiadomBoakye Biography.”

Works Cited

Bradley, Rizvana. “On Black Aesthesis.” Diacritics 49, no. 4 (2021): 20–52.

Jack Shainman Gallery. “Lynette Yiadom-Boakye Biography.” Jack Shainman Gallery, n.d. https:// jackshainman.com/artists/lynette_yiadom_boakye

Karina, Alírio. “Refusing to Vanish: Despair, Contingency, and the African Political.” Diacritics 49, no. 4 (2021): 76–99.

Marriott, David. “On Revolutionary Suicide.” Diacritics 49, no. 4 (2021): 100–32.

Tate Media. “Lynette Yiadom-Boakye Studio Visit.” Tate, November 14, 2013. https://www.tate.org.uk/ art/artists/lynette-yiadom-boakye-16784/lynetteyiadom-boakye-studio-visit

Warren, Calvin. “Rethinking the Black Will: The Cosmological Body, Nihilism, and Resistance.” Diacritics 49, no. 4 (2021): 10–9.

RETHINKING THE BLACK WILL: THE COSMOLOGICAL BODY, NIHILISM, AND RESISTANCE

That order, with its human sequence written in blood, represents for its African and indigenous peoples a scene of actual mutilation, dismemberment, and exile. First of all, their New World, diasporic plight, marked a theft of the body—a willful and violent (and unimaginable for this distance) severing of the captive body from its motive will, its active desire.

—Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book”1

I came into the world imbued with the will to find a meaning in things, my spirit filled with the desire to attain to the source of the world, and then I found I was an object in the midst of other objects.

—Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks2

What is resistance without a will? Does “the will” engender resistance or does resistance produce the will? If we interrogate the infrastructure of black resistance—its metaphysics and a priori conditions—the will is its foundation, often uninterrogated. Although the Black Radical Tradition has critiqued traditional conceptions of sovereignty and singularity, the will persists as an organizing principle or mystical capacity anchoring resistance, rebellion, and imagination for it. The will, then, retains the capacities of “the subject” even as this subject is deconstructed or abandoned in radical thought. Put differently, if objects do resist, as Fred Moten avers, they only resist because objects can will (or activate willing) as a feature of existence. Or as David Marriott remarks in his critique of Moten, this object’s resistance “is also posited as a natural will to resistance.”3 The will is often posited as natural, intrinsic, and universal to provide black objects with an irrefutable resource for resistance (even as the universal is held under suspicion). Resistance, within black radical thought, is an intrinsic activity of the will, such that a will-less object is incapable of resistance, and a will that does not resist is no longer a will at all.

Setting aside the presumption that wills must resist, as a natural inclination, what does the black will entail? Does the black will will its own preservation or does another mystical agency support its resilience? Phrases such as “will of the people” mobilize political activity without much critical insight on willing itself.4 If the will is mystical property, belonging to the people or the person, can this will be stolen along with bodies (and black life as Moten would suggest)?5 And if will-theft is possible, is black resistance the retrieval of the purloined will? Black resistance encounters a problem if the will that preconditions it belongs to another or is incapacitated—even worse, if one wills the will of an oppressive Other (in a devastating Lacanian formulation). What catalyzes resistance if such theft occurs (or if the will is destroyed, much like bodies can be destroyed)?

The Black Radical Tradition often relies on the black will (and synonyms such as “agency” and “action”) to read the archive of resistance and freedom dreams. Slave revolts,

Calvin Warren is an Associate Professor in African American Studies at Emory University. Warren’s research interests are in the area of continental philosophy, Lacanian psychoanalysis, queer theory, black philosophy, Afropessimism, and theology. His book Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation is forthcoming.

Email: clwarr2@emory.edu

marronage, fugitivity, and diurnal contestations are, purportedly, irrefutable evidence of this will and its operations on oppressive conditions—resistance is both evidence and activity of the will. Saidiya Hartman cautions against such a triumphant reading given that domination “so masterfully simulated black ‘will’ only in order to reanchor subordination.”6 “Successful resistance” might just be the consequence of a simulacrum, one accomplishing the internecine desire of the Other as the object’s own will. A simulated will, an agency of ventriloquism and dissimulation, haunts the archive and presents a much deeper problem: metaphysical violence.

In this essay, I return to this archive, through a reading of Hortense Spillers’s “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” to argue that the black will is the target of metaphysical violence, a violence that the Black Radical Tradition either neglects or conflates with political violence/activity.7 As a target of metaphysical violence, the black will is severed from its body—what I will call “the cosmological body”—, thus producing a disembodied will and a will-less black body. The Black Radical Tradition, unable to contend with this metaphysical fracturing, confuses the disembodied will with the coherent will of political philosophy, which results in unbridled optimism and philosophical escapism. This, I argue, is the deep antiblack violence that throws black resistance into crisis. The crisis of the will has a long philosophical career, culminating in Friedrich Nietzsche’s nihilism (and “will to power”). Ultimately, I read Spillers alongside Nietzsche to argue that black nihilism presents a more severe problem than Nietzsche could anticipate (or even bother to consider): the black will is denied active desire and a cosmological body to express its “power.”8 Unlike Nietzsche’s subject, (e)valuation, the endless process of becoming, is not an option for the black object, leading to a nihilism without a metaphysical solution (Nietzsche) or an ontological one (Martin Heidegger’s remembering Being).9 Without addressing this metaphysical “severing,” black resistance reproduces the simulacrum of the Other’s desire (often projecting the subject’s capacity onto the fractured black object).

>>

The cosmological body is the primary target of antiblack metaphysical violence, and such a body is irreducible to physiology, biology, or phenomenology.10 Although corporeality, or the material body, assumes priority in an ocular-centric and monetized economy, the cosmological body provides the infrastructure, or force field, for corporeality, in all its manifestations, to unfold in existence. A schematization of the field of existence, or the

The Black Radical Tradition, unable to contend with this metaphysical fracturing, confuses the disembodied will with the coherent will of political philosophy, which results in unbridled optimism and philosophical escapism.

unique delimitation of this field and fashioning of its resources, is another articulation of this body. Not quite a “form,” as presented in metaphysics and idealism, the cosmological body is both an opening and enclosure, unfolding and accomplishment, an enigma and intrinsic certainty—it is the meeting ground of conflictual, expressive, and spiritual confluence. This mystical body is the enemy of metaphysics and its science of objectification, calculation, and presence. When we speak of metaphysical violence, then, we cannot presume that we begin with metaphysical entities; “violence” names a process of transmogrification—a transformation of cosmology into metaphysics. This “into” is saturated with such brutality, cupidity, and anguish that something other, a horrific alterity, emerges “there.” A thrownness into violence without meaning or actualization—not quite a world for transmogrified bodies, but an ambush of multiple vectors of force, aiming to destroy any “before” (temporal, spatial, spiritual, and cultural) metaphysical conquest. What is the anatomy of this cosmological body? Would such an anatomization clarify or obfuscate “black resistance”—or might it require a different thinking altogether?

Nihilism is precisely the anatomization and diagnosis of the cosmological body. It analyzes the remains, or remnants, of this body after the destruction (weakening) of metaphysics. Decadence, exhaustion, anxiety, alienation, and misery constitute the nihilistic diagnosis of this body—what survives, or is available for anatomization, is contestable within nihilistic thought. The black cosmological body, however, requires a different diagnosis and anatomization than what the nihilist offers; a black nihilist, then, is presented with problems that slightly overlap, but significantly depart from a traditional nihilistic diagnosis. What unites the nihilist and the black nihilist is a concern for the cosmological body, as the site of contestation and “spiritual crisis,” but what remains, or can be salvaged, is so dissimilar that the problem of black nihilism remains largely unapproachable or unthought. The qualifier “black” dockets the foreclosure of the nihilistic solution—a “will to power” or the appropriation of Being—to the problem of metaphysical violence. The answer to the question “What can be done for the black cosmological body?” leads us into a conceptual and strategic abyss, since “doing/doneness” is so embedded in metaphysics and ontology that without recourse to them, any answer appears irrational, nonsensical, or unsatisfyingly mystical. The question requires an answer that undermines the very logic, or purpose, of an answer, or, it presents the answer as unanswerable because the answer lacks a proper presentation/grammar. Put differently, the anatomy of black remnants is unpresentable within onto-metaphysical schemes, leaving the black nihilist in search of a discourse, endlessly falling into a bottomless, conceptual abyss. What seems unanswerable, or unapproachable, is the problem of the black will and (e)valuation.

One pathway into this problem-space is to perform a Nietzschean reading of Spillers’s “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe.” Such a reading would diagnose the “rhetorical symptoms” or letters of the cosmological body as nihilistic signifiers (vacuous nodal points) requiring a hermeneutic capable of interpreting “hieroglyphics of the flesh.” Perhaps what Spillers has accomplished is a psychoanalysis of (black) nihilism. We can re-read this canonical essay as the imbrication, or collision, of nihilistic symptoms: Nietzsche’s

subject engendering black nihilism (and slavery), as a consequence of his/her decay, exhaustion, and conquest; and the black object (the enslaved) enduring European nihilism as an aspect of captivity and antiblackness. Black nihilism, then, is a symptom of European nihilism, an untreatable symptom within the analytic setting of history (and historicity). Nietzsche’s idealized “naturalism,” the unrestrained space of conflictual instincts, is experienced by blackness as a “cultural vestibularity”—a terroristic space of the drives (without ethical, legal, or moral limits).11 In a sense, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe” is an elegant set of analytic notes that create an orthography of the New World as primal scene. This hieroglyphic, this non-sense signifier, emerges at the site of a philosophical fixation, and antiblackness constitutes what Serge Leclaire would call a “letter holder,” as it cuts the cosmological body with an “irresistible, destructive sensuality.”12 What remains after the cut of this letter is part of our concern here—let’s call this “cutting” metaphysical violence.

If “nihilism is the ‘inner logic’ of Western history,” then slavery, as a formative and decisive rupture of Western history, must be read within this logic.13 Every “return” to the archive of slavery, and concomitant engagement with its afterlife, is a nihilistic reading. Slavery is a solution to a nihilistic problem, the crisis of European man—a solution that reproduces the problem in a tortuous cycle of misery. One aspect of this problem is “the will to nothing” (the last will of man); this will to nothing indicates a will so desperate for a goal, an aim within the meaninglessness of existence, that the subject prefers willing nothing rather than living without justification for its suffering. This will, however, is a will that ends willing, the cessation of life as such.14 The will to power, by contrast, is a life force of incessant (e)valuation as becoming, a power that could offer an alternative to the cessation of life, the willing of nothing(ness). Along a psychoanalytic axis, this Nietzschean willing resembles the (re)production of desire, an endless movement around an unobtainable object. This (re)production of (re)production, the endless loop of desire, however, shields the subject from the manque-à-être, the “nothing(ness)” around which symbolic existence is formed.15 Reading Nietzsche psychoanalytically, then, we understand willing as the activation of desire, and life as an incessant encircling—(e)valuation is the mode, or realization, of this movement. We might also think of the “will to nothing(ness)” as the Lacanian drive, a will turned back upon itself, constantly rupturing this life force. A will that stops willing, or sets its goal as nothing(ness) itself, freezes becoming, keeps it stuck in a meaningless drive.

One aspect of the problem nihilism confronts, then, is the possibility of a will no longer willing. What becomes of existence without willing? The subject ceases to be a subject, as such, without this reproduction, or activation, of desire. Could the possibility, or threat, of the unbearable occurring—the evacuation of the will of its desiring—contribute to the sickness and the exhaustion of the Nietzschean subject? Warding off (and disavowing) this possibility, through a compulsion to will, slowly wears the subject down. Each act of willing, then, contains a surplus, a nothing(ness) that both propels and limits the subject. A will to power might just entail the desire to conquer nothing(ness) itself, an endless pursuit of an unachievable objective. The inner logic of nihilism is embedded

in this pursuit. Understanding slavery as such a pursuit, as the activity of a compulsive will to defeat nothing(ness), or to disavow the impossibility of such defeat, recasts the enterprise as an actualization of the European subject’s “will to power” and enslaving black bodies as a solution to the crisis of the will.

Speaking psychoanalytically, we could name this “solution” antiblack projection, thus displacing this crisis onto black bodies to sustain a fantasy of an unencumbered will. Among its other functions, slavery institutionalizes and cultivates this projection; and one name for the projected body, one vulnerable to internecine psychic impositions, is a slave. Captivity transforms the slave’s existence into an incarceration—the slave is imprisoned in the crisis of the other’s will. The slave memorializes the will’s defeat, the death of the will, and consciousness (and labor) fail to provide any exit from the misery of nothing(ness). Put differently, the slave’s cosmological body is the target of this “crisis.” To be made a slave is to deform this cosmological body—to mutilate it metaphysically, preparing it for inhabitation by nothingness.

It is precisely this metaphysical mutilation that Spillers traces throughout the archive. In a passage that seems to anticipate Nietzsche’s crisis, she states:

That [socio-political] order, with its human sequence written in blood, represents for its African and indigenous peoples a scene of actual mutilation, dismemberment, and exile. First of all, their New-World, diasporic plight, marked a theft of the body—a willful and violent (and unimaginable from this distance) severing of the captive body from its motive will, its active desire.16

Readings Spillers’s trenchant passage through Nietzsche, we could suggest that the theft and severing of the black cosmological body is willful for the subject—it both fills the will with an actualized power and provides a telos, or goal, for the will’s activity (“willful”). This bloody scene not only represents physical violence, but also metaphysical violence, since the goal of this willing is to sever the body from “its motive will, its active desire.” Will conquest, then, constitutes a crucial dimension of captivity, since the willing subject actualizes its power through the disaggregation of a black will from its body. A will-less body, and a disembodied will. The goal of this process is to produce an object (a body as Thing). The Thing (a New World Ding) embodies the will’s tombstone, a territory void of desire and saturated with a destructive jouissance—“reduced to a thing, to being for the captor,” as Spillers articulates it.17 Just as the subject entrapped in the terrorizing space of das Ding can only will through ventriloquism (to “desire the desire of the Other”) until death, the slave’s disembodied will is a will unable to actualize desire (because it has been severed from the body), so its will becomes a commodity and plaything for the Other’s desire (the Other’s will). Under these circumstances, can we call the black will a will at all? Can a

Will conquest, then, constitutes a crucial dimension of captivity, since the willing subject actualizes its power through the disaggregation of a black will from its body.

will function without its body?

If the body for Nietzsche (influenced by Arthur Schopenhauer’s philosophy) is a symbol for the cosmic will, an aggregate of conflictual forces (desires), then the black body, in the New World, is a catachrestic opening onto a different trajectory of nihilism.18 The black body, a sign fractured by antiblack violence, doesn’t symbolize the cosmological body (the unity of will and instinctual force), but something other. Thus, the problem of black nihilism is the solution for the Nietzschean subject. Unlike the Nietzschean subject, who can do nothing other than “will his own will” in a solipsistic narcissism according to Jean-Luc Marion, the black object is deprived of will(ing)—such active desire is prohibited under the threat of death. Black deprivation, however, is not a consequence of consciousness regulating or disciplining instinctual forces (producing a bad conscious), but the outcome of ritualized violence and institutionalized sadism. The black will, then, is pulverized into vacuity and inactivity. Black nihilism constitutes an abyss for Nietzsche, more horrific than the horror vacui, since (e)valuation reproduces powerlessness for blackness rather than propel becoming (and inexhaustible self-fashioning).

How do we conceptualize what remains after the cut of metaphysical violence? Is conceptuality (or any noetic synthesis of subject and predication) capable of grasping or presenting this cosmological remnant? Is the will the unacknowledged foundation of conceptuality, and if this is the case, can we conceptualize black remnants without a desiring will? The black body, as Thing, is the limit of conceptuality—which is why Hegel would describe the Negro as the “Thing without value.”19 It might be tempting to psychoanalyze conceptuality itself, as a desire circulating around blackness (the void), but such an analysis leads us into an abyss without (en)lightenment or metaphors of “truth as light.” Unlike Spillers, who refuses (or disavows) the very conceptual problematic she raises—by relying on “metaphor” and “mythology” to give meaning to that which is without meaning or concept (blackness as Thing)—black nihilism must gather the shards of thought in darkness. Put differently, the bodyless will and will-less body present a crisis of meaning and value for nihilism, either as the transvaluation of all values or the forgetfulness of Being. We must not conflate nihilism with black nihilism, since the crisis of the latter cannot be resolved by reducing ontology to value (onto-axiology) or appropriating Being as event.

Theories of black resistance are disavowed eulogies for this black cosmological body. If the work of metaphysical violence produced a Thing (without value or conceptuality), then resistance must reunite will and body, restore the cosmological body. But such suturing might just be a fantasy, an enjoyment of the will-less will, a fraudulent agency that promises meaning without being. Again, resistance is not foreclosed as much as it is imagined without concept, telos, or meaning. As Marriott perspicuously states the matter, we must rethink resistance as “an event that exceeds all such narratives.”20 Fanon’s “hemorrhaging body” might itself be a symptom, a reenactment

of a prior cosmological severing: the severing of the will from the body. Fanon’s body, one that speaks its symptom using a traumatic letter, is the product of violence in which “customs, metaphysics, and ways of life” are obliterated during the colonial encounter.21 Although Spillers and Fanon are writing in different contexts, the metaphysical destruction of the black cosmological body is a consistent problem for black existence, and the hauntology of resistance agendas. Reading Spillers through Marriot, we can suggest that the reunification of black will and body is without a narrative that would render such reunification intelligible or identifiable.

In short, neither value, will, body, nor meaning can anchor black resistance as reliable schemas or narratives. Black radicalism often takes the will for granted as an intrinsic resource for becoming and self-fashioning. Reading Spillers though Nietzsche exposes a nihilistic problem without an intelligible solution—repairing the cosmological body. And if, as I aver, it is this unacknowledged cosmological body that organizes and anchors resistance protocols and fantasies in black existence, then resistance will restage rather than overcome cosmic hemorrhaging. Recasting reenactment as progress entraps black radicalism in a circuit of disappointment. Far more severe than ressentiment and exhaustion, black disappointment produces symptoms and miseries Consciousness and Being cannot relieve. Resistance, if anything, must attend to the black cosmological body, with instruments beyond the world and conceptuality.

Black radicalism often takes the will for granted as an intrinsic resource for becoming and self-fashioning.

Notes

1 Spillers, “Mamas Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” 67.

2 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 82.

3 Marriott, “Judging Fanon.”

4 See Peter Hallward’s “The Will of the People” for a survey of the “will” in continental and political philosophy.

5 Moten, Stolen Life.

6 Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 56.

7 Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe.”

8 Nietzsche’s antiblackness is well-documented. The problem of “black nihilism” is dismissed alongside his dismissal of the “slave’s mentality.” For a reading of Nietzsche’s antiblackness, see Preston, “Nietzsche and Blacks.”

9 See Heidegger’s critique of Nietzsche’s metaphysics (as valuation and domination) in his “The Word of Nietzsche.”

10 The term “cosmological body” is often cited as to understand the mythical body (the body of gods) and a statical nodal point of mathematical theory (i.e. planetary science). My use of the term here, however, is to indicate a unity of spirit and material (before the anatomizing of the human sciences). Arthur Schopenhauer understands the will as an undisciplined or subjectless “cosmic power” in The World as Will and Representation. Nietzsche revises Schopenhauer’s pessimistic perception of the will and understand the body as the symbol of the cosmic will (see Spinello, “Nietzsche’s Conception of the Body”). I use the term “cosmological body” to indicate a unity between will and body. As I will demonstrate, antiblack violence works to sever this body—to atomize and commodify each aspect of it. We could call this severing a “spiritual crisis.” I use cosmology and spirituality somewhat interchangeably to docket a unity before the violence of metaphysics and the human sciences.

11 See Conway, “Heidegger, Nietzsche, and the Origins of Nihilism” for a generative reading of Nietzsche’s naturalistic anthropology (against Heidegger) as the origin of nihilism—consciousness repressing the drives/instincts.

12 Leclaire, Psychoanalyzing.

13 See Heidegger, Nietzsche IV, 52–7.

14 Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality

15 Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII.

16 Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” 67.

17 In Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of History, he states “Negroes are enslaved by Europeans and sold to America. Bad as this may be, their lot in their own lands is even worse, since there a slavery quite as absolute exists; for it is the essential principle of slavery, that man has not yet attained a consciousness of his freedom, and consequently sinks down to a mere Thing—an object of no value” (113). If for the Nietzschean subject it is the regulation of consciousness that enables the production of value, for the black object, slavery is a sunken abyss without such value—consciousness cannot come to the rescue for Hegel. The “Thing” then is the black object unable to (e)valuate and possess value. Axiological destruction undergirds antiblackness. Nietzsche’s dialogue with Hegel does not provide a solution for the black “Thing”: this is the problem black nihilism confronts.

18 See Klossowski, Nietzsche & the Vicious Circle

19 Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History, 113.

20 Marriott, “Judging Fanon.”

21 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 83.

Works Cited

Conway, Daniel W. “Heidegger, Nietzsche, and the Origins of Nihilism.” Journal of Nietzsche Studies 3 (1992): 11–43.

Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove, 1967.

Hallward, Peter. “The Will of the People: Notes Toward a Dialectical Voluntarism.” Radical Philosophy 155 (2009): 17–29.

Hartman, Saidiya. Scenes of Subjection. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Hegel, G.W.F. Lectures on the Philosophy of History

Translated by John Sibree. Kitchener, Ontario: Batoche Books, 2001.

Heidegger, Martin. Nietzsche, Volume IV: Nihilism

Edited and translated by David F. Krell. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1982.

———. “The Word of Nietzsche: God is Dead.” In The Question Concerning Technology and other Essays, edited and translated by William Lovitt, 53–114. New York: Harper & Row, 1977.

Klossowski, Pierre. Nietzsche & the Vicious Circle

Translated by Daniel W. Smith. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.

Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1950–1960. Translated by Dennis Porter. New York: Norton, 1992.

Leclaire, Serge. Psychoanalyzing: On the Order of the Unconscious and the Practice of the Letter

Translated by Peggy Kamuf. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998.

Marriott, David. “Judging Fanon.” Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge 29 (2016). http://www.rhizomes.net/issue29/marriott.html

Moten, Fred. Stolen Life. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 2018.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morality. Edited by Keith Ansell-Pearson, translated by Carol Diethe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

Preston, William. “Nietzsche and Blacks.” In Existence in Black: An Anthology of Black Existential Philosophy, edited by Lewis R. Gordon, 165–72. New York: Routledge. 1997.

Schopenhauer, Arthur. The World as Will and Representation. 2 volumes. Translated by E.F.J. Payne. New York: Dover Publications, 1969.

Spillers, Hortense. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987): 64–81.

Spinello, Arthur. “Nietzsche’s Conception of the Body.” Dissertation Fordham University, 1981.

ON BLACK AESTHESIS

RIZVANA BRADLEY

Cruelty is formal.

—Steve McQueen, “Dialogue with Stuart Comer”1

There is a photograph of a white woman participating in a protest against the state of California’s COVID-19 face mask mandate in front of Humboldt County Courthouse during the mid-May lockdown in California, which circulated briefly online in the summer of 2020. Her hair is gathered in a casual, loose ponytail; she wears slightly oversized black sunglasses, a red-and-white bandana tied around her neck, and a light-washed denim jacket. Standing decisively by the sign she holds, she proudly displays the blackand-white image of an enslaved figure—muzzled, shackled, and chained. The figure is confined to the left side of the woman’s sign, while the right side presents the entirely capitalized declaration: “Muzzles are for dogs and slaves. I am a free human being.”

The idea of freedom is tethered to the conviction that one has certain inalienable rights, foremost among them, the proprietary right over one’s body. But how does this proprietary claim manage to reproduce itself, even in the face of the quotidian entanglements—from the affective to the ecological—that would seem to submit overwhelming evidence to the contrary? Freedom is an aesthetic conceit, and it is by means of aesthetic fabrication that it is sustained as an idea, as an attachment, as a right to be defended.

I am not invested in elaborating a critique of freedom’s racial constitution within modernity. But I am interested in how those who have never been able to claim a proprietary right over the body are put to work to fashion freedom as an aesthetic project, for this (re)productive labor tells us something important about the foundations and operations of an aesthetic regime that is constitutive of the modern world, about the nature and limits of that regime’s representational gambit. Emphasizing the ways this aesthetic regime and the antiblack metaphysics it endeavors to sustain are at once predicated upon and imperiled by blackness, this essay argues that blackness is a problem of and for “the body.” It is precisely this ineluctable problematic that the aforementioned image exemplifies and inadvertently caricatures. To be clear, although this image tells us nothing about black life,2 it does tellingly elucidate the general contours and dynamics of the violent aesthetic regime that every materialization of black aesthesis is made to come before. (My concept of black aesthesis, which both resonates with and departs from Jacques Rancière’s “aisthesis,” is elaborated later in this essay.) Furthermore, the image gestures, against its will, toward the radical dehiscence that blackness bears, even as its bearings are conscripted to aesthetically suture the tears within the metaphysics of an antiblack world.

My forthcoming book, Anteaesthetics: Black Aesthesis and the Critique of Form, begins from a question that reverberates through the image: how do we think with the vexed existence and gendered reproductions of blackness, which cannot be represented within modernity’s aesthetic regime, yet are everywhere “bound to appear”?3 While I can only gesture to the broad contours of that book’s argument here, Anteaesthetics contends that the theoretical project opened by such a question cannot be advanced through the fantasy of absolute escape or triumph afforded by the utopian teleology of another world

Rizvana Bradley is Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies and Affiliated Faculty in History of Art at UC Berkeley. Her monograph Anteaesthetics: Black Aesthesis and the Critique of Form is forthcoming with Stanford University Press. Her scholarship has appeared in Film Quarterly, Black Camera, Discourse, Rhizomes, Women and Performance, and TDR: The Drama Review

Email: rgbradley@berkeley.edu

any more than through the ambition of attaining reparation or recognition within the ontological fortifications of humanism. Instead, such a project must attend to the aesthesis of a black existence that is before the metaphysics of the antiblack world and the representational regime which endeavors to secure and sustain this metaphysics. My conception of “before”—signaled in the title of my book by the prefix ante-—assumes a dual spatio-temporal valence: on the one hand, black aesthesis is vestibular to the antiblack world, its metaphysical threshold and abyssal limit; on the other hand, black aesthesis is always already subject to the violence of that world, even as it remains obdurately irreducible and ultimately unassimilable within it. Anteaesthetics asks after a constellation of experimentations and inhabitations that emerge before the antiblack world, as that world’s condition of possibility and immanent ruination; yet they can neither exist within that world nor escape it. Such a contention does not suggest that black artistry is either a contradiction in terms or an exercise in futility. On the contrary, Anteaesthetics is an attunement to and defense of what is indefensible in black art—of a tradition of artistry that serially and diffusively constitutes a problem of and for metaphysics. Black aesthesis, which emerges in the vertiginous cut between black existence and black non-being, demands thinking with or toward the unthought.4 Only by lingering with the racially gendered bearings of and in the cut between black existence and black non-being, without recourse to the idioms of resolution or redress, might we renew our attunement to the minor dispositions of anteaesthetic invention.

>> I have found myself repeatedly drawn to the aforementioned photograph in the months following the so-called “summer of racial reckoning.”5 What exactly is it about this image that continues to compel and scatter my returned attention? Perhaps it is how starkly the image displays the problematic of racial embodiment and the axiomatic appearance of the racial body within the modern regime of aesthetics. Or perhaps it is because I cannot relinquish the desire to deparochialize its example; to reveal the distance between the unquestionable horrors of this image, and the nominally diametric visualizations that were concurrently granted the trappings of solidarity or racial justice, as infinitesimal. What the image betrays is something on the order of what Frank B. Wilderson III, thinking alongside Saidiya Hartman, has theorized as a “structural antagonism between the subject status of the body and the object status of the Slave,”6 which here hinges upon their irreconcilable relations to the visual. What interests me is the manner in which this synecdochic violence ensures that the aesthetics of the image become irreducibly entangled with the demonstration’s explicit rhetorical performance of white supremacist nationalism. We cannot, of course, fail to notice the means by which the white woman is permitted to emerge as the photograph’s true subject. For it is she who concentrates our attention at the picture’s center, where a strange kind of visual recurrence is underway. The woman appears as if draped in the colors of the American flag; indeed, her very presence in the image is echoed and reinforced by the flurry of flags waving behind her,

along with the white men and women donning wide-brimmed bucket and bush hats, with their sartorial undertones of the frontier and white working-class life.

The angle at which we are prompted to enter the photo, the directionality in which the image pulls us, is toward the insistency of this white woman’s look, cast in the opposite direction of the enslaved figure for whom she holds space, even as she disdainfully relegates this figure to the edges of historical irrelevance. However ambiguous its boundary, the photograph’s provisional frame constructs a fantasy of proximity between all that lies outside the image and the figure doubly enframed within it—the latter rendered captive to this punitive regime of picturing, forever vulnerable to the world from which blackness is barred, by which it is violently regulated, and within which it is constantly forced to appear. This particular photographic image is wedded to the transfixing power of the white gaze, already endowed with the “dissecting” power to dispossess, to borrow Frantz Fanon’s language.7 It is a gaze that mercilessly (dis)aggregates black life, just as it enacts the fantasy of “fixing” blackness into place, in and as a body. 8 All of the coarseness and subtlety of “white rage,”9 singularly directed against the black, are refracted in a racialized bodily problematic. The body becomes the terrain by which aggrieved whiteness is able to ascend to and maintain “the moral high ground,”10 while blackness and black people remain, as Dorothy Roberts contends, forever the “bearers of ‘incurable immorality’.”11 The all too familiar white revanchist performance is threaded through a more complicated relay: the metaphysical violence which is given in and through this image is seemingly effectuated through the reduction of the black to (merely) a body, even as the black is simultaneously stripped of every pretense of the bodily sovereignty that is taken to be the inalienable right of every “free human being.”

This knotted problematic of blackness and the body is bound up with a set of contradictory imperatives that animate the biopolitical machinery of modernity. The picture’s aesthetic investments tell us something about how its visual politics conceal what is most difficult and irresolvable within the image. The white woman’s declaration of and demand for her freedom are inevitably linked to her refusal of the mask that would reveal her body’s precarious microbiological entanglement. Ultimately, she is demanding the right to displace the reality of her own biological vulnerability in order to maintain the pretense of sovereignty. And, her means of making that demand is to hold up for ridicule, and thereby sublimate, the racial object which enables her displacement: the black slave, the consummate representation of the unfree. Her need to invoke the enslaved in the signification of her own freedom reveals the foundational “complicity of slavery and freedom.”12 The enslaved, the figure who becomes a vehicle for the containment of the subject’s radical affectability, is taken as constitutionally predisposed to being subject to another’s will, and therefore requires a muzzle. As Roberts recognized, this is a continuation of the story of blackness as “biological impairment,” a rendering which tautologically ensures the ongoing development of the state’s punitive (extra)legislative regulation of that bodily impairment.13 The muzzle and mask become conflated, each taken, in the imagination of the sovereign embodied subject, as an outrageous impingement upon one’s proprietary claim to freedom and self-determination.

The photograph, which is itself an exercise in containment and subjection, compels us to consider affectability as the justification for unfreedom.14 But it also lets us puzzle over affectability in relation to the specific history of the emergence of the immunological body—a body that has been conceived as a defensive militarized organism, contoured by the principle of sovereignty and propriety, since at least the late nineteenth century.15 Thus, ironically, the white woman in the photograph, the subject who regards herself as sovereign, engages in a disavowal of affectability precisely through the performative defense of her right to remain vulnerable, of her right to lay claim to the defensive body. In this structure, blackness is preserved as the negative foil—taken as both radically affectable and insensate—to white sovereign selfhood. Sustaining these displacements, and suturing the contradictions they inevitably produce, is the work of what David Lloyd terms the “racial regime of aesthetics.”16

If the defensive body of the sovereign subject emerges precisely through the interdiction of blackness from that body, then what is the “body” the black ostensibly inhabits? Is it even possible to consider the aesthetics of that inhabitation? How do we begin to approach the splayed corpus of blackness without recourse to a conceptual grammar for and from which blackness is the ultimate declension? How do we specifically think the body outside of and in appositional relation to that grammar within which blackness may only appear as an aberration or mistranslation?

My interrogation of this image marks an effort to inquire into the racially gendered (re)productions of black anteriority, wherein black aesthesis constitutes both the indispensable requisite and ineradicable remainder for the racial regime of aesthetics and the metaphysics that regime works to suture. Within this inquiry, the body forms a distinctive (ante)aesthetic problematic. The photograph above points us towards a complex set of impositions and displacements, projections and concealments, that have constituted and reproduced the body over modernity’s longue durée. Ed Cohen’s contention that the modern body figures “the human organism . . . as a defended frontier, bound within an epidermal envelope that establishes the limits of a self,”17 along with Donna Haraway’s provocation: “Why should our bodies end at the skin?”18 form a difficult couplet within the context of the problematic this essay elaborates. They index a political unconscious predicated upon an understanding of entanglement and encounter informed by many of the racialized and gendered presumptions that structure the discourse around affectability. While these critical provocations suggest an openness to entanglement and to encounter, the very idea of skin manifesting as the problem of the frontier rhetorically echoes the discourse of conquest. The skin, understood as the threshold that delimits a self-enclosure that must be superseded, unconsciously deploys contrasting logics of exteriority and interiority, finitude and infinitude, which fundamentally renew the con-

How do we begin to approach the splayed corpus of blackness without recourse to a conceptual grammar for and from which blackness is the ultimate declension?

ditions for the modernized body’s normative architecture and appearance. But what of those whose enfleshed existence constitutes the displaced anterior of the braided machinations of bodily sovereignty, imposition, and supersession, those whose bodily interdictions make such corporeal transcendence vitally thinkable?

Most striking is not the picture’s narrativization of the loss or tribulation white citizenship has supposedly endured, but rather the gesture of defense that animates and centers it. That gesture betrays the immanent anxieties over the proprietary logics that establish whiteness and its transparent relation to bodily sovereignty, proprietary claims which have been under severe duress in the face of the abstract threat of a (micro)biologically uncertain present and future. The image gestures toward a singular impasse within the political imaginary from which it has emerged—a political imaginary whose strangely protracted temporality, in the midst of the global COVID-19 pandemic, has become acutely saturated with discursive contests over bodily autonomy and vulnerability, personal freedom and collective welfare, with the racial animus undergirding these delineations not only starkly displayed, but often erupting into militarized violence, whether executed by the state or so-called vigilantes. The degree to which the pretense of national sovereignty—and the transnational affiliations of whiteness and settler coloniality upon which that fantasy of sovereignty uneasily rests—is tethered to the pretense of bodily sovereignty could not be clearer.

If a diagnostic reading of this image requires taking stock of the body politic and the politics of the body as distinct yet inextricable moments in the racial constitution of the ruse of sovereignty, then the full significance of the picture only reveals itself when we recall that there are few events in recent history that have so unforgivingly displayed the immanent failure of the proper body as the SARS-CoV-2 global pandemic that began in March of 2020. One might think, wrongly, that the ravages of this pandemic would have demanded a general reckoning with the stark fact of “our” global, biological vulnerability, exposing the fiction of the body as an autopoietic organism, subject to the reason and will of its rightful proprietor. Yet even as this fiction strains against the realities of microbiological entanglement to a degree perhaps not seen since the so-called Spanish Flu of 1918–19, it proves unyielding. The nominal advent of the “pandemicene”19 has revealed this political and epistemic disavowal of ecological entanglement as a genocidal operation, as we witness death and debility20 accumulate in the millions, sorted across predictable cleavages of race, gender, age, class, sexuality, (dis)ability, and (post)colonial geographies.

>>

If this essay participates in the grueling work of unveiling the aesthetic operations that make the catastrophic metaphysics of an antiblack world possible, it does not do so as an end in itself, for no amount of representational critique will overturn the morbid logic and protocols of the racial regime of aesthetics. Yet the reigning presupposition of the rehabilitative or emancipatory potential of the aesthetic would seem to demand an elucidation of the violent context before which every instantiation of black aesthesis

necessarily unfolds, and with which it is forced to contend. My primary object of inquiry remains those inhabitations ceaselessly drawn and redrawn by the racial declensions that have long facilitated modernity’s displacements. The above example offers merely a glimpse into a “Way of Life”21 lived at the expense of those historically tasked with the burden of bearing these myriad displacements—the displacement of affectability and the necropolitical corollaries of this displacement, symptomatically expressed, but not encompassed, by the merciless asymmetries in the distribution of socioecological devastation. Furthermore, if the question of black aesthesis is inevitably a question of bearing—of emergence and sustenance, enduring and duration—then it is also a question of the black feminine and the black maternal, irreducibly tethered to the terrors and beauties of reproduction. The racially gendered burden of the black feminine is to bear the displacements of an entire metaphysics: to be cast, in the words of Zora Neale Hurston, as “the mule of the world”22—as an object of denigration and disposal, of boundless labor and unforgivable debt.23 I contend that the means of effectuating this displacement, of conscripting this bearing, are ineluctably aesthetic.

However, the racially gendered bearings of blackness are also reproductions of a radical dehiscence—an immanent failure of the racial regime of aesthetics to suture the ruptures borne of the antagonisms and impossibilities of its own metaphysics, and the diffusive irruption of blackness interdicted from presence in the world. Dehiscence, as Jared Sexton notes, is definitionally polyvalent,

indicating, in surgical medicine, the opening up of a wound along the lines of incision (either because the wound was inadequately sutured or has become infected or subjected to further trauma), or, in botany, the opening up of plants along a seam at the age of maturity as a means of dissemination, or, in otology, the perforation in the inner ear labyrinth causing chronic disequilibrium or vertigo.24

Although both Jacques Lacan and Maurice Merleau-Ponty have theorized dehiscence across psychoanalytic and phenomenological registers, respectively, my point of departure for thinking dehiscence is Dionne Brand’s conceptualization of the anoriginary and unfinished displacements of the Middle Passage as “a tear in the world.”25 The anteaesthetic paradox at the heart of black aesthesis is that its emergence from the irreparable woundings of passage, from the vertigo of black experience,26 is at once essential to the fabrication of the world and that which constitutes the immanent rupture of every suture. The aforementioned image exemplifies the paradoxical imperative of black (feminine) anteriority to the aesthetic to an almost comic degree. Presumably unbeknownst to the one who would summon her, the figure forcibly made to appear in the image discussed above is of Escrava Anastácia (“Anastácia the Slave”), an African-descended enslaved woman who has, over time, become venerated as a saint in Brazil. The blackand-white image of Anastácia reappeared on signs displayed prominently in the middle of a large crowd in Berlin, Germany, at an “anti-Coronavirus” protest in late August of 2020. The far right had a pronounced presence among the 38,000 people in attendance, some attempting to storm the Reichstag, home to Germany’s federal parliament. The

image of Escrava Anastácia that has been circulated in both the U.S. and Germany is a reproduction of a nineteenth-century lithograph. This lithograph was originally appropriated in the 1970s by the Cult of Anastácia in Brazil and became a symbol of Afro-diasporic resistance.27 In the 1980s, this image of a tortured, silenced, enslaved black woman came to be regarded as both a Catholic and Umbanda religious icon, and was used as a symbol in the Movimento Negro Unificado (MNU, Unified Black Movement).28

Whether Anastácia ever existed outside of her visualization—in the flesh, so to speak—remains uncertain, a fact we might take either as testament to or allegory for the erasures of the archive.29 The radical dehiscence her figure bears, however, is indisputable. Although Anastácia would seem to be perpetually fixed “within the terrible machinery that tortures her, she avoids interpretational stasis.”30 Semiotically polyvalent, the image of Anastácia cannot help but be subject to the serial violence of objectification,31 but, among her Afro-diasporic followers, she elicits an “ecstatic devotion” that cannot be separated from her disclosure of “white depravity.”32 Far from a compliant vessel for malevolent racial fantasy, she bears an “imaginative amplitude” that is Afro-Brazil’s “diasporic inheritance.”33 Needless to say, the strategic incorporation of her image in transatlantic mobilizations of white revanchism as a passive foil for the aggrandizement of the subject, in complete ignorance of the unfinished histories and (de)compositional force she bears, is nothing short of ironic.

The uses to which Anastácia is put, in and by this image, illustrate a more general conflation of black femininity and the metaphysical dimensions of what Alys Eve Weinbaum calls the “race/reproduction bind.”34 Following Weinbaum’s use of the term, and the black feminist theoretical legacy upon which she builds, I understand race and reproduction to be inextricably bound within and to the modern episteme, in ways that are neither apart from nor formally reducible to the biopolitical imperatives of the plantation. Specifically, I contend that the aesthetic plays an indispensable part in the ongoing conscription of black femininity as “the belly of the world,” to reprise Hartman’s evocative formulation.35 For if the ontology of the antiblack world emerges through the constitutive negation of the black, whose incarnation of metaphysical nothingness under the signs of absolute affectability, primitivity, and dereliction furnishes the coherence of modernity’s spatiotemporal coordinations, then black femininity bears this terrible emergence, in and through the flesh.

For if the ontology of the antiblack world emerges through the constitutive negation of the black, whose incarnation of metaphysical nothingness under the signs of absolute affectability, primitivity, and dereliction furnishes the coherence of modernity’s spatiotemporal coordinations, then black femininity bears this terrible emergence, in and through the flesh.

In my forthcoming book, bearing assumes a tripled valence: simultaneously evoking the reproductive, the orientative, and that which must be endured. The world continues to depend upon (re)productivity of what Joy James terms the “Captive Maternal,” not merely in a pecuniary or biopolitical sense, but in the ongoing maintenance of an episteme.36 In James’s conception, “Western Theory” is “Womb Theory,” that which requires the “Captive Maternal” to marry “democracy with slavery.”37 In the context of the argument made here, I insist that the racial regime of aesthetics is a “womb aesthetic,” indissolubly bound to and endlessly reinscribing the forced (re)productivity of the black “Captive Maternal,” but also thereby (re)generating that maternal’s potential “to fracture the Western womb.”38 The fact that this potentiality for rupture cannot be disentangled from captivity should alert us to the racially gendered (re)productions which subtend both slavery and the myriad forms of black refusal that slavery has sought to contain or eradicate. That is, black femininity is conscripted not only in the (re)production of the world, but also its fugitive ulteriors. In Anteaesthetics, I theorize this inescapable bearing of both the world and that which moves in flight from the world as the double bind of reproduction 39 I argue that the womb of the black feminine is not one form (of abjection) among many, but rather the vestibule through which all forms must pass, even if ostensibly shorn of the traces of passage. Black femininity bears the modern world of forms and the form of the world.

Hence, were we inclined to consecrate Anastácia as a figure of “resistance,” the fact that the dehiscence she bears only emerges through such horrific violence should give us pause. Notwithstanding the spate of discourse in recent years that has enthusiastically granted black women the mantle of saving the world from itself, any affirmative political instrumentalization of the black feminine is inevitability bound to the racially gendered violence of reinscription. Although its locution is concealment rather than affirmation, the body, in whose defense Anastácia is conscripted, is itself a product of such reinscription, even as the flesh from which that body is carved also bears the body’s impossibility.

The injunction of and to politics would assuredly insist that any analysis of the black (feminine) anteriority doubly disclosed, in this instance, by the mobilization of Anastácia’s image by and for a world convulsing under the weight of its own rapacious foreclosures, must ultimately answer (to) the perennial question of history. Yet to even approach the crucial question—What is to be done in the face of a world order predicated on the genocidal sorting of life and death chances?—we must begin to think through the conditions under which the very terms, life and death, materially and discursively cohere. We must begin to unearth the “layers of attenuated meanings”40 and semiotic concealments within propositions that would otherwise be taken as axiomatic. Not least among these

I argue that the womb of the black feminine is not one form (of abjection) among many, but rather the vestibule through which all forms must pass, even if ostensibly shorn of the traces of passage.

propositions is the body, which wields a singular influence in the modern delineation of the boundary between life and death, and the fashioning of hierarchies of animacy.41 As Angela Mitropoulos demonstrates, the defense of life that is the nominal logic of quarantine (cordon sanitaire) is a biopolitical operation, historically and presently imbricated with the racialization of illness and contagion in both material and discursive terms.42 It is inevitably the defense of a “Way of Life”43 that has been and remains predicated upon black death, a fact which is symptomatically expressed not only in the COVID-19 pandemic’s racially disproportionate mortality rates, and the necropolitical operations which produce them,44 but moreover in the ways black “vulnerability to premature death”45 is in turn “imbued with teleological significance . . . [as evidence of] racial senescence.”46 The white woman who wields the sign in the photograph above—declaring “Muzzles are for dogs and slaves. I am a free human being.” — marks a species distinction between herself and another form of life—or rather life given at once to the hold and (with)holding of form—whose constitutional vulnerability is precisely the sign of an irredeemable primitivity and biological debasement that deserves the subjection it is visually summoned to hyperbolize. Now, as always, aesthetics are a matter of life and death. >>

The history of modernity is the history of the body. The philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy goes so far as to declare the body the exclusive invention of Western civilization, “our old culture’s latest, most worked over, sifted, refined, dismantled, and reconstructed product.”47 Hoc est enim corpus meum (this is my body), Nancy tells us, “displays the body proper . . . or Property itself, Being-to-itself, embodied.”48 In Corpus, he writes:

The anxiety, the desire to see, touch, and eat the body of God, to be that body and be nothing but that body, forms the principle of Western (un)reason. That’s why the body, bodily, never happens least of all when it’s named and convoked. For us, the body is always sacrificed: eucharist.49

In Nancy’s text, which elliptically traverses the ontological paradoxes affixed to the modern body, the Eucharist marks an uncertain materiality and ideality which distinguishes the body Nancy claims as Europe’s unique inheritance—for him, an enigmatic coil of anxiety and assurance, penitence and exaltation, openness and closure. Even as the enduring, if iterative and variegated, centrality of the body to the libidinal, discursive, and political economies of the modern world can hardly be disputed, it has become increasingly difficult to pin down exactly what the body is or is meant to signify, and for whom. The body which formally predominates in the philosophical treatises, juridical codes, and economic models of the West since the seventeenth century is what Nancy terms the body proper, largely shorn of the ambivalence and declension Nancy finds so alluring. As Cohen has argued, this proper body is a quintessentially modern invention, the gravitational center and scalar delimitation which grounds regimes of property and personhood:

The modern body aspires to localize human beings within an epidermal frontier that distinguishes the person from the world for the duration which we call a life. . . . The modern body proffers a proper body, a proprietary body, a body whose well-bounded property grounds the legal and political rights of what C. B. Macpherson famously named “possessive individualism.”50

Although this proper body has been placed under far more pronounced scrutiny since the tail end of the twentieth century, there are of course many longstanding and distinctive theoretical traditions, too rich and numerous to review here in more than the most cursory manner, that have emphasized different historical dimensions of, and different modalities for approaching, this body’s constitutive role in the making of modernity. Marxism has tended to foreground capitalism’s reduction of the body to “accumulation strategy” (to use David Harvey’s invocation of Haraway’s phraseology), whether as the vessel for “the capacity to labor” or as the vehicle for “productive consumption.”51 Foucault stressed the disciplinary making of “docile bodies” within a new “machinery of power,” in which the body becomes the site of subjectification in the interest of both economic utility and political obedience.52 For Freud, the ego—that dimension of the human psyche encountered as a “self” or “I,” and thus a condition of possibility for modernity’s regime of individuated personhood, even as the ego cannot be simply conflated with subjectivity—is “first and foremost a bodily ego,”53 founded in the relation between the subject’s body and others. As Patricia Ticineto Clough recapitulates, in Freud’s conception the subject’s inherent “drive to mastery” necessitates the preservation of the bodily ego through various mechanisms of “disavowal or management of the threat to the ego’s definition or boundaries, a threat that, for Freud, comes from the environment.”54

Across the Marxist, Foucauldian, and Freudian registers for thinking the modern body, it is clear that this is a body which, for better or worse, must be made “wellbounded property,” a body which emerges through an ontological localization that pivots upon the pretense of a subject with the capacity for “Property in his own Person,” in John Locke’s notorious phrasing.55 Of course, although the coterminous fabrication of the proper body and the self-possessive individual was ultimately dressed in the liberal rhetoric of universalism, one need only glance at the tears in this discourse to know that its garb conceals another corpus. Indeed, the very discomfiture that some cannot help but feel when passing over Cohen’s words “epidermal frontier” signals the unbridgeable chasm between the subject who imagines himself the possessor (of self, of Earth, of things, of others) and she who has been taken as the object of—or, more precisely, as the medium for—this brutal imagination, who forever bears the trace of being owned upon her skin. In other words, both the proper body and its necessary analogue, the self-possessive individual, are products of a decidedly racial mode of subjectivation and subjection. In my forthcoming book, I trace the black anterior of the subterfuge of the (proper) body and its others, in and through the displaced fleshly mediality which enables these embodiments, as an analysis of each of these disjunctively entangled moments is crucial for an emergent theory of anteaesthetics.

If the proper body has always rattled with the uncertainties and writhed within the vastness of its own denomination, these tremorous movements multiplied in number and intensity as the new millennium approached. Indeed, Nancy is not alone in turning toward the body as a uniquely dynamic site for contemporary philosophical inquiry. The philosopher’s oeuvre must be considered alongside what we may call the “bodily turn” of the latter decades of the twentieth century, in which “the body” has become the discursive meeting ground for an unwieldy multitude of concepts and debates, affects and afflictions, conflicts and contestations, whose distinctive expressions not only span the arts, humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences, but perhaps the whole of civil society.56

Within the university, the problematization of “the matter of bodies,” to borrow Judith Butler’s doubly inflected phrase, has been especially pronounced. Hardly restricted to an idiosyncratic area of specialized interest, what I am referring to with the necessarily imprecise language of the “bodily turn” names an increasingly intricate and widespread tending toward the corporeal within the academy, one which is implicated and reflected in a series of other theoretical pivots, from the “affective turn” to the “biopolitical turn,” or the “more general materialist turn,” as the proponents of new materialism would have it.57 Within the humanities, the most notable feature of the bodily turn has been the epistemic unsettling and/or diversification of the presumptive ontic status of the body—what Butler refers to as “the body posited as prior to the sign”58 and the complex materiality in which every process of signification is constitutively coimplicated. As Judith Farquhar and Margaret Lock recount in their introduction to their anthology, Beyond the Body Proper: Reading the Anthropology of Material Life:

In fields ranging from anthropology to literary studies, history to political science, researchers expanded the classical social science concern with either minds or bodies, meanings or behaviors, individual bodies or the body of the social to focus on a new hybrid terrain, that of the lived body. Seen as contingent formations of space, time, and materiality, lived bodies have begun to be comprehended as assemblages of practices, discourses, images, institutional arrangements, and specific places and projects. . . . Recent scholarship in the human sciences, led perhaps by gender, ethnic, and rights activism in postmodern popular culture, has turned away from the commonsense body . . . learning to perceive more dynamic, intersubjective, and plural human experiences of carnality that can no longer be referenced by the singular term the body 59

In short, in recent decades the hegemony of the proper body appeared to give way, at least within the intellectual formations which lay claim to theory within the humanities, to a development which in turn cannot be separated from the complex reorganizations of

In other words, both the proper body and its necessary analogue, the self-possessive individual, are products of a decidedly racial mode of subjectivation and subjection.

knowledge and power within and beyond the university, particularly in the wake of the minority insurgencies (to borrow Roderick A. Ferguson’s language) of the last third of the twentieth century.60 Notwithstanding the obvious diversity of this intellectual movement within the university, the sheer volume of critical academic interrogations of the “proper” or “commonsense” body, at least within the humanities, would seem to suggest that the injunction to move “beyond the body proper” has become so ubiquitous that, ironically, it has begun to assume the features of a new common sense, to use the Gramscian idiom.

A substantive review of the bodily turn’s diverse theoretical contestations, reconsiderations, or refusals of the marginalization, displacement, subordination, and disarticulation of corporeality within Western philosophy is beyond the scope of this essay. While the concerns, methodologies, and arguments of these interventions can hardly be collapsed (indeed, they are often marked by significant disagreements), what they may generally be said to share is a common implicacy within a broad theoretical movement toward the corporeal as a singularly dynamic site of epistemic rupture or innovation, of ethical solicitation, and of political possibility, a movement which is differentially inflected across a myriad of fields and formations (such as feminist philosophy, queer theory, transgender studies, affect theory, posthumanism, and performance studies, among many others).

Returning to Nancy, for him, the “body proper” is incessantly figured and refigured in Western modernity, but it cannot be said to exist 61 In fact, every effort to place the body proper on display is instantly confronted with the “foreign body,” the body estranged from itself, confronted with the agony or ecstasis of its own “in-finity,” of being in the “open space” of its own making.62 Thus, he suggests, the body does not so much have an ontology, but rather is ontology—the “incorporeal touch” of existence, of “being-with,” of “being born unto the world.”63 Hence Nancy declares the body itself as “something stranger than any strange foreign body.”64 It is this former body, this “absolute body,” given only in touch, which holds out “the true question of an aesthetics,” just as it is that toward which “all our aesthetics tend.”65 Meanwhile, the “strange foreign bodies” of the non-Westerner appear “unacquainted with disaster,” unfamiliar with the corporeal estrangement that would seem to be the condition of possibility for genuine touch, the “spacing of bodies” which, for Nancy, enables an endless series of departures and enfoldings.66 Of course, the “strange foreign bodies” invoked in Nancy’s idiomatic nomenclature (those “endowed with Yin and Yang, with the Third Eye, the Cinnabar Field and the Ocean of Qi”), are tightly circumscribed by their problematically orientalist register.67 These bodies, not yet subject to the fall, remain immersed within “a single, empty, unfeeling sense,” to which Nancy nevertheless ascribes an Edenic cast: “bodies liberated-alive, pure points of light emitted entirely from within.”68 The black bodies of Africa and its diasporas, meanwhile, are categorically barred from consideration altogether, unable to even approach the appellations of “strange” or “foreign.” In effect, Nancy insinuates that the “Eastern” others of Europe remain immersed in a simple materiality of corporeal immediacy, impervious to the wonders and torments of interiority and relation, while black corporeality implicitly becomes what Hortense Spillers terms “the zero degree of social conceptualization,”69 or the improper body par excellence.

I argue that this racial division of corporeality, an axiomatics of which Nancy’s work is exemplary rather than exceptional, is, in the first instance, an aesthetic rather than an epistemological operation. I engage with Nancy specifically because, for many, his labyrinthine deconstruction of the proper body could appear to be an epistemic implosion of the corporeal figuration that is the synecdoche of the (white/European) self-determined subject of modernity, and even a philosophical intervention that opens pathways for thinking corporeality beyond reifications of “identity.” When read through Denise Ferreira da Silva and Calvin Warren’s critiques of the modern human subject and its genesis, however, what Nancy’s unapologetically Eurocentric meditations inadvertently disclose are the ways in which philosophical and aesthetic inquiries that begin with the departure from the proper body—whether through expositions or valorizations of being-in-relation, the porosity of borders, corporeal fragmentation, the body as loss or supplementarity, and even the deconstruction of the nostalgic fantasy of a prior wholeness—risk reinscribing that very same figuration by eliding the ontologically negated improper body, which bears the racial and gendered violence of the former’s displacements.

In her indispensable excavation of the racial genealogy of the modern subject and the ontoepistemological structures of modernity, Toward a Global Idea of Race, Denise Ferreira da Silva argues that modernity’s “arsenal of raciality” establishes “distinct kinds of human beings, namely, the self-determined subject and its outer-determined others.”70 Within the field of modern representation, the former figuration posits the (white) postEnlightenment European as the exclusive subject of history, while the latter figuration consigns “the others of Europe” to subjection before “the exterior determination of the ‘laws of nature’ and the superior force of European minds.”71 The inescapable fact of corporeal existence, and the ungainly surfeit of material and psychic entanglements such existence necessarily entails, naturally positioned the body as an enduring intellectual problem and site of anxiety for the philosophical elaborations of the putatively self-determined subject. Thus, the Cartesian dualism of body and mind—or the ontological partitioning of a thinking substance (res cogitans) and extended substance (res extensa)72—was a necessary step in the effort to establish “the ontoepistemological primacy of interiority,” in the restrictive sense of the rational, self-determined mind. This maneuver of interiorization is accomplished through the denigration and exteriorization of the body, lest corporeality’s obdurately material/sensible affectability shatter the fragile artifice of the self-determined subject.73 However, “because man neither is nor exists without his body, exteriority would remain a ghost haunting every later refashioning of self-consciousness.”74 As da Silva shows, the arsenal of raciality has been the principal means, not of resolving, but rather of displacing the contradiction produced in the fabrication of a putatively self-determined subject who must serially disavow the very corporeality which is the condition of possibility for his existence. The proper body, in other words, requires the racial cipher of what Warren terms “improper bodies,” the latter term acquiring a singular valence when it approaches the threshold of blackness and the demarcations of corporeality in the wake of transatlantic slavery.75

The point I wish to emphasize here is that it is precisely the brutally imposed corporeal immediacy of the improper body which enables the very idea of difference as separation,76 upon which both the proper body and the irresolute flights from it ultimately depend. The improper body of blackness is not so much missing from or neglected within the bodily turn, but is rather its fleshly (under)belly. But what if we refused to begin with the proper body, even to depart from it? How, as Warren urges us to ask, “does one think with the improper? With what grammar do we ascertain the universe of sensations, pleasures, eroticism, and enjoyment without a proper body?”77 I contend that these are singularly aesthetic questions, which must begin from black aesthesis and its gendered (re)productions, rather than from the racial regime of aesthetics, especially as the latter comes to cloak itself within discourses of alterity.

Within the bodily turn, such fabrications of alterity are often advanced in the name of refusing the elisions, disavowals, or subordinations of corporeal entanglement that are replete in Western philosophy. Here the proper body, its ontic subterfuge of property and propriety, appears the victim of its own displacements, assailed by a growing number of investigations into and celebrations of corporealities which are porous, affectable, malleable, or experimental, which are sensuous becomings or encounters with uncertain boundaries between self, other, and world. The body tends to emerge instead as a question, which, more often than not, takes the rhetorical form of, “What can a body do?”78

And yet, almost without fail, when the speaker of such a question turns their gaze towards black corporeality, the theoretical and aesthetic openness of this SpinozianDeleuzian query–for which “the body is not a thing, even an extended thing . . . [but rather] a process of encounters”79—immediately closes up, and we are left with the Fanonian echo chamber (Look! A Negro!).80 The declension from potentiative question to phenomenological injunction should prompt us to take heed of a rather glaring disjuncture: that while the rhetorical trope “black bodies” has become so utterly ubiquitous in English-speaking critical academic and leftist-progressive political spheres that it is almost impossible to avoid, the bodily turn has for the most part refused to engage blackness as a serious theoretical problematic for “moving beyond” the proper body. The bodily turn’s failure to escape “the relentless desire to pursue the black body . . . as an object of inquiry” has been astutely critiqued by Tiffany Lethabo King and Katherine McKittrick, among other black feminist theorists.81 This desire has largely reflected a “racialized erotics”82 (King), and the enduring “ideological currency of dispossessed black bodies”83 (McKittrick), rather than a genuine interest in the constitutive imbrications of raciality and embodiment within the modern world.

I am not suggesting that the burgeoning, interdisciplinary work on bodies, embodiment, and corporeality which comprises the bodily turn lacks richness or depth, or that it has failed to advance crucial theoretical contributions to something like “moving beyond the proper body.”84 What I am suggesting is that the irreducible problematic of blackness and the body has been so thoroughly provincialized within the bodily turn that critical academic and leftist-progressive political spheres have come to rhetorically

conflate “black people” and “black bodies.” This conflation is neither coincidental nor paradoxical, but rather symptomatic of the conjunctural modulation of an enduring discursive regime. This discursive regime is, in turn, embedded in a more general racialcorporeal organization of modernity that precedes the contingencies of historical conjuncture. Reckoning with blackness as an existence that is irreducible to ethnographic locality, as an existence which is more and less than epiphenomenal to the emergence, reproduction, and deconstruction of the proper body, effects something far more radical than an indictment of the epistemic and ethical limits of the bodily turn: it exposes the body itself as a racial apparatus; it calls us toward an irreducibly gendered descent into a black aesthesis, given in the absence of a body.85

The epistemic, aesthetic, and material racial violence which obtains to the artifice of the “black body” is not a local dilemma, but rather a generalized process that subtends the body as such. In Anteaesthetics, I turn to Michel Foucault’s, Giorgio Agamben’s, and Karen Barad’s conceptions of “apparatus,”86 iteratively and respectively, in an effort to clarify and subvert the epistemic, aesthetic, and material racial violence which subtends not only the proper body, but also many of the approaches—whether phenomenological, materialist, or psychoanalytic—that would critique and veer from the proper body without beginning from an interrogation of its quintessentially racial foundations. We cannot begin to attend to the corporeal aesthesis of blackness, and the diverse artistic experimentations that emerge from it, without fundamentally reevaluating our conceptions of “the body.” I argue that the body is principally a racial apparatus, central to the emergence and reproduction of the modern world.

To designate the body as racial apparatus is to unsettle the implicitly universalist premises of corporeal inhabitation that undergird phenomenological being in (and of) the world. Black flesh exposes embodiment as a far more difficult ontoepistemological (and ethical) problematic. In her landmark essay, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Spillers theorizes one of the central cleavages of the modern world, wrought and sundered in the cataclysmic passages of racial slavery: that of body and flesh, which Spillers takes as the foremost distinction “between captive and liberated subjects-positions.”

Before the “body” there is the “flesh,” that zero degree of social conceptualization that does not escape concealment under the brush of discourse, or the reflexes of iconography. Even though the European hegemonies stole bodies—some of them female—out of West African communities in concert with the African “middleman,” we regard this human and social irreparability as high crimes against the flesh, as the person of African females a nd males registered the wounding. If we think of the “flesh” as a primary narrative, then we mean its seared, divided, ripped-apartness, riveted to the ship’s hole, fallen, or “escaped” overboard.87

In my reading of Spillers, flesh is before the body in a dual sense: at once prior and subject to the body. As Zakiyyah Iman Jackson observes, the way Spillers situates flesh “has spatial as well as temporal significance.”88 On the one hand, as Alexander

Weheliye stresses, flesh is “a temporal and conceptual antecedent to the body.”89 The body, which may be taken to stand for “legal personhood qua self-possession,” is violently produced through the “high crimes against the flesh.” On the other hand, flesh is before the body in that it is everywhere subject to the body as racial machinery, violently placed at the disposal of those who would claim the body as property. The body is cleaved from flesh, while flesh is serially cleaved by the body.90 As Fred Moten suggests, the body only emerges through the disciplining of flesh.91 Building on these insightful readings of Spillers, I want to underscore each of these moments as spatio-temporal and recursively entangled. Yet flesh itself can neither be spatialized nor temporalized. Its existence has no cartography or genealogy, even as its labors undergird every map of the world and narration of history. The violent, excisive, and projective rend(er)ing of body from flesh is anoriginary and ongoing, serial and diffusive. Rend(er)ing, in this sense, neologistically stresses the violent rending of flesh that subtends every dissimulative rendering of blackness as phenomenological object or cohesive presence.

We must, in short, understand that every phenomenological appearance of that corporeal figuration we call “a body” is an irreducibly racial and racializing operation. The serial production of the proper body, or the (always already failed) fantasy of selfpossessive individuation that comprises the basis of modern personhood, can only be sustained through the serial production of an ontologically negated, racial double, the paradigmatic instantiation of which is the black. To theorize the body as racial apparatus is thus not only to understand the body “as an effect of arrangements of power,”92 but, further, to stress its strategic generativity within the material-discursive structuration of the world, its indispensability to the ongoing reproduction of subjectivity and subjection, whether the latter are thought through the registers of global capitalism, settler coloniality, or heteropatriarchy.

In Anteaesthetics, I elaborate the relationship between the conscription of black (feminine) reproductivity and the violent (im)mediations of the flesh—that which sets the body as racial apparatus into motion. In short, black (feminine) flesh haptically blurs the putative necessity of mediation and the terrors of immediacy. For, as Spillers teaches us, to be taken as “being for the captor”93 is to be always already “at hand without mediation,”94 always already subject to the violence of touch, and not least when “no trace of hands touching” is permitted.95 Anteaesthetics theorizes this brutally immanent laying-on of hands, this being passed “from hand to hand,”96 as the racially gendered (re)production of blackness as mediality, of black flesh as the corporeal bearing of a series of violent (im)mediations. My use of the term “(im)mediation” is an appositional revision of Pooja Rangan’s deployment of the term, in the course of her important critique of “the presentist politics of compassion cultivated by [humanitarian documentary] images of immediacy,” “to emphasize the mediated quality of . . . immediacy.”97 In contradistinction, I use the term (im)mediation to elucidate the paradoxically inverted violence to which the black is subject: (im)mediation names a violence which the black substantively confronts as immediate, as a condition of absolute

exposure before the world. Nevertheless, for the subject and the world s/he inhabits, the brutal immediacy to which the black is subject provides a constitutive mediation that enables, for example, the distinction between interior and exterior. Without the (im)mediations of the flesh, the racial apparatus that is the body would come apart at the seams.

To treat every instantiation of “body” as the work of a racial apparatus, of course, poses a conundrum for a study which takes up the immanent relations between aesthetics and black embodiment. This is because, for all of the talk of “black bodies,” black people do not properly have bodies, insofar as such “having” is in fact a semantic concealment of a rapacious claim: both to the presumptive ontic status of normative personhood and to the regimes of property and propriety to which the metaphysics of individuation are inextricably bound. Rather, black people are, as da Silva puts it, “no-bodies”98—given to an enfleshed existence which the body’s machinery can neither escape nor completely subsume, as flesh constitutes the body’s very condition of (im)possibility. To speak of black embodiment is thus to approach the limits of phenomenology, for which the black body can only appear as a dissimulation. These dissimulations are the face of the continued expropriative and projective displacements of the body as racial apparatus. And yet, insofar as the traces of the black enfleshed existence these dissimulations cleave can never be completely eliminated, they are aporetic—constantly threatening to leave the metaphysics of presence this apparatus works to secure in ruins.

>> Blackness presents intractable problems for phenomenology, as a philosophical tradition and analytic which takes the body as our “point of view in the world.”99 Phenomenology—which posits the body as the perceptual locus from which lived experience unfolds, from which things are regarded, from which world coheres and to which world is given—is unable to think the enfleshed existence of blackness that is the body’s condition of (im)possibility. Hence, phenomenology is unable to think the black aesthesis which emerges in the absence of a body. Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the body has been especially influential on thinking at the nexus of aesthetics and corporeality since the publication of his two most canonized texts, The Phenomenology of Perception and The Visible and the Invisible 100 Indeed, the “renaissance” his work has enjoyed since the turn of the twenty-first century101 has stretched from film and media studies to art history, from queer theory to feminist philosophy and beyond.102 In Merleau-Ponty’s

Nevertheless, for the subject and the world s/he inhabits, the brutal immediacy to which the black is subject provides a constitutive mediation that enables, for example, the distinction between interior and exterior.

early canonical formulations, human experience is realized through the a priori possession and conjoining of a “body schema”—or the “inter-sensory” or “sensori-motor unity” of the body as it is emplaced within and opens onto the world—with a prelogical “operative intentionality,” a concept he borrows from Edmund Husserl to articulate the “intentional arc” toward the world with which the body schema is originally entwined, activated, and set in motion.103 Hence the body is not merely “one object among others,” but rather the essential “vehicle of being in the world.”104 It is the body which “gives us a global, practical and implicit notion of the relation between our body and things, and our hold on them,” which enables us to “grasp” the “world of objects.”105 The body, he intones, “is our anchorage in the world.”106

Although Merleau-Ponty endeavors to depart from Cartesian dualism by characterizing the body as both object and subject, his conception of the body schema nevertheless requires the ontological segregation of human beings, with their innate capacity to be “body-subjects,” from passive, unreflecting objects, or “the condition of a thing, the thing being precisely what does not know, what slumbers in absolute ignorance of itself and the world.”107 The original intentionality Merleau-Ponty reserves for such a body-subject indicates a classificatory operation that concerns far more than motorics or even volition; it carves the ontological distinction between “existence in itself and existence for itself.”108 In short, a body-subject, existing for itself, will “never [be] a mere thing.”109

However, in Aimé Césaire’s famous anticolonial treatise, Discourse on Colonialism, published just five years after the first edition of The Phenomenology of Perception, “thingification” was precisely the term he used to theorize the violent process to which the colonized were subjected.110 Only two years later, Fanon would peel back the interminable layers of the black experience of finding oneself “an object in the midst of other objects” in Black Skins, White Masks. 111 This racial interdiction from the posture of the subject, the reduction to object or thing, is a thoroughly corporeal operation. Throughout Anteaesthetics, I show how each instantiation of black aesthesis, and the forms of anteaesthetic experimentation which emerge from it, can never be taken apart from the corporeal ambition of this phenomenological reduction (to “black body”).

The fundamentally racial constitution of Merleau-Ponty’s principal phenomenological conceits has been theorized by Afro-diasporic thinkers across various registers, both before and in the wake of his commanding philosophical interventions. From these rich traditions of black philosophical criticism, we can discern several signal disruptions of phenomenological regard which merit emphasis in any inquiry into blackness and the aesthetic. To begin with, phenomenology cannot furnish the conceptual tools for apprehending, apropos Fanon, the “lived experience of the black,” because black people have never had (which is to say, never had the capacity to lay claim to) bodies in the sense presumed by phenomenology.

As Spillers imparts, the “diasporic plight” given in the (unfinished) passages of transatlantic slavery “marked a theft of the body,” a horrific “severing of the captive body from its motive will.”112 The entwined corporeal schema and original intentionality that Merleau-Ponty would take as the subject’s entrance into the world of things, is confronted

by the black as a knot of privation, dereliction, and ruination, its proprietary claim arrested, as Fanon asserts, “by a racial epidermal schema.”113 Whereas Merleau-Ponty encounters a corporeal schema as dynamic and relational, as the boundless “opening upon a world,”114 Fanon encounters a racial epidermal schema that is overdetermined, anti-relational, and suffocating, as a schematization reserved for mere things, for objects among objects. Racial epidermalization becomes the mechanism for the phenomenological subject to avoid being ontologically subsumed within the world of objects and things, to disavow the “terrifying formlessness”115 such a radical entanglement would seem to imply. Whereas Merleau-Ponty can declare himself “in undivided possession” of his body, for its outline “is a frontier which ordinary spatial relations do not cross,116 the poet Lillian Yvonne Bertram reminds us that “for the negro it is a frontier always crossed.”117 Blackness becomes the epidermalized locus of a set of ontological displacements, secured through boundless and brutal violations, so that the phenomenological body-subject can cohere.

Insofar as the subject of phenomenology retains the pretense of self-possessive embodiment, in its coextensivity with individuated personhood, or what Lindon Barrett calls the “self-authorizing presumptions of modern subjectivity,”118 it requires the epistemic excision of unwieldy materiality from this subject’s corporeal schema. This operation of displacement pivots upon the racial epidermalization which paradoxically renders blackness as “a life merely of the body, an existence as obdurate materiality.”119 Blackness marks the immanent return of this terrifying materiality, the irruption of phenomenology’s constitutive outside from within. In Anteaesthetics, I theorize the material (re)turns of this exorbitant120 remainder under the rubric of the black residuum

A black radical critique of phenomenology is essential for any interpretive encounter with blackness, for what this critique implies is that what appears within phenomenology as “the black body” or “the black figure” is in fact a dissimulation, a violently imposed, fictitious “appearance” of that which cannot appear. Yet precisely because blackness marks phenomenology’s constitutive negation, because it bears and exposes the racial aporia within modernity’s “semiotic calculus,”121 blackness must be marked and remarked. The black body is, to reiterate Huey Copeland’s language, “bound to appear.”

My deployment of the term “dissimulation” has resonances with, though is ultimately appositional to and irreconcilable with, its differential theoretical valences in the works of Jean-François Lyotard and Jacques Derrida. Lyotard uses the term dissimulation in Libidinal Economy to insist that “desire is always manifest in relation to structures . . . both giving rise to them and disrupting their stability. Dissimulation refers to the way in which structures always hide desire, and desire is always manifest in a structured form.”122 Derrida’s conception of dissimulation is perhaps more difficult to succinctly relay, but my usage of the term comes nearest to his where he speaks of a “secret shared within itself, its partition ‘proper,’ which divides the essence of a secret that cannot even appear to one alone except in starting to be lost, to divulge itself, hence to dissimulate itself, as secret, in showing itself.”123 However, my concept of dissimulation is specific to the metaphysical feints and aesthetic operations that effect and instrumentalize the

appearance or presence of a black existence that is in fact unavailable to ontology as anything other than the negation of being.

Dissimulation is, in this sense, a mechanism for realizing what Warren terms “a catachrestic fantasy,” or the attempt “to provide a referent for that which does not exist.”124 That is, because “the Negro lacks an ontological place . . . it also lacks a worldly referent.”125 Dissimulation is a phenomenological operation (one which is not simply one among others) which endeavors to fashion, as Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind E. Krauss might say, “the formless into a figure,” and thereby stabilize it.126 In short, the black body is ceaselessly made to appear in an effort to suture phenomenology, yet these violent dissimulations cannot erase the traces of the enfleshed existence for which the dissimulated body is an excisive/projective rend(er)ing, not least because the (im)mediations to which flesh is subject are themselves the means of dissimulation. Thus, every dissimulation of blackness also carries an immanent dehiscence, even as this dehiscence is borne in and by the flesh, in its racially gendered (re)productivity and woundings.

For the black, every appearance of the dissimulated black body is necessarily a coercive encounter, shadowed by the body Fanon describes as “sprawled out, distorted, recolored, clad in mourning.”127 It is an encounter with a body which “can only . . . recognize itself as a fiction.”128 Hence da Silva’s turn to the language of “no-bodies” as the corporeal figurations of those placed “before the horizon of death.”129 Anteaesthetics stresses this formal paradox, which confronts any endeavor to think with black art: every artwork has both everything and nothing to do with the body; it is both bound to the serial reduction of blackness to “a life merely of the body,” to the dissimulation of the black body, and fashioned from the irreducible enfleshment of black existence that constitutes and discloses the phenomenological body’s condition of (im)possibility. What I have termed “black aesthesis” is precisely what emerges in the cut between the violent dissimulation of the black body and a black enfleshment that has always been both more and less than the phenomenological body.

To be clear, to declare the appearance of the “black body” as a dissimulation, as both product and productive of the body as racial apparatus, is not to suggest that black corporeality is immaterial or dematerialized. Quite the opposite. It is to insist upon the impossible distinction between the dissimulation of the body and the exorbitant materiality of black enfleshed existence. In my reading of Spillers, flesh is anterior to the body, anterior to individuation, anterior even to the separation of the material from the semiotic. Spillers’s conception of flesh should not, however, be conflated with the notion of flesh that emerges in Merleau-Ponty’s later work, even as the two could immediately appear to share moments of conceptual convergence. For Merleau-Ponty, in Elizabeth Grosz’s summation, “flesh is that elementary, precommunicative domain out of which both subject and object, in their mutual interactions, develop . . . flesh is the shimmering of a différance, the (im)proper belongingness of the subject to the world and the world as the condition of the subject.”130 Flesh, in my usage of the term, does indeed gesture to a corporeal entanglement which precedes subject, object, and world. However, I emphasize how the history of flesh within modernity is in fact both inseparable from the racially

gendered displacement of flesh through the dissimulation of the “black body,” and to the violent (re)productivity of black feminine flesh, which functions as the medium of this displacement. It is the sequestration and concealment of this fleshly exorbitance through the dissimulation of the “black body” which enables the conceit of the subject who belongs to the world, and for whom “the world remains isomorphic.”131 If Merleau-Ponty and his followers can invoke a universalist idiom of human flesh as “invaginative,”132 it is only because the black feminine has already encountered flesh as abyssal.

My refusal of positivist representations of the “black body” and insistence upon the enfleshed corporeality of black existence is neither prescriptive nor neatly taxonomical. When I say that it is crucial to make a distinction between black enfleshment and the dissimulation of the black body, and in the very same breath proclaim such a distinction impossible, it is to signal the hermeneutic inextricability of the two, insofar as the black body dissimulates the appearance of that which cannot in fact appear, while flesh, as the body’s condition of (im)possibility, that which bears the corporeality of the unthought. Whether multimedia installation, performance, experimental film, or painting, all of the artworks theorized in Anteaesthetics variously grapple with this irreducible problematic. The feints imposed by phenomenology become, out of necessity, sites of deconstructive anteaesthetic practices, given to the aesthesis that emerges in the cut between enfleshment and dissimulation. Black art comes to turn upon, to return, to turn out, what we might call, after the poet Jay Wright, the “art of dissimulation.”133

>>

Black aesthesis is an ante-formal heuristic, which endeavors to attune to that which is at once the prerequisite of, and radically incommensurate with, (aesthetic) form. The manner in which black aesthesis is irreducible to every instance of emergence or codification within the racial regime of aesthetics can be clarified by way of contradistinction. In Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art, Rancière revises the ancient Greek philosophical concept of aisthēsis in order to theorize the dynamic relationship between the “singular event” and the “aesthetic regime of art.”134 These singular events are not necessarily canonized in art history, but embrace an expansive range of activities and activations which are implicated in aesthetic experience more generally. Rancière’s concern is not only the manner in which such events come to constitute art’s historicity, but moreover the ways in which they exhibit and effectuate transformations in modalities and repertoires of thought and feeling, of affect and perception, “constituting the sensible community that these links create, and the intellectual community that makes such weaving thinkable.”135 For Rancière, aisthesis introduces a new thinking into the aesthetic regime, “a thinking that modifies what is thinkable by welcoming what was unthinkable.”136 Thus, such instances of emergence and transformation are also moments of incorporation, of the assimilation of that which had hitherto been unassimilable. It is precisely the possibility of assimilation, of the presencing of thought, feeling, and perception, that allows a sensus communis to cohere.

My concept of black aesthesis resonates with and radically departs from Rancière’s proposition in Aisthesis. It may be described as a “disfigurement” of the concept of aisthesis (to invoke David Marriott’s idiom). Here I briefly outline four valences of the concept’s fleshly corruption: first, while instantiations of black aesthesis are indeed conditioned by, or rather subject to, the racial regime of aesthetics, and they do indeed compel modulations in the operations of this regime, they can neither be assimilated by, nor effectuate foundational metamorphoses of, this regime. Black aesthesis emerges in the abyssal cut between black existence and black non-being, between the dissimulated black body and enfleshment. It cannot be integrated because it is forced to bear the unassimilable, the obdurate, the irreducible, because it is conscripted into the reproduction of the very distinction between being and non-being. Second, insofar as this aesthesis is irreducibly material, it cannot be simply elucidated through either dialectical or new materialist hermeneutics. If anything, it gestures to an exorbitant materiality that calls for something akin to what Marriott terms a “black materialism,” a materiality that requires a poetic thinking with the “dark luminosity of an ultimate and absolute experience . . . that is equally incapable of being exposed to the light of philosophy or of being duped by its aesthetic formalism.”137 Third, because the spatiotemporal determinacy and legibility of the event is conditioned by the racial regime of aesthetics, which structures the sensorium of the world, black aesthesis can only exist as a dehiscence, a deformation, an irruption that can never claim the status of the event. Fourth, the (un)thought and (un)feeling it extends cannot generate a new sensus communis, as blackness is the constitutive interdiction of the socius, as of the sensorium which binds it.

Black aesthesis should therefore not be conflated with the Aristotelian “apophantic discourse,” which, as Ronald A. Judy astutely observes, “aims at superimposing order on the chaos of perception (αἴσθησις, aesthesis) by filtering conceptualizations through the discipline of formulaic statement.”138 Indeed, as I elaborate in Anteaesthetics, by way of critical engagement with Rancière, black aesthesis constitutes the anterior condition of (im)possibility for every aesthetic ordering. Black aesthesis is an emergence without home or horizon, an abyssal passage without terminus, a luminous tear or effluent fissure anterior to the sensus communis, a black (w)hole that perpetually incompletes itself.139 Black aesthesis is neither ontological nor phenomenological, but rather the vertiginous rupture of modernity’s aesthetic relays between being, body-subject, and world. It is an aesthesis which can only appear as ontology and “phenomenology’s exhaust and exhaustion.”140 Its irreducible corporeality is a function of the body’s expropriative displacements, and compels us to assiduously descend into the impossible, yet necessary, distinction between bodily dissimulation and enfleshed existence, to take seriously the question of what happens in the absence of a body.141 “One falls past the lip of some black unknown, where time, they say, ends.”142

Notes

1 McQueen, “Dialogue with Stuart Comer.”

2 “Black life” here marks a question and a problematic, albeit one which lies beyond the scope of this essay: can we speak of black life without immediately reinscribing a vitalist grammar wherein the very distinctions between the “living” and “nonliving” cohere through the brutal reproductions of an antiblack metaphysics? How might we stumble towards new language for a black existence which renders such dualisms untenable?

3 Here I am invoking art historian Huey Copeland’s phrasing in Bound to Appear. Copeland notes that his title was in turn inspired by Cedric Robinson’s formulation: “Racialism and its permutations persisted, rooted not in a particular era but in the civilization itself. And though our era might seem a particularly fitting one for depositing the origins of racism, that judgment merely reflects how resistant the idea is to examination and how powerful and natural its specifications have become. Our confusions, however, are not unique. As an enduring principle of European social order, the effects of racialism were bound to appear in the social expression of every strata of every European society no matter the structures upon which they were formed. None was immune” (Robinson, Black Marxism, 28; emphasis in the original).

4 For a brilliant meditation on “the vertiginous blackness of being,” see Marriott, Whither Fanon?, xiv, passim. On the unthought, see Hartman and Wilderson III, “The Position of the Unthought.”

5 For an extended critical reflection, see Bradley, “Picturing Catastrophe.”

6 Wilderson III, Red, White, and Black, 312.

7 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 95.

8 In Fanon’s words, “the Other fixes me with his gaze, his gestures and attitude, the same way you fix a preparation with a dye. . . . The white gaze, the only valid one, is already dissecting me. I am fixed” (Fanon, 89, 95; emphasis in the original).

9 A further extrapolation of a central point made by Carol Anderson in her book White Rage

10 Anderson.

11 Roberts, Killing the Black Body, 8.

12 Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 115.

13 Roberts, Killing the Black Body, 8.

14 My understanding of the significance of affectability in the (re)production of raciality is informed by Denise Ferreira da Silva’s Toward a Global Idea of Race

15 Cohen, A Body Worth Defending

16 Lloyd, Under Representation

17 Cohen, A Body Worth Defending, 7. See also Neocleous, The Politics of Immunity

18 Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, 178.

19 Yong, “We Created the ‘Pandemicene’.”

20 See Puar, The Right to Maim.

21 See Mitropoulos, Pandemonium, 2.

22 I have adapted Hurston’s original text, this portion of which is written in vernacular: “de mule uh de world” (Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God, 14).

23 In Joshua Bennett’s reading of Hurston’s allegorical invocation of the mule, “Hurston returns to the figure of the mule again and again . . . in order to elucidate the power relations that produce the mule as a form of animal life, which is also to say, a creature invented for the sake of labor and labor alone, as well as a useful metonym for describing the experiences of black women living under patriarchy’s unremitting pressures” (Bennett, Being Property Once Myself, 116). On indebtedness, see Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 125–63; and da Silva, Unpayable Debt.

24 Jared Sexton, quoted in Barber, “On Black Negativity.”

25 Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return, 14. Although Merleau-Ponty’s thought is taken up at various points throughout Anteaesthetics, my deployment of the term “dehiscence” is radically distinct from Merleau-Ponty’s use of the term to denote the reciprocal, chiasmic movement of the flesh. If anything, my usage stresses the displaced anteriority that makes Merleau-Ponty’s usage possible. I expound on the failures of both phenomenology and psychoanalysis for thinking through dehiscence at greater length in Anteaesthetics

26 See Wilderson III, “The Vengeance of Vertigo”; see also Marriott, Whither Fanon?.

27 Wood, “The Museu do Negro in Rio and the Cult of Anastácia”; Handler and Hayes, “Escrava Anastácia”; Wilson, “Because the Spirits.”

28 See Burdick, Blessed Anastácia

29 On the violence of the archive, see Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts”; Lose Your Mother. In Stephen Best’s view, “an existence erased always presents the possibility of recovery, but, having never existed, Anastácia refuses just that. To write her history isn’t to discern who she may once have been but, paradoxically, to understand who she is now. She is neither lost nor found” (Best, “Neither Lost nor Found,” 160).

30 Wood, “The Museu do Negro in Rio and the Cult of Anastácia,” 125.

31 For a proposition regarding the relation between seriality and (anti)blackness, see Bradley and da Silva, “Four Theses on Aesthetics.”

32 Bradley and da Silva, 146, 145.

33 Bradley and da Silva, 143.

34 Weinbaum, Wayward Reproductions; see also Morgan, Laboring Women. Morgan was one of the first historians to write a sustained and systematic monograph on the entanglement of gender and reproduction under modern racial slavery.

35 Hartman, “The Belly of the World.”

36 James, “The Womb of Western Theory.”

37 James, 256.

38 James, 261.

39 For a meditation on the double bind of reproduction that emphasizes the intramural, see Bradley, “Too Thick Love.”

40 Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” 65.

41 See Chen, Animacies

42 Mitropoulos, Pandemonium, 34, and passim.

43 Mitropoulos, 2.

44 On the racially disproportionate impact of the pandemic on health, see Gordon et al., “COVID19 and the Color Line.” On necropolitics, see Mbembe, Necropolitics.

45 Gilmore, Golden Gulag, 28.

46 Mitropoulos, Pandemonium, 68.

47 Nancy, Corpus, 7.

48 Nancy, 5.

49 Nancy, 5.

50 Cohen, A Body Worth Defending, 7.

51 Harvey, Spaces of Hope, 97–116.

52 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 135–69, 138.

53 Freud, The Ego and the Id, 20.

54 Benjamin Fong suggests that the drive to mastery remains undertheorized, and ought to be thought through its constitutive relation with the death drive: “the death drive becomes its own counterdrive, a drive to mastery” (Fong, Death and Mastery, 18, emphasis in the original).

55 Locke, The Two Treatises of Government. Brenna Bhandar argues that it is, more specifically, the “power of appropriation,” including the exercise of that power over one’s “very capacity for self-constitution,” that is the true “point of origin for the Lockean subject” (Bhandar, Colonial Lives of Property).

56 A historicist account of the myriad social developments that have produced this heightened disruption of the authority of bodily certitude lies beyond the scope of this book. However, some of the most remarked upon examples might include the advent of biogenetics, the movement of longstanding revolts against heteropatriarchy’s binary system of sex and gender into a new sphere of visibility, a growing if nascent recognition of complex (micro)biological entanglements, the magnification and proliferation of surveillance technologies, and, of course, the increasingly unavoidable confrontation with the geological epoch misleadingly referred to as the “anthropocene.” A more appropriate designation would be the “racial capitalocene,” as suggested by Françoise Vergès in her melding and reworking of Cedric Robinson and Andreas Malm’s phrases (Vergès, “Racial Capitalocene”). Robinson famously developed his concept of “racial capitalism” in Black Marxism. Although the term “capitalocene” is now widely associated with the works of Jason W. Moore and Donna Haraway, Haraway notes that it was first proposed to Moore in a 2009 “seminar in Lund, Sweden, when then graduate student Andreas Malm proposed it” (Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 184fn50). See also Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life, and Malm, Fossil Capital. Although popular and academic accounts of these developments generally treat race as ancillary, if it is commented upon at all, the writings of black feminist, queer, and/or trans scholars make it abundantly clear that it is impossible to understand a single one of them (whether or not one begins from questions of corporeality) without grappling with their constitutive relations to raciality.

57 Coole and Frost, New Materialisms, 4; Clough, The Affective Turn; Campbell and Sitze, Biopolitics

58 Butler, Bodies That Matter, 30.

59 Farquhar and Lock, Beyond the Body Proper, 1.

60 Ferguson, The Reorder of Things

61 Nancy, Corpus, 5, 83, 95, 97, 99, 140, 154.

62 Nancy, 15–9.

63 Nancy, 101, 121.

64 Nancy, 13, 15, 17, 19.

65 Nancy, 73.

66 Nancy, 15, 17, 19, 21.

67 Nancy, 7.

68 Nancy, 7.

69 Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” 67.

70 Da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race, xiii.

71 Da Silva, 117.

72 Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy

73 Da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race, passim.

74 Da Silva, 44.

75 Warren, “Improper Bodies.”

76 On “the principle of separability” within “The Ordered World,” see da Silva, “Difference without Separability.”

77 Warren, “Improper Bodies,” 47.

78 This formulation is notably associated with Gilles Deleuze’s work on Baruch de Spinoza: Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy, 226.

79 Grosz, The Incorporeal, 67.

80 Fanon, Black Skins, White Masks

81 King, “Off Littorality,” 43; McKittrick, Demonic Grounds, 79.

82 King, “Off Littorality,” 43.

83 McKittrick, Demonic Grounds, 79.

84 Farquhar and Lock, Beyond the Body Proper

85 See Bradley, “Living in the Absence of a Body.”

86 In particular Foucault, Power/Knowledge; Agamben, What is an Apparatus?; and Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway

87 Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” 67.

88 Jackson, Becoming Human, 93.

89 Weheliye, Habeas Viscus, 39. For a contrasting interpretation, see Judy, Sentient Flesh

90 An earlier iteration of this formulation appears in Bradley, “The Vicissitudes of Touch.”

91 Moten, “Of Human Flesh.”

92 Rivera, Poetics of the Flesh, 7.

93 Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” 67 (emphasis in the original).

94 Spillers, “To the Bone” (emphasis is mine). See also Bradley, “The Vicissitudes of Touch.”

95 Spillers, “The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual,” 98.

96 Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” 75.

97 Rangan, Immediations, 15, 4.

98 Da Silva, “No-Bodies.”

99 Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception (trans. Landers), 73.

100 Merleau-Ponty, 73; Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible

101 Lawlor and Toadvine, The Merleau-Ponty Reader, xiii.

102 Representative examples of work in which Merleau-Ponty figures heavily across these respective fields could include Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts; Crowther, What Drawing and Painting Really Mean; Olkowski and Weiss, Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty; and Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology

103 Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception (trans. Landers), passim.

104 Merleau-Ponty, 525, 84.

105 Baldwin, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, 36.

106 Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception (trans. Landers), 146.

107 Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception (trans. Smith), 140.

108 Merleau-Ponty, 140, 242 (emphasis is mine).

109 Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception (trans. Landers), 480 (emphasis is mine).

110 Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 42.

111 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 82.

112 Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” 67.

113 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 84.

114 Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception (trans. Smith), 346.

115 Warren, Ontological Terror, 5.

116 Warren, 112.

117 Bertram, “—The Dream World Is A Place She Can Reach Through Her Own Body,” 58.

118 Barrett, Racial Blackness and the Discontinuity of Western Modernity, 139.

119 Barrett, 138.

120 My use of the term “exorbitance” here and throughout Anteaesthetics is informed by, though not necessarily reducible to, Nahum Chandler’s deconstructivist reflections on “the Negro as a problem for thought” in “Of Exorbitance.”

121 Spillers, Preface to Black, White, and in Color, xiv.

122 Woodward, “Nihilism and the Sublime in Lyotard”; Lyotard, Libidinal Economy

123 Derrida, Languages of the Unsayable, 25.

124 Warren, Ontological Terror, 148.

125 Warren, 148.

126 Bois and Krauss, Formless, 40 (emphasis is mine).

127 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 86.

128 Marriott, Whither Fanon?, 230. Race, in this sense, is not so much “pinned to the [black] body,” as Mayra Rivera writes in her reading of Fanon, but rather constitutes the body (for all who would claim it), in and as a phantasmatic dispensation of power. Fanon’s reflections must be considered from the vantage of a philosophical refusal to take on good faith phenomenology’s foundational conceit: “We inhabit the same world” (Rivera, Poetics of the Flesh, 122, 145).

129 Da Silva, “No-Bodies.”

130 Grosz, Volatile Bodies, 103, 96.

131 Grosz, 107.

132 Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 152.

133 Jay Wright’s line, “the art of dissimulation,” occurs within his book-length poem The Presentable Art of Reading Absence, 9.

134 Rancière, Aisthesis, xi.

135 Rancière, xi.

136 Rancière, xi.

137 Marriott, “The Thought of Poetry.”

138 Judy, Sentient Flesh, 446. For a more pointed discussion of Aristotle’s use of the term, see Hamlyn, “Aristotle’s Account of Aesthesis in the De Anima.”

139 See Harney and Moten, All Incomplete

140 Moten, The Universal Machine, ix.

141 See also Bradley, “Living in the Absence of a Body.”

142 Martin, Good Stock Strange Blood, 45 (emphasis is mine).

Works Cited

Agamben, Giorgio. What is an Apparatus? And Other Essays. Translated by David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009.

Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006.

Anderson, Carol. White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide. New York: Bloomsbury, 2017.

Baldwin, Thomas, ed. Maurice Merleau-Ponty: Basic Writings. New York: Routledge, 2004.

Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007.

Barber, Daniel Colucciello. “On Black Negativity, Or The Affirmation Of Nothing: Jared Sexton, interviewed by Daniel Barber.” Society and Space, September 18, 2017. https://www.societyandspace. org/articles/on-black-negativity-or-the-affirmationof-nothing

Barrett, Lindon. Racial Blackness and the Discontinuity of Western Modernity. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2014.

Bennett, Joshua. Being Property Once Myself: Blackness and the End of Man. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020.

Bertram, Lillian Yvonne. “—The Dream World Is A Place She Can Reach Through Her Own Body.” In Letters to the Future: Black Women/Radical Writing, edited by Erica Hunt and Dawn Lundy Martin, 58. Tucson: Kore Press, 2018.

Best, Stephen. “Neither Lost nor Found: Slavery and the Visual Archive.” Representations 113, no. 1 (2011): 150–63.

Bhandar, Brenna. Colonial Lives of Property: Law, Land, and Racial Regimes of Ownership. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018.

Bois, Yve-Alain, and Rosalind E. Krauss. Formless: A User’s Guide. New York: Zone Books, 1997.

Bradley, Rizvana. Anteaesthetics: Black Aesthesis and the Critique of Form. Stanford: Stanford University Press, forthcoming.

———. “Living in the Absence of a Body.” Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge 29 (2016). http://www.rhizomes.net/issue29/pdf/bradley.pdf

———. “Picturing Catastrophe: The Visual Politics of Racial Reckoning.” The Yale Review 109, no. 2 (2021). https://yalereview.org/article/picturing-catastrophe

———. “The Vicissitudes of Touch: Annotations on the Haptic.” b2o: An Online Journal, November 21, 2020. https://www.boundary2.org/2020/11/rizvanabradley-the-vicissitudes-of-touch-annotations-onthe-haptic/

———. “Too Thick Love, or Bearing the Unbearable.” In Affect Theory Reader 2.0, edited by Gregory Seigworth and Carolyn Pedwell. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, forthcoming.

Bradley, Rizvana, and Denise Ferreira da Silva. “Four Theses on Aesthetics.” e-flux 120 (2021). https:// www.e-flux.com/journal/120/416146/four-theseson-aesthetics/

Brand, Dionne. A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging. Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2001.

Burdick, John. Blessed Anastácia: Women, Race and Popular Christianity in Brazil. New York: Routledge, 2013.

Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” New York: Routledge, 1993.

Campbell, Timothy, and Adam Sitze, eds. Biopolitics: A Reader. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013.

Césaire, Aimé. Discourse on Colonialism. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000.

Chandler, Nahum. “Of Exorbitance: The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Thought.” In X—The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Thought, 11-67. New York: Fordham University Press, 2014.

Chen, Mel Y. Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012.

Clough, Patricia Ticineto, ed. The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007.

Cohen, Ed. A Body Worth Defending: Immunity, Biopolitics, and the Apotheosis of the Modern Body Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009.

Coole, Diana, and Samantha Frost, eds. New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010.

Copeland, Huey. Bound to Appear: Art, Slavery, and the Site of Blackness in Multicultural America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013.

Crowther, Paul. What Drawing and Painting Really Mean: The Phenomenology of Image and Gesture. New York: Routledge, 2017.

Da Silva, Denise Ferreira. “No-Bodies: Law, Raciality and Violence.” Griffith Law Review 18, no. 2 (2009): 212–36.

———. “On Difference without Separability.” In Incerteza Viva: 32nd Bienal de São Paulo. Exhibition catalogue, edited by Jochen Volz and Júlia Rebouças, 57–65. São Paulo: Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, 2016.

———. Toward a Global Idea of Race. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007.

———. Unpayable Debt. London: Sternberg Press, forthcoming.

Deleuze, Gilles. Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza. New York: Zone Books, 1990.

Derrida, Jacques. Languages of the Unsayable: The Play of Negativity in Literature and Literary Theory. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989.

Descartes, René. Meditations on First Philosophy. Translated by George Heffernan. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990.

Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press, 2008.

Farquhar, Judith, and Margaret Lock. Beyond the Body Proper: Reading the Anthropology of Material Life Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007.

Ferguson, Roderick A. The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012.

Fong, Benjamin. Death and Mastery: Psychoanalytic Drive Theory and the Subject of Late Capitalism New York: Columbia University Press, 2016.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage Books, 1991.

———. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977. Edited by Colin Gordon. New York: Pantheon Books, 1980.

Freud, Sigmund. The Ego and the Id. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1960.

Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.

Gordon, Colin, Walter Johnson, Jason Q. Purnell, and Jamala Rogers. “COVID-19 and the Color Line.” Boston Review, May 1, 2020. http://bostonreview. net/race/colin-gordon-walter-johnson-jason-qpurnell-jamala-rogers-covid-19-and-color-line

Grosz, Elizabeth. The Incorporeal: Ontology, Ethics, and the Limits of Materialism. New York: Columbia University Press, 2017.

———. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994.

Hamlyn, David W. “Aristotle’s Account of Aesthesis in the De Anima.” The Classical Quarterly 9, no. 1 (1959): 6–16.

Handler, Jerome, and Kelly E. Hayes. “Escrava Anastácia: The Iconographic History of a Brazilian Popular Saint.” African Diaspora 2, no. 1 (2009): 25–51.

Haraway, Donna. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991.

———. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016.

Harney, Stefano, and Fred Moten. All Incomplete Brooklyn: Minor Compositions, 2021.

Hartman, Saidiya. Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2008.

———. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and SelfMaking in Nineteenth Century America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

———. “The Belly of the World: A Note on Black Women’s Labors.” Souls 18, no. 1 (2016): 166–73.

———. “Venus in Two Acts.” Small Axe 26, no. 2 (2008): 1–14.

Hartman, Saidiya, and Frank B. Wilderson III. “The Position of the Unthought.” Qui Parle 13, no. 2 (2003): 183–201.

Harvey, David. Spaces of Hope. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.

Hurston, Zora Neale. Their Eyes Were Watching God New York: Perennial Classics, 1998.

Jackson, Zakiyyah Iman. Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World. New York: NYU Press, 2020.

James, Joy. “The Womb of Western Theory: Trauma, Time Theft, and the Captive Maternal.” Carceral Notebooks 12 (2016): 253–96.

Judy, Ronald A. Sentient Flesh: Thinking in Disorder, Poiēsis in Black. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020.

King, Tiffany Lethabo. “Off Littorality (Shoal #1): Black Study Off the Shores of ‘the Black Body.’” Propter Nos 3 (2019): 40–50.

Lawlor, Leonard, and Ted Toadvine, eds. The MerleauPonty Reader. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2007.

Lloyd, David. Under Representation: The Racial Regime of Aesthetics. New York: Fordham University Press, 2019.

Locke, John. The Two Treatises of Government. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960.

Lyotard, Jean-François. Libidinal Economy. Translated by Iain Hamilton Grant. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1993.

Malm, Andreas. Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming. London: Verso, 2016.

Marriott, David. “The Thought of Poetry.” In Of Effacement. Stanford: Stanford University Press, forthcoming.

———. Whither Fanon? Studies in the Blackness of Being Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018.

Martin, Dawn Lundy. Good Stock Strange Blood. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2017.

Mbembe, Achille. Necropolitics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019.

McKittrick, Katherine. Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006.

McQueen, Steve. “Dialogue with Stuart Comer.” Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, January 31, 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KM_5z9WvUc

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith. London: Routledge Classics, 2002.

———. The Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Donald A. Landers. Abingdon: Routledge, 2012.

———. The Visible and the Invisible. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968.

Mitropoulos, Angela. Pandemonium: Proliferating Borders of Capital and the Pandemic Swerve. London: Pluto Press, 2020.

Moore, Jason W. Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. London: Verso, 2015.

Morgan, Jennifer L. Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004.

Moten, Fred. “Of Human Flesh: An Interview with R.A. Judy” (Part Two). b2o: An Online Journal, May 6, 2020. https://www.boundary2.org/ moten-judy-interview/

———. The Universal Machine. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018.

Nancy, Jean-Luc. Corpus. Translated by Richard A. Rand. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008.

Neocleous, Mark. The Politics of Immunity: Security and the Policing of Bodies. London: Verso Books, 2022.

Olkowski, Dorothea, and Gail Weiss, eds. Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty. University Park, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006.

Puar, Jasbir. The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017.

Rancière, Jacques. Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art Translated by Zakir Paul. London: Verso, 2013.

Rangan, Pooja. Immediations: The Humanitarian Impulse in Documentary. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017.

Rivera, Mayra. Poetics of the Flesh. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015.

Roberts, Dorothy. Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty. New York: Pantheon Books, 1997.

Robinson, Cedric. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2000.

Sobchack, Vivian. Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.

Spillers, Hortense. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987): 64–81.

———. Preface to Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture, ix–xvi. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.

———. “The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual: A PostDate.” Boundary 2 21, no. 3 (1994): 65–116.

———. “To the Bone: Some Speculations on Touch.” Keynote address for conference by Studium Generale Rietveld Academy at Stedelijk Museum of Art, Amsterdam, March 23, 2018.

Tompkins, Kyla Wazana. Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the 19th Century. New York: NYU Press, 2012.

Vergès, Françoise. “Racial Capitalocene.” In Futures of Black Radicalism, edited by Gaye Theresa Johnson and Alex Lubin, 72–82. London: Verso, 2017.

Warren, Calvin. “Improper Bodies: A Nihilistic Meditation on Sexuality, the Black Belly, and Sexual Difference.” Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International 8, no. 2 (2019): 35–51.

———. Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018.

Weheliye, Alexander G. Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014.

Weinbaum, Alys Eve. Wayward Reproductions: Genealogies of Race and Nation in Transatlantic Modern Thought. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004.

Wilderson III, Frank B. Red, White, and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010.

———. “The Vengeance of Vertigo: Aphasia and Abjection in the Political Trials of Black Insurgents.” InTensions Journal 5 (2011). http://www.yorku.ca/ intent/issue5/articles/frankbwildersoniii.php

Wilson, Michael K. “Because the Spirits: Visualizing Connective Consciousness through Diasporic Aesthetic Imaginaries.” In New Frontiers in the Study of the Global African Diaspora Between Uncharted Themes and Alternative Representations by Glenn A. Chambers et al., 333–56. Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2018.

Wood, Marcus. “The Museu do Negro in Rio and the Cult of Anastácia as a New Model for the Memory of Slavery.” Representations 113, no. 1 (2011): 111–49.

Woodward, Ashley. “Nihilism and the Sublime in Lyotard.” Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 16, no. 2 (2011): 57–71.

Woodward, Vincent. The Delectable Negro: Human Consumption and Homoeroticism within US Slave Culture. New York: NYU Press, 2014.

Wright, Jay. The Presentable Art of Reading Absence. Dallas: Dalkey Archive Press, 2008.

Yong, Ed. “We Created the ‘Pandemicene.’” The Atlantic, April 28, 2022. https://www.theatlantic. com/science/archive/2022/04/how-climatechange-impacts-pandemics/629699/

IMAGE:

A WHISTLE IN A WISH, 2018 Oil on canvas

29 3/4 x 27 9/16 inches

© Lynette Yiadom-Boakye. Courtesy of the artist, Jack Shainman Gallery, New York and Corvi-Mora, London.

UNTRANSLATABILITY, RESISTANCE

On the night of June 30, 1969, Reginald Jones attempted to intervene in the arrest of Mercy Roaches Sandoval, an eighteen-year-old who was intoxicated in public at a restaurant parking lot.1 Sandoval was breaking glass bottles in the parking lot when two Santa Ana police officers on routine car patrol pursued to arrest Sandoval for being drunk in public. As the police officers led Sandoval to the patrol vehicle, Jones asked the police what they were doing. When the officers replied that they were arresting Sandoval, Jones decided to intervene on Sandoval’s behalf. He told the officers that an informal agreement had been reached between the citizenry and the Chief of Police, and that they would be allowed to take care of their own problems around the restaurant. When the officers did not respond to his plea, Jones yelled, “Don’t let the fucking pigs take him away!” The crowd threw rocks and bottles at the patrol car to prevent them from leaving. Jones and another man were able to reach the back seat of the patrol car and free Sandoval. The police officers left the parking lot as the crowd gathered to celebrate Sandoval’s release. There was no pursuit of Sandoval after the patrol car was bombarded by the crowd. The next day at his place of work, however, Jones was arrested under the charges of lynching and incitement to riot.

The Jones case was the first to interpret the 1933 California penal code §405(a),(b) that defines “lynching” as the “taking of a person from the lawful custody of a peace officer,” which in its original legislative intent was established as an anti-lynching statute. The decision of the Jones case would later inform the interpretation of another in 1999, the case of The People v. Anthony J., in which the court found the defendant guilty of “self-lynching.” The interpretation of these two court cases has had repercussions for both the legal and common understanding of the word “lynching.” This essay explores how these distortions obscure the notions of antiblack violence and racial terror that accompany the historical memory and socio-cultural and ritualistic practices of lynching. The interpretation of the court cases has also sanctioned racist police practices against racialized subjects protesting in the Black Lives Matter and the Occupy Wall Street Movements. In this regard, subsequent interpretations highlight the intention of the original statute, as Erin Gray submits, “to bolster law enforcement, and to protect the right of the state to define the boundaries of rational and legitimate violence.”2 The state’s use of its anti-lynching statute reveals how the state weaponizes its own legal criterion to define rioting and vigilante violence as illegal and illegitimate. This use mirrors the ways in which the state justifies its use of racialized state violence and punishment— and not least without questioning what the function of opacity might bring to the state’s use of terms and conditions in their validity.3

In what follows, I take up the question of resistance (to blackness and of blackness) in the context of the first recorded juridical interpretation of the state of California’s antilynching statute in Jones. I examine the interpretation of the statute by the courts and the police in order to explore the nature of blackness’ untranslatability and the manifold resistances. The untranslatability of blackness girds a violence of reason and partial truth that sustains a juridical imaginary in and out of the courtroom. Translation and untranslatability, language and claims: what is at stake is not simply a matter of the

Linette Park is a Visiting Assistant Professor in African American Studies at Emory University. Her research interests include black critical theories/ black studies, carceral studies, gender and sexuality studies, psychoanalysis, philosophy of law. Visual art and film, and the afterlife of slavery and lynching in the U.S. Her first monograph is under advanced contract with Stanford University press for the series Inventions: Black Philosophy, Politics, Aesthetics. Email: linette.park@emory.edu

signs of language, its representation, on which legal and judicial interpretations rely, but the traumatic and racialized effects that come with the repetition of such interpretations. These are interpretations that lean against the deferral of racist reasoning—from the ways that policing practices of racial targeting and subjection are simultaneously condoned and obscured to weaponize language justifying and fortifying the securitization and sanction of state violence. As I will attempt to show, blackness’ untranslatability precedes and exceeds the orders of law, whether de facto or de jure, echoing a violence (Gewalt), as Walter Benjamin observes, that is not simply a material or physical violence but forms of violence and power that are situated conceptually “well before the historical differentiation between potestas and violentia, between legitimate and illegitimate violence.”4 Making clear the nuances of Benjamin’s notion of violence, Sigrid Weigel notes that Gewalt is also defined as:

neither physical violence nor institutional power but rather as a reason (Ursache) that “intervenes in ethical relations.” . . . In other words, Benjamin is interested less in the exertion of physical or political violence and more in the way a reason intervenes in law and justice, which is it so say in the procedure of justification or legitimation. To be more precise: the focus is on the transformation of a reason into violence by way of its intervention in the concepts of law and justice.5

It is in this transformation from a reason into violence that we see, prior to the institutional arrangements and operations of law across its legitimate and illegitimate applications, both the reflection that “there is inherent in all such violence a lawmaking character”6 and also a critique of the language of law and justice. In turn, the flashing moment in which a reason transforms into violence, its intervention on the conceptualizations of law and justice, also unfastens what underscores the production in the call of a juridical decision that would administer law and justice respectively. Ergo, the materialization of a decision, a call for justice, “however, apodictically,”7 illustrates the disavowal of the process of contingency in which that decision rests. The sustained relation of violence (Gewalt) and law and the enduring life of language as a consequence of translation share as their fulcrum the threat of this transformative moment, the conversion of a reason into violence that would disrupt the positive forms of law and language. This specter of an apparent threat and how the law responds to it through its own language and evaluative criterion turns us to the question of blackness’ untranslatability in the two court cases that interpreted the California anti-lynching penal code.

In the historical memory of lynching and in its afterlife, blackness and antiblackness come to index an impossible position in relation to language, meaning, and potential lexical conversions underlining what David Marriott has explained as what blackness n’est pas: what blackness appears to be, forced into any mode of representation, is what blackness is not.8 Provisionally, then, we can say that blackness is always already positioned to relinquish a type of meaning to the dominant orders of history and time, Being and testimony, while at the same time blackness might be imbued and overdetermined with

(non-)meaning. Blackness’ untranslatability also suggests a resistance of resistance—that is, a resistance to the whiteness of the language of law and the laws of language that delegate whiteness with the power of proper resistance—insofar as something must remain from the vision and framing with which the whiteness of law and language affords its terms and conditions. Thus, the untranslatability of blackness poses questions that concern language, law, and resistance—not just of status and function, but also of difference and kind and impossibility: what might resist a type of political demand and meaning posed by law? How might the untranslatability of blackness be essential to what law deems as justice? Untranslatability highlights a fundamental impulse to resist an already existing internal resistance, an imagined threat to the coherence of language. The latter gives plenitude to the former, a desire to overcome and transform perceived symptoms of difference into something perceptible, tangible, diagnosable, interpretable. Within this framework, the untranslatable “is rather what one keeps on (not) translating.”9 Blackness' untranslatability becomes positioned as a threat and must therefore necessarily be contained within the carceral confines of language and in relation to the whiteness of the law that sustains an antiblackness that persists from within and without and underlines desire as well as its collapse into law.

>> The Legal History of “Self-Lynching”

In the context of the legal history of “self-lynching,” the roles of defense and resistance are complicated by the dissimulation of antiblackness, which underscores its legislation, conceptual plentitude, and its persistence in(to) the present. The first two court cases to interpret and translate “anti-lynching” into “self-lynching” do not simply raise the question of who and what constitutes a juridical and legal person; they also highlight the possibility of producing a plurality of subjects at the expense of blackness as a non-self. This phenomenon involves the court and law enforcement’s instrumentalization of the rhetoric of lynching in order to figure a defiance of authority that depends on disregarding the strong association with antiblack lynching—a disregard that can be considered a violent suspension in the imaginary.

More than half a century after the state of California proposed the anti-lynching legislation in 1933, it was used to condone racist police practices against racialized subjects under the charges of “felony lynching” in the arrest of nonviolent Black Lives Matter demonstrators who resisted their own arrest and the arrests of fellow demonstrators. Practices of white vigilantism under the banner of lynch law, frontier justice, and popular sovereignty mark not only the penal code’s prehistory, but also “the re-racialisation of whiteness as the intensification of anti-blackness.”10 White lynch mobs would represent their collective violence as outside the reach of the normalized rule of law. Thus, the extraordinary and unusual translation from “anti-lynching” to “lynching,” as a way to securitize civil society, mirrors the historical practices of the lynch mob’s violent and deathly force displacing black people into racially targeted spaces outside institutional juridical practices, spaces of an antiblack imaginary that perceives racialized subjects as

lynching themselves.

The first report of the 1933 anti-lynching statute occurred forty years after its enactment, in the 1970s. The significant passage of time between the anti-lynching statute’s enactment and its first reported use is indicative of the juridical strictures to hold such a case, and the failure by law and police enforcement to register the original legislative intent of the statute, which was to shield racialized subjects from violence. In this sense, the extra-legal definition of lynching remains limited in conceptualizing how lynching was routinized and naturalized as quotidian practice.11 The forty-year gap also signals the decision-making procedure in the reported use of the statute as somewhat arbitrary, raising the question how lynching has not been, or more accurately cannot be legible in the eyes of law.

While the Jones case acknowledged the historical context of lynch law both in the state of California and nationwide, the acknowledgement was ultimately only in passing and the history of lynching’s racial terror was hardly given any consideration in the interpretation of §405(a),(b). In the decision of Jones, the defendant was charged under the penal code with the felony of rescuing a prisoner, “not in order to do him harm, but to help him escape.” In his defense, Jones raised the following issues pertaining to the lynching statute: that it was unconstitutionally vague and that the trial court erred in not instructing the jury sua sponte (Latin for “of one’s own will” or meaning “one’s own volition”) on the elements of lynching and incitement to riot.12 In sum, Jones rightly pointed to how his defense relied on the difference between the statutory and dictionary definitions of the term “lynching,” the former stripping away the historical memory of lynching’s racial terror and black death implied in the latter. Because there had been no reported cases of lynching as extra-juridical antiblack violence—which again is not to suggest that they did not occur but signals the strictures and failures of various institutions and apparatuses (the courthouse, archive, and news media) to observe the ways in which racial violence was naturalized—the original legislative intent, which was designed as an anti-discrimination measure, was lost in the interpretation of the statute.13 The Jones case, in short, favored the interpretation that Jones’s words elicited an attack on “lawful custody” (a phrase cited in the statute), describing his words to the police as “a lit torch.”14 In other words, Jones’s words were understood as an attack on “lawful custody” itself—the state of “physically holding or controlling a person or piece of property.” The term “lawful custody,” however, was assumed to be tacitly understood and self-evident. In contrast, Jones argued that the court should have guided the jury to “take its own motion” (to make use of sua sponte) in their understanding of lynching. As was described in the court documents, “the defendant claims sua sponte instructions were required, since without any specific advisement, the jury was unable to make any determination on the issue of lawful custody.”15 Consequentially, “lynching” was also abstracted from its socio-historical and cultural context of racial terror. In the statute’s original legislative intent, lynching posed as the criminal activity to be guarded against. Without guiding the jury to take its own motion on the term lawful custody, we see an interpretation of the anti-lynching statute in which “lawful custody,” rather than the

captive held by the lynch mob, is positioned as that which is in threat. The disparity in discerning the two terms, “lynching” and “custody,” through the court’s varying motions on guiding the jury’s voluntary reasoning facilitates the groundwork for Jones’s impossible defense. Just as “lynching” was narrowed in its definition and scope, “custody” remained self-evident. The uneven advancement of these terms affects what becomes translated as not just the legal person under scrutiny but also as willful action: the court’s reading of Jones’s words as “a lit torch,” an attack on “lawful custody,” obfuscates the determination of his willful intent and one’s sense of self.16 Jones’s observation that the jury, and the court more generally, lacked a basic understanding of lynching suggests a fundamental displacement of the original intent as an anti-lynching statute in the court’s interpretation. The displacement carries out only further the dissimulation of lynching’s anti-blackness, the forging of indefinite custody part and parcel of the afterlife of black death, wherein blackness appears as an impossible self before the law.

Because custody is neither circumscribed in legal terms nor given lawful specificity in the context of the arrests, it suggests that custody functions as something other than its (pre)determined legal character. Custody as part of “self-lynching” requires further interrogation. From the state's legal vantage, custody is central in the penal code’s definition of lynching, not only in delineating the transgression that warrants the arrest (“the taking from the lawful custody of a peace office”) and thereby outlining the subject who judges and those who are the objects of that judgment, but also in articulating and maintaining sovereign violence by the police and in marking the racialized ground from which such violence can be performed. But what becomes custodial as well as who and how one becomes the object versus the subject of custody remains unclear. If lawful custody in the context of the crime of “felony lynching” refers to the protection of an individual from a lynch mob or riot, as it is historically familiarized and more commonly understood, and the lynching agent as the perpetrator of that felony, then lawful custody should underline the legal responsibility of containing and keeping the prisoner or captive away from harm. Instead, however, the prisoner or captive seemingly morphs into the agent of lynching. Under these conditions, what operates as custody or who is custodial parallels a similar narrow discrepancy between extra-legal and unlawful violence, between what and who is positioned outside the law and how that informs a perception of criminal activity forbidden by law. The discrepancy suggests that custody serves as a way of facilitating its misalignment with notions of protection, obfuscating the way in which custody functions as an immediate imprisonment, a mode of capture and captivity that precedes the moment of arrest. The significance of this arrest that precedes its lawful form is the psychical state that holds it: white desire, the intensity that amplifies its antiblackness,

The significance of this arrest that precedes its lawful form is the psychical state that holds it: white desire, the intensity that amplifies its antiblackness, maintains black death before and as the law.

maintains black death before and as the law.

The Jones case echoes the impossibility of supplying evidence to testify against one’s lynching—whether it be to provide a defense of actions taken against another’s lawful custody or to bear reason against one’s own lynching. According to the court and law enforcement, Jones’s words become the instrument that elicits a riot and the attempt to remove someone from custody. Who becomes the agent of and what acts as a lynching merge indistinguishably with being taken into lawful custody, just as custody and death fade into one another—a fading that echoes the history of lynching and the horrors of a constant oscillation between life and death, which takes place not because of chance, but because it descends from beyond the juridical scope. This oscillation, though constant, has no expression in law. In other words, what might constitute historical proof of lynching’s unwritten law of antiblackness evanesces, as it can never answer the demands for evidence in a court—a system of jurisdiction made for the human and where, as Frank Wilderson has explained, “Black people cannot bear witness to the coherence of prior plenitude because their ‘loss’ is overwhelming and irreparable . . . and with desire for redress that must be channeled through the conceptual frameworks and cognitive maps which crowd them out as subjects.”17 Wilderson’s critical schema of blackness in a juridical setting tracks the paradox in which the negation of blackness, at the levels of subjectivity and desire, stabilizes an orientation into the courtroom. In this regard, the case for lynching always already exceeds the juridical scope of judgment since antiblackness as racial law predetermines and qualifies blackness as a crime. In the case of Jones, had it instructed sua sponte, the court could have registered the absence of evidence (or for that matter, how blackness before the law, depending on its relation, shapes one term as self-evident and another as open for interpretation). Instead, through its failure to instruct sua sponte, the court affirmed Jones’s conviction.

The translation of “anti-lynching” as “self-lynching” signals a deeper problematic involving testimony and the legal archive, since testimony relies on translation indexical to the human. While it implies a question about who the self is in the legal interpretation of lynching, this translation requires an interrogation of the historical image of lynching and testimony, telescoping the ways in which blackness marks an absence in the site that scripts memory and truth—a site in which blackness is never fugitive, but in essence untranslatable in its non-being. The issue of translation, therefore, draws out a fundamental misrecognition in the shift between different registers of language and signifying systems intrinsic to the process of translation itself. Here, racist myth and white sovereign truth (whether asserted by law or by “the people’s justice,” “the people’s sovereignty,” which excludes black citizenship) converge, with antiblackness at the very heart of its arche. The problem is not about an error in translation, which might then be corrected to provide for better legal representation in and outside of law’s own racist practices of misreading and interpretation, but concerns that which remains uncertain within the conventions of translation itself—the process of conversion and discernment of truth and justice in which antiblackness has no analogy.18 If we consider Freud’s notion that translation is a form of repression, we can infer that blackness is displaced in

the process of translation and representation because it is anticipated as a possible disturbance that would originate and emerge from the material to be translated.19 Translation, in other words, labors to avoid terms and signs that would prevent it from working—and antiblackness undercuts this order of signification and its arbitrary signs from within and without. It is in this sense that blackness’ untranslatability produces the possibility of translation and interpretation, and inhabits an irreconcilable oscillation between lawpreserving and law-making violence.

Translation can also be understood via the process of testimony, a process in which blackness’ untranslatability precedes and conflicts with the possibility of bearing witness since the testimony is necessarily related to human presence. On this score, we can also understand that the sense of time that lapses between the housing of supposed evidence of antiblack lynching in the archive and its arrival as a “wrong” decision or misinterpretation of law—is not about the evidence itself (the signs through which a decision can be made, or for that matter, the conditions of terms and order of events on which the decision rests). There is an antagonism in which blackness’ untranslatability avers an irreconcilability with the ordering of order itself that also precedes and exceeds the diachrony and synchrony of language and the order and sense of de jure and de facto law. There is always already a radical difference through which signification proceeds and its originary point remains as a trace.20 However, I want to submit that the untranslatability of this radical difference is all the more complex and irreconcilable when the desire to simultaneously claim and prohibit blackness from entering an organizational structure functions to prosecute, to judge, and to shape the limitations of one’s defense.

The Jones case interprets the antilynching statute via a translation from anti-lynching to self-lynching. The construal of the statute errs in many ways, but these problems of translation return us to an original non-origin in which blackness does not translate as having personhood or rights in and beyond law. As Jacques Derrida has described in another register and as Emily Apter reminds her readers, that which remains untranslated preserves the “sectional life” of a sentence, “where indefiniteness meets infinitude,”21 and the semblance of language draws from an open abyss. The untranslatability of blackness, its unbearability of a truth, paradoxically marks the arche of an impossible trace that cannot be recorded. The “indefiniteness” of blackness is nonetheless acquiesced in the moment of judgement, decision, and decipherability, reproducing a grammar of violence not just as an event of antiblack murder but also as

I want to submit that the untranslatability of this radical difference is all the more complex and irreconcilable when the desire to simultaneously claim and prohibit blackness from entering an organizational structure functions to prosecute, to judge, and to shape the limitations of one’s defense.

an a priori indictment, a type of foreclosure, in which blackness has no possible plea as defense. In this further sense, we can conceive the interpellation of law and blackness as a nonconsensual bind, which involves a conversion from the untranslatability of blackness to blackness as an imagined legal subject, a process to which one never consents yet which confirms one’s own vanishing in the bolstering of state defense.

The case of The People v. Anthony J., which is the second court hearing to report the anti-lynching statute twenty years after the Jones case, concretizes this point in its stark interpretation of the defendant as a subject who intended to lynch himself. Anthony, a youth attending a community vigil in San Francisco, was sought by police with a warrant for his arrest for auto theft. Interrupting a vigil for Anthony’s recently deceased friend, three police officers pursued his arrest as community members of the vigil endeavored to persuade the police of their inappropriate timing. However, the police persisted in targeting Anthony and called for backup. The number of police officers involved was clearly greater than necessary and members of the vigil urged them to halt the sudden and incredible surge of force. According to the prosecution, Anthony fought against his arrest when the crowd of mourners attempted to set him free. In his defense, Anthony explains that he never asked the crowd to free him and that he only began yelling when the police threatened his mother. The crowd responded to Anthony’s plea for help as he was being escorted to the officer’s patrol vehicle. Anthony was able to run away still handcuffed. When he was found, he was charged as a juvenile for resisting arrest, aggravating assault on an officer, and “self-lynching.”

Similar to the Jones case, the Anthony J. case disregarded the original legislative intent and the historical and racial context of the statute. However, the question to be decided by the court did not simply concern the interpretation of lynching according to its common definition or its legal definition. The case arrived before the court to resolve the question of whether one could voluntarily lynch oneself under the statute’s conditions of protesting against being held in lawful custody by a peace officer. The transformation of self-lynching from “taking a person from lawful custody” to “defense and resisting arrest,” as well as from “harming a prisoner” to “willfully obstructing oneself from being taken into custody,” accents the structural conditions that enable the law to refashion the self as a potential agent of lawlessness in its own mirage. In this regard, the question concerns the essence that animates both conversion and concept—that is, the possibility of a proposition in which a self can be remade and spiritualized in the law’s rereading of lynching.

The court’s interpretation of lynching rested not only on an abstraction of lynching violence, but conversely enabled the process of legal transformation wherein the prisoner who is held captive is refashioned as a self against the custody of a peace officer. In the Anthony J. case, the court shifted its focus explicitly to the assumed nature of justice emanating to preside over the grounds of the juridical subject rather than the will of the subject, but it was only able to do so in reference to the Jones case which observed “that the Legislature is free to define and punish offenses as it sees fit (subject to the prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment), and may choose to define a word in a way

that varies from its traditional meaning.”22 The reasoning of the Jones case, by which the principle of sua sponte can be invoked as a privilege of the court to act “of its own volition” and then denied in the case of the custodial subject, becomes a principle applied to the defendant that filters a reading of the will of his actions. The application of this principle to Anthony’s interference with his arrest results in its being construed as a criminal act. What is accomplished by staging this volition as part of the operation of refashioning a criminal self? In the eyes of the law, Anthony J. is perceived as a criminal figure, a subject who in and for one’s sense of self labored to disrupt the custody of law enforcement. But how the law pathologizes the subject, its criminal actor, and projects it onto Anthony J. remains a question.

In other words, how and why does Anthony J. become a quilting point that allows the narrowing of language for law’s own purposes? And what is the complex, or economy, driving the structuralization of Anthony J. to appear as such? How do translation and resistance work together in spite of blackness’ perceived errancy, or flaw? On the one hand, we might read the court’s interpretation of the law as a type of bad faith in an apparent justice, or as a justice that performs justice, that is ostensibly both spontaneous and synchronous, both in its eminence and immanence. On the other hand, the interpretation does not feign to perform or conceal otherwise—for the law functions as the court’s own racial authority, able to perform within the strictures of the racial state system and to disavow the racist conditions of (im)possibilities that it inscribes.

Derivative of law’s anti-blackness, these racist conditions and violent inscriptions point to both law’s positive operation under the apparent horizon of justice and the limit where blackness is imagined as nothing other than law’s captive, bound antagonistically to a juridical “real.” This is illustrated in what Keramet Reiter has conceptualized as a “legitimacy paradox.”23 Anthony J. uses the law and asserts his rights accordingly to protect himself and his mother against the encroachment of the police, only to be targeted by the law as a criminal subject of his own making without the possibility of defense. The instantaneous transformation (at once legal, yet also an act of the law’s spiritualized rituals) has been explained by Saidiya Hartman as the nexus of the “impossibility of selfpossession,” in which “the slave’s very condition of being or social existence is defined as a state of determinate negation. . . . Thus the fashioning of the subject must necessarily take place in violation of the law, and consequently, will, criminality, and punishment are inextricably linked.”24

Extending Hartman’s argument, we might say that the essence within—a transversal effect that underlies this constellation—telescopes the exclusion of blackness on two levels. First, it magnifies the relationality between “the first person” (the grammatical “I”) and “the constitutional person” (the subject of rights) itself,25 both positions that exclude blackness by their very definitions and the processes of becoming involved in these respective positionalities. The volition of the first person is reinterpreted and distorted against the subject himself, thus presenting an agency that is not his own.

It is at this juncture that the law relegates and instrumentalizes the racialized subject as if submitting him to his own subjugation and punishment. Second, this punishment

draws its penal character from the exploitative nature of antiblack lynching, in which it specifically conscripts the dissimulation of blackness as part of its extrajudicial practice of violence and murder. The illusion itself that Anthony J. submits to his own subjection echoes Hartman’s elaboration of the slave as always already in an impossible position of self-possession. For the dissimulation of antiblackness only consolidates the orchestration of power and authority under a pretense of liberalism in the law.

Following Hartman’s analysis even further, we can understand that the arms of the law have staged scenes of riot and so-called disturbance by the crowd in both the Jones case and Anthony J. case. In doing so, the extent to which the conceptual malleability of lawful custody and sovereign will are defined and executed by the police also enables the conflation between resistance to police violence and “unlawful” violence. With this in mind, we can consider the riot, the collective protest of the abuse of police power, as an expression of opposition to the way in which the crowd is imagined by law (Recht) and also interpreted based on a legal position (Rechtslage).26 Riot in both cases is therefore not only an active resistance of state violence, but also a critique of it and police law, the ways in which the state instrumentalizes the police as arms of the state to foster lawmaking and law-preserving capabilities. Delio Vásquez has pointed to how the conflation of Blackness with crime has a complex and varying history in the US, taking different shapes and access across time periods depending on that period’s particular economic, political, and cultural arrangement of white supremacy. . . .[including] later in efforts by politicians starting in 1965 to depoliticize the urban riots of civil rights movements by connecting them to a concept of “criminal deviance” with original roots in nineteenth-century Europe.27

What is critical in what Vásquez observes as a conflation, the unquestioned (mis)translation of blackness with crime, is the deracination that takes place internally yet moves laterally across the institutional arrangements of antiblackness to sustain a political meaning of white supremacy. If we see over the course of time how such pronouncements of “law and order” can occur even when, or perhaps because, antiblackness riddles the operations of statecraft in plain speech and sight, then we can also infer that such operations and arrangements rely on an untranslatability of blackness and as such must be maintained.

Indeed, it is the relation between translation and transience that signals the paradox of blackness’ untranslatability; this relation configures an afterlife in the enduring survival of blackness’ untranslatability, a continued (non-)life of antiblackness. In Benjamin’s significant conceptualization of translation, he notes, “translation is a mode.”28 Deceptively simple, this “mode,” a manifestation of the essence of being, requires that “one must go back to the original, for that contains the law governing the translation: its translatability.”29 For Benjamin then, “a translation issues from the original—not so much from its life as from its afterlife. . . . Their translation marks their stage of continued life.”30 But how does translation persist if the essence of blackness is untranslatable by nature, whereby the violence of translation only reinforces the problematic of being? Following Benjamin, translation can take place in spite of, if not always with, a type of

errancy. In other words, something must be mistranslated or untranslated to a degree from the original. Translation and “translation issues” emerge, therefore, “not so much from its life as from its afterlife.”31 Barbara Johnson highlights something similar when she explains:

What translation allows us to see is also a fantasy language uniting the two works, as if all translations were falls away from some original language that fleetingly becomes visible. But nothing proves that this is not another back-formation from the difficulties of translation. We are so used to the model of wholeness falling into multiplicity that we read the effect of the effect as if it were a cause.32

This process of translation involves an operation of fantasy, which reconciles different orders (whether of language, time, being) through the revisions of positive law. Translation, in this particular relation between fantasy of wholeness and falling into multiplicity, attempts to recover and maintain that which is irrecuperable while “[enhancing] the belief that there is an origin”33 and still moving forward for the purposes of interpretation and evidence. It also, as Johnson points out, involves a type of reading whereby translation appears to fulfill the fantasy of wholeness and unifying disparities in language. Such an illusory aim becomes both teleological and defensive since fantasy functions as a way of coping with what appears alien(ating) to language. Or as Johnson reminds her readers via Benjamin, “translation, he writes, is ‘a somewhat provisional way of coming to grips with the foreignness of languages.’”34 Placing together Benjamin’s notion of translation as afterlife and Johnson’s translation as a fantasy language then, the moments of decision that translation can afford reveal how they also furnish the legislative nature that ensues and conceals what falls as an undergirding irreconcilability. Translation, in some respects, acts as a mask, and it is through its visage that words and law appear. In the cases of riot described above, we have observed such an irreconcilability, something fundamentally antiblack in the law where an antagonism between blackness and lawful custody takes place. It is in this split, this irredeemable fracture—outside of the interpretation that takes place in the courtroom—that we come to explore further the materialization of “self-lynching” and the non-self of blackness.

>> In Between-Is

Blackness’ presence as an apparent but enduring absence in the scene of “lynching” arrests allows us to understand the nefarious ways in which antiblackness continues in spite of its imperceptible appearance. From within and without, antiblackness signals the psychical level of a structural problematic in which policing and psychosis are tied together. In its redefining of a self that doubles to lynch itself, the Anthony J. case illustrates how a perversion regarding the ends of the self operates as a psychical structure. Through an excessive mode of projecting the Other, the dissolution of the imaginary takes over in processes of identification. The Anthony J. case reflects what is being established at the level of making meaning through an imagined subject, the illusory image of

the Other. In other words, the supposed Other in Anthony J., the self that the law imagines as a threat to the custody of police enforcement by way of acting against oneself, is made possible through an imagined body that is not present. In the context of Anthony J.’s arrest, the imagined self is not an imagined double at the level of fantasy, through which there is an intrusion by an Other; rather, the self appears very much real—not in the Lacanian sense, but present in reality, obstructing his arrest and custody by law enforcement. Because this reality of an imagined self is seen as a legitimate course of events in the eyes of law, the meaning and resignification of lynching also becomes reinstantiated and naturalized as otherwise. To engage with how these (racial) identities and the history of terror become displaced and seemingly irrelevant, I turn to Jacques Lacan’s early introduction of l’entre-je (between-I) as a function of the imaginary in the structure of psychosis.

In his early investigations on psychosis, Lacan identified the state of psychosis as the intermixing of subjects who were conjured at the level of the imaginary but also held status in reality. As I have argued, the question is not who constitutes the imagined self in the case of self-lynching. Lacan’s discussion of the l’entre-je helps us to see the problem presented by Anthony J. in terms of the destructiveness of the racial imaginary of the court. For it is the space of this imaginary that enables the translation of “lynching” as “self-lynching” and negates the history of antiblack violence that led to the original statute. Lacan asks a question about the point at which the delusion begins, which is central for thinking about the structure of the disorder that follows. As opposed to speculating about which order of signification the fantasy establishes or what narratives this order affirms, Lacan asks why, in the first instance, the fantasy is there and what structures it upholds: “at the full tilt upon the domain of intersubjectivity, where the whole problem is to know why it’s fantasized.”35 Reflecting on the structural problematic of how the subject “handles” the signifier (its aims, its meanings), Lacan explains that the intersubjective dimension of the subject is in fact “capable of using the signifier,” and, he adds, “not so as to inform you, but precisely to lure you.” The signifier does not simply afford the subject the conditions of possibility; there is also the “use of the between-I [l’entreje],”36 the inmixing of subjects at one’s expense in the mechanisms of defense (speaking nonsense, projecting one’s fantasies). It is one’s sense of the imaginary, one’s relation to it as real, that allows the illusory image (whether of fantasy, delusion, hallucination) to be signified. As Denise Ferreira da Silva explains, the imaginary is a “writing of the mind in outer determination, that is, always already before, in a relationship, contenting with ‘others,’ a version of the self-determined ‘I’ that necessarily signifies ‘other’-wise.”37 It is indeed “a mechanism of imaginary compensation,”38 a paradoxical economy of both excess and deficit, like an engine that somehow continues to run on empty yet will not stop. Here, the “somehow” is paradoxically not an imagined mechanism of force, but an unstoppable drive. For the subject, “at the heart of psychoses there is a dead end.”39 Not because one encounters a limit in meaning-making, but quite the opposite: meaningmaking is necessarily endless as “an attempt at restitution, at compensation.”40 Thus, with the quintessential dimension of the psychotic structure that is the foreclosure, or

exclusion, of the Other, “the bearer of the signifier,” the imaginary relation labors relentlessly to supply an image that affirms the space between the subject and vision of the Other. It is in this interstitial space that Lacan locates the between-I phenomena “at the level of the little other.”41

Why does this matter in the case of Anthony J. and the context of the defendant’s arrest? An unexceptional articulation of the self, the Other, or image, for that matter, would appear to support the assumption that a better interpretation of these concepts could be utilized by both the court and the police to justify the defendant’s arrest. In other words, an alternative representation would allow for a more ethical or perhaps even more judicious interpretation to take place. However, the notion of l’entre-je illustrates the impossibility of finding a presumably better image or an ethical interpretation as long as the little other in between the positionalities of the subject and the Other grounds and supplies the process of identification. This is so because what falls in between Is cannot be seen. The disparity between the “first person I” and the “constitutional person” discussed earlier only points us to a surface reflection. There is an entire structure underneath the currents of the surface in which the imaginary animates the subject and its many Is. In her incisive elaboration of the question of ontology in Lacan’s work, Axelle Karera makes clear why such lines of flight must be questioned and what the illusions of such ontology can afford. She writes:

For, when one considers Lacan’s ongoing critique of ontology in these seminars, l’ être qui fuit [the feeling being]42 connotes neither a temporary nor a redeemable loss. What Lacan is pointing to is ontology’s illusion (leurre)—a kind of necessary metaphysical swindle—with which the possibility of a self-possessed and voluntarist being-in-command is assumed as the very truth of being.43

If we place these two concerns together—the phantasmatic domain that anchors the terms of persons and “Is” and the ontological machinations of an illusory self-possessed being that (so Karera notes) neither flight nor fleeing can recuperate—we can see that there is always a desirable other image to be had. And yet, because this mirage of being (the image that coalesces phantasmatically to project an alternative self) rests on a libidinal and ontological knotting, it also brings into sharp relief how this staging, of the two in one, makes law’s attempts to rectify the dispossession of a self untenable. With this figure in mind, we can infer that the hydraulics of the imaginary mobilizes the actors, the arrest, and state of policing as the semblance of its own scopic field in the eyes of law. More importantly, it reminds us that what falls in between Is cannot be seen but makes its impressions onto the symbolic practices of policing. L’entre-je brings into sharp relief the suspension of another Other in the projection of an imagined self. Self-lynching in this case takes place not only at the level of the symbolic practice of policing and policing law’s interpretation of the penal code, as displaced from its original legislative intent, but also at the level of the imaginary wherein a prohibition and suspension of another Other occurs but does not appear in the real.44 If Lacan’s conceptualization of l’entre-je points to the perplexity concerning the signifier

for the delusionary subject in and as a matter of speech, then the state’s parlance— both as mediated by law enforcement and the court—only asserts and preserves the order of this phenomenon as actual experience. That is, a racialized subject has lynched itself in resistance to law enforcement. In the same breath, this triangulation between the police, the court, and Anthony J. also reveals a latent presence, which remains foreclosed and yet conjures the semblance of this translation of “self-lynching.” Here, blackness as a non-referential presence (or more precisely, blackness as a non-presence that puts referentiality into crisis) nonetheless closes the field that categorizes persons and identities: racialized criminals, law enforcement, and the court. The law that governs this triangulation is what Lacan describes in his explication of delusion in the psychotic structure: “the course of a genesis that starts from elements perhaps immanent to (gros de) this construction, but which in their original form present themselves as closed or even enigmatic.”45 In the history of lynching, the element of racial antiblack terror, immanent in the construction of lynching, necessarily vanishes from the scene of the arrest and the interpretation of the court. As Joan Copjec might add, elements of the application of law can occur insofar as it “operates by not revealing itself in any positive form.”46

The state appears to ask and answer its own questions in Anthony J.: why the defendant would risk his own rights in the hands of law enforcement (which is designated as the arbiter of protection, law, and order) and why he would do this at the expense of himself. Maintaining the image that Anthony J. is ostensibly a criminal perpetrator of and onto himself, the court also upholds the reality as well as the psychical structure in which Anthony J. lynches himself solely on the procedure of evidence and the interpretation of those objects. But this type of reading, reduced to evidence and ways of reading instantiated by the law, affords an interpretation that withholds truths.47 That is, it is an interpretation that looks for its truth, its own evidence: an “interpretation means that evidence tells us everything but how to read it. Beyond its evidence, in other words, there is no other reality, nothing—except the principle that guides our reading of it.”48 In the dissolution of blackness, the law stays within the mirage of its desire, what it seeks to see: blackness as the cause of another Other hanging himself before law. The court establishes prohibition of the historical memory and racial terror of lynching and black death into the trial. Via the elision of blackness, this prohibition becomes the source of power and meaning, and it gives power to meaning (not just meaning to power) as a “crisis of meaning”49 wherein “lynching” and the self also receive a type of plenitude. In this further sense, a real justice has yet to arrive. The court does not turn away from the racial state system but holds a mirror up to it, as can be seen in the incorporation and reflection of a self that

In the history of lynching, the element of racial antiblack terror, immanent in the construction of lynching, necessarily vanishes from the scene of the arrest and the interpretation of the court.

is projected through the racist imagination of the state.

At stake in both the Jones case and the Anthony J. case is how an apparent gap between time and the law’s unconscious antiblack identifications short-circuits to manifest the law’s most guarded and repressed antagonisms. Translation from anti-lynching to lynching is deemed as a relevant translation (from its original legislative intent) not because it is the right translation, but because blackness’ untranslatability enables the law to exercise segregative practices as its right. Anti-lynching translates as lynching because it is “the most possible” of translations—a suspension of meaning and/or practice in withholding knowledge. How one reads this originary disturbance and the resistance to it is crucial for translation’s successional formations.

In this final regard, blackness falls between the orders of material representation and testimony, before and beyond the orders of de jure and de facto law, resonating with what David Marriott has observed as the “unnamable n’est pas” of blackness: “the basic dissymmetry between the me and not-me, explained by disavowal, [that] opens onto a more vertiginous absence between the I and the it, and this absence cannot simply be represented by disalienation.”50 Marriott elucidates that this descent into which blackness falls is a kind of immanence wherein blackness’ untranslatability signals a non-being without term and against an indexical measure between a law-preserving and law-destroying violence, between mythic and divine power. Marriott’s intervention is crucial for legal theory and beyond as it forces one to reflect on the disparities between the embodiment or discursivity of truth and the inscription of evidence, between testimony and traumatic event, between presence and absence in the legal archive—disparities which remain features of the human and sovereign subject. As I have attempted to argue, the two cases bring into view the relational dependency through which the image of time and the historical memory of lynching violence work together to limit a certain conception of persons (that is, personhood as human) to constitute a veracity even if “as a particular cut-out segment of reality.”51 If testimony—as an event and as an image representative of its time and a time that has ostensibly passed—can only be translated through representations reinforced by law’s imaginary (as a self, a prisoner, the lynching victim, the lynch mob), then we can understand the veil of time not as something that has passed. Rather, the distortion of time by law is driven by the ways in which blackness is ungraspable and thereby always in conflict with any normative representation in law or otherwise. At the same time, the untranslatability of blackness proves a resistance to what is deemed as resistance proper. And for this reason, the untranslatability of blackness unsettles not only a juridical conviction of justice based on law’s own terms and evaluative criterion, the desire of law that drives its legal and positive forms; it illumines that the language of resistance is but a rope of sand without blackness to project its illusory stability.

Notes

1 See Nolan, “Defendant, Lynch Thyself.”

2 Gray, “Anti-Lynching Laws Were Never Meant to Defend Black Lives.”

3 I thank the anonymous reviewer for pushing me to specify this point regarding the language of the state that contradicts its own intent to protect racialized citizens from lynching violence only to inflict violence on those same subjects as means to secure the power of the state.

4 Weigel, Walter Benjamin, 60.

5 Weigel, 60.

6 Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” 283.

7 Benjamin, “Task of the Translator,” 70.

8 See, to name only two of his works that engage with this thesis, Marriott’s Whither Fanon? and “Blackness: N’est Pas?”

9 Cassin, “Introduction,” xvii.

10 Martinot and Sexton, “The Avante-Garde of White Supremacy,” 176.

11 See Goldsby, A Spectacular Secret

12 People v. Jones, 19 Cal. App. 3d 437 (Cal. App. 4th 1971).

13 Jacqueline Goldsby, Sarah Haley, and Leigh Raighford, to name only a few, have explained the impossibility of recording extrajudicial antiblack violence and the insidious pathology of black criminality’s construction. Goldsby, specifically in the context of lynching, explains the pervasive nature in which such violence was not recorded, yet naturalized as a quotidian state of affairs by both the state and (white) citizens (see Goldsby, A Spectacular Secret).

14 Nolan, “Defendant, Lynch Thyself,” 81.

15 People v. Jones, 19 Cal. App. 3d 437 (Cal. App. 4th 1971).

16 See Hartman, “Seduction and the Ruses of Power.”

17 Wilderson III, “The Vengeance of Vertigo,” 20.

18 Wilderson III, Red, White, and Black

19 Here, I lean on Sigrid Weigel’s interpretation of Freud’s notion of translation against the context of repression which she draws from his letters to Wilhelm Fliess (see Weigel, Walter Benjamin).

20 See Derrida, Of Grammatology and Writing and Difference. See also Lacan, Seminar III: The Psychoses.

21 Apter, “Armed Response.”

22 People v. Anthony J., 85 Cal. 2d 783 (App. 4th 1999).

23 Reiter, “The Pelican Bay Hunger Strike,” 581.

24 Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 52.

25 Johnson, “Anthropomorphism in Lyric and Law.”

26 Benjamin, “Zur Kritik der Gewalt,” 48.

27 Vásquez, “Illegalist Foucault, Criminal Foucault,” 939.

28 Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” 70.

29 Benjamin, 70.

30 Benjamin, 71.

31 Benjamin, 70.

32 Johnson, “Correctional Facilities,” 169.

33 Johnson, 169.

34 Johnson, 168.

35 Lacan, Seminar III: The Psychoses, 193.

36 Lacan, 193.

37 da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race, 20.

38 Lacan, Seminar III: The Psychoses, 193.

39 Lacan, 194.

40 Lacan, 194.

41 Lacan, 194.

42 Here, I have added the translation of l’ être qui fuit

43 Karera, “Paraontology,” 167.

44 In this earlier seminar, Lacan has yet to conceptualize the “real,” though he nonetheless maps the imaginary and the symbolic in the structure of psychosis.

45 Lacan, Seminar III: The Psychoses, 217.

46 Copjec, Read My Desire, 176.

47 Copjec, 176.

48 Copjec, 176.

49 Goldsby, “The High and Low Tech of It.”

50 Marriott, Whither Fanon?, 64.

51 Weigel, Walter Benjamin, 170.

Works Cited

Apter, Emily. “Armed Response: Translation as Judicial Hearing.” e-flux Journal 84 (2017). https://www.eflux.com/journal/84/149339/armed-responsetranslation-as-judicial-hearing/

Benjamin, Walter. “Critique of Violence.” In Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, translated by Edmund Jephcott and edited by Peter Demetz, 277–300. New York: Schocken Books, 1978.

———. “The Task of the Translator.” In Illuminations, translated by Harry Zohn, 69–82. New York: Schocken Books, 1968.

———. “Zur Kritik der Gewalt.” In Angelus Novus: Ausgewählte Schriften 2, 42–66. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1966.

Cassin, Barbara. Introduction to Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon, xvii–xx. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014.

Copjec, Joan. Read My Desire: Lacan against the Historicists. New York: Verso, 2015.

da Silva, Denise Ferreira. Toward a Global Idea of Race Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007.

de Man, Paul. “‘Conclusions’: Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Task of the Translator.’” 1986. In The Resistance to Theory, 73–105. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002.

Derrida, Jacques. “Justices.” Critical Inquiry 31, no. 3 (2005): 689–721.

———. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Spivak. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1976.

———. Writing and Difference. Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1978.

Freud, Sigmund. Briefe an Wilhelm Fließ 1887–1904. Edited by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1986.

———. “On Transience.” In Standard Edition, Volume XIV, edited and translated by James Strachey, 305–07. London: Vintage Books, 2001.

Gray, Erin. “Anti-Lynching Laws Were Never Meant to Defend Black Lives: The Case of Jasmine Abdullah.” Truthout, June 15, 2016. www.truthout.org/ articles/anti-lynching-laws-were-never-meant-todefend-black-lives-the-case-of-jasmine-abdullah/ Goldsby, Jacqueline. A Spectacular Secret: Lynching in American Life and Literature. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006.

———. “The High and Low Tech of It: The Meaning of Lynching and the Death of Emmett Till.” The Yale Journal of Criticism 9, no. 2 (1996): 245–83.

Haley, Sarah. No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2016.

Hartman, Saidiya. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.

———. “Seduction and the Ruses of Power.” Callaloo 19, no. 2 (1996): 537–60.

Johnson, Barbara. “Anthropomorphism in Lyric and Law.” In Persons and Things, 188–207. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008.

———. “Correctional Facilities.” In The Barbara Johnson Reader: The Surprise of Otherness, edited by Melissa Feuerstein, Bill Johnson González, Lili Porten, and Keja Valens, 155–78. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014.

———. “The Task of the Translator.” In The Barbara Johnson Reader: The Surprise of Otherness, edited by Melissa Feuerstein, Bill Johnson González, Lili Porten, and Keja Valens, 377–400. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014.

Karera, Axelle. “Paraontology: Interruption, Inheritance, or a Debt One Often Regrets.” Critical Philosophy of Race 10, no. 2 (2022): 158–97.

Lacan, Jacques. Seminar III: The Psychoses: 1955–1956. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, translated by Russell Grigg. New York: W.W. Norton, 1997.

Marriott, David. “Blackness: N’est Pas?” Propter Nos 4 (2020): 27–21.

———. Haunted Life: Visual Culture and Black Modernity. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2007.

———. “The X of Representation: Rereading Stuart Hall.” New Formations 96/97 (2019): 177–228.

———. Whither Fanon? Studies in the Blackness of Being Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018.

Martinot, Steven, and Jared Sexton. “The AvantGarde of White Supremacy.” In Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture 9, no. 2 (2003): 169–81.

Nolan, Michael. “Defendant, Lynch Thyself: A California Appellate Court Goes from the Sublime to the Ridiculous in People v. Anthony J.” Howard Scroll: The Social Justice Law Review 4, no. 2 (2001): 53–96.

Park, Linette. “Unhomeliness—Afterlife and Testimony.” Political Theology (2022): 1–17.

People v. Jones, 19 Cal. App. 3d 437 (Cal. App. 4th 1971).

Raighford, Leigh. Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina, 2011.

Reiter, Keramet. “The Pelican Bay Hunger Strike: Resistance within the Structural Constraints of a US Supermax Prison.” The South Atlantic Quarterly 113, no. 3 (2014): 579– 611.

Sharpe, Christina. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016.

Vásquz, Delio. “Illegalist Foucault, Criminal Foucault.” Theory & Event 23, no. 4 (2020): 935–72.

Weigel, Sigrid. Walter Benjamin: Images, the Creaturely, and the Holy. Translated by Chadwick Truscott Smith. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013.

Wilderson III, Frank B. Red, White, and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010.

———. “The Vengeance of Vertigo: Aphasia and Abjection in the Political Trials of Black Insurgents.” InTensions Journal 5 (2011): 1–41.

LIGHT OF THE LIT WICK,

2017

Oil on linen

79 x 51 3/8 inches

© Lynette Yiadom-Boakye. Courtesy of the artist, Jack Shainman Gallery, New York and Corvi-Mora, London.

© Lynette Yiadom-Boakye. Courtesy of the artist, Jack Shainman Gallery, New York and Corvi-Mora, London.

REFUSING TO VANISH: DESPAIR, CONTINGENCY, AND THE AFRICAN POLITICAL

This essay begins from the premise that despair is an organizing problematic for V-Y Mudimbe’s thought, and proposes to explore The Invention of Africa and The Idea of Africa with despair held in critical frame.1 Two forms of despair might be distinguished here, both grounded in the overwhelming facticity of material and discursive losses wrought by colonialism. One, an epistemic despair, is structured by some form of the question: can there still be a form of African life, knowledge, discourse outside of what has been colonially imposed? A cynicism follows this question—if the answer is felt to be no, then it appears to be necessary to surrender to the ostensibly inescapable subjections of the world, to being nothing but, and bound to, lack. This despair reflects a fear of what we might call permanent inauthenticity, mapped by moves of anthropology and the church to define and convert away African life.

The church pushes the idea of inhabiting knowledge and the world in an “African” way into the terrain of historical fantasy, while the role of the church in colonial history disallows Christianity the ease of attachment or affiliation. Mudimbe reads alienation as a key stage of conversion,2 such that the production of alienation3 becomes the project of managing both the possibility of empire and the corresponding desired impossibility of African ideological response—an impossibility that is at once of collectivity and of discourse. Through the imposition of patrilineage and Christian marriage, the hierarchization of language, and economic conversion into a new labor economy and its rules of inhabitation, Mudimbe reads a new project of “memory” being put into place.4 Suggesting the interface of this memory with a broader structure of relationship to language and politics in the Francophone African world, Mudimbe describes how in the Belgian Congo, “French was thus the domain wherein African traditions were actively eroded in order to permit the growth of a new memory.”5 The mission is central to these operations, delivering education, authenticating marriages, and “assisting” in bringing communities into economic, civic, and spritual modernity. That the extent of the “domestication of memories” in question is pronounced, and the absences it produces are deeply ordinary, constitutes a problem for the autonomy of discourse and for the legitimacy of memory.

Anthropology promises to solve this problem of legitimacy by presenting something that claims authentic access to what is now forgotten. But anthropology is also shadowed by its history. If the church, as political, evangelical, and educational body, constitutes one trouble, anthropology—the “‘science’ of difference” which “‘invents’ an idea of Africa” to be developed by colonialism itself6—forms its counterpoint. Rather than pushing authenticity into an inaccessible past, its regrammatization7 of African practices disables their legibility as African at all. Whether lay, scientific, or presented through the administrative rubric of the “Native problem,” anthropological discourses claim to know Africa. Sharing an epistemic common ground, these projects had different orientations— towards cataloguing difference8 and towards producing “salvation.” These discourses, which offered imperial and colonial form to the idea of Africa, and in whose shadow Africa was (and continues to be) constituted as political, economic, and social object, form crucial ruptures of distinct types. In both cases, it is not only individual subjects

Alírio Karina is a postdoctoral fellow in the Archive and Public Culture Research Initiative at the University of Cape Town, and associate faculty at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. Their book project, Africa After Anthropology, reckons with the influence of anthropology in African Studies and the problem of thinking Africa in anthropology’s wake.

Email: aliriokarina@ucsc.edu

who are changed, though missionary education so often became a path to opportunities which allow, in hindsight, a kind of exalted historical subjectivity. Nor is it just that the idea of particular groups is transformed, though it is easy to pinpoint the ways anthropological discourses have served this role. Indeed, reflecting these, Mudimbe writes: “The African figure was an empirical fact, yet by definition it was perceived, experienced, and promoted as the sign of the absolute otherness.”9

This dual grounding—in the real, and in both malevolent and constructive fiction—is no small matter. Anthropological discourses lay claims to realities, appropriate details from lives people actually live, and draw from this grounding their epistemic authority. And, importantly, these claims are reinforced by the missionary disavowal of this same African figure. Though the doubling of myth and reality is a site of complication—one felt keenly in a book Mudimbe frames as an effort to explain Africa to his children10—it is not one that offers a tidy resolution. It is too late now to simply disarticulate the myth from the real. Not only has African discourse taken shelter in the real to authorize itself to the extent that the real takes on the function of myth, the myth has also been too formative for too long, the real remade in its framework. Indeed, the most fundamental crisis the church and anthropology have posed for African discourse is that they have threatened the very possibility of African subjectivity.

This discursive crisis coincides with another, that plainest crisis of post-independence political and economic despair. This is the despair of hunger, unemployment; states under threat and threats from those same states; exhaustion from conflict and war; cascading foreclosures to political life. These political-economic despairs are tied—not only in Mudimbe’s reckoning, but also in the reckonings of ordinary Africans—to the cultural losses under colonialism. And in this meeting of cultural and political crises, Mudimbe proposes that the dangers of desperation multiply. The relentless and thorough colonial imposition Mudimbe documents over The Invention of Africa and The Idea of Africa is never complete, and this incompleteness (while also counterbalancing the epistemic despair) instantiates other problems.11 Describing the development of the very familiar binarisms through which post-independence states, and particularly African ones, are both described and organized (traditional versus modern; oral versus written/printed; agragrian and customary communities versus urban and industrialized civilization; subsistence economies versus highly productive economies12), he offers a critique of post-independence modernization models that presume that nothing of value is lost by, in moving along this constructed set of axes, reifying an abstracted form of colonial evolutionism. In the midst of these binarisms, an “intermediate space” exists—a marginal space in which:

Not only has African discourse taken shelter in the real to authorize itself to the extent that the real takes on the function of myth, the myth has also been too formative for too long, the real remade in its framework.

as S. Amin noted, “vestiges of the past, especially the survival of structures that are still living realities (tribal ties, for example), often continue to hide the new structures (ties based on class, or on groups defined by their position in the capitalist system)” (1974:377). This space reveals not so much that new imperatives could achieve a jump into modernity, as the fact that despair gives this intermediate space its precarious pertinence and, simultaneously, its dangerous importance.13

I am proposing that it is within this context that we must read Invention and Idea,14 even in their prioritization of the philosophical terrain in which questions about Africanity are situated. Thus, when “absolute discourse” emerges, in the final pages of Invention,15 the problem-space being drawn out is more complex than it immediately appears:

Foucault once said that he deprived “the sovereignty of the subject of the exclusive and instant right to discourse.” That is good news. I believe that the geography of African gnosis also points out the passion of a subject-object who refuses to vanish. He or she has gone from the situation in which he or she was perceived as a simple functional object to the freedom of thinking of himself or herself as the starting point of an absolute discourse. It has also become obvious, even for this subject, that the space interrogated by the series of explorations in African indigenous systems of thought is not a void.16

The obvious concern here—shared by much of African thought—is the question of an African discourse irreducible to the West. Strikingly, Mudimbe here answers this question: an absolute discourse may not currently exist, but it is possible. This barest optimism is grounded in lineages of insistent African claims to autonomous forms of knowledge and power that Mudimbe traces, however these lineages may come to be colored, and in many ways compromised, by Western impositions. Mudimbe does not make this argument from the existence of pockets of African gnosis from which one might trace a lineage to the precolonial—his is in no way a case built upon so-called “survivals” whose existence “proves” the possibility of a return.17 Rather, Invention and Idea build stricter cases for the possibility of African discursive autonomy and authority (the possibility of an absolute discourse) by reading the historical transformations and discursive contestations that have emerged and followed from its seeming impossibility.

Though this essay tries to avoid doing so, in some ways it must tread old ground. Many scholars have dwelt on the image of colonial legacy presented by Mudimbe’s work,18 and the matters this essay will broach have, necessarily, been attended to in other exegetic efforts.19 Of the latter, the work of Pierre-Philippe Fraiture and Kasareki Kavwahirehi is of particular note, because they attend to these matters alongside questions of disciplinarity, interlocutorship, poesis, and politics across the long arc of Mudimbe’s creative and critical production in French and English.20 Despite this pronounced scholarly engagement, and as Zubairu Wai21 and Kai Kresse22 have underscored, Mudimbe’s work, while frequently cited, is underattended to, and his contributions to thought about Africa are consequently minimized. Though the conceptual matters discussed are built upon Mudimbe’s earlier work in French, and some are developed further

in later English books and essays, I will focus narrowly on his two most widely read English-language texts, Invention of Africa and Idea of Africa. Taking despair and absolute discourse as central, though largely subtextual, organizing frameworks, this essay examines the (contested) status of these books’ Marxism alongside their attention to blackness, their presentation of history as site of contingency, inhabitation, and movement. I trace how the development of these ideas across Invention and Idea stages an approach to history, anthropology, political movement, ideology, ideas—and to their mutability and manipulation—that remains productive for thinking African discursive autonomy and black resistance.

>> Histories

Invention of Africa begins with the Scramble for Africa, with Mudimbe declaring the ensuing “most active period of colonization”23 as the point in time where considerations of African discourse must begin. This is an obvious and perhaps necessary starting point—the disruption of discursive autonomy that follows colonization radically and transformatively intensified those disruptions that accompanied the political and economic coercions of the slave trades and their abolition. Invention thus lays out the historico-political structure that will form one part of the text’s contextualization. A “colonizing structure,” demanding “the domination of physical space, the reformation of natives’ minds, and the integration of local economic histories into the Western perspective,”24 is what produces the colony. Writing for the post-independence era (should we take independence to have truly undermined colonial control over territory,25 a matter to which this essay will return), this still leaves two mutually entangled transformations. The one that is most frequently read into Mudimbe’s work is the suppression of African social, epistemic, and discursive forms—by means of religious education, efforts to control the usage of African languages, and racial and anthropological discourses—and its many creative counterparts, which worked to produce a new kind of African subject, whether assimilable to European life or merely well subjected to European labor. This labor forms the other indisputably-remaining side of the colonizing structure; the radical transformation of the larger economy and everyday economic life.

Following this, and alongside an analysis of the consequences of colonialism—the colonizing structure—for Africa’s political-economic condition, Mudimbe famously examines a series of artworks, through which he reads the development and hardening of now-recognizable evolutionist, racial, and anthropological ideas of Africa. He reads Hans Burgkmair’s 1511 work Exotic Tribe as expressing “a discursive order” common to its time, in which black assimilation to a white racial norm and the presentation of exotic markers of difference occur simultaneously.26 He describes a transformation as taking place by the seventeenth century. With difference having lost its counterpoint in resemblance, alterity comes to take sole precedence, now also newly presented in ways aligned with evolutionist “scientific” taxonomies. Importantly, these transformations are

contextualized by not only a growing European familiarity with “the black continent,” but by a major political-economic realignment: the transatlantic and Indian Ocean economies intensifying their trades in captives, and the tensions this triggered both within the continent and between African imperial polities and their erstwhile European partners.27 This quite unusual pivot allows Mudimbe to reset his historiographical priority. The Scramble may be Invention’s first beginning, but with this analysis Mudimbe quite definitively restarts the text with blackness, and with the fact that its development as an ideological form is not simultaneous with first contact or even black entrance into the European discursive and aesthetic imagination. Invention, in tracking images of Africa, is a text animated by its racial production, and thus by the production of blackness as a site of discursive disputation.28

If Invention of Africa works to theorize with these histories always in mind, Idea of Africa is a text foundationally concerned with history. This reflects an understanding of history as a discipline in conflict with anthropology.29 But, more broadly, Idea is invested in understanding the past, memory, and the discursive and political potential they carry. In doing so, the work builds upon a concern shared by Invention and Idea, with history as method. Across both texts, Mudimbe draws together something of an intellectual history of Africanist discourse. This history is impressionistic and idiosyncratic—Idea’s inclusions “perfectly unrepresentative” and its questions “essentially theoretical”30—but it is no less consequential for it. Across these two texts, these unusual attentions allow Mudimbe to stage a set of conversations between the past and the present that are driven by their contestations.

Mudimbe’s tracing of Catholic Church doctrine is of particular importance. As political entity with authority over Western Europe, the Catholic Church came to define modes of relation to the African continent that preceeded an extensive interest in Africa on the part of European kingdoms, modes that survived the supremacy of the church and were even escalated. The 1452 and 1455 papal bulls Dum Diversas and Romanus Pontifex gave “the kings of Portugal the right to dispossess and eternally enslave Mahometans, pagans, and black peoples in general.”31 Romanus Pontifex would also establish the legitimacy and incontestability of Portuguese dominion in Africa. Along with similarly defining territorial legitimacies in the Americas, the 1493 bull, Inter Caetera, also obligated Catholic kingdoms to conversion efforts. Reading the principle of terra nullius as taking its origin in the Romanus Pontifex, Mudimbe underscores how it enabled a system of “international law” in which, over four centuries, only European nations were entitled to claims on territory.32 The Reformation then did not unsettle this aspect of Catholic law, except insofar as it raised the economic imperative underwriting voyages of exploration above their theological justifications.33

Importantly, in mirroring the extending move with which he opens Invention, Mudimbe insists on thinking the colonization of Africa as shaped by preceding discursive-political transformations, placing it in a discursive lineage with the colonization of the Americas, Asia, Oceania, and the Pacific that is grounded in the legitimation of conquest and conversion but the legal right to enslave. In doing so, Mudimbe is bridging the

distance between two epochs that mark African historiography and the historiography of empire: those of slavery and colonization. He is not imagining slavery as coterminous with colonization (except where it is), nor disregarding the specificity of the African historical experience—which is why Invention, rather than opening with Portuguese arrival, opens with the aftermath of the Berlin Conference. Instead, he is working to keep alive in the historical imagination undergirding these texts an attention to the transatlantic slave trade in particular, an attention that is also formative for most of the scholars with whom Mudimbe thinks.34

Idea mirrors too Invention’s discursive history of Africanism. It opens by narrating a seventeenth-century reactivation of Philostratus’ account of Hercules being attacked by a group of pygmies. In its original telling, the (already African, “Libyan”) pygmies— who as “children of the earth” are depicted as ants in comparison to Hercules (that is, as ultimately, fatally, human)—are counterposed to, and defeated by, Hercules’ divine might.35 In its later telling, the pygmies come to be marked distinctly by racial evolutionary hierarchy. Their attack, rather than springing from loyalty to the “earthly realm,”36 affirms instead their banditry; their loss confirms “the fatality of their role: that of being aberrant, morally sick little ‘things,’ springing from the soil like ants.”37 This story and its hierarchies are echoed later in the chapter, when Mudimbe describes the import of narratives of “discovery,” whose purpose is to authorize what follows discovery, and moves on to a close analysis of the Romanus Pontifex. Of particular note here is Mudimbe’s reading of the disputation between Bartolomé de las Casas and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda’s interpretations of these doctrines. Sepúlveda’s insistence that, in Mudimbe’s words, “all natives were meant to be subjugated,”38 and that this subjugation was the divine obligation of the pious reflects a strict reading of Romanus Pontifex, which serves as a juridical instantiation of the ways mythology can, by writing backward into an infinite past, come to be used as evidentiary basis for what is already felt to be true.

Mudimbe reads the structural form of this “native” through Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. A text that claims to have nothing to do with the “native,” it is nevertheless structured in opposition to all things ascribed to this figure, with Europe reflected back to itself as the possibility that emerges only once the interior and exterior Others have been fully subjugated. The possibility of European joy, sanity, and broader moral cleanliness is predicated on the eradication of that which conflicts with Protestant ethics. In contrast to the Herculean representation, through which evolutionary hierarchies are “proven,” Burton’s implicit savage is the form that defines the European, against which the European must come to define himself, and (like in the Herculean tale) is corresponding to those who would rightfully be conquered and killed or converted. At stake is the possibility of the West itself.

What Mudimbe is emphasizing in these framing gestures is that all of these discourses are made to do material work. Not just ideas in the world, they are mobilized to meet particular ends, to reflect conflicts regarding the work it is desirable for them to do and distinctions in what they can practically be used for. In one instance, they become moti-

vations and apologetics, sometimes at once. This much is clearly true of the “body of knowledge on the means of exploiting dependencies” and others charged with maintaining “structural distortions” Mudimbe describes in Invention.39 Alternately, and what is perhaps true of more, they come to offer a discursive background against which such motivations and apologetics might explicitly be drawn. As Mudimbe notes, Idea works to show that “the epistemological and intellectual disorder represented by [his] reading is, indeed, also a political one.”40 No less important is that these discourses, within themselves, are diverse. They occupy a space of contestation. The fights over the meaning of black, native, savage, African—these are bound in varying ways to the world from which they emerge, and their undercurrents come to change through all of these influences, sometimes in ways that seem continuous and elsewhere like rupture. Mudimbe takes care to articulate these distinctions. Noting the idiosyncracies and the historical positioning of discourses, he draws out the transformations in European colonial and Africanist discourses over their long history, underscoring the simultaneity of disputation and usage, and therefore the possibility of both such disputation and the changes that follow from it.

>> Black Marxisms

The disputations that mark post-independence African political life are of central concern in these books, particularly those following the varied Marxist political projects that marked “the political awakening of Black Africa.”41 Mudimbe’s analysis of colonial and post-independence political discourses reflects a broader intellectual field in which the so-called “failure of contemporary African society” is explored for its ideological substance,42 a substance which is often little more than racial. Where this analysis is not exclusively racist, it works to examine contemporary crises as consequent of the installation and (partial) retention of the colonizing structure. The implication that one might draw, immediately, is that in the post-independence era we do not see the production of a fully post-independence discursive apparatus suited for post-independence aims. This extension, naïvely posed, is essential to Mudimbe’s argument. A stricter version of this kind of analysis, such as is presented in On the Postcolony, maps onto Mudimbe’s reading of the colony and its post-independence successor state in conflictual ways. For Mudimbe, their external management—by foreign financial interests, state and religious interests (when these have not been coterminous), and the need for metropolitan opinion,

The fights over the meaning of black, native, savage, African—these are bound in varying ways to the world from which they emerge, and their undercurrents come to change through all of these influences, sometimes in ways that seem continuous and elsewhere like rupture.

amongst other factors—is at the heart of their colonial character. It is not merely the local that is in question, but a structure of dependence that takes form partly under its sign, into which one might read, following Siba N. Grovogui, a status of nonsovereignty. This structure stabilizes political, economic, and epistemic movement into the “traps” African Studies is used to examining. But it does not do this because such stability is inevitable or essential to the character of African political life.43

This is not to say that Mudimbe is optimistic about the trajectory of African politics. In Idea, his critique of African politics registers frustration with brutal statecraft and disillusionment with failures operating under revolutionary signs. But Mudimbe’s analysis of this failure betrays a slippage in attention to a crucial factor: the Cold War context of generalized interventionism and destabilization, in which not only capitulation but also “resistance” came to take quite ugly forms, and the Marxist states in “Black Africa” were forced to act. In this context, Ernest Harsch’s early critique of Invention as a text that could be more explicitly shaped by an attention to resitant politics earns a new valence. Regarding Mudimbe’s reading of Jean-Paul Sartre’s influence on African anticolonial intellectuals (discussed below), he asks:

Were these intellectuals (and indeed, Sartre himself) not also influenced, at least to some extent, by the very visible anticolonial struggles that were then underway? Did not the strikes by African rail and dockworkers, the women’s mobilizations in Nigeria, or rural insurgencies such as Kenya’s Mau Mau leave some imprint on African intellectuals’ efforts to throw off colonial ideological assumptions and develop new, more independent ways of thinking?44

For Harsch, this absence reflects a broader anti-Marxism and idealism that I find quite difficult to read into Invention. Rather, these slippages appear to reflect a project that, while trying to hold material politics in view, has failed to fully draw out its theoretical valences, even while reckoning with their aftermath. But it is also true that Mudimbe’s work has as its object something distinct: the stakes of failing to reckon with Africa as idea. Including Mudimbe’s own work into this corrective, these slippages underline the relationship between the question of black resistance (here, states under political, economic, and military threat, working to resist the status of neocolony) and that of absolute discourse.

Mudimbe writes that “when they have not led to bitter failure,” African political decisions have triggered resentment, and literary mockery by the tradition often glossed as Afropessimism.45 He does not exactly align himself with the reading that not colonialism but “we [Africans] are, in the main, to blame for our misfortunes,”46 but the distress motivating it is one he shares. While the tone of Mudimbe’s analysis of African politics is consistently one of frustration, there is a marked change between the two books under discussion.47 Invention is sympathetic to the ambitions of post-independence politics— devoting much space to the work that discourse hoped to accomplish—even for those politician-theorists, like Nkrumah, whose theoretical work Mudimbe cannot but recognize, and whose leadership he cannot but disavow.48 In Idea, he is much more abrupt:

The rigor of the materialist discourse of Nkrumah was matched by one of the most mediocre political dictatorships; the socialist test of Sekou Toure turned out to be . . . only an autocratic order whose effort . . . jumbled all investments and Marxist figures that it had initially justified; the Ujaama of Nyerere unveiled nothing but the contradictions of bureaucratic mechanisms that asphyxiated the disfranchised classes whose State socialism was supposed to improve; finally, the elegance of Senghor’s readings of Marx and Engels is . . . a simple object of scholarly exegesis for erudites.49

Mudimbe’s critique is specific and twofold. Post-independence African politics, he argues, was foundationally “marked by fantasies of an illusory new beginning of history.”50 These fantasies failed to manage what Mudimbe, following Foucault, reads as surrendering (in an epistemic field marked by the tension between empiricism and eschatology) to the ambition of a future whose proof is in the making,51 and eliding African histories and realities in the process. Alongside this elision lies a distinctly political failure to manage what mobilized discourses come to obligate—how founding myths build political expectations, and impose political prices, that may be met or not, paid or not, but must nevertheless be reckoned with.52 The second problem regards the content of these fantasies. Mudimbe argues that the problem of proletarian organization—the central problem in bringing about a Marxist new history—impels a political project oriented around subjectivity. In this context of efforts to “prescribe African culture autonomy and economic and technical progress,” Mudimbe reads the production of politics predicated “solely on the right to be different and on the virtues of otherness,” in which, among other faults, “metaphors on African tradition are substituted for the constraints of history.”53

These failings represent the merging of two sets of intellectual-political problematics in African Studies. One, a tendency to think class as the matter of concern, sees “thinkers [tending] to reevaluate African socialism and [insisting] on the usefulness of applying the Marxist lesson in a more systematic manner.”54 Another sees a return to tradition, variously conceived, as a terrain for “regeneration.”55 Mudimbe, in placing these tendencies alongside each other both in his narration of Africanist disciplinary history and, crucially, in his own presentation of his arguments, is underscoring that the field is defined by how dissatisfying either pole of response is. This Afropessimist dissatisfaction reflects the despair over the failing of the Marxist turn, and the failure of the promise of the future to come. But if the future is not coming, the past is also not returning—and so another school of African thought reflects the sense of artifice of tradition as politics. So the question of African discourse is also weighted by the question of what to do with the continent’s political predicament, and the hope (and the threat) that new myths might establish “the possibility of a new political order.”56

Founding myths build political expectations, and impose political prices, that may be met or not, paid or not, but must nevertheless be reckoned with.

This anticipated hypothetical political order cannot, for Mudimbe, function if it hopes to represent itself as the beginning of a new history. But this does not necessarily mean it cannot make one. Indeed, if Mudimbe “[questions] Marxist lessons on Africa,”57 criticizes Marxian eschatology and African Socialist tendencies to dwell on subjectivity, he by no means disavows Marxism’s historical method:

I contend that the class struggle is the propulsive force in history, but it is neither chance nor the hazards of the condition of individuals, singular members of that class, that signifies history. Historical materialism is neither subjective figuration nor a demand for individual, psychological attitides, but rather, and much more so, it is a law and a focus of pressure and configuration coercing each other on history’s ladder.58

This commitment to the dialectic colors the lessons Mudimbe draws from Léopold Sédar Senghor’s political theory. Senghor’s caution with Marxism is of particular interest here. In some moments he is questioning, and in others he aligns himself with Marxist analysis.59 The substance of this ambivalence seems reflected, if not quite mirrored, in his narration of Senghor’s own ambivalence toward Marxism. Taking the value of Marxism as an account of the human cost of capitalism, Senghor is less willing to embrace “Marxism as a theory of knowledge”:

It is one thing to use its schemas for analyzing and understanding the complexity of social formations, and another to accept the idea that social complexities universally fit into the concept of the class struggle and express the need to deny religion.60

Here the problem of constituting the proletariat recurs—and the question that it raises is that of whether Négritude, as Senghor conceives of it (as a project of repersonalizing Africans and enabling their self-fulfilment61) might constitute a different political class on better, more coherent, terms. In any case, Senghor (like Frantz Fanon, and, with important differences, like Sartre) reads Négritude as a resistant stage in a dialectical movement towards a total liberation.62 For this movement to be viable, in any of its variations, Négritude must be able to establish the conditions from which this liberation might be set into motion. Failing this, its “dialectical” reading is reduced to mere fantasy.

This question is of particular importance because Négritude serves as point of reinflexion for Africanist political and social thought, through which (in Mudimbe’s reading) the early Pan-Africanism of Edward Blyden is reshaped into anticolonial form, and from which the Pan-Africanism and broader African Marxist experiments that follow draw their inspiration.63 Of equal importance is that it offers the first consequential and cohesive Africanist political and aesthetic project that takes blackness as its organizing basis and is structured more broadly by not-just-difference, which is not-just-inhabited—an alterity that is claimed. That this claim to alterity appears at times to merely invert, and thereby recite, racist myths is less important to Mudimbe64 than the fact that this kind of claim, as essentialist orientation to truth and political organization, becomes stifling, unless it is internally or externally (that is, destructively) overcome.

Mudimbe reads this fact as critically defined and foreseen (and, no less importantly, its preceding space of opportunity critically delimited and foreclosed) by Sartre’s preface to Senghor’s Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache, “Orphée Noir65.” Mudimbe goes on to argue that, by binding Marxist revolution to anticolonialism and antiracism, Sartre “gave meaning and credibility to all signs of opposition to colonialism,” such that anticolonial violence might be narrated as not standalone moments of revolt, but events that might dialectically “provoke the possibility of new societies.”66 Such continued provocation and possibility, beyond the moment of independence, is at the heart of the political question Invention and Idea traverse.

Sartre’s analysis serves as a corrective to a tendency Mudimbe reads as marking African politics in Négritude’s wake. Reading a political tendency, shared by Senghor, to dispute Karl Marx’s reading of structured social desires and the consequences of the antagonism between them, Mudimbe argues that African post-independence thinkers worked instead to reinvent history, and in the process discredited its possibility.67 Against this, “according to Sartre, negritude signifies, fundamentally, tension between the black man’s past and future,”68 a tension which impels its “claims to be a key to a new understanding of history” and prevents movement in lacking also attention to a project of remaking the present. Instead:

Unless understood as metaphors, the signs of otherness that negritude might have promoted in literature, philosophy, history, or social science, seem to refer to techniques of ideological manipulation. René Depestre forcefully points this out.

"The original sin of negritude—and the adventures that destroyed its initial project—come from the spirit that made it possible: anthropology. The crisis that destroyed negritude coincides with the winds that blow across the fields in which anthropology—be it cultural, social, applied, structural—with black or white masks, is used to carrying out its learned inquiries."69

Constituted against a politics in which alterity offers the panacea70 of a grounds for a newly unalienated, valorized figure to emerge into historical subjectivity, Mudimbe’s historical attention, and commitment to historical materialism, warrants closer investigation. In their critique of independence movements and analysis of Africanist intellectual history alike, these texts are attentive to the antagonisms that have brought the present into being and structured it, and to what might follow from the tensions of the present. In revolutionary accounts, this dialectical materialism is a model of the future (and so it must be, as part of the function of such a text is to exhort). But Mudimbe is reluctant to explicitly “draw political implications” from his work.71 Instead, in his philosophical account, the dialectic offers a way to understand the facticity of the present by recognizing the movements that have brought it into being. His historical materialism, then, reflects how epistemic, economic, political, and social currents come into conflict and crisis, and, no less importantly, how their clashes, coincidences, and asymptotes are the consequence of both the epistemic-political potential of given ideas and what is ultimately done with them. The future is not predetermined nor

evolutionist, and certainly not fixed towards freedom. But Mudimbe is pointing out that, against the anthropological reading whereby African conflict might endlessly confirm the stability of an African social system, conflict can mean rupture. Put briefly, things can happen.

But what kind of things, on what kind of terms? Even if tainted discourses can have capacities exceeding those for which they have been mobilized, is blackness one of them? Can blackness—can alterity—be at the heart of a politics without that politics being built around its claim? It must depend on what blackness is taken to mean. In the case of Négritude, which perhaps indexes all politics that claim primarily to reverse a terrain of negation, Mudimbe’s answer seems clear—it is compromised, not by its lack of authenticity, but by its refusal to fully reckon with the establishment (not mere existence) of the terrain. There is a sense in which this critique appears incompatible with the broader project of Invention and Idea. If Mudimbe is interested in the idea of an African anything, one might ask how a claim to alterity is what renders Négritude suspect. Earlier in Invention, Mudimbe rails against Carl Sagan’s inability to conceive of the scientific legitimacy of Dogon astronomical practices.72 While he is sympathetic to the impulse to resolutely reject the politics of difference, he also neither aligns himself with it nor fully sees it as a perspective in play. He closes Invention on the promise of an absolute discourse; and, in Idea, he takes up the project of legitimating ways of thinking Africa that emerge from objects which, in their overdetermination by anthropology, appear to congeal difference. Rather than being a problem for Mudimbe, the actuality of difference is something he wants to give room to breathe, to develop. But Mudimbe also reads political efforts in which difference is both sole method and ambition as efforts that are, at best, deeply vulnerable to manipulation. Though in some ways this may appear to be truly a dogmatic position, assuming much still about the constitution of history if not about its course, it does not reflect a surrender to class determinism. Rather, this position is grounded in a form of commitment to history that is defined by its inhabitation. Blackness, here, is not a phenomenon outside of history, emerging from but perpetually subordinated to it, but rather something whose seeming perpetuity is actively produced.

>> Conjugating

This production, being equally a terrain of disputation, takes various forms. Mudimbe’s analysis of European representations of Africa beginning with Burgkmair emphasizes the importance of artistic production (and visual and material practices more broadly) as one such form. Following Mudimbe’s approach, I read two portraits by Athi-Patra Ruga and Irma Stern’s paintings which they reference, whose internal orderings, archival musings, and self-references play out a deliberate and illustrative discursive movement.

Figure 1: Athi-Patra Ruga Swazi Boy, 2014 Courtesy Athi-Patra Ruga and WHATIFTHEWORLD

The first of Ruga’s works is a tapestry, titled “Swazi Boy” (see Figure 1). This tapestry reworks a portrait Stern painted in 1929, of a young Swati man who is identified solely as “Swazi Youth.” In Stern’s painting, the sitter is depicted with eyes barely open, gazing forward, his hands behind his head. He wears a stylized representation of Swati traditional attire that appears, sensually, to be sliding away from his body, his arms adorned with rings that emphasize his biceps and forearms (though musculature is barely painted), with sketchy suggestions of a headdress. He is seated on a rock in front of rolling green hills on a clear day. In “Swazi Boy,” Ruga transforms the ethnographic sensuality of Stern’s depiction into an overt declaration of queer sexuality. Golden bands and traditional robes are replaced with nothing but studded leather cuffs and a chest harness. The backdrop is replaced by a rich brocade, the bare chest is made noticeably muscular, the face now bearded, and the subject’s eyes fully open, defying instead of seducing. Ruga’s use of color is different too—beyond a vibrant change of the subject’s hair color, Stern’s naturalistic shading gives way to primary-colored detail. Ruga’s 2019 stained glass titled “Swazi Youth After” (see Figure 2) is the final iteration. Using his own tapestry as primary material, and taking its approach to shading to its limit, Ruga here depicts the same figure, posed in the same way, with the same adornment and implied nakedness, but to quite different effect. While transforming the light passing through it, and invoking Christian iconography, the fragmentation of the stained glass technique emphasizes the subject’s body while also posing it, rather than as a simple and transparent site of eroticism, as a site of consideration.

Critically here, the reengagement of a colonial visual language is the means through which a discursive autonomy is produced. The so-called “Swazi Youth” in Stern’s portrait is transformed, and transformed again, by Ruga’s work. In the process, something in excess of the reference and its coloniality is produced, inscribing a vibrancy into the figure of a subject who is otherwise unknown to us. Though the different iterations of this subject are not outside of Western artistic reference, something happens through the project of discursive remaking that is its own; the remaking creates a form of authenticity through reference to the imagined that the original portrait attempts to produce in reference to an anthropologized real. It is not an authenticity that claims any particular origin nor one that claims to disavow the Western trace. It is also not one grounded in any claim to the truth about the sitter, however worthy a task finding it might be. Rather, this work underscores the existence of a terrain for movement, of a discursive space oriented, if not to futurity, then to what is still in the making.

Further, the creativity of Ruga’s work implicates the fact of a broader creative terrain for African discursive life, one that is often less spectacular or less willful in its discursivity: that residing in the African objects held in museums. Mudimbe’s discussion of these

Figure 2: Athi-Patra Ruga Swazi Youth After, 2019. Courtesy Athi-Patra Ruga and WHATIFTHEWORLD

objects follows his analysis of African political failures, suggesting a relationship to the problems of historical erasure which he reads these political failures as posing. Mudimbe understands ethnographic museums as tasked broadly with “converting overseas territories to the self and imagination of the West,” in the shared service of ethnological reason and colonialism. As such, he reads their “representations” as forms that “should be negated in the long run,” as they remain “witness to a ‘primitive’ past.”73 To undo this representational work, the objects in these museums must be rethought. These museum objects, Mudimbe argues, should not be understood through the frames of anthropology or art history. Instead of being read as artefacts or artworks, Mudimbe proposes to think them as “worked objects.” These worked objects are historical accounts, subject to many of the same constraints that shape how we must understand accounts within the archives of colonial administrations, but with a critical distinction: the worked object is given material form by those whom it is tasked with representing:

Indeed, African worked objects signify an “archival” dimension with a commemorative function. They impress onto their own society a silent discourse and, simultaneously, as loci of memory, recite silently their own past and that of the society that made them possible.74

This object is a material practice of memory, and, crucially, a living one, “reproducing, in its own successive concrete images, its conceptual and cultural destiny, which, often and explicitly, is a testimony to a will to remember or to forget certain things."75 Indeed, the silence of the worked object’s discourse points to a necessary familiarity. Though this may not readily be articulable, this discourse reflects a mode of knowing grounded in recognition—which may, of course, vary in depth and sophistication amongst its knowers76—and ordinary practice. These objects, from the most ordinary to the most sacred, collectively speak “(to those who can really understand) of the continuity of a tradition and its successive transformations.”77 And it is this silent discourse that conditions into possibility autonomous forms of collective thought and knowledge. Unlike the myths that may play a similar role,78 the silence of this discourse allows it some (though not complete) remove from the status of commentary upon history. Rather, a worked object (worked by someone, with specific purpose and intention, who is in history even if they are not trying to “write history”) is a point of mediation, reference, and instantiation for the kinds of things one needn’t think to know. But this silent discourse does not reside in the objects; it is only referred to by them, and familiarity is required for this reference to be engaged. So these objects’ capacity for memory work only exists within a community of reference.

Outside of this community, in the museum, these objects default to doing instead the work of representation.79 They are tasked with deputizing for and defining people, as opposed to comprising details from which those same people might find meaning, through which they might pass on a basis for certain ways of knowing. Mudimbe does not suggest here that this work remains possible for those objects to do, after their removal from everyday life. Instead, he argues (while acknowledging the scale of the task) that these materials might still be salvaged from representation, instead being put to (a dif-

ferent, perhaps now-more-conventional, kind of) historical use.80 This is not exactly a project of holding onto the so-called “survivals” of colonialism that exceed Western senses of epistemic possibility, but a broader task, of sustaining and fashioning forms of knowing that might serve as epistemic resources for contemporary African needs— needs formed in the wake of slavery and colonization, yes, but also in the wake of the crises of the post-independence era. Indeed, along with the historical work Mudimbe is proposing (and the significance of its very proposal), this chapter is offering a theory of the present. Pulled out of its specificity as a way of thinking the discourse we may want to salvage or remake (whose possibility remains, to a degree, open), “silent discourse” (and the collectivity, intimacy, and ordinarity of its structuring relations) offers too a way of thinking about the discourse we have. A silent discourse built from habituated imposition is not the same thing as one built from habituated inheritance (nor is the inheritance ever fully out of the picture). But imposition offers grounds for remembrance and reference; the intimacies that underscore violence are also grounds from which to think, from which discourses emerge. Indeed, Mudimbe himself elaborates upon this point in the chapter “Reprendre,” which deals with contemporary African art, and in which he describes “Ndebele mural painting”—an ordinary and habituated form—as “conjugating” the past to the present.81

These objects reflect, in some ways, the tradition counterpoint to Marxist politics— discourses whose joint problem Mudimbe is examining in these texts. It is clear too that African history is a problem, as field and as terrain for thought. Responding (and not without ambivalence) to Jan Vansina’s intervention of establishing a method to reconstruct an image of the distant past through collective rememberings of it, Mudimbe’s suggestion is another. That one can rigorously, if speculatively, find a relation to the past by examining worked objects as discursive elements in historical motion, rather than (simply) as representational works. In the process, this discursive response might hope for something beyond a kind of representational resistance, but to establish a basis for discourses that might then instantiate a new terrain of power, or keep the possibility of such instantiation in play.

>> Contingency

That Mudimbe ends Invention on the promise of “absolute discourse” underscores its broad project, and the project that Idea then takes up. These texts, born out of Mudimbe’s “commitment . . . to what it essentially means to be an African and a philosopher today,”82 are responding to dire and entwined matters of political and epistemic possibility, of

But imposition offers grounds for remembrance and reference; the intimacies that underscore violence are also grounds from which to think, from which discourses emerge.

claims to knowledge that might be claims to power. But such claims must be made in the context of an epistemic and political despair. The fear is that Africa is inconceivable from within itself. And yet, Mudimbe emphasizes throughout these texts that the origin of a discourse is not identical with what that discourse can or does enable—the matter of capacity, of who decides to put a discourse to use, and the fights that take place to refigure it.83

If Mudimbe is uncomfortable with subordinating history to the demands of subjectivity, he has no such concern with agency as a historical or political question, except perhaps when it is belabored. Instead, the “subject in the discourse on the Same or on the Other” is the “obvious way out” of the problem of how epistemic transformations can take place—“directly or indirectly, consciously or unconsciously,” this subject “participates in the modification or the constitution of an epistemological order.”84 This is, in a way, a historical response. But as Mudimbe establishes above, this does not mean it matters any less for the politics of the present. Instead, this binding of concepts in his thinking (of speech, inhabitation, contingency, which also means of history and politics, and an orientation thereto that is grounded in commitments to particular histories and politics, grounded in commitments against the “major monstrosities: the slave trade, colonialism, and nazism”85) underscores a philosophical-political commitment. This commitment might be described as an optimism (albeit a very slight one) that things can happen, even amidst epistemic and material closures. But they must be made to, and this making is not, ultimately, intellectual work.

By the end of Idea, the question of absolute discourse is no longer the question of its possibility but that of the means to grasp it. The political, economic, epistemic—these are all contingent terrains, whose fissures and cracks can be made to widen. The implication of Mudimbe's analysis is that this work of grasping, however it may sometimes take origin or inspiration from philosophical or political theories, must be borne out ordinarily—in everyday struggle whose terms are defined by materialities of position. These materialities, perhaps well-exceeding the distinctions offered by Marx, must nevertheless correspond to something that also exceeds useful mythology. Mudimbe’s attention to silent discourse underscores this—the claim to things that precede and exceed the colonial (even, I would add, the claim to having lost them) has the capacity to be a claim to not the idea of collectivity but to one another. Beyond a potential claim to alterity and to blackness, this collective knowing (whether existing, in the midst of a rebuilding, or grieved in its absence) is reflective of the beginnings of a political orientation. In the place of the presumption of African political and epistemic futility, Mudimbe offers, through his attention to history, a theory of politics—of resistance, response, claim, seizure—that can speak at once to the production of Africa’s political and economic vulnerability and to the contingencies of responding to it.

If discourse is moldable and contestable, and ordinary, there must be capacity for political shifts to be conceived, organized, and brought into being (though the matter of their survival is of a different order). This is not a utopian suggestion,86 necessarily, but a clarifying one; returning to Mudimbe’s discussion of the “intermediate space,” when

profoundly meaningful racial, ethnic, and national signs come to bear the weight and the antagonism of material despair, the danger in question is that of the ready production of reactive, rather than creative, forms of political organization. And yet, the problem here is not the sign itself, nor the immutability of the discourses surrounding it. Following Mudimbe’s argument regarding silent discourse, it may be that contestation is made impossible and thought itself inadequately encouraged. But at the heart of the issue is the bad faith with which the sign is claimed, and how it can thus be situated in a set of inherited discourses that muddy the visibility and structure of power.

Indeed, by reading Invention and Idea for their historico-political attentions, a crucial problematic for African political analysis is partially unraveled. Working to disarticulate myth-making from truth, without losing sight of what work ideology can do—a project which, in these texts, takes the sign of anti-anthropological critique—these texts find means, however sideways they may sometimes be, to talk not only about Africa but also about the traffic in “Africa” and “blackness,” without reproducing it. It seems clear that the project of making-ordinary the critical practices of memory, and rememory, that Mudimbe proposes, means maneuvering and disarming real and mythic traps in African discursive life. And it is here that the everyday incarnation of historical memory—and the critical appraisal of historical ideas—carries its greatest promise: not as a claim to futurity, exactly, but as a condition for engagement in African and Black political life.

All in all, I would lean toward conceiving of history, all history, as an invention of the present. Whatever the historian discerns in the past as forms of behavior, systems or institutions . . .

it is with respect to the present that the historian gives them significance and understands them. From this perspective, Glissant’s nightmare could be dissipated. Not only does he incarnate history, but he writes it in such a way as to create for himself a distinctive vision and thus an object of knowledge.

Between night and light, then, memory rises up as a sign.87

Notes

1 I am indebted to Linette Park’s editorial support, and to Xafsa Ciise, Sabelo Mcinziba, and the anonymous reviewer for generously and critically engaging earlier drafts of this essay. I am also grateful to Athi-Patra Ruga for sustaining a generative creative conversation and giving permission to use his images. In addition, the financial assistance of the National Research Foundation (NRF) toward this research is hereby acknowledged. Opinions expressed and conclusions arrived at are those of the author and not necessarily to be attributed to the NRF.

2 Mudimbe, Idea of Africa, 105.

3 Mudimbe’s analysis of alienation in Invention of Africa, 93, is indebted to Marxist analysis and to Fanon; entailing “both the objective fact of total dependence (economic, political, cultural, and religious) and the subjective process of the selfvictimization of the dominated,” Mudimbe presents alienation as a phenomenon that is at once the condition of imperial possibility and a tense undercurrent threatening to rupture it, both of which must be managed for the colony to succeed. This analysis must be put in conversation with his earlier work, L’autre face du royaume, in which Mudimbe uses the work of Jacques Lacan to propose that the intersection of the binarisms of assimilation and “savagery” reflected in alienation can be made use of.

4 Mudimbe, Idea of Africa, 131–33.

5 Mudimbe, 132.

6 Mudimbe, 30.

7 Mafeje, Anthropology and Independent Africans, 35.

8 Mudimbe, Invention, 66

9 Mudimbe, Idea of Africa, 38.

10 Mudimbe, xi, 209.

11 Mudimbe, Invention of Africa, 4–5.

12 Mudimbe, 4.

13 Mudimbe, 5 (emphasis is mine). A note here that Samir Amin’s choice of phrasing—“vestige,” “survival,” and the broader positioning of ordinary forms of African life in an archaic past—is both a problem and of some theoretical importance. In selecting this quote I recognizw that Amin, while also instantiating this, offers a presentation of how the idea of this pastsituatedness comes to operate in African ordinary life. That is to say, the idea of the ordinary as archaic, in the midst of the ordinary experienced as ordinary, is precisely one of the features that produces the alienation and despair Mudimbe is analyzing here.

14 An attention to the politics that claims and responds to despair underwrites On African Fault Lines and his essays in the volume he edited on Présence Africaine, The Surreptitious Speech

15 Mudimbe, Invention of Africa, 200.

16 Mudimbe, 199–200.

17 Invention and Idea are both antagonistic to such arguments, though this antagonism does not extend to the practices from which such arguments are built.

18 See for instance Diawara, “The Other(‘s) Archivist” and “V.Y. Mudimbe”; Prah, “The Subvention of the Invention of Africa”; Apter, “Que Faire?”; Desai, “The Invention of Invention”; Slaymaker, “Agents and Actors in African Antifoundational Aesthetics”; Mafeje, “Who are the Makers and Objects of Anthropology”; Zeleza, “Historicizing the Posts”; Kresse, Introduction to Reading Mudimbe.

19 See Mouralis, V.Y. Mudimbe; Diawara, “Reading Africa Through Foucault”; Masolo, African Philosophy in a Changing World; Fraiture and Orrells,The Mudimbe Reader; Azgenay, “VY Mudimbe’s Archaeological Reading of Africa’s Difference.”

20 See in particular Fraiture, V.Y. Mudimbe; Kavwahirehi, V.Y. Mudimbe et la ré-invention de l’Afrique.

21 Wai, “Resurrecting Mudimbe.”

22 Kresse, Introduction to Reading Mudimbe.

23 Mudimbe, Invention of Africa, 1.

24 Mudimbe, 2.

25 Such a claim is a difficult one, even if one would prefer to read military presence and resource ownership as reflecting influence rather than control; and yet it is of less urgency to the arguments explicit in Invention and Idea than the following two. However, this is suggestive of a problem at play in Mudimbe’s overall work. Though Mudimbe uses “neocolonial” to describe Africa’s post-independence predicament in ways that assume Nkrumah’s analysis—and in L’odeur du Père, the stability of economic dependence in the neocolony is an establishing concern from which Mudimbe develops his analysis of intellectual dependence—Mudimbe at times (see for instance, Idea, 42-3) writes the extent of the neocolonial problem as though utterly superseded by, and irrelevant to, the inadequacies of post-independence statecraft. These matters remain central parts of what establishes the terrain of despair into which Invention and Idea are written, and to which they respond.

26 Mudimbe, Invention of Africa, 8–9.

27 Mudimbe, 10.

28 Beyond the text’s concern with blackness as a site of reclaimed alterity, note Mudimbe’s references to the “black continent” (7, 15, 80, 141), “black Africa” (43, 55, 95, 170), and the “dark continent’ (51, 115, 141). Many of these references are quotes or otherwise citational, and the use of “black Africa” may well be a francophone artefact. But the usage nevertheless reflects the desire to keep blackness in play in attending to changes in the conceptualization of the continent.

29 In that capacity it is partly a concern with interdisciplinary squabbles, whose significance Mudimbe is quick to undercut. He nevertheless underscores the importance of historical and other disciplinary apparatuses (philosophical and sociological, to name but two) as counterpoints for reading anthropological discourse (Idea of Africa, 188, 190).

30 Mudimbe, 213.

31 Mudimbe, Invention of Africa, 58. This analysis is greatly elaborated in Idea of Africa

32 Mudimbe, Idea of Africa, 32–3. This line of legal-historical interrogation is productively developed in Siba N’Zatioula Grovogui’s Sovereigns, Quasi Sovereigns, and Africans. The reading of African non-sovereignty Grovogui offers represents a response to African politics that underscores its condition of possibility.

33 Mudimbe, Invention of Africa, 58.

34 As such, these texts share in the identification Mudimbe describes as marking African politics in Idea of Africa, 183: “There is an identification with death at the very basis of the most significant African ideologies: ’Négritude,’ ‘African personality,’ ‘Pan-Africanism.’ I refer to the identification—for good, sacred, and highly respectable reasons—with the millions of victims of the slave trade and the identification with those who resisted the process of colonization and were killed.”

35 Mudimbe, 1.

36 Mudimbe, 1.

37 Mudimbe, 2.

38 Mudimbe, 33.

39 Mudimbe, Invention of Africa, 16.

40 Mudimbe, Idea of Africa, 208.

41 Mudimbe, 42.

42 Mudimbe, Invention of Africa, 96.

43 The sense in which I am using the word “stability” is reflective of a stability in what is politically and economically possible, and what is thinkable in these and other domains. But this stability is produced through the decisive and ordinary destabilization of everyday, and macro-scale political and economic, life.

44 Harsch, “Reinventing Africa?,” 137.

45 Mudimbe, Invention of Africa, 92. I should note that Mudimbe does not use this term, but it is nevertheless commonly used to refer to the formation he points toward in assembling this African literary problematic and the list of authors that follow. It is not to be confused with the contemporary critical usage of the term in black studies.

46 Mudimbe, Invention, 92.

47 It seems not unimportant that Idea of Africa is written, unlike Invention of Africa, immediately after the end of the Cold War, and in the intellectual wake of Francis Fukuyama’s “The End of History?” There is a sense in which he is writing against Fukuyama’s teleology, and also a sense of reckoning with its factual accounting of material foreclosures. Whether one sees geopolitical or internal causes, the space of post-independence opportunity (either imperfectly capitalized or squandered, but certainly real) has been followed by a period of impossibilities. I read Mudimbe as proposing this impossibility as a part of history’s movement.

Indeed, Fukuyama’s argument is addressed more directly in a 1995 special issue of The South Atlantic Quarterly, edited by Mudimbe. In his introduction, Mudimbe frames the issue as reflecting the sense that “the concepts of exile, the ethnicization of the political, and the recess of the social, as well as their sociopolitical actualizations, go along with the apparent triumph of liberalism, the ‘end of history’ described by Francis Fukuyama” (982) before following with a brief

historicization of political subjectivity (the “subordination of the social to the political,” 983). The issue examines an ostensible foreclosure (the ostensible foreclosure) that is, instead, a historically situated predicament that is generative of political movement.

48 Mudimbe, Invention of Africa, 95–6.

49 Mudimbe, Idea of Africa, 42–3.

50 Mudimbe, 42.

51 Mudimbe, 41.

52 Mudimbe, 41–2.

53 Mudimbe, 43.

54 Mudimbe, Invention of Africa, 96.

55 Mudimbe, 96.

56 Mudimbe, 96.

57 Mudimbe, Idea of Africa, 41.

58 Mudimbe, 44.

59 Along with the aforementioned discussions of alienation, see Mudimbe, Invention of Africa, 3. While drawing out the debates on whether imperialism and colonization followed the profit motive, he writes that, “at the risk of being labeled dogmatists, Marxist interpreters accept the essentials of Lenin’s thesis [in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism].” Half a page later, he playfully returns to this gesture: “It seems impossible to make any statement about colonialism without being a dogmatist, particularly where economic organization and growth are concerned.” He concludes that regardless of the motivation at play, the consequence remains the “colonizing structure” (3–4), before a brief analysis of its production underscoring capitalism and alienation (5).

60 Mudimbe, 93–4.

61 Mudimbe, 93.

62 Mudimbe, 94.

63 Importantly, Mudimbe reads the problem Négritude establishes as only exacerbated in the political discourses that exist alongside and beyond it. These latter discourses’ early reliance on ideas of black personality, and this only later being supplemented with a project of political autonomy, reflects for Mudimbe a grounds for political incoherence (see Invention of Africa, 87).

64 “It is true that criticism, especially African, has mainly seen in Senghor the promoter of some famous oppositions which, out of context, could appear to embrace perspectives proper to certain racist theoreticians: Negro emotion confronting hellenistic reason; intuitive Negro reasoning through participation facing European analytical thinking through utilization; or the Negro-African, person of rhythm and sensitivity, assimilated to the Other through sympathy, who can say ‘I am the other . . . therefore I am.’ On this basis, Senghor has been accused of seeking to promote a detestable model for a division of vocations between Africa and Europe, between African and European . . . This seems quite wrong. Senghor’s philosophy can be simply understood through a challenging proposition he offered to the Senagalese Socialist Party in July 1963: ‘Finally, what too many Africans lack, is the awareness of our poverty and creative imagination, I mean the spirit of resourcefulness’ (1983: 152)” (Mudimbe, 94).

65 Sartre, Orphée Noir

66 Mudimbe, Invention of Africa, 85.

67 Mudimbe, 86.

68 Mudimbe, 86.

69 Depestre, Bonjour et Adieu à la Négritude, 83, cited in Mudimbe, Invention of Africa, 87.

70 Mudimbe, Invention of Africa, 83.

71 Mudimbe, xi

72 Mudimbe, 13–5.

73 Mudimbe, 13–5.

74 Mudimbe, Idea of Africa, 68.

75 Mudimbe, 69.

76 Mudimbe, 68.

77 Mudimbe, 68.

78 See Mudimbe, “What is the Real Thing?”

79 The work of representation here is that of the African (and Africa) as site of alterity, with the museum in the metropole as point of reference. As such, one might read this as an argument only against misrepresentation, which leaves open the possibility of some kind of “authentic” representation of the African continent. But recalling Mudimbe’s critique of Négritude—and recalling that it was not a critique of the myths maintained in its project of counter-representation—the suspicion toward representation must be read as broader, as reflecting how its essentialisms, however productive, weaken its capacity to embrace political movement.

80 Mudimbe, Idea of Africa, 67. Mudimbe proposes a method through which to “decode” worked objects, and describes that effort as “an ambitious and, at the same time, completely ridiculous task.”

81 Mudimbe, 172.

82 Mudimbe, Invention of Africa, xi.

83 Indeed, he is not anxious about writing them in a colonial language, nor about analyzing Western sources, arguing that while these books could have been grounded in other ways, the project would lose its “historical and conceptual coherence” (Idea of Africa, 213) without the contextualization in the Western sources from which urgent African discursive terrains and historical events gain form. In insisting on the relevance of Eurocentric texts, it is not so much

that Mudimbe abandons the critique of Eurocentrism as that he refuses the suggestion that everything at all emergent from colonialism is so overdetermined by it that one must somehow reconstruct altogether, outside of colonialism, a system of thought and politics and economics to even be able to move. Though European discourse seems itself a foundational trap for African thought and politics, it can only actually be a trap if Africa is deemed to be intrinsically outside of the political and the historical; if it is considered to be outside of contestations that work to reshape the terms on offer. Put differently, it is only a trap if it is relied upon and acquiesced to as one.

84 Mudimbe, Invention of Africa, 48.

85 Mudimbe, Idea of Africa, 212.

86 Following Fraiture, this may reflect a tempering of a prior utopianism. If L’Autre face’s concern was with knowledge as a form of revolutionary praxis, the relationship between received discourse and depair (and discursive autonomy and resistant) are apposite attentions for the period in which Invention of Africa and Idea of Africa come to be written (see Fraiture, “Mudimbe’s Fetish of the West”).

87 Mudimbe, Idea of Africa, 195.

Works Cited

Apter, Andrew. “Que Faire? Reconsidering Inventions of Africa.” Critical Inquiry 19, no. 1 (1992): 87–104.

Agzenay, Asma. “V.Y. Mudimbe’s Archaeological Reading of Africa’s Difference in Cultural History.” In Handbook of African Philosophy of Difference, edited by Elvis Imafidon, 129–48. Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2020.

Depestre, René. Bonjour et Adieu à la Négritude. Paris: Laffont, 1980.

Desai, Gaurav. “The Invention of Invention.” Cultural Critique 24 (1993): 119–42.

Diawara, Manthia. “Reading Africa Through Foucault: V. Y. Mudimbe’s Reaffirmation of the Subject.” October 55 (1990): 79–92.

———. “The Other(’s) Archivist.” Diacritics 18, no. 1 (1988): 66–74.

———. ed. “V. Y. Mudimbe: A Special Section.” Callaloo 14, no. 4 (1991): 928–1035.

Fraiture, Pierre-Phillipe. “Mudimbe’s Fetish of the West and Epistemological Utopianism.” French Studies 63, no. 3 (2009): 308–22.

———. V.Y. Mudimbe: Undisciplined Africanism. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013.

Fraiture, Pierre-Phillipe, and Daniel Orrells, eds. The Mudimbe Reader. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2016.

Fukuyama, Francis. “The End of History?” The National Interest 16 (1989): 3–18.

Grovogui, Siba N’Zatioula. Sovereigns, Quasi-sovereigns, and Africans: Race and Self-determination in International Law. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.

Harsch, Ernest. “Reinventing Africa?” Africa Development/Afrique et Développement 15, no. 2 (1990): 131–37.

Kavwahirehi, Kasereka. V.Y. Mudimbe et la ré-invention de l’Afrique: Poétique et politique de la décolonisation des sciences humaines. Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 2006.

Kresse, Kai, ed. Introduction to Reading Mudimbe, special issue of Journal of African Cultural Studies 17, no. 1 (2005): 1–9.

Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich. 1917. Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (A Popular Outline). New York: International Publishers, 1933.

Mafeje, Archie. “Who are the Makers and Objects of Anthropology? A Critical Comment on Sally Falk Moore’s ‘Anthropology and Africa.’” African Sociological Review/Revue Africaine de Sociologie 1, no. 1 (1997): 1–15.

———. 1998. “Anthropology and Independent Africans: Suicide or End of an Era?” African Sociological Review/Revue Africaine de Sociologie 2, no. 1 (1998): 1–43.

Masolo, D.A. African Philosophy in a Changing World Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1994.

Mbembe, Achille. On The Postcolony. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.

Mouralis, Bernard. V.Y. Mudimbe: ou le discours, l’ecart et l’ecriture. Paris: Editions Présence Africaine, 1988.

Mudimbe, V.Y. L’autre face du royaume: Une introduction à la critique des langages en folie. Lausanne: Editions L’Âge d’Homme, 1973.

———. L’odeur du père: Essai sur des limites de la science et de la vie en Afrique Noire. Paris: Editions Presence Africaine, 1982.

———. ed. Nations, Identities, Cultures. Special issue of The South Atlantic Quarterly 94, no. 4 (1995).

———. On African Fault Lines: Meditation on Alterity Politics. Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZuluNatal Press, 2013.

———. The Idea of Africa. Bloomington, IA: Indiana University Press, 1994.

———. The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge. Bloomington, IA: Indiana University Press, 1988.

———. ed. The Surreptitious Speech: Presence Africaine and the Politics of Otherness 1947–1987. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.

———. “What is the Real Thing?” In Parables and Fables: Exegesis, Textuality and Politics in Central Africa, 69–85. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991.

Nkrumah, Kwame. Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism. London: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1965.

Prah, Kwesi. “The Subvention of the Invention of Africa.” Africa Development/Afrique et Développement 15, no. 2 (1990): 119–31.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. “Orphée Noir.” 1948. In Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache, edited by Léopold Sédar Senghor, ix–xliv. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1985.

Slaymaker, William. “Agents and Actors in African Antifoundational Aesthetics: Theory and Narrative in Appiah and Mudimbe.” Research in African Literatures 27, no. 1 (1996): 119–28.

Wai, Zubairu. “Resurrecting Mudimbe.” International Politics Reviews 8, no. 1 (2020): 57–76.

Zeleza, Paul T. “Historicizing the Posts: The View from African Studies.” In Postmodernism, Postcoloniality and African Studies, edited by Zine Magubane, 1–38. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2003.

ON REVOLUTIONARY SUICIDE

So many of my comrades are gone now. Some tight partners, crime partners, and brothers off the block are begging on the street. Others are in asylum, penitentiary, or grave. They are all suicides of one kind or another who had the sensitivity and tragic imagination to see the oppression. Some overcame: they are the revolutionary suicides. Others were reactionary suicides who either overestimated or underestimated the enemy, but in any case were powerless to change their conception of the oppressor.

Only resistance can destroy the pressures that cause revolutionary suicide.

— Huey P. Newton, Revolutionary Suicide1

The wager—to die in such a way that one’s suicide (homocidium dolorosum) overcomes death—not by giving into it, going toward it, or working for it, but dying in such a way that one’s suicide (suicidium) is more than suicide, even though one’s death is already known and identifiable as such, a death in whose resistance one discovers something other than death.

This would be a suicide, then, whose most resolute resistance is an indication of the social death that afforms2 it, setting the same mark on resistance and reaction alike.

It may seem strange to approach suicide from the angle of resistance. After all, isn’t suicide a transgression, an evasion, even in its ineffable resistance to life, power, to society?3 Why, then, should we consider this most singular decision from the perspective of what—in the language of black sacrifice and protest—most often oppresses it, shackles it, or condemns it? And isn’t the most intractable feature of suicide precisely its refusal of resistance, the moral-theological definition of life as utility, futurity, or duty? But we may still wonder why Huey Newton himself, after having set up this great antagonism between resistance and reaction, between those who choose to resist social death and those who pathologically only perform it, should turn to Friedrich Nietzsche, and his notions of “reaction” and “will to power,” to uncover another, more revolutionary form of suicide. The question remains, in other words, of whether what we consider to be social death is really so easy to distinguish from what we consider a resistant death—that is, a death defined by its afformation, or by its vir (virility), capacity, passion, or power.

David S. Marriott is Professor of Philosophy at Emory University. He has published the monographs On Black Men (2000) and Whither Fanon? (2018). His most recent book of poetry is Before Whiteness (2022). His present project N’est Pas is forthcoming with Stanford University Press.

Email: marriott@ucsc.edu

Let us begin by saying that nothing seems more elusive than this distinction. It cannot be credited or limited to a matter of individual sensitivity, strength, or weakness; nor is it limited to questions of justice, or community. Indeed, everything in Huey Newton’s theory combines to suggest the proximity—the intimate relation—between reaction and this suicide that, at first glance, seems to be opposed to it and resist it, or seeks to negate it, actively. The suicide that would fulfill its revolutionary possibility must always resist the reactance that grounds its very possibility. It must be reactive in that it resists, and

resistant in that it endures reaction. Just as revolutionary suicide is shown to be structured by reaction, by its atavisms and tyrannies, so, too, the desire to resist it is grounded in a counter-reaction, both because the enmity that precedes it requires that black suicide always be a substitute for resistance, and because of the suicidal structure of black resistance itself.4 This means by the same token that reaction carries within itself the drive— the destiny—of resistance and that which resists it. Reactive suicide produces what it forbids, making possible the very thing that it would make impossible: the resistance against black social death and reaction. Since therefore black resistance is not suicidal because it resists, but suicidal because it is reactive, we must look beyond the diremptions of power and the powerless, and those affected by complicity and submission, to see how resistance and reaction are connected. In short, and at risk of encroaching on what will be my conclusion, I would say that black reactive death is black resistance, is the same as its revolutionary other. This duality is ambiguous, and so we must understand it carefully, literally, and in all its senses. It involves two very different notions of (black) resistance and two very different notions of (black) death, in which the miseries of one are what drive us to seek a more revolutionary terminus in the other, but it is resistance (as lack and drive; as sacrifice and bestowal) that brings us imperceptibly to the two deaths. Not as cause and consequence, affirmation, or negation; but as an experience of suicide that is therefore only formable, translatable, as a resistance to the obsessions and conformity by which blacks give in to suicide as a defining telos or end.

Thus, either we understand that revolutionary suicide is the same as reactive suicide, in which case revolutionary suicide, always identical to itself in its sacrificial difference, triumphantly assimilates reactive suicide into itself (this is the dialectical—and, in Newton, the political—version of this duality); or we understand reaction to be the same as resistance—and at once the duality becomes more difficult to understand, we no longer know who or what this revolutionary suicide is that a moment ago seemed so obvious, nor do we know whether we are still dealing with resistance at all. Indeed, I am not sure that we should even distinguish the second “suicide” from the first. This would be to resolve it dialectically, whereas here only the fact that resistance is already doubled by reaction (in the sense of a double origin) makes it possible to distinguish a difference in the same notion. But that notion does exist in Newton, where it indicates what I will call, for lack of a better term, an ethical beyond of resistance. That, at least, is what I would like to demonstrate: that here, in this infinitesimal, imperceptible difference of emphasis, Newton’s notion of black revolutionary politics is ultimately played out. This is also an opportunity for me to extend and reflect upon previous analyses of black resistance: that is, the hope of its affirmation versus the reactive emnity of its truth.5

That, at least, is what I would like to demonstrate: that here, in this infinitesimal, imperceptible difference of emphasis, Newton’s notion of black revolutionary politics is ultimately played out.

But even before we turn to the Newtonian wavering between a “politics” and an “ethics” of resistance, we should first like to comment on the word “resistance.” Resistance, far more than freedom, changes the very nature of what we think we know about black life and death. Nowadays we speak easily—and I just did so myself—about the revolutionary “subject,” the subject of liberation, and the subject who resists (worldly injustice, say, in the name of freedom). But what do we really know about resistance? In philosophy, resistance seems to create its own resistance (to definition); and is, at the same time, the taking place of that imperative.6 To know resistance is possible only if we pursue its reactions. And thus, the need to draw a boundary line between resistance and reaction, even though we know it is impossible to do so without presumption. Resistance, then, ultimately belongs neither to life or concept, but to the symbols we have of them, or, less commonly, it is an “afformative” capacity which no will can symbolize without making resistance into what is not itself resistant.7 This is a particularly stark example of the problem before us. If life is to retain its vital, subversive power, whether prefigured as drive or impulse, life itself must resist that which resists it. Resistance is thus deemed to be either a drive or capacity that gives immediacy to life/will through struggle or combat; consequently, it is presented as a force or energy that inevitably confronts power because it is already immanent to it. Resistance is thus both an unfolding power, since in it force and life are truly one, and a willed encounter with the alienations and oppressions that would suppress it, and that in the end condemns, escapes power. Without desire—of power, or to power—resistance cannot constitute or fulfill itself; it cannot model or manifest itself as possibility or actuality. Resistance is, before all else, with and without resistance; and so ever beyond and behind itself in advance. As such, we cannot know it beyond these infinitely-finite points of reaction. Faced with the suicide of the worker, the subaltern, or the slave (whose only object is assumed to be freedom?), resistance is not merely a datum but the reactive affect of what it is not (n’est pas). It is resistance that resists (itself) and resistance that is unable to resist (itself as resistant).

But what does it mean to say that reaction becomes resistant through suicide? Or that freedom is the inner meaning of that encounter? This, of course, is how classical philosophemes render the unfree life of the slave. In the slave, freedom is assumed to be nothing but virtue, knowledge, and recognition. Apart from fugitivity or escape, the slave can only encounter true life in the moment he discovers suicide as fate. As such, freedom not only produces life, it also makes the slave see how resistance grounds his sovereign possibility, by setting aside what he thinks he knows about “slave” life and its “human” possibility. But what of that jouissance that leads him imperceptibly to destruction and sees in suicide a singularly black afformation, one that makes a politics of life— a life deemed transcendent—impossible? If suicide is the moment in which I perceive that everything could happen, a moment in which a gap opens up in my knowledge and experience to which I have no relation, but to which I give myself utterly, what is it that I experience—the forfeit or the danger that comes from truly knowing it? But if this is the wager that frees me, in which I behold resistance’s dazzling light, have I not already lost what I imagined I gained, that is, a freedom symbolized as the meaningful, transcendent

movement of all affirmation, for to lose myself in that thought is to perish in the very discovery of it?

In this connection, it may be useful to recall that the word “resistance” appears only rarely in Newton’s Revolutionary Suicide, who preferred to speak of “confrontation,” “spontaneity,” or “the ability to act.”8 That is why it is best to recognize right away that revolutionary suicide comes to us not as an “affirmative capacity to resist”9 but from a particular interpretation of a black reactive incapacity to resist: it is from his theory and experience of antiblack state violence and the Black Panther Party (BPP), founded in 1966, that we must date the use of the phrase “revolutionary suicide.”

This phrase, as Newton well knew, comes from philosophy. It denotes a moment before any possible assurance of a meaningful beyond. We could even say that it is the key term in his reading of Nietzsche’s will to power. The suicide is not primarity he or she who suffers, much less the psychology of suffering to which we so often find it reduced today. Above all, the word “suicide” designates the highest maxim, the “overcoming” or drive, the revolutionary journée or quest for life which is posed, supposed, and presupposed in Section 36 of Twilight of the Idols: “To die proudly when it is no longer possible to live proudly. Death of one’s free choice, death at the proper time; with a clear head and joyfulness . . . an adding up of life.”10 And, as Gillian Rose has shown, it is only to the extent that such a death, in the form of its tallying up, is heir to the true nobility, the true freedom of its will to power, that it becomes resistant in the modern sense of the word.11 Not only does an unfree (slavish?) death appear to be a reactive death; it also manifests a suicide of the will: “When you do away with yourself you are doing the most admirable thing there is,” Nietzsche writes, “life itself gets more of a benefit from this than from any sort of ‘life’ or renunciation, of anaemia, or other virtues.”12 Suicide, then, is not a negative, even pessimistic ideal. Pessimism (pur, vert) is life negating itself as will and representation; suicide is the affirmation, not of life, but of will to power. Apart from this affirmation there is only decadence, wretchedness, sickness, fragility, despair. Recourse to suicide is thus necessary to recapture that drive to life which has not been preceded by any sickliness and is itself life’s blackest affirmation. By the word “black,” I do not want to indicate an identity, i.e., a psychological or emotional index, but more the scandalous assertion of resistance’s unensurability as possibility. This should not be understood in the sense of being-towards-death, but more in the sense of a being for whom there has never been such a thing as history or futurity, and who is henceforth to be conceived as the point where subject, consciousness, representation or will, cannot be named in this way, either in labor or in desire, in struggle or in the work of art. For, as is clear from what we have just said, and as Newton quite rightly notes, this is a being without the surety of any ipse structure, and one whose death, paradoxically, is the condition wherein unlivable life is transformed into will to power.

Thus it was this afformative concept of suicide that Newton imported from philosophy, and with astounding amplitude. Power and resistance are no longer opposed, nor are they equivalent. Indeed, they are no longer even equivalent to themselves. They are their own resistance and their own (resistant) reaction. Black power, for example, no

longer creates resistance, but rather is the differential structure of black reaction, a reaction that also inhabits resistance. “Reaction” and “resistance” can therefore no longer be simply opposed, but neither have they become identical. Rather, the very notion of their identities as vitalist or voluntary is put in question. In addition to this aporia, the inseparability of black power and suicide renders any affirmation that contains it problematic.

My purpose here is not to reevaluate the politics of that decision in the history of the Black Panther Party, or the strategies to which it gave rise. I would merely like to call attention, in a very preliminary way, to what Newton says of suicide as a revolutionary attitude towards black social death, and to the notion of suicide as a black power freely chosen that is neither power nor decision, but a power that escapes both power and decision. Or as the destiny of a philia that simultaneously acquits itself in a phobos that sets out to condemn and destroy it. No doubt this appeal to revolutionary philia (as well as will, freedom, autonomy, liberation, actuality, possibility, and so on) permitted Newton’s trenchant critique of reactance by ridding it from the outset of all psychologism and all vitalism or biologism. But why keep the word, and hence also the concept of suicide, particularly when it was simultaneously being invested with all the pathos and pathology of social psychology? Wasn’t what was at stake, as Howard Caygill has indicated, the removal of blackness from any “theology of resistance” to a “thanatopolitics” issuing from an appeal to suicide as the highest maxim which blackness reveals by itself and, after a fashion, in itself, as black political immortality?13 In fact, would Newton have agreed with this notion of an “immortal revolution that is always to come” if he had not embraced suicide, more than anyone else, as a black power that is somehow more originary than life, representation, or will to power?

Perhaps it is because black life is always on the outside of life that its death can only occur in politics as an enigmatic spectacle?14 As such, suicide does not mean evasion or escape, but the drive that brings us imperceptibly to our deathly affirmation. That is, the fate whose cause and effect in the world is always the exception, because being dead it can neither die nor be killed, and thereby is the infinite labor of a dying without end? Thus the suicides that are doubles of each other, and that Newton himself is first induced to say, are both a reaction (an aphinisis or ascesis) and a resistance because of the struggle to find another meaning (both protest and defense) in black life-death: perhaps this is why he concludes his autobiography with this appeal to a philia that turns against itself, by refusing the assurance of either nihilism or martyrdom in the choice of taking a stand. The idea that philia is only resistant when it seeks neither end nor community also means that black resistance can only be gained insofar as it withdraws from every determination, be it political or ontological. Thus, suicide may transform what is always already present as reaction, provided it does not accord with itself, and that it makes plain its founding in the movement of the plea for the overcoming of life, which it

Perhaps it is because black life is always on the outside of life that its death can only occur in politics as an enigmatic spectacle?

can neither be assured of nor determine. In that case, the mort à bout touchant of which Fanon speaks15 (and which in Newton’s text is never encountered as a “death-wish”16) becomes revolutionary, or it negates the tyranny that dominates it but is not present, in which case it is reactive, imaginary. The doubleness of the word “reactive-suicide” carries the text’s signifying possibilities beyond what could be reasonably attributed to a politics of resistance. Newton’s reading of Fanon thereby shows a more complex dividing line between death and resistance that often functions against its own explicit (metaphysical) assertions, not just by creating ambiguity, but by inscribing a systematic suicide behind or through what is being said about revolution.

Nor is this a matter of overlooking the fact that the Newtonian black revolutionary subject is always the most besieged, precarious subject, the profoundly condemned subject of enmity and of violence—and therefore nothing like the sovereign and freely chosen subject of the philosophers, nothing like the virile, autonomous ego of possibility or its ethical successor, the subject of a capacity to resist. Nevertheless, this infinitely besieged subject, reduced to a reactive demand for freedom that political-philosophical life arouses and forbids, is still a subject that resists. Newton, in a very enigmatic way, retains the word, at least as the purest moment of lived capacity, the real as opposed to a false vitality, a desire to live that is equally willing to be condemned in its continued strength. That this position, from the very fact of its being mystical, ecstatic even, is equivalent to an unknowable renunciation, makes little difference. Newton chooses it to the extent that in daring to resist, black suicide promises not so much reappropriation but a withdrawal without reserve. Emptied of substance, virtually dead, black reactive life subsists in the withholding of what it renounces. And in the closed world of social death in which it continues to murder itself in order to resist itself, black life takes the form of a protest that has, historically, appealed to what is withheld in the agon of its existence.

It is not my intention here to analyze this powerful refusal of black social death in any detail, this refusal that is all the more powerful for being presented in the guise of a death without law or limits that is sub judice and cannot be actualized or affirmed as such. If, getting ahead of the analyses to come, I have nevertheless referred briefly to this refusal as beyond resistance, it is because it constitutes both the outer limit of what resists and the condition of impossibility of any language of politics being able to grasp its resistance today. Above all, I have referred to it because it seems to me that resistance functions here as a veritable symptom. How are we to say that black power is resistant, or that it somehow conforms to a discourse (of resistance) that is always conforming to the authority of what it philosophically resists and unwittingly affirms as such? Once the many misreadings of Newton’s text have been taken into account, shouldn’t we have asked instead what, even in Newton himself, brought about this desire for black suicidal death? Shouldn’t we have suspected the radicality and ideality of a notion made in the name of an impossible actuality? An ideality that is always dead in the act, so to speak, and is as fatal as it is impossible? In short, shouldn’t we indeed return not to Newton, but to Newton’s philosophical understanding of suicide, which alone holds the key to its political affirmation as black power?

We must choose: either blood or the message.

— Ali Shari’ati, Husayn, Vãres-i Adam17

Vitalism or mortalism? Arguably what is at stake here is a reading of Nietzsche which goes beyond the metaphysics of energy or will.

Let us now examine more closely the strategies and assumptions involved in this critical rereading. It is clear that Newton was not seeking the meaning of Nietzsche’s will to power in any traditional sense. I want to compare that reading to another that also positions itself on the question of suicide as the true object of will to power. Georges Bataille’s various writings on death, inner experience, and sovereignty will be our example.18 And not only because these writings are themselves Nietzschean writings of autobiography, but also because Bataille writes of a wager that could be said to be a direct response to the unreadable nature of resistance and of what lies beyond it: a death for which no literal, proper term can be substituted. In writing of suicide, Bataille realized that death had already become a political question of affirmation beyond the “subject.” If politics is the figure of limits, resistance makes us see that the true cost of inner experience is, in a sense, our encounter with the illimitable.

But in what follows, I also want to argue that Bataille’s reading of Nietzsche maintains life not as power but as a will to chance which is always in danger of confusing risk with the affirmation of what, if we had but lost it, we were never in danger of losing, that is, ourselves, our own fear of death, our own will to affirmation.19 Or perhaps we should say, denying the chance of death doesn’t make those who deny it any more reactive or resistant. Just less sovereign.

Bataille’s great achievement is thus to wake us to the loss of such losing while urging us passionately to risk beyond our limits. He wants us to sacrifice ourselves for something that is literally unsacrificeable, for it is nowhere to be found. In a word, here a line is tautly drawn between expenditure and the laws of return (the return that conserves itself, but always outside of itself). Those whose lack of life makes them desperately want to own life, to conserve it, are therefore also the most reactive. Bataille’s attempt to found a sovereign community was thus an attempt to bring to an end such mortalism.20 (But is sacrifice, in its abandoning, anything more than a means? And is the self that abandons itself, to pleasure and/or cruelty, resistant, or merely a self forcibly subduing itself to the idea of abandonment? The sacrificial community is nothing other than the sacrifice of community, the abandoning that gives itself unreservedly over to abandonment.)21 But both risk and limit remain figures of speculation in his work and via a dialectics of resistance and spectacle. They are, in other words, consolations; sacrificial substitutes for an

Or perhaps we should say, denying the chance of death doesn’t make those who deny it any more reactive or resistant. Just less sovereign.

always already transgressed limit. They are not vehicles that make us see the literally black and, in a sense, lethal afformation of will to power. Or at least this will be my argument in what follows.

And still more profoundly, does sovereignty manifest itself as what truly returns to itself, by expending itself in all the chance events that resist it, while canceling all the conserving forms that play a part in it? It would then be necessary for sovereignty to return to itself in at least two senses: as random expenditure (of the finite) and as the expenditure that has to maintain chance as the improbable, infinite figure of a return which can never be sacrificed as such. As regards chance, it becomes impossible to tell whether those who lack drive or are unable to kill (or expend) the anguished servility that is killing them are simply reactive, or unable to affirm not their difference, but their sovereign identity. It is necessary to say here that chance preexists return as either identity or relation. There is resistance to the extent that absolute expenditure (that is, chance) is affirmed. But this affirmation must itself resist resistance’s return to itself. In this regard, it is necessary not to draw back from the consequences of reaction for sovereignty to be the affirmation of chance, but sovereignty cannot thereby resist its own absolute affirmation which is its own reactive principle. This is why resistance must consist of and realize itself as absolute expenditure. We can equally say, no compromise is possible between Bataille’s vitalism and Newton’s reactive ontology.

What I want to claim here is that the role of suicide in Bataillean criticism—which is reactive precisely because it only acknowledges sovereign life as resistant—is always to risk a certain “limit” and be the pathos, or inner experience, of its transgression. It is the wager whose only definition is to be the acknowledgement of an impossible limit, the symbol of an immanence without end or closure. (Suicide is thus an experience of acknowledgement.) Death, in other words, is what is paradoxically added to the finite in order to supply the limit wherein life discovers that it is “forever deprived of sense” (and hence sovereign in its impossibility) and that life, reactive life, is “mere performance,” that is to say, a servile, egoic spectacle.22 The very designation of a limit as constitutive of life, a life wherein suicide comes to represent, through its transgression, a sovereign or reactive possibility can, in short, no longer be thought to be a ceaseless affirmation of power, but rather a limit that Bataille variously defines as “evil,” inutilious, or “sacred” expenditure. One begins to see where resistance fits in. It returns in each event as the limit that rules over every desire; it shows how sovereignty is mastered by the very need to affirm it as the most resistant determination. In this way, the limit that expends itself as sovereign can only do so insofar as it goes beyond every form, but this “suicide” remains forever preserved in the form of such sovereign acknowledgment. When Bataille defined sovereignty, famously, as “nothing,” this was a way of affirming chance as a principle that disrupts any servile purpose, but it is precisely for this reason that nothing can be left to chance in such definition.23 As such, the beyond of resistance is both the opposition and affirmation of a probability without telos, but only insofar as this beyond returns to itself as a sovereign reactive movement. It is interesting to note the ways in which Bataille’s historical and aesthetic discussions of sovereignty tend to employ figures of surrender and loss. But always in a language that

allows neither. As such resistance is reduced, initially and before all else, to a determinate transition. Thus, if there is to be a community beyond that of the subject, there has to be “loss” for that subject to be formed or to come into being, that is, enter into the world. Community and subject can both be grasped as a movement of risk without any assurable sense; but what we can be assured of is the sense of such indeterminacy. We are incapable of knowing either what we are or whether we are without risk, or without explicitly corpsing the anguish defining human life in general.24 This trans before any possible sense is thus thoroughly determined and determining of what it means to be with others, or to die sovereignly. But this will to chance, named in this way, cannot do justice to what Newton calls the withheld life of black speech and language; that is to say, the nonsovereign “life” that suicides itself because it can no longer resist the world, or its non-existence.

Does it change anything to call this limit “sacrifice”? Probably not. And yet existing discussions almost invariably confront, leave unresolved, and detour around the question of the nature and boundaries of this sacrifice. As Jean-Luc Nancy puts it in “The Unsacrificeable”: the question of life is where sacrifice begins, but can life, or being-with, ever be sacrificed? And if sovereignty is that miraculous moment in which the subject expires before itself, and expires from the enjoyment of expiring, at what point does life become sovereign, and therefore resistant? Bataille never provides us with an answer. But from this perspective, let us say: the chaos of what separates us from what we are in our anguish is less terrible than the idea of an infinite monotony of non-sovereign being. Reason cannot make us choose either, and inner experience cannot reveal either as wrong. So at what point can one resolve the difficult question of when sovereignty begins if not by saying, with Nietzsche, “thus I willed it” (as chance, as power); or, with Bataille, “thus I cede or abandon it” (as chance, as sacrificial loss).

But this is not quite true for another, much more problematic aspect of Bataille’s affirmation of chance: the aspect that deals with the mania, the philia for transgression— and here we should take transgression in both its senses, as crime and offense. Indeed, we know that from early on Bataille felt constrained, alongside his wish to literally be Nietzsche, to say that the person who puts his own life at risk experiences a consummation, an ecstasy that, rather than seeking a beyond, is a fatal encounter with radical immanence. This argument, as Newton also suggests, is itself a refusal of transcendence, since being-with here fuses with the process of becoming. Without retracing the various steps of this Bataillean “myth”—this violent passion that the ego devotes to itself (or that devotes the ego to itself in its own sundering)—it is worth pointing out that this myth also serves to reinstate a myth of the (white, Western) subject as both destiny and foundation. It designates a subject who can only enter into relationships with others by assuming this abyssal, expiatory, sovereign obliteration-restoration beyond otherness. It is, as Bataille tells us, a crime to enjoy chance as will to power. His reasoning is that what resists also transgresses, and it must do so in a way that is at once without diminution or ressentiment.

On this score, violent sacrifice is taken to be the essence of society but only for those who seemingly have already made the choice, and not just any choice, but the choice to

be a non-subject or an absolute subject, who is thus headless (i.e., sovereign) and always at fault (i.e., transgressive) in their very being, for to be sovereign is to be at fault to any order or system: hence the need to wager, to mitigate, or expiate the egotism of this mitigation. In saying that egotism lives without resistance—for it merely dissimulates it and conceivably takes malign pleasure in doing so—is to say that will still belongs in the category of desire and not that of drive or its “ethics.”

Yes, we are fated to be. And to establish community, myth is needed (Bataille calls it the “sacred,” a word whose own mythic character is never really questioned as such, but endlessly performed as if it were a kind of mana). When the issue is race or power, however, we know that life has already, in a sense, been invaded or intruded upon by a fault that is never simply sacrificial-ontological. As Newton (reading Fanon here) convincingly demonstrates, the reaction that vainly seeks to authorize itself as ipseity, since its authority comes from outside of itself, or from what it thinks of as vitality, is always part of this fantasm that sees, in sovereignty, the chopped-off part, the severed head whose loss allows the community to both mourn and rationalize itself as a collective. And here, precisely, is where the essence of community arises and where one must embrace the terrible founding power of resistance (resistance as the mutilated beyond of the subject, in whose name the subject discovers its limit), not because one’s identity is limited, but because, as a subject, one becomes a subject only insofar as I am not. Or: I exist because I am mutilated-severed. And here equally the desire to transgress being becomes a servant of power, to make it the event of non-sense in its resistance to sense.

And since a choice must be made, it must be one that offers the least interest, the least usefulness, the least productive outcome. Not because these values are slavish or servile, but because they have become representative of reactive life. This is already tantamount to saying—and here lies the enigma—that to be a subject of black power, one must lose two things: life and its relation to language, for this is a life that is not yet in language, and so cannot be cathected or recathected as language. Thus you must stake two things: your reason and your will, your knowledge and your freedom, your death and your life. This bears repeating. In the case of Bataille, we can only transcend-resurrect ourselves if we heal the split between sacred (loss) and sovereignty (the politics, the joy, the experience of community as the affirmation of chance and transgression, and therefore the chance to truly, transgressively, be white). The power that would risk submission to the former of its own accord, that is autonomously, gains everything; whereas in the case of revolutionary suicide, there is power precisely because there was never any sovereign loss. Ultimately, in Bataille’s philosophy blackness must be treated as a slave, as exemplified by its lack of limit-experiences. For it cannot return to sovereignty either as sense or nonsense, it cannot transgress the situation of social death in which it is inscribed, and it cannot affirm this situation as either one of being or chance.

We are speaking here of a crime that precedes the language of sovereignty and being. Indeed, this leads me to suspect the exact opposite, that the community that loses the sacred—as myth—loses nothing but itself and remains perfectly undecidable as life and politics. There is no black political community not because of an absence of myth, but

because black life is already decapitated, so to speak, and only by killing itself (rather than being endlessly killed) can it more abundantly live as resistant.

You could say that in expiration, Bataille redirects dialectics toward a non-political politics (i.e., myth), wherein society is obliged to risk itself in order to be reborn as sovereign immanence; whereas for Newton, revolution is possible because black life is the risk of the political as traditionally defined. For it is not life that must be resisted, but the world that expels black life from the human. Or less tendentiously: if suicide is what discloses the religious and ethical truth of sacrifice, then sacrificing has always relied on a white passion to become; as if by becoming white it were possible for the subject to appropriate the risk of dissolution and to do so irremediably. At one point, Bataille writes as if sovereignty is the miracle of my will, and supposedly because of the pain and torment of being reduced to nothing. But for those who have been nothing, and whose difference is a “no longer” and “not yet,” the political has a different story to tell than the choice of humanization (as the necessary cost of subjection). I hope to make this clearer in what follows.

To explain and displace will to power by chance, the black or non-white subject must thus become itself the power that resists, which is why Bataille’s enigmatic rereading of Nietzsche as an ecstatic myth of surrender that can scarcely surrender its own myth and therefore cannot communicate itself as resistant, has a profoundly different addressstructure than Newton’s. Whereas Bataille ontologizes sacrifice, Newton puts into question the sacrificial truth of blackness. The difference here is not what is being staked as the risk to one’s life, but the story of one’s fascination with the wager that one submits to as the price of community, and to which one imagines oneself obliged through this very fascination; namely, a philia of expiration that grounds itself in what sunders and unites it in a perfect sacrificial economy of desire, mortality, and finitude.

That being so, Bataille’s error was not so much a totalitarian fascination with sacrifice but the confusion of chance with a “nothing” that withdraws and must withdraw itself from every relation (including the trans that is assumed to lie at the archaic womb of the world). One of the most obvious differences between Bataille and Newton on suicide therefore concerns both the stake and the value of what it means to be and to be acknowledged as such: only whiteness can become the singular, sovereign instance, since it is responsible for the knowledge by which man “knows” the real essence of the finite, which is why it has to guard itself against the black abysses from which it arose but which it cannot do without.

To explain the consequences of this, let us once again examine the concept of sovereignty and its influence on Bataillean criticism. Bataille understands authentic sovereignty as a certain relation to death—that is to say, the sovereign is he who discovers his most authentic instance in the wager of absolute loss. Sovereign life ensues when “the possibility of life opens up without limit.”25 The subject becomes sovereign when he is no longer “enslaved” (Bataille’s word) by anguish, identity, laws, labor, and prohibition. Hence, the sovereign “is he who is, as if death were not.”26 Sovereignty marks not the future (as repetition or end), but the perpetual risk of life’s ending. That is why freedom

is only representable as sacrifice—sacrifice as both what aligns (the space proper to life and death) and what violates any attempt to limit it to loss or dispensation. Again, for the sovereign to offer sacrifice, be it in the form of war, death, or massacre, it is essential that the sovereign bears no resemblance to what resembles it, or what limits it to a spectacle of freedom. But this loss is not a Hegelian act of recuperation—of exchange or economy—but a willed dissipation that cannot be corrected or contained; and that signifies an abandonment without reserve, an abandonment that nothing escapes, and that is also a kind of poetic writing.

But what, once again, can never be abandoned is this thought of an exemplary fate that never ceases to risk its own sovereign exceptionalism. As if the theory of exception has to resort to a logic of exception in order to figure or reveal the exception that it is meant to explain. And one which continues to reveal a certain pious thinking of the sacred in its livable, deathly limits as both racial exception and rule.27

Here Nietzsche’s “triumph precisely in the last agony,” far from reconciling will and power, separates them still further. Indeed, regis cida (cidium)—one of the most important determinations of sovereignty in its classical, religious form—is reconceived here as a will to nothingness that not only takes pleasure in sacrifice, but performs this jouissance as an endlessly active principle of abandonment. There is more than a whiff here of recuperation in the sense that theology is now anthropology and sovereignty is now acephalic. Nevertheless, Bataille’s insight remains unsettling: if the concept or logic that linked sovereignty to a slavish economy of redemption is no longer and has been replaced by a caesura whose most exemplary figure (the “nothing”) can no longer be construed as law, outcome, reason, or faith, then there is no idiom of sovereignty, whether based on tribute or donation, on sacrificium or sacer, that can avoid this sacrificial principle of afformation. Community and spirit are thus the effects of afformation, and both compete in their chance to be nothing. This is not so much sovereignty gone astray as rather the expression of vitalism, the determination of death as a decision to be nothing, or, to borrow a phrase from Fanon, the sacrifice of life to an abyss, an arché, whose individuation presupposes nothing but the power to afform nothing, a nothing which remains lost between nothingness and infinity. (This is where community abuts onto a principle of abandonment so absolute that it is nothing but chance itself.)

How can we save the besieged subject and condemn vitalism without casting around for a more authentic (less dialectical, less rivalrous) image of resistance? At least this will be the frame for thinking through Nietzsche (and Bataille’s) legacy, which will also allow us to clarify how Newton’s notion of revolutionary suicide, and its formulation of resistance and reaction, poses difficult questions for that legacy. And, first and foremost, how that notion makes evident a certain thinking of suicide in black thought.

>> Let us turn to one contemporary example, that of Cameroonian scholar Achille Mbembe. In 2003, Mbembe published an essay on “Necropolitics” that turns to Bataille to rethink

the place of death, terror, and suicide in modern idioms of state power.28 But instead of the camp, Mbembe turned to the example of the colony, and specifically blackness, to ask in what sense sovereignty, and its genealogy of values, can still be affirmed sovereignly? Or by what right does it still make sense to divide sovereignty into the least and the most sovereign, or to separate what is more authentically endowed as sovereign from that which is merely endowed as its spectacle? Mbembe makes this question specific, by considering two decisions and two typologies—that of the suicide bomber and that of the slave. I would like to suggest that suicide bomber and slave are two opposing qualities of affirmation and negation, but also two forms of destruction and creativity, life and death. Here are the passages in question:

There is no doubt that in the case of the suicide bomber the sacrifice consists of the spectacular putting to death of the self, of becoming his or her own victim (self-sacrifice). The self-sacrificed proceeds to take power over his or her death and to approach it head-on. This power may be derived from the belief that the destruction of one’s own body does not affect the continuity of the being. The idea is that the being exists outside of us. The self-sacrifice consists, here, in the removal of a twofold prohibition: that of self-immolation (suicide) and that of murder. Unlike primitive sacrifices, however, there is no animal to serve as a substitute victim. Death here achieves the character of a transgression. But unlike crucifixion, it has no expiatory dimension. It is not related to the Hegelian paradigms of prestige or recognition. Indeed, a dead person cannot recognize his or her killer, who is also dead. Does this imply that death occurs here as pure annihilation and nothingness, excess and scandal?29

And:

Death in the present is the mediator of redemption. Far from being an encounter with a limit, boundary, or barrier, it is experienced as “a release from terror and bondage.” As Gilroy notes, this preference for death over continued servitude is a commentary on the nature of freedom itself (or the lack thereof). If this lack is the very nature of what it means for the slave or the colonized to exist, the same lack is also precisely the way in which he or she takes account of his or her mortality. Referring to the practice of individual or mass suicide by slaves cornered by the slave catchers, Gilroy suggests that death, in this case, can be represented as agency. For death is precisely that from and over which I have power. But it is also that space where freedom and negation operate.30

Why should one suicide be better than the other? Why is one deemed an absence or failure of agency or resistance, and why is one deemed resistance in its pure state? If the culmination of suicide lies in the recognition of the very difference between annihilation and agency, why is death by suicide bombing considered a lesser death for this statement to be true? What can be said about this contrast that can only evoke validation (of suicide) as a difference between opposition and agency? The difference between an experience of will thereof rather than an unfree desire? But is this not a difference that is marked, in turn, by a hope to live that can never actually be lived, since it can only sacrifice itself (as a hope for the future), and makes freedom aberrant, or ungraspable?

Of course, these oppositions are themselves animated by oppositions that remain implicit: the suicide bombing is described as a spectacular exercise of power, the slave suicide as a release from terror and bondage; the suicide bombing is a transgression beyond recognition, the slave suicide is a servile representation that affirms death as power, and so returns to itself as a recognition, or as that which wills recognition as power. The very transferential process that tends to absolutize the revolutionary speculum of one (as the death whose being exists outside of itself) deabsolutizes the assumptions that are still operative in the slavishness of the other (as the being that lacks being).

On the one hand, if the death of the suicide martyr can only be thought as a sacrifice without expiation, what cannot really be thought is suicide as a death without expiated power. But on the other hand, acting as if agency can be changed into power does not make it so, it is simply to think desire as sacrifice, and therefore refers not so much to suicide as it does to its sacrificial meaning. In brief, slavery must sacrifice itself as sacrifice in order to affirm its non-slavish truth. But even if we say that Mbembe’s and Paul Gilroy’s ideas of the slave have a lot in common (or at least seem to have a lot in common in the construction of the slave as the opposite of a sovereign expenditure), the idea of slavery being proposed here does not escape the Bataillean censure that what is being proposed as a return to agency is merely a slavish imitation of sovereignty. What can be said about a suicide that could transform itself into a will to power rather than reduce itself to a dialectics? Or if we want to save blackness, as a nonsovereign affirmation of life, do we always need to oppose it, finally, to a sacrificial rhetoric whose self-destruction is singled out as merely a spectacle which not even death can redeem?

The more one studies Mbembe’s oppositional rhetoric, the more one can’t help noticing that slave suicide is characterized as an affirmation of value (of freedom, say, or mortality) and suicide bombing is indicated to be a mere means, or a sign that remains signless. His reasoning is simple: representation saves us from annihilation. No amount of power can substitute for the power of representation. Therefore even if “sacrifice consists of the spectacular putting to death of the self” (which was also the reasoning behind Bataille’s critique of modern fascist power), what can never be sacrificed is the concept of sacrifice itself, or the logic that links it to an economy of redemption. This is always the problem with pointing out death as the limit or boundary to life. The representation of death as the impossible limit to possibility always works to secure the meaning of impossibility as limit. This is the basis of Bataille’s argument against the differentiation of mastery and slavery as a function of the Hegelian dialectic. What is never put to death, or what is never risked as such, is death as a speculative concept of philosophy. A speculation which Bataille, as we know, unwittingly repeats. In both the historical and ontological context of resistance, this is why slavery, in its resistance, remains enslaved to the sovereignty that initiates it: for only sovereignty can represent the giving and taking of slave life to the extent that it restores to death the spirit and counter-spirit of immortality. Indeed, sovereignty can only be affirmed in its difference from “black” Hegelian mastery, for the latter is always dependent on its relation to the slave and therefore can never redeem it.

Contrary to Mbembe, therefore, I think that slave resistance and revolutionary suicide are absolutely distinct—not formally but ontologically. If the former seeks a redemptive world, the latter names a world where possibility cannot be afformed without consolation or pathos. Consequently, I do not believe that Newton would accept the argument that slave suicide is less reactive, for this simple reason: any desire to save oneself from social death is already proof that the sacrificer is socially dead.

Again, why is suicide transgressive in the example of the bomber and not in that of the slave? Both suicides are read as attempts to take power over death. And the phrase “taking power” must itself be taken in the strongest sense: what is taken back is being, being as will and destruction. However, whereas for the suicide bomber death is seen to be separate from the continuity of being, for the slave death reveals the non-being of being, a lack or nothingness. Accordingly, the suicide that does not recognize this power (of death) ends in annihilation, and the suicide that does becomes an expiation, a triumph because by separating death from non-being, it separates death from that will to nothingness that is somehow deeper in us than either life or death. These ontological arguments, in the context of what precedes them—histories of genocide and enslavement—tempt me to think that the true meaning of necropower is this categorial will to nothingness, and that the sovereign decision is thus divided between those who confront this will head-on (Mbembe’s words) and those who divert it into questions of possibility and agency. But is there another way of thinking about the suicide bomber and the slave in relation to sovereignty? Can one think of a suicide that is more sovereign than sovereignty precisely because it is less than sovereign? And how does the desire of the least, rather than the most sovereign, relate martyrdom to agency?

“In the logic of ‘martyrdom,’” Mbembe writes, “the will to die is fused with the willingness to take the enemy with you, that is, with closing the door on the possibility of life for everyone.”31 Mbembe, of course, is somewhat hesitant about treating the suicide bomber as a martyr, hence the scare quotes around the word martyrdom, but he does not exclude the word “sacrifice” when he writes: “The besieged body becomes a piece of metal whose function is, through sacrifice, to bring eternal life into being. The body duplicates itself and, in death, literally and metaphorically escapes the state of siege and occupation.”32 The word sacrifice here acquires a political as well as a sacred connotation (the suicide martyr does not only seek to kill the enemy, in brief, he also attempts to bring “eternal life into being” by deriving its essence from the sacramental exchange of blood in an interminable war on behalf of that community). Suicide bombings should not be understood simply as murder, as when modern militias massacre disposable populations in camps and zones of exception. For what is fleetingly revealed as the body literally transforms itself into a weapon: here “resistance and self-destruction are synonymous.”33 The word massacre, by contrast, solely defines the ways in which modern warfare and genocide reduce people to “empty, meaningless corporealities”; ways of killing, in short, that are purely instrumental and indiscriminate, and reject the politics of waging war and the traditional categories of state power and territory.34 Less instrumentally but just as murderously perhaps, the martyr’s sacrifice “reveals nothing” but a “subterfuge”;

these words, taken from Bataille, underpin the conviction that in the suicide’s sacrifice, the martyr “dies seeing himself die, and even, in some sense, through his own will, at one with the weapon of sacrifice.”35 Note here how sacrifice, at the level of martyrdom, is in the service of a disfiguration and restoration of body and will (a belief generally fed by the wish to no longer feel oppressed by the expectations and demands of finitude). If the enemy was once proudly seen as the limit of political life, now the enemy is generalized as the embodied limit of life itself. This is considered the defining shift in modern antagonism, wherein the state of exception and relations of enmity “have become the normative status of the right to kill.”36

In our present moment, the one thing that all critics seem to agree on about suicide martyrdom is that it is “the ultimate form of resistance” that, ironically, “acts as selfpreservation.”37 These words from Jasbir Puar’s Terrorist Assemblages (2007), also suggest that suicide martyrdom is “the giving of life to the future of political struggles”; a life given, moreover, from the “conditions of life’s impossibility”—in other words, revolutionary suicide makes the impossible manifest in political life as such.38 But what does the giving of life as self-sacrifice mean? The relationship between life and power is redemptive to the extent that suicide can still be determined as a representation, to the point where it can be politically affirmed as a symbol, which the community is affected by, insofar as it establishes or denies it. It follows that for suicide to become a political force, it has to be made real by representation. Political and historical realities demand it: our capacity for being affected demands that suicide should follow a mimetic model of sacrifice. As such Puar cites Gayatri Spivak stating that “there are no designated killees in suicide bombing . . . [and] there is no dishonor in such shared and innocent death.”39 But for whom is Spivak speaking? More, if there is no killee or victim in this shared aftermath, why does this imply a dying that is innocent, rather than an impossibility that is unknowable? Since there is no killee or victim, there is no murder, but also no resistance or possibility. All there is are bodies reduced to expressing the power of death as spectacle, in whose performance they are merely the passive semblants or effects. Such equivalence not only voids political life of value, but seems to equate innocence with redemption, with the result that sacrifice becomes even less capable of resolving human unfreedom or conferring on it any significance. Spivak’s formulation not only implies a death beyond any conceivable political order, and therefore beyond torment or struggle, it also cannot think revolutionary suicide without the notion of a nonreferential spectacle that belongs to no one, is for no one, for it is a shared apprenticeship in utter extremity. Death occurs here not as excess and scandal, but as a pure manifestation that precedes morality and self. This is why suicide is presented as the indefinite exchange of an impossible innocence. It is in this sense that Spivak, even without elaborating the concept of revolutionary suicide

All there is are bodies reduced to expressing the power of death as spectacle, in whose performance they are merely the passive semblants or effects.

or giving it its full significance, was already speaking as if suicide is the restorative, sovereign affect of power in which the fit between appropriation and sublation is seamless. Suicide can thus be witnessed and saved for representation because it is always judged to be a matter of feeling and sensibility rather than of will to power or justice. Perhaps this is why Bataille says that the philosophical concept of death can never escape the “obscene colonization of death” which is both its pathos and its ressentiment

Optimism is dead—it died of vanity.

— Charles V. Charles, "Optimism and Frustration in the American Negro"40

The vir of sacrifice. It strikes me that there are now two ways of thinking about black resistance: as capacity (liberal humanism) and as incapacity (Afropessimism). This disputatio takes the form (for me) of a meditation on resistance, i.e., whether blackness is that which is not or that which is. If blackness is the affirmation of a new covenant, despite all its wretchedness and slaughter, is that because its power is yet to be recognized as a singular and incomparable affirmation, or because that power is always beyond power, and this is the price paid for the revolutionary beyond its ethics? I have sought to underline how these two views on blackness are opposed. While a theory of resistance will not have necessary racially resistant consequences, Mbembe’s attempt to moralize resistance in its resistances can never lead to a black resistant truth. And just as Newton’s merit lies in trying to think resistance as black power, the whole dignity of his thought consists in the way it pursues its contrary reactive principle as the completely realized truth of blackness. Resistance is not heroism or freedom, nor sacrifice or redemption. All in all, resistance is not the sovereign chance of being. It is the fall that awaits every becoming, but a fall that cannot be rejoined to being without schism. On this particular point, Mbembe does not pursue the ambiguities of sovereign power as disintegration. In a strict sense, if we are all now simultaneously homines sacri, which is itself the measure of what necropower is defined against, it is precisely because our political fate is inextricable from the possibility that we could all end up butchered at a moment’s notice (by drones or war machines), and there is no way anymore of avoiding this extermination by any sacrificial appeal. Neither law nor mercy will save us, nor will technology if its “power” is always assumed to belong to prosthetic emnity. But how can human consciousness or its technicity be anything but reactive and defensive, if the prosthetic is itself what racial consciousness is defined against?41 Such arguments feel a lot like racial paranoia. That is, the question of technology is always about the racial limit that technology attempts to eradicate. But in this case, as they say, even paranoia has technical racist prostheses. Or perhaps we should say that denying the paranoia of technical life doesn’t make those racially “real fears” go away. Perhaps this is why Afropessimism is suspicious of the humanism of such arguments, because of the temptation to reify technology as the cure for racism while denying the racist means of obtaining this cure. Such arguments

offer us nothing else but an analogy between technique and extermination. Merely being suspicious of analogy could itself be dismissed as reification if it is not for something. Instead of analogy, Afropessimism takes seriously the idea that the slave is a nonsovereign relation to the world. As such, its relation to the world is not a matter of sensibilia (affect) or of alienation, but structured by an antagonism defined by racist incapacity. So what would an Afropessimist make of the Mbembe-Gilroy idea that the slave can only enter into being, or into representation, as a suicide? Can the socially dead even commit suicide? Is there something about turning racial slavery into a form of agency that simply repeats its incapacity in the form of critique?

Perhaps this is not the right question, or the right question cannot yet be put into words. Even though we would like to believe that as individuals we would have agency in the face of certain destruction, and in large part because this is what is meant by the assumption of possibility, what leaves me uneasy, or decidedly unconvinced, is the belief that 1) agency comes into being through sacrifice, and that 2) the unfree could ever sacrifice themselves sovereignly. It is not that we could never actively respond to what we believe is fated, or what we see is in need of liberating; but why presume that freedom is the telos of sovereignty rather than a will to nothingness? In putting myself to death, hence grasping the end of possibility as negation, why assume that this will is in any sense a plea for freedom, or could be resisted, or shares any complicity with a life-affirming martyrdom? What could possibly confirm in me the certainty thereof? On what basis could I assume that the desire for liberation (in extremis) is not the easiest and most complicit act of self-delusion or terror? And why this belief that those who are socially dead, and so never quite alive or dead, could redeem themselves by choosing to see themselves as free and resistant in death’s proximity?

What Newton’s contribution to that tradition allows us to see is that there is a (philosophical) mastery for whom blackness is always already mastered, and for whom there is no remedy for the remedial concept of sovereignty as such.

Unsurprisingly, when Newton represents mastery or slavery, he does so in the Nietzschean sense, i.e., as passive-active relations of value or force. Accordingly, he removes resistance from the law of ontology—he presents blackness as an anti-value to the precise extent that it troubles every “sovereign” relation of expenditure and resistance.

These two images of resistance appear to have little in common, and, in fact, that is the point. The first allows for sovereignty to emerge as non-knowledge (of what Bataille famously calls non-savoir); the second allows us to see how blackness is a displaced name for death itself and is nothing other than this, thus blackness is a name for nothing as such. As death, however, this n’est pas cannot be posited as nothing, for its oblivion offers

In putting myself to death, hence grasping the end of possibility as negation, why assume that this will is in any sense a plea for freedom, or could be resisted, or shares any complicity with a life-affirming martyrdom?

no consolation. And only in that sense can it be called resistant. As such, its predicament does not lie in non-savoir, the category of a loss without reserve, for its obliteration cannot be characterized as negation. More simply, blackness offers a death that cannot even be assigned the negation of meaning or sense, or its analogical value. Black social death is thus, beyond savoir, a name that is incapable of assuming the meaning of sacrifice, for it marks an effacement of the infinite pathos of sacrifice as “spiritual truth” (these words are Nancy’s), and its passing cannot be transposed as the mark or the sublation by which the finite must be sacrificed for sacrifice to accede to its own truth.42 Blackness is the name, in brief, by which being unnames and surrenders itself, and this is why it is also an absolute resistance to the philosophical idea and rhetoric of resistance. Why then is it repeatedly posed and deposed according to the (philosophical) language of sovereignty?

This is a very difficult question to answer. But let us consider an initial hypothesis. What Bataille refers to as sacrifice is not censored by virtue of the fact that it puts death to work, but rather the opposite: sacrifice cannot become sacrifice without immediacy, it cannot reproduce itself without immediacy, since immediacy is precisely what allows for the materialization of spirit, and without that materialization sacrifice cannot become philosophy. But in order to affirm itself as spirit, as sovereign, dialectics thereby renders immediacy “figurative,” that is to say, allegorical, slavish. This is why for Bataille sacrifice is “fascinating as light,” and why for Nancy sacrifice “cast[s] an obscure light.”43 Sacrifice (and its philosophy) cannot become or affirm itself without this presumption of finitude, with its eye-catching terror and effects. What, then, do we see when we look on sacrifice? And depending on where we look, is it possible to see anything beyond martyrs and victims, slaves and masters, that is to say, sacrificial spectacles permitting the (white) allegories of philosophy?

Going back to Mbembe’s assertion: the sacrifice that is expelled from the polis always returns to haunt the spaces of everyday life, because the power to decide who is disposable and who is not is equated with the racial distribution of death in which “the murderous functions of the state” can now operate with impunity against those deemed enemies, and against those considered dangerous, infectious, or simply expedient in their immediacy.44 It is not perhaps an accident that one of Mbembe’s ongoing concerns is how racial-ethnic difference has become the murderous limit of all sovereign possibility in the modern nation state. Expedited mass race murder does not bear witness to the demise of sacrifice but is the “most complete example of a state exercising the right to kill”; what biopower exposes is how the logic of exception has become separated from law and spirit and is no longer part of a sovereign decision.45 And yet, in the colony, as Mbembe also has pointed out, this separation was already in play. Mbembe cites Arendt’s infamous comment (in the Origins of Totalitarianism): “so that when European men massacred [natives] they somehow were not aware that they had committed murder.”46 This separation between awareness and massacre also renders sacrifice invalid, or pointless. Native life would seem to represent what is killable but not sacrificeable, what is posited as valueless life. Yet what is the lesson that Mbembe takes away from this? That there are some who live “in a state of injury,” and some who injure, who cause this injury.47 When

he says that injurious life persists, recreates itself, he reveals the limits of his humanism. He gives voice not to an affirmation beyond sovereignty, but to philosophy’s sovereign lament, not to revolutionary suicide as a force (of afformation) but to the moral sadness of those who have suffered “a horrifying experience, something alien beyond imagination or comprehension.”48 Resistance, as it is thought in Revolutionary Suicide, has nothing to do with imagination or empathy; such language can only reiterate (or reflect) a reactive thinking of black life. To feel that black suffering is something somehow beyond the limits of imagination is to still think black life as reducible to the whiteness of its representation, and so can only reiterate that reflection as the meaning of an antiblack negation.49 Mbembe is thus unable to bring into view the other of such positing, the other of philosophy that is always already there at the origin, namely the enslaved life that is also irredeemably withheld and that withholds itself from what human being makes possible, or racially knowable as such.

>> All “communication” participates in suicide and crime.

50

— Georges Bataille, On Nietzsche

Suicide: devoit or on doit? Let us say that, in philosophy, this caricature is always the slave’s desire. But is there another answer? To be liberated, not from suffering, but from will-less oblivion?

Just to be clear: this is not an acceptance or refusal of suicide. Nor is it an insistence on the freedom of decision. As if all one had to do was to say: yes, I accept all of this pain and anguish, now I know my nature and my existence. No. To renounce all obedience, all obligation, first of all, to existence, is the slave’s first resistant act. Everything else is mere hope or expediency.

>>

Before concluding, let’s just briefly sum up for a moment. The condemnation of suicide bombing in Mbembe originally involved two kinds of outrage: as outlined in “Necropolitics,” the suicide bombing was originally condemned for equating martyrdom and survival, and for making the body into a weapon of war against other bodies (guerre au corps-à-corps)—the idea that the martyr “clos[es] the door on the possibility of life for everyone.”51 Moreover, when he associates suicide martyrdom with the example of Palestine (but can Palestine ever be just an example?), Mbembe says that the besieged body represents sacrifice through transgression.

We must be careful not to invert the relations here. There is no doubt that sacrifice reveals, as Bataille says, nothing but its own subterfuge; for there to be a sacrifice it does not matter what the object says or does but what it is; mana in a word is the essence of sacrifice, but for sacrifice to be effective it has to become known as such. It has to be com-

municated, or acknowledged. The link between spectacle and knowledge thus relies on there being a representation, on whose assured repetition we can rely. What outrages Mbembe about the suicide bombing is that a death that seeks to go beyond representation has no expiatory dimension and so cannot be sublated. It is not related to the Hegelian paradigms of prestige or recognition. But these formulations and opinions seem to display a misunderstanding. If, on the one hand, suicide is an example of sacrifice, then the desire for eternity (for paradise) does indeed confer prestige and recognition; and natural death is not simply death but is itself an act of spiritual expiation and sublation. Indeed, one could read the decision to self-detonate as Spivak does: not as violence or as spiritualization, but as the negating innocence of negation.

Mbembe doesn’t pursue any of this: firstly, because to have value, suicide has to be seen as redemptive; and secondly, it must be recognized as morally innocent. Only in this sense can suicide be an instance of agency. But these formulations put into jeopardy Newton’s idea that suicide can also be life-affirming as an exception precisely because of its incapacity to posit and to mean. And precisely because no moral-theological lesson can be derived from it. One thing is certain: lying at the heart of Newton’s Nietzschean reading of suicide is the belief that the most life-affirming act could be the one that ends, not one’s life, but its racially contingent de-mediation. That, at least, is what Newton takes from Nietzsche, i.e., the belief that one’s suicide should not be done out of ressentiment, but from will to power; or, more precisely, from its afformation. And not because black suffering has no meaning, or a meaning beyond one’s control, but because a black affirmation should not be confused with self-preservation, salvation, or morality. How does revolutionary suicide perform black life-afformation? Not by willing life or negating it, nor by preserving life as life, but by an act of creative willing. It testifies not to a diminished life but to a life overflowing with deadly abundance. As such, it is able to perform a transvaluation. Everything that is done to that life cannot be done again. The hardest task is thus not to transform reaction into sovereignty, but to avoid trying to conserve the “nothing” as a reason for one’s self-destruction. Creative willing is to be understood here as the active destruction of everything that is reactive and life-denying up to and including the joy in destroying, which is also an affirmation, that is, the afformative power of negation. Hence the doctrine of eternal recurrence, which Nietzsche describes in Ecce Homo as “the highest formula of affirmation that is at all attainable,” a formula in which to will everything is to will nothing but the thought of affirmation. It is the affirmation of what is without meaning or telos, “but inevitably recurring, without any finale into nothingness,” which is also why this thought is also called “the most extreme form of nihilism.”52 Accordingly, the thought of death as consolation or as escape is dismissed as weakness, cowardice, or spitefulness. The subterfuge of the ascetic ideal is its sacrificial hope for a better life. Whereas suicide as life-afformation is what rebels against the ascetic ideal and all its conventions.

If resistance is a demand for black sovereign life, it is not a demand for presence or absence, whether manifested as chance or enmity.

If there is a resistant life, it is infinitely beyond our comprehension, since being resis-

tant, it bears no relation to our wishes or desires.

This being so, who would dare say to the slave that its suffering was meaningless and/ or transgressive? Certainly not we, who bear no relation to him. But this is precisely what the discourse of sovereignty presumes. And in response to which the only answer would be that I (as slave) can only affirm life as suffering, as a kind of infinite suffering, and only as such can it be affirmed or resisted as a form of meaningful eternity not to be endured as such. Rather the idea of life as interminable dying might well be the most compelling reason to end it.

With this in mind, let us therefore return to the text which gives this essay its title. In the epilogue to Revolutionary Suicide, Newton writes:

The difference [between revolutionary and reactive suicide] lies in hope and desire. By hoping and desiring, the revolutionary suicide chooses life; he is, in the words of Nietszche, “an arrow of longing for another shore.” Both suicides despise tyranny, but the revolutionary is both a great despiser and a great adorer who longs for another shore. The reactionary suicide must learn, as his brother the revolutionary has learned, that the desert is not a circle. It is a spiral. When we have passed through the desert, nothing will be the same.53

As this passage implies, there is no redemptive meaning to be found within black life. One cannot live this unlivable life—this desert—except by resisting it. If resistance is the power of turning death against itself, of negating reaction, that is because one cannot hold onto life as a possession or capacity. The reversal of reaction would be no reversal at all, but a reinstatement, without this absolute letting go. It is by confirming the wager (and not by escaping it) that black power answers the demand of will to power. This means that black power offers neither escape nor absolution but, on the contrary, is the endless elaboration of the resistance which arises out of reaction.

So let us say: resistance is the double negation of reaction and of being acted-upon. But to which view will we be inclined? Neither reason nor passion can decide the question. The movement of resistance, already a result of these pressures, separates us from the decidability of decision, the ability to decide. It is no wonder that Newton’s autobiography, with its endless accounts of trial and summary execution, shows how reaction and resistance are profoundly implicated in one another. It is also no wonder that he had great difficulty writing a black revolutionary life that could do justice to either position without reducing either to a logic of exception or enmity. The desert of reactionary suicide is a good example for the attempt to deny nihilism as the end of existence while knowing that any attempt at escape could always end with reactive nihilism. Which doesn’t mean that the reactive ending of life cannot be resistant to life in another sense. One must write with this life, from this life, writing for black life as life, but one must write knowing that the desert is not a circle—that is, an eternal recurrence that makes death as such meaningless—but a spiral in which hope and desire, despair and adoration, suicide and enmity are radically intermingled and indeterminate (whether they are understood as revolt or reaction).

The spiral thus describes a unicity of return and chance: the spiral is eternal and is

eternal because it spirals, for it does nothing but return. Thus blackness only occurs through its reactive recapitulations, since it is nothing other than the power by which its reactive modes occur. Hence there is only resistance in reaction, or according to reaction, and these are themselves reactions to resistance’s power, its trajectories and intuitions. And this is what leads Newton to conclude: revolutionary suicide is not an event, but a circling back, in which each turn takes account of a previous turn, and in whose collective movement every single moment resists and reacts to those spiral turnings that precede it.

Only in this way can one speak of an ethical “beyond” of resistance—that is to say, the arrow in whose infinite-finite arc chance assumes a chaotic order of thought as afformation. Now flight here is not a dialectical movement, but the infinite principle of its resistant mediacy and negation.

In any case, Newton does name revolutionary suicide as a life-affirming decision in the world. And nothing could be further from nihilism. The idea that eternal recurrence might be a counsel of resignation never occurs to him. Several times in the book in his attempts to outline the ideal of black revolutionary politics and leadership, he repeats an African proverb: “I am we—I, we, all of us are the one and the multitude.”54

I am we: as a definition of black community, this idea chimes with Newton’s other great Maoist idea of “intercommunalism,” according to which there is no being, everything is becoming; or that the one can only be affirmed as the being of becoming, the multiple.55 But note the two ways of thinking becoming here: that of the arrow (there is no being beyond becoming), and that of the spiral (no becoming beyond multiplicity); neither multiplicity or becoming are resistant or reactive in themselves nor do they enter into relation as means or ends. But neither are they conceived as singularities or multiplicities in which being, in turn, could be seen to escape its determination by constant change and transformation. Newton’s view of the party and of political leadership was thus one of afformation, the afformation that the multitude is itself one. Intercommmunalism would be (perhaps perpetually) not the disjunctive synthesis of desert and spiral, but rather the afformation of chance as the multiple itself. Multiple afformation is the way in which the one—the leader, community, or the party—affirms and resists itself by remaining nobody and nothing. There is no negativity in becoming here; no diminishment to be expiated or redeemed (Mbembe), no innocence that is deemed to be the truth of the multiple (Spivak). Nevertheless, there is an afformation of a figure-obliterating act as the being of that which becomes resistant through reactive repetition. Suicide is black being becoming itself, suicide is the law by which blackness abandons itself to multiplicity, and multiplicity returns to the one as the unity of reaction and resistance. We must understand the stakes of Newton’s Nietzschean interpretation: the notion that “I am we” depends entirely on the notion that only in being absolutely abandoned can life be afformed. Suicide afforms becoming and it afforms the being of becoming. So paradoxically it is Newton, not Mbembe, who takes suicide seriously in the world. Newton’s distaste for reactive nihilism does not exclude a sensitivity to its effects, which merely increases his desire to transform it. In fact, Revolutionary Suicide was written to defend his version of black revolutionary politics. And his vision of the Black Panthers as a party

of black life-afformation was inextricably connected to the figure of blackness as literally a crime of communication. Indeed, at the time of writing the book, Newton had personally witnessed countless members of the Black Panthers being condemned for the crime of being resistant: murdered for arming themselves, for defending the people against police brutality, for bursting the limits of antiblackness. Only by refusing blackness can one correspond to its resistance.

Yes, one must wager one’s singularity as if it were the multiple. There is no choice, you are already committed by the fact that singularity is the point where the multiple acts upon itself, and the multiple is the place where the singular is acted-upon in its irreducible resistance to reaction. Which will you choose then? Let us say: since a choice must be made, let us see which offers you the least resistance. You have two things to lose: life and enslavement. And two things to stake: your death and your will, your knowledge and your existence. Since you must necessarily choose, you are no more affronted by choosing one over the other. There is no rivalry over something which neither possesses—a life free from endless struggle and terror. But your suicide? Let us weigh up the gain and the loss involved in suicide-as-resisting: if you resist you resist everything (force, structure, order, law, ressentiment), if you lose you lose nothing but reactance. Which is why it is impossible to tell apart getting even from an even greater loss. But isn’t the wager itself an appropriation? And isn’t blackness ressentiment? This is why it matters that resistance is not a wager of life or its value. It is a drive: both arrow and desert. At the same time, it is a spiral, a turning, a repetition, that has to begin with what infinitely condemns it. Since there is equal gain and loss, the drive cannot resist itself as drive, and its force cannot be denied, only moralized as a means or end.

This is why there may be a deeper link between reaction and resistance than we have hitherto examined: if the former conserves, according to Bataille, the latter is the irresistible power for the black to expend itself, to follow its path, whether out of the desert or into the universal spiral, for one must choose and one cannot choose: such precisely is the limit of black ethics.

Let us say then: the drive to resist is irreducible to both its revolutionary affects and reactive affects, and this is the profound intuition of black power itself. Resistance cannot become a power without becoming a transcendent principle. This is what Newton means when he speaks of reaction, the tragedy of its suspect witnessing. To know how to transform reaction is to know that blackness is nothing other than resistance itself. But we do not yet know the power of affirming resistance because we mistake it for an end to be obtained rather than a n’est pas which can never be represented as such, because it resists resistance. Thus the extremely difficult axiom: blackness is the afformation that murders itself as resistant. It is the afformation of suicide as resistance. Only in this sense can one say that the one is the multiple. What this means is not at all that the multiple can only be affirmed as the one, but rather, the multiple is afformed as the one’s resistance to itself, beyond its consistency as one, its contingency and decision.

Suicide, for Newton, is thus affirmed as the moment when black revolutionary life somehow turns into not necessity (destiny) or ressentiment (slavery), but the reaction

of resistance itself. Again, if I can only know resistance as meaning or sense, then I no longer resist my death, since what is revealed to me, as model or object, can only speak to my enslavement. And, at the same time, to become a revolutionary subject I have to kill myself, kill myself in front of myself: the reactive other that I am no longer exists, has never been me, since I killed myself from the start, since I assimilated, consumed, incorporated him from the beginning. And precisely because I could not lend myself the certainty of being in favor of, let alone become capable of, resistance.

We must therefore attach the greatest importance to the following conclusion: suicide can never become sovereign to the precise extent that the one is the multitude and vice versa. This is where Mbembe’s notion of necropower paradoxically comes back in. In Newton’s case, the idea that politics has literally become murder, and sovereignty massacre, in ways that, by implication, exceed the meanings of enemy and exception as commonly understood by politics, is nothing new in American history. Black America has always experienced the duress of a besieged population. But what is new is the formulation of suicide as a logic—a language—by which the besieged body is made fateful, and not simply because it resists, but more because it is prepared to risk everything for that which it is not. And so it comes as no surprise that Mbembe should segue from a discussion of the suicide bomber to that of the slave (the latter is missing from Puar’s and Spivak’s accounts). No surprise, either, that he should directly assert that in slave-suicide one glimpses freedom and agency rather than innocence, futurity rather than history; an assertion that repeats Bataille’s reading of sacrifice as authenticity, but with a crucial difference: here the moment of death amounts to a refusal of social death, rather than the assumption of a “supreme virility” by which death “precisely makes possible all other possibilities.”56 The problem with this sacrificial conception of death as the “space where freedom and negation operate” is not the historical example of slaves killing themselves when cornered by slave catchers, but the fact that it arises from an emphasis on a subject willing to kill itself in order to preserve its futurity as a subject.57 A notion that is, broadly speaking, dialectical, which means that it remains, to all intents and purposes, servile, and therefore nonresistant. If being sovereign is to be found in suicide, one’s sovereignty does not exist, sovereignty does not exist, but cancels itself by the fact of being dead and is therefore never master even of its own death, even if this becomingdead is its only chance at redemption.

If being sovereign is to be found in suicide, one’s sovereignty does not exist, sovereignty does not exist, but cancels itself by the fact of being dead and is therefore never master even of its own death, even if this becoming-dead is its only chance at redemption.

One final comment. Although Newton’s reading of Nietzsche is enigmatically brief,58 what he takes from Nietzsche should therefore be understood as follows: To admit the thought that there is no resistance besides that of suicide and most certainly none that is not reactive raises a question that is no less startling to us—if one believes that the decision to end one’s life is not a decision against life but the only chance by which life can be won in its disappropriation, then it is most likely also the case that black life must expend itself in order to live, in the sense that it reveals an “is not” (n’est pas) that precedes one’s being. Whoever does not want to avail themselves of this possibility remains reactive, because they cannot free themselves from what blackness is not, and so are deconstituted by the thought of it.59 Resistance therefore leaves us with no choice: it is nothing but the meaning of black life’s resistance to itself. Without this resistance of life to its meaning and esteem as life, that is, without this black power, whose finite loss becomes an infinite chance of defiance and revolt, blackness would not have the assertive force that it does, and there would be no possibility of it becoming other to itself. Blackness has no being; but this “is not” does not mean a nullity or a nothing, but is the occurrence of an expense that withdraws itself from every consolation. This withdrawal—which Newton also characterizes as a refusal, as resistance, and, in Revolutionary Suicide, as community—belongs to the perduring structure of blackness itself, so that Newton can say that in blackness what is revealed is neither desert nor an arrow, origin or process, but that which remains withheld even as it releases itself in ever-multiple occurrences. And this resistance—insofar as it is simultaneously the resistance of resistance—must remain withdrawn from itself, that is, it must remain reactive.

In that it resists, the most revolutionary black subject is therefore first and foremost the most suicidal. We could even go so far as to say: black revolution is suicide and suicide is black revolution (suicide signifies here neither a means nor tactic of resistance à la Clausewitz, but a black asemia that refuses all orders of logos and logic, as well as the police states of being and ontology).60 Let us also remember that by representing black political death as the “not” of sacrifice, in the mode of an unpayable debt or inutilious expenditure, the black revolutionary subject also expends itself beyond representable capacity, including that of resistance. Therefore we must take care not to reduce revolutionary suicide to that of ego or spectacle or as driven by a logic of enmity and sacrifice. In reality, the black subject is nothing outside of the death wherein it consciously giveswithholds itself from itself; and the structure of black community cannot be a negativum or an abandoning, but a non-giving which is nonetheless a ot-one (a not-nothing), whose death, insofar as it frees itself, actually should be called the true and ultimate revolutionary suicide.61

What Newton reads in Nietzsche’s will to power is, then, this: that the best way to serve the community is to help it die well, to overcome its resistance to death, and to know itself through this suicide—the imperatives of that willing lead to the revolutionary effects of destruction, that is to say, to the most destructive acts of creation. By will-

ing its own death, the community gives the lie to life’s neutrality or universality. And in that imperative to die, it negates death and gives voice to the living—it affirms itself, not as life, but as will to power.

Here death ceases to be death, but rather every moment of life is lived as irremediable, in order to live it again as black power. Here there is no sacrifice of life to political community, but the realization that by giving up everything one receives back (absolutely, infinitely) the same. And the same as resistant. The alternate symbol of this ecstatic nihilism is black ressentiment which counters state violence with infinite mercy, or opposes niggers with guns to unarmed freedom marchers. Now Newton’s decision, as Minister of Defense, to place armed patrols in the community ought to be read as a political strategy first and foremost, but not because the gun was a means or an end, but because it transformed the lines of resistance as such—from finite self-destructive suffering to an infinite calculation that was inherently suicidal. The gun provided “reasons” (his word) not simply for defense, but so that people could see and know black power, and not mistake its courage for mere malice or egotistical posturing. Black power lives, but precisely for this reason, it cannot be given power as a datum or representation. It cannot come to presence without sacrificing its presencing, for blackness is nothing other than the power of its effacement, and, sensu stricto, it can only give (represent) itself as reactive. But can resistance be made into a law—a law of blackness—without sacrificing itself? By the same token, can resistance redeem itself as an argument for self-obliteration? As a finite gift of being? Can the resistant will as will (vouloir) be the same as the legislative will (Wille) of duty (on devoit) or obligation (on doit) without suiciding itself as the choice of resistance? Would this not also be evidence of a ressentiment, the return to law as origin?62 Newton indicates that the drama of blackness was not to appear before the law but signifies the ability to tell the law to go fuck itself. That, it would be useless to deny, is what Newton attempts to do in Revolutionary Suicide. Blackness as the lie, the malignant discord of law whose repeated death confirms the errancy of its legislation. And for whom the law of the world is absolute injustice. Yet it can be shown that this project is inherently self-subverting because its very starting point is not life or law but the desire for a kind of infinite withholding, that is nothing or n’est pas. But this figure is, at every moment, both absolutely resistant and beyond any attempt at resistance. In any case it is not something that anyone can simply choose to do nor merely avoid. What blackness resists then is this: that it does not resist, and before all else, that it does nothing but resist (itself) in its resistance.

Notes

1 Newton, Revolutionary Suicide, 359, 6.

2 With the word “afformation,” which here means an ellipsis that checks and interrupts any ipse, I show how resistance, in taking leave of itself, also resists itself, but not because it strives to be resistant. Suicidium thus resists rule and law, but not because of the violence of what it afforms. Rather, in revolutionary suicide there is a bold attempt to challenge the violence of the antiblack world; and in the nonviolence of its deposing there is nothing but an attempt to rouse the socially dead to justice (see Hamacher, “Afformative, Strike,” 1139).

3 “Killing oneself is a crime (a murder). It can also be regarded as a violation of one’s duty to other people” (Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, 176).

4 In John Singleton’s film Boyz n the Hood (1991), these two principles are shown to be intermingled.

5 See Marriott, “The Perfect Beauty of Black Death”; Marriott, Haunted Life, final chapter.

6 Compare Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1; Deleuze, Foucault; Derrida, Resistances of Psychoanalysis

7 On “afformation” see Hamacher, “Aforrmative, Strike.”

8 Newton, Revolutionary Suicide, 202.

–

11 Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law, 139–40. But, she adds, “to reduce the notion of ‘voluntary death’ to suicide, self-destruction, is to fail to hear the affirmation of the will in the idea of the voluntary, which may prevail in any ‘natural’ death” (140). But this goes against what Nietzsche himself says: the reason why will to power is irreducibly opposed to voluntarism is because it has either gone astray or is anxiously sought for, as an egoic desire, whereas it is nothing but the affect of unknowable, non-egoic drives. Suicide is the resistance of those drives in those alive enough to want to renounce them.

12 Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, and Other Writings, 210.

13 Caygill, “Philosophy and the Black Panthers,” 21. See also On Resistance, 164.

14 This question should not be confused with Jean Genet’s distinction between resistance and spectacle in his writings on the Black Panthers (see Genet, Prisoner of Love). On the relation between resistance and illegalism, Foucault, and the Black Panthers, see Vasquez, “Illegalist Foucault”; Heiner, “Foucault and the Black Panthers.”

15 The phrase means death at point-blank range or suicide by firearm (see Fanon, “Medicine and Colonialism”).

16 Whenever the phrase appears in Revolutionary Suicide, it is negated: this maybe because the phrase was used by Eldridge Cleaver, who is the great antagonist of the book. With reference to Fanon, Cleaver writes of a “racial death-wish” (Soul on Ice, 102–03).

9 Caygill, On Resistance, 163–64. See also Caygill, “Philosophy and the Black Panthers,” 10. For a brilliant reading of the limits of Caygill’s analysis, see Hallward, “Defiance or Emancipation?”

10 Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, and Other Writings, 210.

17 Shari’ati, Husayn Vãres-i-Adam, 207–08.

18 I will be referring mainly to: Erotism, The Accursed Share, Inner Experience, and On Nietzsche

19 The phrase “will to chance” is the subtitle of On Nietzsche

20 See Bataille, The Sacred Conspiracy

21 “To sacrifice is not to kill, but to abandon and to give” (Bataille, Theory of Religion, 48–9).

22 Bataille, “Hegel, Death, and Sacrifice,” 293.

23 Bataille, The Accursed Share, 256.

24 See Bataille, “Sacrifices,” 130–37.

25 Bataille, The Accursed Share, 198.

26 Bataille, 222.

27 This problem is also writ large in Jean-Luc Nancy’s 1991 essay “The Unsacrificeable.” Nancy’s attempt to shift the terms of debate from that of mimesis to that of singularity, from sacrifice to that of community, is part of a much larger debate on metaphysical fascism. However, my problem with his reading is as follows: in it the concept of the West remains metaphysical (as both end and origin) and the relation of sacrifice to modern biopolitics remains wholly ignorant of blackness.

28 Mbembe, “Necropolitics.” Due to constraints of space, my focus here will be solely on this 2003 essay and not on the later book, Necropolitics

29 Mbembe, 38.

30 Mbembe, 38.

31 Mbembe, 38.

32 Mbembe, 37.

33 Mbembe, 19.

34 Mbembe, 35.

35 Mbembe, 38.

36 Mbembe, 16.

37 Puar, Terrorist Assemblages, 216.

38 Puar, 216.

39 Spivak, cited in Puar, 218.

40 Charles, “Optimism and Frustration in the American Negro,” 270.

41 Mbembe’s decidedly odd arguments about race and technology can be found in Critique of Black Reason. For a critique of this “critique” see Marriott, “The Becoming Black of the World.”

42 Nancy, “The Unsacrificeable,” 24.

43 Nancy, 21, 25.

44 Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” 17, 27.

45 Mbembe, 17.

46 Arendt, cited in Mbembe, 24 (emphasis is mine). What is the relation between the outside and the beyond? Or, as Hannah Arendt puts it in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), a key text for Mbembe: in the colony, savage life was, in the eyes of the colonist, “a horrifying experience, something alien beyond imagination or comprehension” (cited in Mbembe, 24, emphases are mine). This is the paradox Arendt presents in similar terms when she suggests that the “horror [of the camps] can never be fully embraced by the imagination for the very reason that it stands outside of life and death” (cited in Mbembe, 12, emphases are mine). What is the difference between being outside and being beyond? Are they the same? Do they signify the same forms of exclusion? And is the being beyond, evoked here as the unimagined and unaware, simply to be understood as the racial limit of sovereignty? Although Mbembe doesn’t seem to notice it, I do think that the two words represent different possibilities that are at once racial—and hence political—in nature. It is just this Arendtian notion of a “beyond,” of a life that can never be fully embraced, that rhetorically performs what the theory of exception of the camps is meant to explain (a theory in which black life, unlike Jewish life, exists so far beyond the limits of imaginative sympathy that it becomes the “outside” that makes the outside of life and death both imaginable and comprehensible), and whose meaning is beyond relation as such.

47 Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” 21.

48 Mbembe, 24.

49 At the same time, I would suggest that the pursuit of freedom remains an ambiguous theme on which to understand the being of the slave— at least it risks falsification and wishful thinking. To argue for freedom as agency (that is to say, the belief that every human life ardently desires its freedom, or that freedom is immanent to human existence), is to confuse the appropriation of death, of death as theologized, with a people’s struggle for justice in the face of earthly dishonor. Why? Because if suicide is the act through which freedom and being become transcendent then their difference is already sacrificial. The act that separates me from myself (from myself as slave, thing, object) may be an escape from actual siege but there is no path here to transcendence or immanence, indeed, it might simply be the letting go of the unbearable, the impossible, a passive acceptance rather than an active contestation. But it is precisely because a sacrificial meaning is required here that there is no longer a basis for thinking freedom as an end. And this is precisely why Newton’s analysis of black revolutionary suicide calls this rhetoric out, as both a nihilism and a writing of consolation.

50 Bataille, “On Nietzsche,” 40.

51 Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” 37, 35.

52 Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 55.

53 Newton, Revolutionary Suicide, 613–14.

54 Newton, 613.

55 Newton, “Intercommunalism.”

56 Levinas, “Time and the Other,” 40.

57 Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” 39.

58 See Newton, “The Will to Power” and “Thoughts on the Will to Power.”

59 Or, as Nietzsche writes in the third essay of the Genealogy of Morality: “We stand before a discord that wants to be discordant, that enjoys itself in this suffering” (On the Genealogy of Morality, 86).

60 Compare Caygill, On Resistance, 15–23, on Clausewitz’s On War.

61 On the figure of the ot-one see Mariott, Lacan Noir, 19.

62 On the (Fanonian) relation between devoit and on doit see Hallward, “Defiance or emancipation?”, 31.

Works Cited

Bataille, Georges. Erotism: Death and Sensuality Translated by Mary Dalwood. San Francisco: City Lights, 1986.

———. “Hegel, Death, and Sacrifice.” In The Bataille Reader, edited by Fred Botting and Scott Wilson, 279–96. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1997.

———. Inner Experience. Translated by Stuart Kendall. New York: SUNY Press, 2014.

———. On Nietzsche. Translated by Stuart Kendall. New York: SUNY Press, 2015.

———. “Sacrifices.” In Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939, translated by Allan Stoekl, 130–37. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985.

———. The Accursed Share. Volumes II and III. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Zone Books, 1991.

———. Theory of Religion. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Zone Books, 1992.

Bataille, Georges, Roger Callois, Pierre Klossowski, and Michel Leiris. The Sacred Conspiracy: The Internal Papers of the Secret Society of Acéphale and Lectures to the College of Sociology. Edited by Marina Galleti and Alastair Brotchie. London: Atlas Press, 2018.

Caygill, Howard. On Resistance: A Philosophy of Defiance. London: Bloomsbury, 2013.

———. “Philosophy and the Black Panthers.” Radical Philosophy 179 (2013): 7–13.

Charles, Charles V. “Optimism and Frustration in the American Negro.” The Psychoanalytic Review 29 (1942): 270–99.

Cleaver, Eldridge. Soul on Ice. New York: McGraw Hill, 1968.

Deleuze, Gilles. Foucault. Translated by Sean Hand. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1988.

Derrida, Jacques. Resistances of Psychoanalysis. Translated by Pascale-Anne Brault. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998.

Fanon, Frantz. “Medicine and Colonialism.” In Studies in a Dying Colonialism, translated by Haakon Chevalier, 121–47. London: Earthscan Books, 1989.

Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: The Will to Knowledge. London: Penguin Books, 2008.

Genet, Jean. Prisoner of Love. Translated by Barbara Bray. New York: New York Review of Books, 2003.

Heiner, Brady. “Foucault and the Black Panthers.” City 11, no. 3 (2007): 313–56.

Hallward, Peter. “Defiance or Emancipation?” Radical Philosophy 183 (2014): 21–32.

Hamacher, Werner. “Aforrmative, Strike.” Cardozo L. Review 13, no. 4 (1991): 1133–58.

Kant, Immanuel. The Metaphysics of Morals. Translated by Mary Gregor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Levinas, Emmanuel. “Time and the Other.” In The Levinas Reader, translated by Sean Hand, 37–58. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989.

Marriott, David. Haunted Life. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007.

———. Lacan Noir: Lacan and Afro-Pessimism. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021.

———. “The Becoming Black of the World.” Radical Philosophy, 2, no. 2 (2018): 61–71.

———. “The Perfect Beauty of Black Death.” Los Angeles Review of Books, June 5, 2017. https:// thephilosophicalsalon.com/the-perfect-beauty-ofblack-death/

Mbembe, Achille. Critique of Black Reason. Translated by Laurent Dubois. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017.

———. “Necropolitics.” Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003): 1140.

Nancy, Jean-Luc. “The Unsacrificeable.” Translated by Richard Livingston. Yale French Studies 79 (1991): 20–38.

Newton, Huey P. “Intercommunalism: February 1971.” In The Huey P. Newton Reader, edited by David Hilliard and Donald Weise, 181–200. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2002.

———. Revolutionary Suicide. London: Penguin Books, 2009.

———. “The Will to Power: A Talk before the Southern California Counseling Center, May 20, 1972 (Draft).” Series 1, Subseries 5, Box 48, Folder 17. Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation Inc. Collection, Stanford University, Green Library Special Collections, June 2021. Transcript.

———. “Thoughts on the Will to Power” (1977–1978). Series 1, Subseries 4, Box 40, Folder 2–3. Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation Inc. Collection, Stanford University, Green Library Special Collections, June 2021.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morality Translated by Carol Diethe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

———. The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, and Other Writings. Edited by Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

———. The Will to Power. Translated by Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Collingdale. New York: Random House, 1968.

Puar, Jasbir. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017.

Rose, Gillian. Mourning Becomes the Law: Philosophy and Representation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Shari’ati, Ali. Husayn Vãres-i-Adam. Majmu’a-yi Asar (Collected Works) 19. Tehran: Qulam, 1982.

Vasquez, Delio. “Illegalist Foucault.” Theory & Event 23, no. 4 (2020), 935–72.

IMAGE:

WAVES AND CRESTS, 2019

Oil on linen

23 5/8 x 25 5/8 inches (canvas)

25 1/2 x 27 1/2" x 2 1/4" inches (framed)

© Lynette Yiadom-Boakye. Courtesy of the artist, Jack Shainman Gallery, New York and Corvi-Mora, London.

IMAGES >> LYNETTE YIADOM-BOAKYE

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s oil paintings focus on fictional figures that exist outside of specific times and places. In an interview with Nadine Rubin Nathan in the New York Times Magazine, Yiadom-Boakye described her compositions as “suggestions of people. . . . They don’t share our concerns or anxieties. They are somewhere else altogether.” This lack of a fixed narrative leaves her work open to the projected imagination of the viewer. Her paintings are rooted in traditional formal considerations such as line, color, and scale, and can be self-reflexive about the medium itself, but the subjects and the way in which the paint is handled is decidedly contemporary. Her predominantly black cast of characters often attracts attention. In an interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist in Kaleidoscope, she explained “People are tempted to politicize the fact that I paint black figures, and the complexity of this is an essential part of the work. But my starting point is always the language of painting itself and how that relates to the subject matter.”

Yiadom-Boakye was born in 1977 in London, where she is currently based. She attended Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, Falmouth College of Arts, and the Royal Academy Schools. She is the 2018 recipient of the Carnegie Prize, awarded for her contribution to the Carnegie International, 57th Edition. She was shortlisted for the 2013 Turner Prize.

Yiadom-Boakye has had many important solo museum shows, including an upcoming exhibition that will open at Tate Britain in London in 2020 that will travel to Guggenheim Bilbao, Spain. Most recently, her work was included in the inaugural Ghanaian pavilion at the Venice Biennale, and she had a solo exhibition at the Yale Center for British Art as part of the Hilton Als series.

She is included in numerous institutional collections, ranging from the Tate Collection in London to The Museum of Modern Art in New York. Within the past two years, her work has been added to the permanent collections of the Art Gallery Museum of Southern Australia, Adelaide; the Baltimore Museum of Art; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; the Dallas Museum of Art; the Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland; the Minneapolis Institute of Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and the Yale Center for British Art, Connecticut. Jack Shainman Gallery has represented Yiadom-Boakye since 2010 when she had her first solo show entitled Essays and Documents. Her most recent show with the gallery was In Lieu of a Louder Love in January 2019.

IMAGE: AN UNKINDNESS, 2019

Oil on linen

63 x 51 3/16 inches

© Lynette Yiadom-Boakye. Courtesy of the artist, Jack Shainman Gallery, New York and Corvi-Mora, London.

Website: https://jackshainman.com/ artists/lynette_yiadom_boakye

Founded in 1971, Diacritics publishes original work in and around critical theory, broadly conceived. Diacritics offers a forum for thinking about contradictions without resolutions; for following threads of contemporary criticism without embracing any particular school of thought. For Diacritics, eclecticism in the humanities means nurturing work that is transhistorical, creative, and rigorous.

Manuscripts should be prepared following The Chicago Manual of Style, 17th edition, with short-form endnotes and a list of works cited. Essays of between 8,000 and 10,000 words may be sent as an email attachment to diacritics@cornell.edu. Please include an abstract on the first page and remove any selfidentifying references. Our aim is to provide a formal response to authors within three to six months. We support innovative prose in scholarship and we especially encourage the long and sophisticated book review articles that have been the hallmark of Diacritics since its very beginning.

DIACRITICS

Department of Romance Studies

K161 Klarman Hall

Cornell University

Ithaca, New York 14853

http://www.diacriticsjournal.com

COVER:

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye

INTERSTELLAR, 2012

Oil on canvas 78 3/4 x 71 inches

© Lynette Yiadom-Boakye. Courtesy of the artist, Jack Shainman Gallery, New York and Corvi-Mora, London.