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Here is my Editor’s Note for the new issue of Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy. The issue includes essays:
Jacques Lezra on Badiou
Norman Swazo on Derrida and the refugee
James Dutton on Stiegler
Dan Cook on Levinas
And a book forum on Geo Maher’s new Anticolonial Eruptions, with Maher’s response to critics Begüm Adalet, Althea Rani Sircar, Anna Terwiel, Kevin Bruyneel, and Henry Aoki.
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Here is the pre-print of my essay “On the Fecundity of Small Places,” due out in a volume Africana Studies: Theoretical Futures, edited by Grant Farred. It’s a fantastic volume. I like this essay, which argues against privileging of translatability and transparency, embracing instead the opacity of vernacular culture and its sense of place.
Small places are fecund and speak back to empire and imperial notions with the assertion of place—the particularity and peculiarity of time, mem- ory, and space. “The land of our forefathers’ exile had been made, by that travail, our home,” as Baldwin puts it in “Princes and Powers.” In this quick, even offhand, yet transformative statement, Baldwin restarts a conversation about identity that effectively decenters and destructures the work of empire—even on questions of diaspora. The travail that makes home, that work and existential effort that reconfigures space across memorial and historical time, speaks back to empire by asking what sort of work empire has done to make land into home, a conventional, though always radical, insight drawn from the lordship and bondage chapter of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit: through his work, the bondsman captures a sense of identity that the lord cannot claim. Namely, a connection to place.
The decolonizing work here is worth noting. In theorizing the function of small places in cultural formation and the labors of identity making and world making, we move away from the long shadow of empire in languages of domination (eurocentrism, white nationalism, white identity and politics) and languages of liberation (diaspora, remnants of racial essentialism, nationalisms of all sorts), not to establish a new center or cluster of centers— the fantasy of reversed and inverted forms of nationalism), but to contest the idea of center itself. Small places do not refer to anything other than them- selves. This is the ethical and epistemological work of opacity. In that particular form of kath auto, as it were, every place is revealed to be a small place, and the very notion of a center or a pure culture is self-aggrandizing, chauvinistic mythmaking. We here arrive at one of Antonio Benítez-Rojo’s great insights from The Repeating Island—namely, that every culture is syncretic, there are no single roots, and what makes cultural production interesting is the dynamic of response to the component parts of syncretic work. And so in the wake of the decolonizing work of decentering, uprooting the explicit and implicit work of empire, we are returned again to the question of influence. small places are not atomistic sites or cultural entities. Rather, every site and cultural entity emerges from syncretic work in the past that, when calibrated for identity and nation formation, becomes singular, unique, and to some extent unifying. so how do we think about the dynamics of influence and confluence in a decolonizing register? Again, Glissant: the thought of tout-monde. Perhaps in a twist on his phrasing, recalling Derrida’s refrain tout autre est tout autre, we can say it: tout monde est tout-monde.
I actually don’t think the Rittenhouse verdict is more of the same. I think it’s something new that’s new because it revitalized something old. And, in that, in its own way, more of the same in the worst possible ways.
White Power, Free as Fuck (as his gesture and t-shirt put it).
More on that in a minute.
A frame:
If I can back up a bit – the scholar (and more) in me got frustrated when racial disparities in COVID-19 infections and deaths got described as necropolitics. That was biopolitics through and through, an almost boringly clear textbook example really, and the difference makes a difference. It’s a distinction that starts and structures Mbembe’s essay and each describes very different things. Necropolitics is not “that people die as a result” just as biopolitics is not “how people live.” In fact, it’s almost the opposite. And it’s not the case that “necropolitics” is about bad things and “biopolitics” is about less bad things. They are descriptive concepts, not adjectives, which for me is a really crucial thing. Biopolitical practices are not less terrifying than necropolitical practices, though the words definitely feel different.
This is not just a scholarly John fussy thing.
And you can just read Mbembe’s essay for the distinction and why it matters.
The reason the distinction matters (to me, but also generally) is because of the importance of the specific dynamic “necropolitics” describes: the production of a killable class that sustains, in tandem with the creation of a killing class, contemporary notions of sovereignty. If biopolitics is (at minimum) the management of who lives and how and under what conditions, then necropolitics is about the management of sovereignty around states of exception: who can be killed with impunity and whose sovereignty is made possible through the production of a killable population and the execution of fatal violence.
That’s what is at work in this fucking awful Rittenhouse case.
He’s white and murdered two white people, injured another. “Self-defense” is both a proper window into what’s going on, I think, and also not particularly clarifying.
What “self” was being defended? No one can seriously claim he was afraid he’d die. And his defense of self did not begin and end with getting knocked down and threatened with a skateboard. That’s the whole point and why the right (and most of white people in the U.S.) were obsessed with photos of him cleaning graffiti off the wall or some vague hand wave at protecting businesses. It was his personal, as a white person, and our nation’s very notion of sovereignty that was at stake in Kenosha’s (and all other) racial justice protest. Sovereignty was at stake *in principle*, not just (if at all) personally. That is – and this is a hard truth, I think – white sovereignty can’t survive the idea that Black lives matter. To make such lives matter is to contest the centerpieces of necropolitical practice: Black people are a killable population and exercising the right to do that killing, defending the right to do that when needed (the white political self of self-defense, defense of one’s state of exception) is imperative.
The fact that this double sense of self-defense worked and led to a finding of innocent on all charges is, in my view, the content of the trope “the legal system working as it was designed.” So, in that sense, I actually do think this is more of the same.
But he killed two white people and intended to kill a third. That’s a different sense of a killable population, a shift in the state of exception.
Something new, something old. It’s a plain case of the fear of racial contagion, that by simply being near or in some sympathy with the lives of Black people, white people are fundamentally changed. Not just holding different beliefs or opinions, but, more radically and as if by blood magic, becoming a different kind of person and citizen – contaminated, transformed, and now killable too. This is an old-fashioned race-traitor, *slur*-lover mentality by whites, retrieved no doubt out of the emerging anxiety around “white genocide” and other right-wing, increasingly white-mainstream, fears. I can’t remember ever seeing it so boldly articulated in public, in my lifetime.
This really has me re-thinking or re-assessing the ease with which our nation accepts the mass murder of school children. It’s like the demographic shifts in the nation – or at least white panic about those shifts, however real or mythical they are – have set in motion a deep, committed effort to expand the killable class in order to maintain our traditional sense of sovereignty no matter what. Perhaps those children became more and more disposable because of whatever the right called then what they now call “critical race theory.” A result is how the second amendment has become a full, unmediated icon: saturated with religious meaning, rendering completely insignificant those other things like speech, assembly, religion, the franchise…the list goes on and on. Sovereignty in a necropolitical order, period. Sustained by our god the second amendment. Nothing else.
It’s just more blood overflowing the already massive blood in our history’s streets. The other rising sea level: more and more bleeding to remain our very worst selves as a nation.
Here is the syllabus for my fall 2021 course on James Baldwin, which focuses exclusively on his non-fiction work. The course description is as follows:
This is a seminar on James Baldwin’s non-fiction, tracing his development of thought from early musings on Harlem, poverty, and racism to the late reflections on violence, antiblackness, and the compulsion of the United States to define itself through the abjection of Black life. We will trace this development through a set of distinct yet interconnected themes in Baldwin’s work: urban life, the problem of whiteness, his critique of Richard Wright, the meaning of African American language and culture, exile and home, and the complex intertwining of pessimism and hope.
This is a twist on a previous syllabus for a course on Baldwin, which had focused more on the 1956 Paris Congress and its implications for his work. My aim in this syllabus is to engage some of the same questions – namely, exile and Black identity – inside Baldwin’s work rather than in the wider context of the black Atlantic mid-century moment.
See syllabus: HERE
This is a really thoughtful and interesting review. I appreciate it so much because it engages with the possibilities of my book, but also asks some key questions – critical in formulation, though, honestly, I think they’re more a matter of clarification. It’s interesting to read readers. They find ways that your book might be significant (Miguel does that here in ways I so appreciate), and they find aspects that aren’t clear or remain under-articulated (he also does that in important ways). Super grateful for his thinkerly work in this piece.
I really wanted this Glissant book to have what, for me, is the feature of a genuinely good book: produce new horizons of research and thinking. In particular, I wanted the book to point to or suggest things for areas I can’t do with deep competence, namely, to draw Glissant’s thinking across the Atlantic to Africa as well as into the continental Americas and indigenous/borderlands thought. There is a lot there. I hope the book gets us somewhere that way, even a little bit. Philosophy is patient discourse. I believe in contributing to tiny steps. I’m thrilled Miguel thinks it helps take a step or two.
Two critical questions came up, though for me they feel more like points of under-clarification on my part. So, a word or two on that…
1. Miguel asks about the use of “we” in the book. Fair question. Part of the answer is that it’s a stylistic choice. I don’t like overly doing the proper name thing in writing, which means the “we” functions rhetorically. Boring response and not really the heart of the query. The substantial part of the question is much deeper and I gather the book isn’t clear enough on it. That answer has to do with the entanglements of colonialism, which is the preoccupation of my previous book and carries over into this one. The entanglement of colonialism is typically pitched as the anxiety of the colonized, who are tasked with thinking through and disentangling relations with colonial social, political, and cultural systems. But that goes both ways. The colonizer is also entangled with the same system. The “we” emerges here, and in my Glissant book the “we” refers to Atlantic theory – Europe and the Americas, in particular, and specifically in Glissant’s own work (he says so little about Africa…for real reasons) how that in between that is the site of anxiety, pain, and hegemony, but also creolization, transformation, and the new of the New World of the black Americas.
I think the review is right in that way, namely, that I supposed too much about the implied structure of Atlantic theory and how north/south collapse in Glissant’s thinking, not as a matter of sameness, but as a matter of chaos-monde, tout-monde, and the dynamics of creolization. The entire Atlantic world is in that “we.” The attributes I ascribe to the we – fixation on root-thinking, retrieval of the past, and so on – are not particularly stable or even possibly stable after Glissant. A good set of paragraphs at the outset would have helped make that clear. Miguel is right to raise that query. It did make me think about the specificity moment I missed, a moment missed that’s especially lol’poignant for a book essentially about specificity: in the intro, I should have used “Between Europe and the Black Americas” instead of “Between Europe and the Americas.” The entanglement, such as it is, between colonialism and the indigenous Americas or Africa is very different than entanglement with the black Americas. I covered this under the rubric of what’s “new” in “New World,” but some finer grained articulation would have elevated some insights.
Tl;dr, the “we” refers to Glissant’s understanding of Atlantic subjectivity and the entanglement structure of colonialism. A few sentences here and there would have made a difference in the book, I see that now.
2. This is related to the first, which is Miguel’s second critical issue raised: why read Glissant in relation to the thinkers I choose?
A first reply is that my own sensibility as a scholar is to read relations however you want, that’s what makes the book your book. It’s your book when you read from your best literacy. Unexpected critical confrontations produce new strands of scholarly debate. I definitely avoid, for better or worse, the self-reflection that describes motivations for decision. A style question, really, but this review reminds me that some clarity would help.
A second and substantial reply, then, would have to address Miguel’s deeper query about situating Glissant “in a tradition.” I actually didn’t want to do or imply that kind of thing at all. In fact, the opposite. It’s comparative studies work, work that in this case sets up contrasts to implied interlocutors – it is important to me that Glissant is carrying on decades long quiet debate with German and French critical theory, I wanted to excavate that – in order to expose the colonial presuppositions of that theory. I wanted to see how the position from which, say, Heidegger or Benjamin work is entangled in colonialism, and then to see how Glissant’s differentiation from and dis-assembly of that work clarifies the unicity of Caribbean history and memory. In other words, comparative work in an anti-colonial register. That anti-colonial register reframes how one might re-read Heidegger or Benjamin, but also, to the key point in the book, is a way to clarify Glissant’s own position. Out of that clarity one can then generate a sense of ÉG’s contributions to a whole host of theoretical debates on history, memory, trauma, and so on.
For me, this is completely different work than situating Glissant in a tradition. To what tradition does Glissant even belong? That’s a genuinely fascinating and not at all straightforward question to ask. Part of the book’s argument, and of my previous book on postcolonial theory too, is that Glissant belongs to the tradition of Atlantic theory and that, as such, he is an insurgent thinker who blows up both the European pretension to self-possession AND the colonial hangovers in Caribbean thought before him (Aimé Césaire, René Ménil, and Frantz Fanon, in particular). I hadn’t thought to clarify this particular feature of the book, but, as all good reviews do, I’m reminded of how some things remain a bit too implied at key points. Unfortunate in this case because it is something about which I care very deeply. It’s also a reminder of how with comparative work you can’t assume an understanding of what’s done in such a critical approach. What I wanted to do with comparative work and how that impacts our understanding of Glissant, as well as his place in Atlantic theory debates, emerges across the text. But telegraphing it, I now see, would have avoided some misunderstandings and made the book stronger.
The irony for me: I always warn my students about this in their essays and encourage a more deliberate introductory apparatus, along with purposefully threading elements together as you proceed. At the same time, I explicitly (to myself) wanted to write a less blueprinted, less telegraphed book this time around and engage in a more exploratory mode and with associative logic. Perhaps this is one of the costs of such an approach to writing.
All that said, I’m super grateful for Miguel as a present and future interlocutor. This is a thought-provoking review that underscores some bits in the book that need clarification, but, for me, more than that it underscores the utter complexity of thinking about the Americas and the Atlantic world more widely. There is no stable footing. There is no pre-prepared language for relation, Relation, and the cultural politics of all that. We who care about such things are making that language and setting (or unsettling) footing for future discourse. Glad to have Miguel as a companion traveler. Years to come talking about this, my friend. Books are short, life is long, and ideas are always trailing off into a future we can’t know.
I’m so happy the translation of Sortir de la grande nuit is out (with another essay included). This is probably my favorite of Mbembe‘s work. Coupled with the translation of Politiques de l’inimitié (Necropolitics) and of course Critique de la raison nègre, this is some of the most compelling work on decolonization … really glad this is all available now for people who do not read French.
I have to say, too, that Mbembe is the only writer to get me excitedly back to looking at Fanon, whatever very real and deep reservations I have about Fanon and Fanon scholarship. But I think what’s now Out of the Dark Night opens really new horizons, especially in the “Epilogue”:
The aim of anti colonialism was to create a new form of reality: emancipation from what was most intolerable and unbearable in colonialism, its dead force, and then the constitution of a subject who, at the origin, would first refer to itself – an, in referring first to itself, to its pure possibility and free apparition, would inevitably relate to the world, to others, to an Elsewhere.
…
The objective of the uprising was to be born into freedom. Its objective was to break the dead forces that limit the capacities for life. Becoming free was the equivalent of being by and for oneself, constituting oneself as a responsible human subject – before oneself, before others, and before nations. This is what I have referred to through this book as the politics of ascent into humanity.
There is so much here. It is a big, broad take on anticolonial struggle and the future of decolonial work, which follows from detailed and compelling analyses in all the pages that preceded – as well as the books that have preceded it, for sure. But what caught my eye in this moment is the turn to the ethical subject in formation, not just a romantic revolutionary subject that comes out of so much in Fanon scholarship or a kind of liberal fascination with self-assertion dressed up as revolutionary muscularity. Rather, Mbembe links the ascent into humanity as a distance, a distance that is something without real philosophical language, in which one is able to see self, other, nation as sites of responsible self-making instead of screens on which to project one’s self or the fantasies of what community and nation would look like. In other words, decolonial *becoming* that dispenses with narcissism and obsession with power in the name of being before self and others and community/nation as a responsible, responsive, and co-creative subject. In that way, I think the “Epilogue” to this new translation is my favorite part of the book. Mbembe steps directly into the space Fanon compels and opens up, but does so with a kind of humility and vulnerability that speaks to futurity on its own anxious terms: if we do not know what is to come after, we become in the after and make worlds there, or at least can possibly make worlds, in the mode and name of responsibility. The future is an ethical task.
I like this turn. It is immensely difficult space because it is a space to come (à-venir, avenir, the undeconstructable, etc.). But this is some of the most honest reckoning with space to come I’ve read. I know this book will get eyes on it. And I’m so happy about that.
Here is a final draft version of the syllabus for my S’21 course “Imagining ‘the Americas.'” The course engages the question of how conquest and the Middle Passage haunt the memory and history of the hemisphere, infusing our language of self, other, and community and the pathologies and fecundities of cultural production. Our assertion is a plain fact: “the Americas” is a phrase synonymous with trauma and loss. Conquest and the Middle Passage are originary events that set in motion particular, peculiar, and site-specific notions of memory and history. How to understand these origins and their ghosts is explored through critical essays, polemics, poetry, film, and novels that blend fiction and imaginative history.
Here is a draft of a new essay on the afropostmodern, in which I refer to parts of Jean-François Lyotard’s work in order to frame a sense of the postmodern turn in afro-Caribbean theory. (It is for a volume on Lyotard’s legacy.) I argue that the language of metanarrative and differend underscores important features of the afropostmodern – namely, in the work of Édouard Glissant and Derek Walcott – around the fecundity of contradiction and paradox. A snippet:
And if we return to Lyotard, this site of modernity/postmodernity offers a twist on the story of the postmodern and the differend, shifting from the consequences of Lyotard’s conceptions, in which anti-state and anti-imperial agitation works against the violence of modernity in our moment, and toward a notion of the afropostmodern as an originary interruption, disruption, and contestation of modernity’s violence in the very moment of its inception. The question, then, is not simply how postmodern strategies mitigate and disrupt conventional forms of violence, but also how dating or periodizing the postmodern in the moment of modernity’s emergence reveals an alternative mode of thought in the shadows of Europe’s worst excess. Further, when we see this sort of emergence-at-origin, we catch sight of something utterly compelling and revolutionary: the creation of worlds-becoming that work with fragments, work without strategies of legitimation, and therefore work without what Lyotard calls the fantasied “universal genre of discourse” that regulates difference. I am thinking here of the opening pages of The Differend in which Lyotard sets out the problem: “Given 1) the impossibility of avoiding conflicts (the impossibility of indifference) and 2) the absence of a universal genre of discourse to regulate them (or, if you prefer, the inevitable partiality of the judge): to find, if not what can legitimate judgement (the ‘good’ linkage), then at least how to save the honor of thinking.” (The Differend, xii) Thinking becomes, in the afropostmodern, a thinking of becoming – but always a becoming without reference to a possible being that stabilizes. Glissant, for that reason, characterizes Relation, his term for afropostmodern thinking, as rhizomatic and (on the model of theoretical physics) chaotic. Nomadic without the desire to set up a final or single root. A Deleuzean term, but one adopted in response to the demands of thinking in the wake of the failure of metanarratives of race, origin, or political principles to negotiate and neutralize contradiction, paradox – the threats to the modern order and its authoritarian impulses.
for.Citing and Siting the Postmodern – Lyotard and the Black Atlantic
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