Black Hospitality: A Theoretical Framework for Black Ethical Life [1st ed. 2022] 3030952541, 9783030952549

Table of contents :
Acknowledgments
Contents
Chapter 1: Introduction: Black Ethical Life
I. The Question/Problem of Ethics
II. Black Ethical Life
III. Three Vignettes of Black Hospitality: Charleston, Sandra, Eric
IV. Chapter Summaries
References
Chapter 2: Extra-ordinary Black Vulnerability
I. Introduction
II. The General Economy of White Supremacy and Extra-ordinary Black Vulnerability
III. Black Vulnerability and ‘Social Death’
IV. Beyond the Material to the Unconscious
V. Paradigmatic Policing
VI. Conclusion: The Political and the Ethical
References
Chapter 3: The Black Home as Black Social Space/Time
I. Introduction
II. The Unthought, the Dispossessed: No Home, No Domesticity
III. Fred Moten and Blackness: Unsettling Foundations of the Black Home
IV. The Black Home
a. Celebration
b. Homeless or the Black Home?
c. The Black Home in Beyoncé’s “Lemonade”
V. Conclusion: Sunset at the Threshold
References
Chapter 4: Black Hospitality
I. Introduction
II. The Negro as Problem for Thought: Aporetic Blackness
III. Derrida, Hospitality, Blackness
a. The Vulnerable Host
b. The Impossibility of Black Hospitality or Transgression at the Threshold
c. Black Sociality as Self-interruption
IV. Conclusion: Black Hospitality and Moral Decadence
References
Chapter 5: Barbarism and Beloved
I. Introduction
II. Beloved as Black Hospitality or the Barbarism of Black Art
III. Black Hospitality in Beloved
a. Extra-Ordinary Vulnerability
IV. The Black Home … 124 Bluestone Road
a. The Space/Time of Beloved
V. Barbaric Black Hospitality
References
Chapter 6: An Epilogue on Friendship
References
Index

Citation preview

Black Hospitality A Theoretical Framework for Black Ethical Life

Mukasa Mubirumusoke

Black Hospitality

Mukasa Mubirumusoke

Black Hospitality A Theoretical Framework for Black Ethical Life

Mukasa Mubirumusoke Intercollegiate Department of Africana Studies Claremont McKenna College Claremont, CA, USA

ISBN 978-3-030-95254-9    ISBN 978-3-030-95255-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95255-6 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

For Mummy and Taata

Acknowledgments

With all indebtedness, I would like to thank: Mummy, Taata, Birungi, Nansubuga, Mutebi, Winnie, Jed, Nsaba, Kaaya, Jamie, Zach, Carlington, Esperanza, Imani. Cynthia Willett, Sean Meighoo, George Yancy, John Lysaker, Melvin Rogers, Geoff Bennington. Osman (editor), Jordan (editor), Toshia (and family), Mont, Dan, Pete, Taylor (and family), Skateboarding, Fletcher, Carter, Perry Hall (and family), JCal, Jose, Laybold, David Ellis, Chole, Ben, Taryn, Danielle, Haylee, BSC, Aaron, Roshni, Jordan, Taina, Lilly, Isaac. Scotty (and family), Ben, Alex, Zach, Bren, Nietzsche, Books, Strand, Coyne, Malek, Prof. Griffin, Kalpana, Shoshone, Eastern Boarder, No Comply, Hogan (and family), Music, Freezy, Max, Travis, Angelica, Katie, Maria, Justin. Shiela Walker, Maryan Soliman, Derik Smith, all of: Africana @ CMC, Philosophy @ CMC, Philosophy @ Grinnell, Philosophy @ Emory, Philosophy @ Boston College, Philosophy @ Occidental. The students, all of them. The external reviewers and the editors at Palgrave. Thanks again, your friend.

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Contents

1 Introduction: Black Ethical Life  1 I. The Question/Problem of Ethics   1 II. Black Ethical Life   7 III. Three Vignettes of Black Hospitality: Charleston, Sandra, Eric  15 IV. Chapter Summaries  25 References  30 2 Extra-ordinary Black Vulnerability 33 I. Introduction  33 II. The General Economy of White Supremacy and Extra-­ ordinary Black Vulnerability  40 III. Black Vulnerability and ‘Social Death’  45 IV. Beyond the Material to the Unconscious  53 V. Paradigmatic Policing  60 VI. Conclusion: The Political and the Ethical  66 References  71 3 The Black Home as Black Social Space/Time 75 I. Introduction  75 II. The Unthought, the Dispossessed: No Home, No Domesticity  79 III. Fred Moten and Blackness: Unsettling Foundations of the Black Home  93 IV. The Black Home 105 a. Celebration 105 ix

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b. Homeless or the Black Home? 107 c. The Black Home in Beyoncé’s “Lemonade” 118 V. Conclusion: Sunset at the Threshold 131 References 140 4 Black Hospitality143 I. Introduction 144 II. The Negro as Problem for Thought: Aporetic Blackness 149 III. Derrida, Hospitality, Blackness 157 a. The Vulnerable Host 159 b. The Impossibility of Black Hospitality or Transgression at the Threshold 165 c. Black Sociality as Self-interruption 174 IV. Conclusion: Black Hospitality and Moral Decadence 176 References 180 5 Barbarism and Beloved183 I. Introduction 183 II. Beloved as Black Hospitality or the Barbarism of Black Art 185 III. Black Hospitality in Beloved 193 a. Extra-Ordinary Vulnerability 193 IV. The Black Home … 124 Bluestone Road 196 a. The Space/Time of Beloved 197 V. Barbaric Black Hospitality 208 References 212 6 An Epilogue on Friendship215 References 218 Index219

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Black Ethical Life

… we lose any hint or suggestions of a dimension of ethics … (Spillers, 2003) —Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book”

I. The Question/Problem of Ethics The twenty-first century has been revolting. The proliferation of videos and firsthand accounts of black death, harassment, and violation at the hands of police officers and unofficially deputized citizens, the reverberating consequences of mass incarceration, steady material disparities sharpened by the 2008 housing crash, food deserts, low employment, fear, and disenchantment. All revolting. Revolting was also the response: mass protest against police violence, demands for abolition, rejection of colorblindness, advocacy for black people to live freely in all their magnificent diversity. Revolt belongs most properly to a lexicon of the political and, for intuitive reasons, politics has been the arena in which demands for justice, transformation, and recompense have been asserted. New laws, committees, politicians, administrations, structures, the whole entire racial imagination has taken for granted the experience and demands of the political arena to finally seek justice—or argue for its impossibility—for the systematic degradation of black life. This focus on politics extends beyond the © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Mubirumusoke, Black Hospitality, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95255-6_1

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tireless effort of people on the ground to a great number of groundbreaking academic work in philosophy, sociology, psychology, and black studies writ large, continuing a long tradition of interrogating the Negro question. This is all to say that, whether implicitly or explicitly, politics and political ontology more broadly have framed the discourse of black life as black struggle. Political ontology is the study of the fundamental being of the political, as opposed to discussions of party politics or specific policies, and as such it speaks to who—and also ‘what’ I suppose, more on this later— fundamentally constitutes a being within political discourse. Since Aristotle, political ontology has been seen as answering the question of who qualifies as fully human, and since the age of Enlightenment that question has been adjusted to qualify who bears fundamental rights as human. Starting around the latter period, however, the question of who is human and who bears these rights only gains full perspective when one considers the colonial and imperial conquests of the European nations. While not mentioned by name, the practice of chattel slavery, which will evolve into the Negro question, envelops the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution and behind the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen is the Haitian revolution. This is to say, the political ontology forming around the time of the Enlightenment has been tasked to answer more specifically, although not in so many words, “what is the political ontology that have rendered black people to the status and position they occupy during this period of European colonial conquest and racial enslavement?” According to a groundbreaking and foundational essay published in 1987 by Hortense Spillers titled “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” the answer to this question of the ontological status of black people has been answered: black people in the paradigm of antiblackness are rendered fungible objects. The effects of this essay are unquantifiable, which is somewhat ironic since it has solidified—not for the first time, but definitely without comparison in terms of influence for contemporary black studies—an account of black people, starting from the Middle Passage, as quantifiable objects. In addition to canonizing concepts and terms such as ‘captive bodies’, ‘flesh’, and ‘ungendered’ within black studies, the myriad of ways Spillers articulates the object, as opposed to human, status of blackness is breathtaking. Her archival dexterity is on full display as she begins constructing an in-depth analysis stretching from the slave trade to the twentieth century, using Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s report on the Negro Family to initiate the study and moving through

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familiar and not-so-familiar sources, from Life of Olaudah Equiano and Incidents of a Slave Girl to Gomes Eannes de Azurara’s Chronical of the Discovery and the Conquest of Guinea, 1441–1448 and the studies of the slave codes by abolitionist William Goodell. The epigraph to this introduction is actually Spiller’s response to Goodell’s citation of an advertisement for slaves for use in medical experimentation from the Charleston Mercury in 1838. In this passage Spillers gives a vivid account of black objectification while, as an aside, she simultaneously marks a precise edge to the disciplinary and experiential scope of discussing black people. Here is the passage at length: This profitable ‘atomizing’ of the captive body provides another angle on the divided flesh: we lose any hint or suggestion of a dimension of ethics, of relatedness between human personality and another, between human personality and cultural institutions. To that extent, the procedures adopted for the captive flesh demarcates a total objectification, as the entire captive community becomes a living laboratory. (Spillers 2003, 208)

The loss of “any hint or suggestion of a dimension of ethics” follows from the “total objectification” of black people as captive “bodies, “flesh” or “community.” And while advertisements of that sort would be impossible—one would hope—in contemporary times, we know its metaphysical framework has persisted throughout history, from the practices of the ‘father of gynecology’, J.  Marion Sims, on enslaved women, to the Tuskegee Syphilis Study and moreover to contemporary studies finding that even modern medical practitioners believe black people have a higher threshold of pain. Spiller’s observations and argument give form to a political ontology where black people are libidinal and material resources for white supremacy. From the position of this political ontology ethics is questionable at least. There is no ethical logic to an engagement with black people; there can be no discussion of moral worth or dignity, of ethical responsibility or moral maxims, within this framework. Over 30 years after the publication of “Mama’s Baby,” Frank Wilderson III picks up on this constitutive exclusion from the dimension of ethics in his book Red, White, and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S.  Antagonisms. One could say the significance of its influence is made evident by the fact that the title of the introduction is “Unspeakable Ethics.” He suggests at the beginning of the introduction that while the political ontology of the United States is fundamentally and undeniably unethical, it also rests on a ‘grammar’ of

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antagonisms, that is, irreconcilable racial positionalities, and as a form of grammar, we learn from linguistics that “our grammar goes unspoken. Our grammar is assumed … Likewise, the grammar of political ethics … is also unspoken” (Wilderson III 2010, 5). The grammar of the US political ethics, therefore, goes unspoken necessarily, since it is, metaphorically, the air we breathe. However, it is the other sense of unspeakable, as in unimaginably horrific, that Wilderson wants to really resonate with the reader. The United States rests on a political ontology that renders black people objects, i.e., openly vulnerable to unmediated violence, and therefore  is  fundamentally unethical or offers  an ethics that is unspeakable. In Wilderson’s analysis of this political ontology, freedom—a fundamental component of subjectivity—becomes interesting, since freedom is currently reserved for the human and, specifically human’s capacity to eschew contingent relations of subordination. This is not a robust freedom, since it relies on parasitic relations to define itself. Modern freedom is always a ‘free from’ this identity or that identity, but most fundamentally freedom is being free from blackness. Achieving a freedom no longer contingent on relations to blackness, achieving a true unmediated freedom or, as Wilderson explains, “allowing the notion of freedom to attain the ethical purity of its ontological status”, to attain this status of freedom, he continues, “one would have to lose one’s Human coordinates and become black. Which it to say one would have to die” (Wilderson III 2010, 23). On this account, Wilderson is proposing the only true ethics, an avowable ethics, that is, one which is not fundamentally or paradigmatically unethical, stems not from the position of whiteness, that is, the ‘human’, but occurs after blackness, that is, the slave. This ‘ethical purity’ would require escaping completely from the ruling political ontology of the human and its limited parasitic concept of ‘freedom from’, for example, freedom from patriarchy or freedom from alienation, and so on, and embracing a black political imagination that starts with a ‘gratuitous freedom’ from all limiting conceptual frameworks of modernity, for example, “freedom from the world, freedom from humanity, freedom from everyone (including one’s Black self)” (Wilderson III 2010, 23). This project takes up the question of the unethical by challenging the politico-ontological reduction of blackness to the object that subtends Wilderson’s largely persuasive afro-pessimist position. In contrast to

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Wilderson’s radical abolition and an ethics beyond the human that must await the ‘end of the world’, Black Hospitality argues that an ethics is discernable in as much as blackness always already escapes the hold of political ontology by means of a paraontological fugitive sociality. Paraontology refers to an ontological status that is not rooted in a metaphysics of presence or non-contradiction; it ‘escapes’ traditional ontology, which takes for granted that being or a being is always stable, reified, and fully knowable. Blackness as paraontological and black people’s relation to blackness allows for a conception of fugitive sociality whereby black people’s status as a passive object is challenged. Both paraontology and fugitive black sociality can be framed within modern political ontology but are not beholden to the rigid parameters of that political ontology because they contain attributes that resist objectification as objectification, or escape a reduction of such objectification, hence ‘fugitive’, in ways not explored by Wilderson. This account of blackness—inspired by the works of Fred Moten primarily, but also Nahum Chandler, C. Riley Snorton, and a host of others—fits within a structure of ethics that builds from Jacques Derrida’s impossible hospitality. Paraontological fugitive blackness is not the irreconcilable opposite of whiteness in the vein of Carl Schmitt’s friend/enemy distinction, but instead challenges this Manichean framing of purity and pathology with a conception of a criminal blackness that escapes ontological determination through a social indeterminacy that is always out of reach. The crime of antiblackness in its arresting subjugation of black people is made all the more legible by the criminal escape of blackness from political ontology and the scarred sociality the abides in its wake. In other words, the pathology of blackness that has demanded reiterative conceptual and tactile violence against black people is not characterized exclusively by submission, but also by the way blackness always seems to escape its circumscribed ontological limits, or more precisely escape ontological limitation altogether. All-together, another way of saying black sociality, describes the movement of blackness—a black social movement—by means of a relation to otherness that refuses to go unheard and unfelt despite it never quite ‘being’ anything at all. It can also be described as an intimacy that contests the strident metaphysical stratification of beings and the liberal politics of individuality. To be sure, black social fugitive escape is not the gratuitous freedom from the human that the likes of Wilderson demands—and I am ultimately in agreement with these demands in some possible future, some

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different political cosmology—at least not entirely, but it does illuminate how blackness always maintains itself by the very nature of its ‘not-quitebeing’, by its paraontological stature that problematizes ontology in the direst of non-human conditions. These dire conditions are often thought of and brought to us through the lens of the political. The news reports black death through a constant stream of devastating images, sound bites, empty analysis, and overfull tears. Pleas are made to our politicians to arrest, punish, or just acknowledge crimes against black people as crimes against humanity, and while black people react in various ways to the always insufficient responses and demands for accountability within the familiar terms and policies of our everyday political life, for example, ‘arrest him’, ‘fire her’, ‘reprimand them’, ‘vote blue’, ‘vote green’, ‘don’t bother voting’, the political ontology of white supremacy remains unscathed if not emboldened. Black hospitality asks, how might we imagine these same situations not exclusively from the political but from the ethical, specifically using the rubric of an impossible hospitality. The structure of Jacques Derrida’s impossible hospitality is appealing because it can account for two familiar qualities of blackness: vulnerability and generosity. Following from a modern antiblack political ontology, black people remain unimaginably vulnerable to the whims of others, this is a direct effect of their objectification. Their open vulnerability is a manifestation of their subordination to the order of whiteness; it is that which fortifies the (white) human materially, but primarily libidinally. The openness of blackness can also characterize a generosity; that is, black people are expected to be open to their subjugation but also generally open or porous in their constitution, to be generous with their welcoming of others—and they are—meanwhile any action or inaction can be read as violation of the way things are supposed to be, the way black people are supposed to act. In other words, blacks are expected and constituted as hospitable (vulnerable and generous), and yet in practice they are always already presumed to be hostile. Derrida’s account of hospitality finds these contradictory conditions to be essential to its structure. It pivots around an essential aporia whereby any proper ethics is not decided by autonomous individuals and their ability to rationally derive maxims, calculate happiness, or prudently apply virtues, but instead is an impossible response, a responsibility to the other through an unmediated welcoming. Derrida’s hospitality is aporetic in

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that its possibility involves a structural impossibility, as opposed to irreconcilable antagonism; it positions the host, that is, the ethical actor, to be completely open to the other, to the point of being completely vulnerable and generous, without hesitation or reserve; however, the practical application of such generosity from this position of vulnerability is actually impossible, since any gesture of welcoming necessarily implies a mediation of that generosity and thus is not completely open. Even a ‘hello’, ‘come in’, or ‘good evening officer’ violates the standards of complete openness, since they imply a condition on that welcoming— for example, a condition of acknowledgment by the other, the guest—and thus said hospitality is also a hostility. This ethics, therefore, is im-possible. Black Hospitality argues that this structure of ‘im-possibility’ characterizes black ethical life specifically. The problem of an im-possible black ethics is the response to the question of the possibility of an ethics in white supremacy. This is a departure from other readings of Derrida, including some of his own, which suggest that marginalized people are not the ‘hosts’ of ethical experience in modernity, but they are the guest, that is, the other. For Derrida it is often the immigrant other who is attempting to gain access to the host’s abode, such as the United States or Europe. Black hospitality, however, argues that the paraontological sociality of blackness actually situates black people in the position of the vulnerable host, whereby their ethical demands are simultaneously made legible and impossible by their political circumscription. Nevertheless, blackness perseveres, escapes its circumstances and circumscriptions, through an ethical responsibility and impossible welcoming of the totalizing other of antiblackness from the black social other within, that is, the excesses of blackness that escape identity. This black sociality of ‘the other within’ opens a crack in the world that black people are metaphysically beholden to and paraontologically may escape from, if only for a moment.

II. Black Ethical Life Another name for this triad of the political, the social, and the ethical is black ethical life. This is a play on Georg W. F. Hegel’s conception of ethical life [Sittlichkeit] as elaborated in The Philosophy of Right. While it is difficult to suggest many continental philosopher have dealt with blackness sufficiently, including Derrida, it may seem particularly cynical to use a

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term introduced by Hegel, who infamously argues that the inhabitants of black Africa are outside of humanity, outside of reason, and thus without dignity. So much so, in fact, their enslavement would be the only means of even approximating humanity and freedom (Although there is good reason to be skeptical that even this pathetic conciliation was sincere) (Hegel 2001, 116–117). However, this position of blackness outside of the human, outside of the rational movement of Geist where the subjective will is reconciled with the objective march of rationality through the sublation [Aufhebung] to a higher truth, which is to say, Hegel’s seemingly rational justification of black subordination and gratuitous violence leads to the precise intervention that I am arguing black ethical life serves within the ultimately unethical structure of white humanity as political ontology. Black people’s incapacity to realize objective universals, their ambivalence to the ‘Law’ and the “universality of [their] essential being,” their “wild and untamed state,” their “perfect contempt for humanity,” and the fact that “there is nothing harmonious with humanity to be found in [their] type of character” outlines the characteristics of a paraontological blackness that disrupts the human paradigm (Hegel 2001, 113). Indeed, black people must have ‘perfect contempt for humanity’, but this contempt does not stem merely from a rational or moral deficiency as Hegel suggests. Blackness, “enveloped in the dark mantle of Night,” (Hegel 2001, 109) illuminates the extra-ethical perspective of an injustice that transgresses the enlightenment’s stronghold upon reason and humanity. Hegel struggles to keep this injustice of slavery at bay, or at sea if you will. His trepidation is evident by the abrupt conclusion to his reflections on Africa: “we leave Africa, not to mention it again” (Hegel 2001, 117). This statement, which is nothing short than a reiteration of Wilderson’s understanding of the unspeakable, attempts to quickly close the door on the previous reflections that justify slavery where he argues it is a means for black people to come to into maturity through interaction with Europeans. He then writes, “Slavery is in and for itself injustice, for the essence of humanity is Freedom; but for this man must be matured. The gradual abolition of slavery is therefore wiser and more equitable than its sudden removal” (Hegel 2001, 119). Black people cannot come to maturity on their own and therefore should not be ‘given’ freedom ‘suddenly’, through immediate abolition, or God forbid pursue it through revolution, but it should be achieved through the ‘wisdom’ of ‘gradual abolition’ determined by the very people who are responsible for their enslavement. One can only imagine how gradual Hegel imagines this process to be or if it is

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ever even meant to be achieved at all. Andrea Chu Long suggests that this process of abolition belongs to a bad infinity as opposed to a virtuous one (Long Chu 2018, 424) and Darell Mollendorf justifies his skepticism of Hegel’s  black abolition by referring to Hegel’s own words in that very same passage. (Mollendorf 1992, 255) Just a few sentences before the suggestion of gradual abolition Hegel writes declaratively: [W]ant of self-control distinguishes the character of the Negroes. This condition is capable of no development or culture, and as we see them at this day, such have they always been. The only essential connection that has existed and continued between the Negroes and the Europeans is that of slavery. In this the Negroes see nothing unbecoming to them, and the English who have done most for abolishing the slave-trade and slavery, are treated by the Negroes themselves as enemies. (Hegel, The Philosophy of History 2001, 119)

It’s safe to say, according to Hegel, black people are really just not cut out for ‘development or culture’ despite his half-hearted advocation for gradual abolition and even more remarkably Hegel cannot imagine why black people would see the English as enemies despite their gracious manumission. He cannot rationalize why the former enslaved would seek a justice that lies beyond the formal ending of chattel slavery in Britain and its colonies. Let’s be honest, he quickly moves on from Africa because he knows what Thomas Jefferson knew, that the abolition of slavery alone is not justice, that is, the end of white supremacy, he knows that black people would want to destroy contemptable humanity as we know it. ‘Gradual abolition’ at the hands of Europeans is no abolition and the irrational, according to Hegel, hostility to European abolitionists cannot be contained within the movement of rational Geist. In essence, Hegel must, on the one hand, argue that freedom is inconsistent with the essence of blackness; that is, slavery is the only reasonable relation of blacks to (non-white) humanity, and yet on the other hand, also feel compelled to half-heartedly advocate for a vague disingenuous march toward a type of degraded human freedom for black people before ultimately turning the page of history (for shame or for fear or for something else…), never to be mentioned again. From these observations we should conclude that the demands of true black abolition or black revolt are outside of the parameters of reason’s development even though ‘freedom’ is apparently the accomplishment of reason. This is because black abolition is not a dialectical sublation that leads to a freer more rational

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humanity, it is the ultimate destruction of humanity and its parasitic freedom of anti-blackness. The subterranean murmurs of black ethical life in modernity are not the reality of an actualized black abolition beyond the human, not yet. I’m not sure such an event could be predicted or calculated. Instead, they are the demands for abolition through the interruption of the (un)ethical life of white humanity by the fugitive movement of black sociality as an impossible hospitality. Hegel’s philosophy would suggest that it is only through modern European ethical life, which consists of the family, civil society, and the rational state, that enslavement can be used to drag black people along to maturity, to the type of human freedom that the real ‘humans’ participate in. Black Hospitality suggests, however, that black ethical life disrupts, as opposed to sublates, the rational ordering of Hegelian ethical life; it challenges this progressive narrative of abolition toward humanity by making the impossible demands of hospitality heard now, loudly, even if also only fleetingly. Hegel’s concept of ethical life is elaborated in The Philosophy of Right as the third stage in the development of freedom in objective Spirit. Ethical life is the determinate negation of morality which develops out of the abstract right to secure property and culminates in the ideas of the good and conscience. This framework of morality is not sufficient, since it only reaches the abstract level of subjective individuality that we find in Kantian morality. Ethical life concretizes the abstract individualism of morality: “The identity of the good with the subjective will, an identity which therefore is concrete and the truth of them both, is ethical life” (Hegel 1967, 103). The ‘concreteness’ of ethical life means that it takes place in the phenomenal world: “Ethical life is the concept of freedom developed into the existing world and the nature of self-consciousness” (Hegel 1967, 105). Hegel’s innovation in pointing to the register of ethical life involves taking the rational moral laws and ideas of the good and universalizing them at the level of custom, law, and institutions whereby they are embraced as one’s own with others. On this view, values and institutions can be understood as being authoritative and rational without feeling as if they are imposed coercively from without. For Hegel here in lies freedom, when the subjective rational moral law of a Kantian morality finds confirmation and affirmation in the world of an everyday modern political liberalism.

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While our current political paradigm does not exactly mirror the ideal form of the constitutive elements of Sittlichkeit as developed by Hegel, namely the specific prescribed structures of the heteronormative nuclear family, capitalist civil society, and monarchical constitutional state, it is helpful to acknowledge how these elements do describe an experience for modern subjectivity that is recognizable and—just as importantly—how black experience problematizes this formulation. Hegel’s ethical life provides a framework that accounts for the intersections of the social and political to account for the larger ethical implications of modernity, even though the primary dialectic moving from morality is reconciling the subjective with the objective, that is, realizing the subjective will in the objective world of institutions, laws, and customs. This realization makes ethical life akin to second nature, where one is truly free in as much as nothing seems outside of one’s own individual will (Hegel 1967, 108). This disposition must be so sutured between the objective and subjective that even subjective belief in the objective manifestations would not satisfy the conditions, Philip J. Kain explains, “Laws must not merely be objects of belief. They must be so rooted in our life practices that we simply know them. They are simply facts—they are absolutes” (Kain 2018, 90). Belief gives too much room for subjectivity, full realization is to know what is wrong and right, and to violate the norms and laws is to forfeit one owns and transgress another’s freedom. Historically, the development of ethical life culminates in the constitutional state, as world Geist moved from the ‘Orient’ to ancient Greece, Europe, or Germany more specifically. It is only in this time, Hegel’s time, that Geist has reconciled the internal contradictions that prohibited full freedom throughout history and led to the possibilities afforded in modernity where one can find and create the auxiliary elements to fully actualize Geist and thus freedom—and eventually pull the rest of humanity who are lagging along (Hegel 1967, 216–223). This begins with the first element of ethical life, the family, through marriage, property, and the education of children. With marriage love is the feeling that represents the most natural manifestation of mutual recognition, of recognizing one does not feel complete without another, even if both parties, in Hegel’s case between a man and a woman, are not equals (Hegel 1967, 111). This love is monogamous, heterosexual, and recognized by others as legitimate. Property provides the material security for the family and distinction from others, while education of the children sets up the future. Children are only potentially free, but by the time of maturity they are nourished materially

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and cultivated virtuously to realize their freedom fully—and siblings have the highest potential for a true mutual recognition. Hegel’s formal relations of ethical life consist of two other stages: civil society where the individual satisfies their material needs through capital in the system of needs and the state where the laws that realize legal relations among citizens are formalized through a constitution, executed by an executive office and realized symbolically as unified in the monarch. In each stage we see again Hegel describing the reconciliation of the subjective with the objective. In the former, the conflict between individual desires and welfare that give rise to class conflict in capitalism can be reconciled with communal welfare systematically, that is, rationally, through institutions like corporations that curb shame and poverty and look something like modern unions (Kain 2018, 124). In the latter, sovereignty is founded in a constitution that formalizes the laws, offices, and procedures for individuals to will the unity of the larger organic order that is the state separate from the private powers of civil society, which is formally and ideally expressed in the individual monarch. In the family, civil society, and the state, ethical life is actualized through the reconciliation of the individual with objective elements. Only through these three stages does the idea of the ethical come into full fruition. If we return to the first stage of ethical life the impossibilities of an analogous black model are easy to recognize. From where does the Hegelian love and mutual recognition of the  traditional family emerge when all forms of union are constitutively precarious, that is, the existence of natal alienation?1 Whether it be from the perspective of the legal prohibition of marriage between the enslaved, the right to separate lovers at will by slave masters, the impossible relation of kin and love between white male slave owners and the black women they viewed as property and impregnated and the children they bore, who were also property and thus denied the ethical education for adulthood. Post-bellum realities were not much of a reprieve as material precarity within black households prohibited the means for such recognition and the ever-present threat of imprisonment and extra-judicial murder recreated the dynamics of precarity of the antebellum period. Black fugitive sociality is not found in a retrieval of these formal relations that are denied, but in the many indecent ways black love was and is made possible through the impossible perseverance, alternative arrangements, and a broader more limber sense of familial relations that constantly evolve and resist formalization and/or reconciliation—and thus forbid dialectical sublation into the Hegelian order. Tiffany Lethabo

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King crystalizes this disposition frankly in her essay “Black ‘Feminisms’ and Pessimism: Abolishing Moynihan’s Negro Family,” which “focuses on Black abolitionist critiques that denaturalize the family as a normative and humanizing institution to which people should aspire to belong” (King 2018, 69). Furthermore, she describes the role of black sociality in terms of a disruption of the norm instead of a recovery: Because of the ongoing disruption of Black sociality and the understanding that Black relations are under assault, the ‘Black family’ has taken on an almost sacred significance within Black social life due to its heralded role as a protective mechanism to Black vulnerability and violation … this essay does not indulge in a nihilistic destruction of the family for the sake of Afro-­ pessimistic intellectual experimentation. Rather, it is precisely because of this need for and commitment to Black sociality as a dynamic and inventive practice that this essay presses toward otherwise modes of thinking and being with one another. (King 2018, 69)

The black family has been apotheosized, and for good reasons if we take Lethabo King at her word, but it must be and has always been outside of the formal ‘normative and humanizing institution’. Black people cannot turn back, or look forward, to this humanistic form, they must in their own way embrace the disorder of property, gender, and sexuality found in Moynihan’s report. Black people’s natal alienation, which is the denial of heritage and genealogy,2 opts for alternative structures of kin beyond Hegel’s family of idealized love to a social fugitive escape of family that bends epiphenomenal relations and  embraces  what the state-sanctioned idealized family was never meant to provide black people and that could never accommodate blackness. The concept of black sociality that this project relies on and Lethabo King alludes to transgresses not only the family but the many ways contemporary civil society and the state work in tandem to objectify black bodies. Black labor is not only exploited disproportionally in comparison to other social and ethnic groups through material relations with capitalists—in fact, it is contended that black labor jumpstarted capitalism through slavery and the imagined endless supply of material support (Wilderson III 2003, 229)—but also the labor of the libidinal economy transforms black people into the objects that satiate the constitution of non-black political identity through gratuitous direct relations of violence interpersonally and at the hands of the state without reprieve. Black

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sociality is not the denial of these realities of violence that subtend antiblackness and thus (un)ethical life, but it is the paraontological excess that escapes by means, or in spite of, this reality, that is, by the very means of a more primordial violence that insists blackness can never simply be determined ontologically and instead escapes fugitively in the logical and practical lacunas of identity and individuality. Black sociality will be explored more extensively later in this project, but it’s important to reiterate that black ethical life as it is grounded in fugitive black sociality is not an analogous other to (un)ethical life nor is it the dialectical sublation of black sociality and an antiblack political ontology. Instead, black ethical life is a contestation of the logical cogency of antiblackness and as such it interrupts dialectics from the very start. Black ethical life exists beside contemporary hegemonic (un)ethical life—even as we concede it does not have the same content as Hegel proposes—in a stateless fugitivity that transgresses the characteristics and parameters of its supposed counterpart. In its fugitivity it is the only glimpse of a true ‘extra’ ethicality, the only call for an absolute abolition, since its conditions lead to the events of black hospitality that are the criterion for recognizing the structurally unethical and hostile dynamics of the modern world, as opposed to the circumstantially unjust behavior of breaking laws or norms by peripheral citizens within the larger ethical whole. Philip Kain succinctly sums up the idea of freedom in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right as a number of different and progressively more complete iterations of “being oneself in an other” (Kain 2018, 85). Black ethical life expresses the condition of escape by being other to oneself, whereby this othering passes between the other within (black fugitive sociality) and the other without (modern antiblack political ideology). Instituted through a coordination of civil society and the state, black kinship ties are set to be obliterated and yet persevere as obliteration through the excessive paraontological fugitivity of black sociality. Black ethical life consists in the play between the fugitivity of black sociality over against the imposition of the political. It cannot be fully sublated into the (un)ethical life of modernity, but instead manifests itself through the structure of black hospitality when, under these structural conditions, black sociality confronts the demands of antiblackness and asks this other (antiblackness), through an other (black sociality) to embrace the impossibilities of black ethical life.

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III. Three Vignettes of Black Hospitality: Charleston, Sandra, Eric In his remarkable reading of W.E.B. Du Bois, Nahum Chandler proposes a nuanced way of understanding the effectiveness and importance of giving an account of real-life events for describing how the self is interpellated and how race functions in general. In the third chapter of X: The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Thought, he reflects on Du Bois’ use of autobiography in thinking difference and the problematic ontology of ‘the Negro’ or blackness. By harkening to specific micrological instances of Negro identity, Du Bois does not summarily dismiss the large conceptual apparatuses operating under the sign of race, but instead uses personal identities and historical examples as a way to approach and think through the larger historical and ontological stakes of the problem of the Negro as a problem of thought (Chandler 2014, 70). In other words, it would be fruitful to look at singular specific instances in the world to get a grasp of the larger structural and theoretical underpinnings of race, or for our sake black hospitality. According to Chandler, what Du Bois referred to as the autobiography of the concept allowed him to think larger questions about racial differentiation through, “a subjective practice that is not reducible to the intentionality of the subject, and in the constitution of the African American subject, thought in terms of its concept or possibility (hence in terms of subjectivization) as a unique structure of repetition” (Chandler 2014, 74). In other words, we can look at different iterations of specific black experience, beyond the ‘intentional’ ends of the person—that is to say, the black person need not be consciously or autonomously conducting a sort of black performance, or black hospitality—and nevertheless, in these observations and the repetitions of certain acts, we can deduce more general information. For our purposes with the following three vignettes, we will see how the difference at the center of iterability can magnify the personal experience to the larger structures of the proper ethical subject’s impossibility, as Chandler explains in terms of autobiography: Du Bois explicitly indicates that his intention as (an individual) subject does not constitute, pure and simple, the phenomenon being described (the experience of an individual subject). Rather, this subjectivity, this experience, the organization of intentionality, as well as sense in general—insofar as it is specific object of Du Bois’ inquiry—is itself situated in terms of systematic

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possibility. However, if this is so … in order for distinction by way of a social idea or formal concept of race to operate as an iterable distinction, as a system of repetitive marks, it can only do so in the making of subjects—in the making and not before. It is not given in the thing itself whatever it is. (Chandler 2014, 82)

Chandler here explains, via Du Bois, how the concept of race is always in the making through subjects. This means that with each individual there is a possibility of practicing one’s identities through the material and psychical conditions that are provided as the individual; for example, a specific black person living in New York City has certain options to experience him or herself. In this experience of oneself, the concept of blackness is magnified, and the subject is seen through the eyes of the concept. However, the movement is also reciprocal and therefore subjectivation is dynamic, not simply empirical or ideal, in that the blackness in question is being made in the different iterations of blackness practiced by the individual, and what it means to be ‘black’ is not done and settled beforehand. For Chandler, Du Bois is interested in concrete social practices that must go through the subject and history. The radical difference of the subject is between the systematic and the individual: “The subject is situated in history and historicity; yet, the very possibility of historicity is situated in the structure that opens the possibility of subjective practice” (Chandler 2014, 85). I am interested in conceptualizing the following vignettes as between the systematic and individual in this same way Chandler describes, but in terms of black ethical life. These three vignettes are close to the same at the systematic level and yet different iterations at the individual level showing the fugitive dynamism and yet paradigmatic condition of black hospitality through difference. Charleston, South Carolina is the site of the Dylann Roof murders at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church. The Emanuel AME Church is a special place with a rich history for black Americans. Founded in 1816 it stands as one of the oldest black churches in the South and was created as a place of refuge. With the institution of chattel slavery still 47years away from its federal abolition, it is safe to say that at the heart of the church’s creation was a reaction to fervent, state-sanctioned, antiblack racism. Nearly 200 years later, the church has remained a symbol of black resilience, serving as a place of gathering and organization for demonstrations against the plight of black Americans throughout slavery, the

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Civil Rights movement, and more recent manifestations of protest such as the Black Lives Matter movement (Payne 2015). While it may seem egregious to portray the events at the Emanuel AME Church in terms of the hospitality of its patrons, these events actually illuminate quite well the contradicting conditions of fugitive black sociality and antiblackness that make up the impossible nature of black ethical life. Let’s start with the church itself, which can be conceptualized through a rich history and spatiality: fundamentally, the church is a black home for black hospitality. As I develop in Chap. 3, the black home is a trope used to describe the variable spacing and temporalization from which blackness emerges as escape and which enables the fugitive social nature of this condition. Therefore, we see that not only the hospitable actions of those patrons the evening of June 17th belong to that specific group at that specific time, that is, the collectivity of singular patrons gathered at this meeting, but the extended hospitality also belongs to a history of a renowned black church and the fugitive sociality that extends beyond its parameters. In other words, how could we not configure the actions of hospitality that took place not simply as the hospitality of those patrons specifically, but as a hospitality that configures the spatiality of the black church as a place for refuge, for protest, and for open doors, i.e., as a generous fugitive black sociality? And as we see, its identity as a place of worship and hospitality  is also, contradictorily,  a perfect place for antiblack terror as was witnessed when Dylann Roof, a 21-year-old white man, was welcomed into the church during a mid-week bible study session. Roof remained in the church with the other attending patrons, all black, for an hour before he stood up, delivered the prelude that “I have to do it. You rape our women and you’re taking over our country. And you have to go,” (Ellis et al. 2015) and then shot at the patrons while yelling racial epithets until he was out of ammunition. He killed nine people. To recognize some structure of hospitality as framing the events of that evening is intuitive and almost inevitable. Any hospitality ‘worthy of its name’, we recall from Derrida, entails that one remains completely and unconditionally open to welcoming the other. The  Emanuel AME Church’s  patrons initial gesture of invitation remains undeniable. They allowed the strange anonymous other, that is, Roof, a proxy for white supremacy writ large, complete access to their small gathering. A risky gesture for any person, but extremely risky for black people in America. We are well aware by now of the extreme vulnerability of black people,

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that is, the threats of intrusion and violence to self, friend, family, and home, and Derrida himself recognizes the risk that ones’ home may be destroyed in gestures of hospitality as constitutive of any hospitality ‘worthy of the name’. Black experience, however, is punctuated by a constant fear of intrusion that is particular to a modern metaphysics of objectification. The riskiness of hospitality for black people resonates differently because of the specifically vicious history that haunts the very halls of the Emanuel AME Church. How can one reasonably expect the patrons to welcome Mr. Roof into this black home? And yet they do. However, according to Derrida’s unconditional hospitality, acknowledgment of the guest in any form undermines an unrestricted openness. Therefore, in the moments when the patrons plead for their lives as Dylann Roof opens fire the patrons’ ostensibly breach the normative expectation of antiblack racism of full acceptance and even submission. They do not accept Mr. Roof into their home for what he is, an antiblack racist, and indeed a mass murderer. How could they? In the context of a man going on a genocidal rampage, the black patrons must temper their invitation to the guest. It would be truly unbelievable if any of the patrons encouraged Mr. Roof and his accompanying political agenda. Black people must always show some prudence when inviting a guest despite the demands for unconditional openness, but this should be expected from a people who find themselves in ethical predicaments that expose their extreme vulnerability as black in America. They are obliged to welcome the antiblack racist and they will welcome him, and yet they cannot and should not. This is one iteration of the experience of the impossible of black hospitality, a damned if they do and damned if they do not in the house of God. Seemingly without out any specific identifying information of these specific victims, Roof calls upon the long history of pathological black criminality to justify this massacre despite their welcoming him.3 When the patrons plea for their life, it need not and, I would venture to say, should not be read as outright rejection of the original invitation to Mr. Roof. Instead, what we witness when Tywanza Sanders intervenes and attempts to reason with Mr. Roof and protect his grandmother is an extension of the very same invitation that was offered to him when the doors opened, and he walked in (Corasaniti et al. 2015). This invitation—which began with the initial welcoming into the church, then became a plea for

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their lives, and even turned into an unimaginable extension of forgiveness by the relatives of the victims—exists in a larger context as an invitation for Roof and whiteness writ large to abolish the hostility of mere objectification imbedded in the antiblack political metaphysics of modernity that saturates the unethicality of America. The impossible forgiveness is an extra-ethical invitation extended by a fugitive black sociality passing through the survivors, ancestors, and relatives of the deceased who invite America to share the proverbial home of blackness, hosted by black people of their history and future, to feel the possibility of abolition, at this time, only for a moment. Such invitations may not, and often do not, reach the guest as invitations; again, they are often interpreted as hostile ruses. The pleas for Roof to not shoot may be understood as merely an instinctual reaction from these persons under extreme duress, or, for the antiblack racist, they may be understood as a conniving and inauthentic claim to innocence, since they are guilty of “raping our [white] women and taking over our [white] country.” However, this project contends these pleas are an appeal of black ethical life by means of inviting Roof, as a purveyor of antiblackness to reject this world; to come in, inhabit, even take refuge in the dilapidated, yet resilient spacing and timing of the black home. In Derrida’s account of unconditional hospitality, to invite the guest, which may take the form of a greeting or even naming, acknowledges the guest and, therefore, transgresses, that is, undermines and violates, the unconditional pretense of hospitality. The host is always already criminal in this ‘transgression’ and their actions and pleas always already appear hostile despite a certain hospitality in this context. Following this same logic, I am claiming that these patrons’ pleas for their lives and their relatives’ offering of forgiveness should be interpreted as acts of transgression. We already know that black actions, or lack there of,  are interpreted as transgression or criminality and, therefore, identifying even these pleas for their lives as acts of transgression is not far-fetched. As counter-intuitive as it may sound, I want to envision black criminality as essential to challenging the precepts of antiblackness by arguing the following: if Derrida’s formulation of unconditional hospitality is grounded ‘impossibly’ through transgression then, in their inevitable and always already transgressive reactions to the guest in an antiblack America, black people are expressing their own unique extra ethical intervention through the aporetic transgression as their ‘impossible’ duty

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within and against this paradigm of antiblack racism. Ethics begins with black transgression, or better, with transgressive blackness; it begins with a welcoming of the  other without into the black home from the other within, which is a criminally fugitive black sociality that ultimately rejects the individualism and political metaphysics of modernity. We must not forget this necessity of self-interruption. While I am sure the interruption of the self and welcoming of the other of the self within the  host can take many forms, for the events that took place at the Emanuele AME Church, I contend that black sociality and a black history riddled with white terror and black resilience are the different dimensions in which the self is interrupted by the self as fugitive black sociality. The patrons of the Emanuele AME Church and their relatives all exist as themselves only insofar they are inhabited and haunted by the elusive history and the transformational spacing that is the home of black sociality. The patron’s pleas reverberate in that church and their forgiveness calls forth a history and future of black people welcoming the other in the face of terror and it is in this respect that they interrupt themselves as other. In welcoming Roof, these patrons reject acquiescing to the demands of antiblackness and simultaneously invite the other of antiblackness into the ‘black home’ that is constituted through the irruption of a paraontological black sociality skirting between the framework and the frame of minds foundational to the church. The black church, that is, the black home, is always there, but never here. Now for the devastating video of Eric Garner from July 17, 2014. There are two popular ways the video may be read. One way would suggest that Garner is the aggressor and failing to cooperate. Furthermore, he is a threat to these police officers, the community, and justice writ large. In this case, the police officers respond with appropriate force and his death— perhaps an unfortunate accident, perhaps for the greater good—is in the end justified. Another way to read the video frames Mr. Garner as another black man receiving another brutal attack at the hands of American police officers, who find his blackness, the fact that he appears to be a black man, threatening in itself. In this counter case, the police officers are either individually racist or the extended brute force of a racist society that systematically brutalizes its black population in order to maintain an unjust hierarchy enforced through pain, death, and suffering. Generally, people who recognize that antiblack racism continues to be a pervasive problem in America, despite the many legal, political, and moral changes that have apparently transpired in the past 150 years, adopt a version of the second view with

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the most important components being the relatively passive role of Mr. Garner and the active role of the police officers. From this perspective, the police are the sole or ultimate transgressors and Garner is the victim. I would like to propose another option that is not reducible to the first or second interpretations, but not necessarily a third. What if Mr. Garner is not simply the passive recipient of extra-juridical violence, a disposable guest in the holy house of antiblack racism that is America? Within the framework of black hospitality Garner is the host who responds to the other and the police the guest who are ‘welcomed’. As for the black home? Not a church, or any ‘enclosed’ place, but a street corner. In this instance, it is on Bay Street, Thompson Park, on Staten Island in New York City (Baker et al. 2015). As we know, Mr. Garner was known for selling loose cigarettes and this was most likely the business the officers were claiming to be attending to. However, there are many ‘Bay Streets’ in America where black people participate in different economies of exchange. These black markets, which are not exclusive to black people fuel an extra-legal market of exchange. They are the products and solutions for a black community that has been displaced and misplaced by antiblack racism. We need not recite the devastating statistics that accompany the practices of redlining, segregation, redistributed material resources, educational deprivation, police surveillance, and more. However, we should not fail to emphasize that these black homes, through illicit commerce and illicit movements of identity, are also a space of black social fugitivity with affective excesses, ‘non-traditional’  education, and exponential  growth that escape traditional space and time. Now the street corner is also a space where we can recognize the excessive vulnerability of black people. If your access to this spatiality happens to be the nightly news, you will recognize it as a place where dueling gang members participate in an endless cycle of death for territory, money, or glory. In the previous passage I provide examples of how this ‘neighborly aggression’ already has its foundation in an oppressive system that makes resources scarce and violent solutions almost inevitable and ostensibly encouraged. However, aside from the misnomer ‘black on black violence’, we also know that these corners are surveilled by the prevailing antiblack apparatus of violence: namely the police. Garner was aware of this presence and as it noted in the New York Times article “Beyond the Chokehold: The Path to Eric Garner’s Death” by Al Baker, J.  David Goodman, and Benjamin Mueller, he had even been let off by some police officers earlier that same month (Baker et al. 2015).

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On that July afternoon, with Garner as the black host of a black home it is once again difficult to imagine this interaction as an invitation extended to the police officers. In fact, he is irate, wondering why he is being bothered, pleading his innocence, while the camera person—another occupant of the black home—corroborates. The always already criminal Garner responds to the demands of an unconditional hospitality with an invitation to those officers, and soon all of America, to witness the impossibility this situation. He explains, “Every time you see me you want to mess with me. I am tired of this! This stops today! … Please, just leave me alone” (Captelouto 2014). His plea asks us all to come into his home, please, and see its devastation, see that black people are  expected to feed themselves and their children with no resources and if they maket their own means they are greeted with hostility—a hostility, which, at least at the beginning of this video, is cool calm and collected. I hear him say in these pleas to his always already rowdy guests, “Hello. This invitation into my world, my reality, is all I have to offer, but come in, please.” Take a glimpse at black ethical life as it interrupts the white unethical political ontology. In this alternative interpretation framed by black hospitality, Mr. Garner offers an invitation to the other that we know can only be read or seen as a transgression of the threshold, a hostile response to his unwanted and unsolicited guests. In America there is always a risk that the guest the black person welcomes into their home will strive to destroy it—along with the host—and that is precisely what took place in the case of Mr. Garner. The police took his invitation as a threat, his hospitality as hostility and in doing so his status as active or passive agent and the understanding of himself as guest and host become vividly ambiguous. As he lay completely subdued by five police officers, and yet, unbelievably, still vulnerable, Mr. Garner made his last pleas. From within the framework of hospitality, “I can’t breathe!” was a final gesture of welcoming that still echoes on the deaf ears of the guest that refuses to listen; but also, I would venture to propose, that “I can’t breathe!” was a transgressive act of fugitive criminality and black sociality. ‘I can’t breathe!’ echoed along every street corner, through the halls of the black home, and on the t-shirts of Americans. A sort of call and response of the black community takes place, reifying the horrors and celebration of black life in the iterability of Garner’s pleas. He was not the first and would not be the last to utter those final words. The masculine figure of dialectical sublation and conquering of the other is replaced with a repetition that leads to the transitory unveiling of a fugitive black sociality, the impossible domesticity of a black home that can be

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recognized in protest, as well as on these pages. In these gestures we recognize ‘I can’t breathe!’ is again the impossible experience of the double bind of the always already criminality of blackness—of the brazen posture to be self as other—offering a generosity in the face of these impossible stakes. Offering to the police, as guests, to recognize the vulnerability of blackness. In fact, it was an invitation to all of unethical America, a black ethic of unbelievable hospitality, that continues to resonate as a breathless number of videos continue to surface. The video related to the death of Sandra Bland is much different than Garner’s, perhaps most notably because it does not show her death (Or does it? What is black death? See the first chapter.). However, before broaching the topic of her displaced and untimely demise, let’s consider the situation. Sandra Bland was from the Chicago area of Illinois, although she went to college in Texas at Prairie View A&M University, a school founded by ex-slaves. Throughout her early twenties Bland would live intermittently between Texas and Illinois, struggling to find stable employment after graduation, she also, during this time, found herself with quite a few run-ins with the law while driving (Nathan 2016). ‘Driving while black’ is a common adage that plays on the illegal offense of ‘driving while intoxicated’. The former, of course, refers to the disproportionate amount of attention, traffic stops, searches and arrests that black people are subject to as drivers, as movers, as fugitives of the law objectification. In The Nation article cited above by Debbie Nathan on Ms. Bland we learn that in an area of Illinois where Bland was once ticketed that “According to state data, black drivers in towns like Naperville, Lisle, and Villa Park are up to four and a half times more likely to be stopped for traffic violations than white drivers, and up to four times more likely to be searched” (Nathan 2016). Bland’s is only one of many stories as of recently that can account for black death and harassment as a result of interactions with police officers while in a car, often initiated explicitly through extra-legal procedures. In so much as that is the case, particularly as the car becomes engulfed by a spatiality and temporality where black extra-ordinary vulnerability, as exclusion from the political, is highlighted  despite also being simultaneously a mode and  figure of black escape, we can consider cars to be an extended dimensionality of the spacing of the black home. The car can often be a place of celebration and friendship, especially as a space to get away from problems through listening to music with friends, and yet as we see it is also a space on the run that opens black people to violence.

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On July 10th, after returning from signing papers for a new job, Sandra Bland was pulled over by Texas state trooper Brian Encinia. We hear from the officer’s dash cam that she was pulled over for failing to signal. Bland sounds annoyed as she explains her side of the situation, namely she was being approached by an accelerating police vehicle, without lights, so she tried to move out of the way. The dynamic of host and guest is straight forward considering the framework we have erected thus far for black hospitality. The demands for unconditional access from the police to black people were highlighted above and Bland, while cooperating by all other means, showed annoyance and this of course was a major violation of the economy of hospitable exchange. From Bland’s perspective we know this is not just any interaction, but, another time and another place, where she was being pulled over. She was just returning from a job in the town of her alma mater; finally catching a break, after years of tough breaks, heartbreak, and depression (Nathan 2016). The black home she sat in that July was dark and tattered, she did her best to welcome her guest, but we see the final provocation was actually by the guest, when the officer asks Bland, in her own car, to put out her cigarette. This is a hospitable gesture by Bland insomuch as her smoking was most likely an attempt to calm her nerves after being audibly annoyed, again, as we have seen time and time again, the lit cigarette was flipped and seen as transgression, as an egregious violation of the power of the state over ungovernable black objects. From there we see the tone change, simply for refusing to extinguish her cigarette, Encinia demands that she get out of the car and as she continues to refuse, we see video of Encinia physically assault her until she walks away from the car on her own volition (Bland 2015). From there the tragedy continues as Bland is jailed by herself at a county jail, where while at first filling out paperwork to the contrary, she confides in a guard, explaining she is very depressed and had attempted suicide. The proper procedures were ignored for getting Bland assistance from a mental health professional; this refusal is a reminder of both the fugitive black sociality that knows better than to rely on state assistance and Derrida’s insistence that there is always the threat that the guest can come and destroy the place, and the treatment of Bland in these circumstances is nothing short of destruction. Four days after her initial encounter with Encinia she was found hanging from a bathroom partition. We learned above that there is no hospitality without the self being interrupted by the other within, by evoking the other within so that one can provoke the other without. In this case, Bland’s ‘self-interruption’ was by the guest or

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other within that could no longer bare the other without, another form of black fugitive escape that does not necessarily redress the political conditions but does highlight certain realities. In taking her life it is indeed impossible and indeed offensive to read this as  a gesture of welcoming. Nevertheless, undoubtedly Bland gave insight into the darkness of and difficulty of black social fugitivity, the way it sometimes escapes never to return to an individual or if it does it is too late, too dark. The possible does indeed proceed from the impossible and Bland undoubtedly galvanized a response from the black community from an impossible tragedy where her ultimate transgression was to take her life in state custody and expose the ravages that antiblackness had exacted upon the black home through her impossible hospitality. Sometimes, resilience at the limit only exposes more wounds—only naively could someone believe Sandra Bland’s were ‘self-inflicted’.

IV. Chapter Summaries Black Hospitality has been divided into four  other chapters. Chapters 2 and 3 provide crucial theoretical foundations for Chap. 4, which addresses the concept of ‘black hospitality’ head on, while Chap. 5 provides an engagement with Toni Morrison’s Beloved to further articulate and expand the richness of a black hospitality through and as aesthetics. Each chapter could in theory stand on its own; however, there is a logic that makes the four fit together. Chapter 2, titled “Extra-ordinary Black Vulnerability,” starts us down the road toward black ethical life through an exposition of how black people are rendered vulnerable in/by a white supremacist and antiblack America via a detailed and deep engagement with afropessimism. We start here as a first gesture in the recontextualization and reconceptualization of Derrida’s conception of unconditional hospitality. Unconditional hospitality belongs to  a branch of ethical theory called response ethics. The main insight of response ethics follows from a reversal of traditional moral theories, which focus first and foremost on the moral calculus and reasoning of the first-person agent, and instead argues that moral responsibility begins and lies solely in responding to the other. As a subset to response ethics there is vulnerability ethics that takes into account a mutually constitutive vulnerability in different ways and forms. Now Derrida does not address either of these schools of thoughts in name, but he has a penchant for describing the responsibility of the host to unconditional hospitality as

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recognizing the risk of hospitality, that is, a vulnerable exposure to a guest that could be monstrous. This chapter is dedicated to the detailed account of the monstrosity of antiblack racism that renders blacks vulnerable. However, there is a uniqueness to the vulnerability of blackness that goes beyond even the parameters set by vulnerability ethics, that is where the afro-pessimism of Jared Sexton and Frank Wilderson come in. After describing the parameters of vulnerability from a political-ethical position rooted primarily in the work of Judith Butler, the chapter proceeds with an account of white supremacy and antiblack racism that ultimately centers around Jared Sexton’s description of white supremacy as an excessive general economy that follows no overarching dialectical reasoning or logic and instead is an infinite source of iterations and practices of white supremacy’s domination. This particular characteristic highlights an insidious characteristic of white supremacy that is captured in the neologism ‘extra-­ ordinary’. The term highlights the constitutive nature of white supremacy that renders its eternal return banal, but at the same time its excessive extraordinary nature that overwhelms black existence. The chapter then proceeds with a thorough explication of afropessimism, specifically the work of Frank Wilderson III, through the lens of extra-ordinary vulnerability to describe the metaphysical dynamics of a political ontology that renders black people as abject objects instrumental to the cogency of traditional western political ontology. Chapter 3, titled “The Black Home as Black Social Space/Time,” argues for a conception of fugitive black sociality that challenges the completeness of the political ontology of afro-pessimism. This move is important for two reasons. The first reason follows from furthering the project’s intention to enrich and refigure Derrida’s bare account of hospitality. While Derrida often appeals to the ethical actor and their difficulties under the name of the host, an extensive description of what may qualify as the home, that is, the condition for the host’s emergence, is virtually non-­ existent. Therefore, I use the opportunity of this absence to introduce black fugitive sociality as counter to both modern subjectivity and the bare terrain of black life in afro-pessimism using the trope of the black home. The trope of the black home offers a dynamic topography and temporality to give an expansive account of black fugitive sociality. Instead of rejecting the extra-ordinary vulnerability of the previous chapter, Chap. 3 works through and beyond its parameters to describe the dilapidated, haunted, displaced, yet social black home where something is found beyond the political.

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Chapter 2’s account of vulnerability is nothing short of devastating. The historical accounts from slavery up until modern times leave very little left for developing an understanding of self-hood or the grounds upon which it may emerge. Chapter 3 begins with Saidiya Hartman’s rather bleak account of the black self as the unthought, down from slavery all the way up until her own life experience and then turns back to Frank Wilderson III as the conclusive thinker of the foreclosure of the black self as a capacity to affect the political world. This section also includes a crucial engagement with the impossibility of black domesticity. To resuscitate a sense of self as sociality and the grounds of possibility from the devastations of afro-pessimism, the chapter subsequently sets the foundations for the black home with the work of Fred Moten. Moten conceptualizes blackness as that which precedes the political objectification of black people in Wilderson’s political ontology, utilizing an idea of paraontology inspired by the work of Nahum Chandler. Moten sees blackness neither as mere object nor subject for that matter, but as a fugitive social excessiveness of the object, or the ‘thing’, that operates beyond the political death articulated by Wilderson. From there the chapter confronts Moten’s continuity with afropessimism in regarding an impossible black domesticity and argues that indeed a fugitive spacing begets the possibility of a black sociality by embracing impossible black domesticity. This is the black home, where fugitive black sociality emerges through escape to leave its traces  in/as  the black self. I conclude the chapter with a reading of Beyonce’s 2016 visual-album “Lemonade” to further develop the trope of the black home. Chapter 4, titled “Black Hospitality,” goes full force into the peculiar experience of the black ethical life constructed through vulnerability with an expectation of unquestioned generosity that, following from the im-­ possible structure of Derrida’s unconditional hospitality, is nevertheless understood as hostility. The chapter begins with an account of Nahum Chandler’s centering of blackness through the figure of ‘the Negro’ within western thought through his inventive reading of Du Bois in his book X: The Problem of the Negro as a Problem of Thought. The purpose of this section is to elaborate conceptually why it is necessary to place the liminal, displaced, and untimely understanding of blackness in the framework of the host in the account of hospitality as opposed to the guest. In convincing manner, Chandler argues that Du Bois’ articulation of the problem of the color line, and more specifically, the problem of the Negro is, in fact, a problem of western thought in general. In as much as western thinkers

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were attempting to articulate a conception of the human through contradistinction to black people, in his reading of Du Bois, Chandler shows how these westerners unveiled the impossibility to articulate a fully formulated stable conception of identity, thus disrupting western thought altogether. From this theoretical rendering of a certain sense of centrality of blackness to western thought we move into black hospitality, which begins by giving an account of Derrida’s unconditional hospitality then moves to further justify why it would be advantageous to understand the black experience through the lens of hospitality by employing a comparative analysis of Derrida’s understanding of the vulnerable host and the vulnerability of black people as rendered through antiblackness, which, furthermore, acknowledges a historical precedent of compulsory black hospitality. The chapter then moves to the experience of impossibility for the black host through an account of the necessary transgression of the laws of hospitality and how this transgression follows not only from the always already criminalization of black people, but also the criminal fugitivity of black sociality. With black social fugitivity we can than understand Derrida’s conception of self-interruption by the other within, which is black fugitive sociality, as confronting the other outside, which is white supremacy political ontology. The project concludes with a chapter on Toni Morrison’s Beloved, titled “Barbarism and Beloved,” read as and through the lens of black hospitality. We turn to fiction, and Morrison’s masterful work specifically, for a more expansive and vivacious account of blackness and the experience of black ethical life that can be rendered through an aesthetic medium. This chapter begins, however, with an engagement with Theodor Adorno to understand aesthetic works as ethical in themselves so that we first understand Beloved as black hospitality. Adorno famously claimed poetry after Auschwitz to be barbaric, but from the position of black expression, or black aesthetics, what if the barbaric is precisely what characterize black aesthetics as an ethics? From this exploration of black aesthetics as a barbaric black hospitality I read Beloved through black hospitality, where the chapter shows how Morrison, with the liberty of certain aesthetic choices and literary devices, gives an exceptional account of black hospitality. There are many events and characters that one could use to situate and articulate the experience of black hospitality at the threshold in Beloved, but the chapter focuses on the event and characters that inspired the story

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and world of Beloved, namely the infanticide of Sethe’s second-youngest daughter, Beloved. This event conjures the experience of impossibility in a way that ‘cannot be passed on’. Together, Chaps. 2, 3, 4, and 5 explicate how a black ethical life is im-­ possible, if only obliquely, from and toward another world. The transgressive welcoming of the other without by the other within is the extra ethical problematic response to the question of a possible ethics for the antiblack modern political paradigm. There is no real ethics from the political perspective of antiblackness, but there is an im-possible ethics orientated by a fugitive black sociality that breaks through from time to time, or from time through time, in the myriad of ways that blackness expresses itself. It invites all and everyone to abolish this political world and to demand a whole new universe, to reject a political reality that black people know too well and affirm blackness’s disrupted potency all-together.

Notes 1. Hegel already pathologized the African family in the Philosophy of History lectures, where he offers the ‘non-traditional’ family structures as an example of how black people lack universal laws (Hegel 2001, 115). 2. The story of Ma’Khia Bryant, a black teenager who was shot by police while wielding a knife, comes to mind. Bryant was in foster care and expressed a desire to return to her birth mother. This sort of resentment toward her familial status underlies the conditions that lead to her tragic death, not because she was denied a traditional family, but because she was denied family all together. Her felt isolation irrupts in her response to the other people that antagonized her. And while the fact that she was armed with a knife withheld sympathy from many for Bryant, with people asking, “What if that was your daughter she was threatening, would you want the police to simply deescalate?” I heard none of the talking heads ask the more poignant question, “What if Ma’Khia was your daughter? Is not Ma’Khia one of our sisters? Is that the way her life should end?” 3. The radical sense of this double bind can be pushed to an even further extreme if we consider Judith Butler’s position that, from the perspective of white paranoia, black people are always already the violent transgressor. In an essay on the Rodney King trial, Butler describes the violent beating of King by white officers as a response to the perception of King’s blackness, which entails he is always already going to attack. From this perspective, the black host’s vulnerability to the other is exacerbated because he or she is always already seen as transgressing the norms of white normative society

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before any gesture whatsoever is made. In other words, the black host does not simply accept that his or her invitation will inevitably transgress the norms of hospitality, rather black people extend their invitation knowing that they are always already a threat to the normative and ontological structure. Black people accept that ‘the Other’ will approach with a pre-justified hostility before they can even conceptualize their responsibilities as a host (Butler 1993).

References Baker, Al, J.  David Goodman, and Benjamin Mueller. 2015. Beyond the Chokehold: The Path to Eric Garner’s Death. The New York Times, June 13. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/14/nyregion/eric-­g arner-­p olice-­ chokehold-­staten-­island.html Bland, Sandra. 2015. Dashcam Footage of Sandra Bland’s Arrest During a Traffic Stop Before Her Death in Police Custody  – Video. The Guardian, July 22. https://www.theguardian.com/us-­news/video/2015/jul/22/dash-­cam-­ sandra-­bland-­arrest-­video Butler, Judith. 1993. Endangered/Endangering: Schematic Racism and White Paranoia. In Reading Rodney King, Reading Urban Uprising, ed. Robert Gooding-Williams, 15–22. New York: Routledge. Captelouto, Susanna. 2014. Eric Garner: The Haunting Last Words of a Dying Man. CNN, December 8. https://www.cnn.com/2014/12/04/us/garner-­ last-­words/index.html Chandler, Nahum Dimitri. 2014. X-The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Thought. New York: Fordham University Press. Corasaniti, Nick, Richard Pérez-Peña, and Lizette Alvarez. 2015. Church Massacre Suspect Held as Charleston Grieves. The New York Times, June 2015. https:// www.nytimes.com/2015/06/19/us/charleston-­church-­shooting.html Ellis, Ralph, Greg Botelho, and Ed Payne. 2015. Charleston Church Shooter Hears Victim’s Kin Say, ‘I Forgive You’. CNN, June 19. https://www.cnn. com/2015/06/19/us/charleston-­church-­shooting-­main/index.html Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. 1967. Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Trans. T.M. Knox. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2001. The Philosophy of History. Trans. J. Sibree. Kitchener: Batoche Books. Kain, Philip J. 2018. Hegel and Right: A Study of the Philosophy of Right. Albany: SUNY Press. King, Tiffany Lethabo. 2018. Black ‘Feminisms’ and Pessimism: Abolishing Moynihan’s Negro Family. Theory and Event 21 (1): 68–87. Long Chu, Andrea. 2018. Black Infinity: Slavery and Freedom in Hegel’s Africa. The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 32 (2): 414–425.

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Mollendorf, Darell. 1992. Racism and Rationality in Hegel’s Philosophy of Subjective Spirit. History of Political Thought 13 (2): 243–255. Nathan, Debbie. 2016. What Happened to Sandra Bland. The Nation, April 21. https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/what-­happened-­to-­sandra-­bland/ Payne, Ed. 2015. Charleston Church shooting: Multiple Fatalities in South Caroline. CNN, June 21. https://www.cnn.com/2015/06/17/us/charleston-­south-­ carolina-­shooting/index.html Spillers, Hortense. 2003. Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wilderson, Frank B., III. 2003. Gramsci’s Black Marx: Whither the Slave in Civil Society. Social Identities 9 (2): 225–240. ———. 2010. Red, White, and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms. Durham: Duke University Press.

CHAPTER 2

Extra-ordinary Black Vulnerability

I. Introduction In February of each year American school children learn of a dark and distant time where people that looked like Oprah, Jay-Z, Beyoncé and even the 44th President, Barack Obama, were brought over from Africa and forced into labor because of the color of their skin. They learn of Abraham Lincoln’s emancipation proclamation and then are reminded of the reason they got a three-day weekend a few weeks prior when they come to Martin Luther King, who fought for the right for children like themselves to learn next to each other, to sit next to each other on a bus, and eat together at restaurants. Come 2008 and supposedly racism is just an historical issue; America has finally blinded itself to the trivialities of race. The rhetoric of a colorblind present and future was for many black people fantastic; nevertheless, in the media it reached its apex with the election of President Obama. The leader of the free world was a black man and, therefore, a great majority of Americans declared antiblack racism over. However, while Barack Obama and figures like the aforementioned Oprah and Beyoncé commanded a great amount of popularity, admiration, influence, and money, a significant amount of black people simply could not concede to the proclamations of the death of racism. The projection of these figures into the limelight, rubbing shoulders with America’s white elite, was fool’s gold, the media was wearing rose-colored glasses. Many black people knew this, many other people did not. Nikhil Pal Singh © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Mubirumusoke, Black Hospitality, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95255-6_2

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explains the purpose these ‘exemplary individuals’ serve in Black is a Country, where he observes: “the projection of images of black inclusion (often through the elevation of exemplary individuals) minimizes a contentious, unfinished history of collective struggles against white supremacist monopolies on nationalist ideals and practices” (Singh 2005, 17). This issue of whether black people wished to be incorporated into these nationalist ideals or instead to simply destroy them as ideals and practices altogether notwithstanding, it’s safe to say that the state apparatus and civil society indeed are still operative via the regime of white supremacy or antiblackness despite a black chief of state. The reality of the still existent and moreover thriving antiblackness returned to the public eye in spectacular fashion with the murder of Trayvon Martin and the creation of a public movement that came to be known as Black Lives Matter. The death of Trayvon Martin galvanized a collective voice of black Americans that revitalized the urgency of race, antiblackness, and black vulnerability in relation to existing conversations about systematic and personal racism in the twenty-first century. Trayvon was an unarmed black teen, criminalized supposedly by his sweatshirt—although we all know his sweatshirt was only a cover for the black skin that truly “magnetized” those bullets  (Wilderson III 2010, 80)—and shot to death by George Zimmerman after returning from a convenient store. The outrage over his death was palpable in the streets and on the internet; sadness and grief subsumed a great part of the black community. Images of Trayvon Martin were wallpapered on traditional and social media alike, circulating within a tragic pantheon of other black Americans: from Emmet Till’s face, swollen and beaten, the unnamed blacks being hosed on the streets of Alabama, Martin Luther King on the steps of the Washington monument, to Tommie Smith and John Carlos on the podium of the 1968 Olympic, and the Black Panthers wearing black berets and wielding guns on the stairs of the California state Capitol building. This was 2012, it is now 2021 and we know Trayvon was only the tip of a giant iceberg that continues to emerge from the dark depths of America’s subconscious. With the subsequent deaths of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Freddie Gray, Walter Scott, Sandra Bland, and more recently George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, the black community attempts to grieve and, through movements like the one for black lives, has together revived once again a public discourse concerning the prison-industrial complex, the continued practice of housing discrimination, and, most

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vocally, police brutality. For many, it is no longer debated that the Negro question, punctuated by a question mark that when flipped coils around and suffocates black life and death like a noose, remains suspended over the twenty-first century as well. In the summer of 2020, there were protest numbers like no time before in the history of the United States, with the New York Times reporting an estimated 15–26 million people having participated in marches following the death of George Floyd on Memorial Day weekend (Buchanana et al. 2020). It may seem that the naivety of colorblindness that marked the beginning of the century has finally been left behind for the specific issue of black life. It is not unusual for pundits to contend that the sheer size and the proportion of white people participating finally indicates that this time, this death, with this lynching, the issue of black life and death is being taken seriously. But is it correct to assume that the massiveness of the protest and its participants could be a metric for comprehending the meaning, or better the function, or even better the meaninglessness, of black death? By highlighting the quantitative aspects of these protests, by offering the hard numbers of a newly awakened non-black America, the Times article obscures the underlying morbid reality of black death and life. Black life is subject to a unique vulnerability, it is incalculable because of its qualitatively distinct constitution, this is to say because of the lack of meaning of black death. Seduced by the spectacular once more, it needs to be stated that neither the spectacular colorblindness in the election of the first black President nor the spectacular record protests following the death of George Floyd will address or redress the mundane exorbitance of black vulnerability. For philosophers and critical theorists, the concept of vulnerability has found increased consideration and importance in the latter half of the twentieth century, specifically within the scope of political and ethical thought. The emergence of vulnerability as a central concept follows from a general turn away from the autonomous rational subject found in deontological or utilitarian ethics as well as in liberal political theory—to an account of the relationality toward and dependency upon others and the outside world. That is to say, when we think of the subject, the person, or the human, first and foremost, their essence is captured by their openness to the other, their vulnerability to injury or deprivation, and not by their possible positive capacity to react to or calculate that openness. Judith Butler has emerged as a pivotal voice in this reconsideration of subjectivity or personhood through vulnerability. Following her profound

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intervention in rethinking subjectivity, sex, and feminism through the concept of performativity in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (Butler 1990, 34), her twenty-first-century reflections on vulnerability once again challenge the presumptions of a self-same substantive subject that exists prior to being in the world and relations to  other humans. In works like Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence and Notes Towards a Performative Theory of Assembly, Butler has led the way in thinking vulnerability in a political and ethical register. In the Preface to Precarious Life, responding to the political and military mobilization of the Unites States after 9/11, Butler states that the “fundamental dependency on anonymous others is not a condition that I can will away” (Butler 2004, xii). This statement sets the framework for a conception of political ontology where all agents are fundamentally vulnerable, or precarious, in as much as they are constitutively open to others or ‘the Other’. Now, Butler, of course, is not set to argue that Americans experience their vulnerability similarly to the peoples of countries they have directed their ire and weaponry toward pre- and post-9/11. Her second and third chapters focus on the very specific conditions of vulnerability for Middle Easterners who are on the receiving end of the direct military and economic impositions that have devastated their countries and criminalized their existence. On Butler’s view, the West has imposed an intensified vulnerability on these subjects as a response to its own perceived vulnerability. The West’s self-perceived vulnerability is stoked by fears of Middle Easterners as perpetuators of imaginary threats, transgressions, and a predilection to ‘terrorism’ predicated exclusively upon racial/ religious identity. American vulnerability is supposedly protected by exploiting the vulnerability of these ‘other’ non-western people; an intensification (perhaps) of the orientalism Edward Said described many decades ago (Said 1979). Nevertheless, in light of this undeniably asymmetrical relationship to military and economic power, Butler wants to contend that there is a continuum of vulnerability that makes a future morality and global politics possible through the lens of a collective responsibility. This amounts to arguing, essentially, that there was and continues to be a shared vulnerability that creates the conditions of possibility for both an attack such as 9/11 and the ‘counter’ attacks and policies known as the war on terror. In other words, (potentially) hurt people hurt people. For Butler we cannot settle for individual will and action when it comes to thinking through the forms of agency and responsibility demanded post 9/11; it is not simply

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the actions of Bin Laden or al-Zarkawi or the Bushs (son and father) or Rumsfeld or Cheney. Instead, we need to recognize accountability collectively and internationally through the intricate relations that draw the global politic together. Again, this accountability is rooted in a shared ontological vulnerability that makes possible the political community Butler desires. She reiterates in her second chapter: [E]ach of us is constituted politically in part by virtue of the social vulnerability of our bodies—as a site of desire and physical vulnerability, as a site of publicity at once assertive and exposed. Loss and vulnerability seem to follow from our being socially constituted bodies, attached to others, at risk of losing attachments, exposed to others, at risk of violence by virtue of that exposure. (Butler 2004, 20)

We all share in vulnerability argues Butler, even on this global geopolitical scale and it’s rooted in a ‘social vulnerability.’ Against Butler’s idea of a shared ‘social vulnerability’, this chapter argues human vulnerability in its various guises and comparable quantifications is not of the same quality as black vulnerability. Black vulnerability is of a different kind then even the extreme vulnerability Butler identifies as imposed by the war on terror. Black vulnerability has an abject quality because of its non-relationality that expels the experience of black people from the realm of the human by means of an objectifying violence. The extralegal policies issued  by the United States  state department seemingly defy all modern legal precedence domestically and internationally, culminating in the practice of indefinite detention at Guantanamo Bay—which still holds thirty-nine people as of January 2022. And yet, these conditions still discursively refer to a human subject insomuch as these persons retain some form of cultural historical integrity and a political ontology that can identify and punish transgressions of its normative orders, even if these transgressions are generally seen as acceptable by a broader human coalition. Undeniably a shared vulnerability of the human gets manipulated and contorted to produce an intensification of vulnerability for the brown, deceitful, ‘terrorist’, both abroad and in the United States. The profound degradation of the Middle Eastern person, however, is not the same as the abject black object and this distinction must be considered beyond the discourses of colorblindness, protest size, or even the unfathomable unconstitutional practices of the US government toward an entire religion and region post 9/11.

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This chapter began by recounting black experience at the beginning of the twenty-first century not merely because it describes a black vulnerability that overlaps temporally with the hostility toward Middle Easterners, which is the signature of the never-ending war on terror that framed Butler’s reflections of vulnerability. Indeed, these two historical examples are worthy of comparison for their temporal overlap and conceptual distinction, but also a look at the beginning of the twenty-first century and the right ‘now’ for black people also calls attention to an eerie repetition of the same, whereby the spectacular horror of violence that is attached to the names Trayvon, Tamir; Taylor, Floyd, seem all too familiar and even now more than ever seem almost necessary for the functioning of the political order of America, even if it is not clear why. In describing the peculiarity of black (political) vulnerability this chapter will also need to address what appears to be this compulsion of antiblack violence and the spectacle that obscures it. Butler’s reimagination of subjectivity through vulnerability is an attempt to reform the ethico-political presumptions that encourage individualism, nationalism, and dichotomous self-­constructions, suggesting American aggression and Middle Eastern resentment are notes in the same chord. The concept of vulnerability supposedly can unveil the harmony of humanity even when its violent hypocrisies are loudest. Yet the hostility toward blacks and their vulnerability resonates in a different key; the interminable ‘war on terror’ is different from the positionality of the slave that must be reaffirmed regardless of, and illegible to, more prominent narratives in American political discourse and political economy. Through the lens of afropessimism, Frank Wilderson III and Jared Sexton—along with others—allow us to conceptualize the uniqueness of black vulnerability, or rather its illegibility and objectifying nature, over and against the spectrum of shared political vulnerability described by Butler and others. The key to understanding black vulnerability and its extraordinary character is a notion of social death—which will be recategorized as political death in the next chapter—that positions black people not merely at the edge but on the outside and antagonistic to a political community that is structured by antiblack white supremacy. Wilderson provides the most comprehensive conception of black social death working primarily from, with modification, Orlando Patterson’s definition in the seminal work Slavery and Social Death, in addition to inspiration from Frantz Fanon, Saidiya Hartman, and Hortense Spillers.

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Through social death, black people occupy a positionality—not a subjective identity—that refuses legibility as human. This is accomplished under the parameters of dishonor, natal alienation, and gratuitous violence. The black positionality is unique in its’ non-relation to all other positionalities inasmuch as its degradation is an absolute abjection, in other words modern political ontology denies all relationality to black people. It is not contingently maintained through possible transgressions, but structurally constitutive through negation in the formation of proper political subjectivity, from the most valued to the least valued political subjects. Social death as abjection is necessary to maintain the world of the human. Jared Sexton offers the helpful description of a general economy to conceptualize the excess and need for repetition as a non-rational affective investment in the abjection of black people. From these perspectives emerges a concept of black vulnerability that goes beyond Butler’s homogenized conceptualization of a collective ontological vulnerability. Through a loss of what was never there, a loss that is gratuitously reified through repetition, we can better understand what is specific to antiblack violence. David Marriott employs the term abjection to signify a loss that was never present (Marriott 2007, 123). Gratuity compliments abjection, as it explains the excessive repetition of antiblack violence, since there are no legible norms to be transgressed in a loss that was never present and thus no ultimate rationality or foundation to rest on except bare assertion. As Wilderson describes in the first chapter of Red, White, and Black: This (gratuitous) violence which turns a body into flesh, ripped apart literally and imaginatively, destroys the possibility of ontology because it positions the Black in an infinite and indeterminately horrifying open vulnerability, an object made available (which is to say fungible) for any subject. (Wilderson III 2010, 38; my emphasis)

In describing black vulnerability as ‘infinite’, ‘indeterminate’, and ‘horrifyingly open’, Wilderson provides a conceptual framing and analytic undoing that demands rethinking who may belong to the spectrum of human vulnerability and what does not. This chapter next turns to an explication of the excessive ‘extra-ordinary’ nature of the illegible, fungible, accumulative, and abject object of blackness that characterizes black vulnerability.

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II. The General Economy of White Supremacy and Extra-ordinary Black Vulnerability Following in the spirit of Butler’s innovative refiguring of subjectivity via vulnerability, Catriona Mackenzie, Wendy Rogers, and Susan Dodds, in the introduction to their 2014 reader titled Vulnerability: New Essays in Ethics and Feminist Philosophy, also call for the displacement of the traditional role of rationality for describing the essence of humanity, proclaiming “Human life is conditioned by vulnerability” (Mackenzie et al. 2014, 1). While vulnerability may have universal applicability for human life, they argue it does not come in one standard universal form. They make a welcomed contribution to Butler’s intervention by breaking down vulnerability into a helpful taxonomy that situates the different ways it manifests itself through our materiality as needy bodies, through the social and affective nature of our being open to others through grief, humiliation, or through our socio-political nature as open to exploitation and oppression. Also, vulnerability can emerge from a different variety of sources, that is, inherent, situational, or pathogenic, as well as exist in different states, that is, dispositional or occurrent. These distinctions are constructive and yet limited when it comes to black people. Under this rubric, the experience of black vulnerability would fall under an occurrent state, meaning that it is not a matter of dispositional possibility of becoming vulnerable, for example, some physical disabilities, but rather black vulnerability is manifest constantly. Furthermore, its source would be pathogenic entailing a systematic oppression that is not simply inherited by means of being human or strictly situational. Makenzie, Rogers, and Dodds explain, “a key feature of pathogenic vulnerability is the way that it undermines autonomy or exacerbates the sense of powerlessness engendered by vulnerability in general” (Mackenzie et al. 2014, 9). At first glance their taxonomy appears more than sufficient to account for black vulnerability. Black vulnerability would be one among many forms of occurrent and pathogenic conditions that plague a plethora of identities that fall short of the generally accepted zero-sum position of white cisgender heterosexual ablebodied bourgeois men. However, there is a marked difference for the experience of black people: their autonomy and ‘sense of power’, at least as traditional subjects, is not undermined but illegible because of an original lack of political ontological stature. Singularly, the pathology that characterize black vulnerability is abjection, whereby black people are banished from the metrics

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of humanity that would render their suffering, and therefore their vulnerability, irrational, that is beyond sublation, and non-relational. Perhaps the most insidious component of black vulnerability from a philosophical perspective follows from the fact that antiblackness elides any appeal to an ultimate justification or rationality. When confronted with the machinations of antiblackness in everyday life, for example, with hate crimes, police brutality, disproportionate wages, and so on, these manifestations at first appear as if they can make sense in some larger context or rationale. As if there is some identifiable reason why black people deserve repercussion, as if they had transgressed some cultural normative arrangement or even economic preserving ideology. These racist ‘events’ appear in a taxonomy of violence that point toward antiblackness, but what if the underlying justification beyond their expression from a restricted perspective escapes any ultimate justification or rationality beyond the bare assertion of black abjection? We may say that Michael Brown would be alive if he had not stolen from that convenient store (if indeed that was the case), if he were not poor (although this too of course plays a role), if he had not charged like ‘the Hulk’, if he were not jay walking, but those ancillary reasons only obscure the reality that his violation ultimately needs no reason. It was not simply a ‘sense of powerlessness’ or lack of autonomy, but instead abject inhumanness, his non-relationality, that brought him to the alter for sacrifice in the name of white supremacy. His blackness made him vulnerable beyond belief—or, to be more specific, only on the grounds of belief—because it was his blackness that brought Darren Wilson to that neighborhood, as with many other officers, and it was his blackness that turned the 18-year-old into the Hulk, it was blackness that turned 12-year-old Tamir Rice into an armed and dangerous adult, it was blackness that turned Rodney King’s shielding forearms into aggressive pursuit and falling pants into sexual assault. Jared Sexton articulates the structure of a ‘libidinal economy of white supremacy’ using the insightful heuristic of the general economy. The libidinal economy refers to the affective and subconscious desires and investments that informs one’s self-identifications. For ‘white supremacy’ these are the arrangement and distribution of desires and affects, positive or negative, that support the formation of any identity over against blackness. Now, a general economy challenges the logic of traditional economic models that are considered essentially rationalized laws of exchange, since its grounding principle is instead exuberant expenditure, without any ultimate reason. Sexton describes white supremacy as a general economy in

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the 2003 essay co-authored with Steve Martinot titled “The Avant-Garde of White Supremacy,” but he explores the concept with greater depth and by name in his 2008 book Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism. While in the former essay he uses the term ‘hyper economy’, in the latter he uses the term general economy explicitly, citing Arkady Plotnitski’s Reconfigurations as his source. For this discussion, however, it is worth considering the more familiar, and the inspiration of Plotniski’s analysis in his book, twentieth-century French theorist and eroticist Georges Bataille. Bataille introduces the concept of the general economy along with restricted economies in the first volume of his series The Accursed Share (Bataille 1991). The essential quality of a general economy is its never-­ ending excessive productivity. In Bataille’s cosmological account, he cites the sun as an example of this excessive wealth of productivity that fuels the growth and movements of all other ‘restricted’ ecological economies. For Sexton, white supremacy is a general economy unto itself fueling the violence and oppression of black people which would analogously have corresponding restrictive economies. White supremacy is an endless source of racist sentiments and affectations that uphold an assertion of superiority feigned throughout modern history by different principals and technologies that deem black people essentially objects, even though at bottom there is in fact no true essential quality or logic to substantiate this affectation, just the satiation of a libidinal economy rooted in black abjectness.1 Citing the work of Albert Memmi, Sexton contends that racism’s meaning is not found in its coherence or functionality. In fact, although we see racism manifest in different structures, white supremacy’s meaning is naïve at best and has its force only in affect or simple conviction (Sexton 2008, 27). Of course, this force of conviction need not be reduced simply to the psychology of specific individuals; it is carried through historical practices and beliefs expressed through policies, institutions, political group formation, and so on. In other words, it belongs to the collective unconscious of white civil society and its junior members. There is an ironic revelation with vulnerability studies’ decentering of rationality to describe a more essential condition and structure of political subjectivity, since, indeed, there is no singular logic or rationale that can justify why black people should be subject to oppression; there is only a conviction that whiteness is superior, rational, and denotes humanity and the actions that follow from this sentiment. Sexton and Martinot contend in the “Avant-Garde” essay:

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White supremacy is nothing more than what we perceive of it; there is nothing beyond it to give it legitimacy, nothing beneath it nor outside it to give it justification … whatever mythic content it pretends to claim is a priori empty. Its secret is that it has no depth … its truth lies in the rituals that sustain its circuitous, contentless logic; it is, in fact, nothing but it’s very practices. (Sexton and Martinot 2003, 175)

These rituals are the different forms of gratuitous violence performed upon the black body that substantiate white supremacy’s ultimately ‘banal’ occupation. The repetition of these acts is necessary, they function to buttress the subject formation and libidinal gratification of whiteness under the auspices of its emptiness. Without the functional repetition, the hollowness and horror of white civil society as a genocidal machine would be revealed in its unbearable reality. But the acts need not be exemplified only by those spectacular violent actions against black people, such as the infamous police shootings or lynchings appealed to in the introduction to this chapter. While these spectacular events do have a function, they serve a larger narrative for the life of whiteness as superior and black people as the threat that must be kept at bay for white civil society to thrive; nevertheless, white supremacy also functions in banal everyday activities like the use of derogatory language, police occupation of a neighborhood, or the excessive sentencing that bend the imagination of propriety while also going hardly noticed. Moreover, “this banality [of white supremacy] is our tacit acquiescence to the rules of race and power, to the legitimacy white supremacy says it has, regardless of their total violation of reason and comprehensibility” (Sexton and Martinot 2003, 173). Banality does not present itself in the same acts, but instead comes to fruition through different proposed practices and rationales for violence, that is, restricted economies, that have discrete but not totalizing rationalized ends, which ultimately fortify the general economy as the norm.2 We need only think of Trayvon Martin’s sweatshirt and the attention it garnered as a manifestation of this banality and the obscuring of the excess that truly subtended his death. Popular culture galvanized around this sweatshirt, as if it had any merit to articulating the irrational death of this black boy. The sweatshirt draped over the extraordinary and excessive affective investment of white supremacy as a shield for the true source of his death that could never have been articulated with reason because indeed there was no reason. This of course is an example of ‘respectability

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politics’, which contends that the capitulation to a standard of human decency or respectability will place black people within the realm of the human, the political, even though we have many examples that prove that designation simply can never be extended to black people regardless of their dress or speech. While at first appearing like a Kantian ideal of reason, the economy of respectability is not a mitigating rational ideal that can be approximated but an illusion of inclusion that rests on an irrational, i.e. non dialectical, endless economy of vitriol that figures blackness as abject. The sweatshirt, just as much as Emmet Till’s suit and tie, was an empty husk indistinguishable from the open wound of his black flesh. Black people, as they are ultimately subject to the excessive general economy of white supremacy, are thus excessively vulnerable, since they are continuously open to illogical and ostensibly endless manifestations of violence, both physical and psychological, grounded in and necessitated by their imposed inferiority and the need to satiate the assertion of white superiority by all others. To be clear, the excess is not a quantitative claim, it’s not a matter of simply more or less violence, but a qualitative claim that marks blackness as an excess beyond the logic of a normal economy of  ‘logical’ violence. In the “Avant-Garde” essay, Sexton and Martinot describe the two economies as such: On the one hand, there is an economy of clearly identifiable injustices, spectacular flash points of terror, expressing the excesses of the state-sanctioned system of racial categorization. On the other, there is the structure of inarticulability itself and its imposed unintelligibility, an economy of the loss of meaning, a hyper-economy. It is this hyper-economy that appears in its excess as banal; a hyper-injustice that is reduced and dissolved in the quotidian as an aura, while it is refracted in the images of the spectacular economy itself. (Sexton and Martinot 2003, 177; my emphasis)

The ‘hyper’, that is, general, economy remains for the most part hidden, elusive, ‘unintelligible’, and thus contributes to black abjectness, while the spectacular, that is, restricted, economies have their own shocking manifestations in the real world in instances like police brutality but also lynching, or cross burning.3 Under these instantiations, which transform in different spaces and throughout history, antiblackness appears to follow a certain kind of logic and its outcomes appear somewhat coherent. These manifestations of antiblackness can be explained away through specific circumstances such as self-defense or poverty, but in reality, there is no

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coherence or logic that justifies the sentiment of antiblackness itself. In Amalgamation Scheme Sexton writes, “Racism only ever appears in this way; that is, it appears as what it is not, as something other than it is. It is essentially misleading, suggesting that the underlying affective system operates only to the extent that it does not appear as such” (Sexton 2008, 27). While the general economy of white supremacy remains essentially elusive, the restricted economies are the way it manifests, the way it is made vaguely visible. While remaining essentially masked and disguised, thus extending the limits of regular pathology into pathological abjectness, its excessive productivity through the vulnerability of black people as a result of senseless illogical automatic violence can only come to form in particular practices of oppression and persecution that substantiate black people as objects mired by social death. Consequently, the excessive general economy of white supremacy goes beyond the standards of vulnerability proposed above. Black vulnerability is occurent, that is, constant, but also reiterative in the fashion it needs to be punctually maintained because of white supremacies emptiness, this vulnerability is also abject in addition to pathogenic, that is, without gradation or relation, because it is never present, and as such it is also excessive, or extra-ordinary, in as much as white supremacy is gratuitous, without reason, but also banal. Extra-ordinary captures both the ‘banality’ of white supremacy’s everyday manifestations, for example, the ease and efficiency with which the sentiments fueling mass incarceration of black people go unaccounted and the excessiveness that takes black vulnerability beyond the standard of simply ‘undermining’ autonomy and instead instantiates an elusive abjection that substantiated their being as an object for whiteness, subject to gratuitous violence. A violence that is not rooted in some form of social contract between participants that only gets enforced at some contingent violation, but rather a gratuitousness that can and must be enforced under any circumstances and without any higher logic outside of retaining the framework of civil society by satiating an affective sense of superiority.

III. Black Vulnerability and ‘Social Death’ To say the intervention of afropessimism has been contentious, for both black studies and the general public, would be an understatement. The reviews of Frank Wilderson’s latest work alone express a kind of resentment that is so sharp it’s hard not to believe that these writers did not

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interpret Wilderson’s work as a hand sealed personal condemnation of their livelihood (McCarthy 2020) (Cunningham 2020). These reviews are often written with a semi-performative defiance of Wilderson’s contention about their ‘social death’, but what cannot go overlooked in these types of responses is that even in their avowed defiance these reviewers cannot escape the political ontology that locates them on the other side, as opposed to the other end, of humanity. These reviews are written from an experience the reviewers often feel can approximate the experience of their apparent fellows, but Wilderson is concerned with the metanarrative of structural positionalities and not the performative capacities perceived in everyday existential experiences or personal expression. Wilderson is not challenging how they may feel from day to day, but what they are, or are not, in the grand scheme of things that exceeds performative political gestures through an extra-ordinary vulnerability.4 The distinction between the performance of blackness and its ontological status that motivates Wilderson builds primarily from the term social death, originally attributed to Orlando Patterson. The term has been adopted and deployed by many to describe the depraved or degraded status of persons under conditions of oppression. Wilderson adopts the definitional components of naked (gratuitous) violence, natal alienation, and dishonor from Patterson, but interprets them beyond certain ontic conditions—where, for instance, for Patterson anyone may become a slave—to a specifically black ontological paradigm that is crystallized phenomenologically and psychoanalytically in the work of Frantz Fanon and the interpretations of his work by David Marriott. Wilderson also takes up Hortense Spillers psychoanalytic framing and vocabulary of a foundational grammar of suffering that reoccurs indefinitely through a violation of the flesh over against a grammar of freedom of the body. Additionally, he builds off Saidiya Hartman—who also has Spillers, Patterson, and Fanon in mind— by replacing the terms of human degradation with logics of the object of commodification, whereby black social death is better conceived in terms of fungibility and accumulation instead of exploitation and alienation. Wilderson conceives the continuity and coalition of these black theorists— and others—to paint the picture of a black existence that demands an entire reimagining of the political through the lens of extra-ordinary vulnerability in three registers that will be explicated in the rest of this chapter: discursively, materially, and psychically. Beginning at the discursive level, Wilderson’s discussions of black social death offers his readers a number of different perspectives and occasions

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to recognize the fundamental nature of this paradigmatic condition: from movies and theater, from political to social movements, from domestic to international understandings of blackness. In all these arenas, he remains steadfast in his analysis of the terms of social death as excessive to the limits of their restrictive economies. To reach the level of paradigmatic political positionality, he stresses the separation of the identity formations and performative gestures we may attribute to black people uniquely, or that they may even share with other groups, from the ontological or paradigmatic that overdetermines their stature as fungible, accumulative, and abject. In the essay “End of Redemption,” he states it bluntly: Blackness is social death, which is to say that there was never a proper meta-­ moment of plentitude, never a moment of equilibrium, never a moment of social life. Blackness as a paradigmatic position (rather than as an ensemble of identities, cultural practices, or anthropological accoutrement), cannot be disimbricated from slavery. The narrative arc of the slave who is Black (unlike Orlando Patterson’s generic slave who may be of any race) is not an arc at all, but a flat line, what Hortense Spillers calls ‘historical stillness”: a flat line that ‘moves’ from disequilibrium to a moment in the narrative of faux equilibrium, to disequilibrium restored and/or rearticulated. (Wilderson III, Afro-Pessimism and the End of Redemption 2016)

There are two things to note. First, his contention that blackness is a paradigmatic position often is overlooked or misrepresented. Here he is insisting that the qualities we attribute to the performance of blackness, the unique ‘cultural practices’ or ‘anthropological accoutrement’ that one may recognize as contributing to what it means to be black—for example, black music or  other cultural performances—are not definitive of the ontological or paradigmatic position of blackness. This is not to say they are completely distinct, but they are not essential and also cannot be separated, or ‘disimbricated’, from the structural foundation of white civil society as its negation. This is to say blackness cannot be separated from the structural position of ‘the Slave’. Of course, this does not mean blacks in contemporary society are subject to or the object of the same types of violence of chattel slavery, but their metaphysical role in the formation of the political world remains the same. Just as the proletariat who is not forced to work 80 hours or who attains healthcare and vacation days, is still the laborer and not the capitalist, the black sharecropper, prisoner, or CEO (or President!) is still in the metaphysical position of ‘the Slave’ and

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as such is discursively illegible at the level of political ontology, falling rather into the general economy of white supremacy. We need only to recall the insistent fashion in which President Obama and his wife Michelle Obama—despite or perhaps in light of his office— had been hailed in terms of abject blackness through images of primates, to realize how their political agency was rendered illegitimate or simply illegible despite his properly America political behavior of, for instance, ordering drone strikes in the Middle East and being scornful of ‘absentee’ black fathers. We can describe this illegibility as extra-ordinary insofar as it exceeds the general level of discourse of an accepted humanism, while at the same time appearing banal, as an everyday regular preoccupation with the affective assertion of white supremacy. In other words, these images and the language of dehumanization supersede the discourse of the human and appeal to the paradigmatic black abjectness as cursed existence, regardless of President Obama’s performance (queue ‘Amazing Grace’) as the highest political agent in the land. The second thing to note in Wilderson’s passage is that this ‘flat line’ or ‘historical stillness’ in the ‘narrative arc’ of ‘the Slave’ serves as another axis in the description of social death. For some the diachronic narrative arc of black life, particularly in America, projects a trajectory of increasing freedom. This would entail some initial point of coherence or equilibrium that is forgotten through violence and displacement only to be returned to, perhaps in a new light. This may be the narrative of Pan-Africanism, a return to the motherland with a newfound unity, or black liberalism, a return to foundations of American equality and fraternity; that is, ‘the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.’ However, these are false narratives, since with the creation of blackness any original equilibrium was eliminated. ‘Africa’ did not exist prior to European invasion and there is no ‘Africa’ or land of the free (for black people) to return to. With no place to retreat, the contours of a legible vulnerability are imagined with Pan-Africanism, but they are ultimately destroyed, since underneath these restricted conversations, there is no place or time that does not fall victim to the extra-ordinary vulnerability of its destruction by white supremacist disregard and/as destruction. Instead, what we witness with different black political ‘movements’— the implication of motion can only be metaphorical at the paradigmatic level—is a historical stillness. Imagined equilibrium with moments like emancipation, the civil rights legislation, or decolonization only unveil the

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persistence of disequilibrium. There is no actual movement, or arc, in this historical narrative; no point of reference to imagine a newness as long as black people remain in the paradigmatic, ontological position of ‘the Slave’. How else does one come to understand the practically rote action and reactions to spectacular violence against black people—death, protests, deceptive or limited legislation,5 and repeat—if not the historical stillness of the black story; where history instead appears to be an eerily persistent and placid backdrop that exceeds all narrative possibilities? Sexton’s rubric of the general and restricted economies is translated into historiographical terms, whereby non-black political movements participate in restricted economies that contribute and participate in the story of the redemptive human; meanwhile, black narratives have no stable foundation against which to project such a narrative; instead, they are overwhelmed by the excesses of force of the white supremacist general economy that destroys narrative capacities. To further elaborate, the uniqueness of black social death via Orlando Patterson’s concepts, Wilderson explains on the next page: Patterson’s three constituent elements of slavery—naked (or gratuitous) violence, general dishonor, and natal alienation—make the temporal and spatial logic of the entity and of setting untenable, impossible to conceive (as in birth) and/or conceive of (as in assume any coherence). The violence of slavery is not precipitated as a result of any transgression that can be turned into an event (which is why I have argued that this violence is gratuitous, not contingent); dishonor embodied by the slave is not a function of an event either; his or her dishonor is general, as Patterson writes, or as David Marriott has argued, it is best understood as abjection rather than degradation (the latter implies transition); and since a slave is natally alienated, s/he is never an entity in the meta-narrative genealogy. (Wilderson III 2016)

With Wilderson’s elaborations of Patterson’s elements of slavery in these terms of narrative and event we arrive at a clearer sense of what they entail: these elements are not based on any contingent relationship to the violation of the human story, instead they mark the permanent stature outside of it. In other words, ‘historical stillness’ is maintained because the elements of slavery are not predicated on any form of recognition that justifies their position. There are no events or substantive qualities that circumscribe black identity outside of being black, which must be insistently enforced. Antiblack violence comes from nowhere, everywhere, all

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the time; their lack of honor not only is an abjection they were born into, but has no origin story, no history—the proverbial Middle Passage and the very real forced miscegenation, territoralization, and one-drop rule obliterated them—and that’s why they cannot be placed in any formal genealogy that can be recognized as such, for Wilderson. Here again we are brought to terms with the extra-ordinary: these three registers of natal alienation, general dishonor, and gratuitous violence explicate the ways in which blackness necessarily exceeds the normal components of forced labor that are horrific but still imply relationality. Blackness emerges from, or recedes into, an ever-present general economy of reproductive material for consumption by white civil society, instead of having the quality of a legible human story with recognizable relations and heritage that confer a sense of origin. Through these articulations of social death and slavery, we can also see how there is a difference between black social death and the amorphous ‘terrorist’ explored by Butler in Precarious Life. Butler is thorough in her explication of how the designation of people of Middle Eastern descent as ‘dangerous’ (Butler 2004, 76) set them in a precarious position within relation to the law. With the help of classic neo-cons Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and John Yoo, this identity was imposed by indefinitely (to this day) suspending standard judicial procedures which entail the horrifying acts of torture and total disregard of civilian life that facilitate the economic control and exploitation of the Middle East. The rendering of Middle Easterners outside of the juridical norms of the United States— that is, as always already criminal and never escaping the status of enemy combatant even after capture and detention—seemingly locates them totally outside of the political and, in a manner, analogous to social death (Butler 2004, 76–79). The tragedy of America and the West’s policy toward the Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Middle Eastern post 9/11 are contemptible; nevertheless, they do not occupy the same condition of black social death.6 A threat to the American nation is ontologically distinct from a threat to the white political order. To understand this distinction, we cannot only look at the practices of the state or the devastating reality of the current condition of people terrorized by the state. The question and narrative of national security is set in a different key than “the Negro question” and the security of whiteness. The existence and maintenance of Guantanamo Bay does not address or contest ontological and paradigmatic concerns which Wilderson identifies in the first above quoted passage through the idea of a ‘meta-moment of

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plentitude’ and in the second one as an ‘event’. The crucial difference is that there is a time and/or place imagined for the ‘terrorist’ in Guantanamo or the immigrant or the European American to return to that indicates a cultural, historical, and positional integrity of humanity, that is, a meta-­ moment of plenitude, that had been violated in their narrative of subjection as human, an identity that had been upset and that, furthermore, may be returned to and where ‘equilibrium’ can be found again. Such a place or time does not exist for  the extra-ordinary condition of black people who exist as “a fatal way of being alive” (Marriott 2000, 15). The economic exploitation and deathly violence against Middle Easterners belong to a narrative arc where a transgression took place, that is, 9/11 or denial of natural resources and land access, that precipitated their stature as ‘dangerous’. In this narrative arc there is a place that still exists, even if physically under siege now, and time that did and, in the future, may exist from where their heritage may be retrieved and/or flourish. An equilibrium can be returned to after the dehumanizing practices of post- or even pre-9/11 destruction and occupation. Such an equilibrium for the positionality of ‘the Slave’ is not conceivable. In “Gramsci’s Black Marx: Whither the Slave in Civil Society” Wilderson uses the work of J. M. Coetzee to describe an anthropological and historical schema used by Europeans to map the integrity of humanness or proper political subjectivity. In this schema, black data is missing from either the anthropological or the historical axis, which if existent would secure this stature of humanness at the discursive level, but since it is absent, this leads to a crisis or a scandal of being uninterpretable. Other groupings may rely on anthropological categories such as clothing and work or historical categories such as entitlements, sovereignty, or immigration (Wilderson III 2003, 234–237). Black people in America, and across the diaspora, are interpreted as missing signifiers in this discourse and thus are illegible within the human narrative. It is in this sense that black vulnerability is not simply pathogenic by the standards described above and sharable with Middle Easterners, rather their vulnerability is illegible, abject—that is, they have no honor or relationality—and normalizing; thus it is extra-ordinary. The constellations of human agency are not diverted or deferred and there’s not simply a ‘sense of powerlessness’ that may be corrected or reoriented. The Slave does and must occupy a structural position without any imaginable recursion to political agency in order for the human identity to live on in strength or peril. Adjacent to the sun of Bataille’s general economic cosmology, blackness emerges from the black hole of white supremacy,

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which is imperceptible and ultimately unknowable, but nevertheless fuels the cosmological order of the human universe.7 Now it may also be prudent to emphasize how Wilderson makes a strategic departure from Patterson to identify a crucial distinction in terms of slavery. While Patterson innovatively recognizes that slavery is not reducible to forced labor—the labor you may find also as an indentured servant or even as a contractor in sports—but is structural, he also understands the position of slavery as social death to be applicable to anyone who may, for instance, become a prisoner of war—for example, the prisoners of Guantanamo Bay—even though the slave as prisoner of war may return physically and/or psychically to a prior plentitude, that is, a legible cultural home. For Wilderson, non-blacks may indeed experience slavery, but it is not a constitutive event for their identity or for their narrative. They have the advantage of the capacity to conjure a reason for the violence perpetrated against them that led to their oppression, servitude, or even slavery as the reaction to a performative transgression of normative expectations, even if this transgression is outside of their own cognitive and practical cultural formation.8 The conditions of black social death prohibit such a coherent formation in as much as it remains in its structural antagonism with the human or white civil society as incoherent, illegible, abject and thus always under the thumb of white civil society by prohibiting any sort of imaginative coherence or semblance of freedom.9 These examples illustrate the underlying extra-ordinary affective investment by white civil society in its libidinal economy and they can save one from being led too far astray by relying upon another red herring: the tragically true but ultimately misleading accumulation of facts and stats of black abject life. Inasmuch as the facts and corresponding events of black life are discursively approximated—for example, police violence, prison statistics, homelessness rates, the wage gap, and the performative gestures of blacks in responses, for example, public mourning and protest—they do not necessarily get to the excessive affective economy and, therefore, Wilderson maintains that the problem is beyond the expression of language or as he professes in another essay, and just as poignantly, “taxonomy can itemize atrocities but cannot bear witness to suffering.” The ‘grammar of suffering’ that organizes black social death remains opaque at a discursive level, that is, the semiotics of the human, but it subtends the positionality of the black slave, or the ‘position of the unthought.’ Many people may want to compare the quantitative overlap of black tragic facts with those of the poor, and indeed there is overlap,

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but the coincidence of these facts and atrocities does not get to the fundamental level of black vulnerability that exceeds restrictive articulations. The lists of atrocities, while undeniable and horrific, rely on numbers and data that confuse this violence for a violation of the human that does not extend to black people and thus they divert attention from the affective comfort and security that antiblackness calls forth in a way that literally vitalizes white civil society even if it cannot be spoken of coherently and exceeds rationality. The transatlantic slave trade, the Maafa, the Berlin Conference, the State of the Unions, had and continue work in the transformation of ‘Africans into blacks’ over against the human and as such forbid narratives of return to a political ‘home’—even the memory of a home—that has not been transmogrified by the shadow of blackness.10 Under these conditions, how can black vulnerability be legible in any political terms? With no humanity to return to, black people are extra-ordinarily vulnerable and open to violation from a general economy; they have no sanctuary literal or imagined, just a black hole. Experiencing a ‘sense of powerlessness’ or lack of autonomy makes sense only in terms of degradation, not in terms of complete illegibility and abjection. It is literal open season, and not simply for death, but in as much  as blackness plays a constitutive role, black people’s vulnerability also becomes the non-discursive backdrop for which white civil society can write their own story and, therefore, complete annihilation would be undesirable. Whether it be a trip to the Heart of Darkness or the Caribbean and New Orleans, c.f. Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, or to the largest protests in American history, blackness is the framework for white civil society’s coming of age; forever illegible because it comes from the illogical general economy of vulnerability found in the excessive resources of the libidinal economy.11

IV. Beyond the Material to the Unconscious The dynamism between the structural positions of black social death and white humanism has the tendency to be confused or understated by discursive tendencies to expand humanity to all peoples. The structural integrity that anti-blackness provides for the constellation of political ontology escapes political discursivity, that is why there is no narrative arc of the black human. No stories, personal accounts, or book reviews can tell a story of the humanity of ‘the Slave’. The failure of the narrative of ‘the Slave’ is only one register of describing black social death and Wilderson is

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sure to explicate how other popular paradigms also fall short of accounting for blackness as human, including historical materialism. Wilderson formulates blackness as an unmediated object for white civil society instead of as a degraded subject or other. This idea of blackness also extends beyond the conceptual humanisms of Marxism and the Oedipal complex or the semiotics of alienation found in Freud and Lacan respectively. Or, in other words, in addition to the fungible and accumulative black object as functioning outside of the grammar of the exploitation and alienation of the worker, Blackness is also the abject object that is crucial to the general economy of the non-black psyche which is where the excesses of vulnerability emerge. Beginning with Marxism, Wilderson’s essay “Gramsci’s Black Marx: Whither the Slave of Civil Society” provides a concise argument about the failure of historical materialism to account for the proper positionality of blackness and, thus, the illegibility of black vulnerability in terms of the exploited worker or alienated from their species-being. In this essay Wilderson takes the vocabulary and concept of a decisive antagonism and resituates it beyond the sublation or possible reconciliation of class conflict. Instead of race and racism falling to the level of a derivative phenomenon employed by capital to obscure class relations through false consciousness, Wilderson argues for capital and antiblack racism’s co-­ constitution, that is, white supremacy as the base of capital, whereby the slave as a structural position is a scandal (Wilderson III 2003, 225). (If slavery was purely for material gain, why not cut out the expensive trip to Africa and subordinate the poor of Europe to the conditions of chattel slavery?)12 The familiar argument of Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci in the Prison Notebooks calls for the workers to challenge and upset the hegemony of bourgeois civil society and to subsequently socialize the private interests of the capitalists in order to reconcile the state and civil society, thereby an ethical relation can emerge beyond alienation and exploitation. That capitalism was jumpstarted by slavery and colonialism through not only a relationship of direct force but a structural antagonism more essential than waged oppression or useful labor goes unthought (Wilderson III 2003, 231–232). Again, state violence against black people is not contingent; it is not the result of a mere manipulation of civil society that can be readjusted or reconciled through fair labor practices, and it is not a matter of simply coming to one’s senses and implementing a social reorganization of

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class. Violence against blacks is structural and gratuitous— that is, ontological and without (dialectical) reason—and therefore the terms of worker alienation and exploitation are not applicable. Instead, we must think of blackness as a fungible and accumulative object. Wilderson crystalizes this structure in a proposed scenario that takes place at a meatpacking factory in Chicago. In this scenario he recalls Gramsci’s inciteful analysis of hegemony and the prerogative of the industrialists to rationalize and formalize the lives of workers all the way down to their sexual practices. While bleak, there is a way to fashion a question of class antagonism or a ‘war of position’ between the laborers and capitalist that bares itself in these reflections on the proper family structure of the workers of the meat packing plant. Wilderson then curiously contemplates the broader concerns of the meatpacking scenario that go unquestioned by asking, “what about the cows? The cows are not being exploited, they are being accumulated and, if need be, killed?” For what does he mean by this? He then elaborates: Nowhere in Gramsci can one find sufficient reassurance that, once the dream of worker exploitation has been smashed — once the superstructure, civil society, has ‘flowered’ and the question of hegemony has been posed — the dream of black accumulation and death will be thrown into crisis as well. (Wilderson III 2003, 233)

In, other words, the primary political structure, the paradigm of antiblackness, remains intact as long as black people are vulnerable as the actual raw material of accumulation and fungibility—or possible death—for white civil society. Black people are the cows that are essential to the functioning of the meatpacking plant and cannot speak any more of freedom before or after the possibility of the worker escaping exploitation by socializing the means of production. The only point that may be slightly obscured by this example is the reality that alongside a possible logic and rationale of capital for black objectification that historical materialists may hold on to in order to understand this configuration, that is, a restricted economy, there is the more important general libidinal economy that extends beyond this logic, all logic, and serves white fantasies of subjective monumentalizing, that is how black people exist as “being for the captor,” in the words of Spillers (Wilderson III 2003, 230, 239). In the “Introduction” to Red, White, and Black, Wilderson provides a poignant example that addresses this possible obscuration by explaining

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how Marx’s political economy is sutured to the more important component of the psychic integrity of white civil society, that is, the general libidinal economy. There he references the first volume of Capital, where Marx highlights the difference between the slave who makes no wage and the proletariat that makes a very small amount. The decisive distinction he recognizes between the slave and the poor white laborer is profound. The laborer, Marx notes, even if they have only a small amount of money, can purchase commodities, a loaf of bread, just like the capitalist. However, Wilderson, once again, goes a step further and unveils a more morbid reality when he explains, “It is frightening to take the ‘same relationship’ in a direction that Marx does not take it: If the workers can buy a loaf of bread, they can also buy a slave” (Wilderson III 2010, 13). This “psychic dimension” that separates the proletariat from the slave but highlights its excessiveness to any political relation with excessiveness to the rest of civil society (Wilderson III 2010, 13) is the fundamental distinction that separates black people from white civil society, even of those in white civil society that are materially deprived. Black people become fungible and accumulative objects, excluded from the grammars of exploitation or alienation at the ontological level. To further vivify this point we can look at an article from 2015 by Connor Kilpatrick titled “Let Them Eat Privilege” (Kilpatrick 2015). Kilpatrick argues that focusing on the superficial banalities of certain privileges enjoyed by the moderately moneyed classes draws attention away from the larger class conflict that capitalism creates and supports, whereby the super-rich, the capitalists, or the 1 percent, are in an entirely different stratosphere than the other classes—including those who may be able to shop at Whole Foods instead of struggling to find food altogether (Kilpatrick 2015). Simply naming the luxuries of the middle class as compared to the very poor does not address the larger issue, “the one-percent concept isn’t about a lifestyle or individual consumption habits … It’s based on concrete socioeconomic relations … The category of class, after all, is relational—not gradational” (Kilpatrick 2015). Kilpatrick is correct that there may indeed be a relational distinction between the laborer and the capitalist that appears paradigmatic, but the psychological security and reification that comes from the objectification of the black other is of a different sort and register altogether, that is, nonrelational. A certain amount of quantitative accumulation by the poor laborer can make them a capitalist; while there is not enough bleaching cream to make a black person white.13

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This is not to imply that there is not class difference among black people. The black people listed at the beginning of the chapter as so-called beacons of progress do indeed live a much different life than the poor and working-class victims of violence that were named soon after (although a few of the former did not always live with money and may not continue in the future14). There are real consequences for these class distinctions; for example, Skip Gates ultimately had a beer summit with the first black president after his confrontation with a police officer; meanwhile, Brionna Taylor did not even get a knock at the door before her demise. These different class experiences cannot be conflated and the black poor and working classes experience life differently, but that experience does attend to the ontological. The few black Americans that owned slaves, for instance, were not whitened; they had more money. Nevertheless, they were always vulnerable in a way that was not the same as even the poorest white people who may indeed perish from the consequences of their poverty. The qualitative distinction between white and black exceeds calculations and again only an appeal to the general economy of white supremacy can make sense of this distinction. The vulnerability of any proletariat can be overcome through hard work (some harder than others), but black vulnerability at the ontological level—which includes sudden death for no reason at all except the fact that one is black—cannot be ultimately mitigated by labor regardless of the neighborhood. Therefore, while it may not be the literal case that black people can be purchased as chattel slaves in 2020 (although the conditions in Libya may challenge even this contention), the nonrelation of blackness as vulnerable to anyone was set by a diremption between black and non-black centuries ago and this antagonism is constituted by the extra-ordinary, that is, illegible, accumulative, fungible, abject, objectification, and the open vulnerability that follows from it. From a materialist perspective, it is often argued that racism and sexism are used to obscure true class relations and create inessential hierarchies and intraclass conflict. A Marxist or class critique may indeed allow one to see the exploitation at work behind the hypnotic light of our computer screens, but will that unmask the ‘ugliness’ of the affective economy and larger ethical dilemma of white supremacy? Let’s hear Wilderson explain in his own words: Anti-black violence is vital to the psychic well-being of White (and non-­ Black) people everywhere. Violence against black people provides a sanctuary for White people, a guaranteed matrix of safety, security, and

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respite—respite from the otherwise unbearable hydraulics of their own family lives, and from the unbearable hydraulics of an ugly world that they have created and which they know, in the collective unconscious, to be ugly, though they can’t bring themselves to admit it is beyond redemption. (Wilderson III 2015, 148)

Antiblack violence is vital in maintaining the hierarchy of the antiblack world, but as the parenthetical term intimates, the human also extends to those non-blacks, which Wilderson identifies as the ‘junior members’ of white civil society (Wilderson III 2007, 26) and who may also attend to the bottomless well of anti-blackness for their own constitution. These junior members are the familiar marginal political groupings, whether they be other people of color, other categories of identity regarding gender, sexual orientation, or even the  previously discussed political economic positions, such as the worker. It is hard not to recognize that this sort of malleability in terms of self-fortification is once again an attribute of the excessive economy of white supremacy as the gift that keeps on giving. In contemporary times we see the proliferation of identities that make claim to their marginal status over against the status quo and their legibility is not just symbolic differentiation. This may indeed mark their legibility as a given ‘exceptional’ categorical possibility, but the vitality of their stature is enriched or stabilized by comparing and distinguishing from blackness. All these junior members participate in the fortification of white civil society, only marginally, but still by way of anti-blackness. This is indeed a polemical contention, but it need not be so reductively interpreted as a ranking. Rather, the constitutive primacy of antiblackness serves as a tracing of the conceptual landscape, whereby it becomes clear where the ever so replenishing life force of what we recognize as the human or civil society springs  from. Wilderson provides a number of examples of how such parasitic anti-blackness arises in everyday life from junior members. For instance, in the previously cited “Prison Slave” essay he cites the sort of anti-black subjection that Assata Shakur describes in her biography via a white woman in the abolitionist movement, concluding, “The verisimilitude between Assata’s well known police encounters and her experience in civil society’s most nurturing nook, the radical coalition, raises disturbing questions about political desire, black positionality, and hegemony as a mode of struggle” (Wilderson III 2007, 24). One question may be: what are the limits of non-black prison abolitionists when it comes to sacrificing for the greater good? Carceral punishment for

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even the most heinous crimes appears to be one thing that must go with the abolition movement, but even then, antiblackness cannot help itself from flourishing even in the most radical places. Also, in another example of the ever-expanding list of who finds respite in antiblackness, one may turn back to the essay “Afro-Pessimism and the End of Redemption,” where Wilderson recalls a conversation with a Palestinian friend whose cousin had died constructing a bomb. The friend then confided, in a moment of unfiltered grief, that the humiliation of the full body searches conducted by Israeli soldiers was worse when it was an Ethiopian Jew. Wilderson goes on to explain: I was faced with the realization that, in the collective unconscious, the Palestinian insurgent has more in common with Israeli state and civil society than s/he does with Black people. What they share is a largely unconscious consensus that Blackness is a locus of abjection to be instrumentalized on a whim. At one moment Blackness is a disfigured and disfiguring phobic phenomenon; at another moment Blackness is a sentient implement to be joyously deployed for reasons and agendas that have little to do with Black liberation … My friend’s and his country’s women’s and men’s negrophobogensis, is the bedrock, the concrete slabs upon which any edifice of human articulation (whether love or war) is built. (Wilderson III 2016)

Antiblackness necessarily shades even the ‘micro-aggressions’ in the examples of Assata and Wilderson’s friend above. The white prison abolitionist and the Palestinian insurgent can sense the absolute abjection of blackness, and they gesture toward it to give themselves a glimpse at their own humanity, however much degraded by the violence they are subjected to via contingent violation as opposed to the gratuitous violence that black people may meet at a whim. Black vulnerability is of the same quality as theirs. While black people and the junior members share the category of occurrent, it is not pathogenic in the way of undermining autonomy or exacerbating any sense of powerlessness through particular actions that circumscribe their subjection. Instead, it is a vulnerability that is abject, that is discursively illegible or without origin, objectifying, psychically replenishing, and fortified by the dominant and marginal constituents of civil society, gratuitously, that is, without reason or dialectical reconciliation. Black vulnerability marks the parameters of human or subjective capacity through a broad coalition of policing the contours of the human and hardly human in a collective unconscious of antiblackness.

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V. Paradigmatic Policing Finally, let us return to police violence against black people as a paradigmatic phenomenon that reifies the sense of illegible gratuitous abject black vulnerability. Not only has police violence galvanized the contemporary political reaction to black vulnerability, but in reality, this type of state sanctioned violence has consistently had a place in America, whether it be direct violence by the police or the making available of black people by the police for lynch mobs. Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Brionna Taylor, Eric Garner, George Floyd: they belong to a much longer list of extra-judicial killings related to the police.15 There was a hesitation to appeal to these police killings inasmuch as their sheer repetition, in terms of both their execution and the public reaction, can seem numbing, and yet, in a strange confluence of feelings, it’s this type of violence that never fails to elicit a flush of overwhelming feelings in the United States and globally. These incidents are essential to the understanding of the excess and gratuity of black vulnerability that goes beyond the fact that many victims  in the media were unarmed and thus defenseless. You may recall yet another name that could belong to the list above as his death occurred just on the threshold of the twenty-first century, Amadou Diallo. Shot dead by a New  York special crime units in 1999, Diallo’s death is remarkable not only as an extra-judicial killing of an unarmed black man, but for the brutality of the killing. It was almost unimaginable to find out that Diallo, this single person, was shot 41 times as he reached for his wallet. Was he less than a person and more of a shooting target? Was that force as necessary as it was for Derek Chauvin to kneel on George Floyd’s neck for eight  minutes, echoing the pleas of Eric Garner, that he could not breathe? All of these descriptions, as incisively as they may point to an excess of force and excessive imagination, are physical and psychical manifestations of abject blackness but they do not speak directly to the most important libidinal axis that describes the nature of excess that circumscribes the positionality of these encounters between black people and the whiteness of civil society. In the “The Avant-Garde” essay, Martinot and Sexton attempt to articulate the discordance between the facts of the Diallo execution and the (non)relationship of black people to white civil society, writing: [T]he true excessiveness is not in the massiveness of the shooting but in fact that these cops were there on the street looking for this event in the first

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place, as a matter of routine business. This spectacular evil is encased in a more inarticulable evil of banality, namely that the state assigns certain individuals to (well-paying) jobs as hunters of human beings … All attempts to explain the malicious standard operating procedure of US white supremacy find themselves hamstrung by conceptual inadequacy; it remains describable, but not comprehensible. The story can be told, as the 41 bullets fired to slaughter Diallo can be counted, but the ethical meaning remains beyond the discursive resources of civil society, outside the framework for thinkable thought. (Sexton and Martinot 2003, 170, 172)

In their reflections on Diallo, Martinot and Sexton provide a familiar picture, given the discussion above, to conceptualize the excessive, extra-­ ordinary nature of black vulnerability. The ‘discursive resources’ that would demand justice for whites and occasionally some other non-Blacks cannot be reserved for black people whose vulnerability remains illegible or “outside the framework of thinkable thought.” The spectacular events are just that, a spectacle. Attentive to the fears of Saidiya Hartman in Scenes of Subjection on how spectacular violence can overshadow the mundane scenes of violence against the enslaved and freed black people, Sexton and Martinot point out how the logic of this repetitive cycle lies in the ephemeral and divertive nature of highly covered police brutality (Hartman 1997, 3–4). To acknowledge and discuss police brutality relies on conjuring particular events that are peppered in the news from year to year, sometimes month to month, although happening day to day, and this circularity and repetition of some anoriginal black abjectness overshadows the mundanity of white supremacy’s everyday rule.16 As one could imagine, following the discussion of the relative ineffectualness of facts discussed above, the spectacle of police violence, whether it be 41 bullet holes, eight minutes of strangulation, or 60 seconds of silence, obscures the constitutive affective/psychological structure of the non-relation of black people to white civil society. Such spectacles may lead one to believe the deaths of Diallo and Floyd signify, for instance, an undermining of the political autonomy that black people once had or deserve in this political ontology. The truth is that these deaths reify their stature as object, or in other words they are the dark conditions of possibility for the political subjective capacities of white civil society. When regarding the functioning of the spectacular, it also cannot go unmentioned that black cisgender men have garnered the most attention and although the considerations here will avoid focusing on any singular

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event in too much detail, it should be noted this group is not exclusively subject to such violence. Patrice D. Douglass gives a very nuanced reading of gender and afropessimism as it follows in the wake of Spillers’ invocation of (un)gendering and the fashion in which femininity and masculinity are misnamed and misrecognized under white supremacy. Douglass explains: Juxtaposing the hyper-visibility of the death of Black men against the invisibility and silencing of the death of Black women opens a litany of trap doors. Placing the lens on how Black women die is not to demand that visual images of their deaths are repeated on social media networks and the nightly news at the behest of the pleasure of viewing Black suffering. In fact, the issue of Black gender is more complex than the dichotomization of death. Furthermore, to bifurcate Black gender, Black women up against Black men, achieves nothing more than reifying gender stratifications that historically and experientially have never been made available to Black people. By shifting perspective, we might ask, how Black feminist politics account for the dead and dying inclusive of all genders? (Douglass 2018, 108)

This concluding call, asked of and inspired by black feminism, thus demands, not the dismissal of gendered violence, but rethinking the juxtaposition and ossification of such identities that are never afforded through proper terms of gender, since they are only created through a violence to separate these black identities from the political ontology of the human. Black (un)gendering thus exposes with greater depth the ways in which black vulnerability exceeds all principles and categories of the human. To refer to Douglass one more time at length she elaborates: The archive of gender is structurally anti-black. Its assumptive logic, whether explicit in its presentation or not, maintains that all women have the same gender. This orientation of thought does more than render Black gender invisible or silent. It makes it conceptually impossible to think of gender violence as orienting more than the realm of gender. Rather than engaging a politic fixated on what binds women together in life, I want to draw focus to what separates Black women in death. What creates the conditions of (im)possibility for Black women to die? (Douglass 2018, 115)

Humans die; meanwhile, black women are hailed into existence by a violence that only permits their perishing. This reality needs to be kept in mind when we are thinking of the phenomenon of police violence.

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Violence against black women should not be ignored, but an increased media presence does not bring about human recognition; their absence is part and parcel of an anti-black violence that imposes gender differently, though for a similar end, that is, social (and real) death. Wilderson falls in line with much of what Douglass explicates and suggests that the media focus on the carceral violence received by black men only serves the purpose of reifying spectacular violence and offering a false sense of agency through assuming the human categories of gender. Gender for black people is not essential, it is a ‘borrowed institutionality” instrumentalized in strategic ways.17 In the end, the actions of police brutality, inclusive of all genders, are not simply spontaneous or isolated acts of individual anger; they serve the ends of white civil society inasmuch as its constituents, while recognizing a certain horror in police brutality, feel safe from the fears and dread of its reality in the space where it belongs, namely in the black community. Moreover, there is also pleasure derived in the negrophilic dalliance of a weekend warrior protestor where their confrontation with police actually can be dignifying. These spectacular images show to many that the police are doing their job, which explains the ex post facto justifications of these black people as criminals even though the criminal records that these victims might possess actually points to the criminalization of their livelihood, that is, the banality of white supremacy. Again, the spectacles obscure all of this and serve to provide a “vital cultural labor” (Sexton and Martinot 2003, 176) Or as Sexton and Martinot state explicitly: White supremacy is not reconstructed simply for its own sake but for the sake of the social paranoia, the ethic of impunity, and the violent spectacles of racialization that it calls the “maintenance of order,” all of which constitute its essential dimensions. The cold, gray institutions of this society  – courts, schools, prisons, police, army, law, religion, the two-party system – become the arenas of this brutality, its excess and spectacle, which they then normalize throughout the social field. (Sexton and Martinot 2003, 180)

As mentioned above, the practice and exhibition of police brutality is a necessary component to justify the presence of police and to secure the normalcy of white civil society and this is repeated in a plethora of different seemingly separate arenas of civil society (‘courts, schools, prisons’). Of course, within this logic, there is a reversal of who truly is the aggressor

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and who is keeping the peace, and this too diverts attention from white supremacy’s absolute rule. The seemingly necessary maiming and death of black people by the arbiters of justice does not make sense, its excess is irrational, and yet it informs social cohesion. “In other words” as Wilderson states, “from the incoherence of black death, America generates the coherence of white life” (Wilderson III 2007, 29). However, if we are to truly come to terms with the paradigmatic function of policing we must follow Wilderson beyond Sexton and Martinot’s observations to an unsettling conclusion, which again appears to transpose an argument made by Hartman. As she astutely observes in Scenes, the subjection of black people in the antebellum period was not limited to the slave master but was available to any white person for whom the enjoyment of subjection could reify their identity as truly human (Hartman 1997, 25). Wilderson extends this observation, contending modern policing is not exclusive to the police, instead “white people are not simply ‘protected’ by the police. They are—in their very corporeality—the police” (Wilderson III 2007, 26). Policing therefore is not limited to an occupation, but is a relation to power and black subjection. It is a power that is gratuitous not contingent on any specific transgression and a relation afforded to whiteness by and large, and this relation may be borrowed and sometimes expressed by non-whites or the ‘junior members’ of civil society. We should thus not regard policing as a form of violence reserved strictly to what is performed by uniformed police officers. In an interview Wilderson explains, “Policing—policing Blackness—is what keeps everyone else sane. And if we can start to see the policing and the mutilation and the aggressivity towards Blackness not as a form of discrimination, but as being a form of psychic health and well-being for the rest of the world, then we can begin to reformulate the problem and begin to take a much more iconoclastic response to it” (Wilderson III 2014). Police violence is a paradigmatic example of antiblackness precisely because policing in more general terms is a form of violence that regulates antiblackness. The illegible, accumulative, fungible, abject vulnerability of blackness is maintained through a paradigm of policing made available to all non-blacks with the goal of sustaining the psychic integrity of civil society. This paradigm of policing can be expanded even further if one considers Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s criticism of policy as a mode of governance in The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study.18 Policy functions to create governable objects through programming that objectifies and fixes the excesses of social reproduction into order. The

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overlap with our discussion above is unmistakable; Moten and Harney even describe policy as “the reign of precarity,” or in other words the reign of the vulnerable, and they suggest the citizens themselves have been deputized to enforce policies in the name of the governing order or the state (Moten and Harney 2013, 66, 75). In this regard, policy making in general has an antiblack orientation that aims to permanently circumscribe the ‘bad debt’ that situates black vulnerability as outside of political or human discourse in general. “Policy” they write, “is the form that opportunism takes in this environment, as the embrace of the radically extra-economic, political character of command” (Moten and Harney 2013, 77). While not stated as such, the totalizing post-Fordist ‘environment’ of governance they are describing which embraces a ‘radically extra-economic, political character of command’ describes nothing other than the general extra-ordinary economy of antiblackness. The most obvious and undeniable convergence between policing and policy making is the broken windows strategy. The strategy had been lauded for its results in ‘order maintenance’ in many of the big cities in America. The policy demanded increased police presence to attend to even the most minor nonviolent crimes, for example, loitering (c.f. 13th Amendment), as a means of stunting those activities that would lead to a larger feeling of disorder and thus potentially leave a community “vulnerable to criminal invasion” (Kelling and Wilson 1982). The ‘maintenance of order’ requires criminalizing any behavior that may seemingly contribute to disorder. Police, and of course the deputized ‘good intentioned’ citizen like George Zimmerman, are not there to address crimes per se, but to stamp out the potential of any disordering behavior, or disordering being. Well blackness is first and foremost a disordering phenomenon and thus ‘criminal’ in its conceptualization, but a full engagement with the dynamic nature of this disordering characteristic will have to wait for the next chapter. In the end, the broken windows strategy is a manifestation of an ever more intrusive governance and has had devastating results, whereby Matt Taibbi reports cities like Baltimore had arrested 100,000 people in 2004 and in Chicago 250,000 people were stopped (Taibbi 2020). Taibbi, points out what has been widely known, that such policing targets certain communities, which he euphemistically describes as ‘those’ neighborhoods, and that is why it has garnered support from all political sides, statistics notwithstanding (Taibbi 2020). In the end, there is no mistaking that such policies work with the dispositions that led to the deaths of Eric Garner and George Floyd, but also Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice and Breyona Taylor,

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and moreover, such policies are nothing more than the repetition of the hostility extended to blackness since Africans entered the hold of the ship. Police, policing, and policy share an etymology and belong to a vocabulary that structure the grammar of extra-­ordinary black vulnerability that retains its hold on black people, up against cop cars, brick walls, or around their necks, and as such retains black people in the hold, in order for white civil society to function as usual, to hold its own.

VI. Conclusion: The Political and the Ethical This chapter recounts how black people have been excluded from civil society specifically and political ontology more generally, exposing them to an excessive extraordinary vulnerability constitutive of (white) humanity. If black people are thus necessarily excluded from political calculations, on what grounds can one come to articulate wrong? If the cows of the meat packing industry have no claims to rights or political agency, then on what grounds do we register this violence? This requires recognizing that this vulnerability transgresses the terms and discourse of the political only to register on the map of the ethical. While Wilderson does not address this relation in any systematic form, it is a crucial component to his picture. As aforementioned, the subtitle for the introduction to Red, White and Black, is “Unspeakable Ethics”; however, Wilderson does invoke the ethical in other instances, such as in his essay on South African revolutionary and black consciousness proponent Steve Biko. There, speaking through Fanon he states clearly, “What we learn from Fanon and others is that the world is unethical due to its subsumption by the slave relation” (Wilderson III 2008, 103). Further along he elaborates: [I]t would appear as if Fanon’s meditations coalesce around the following postulate: The Human relation is unethical because it relegates Blacks to the lowest rung of Humanity; and because it subsumes the world in asymmetrical power relations predicated on race. In point of fact, Fanon’s revelations are more severe than that. Race is a vertical distribution of values within Humanity. But a Black is a sentient being positioned below, or beyond, Humanity’s distribution of values. (Wilderson III 2008, 107)

From this quotation I gather a sense of violation cannot be brought to the terms of the political, but there appears to be room to make ethical claims. This chapter, as the first step in exploring black ethical life as

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hospitality, suggests the fashion in which black vulnerability is positioned ‘below, or beyond the Human’ helps elaborate the ethical framework, although it is not sufficient. Wilderson infamously claims that, again following Fanon, we need to destroy the world instead of trying to find a place in it. There is no grand plan on how such a destruction may take place and Wilderson also suggests constructing such a plan is misguided. Nevertheless, to fully comprehend the necessity for this destruction we need to consider how, while excluded from the terms of this political ontology, there are still means to articulate the demands of an impossible ethics in response to the (white) human. This claim will not be properly discursive or prescriptive to the ontological, at least in those political terms; instead the ethical is that which remains or escapes social—or what we learn to call ‘political’—death, through a fugitive black sociality, making claims in virtue of ethics’ very impossibility, (Warren 2018, 74) Wilderson thus leaves the opening to think and interrogate the ethical that has gone unspoken and unthought (Wilderson III 2010, 17).

Notes 1. While Sexton most likely would associate white supremacy with the sun, in an upcoming article I argue white supremacy function more like a black hole, superseding Bataille’s limited considerations of antiblackness in his cosmological account. This article relies on many of the revelations and explanations concerning the two economies found in this chapter. C.f. Mubirumusoke, Mukasa “Prolegomena to any Future Cosmology” in Philosophy Today. 2. Kara Keeling has a similar concept, which she names ‘quotidian violence’, that functions to subdue blackness, along with queerness, in favor of the status quo; she leaves open, however, a critical potentiality of queerness to this everydayness, writing, “quotidian violence names the violence that maintains a temporality and a spatial logic hostile to the change and chance immanent in each now; a quotidian violence presently holds in place a spatiotemporal logic that is hostile to queerness in time” (Keeling 2019, 17). Queerness is an epistemological category that subverts any social category but is rooted in materiality, argues Keeling. It is not clear whether this epistemological potentiality and intervention truly reaches the recess of the ontological that makes blackness any less vulnerable or if that is Keeling’s goal. 3. These different iterations also recall Hortense Spillers’ opening passage in the foundational essay “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American

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Grammar Book.” There she writes: “Let’s face it. I am a marked woman, but not everybody knows my name. ‘Peaches’ and ‘Brown Sugar’, ‘Sapphire’ and ‘Earth Mother’, ‘Aunty’, ‘Granny’, God’s ‘Holy Fool’, a ‘Miss Ebony First’, or ‘Black Woman at the Podium’: I describe a locus of confounded identities, a meeting ground of investments and privations in the national treasury of rhetorical wealth. My country needs me, and if I were not here, I would have to be invented” (Spillers 2003, 203). The country needs her because she is an object that retains the political possibilities and stabilities of white supremacy through the degradation of blackness. In a twist on Nietzsche’s infamous conceptualization of western metaphysics as a question of truth and different women in the Preface and throughout Beyond Good and Evil, we can imagine Spillers inaugurating the idea of white supremacy in this essay with the question ‘Supposing truth were a black woman?’ Would it not be those all too many guises with no fundamental essence aside from the way they offer some sense of identity over against blackness time and time again? 4. According to Wilderson, the political potentiality of performative actions of identity, especially as associated with the theory of performance associated with Judith Butler, remains quite limited, even if it is an unabashed assertion of humanity through marches and protests. Black performance does not have the quality of reconfiguring ontological positionality in the way other identities can rearrange ontic identities. Wilderson in Red White and Black explains, “[Hartman’s] text maintains an unpersuaded and underwhelmed stance toward the explanatory, much less liberatory, power of the performative when asserted in conjunction with the Black. This is because it is impossible to divorce Blackness from captivity, mutilation, and the pleasure of non-Blacks. Butler and company assume a presence, masked and reified; Hartman assumes a negation, captive and fungible” (F. B. Wilderson III, Red, White, and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms 2010, 313). In the following chapter we will revisit this question of blackness and performance at the limits of an ontology straddled by the political and social. The question will be not if black people’s performance, or, rather, the performativity of blackness, reveals an equivalent presence or masked humanity, but whether the performative reverberations of blackness expressed by black people unveil a spectral sociality in the non-present escape of blackness. 5. By limited I mean the loopholes that are often included, just to name two familiar examples: the caveat on prison labor in the 13th Amendment, or the failure to restore certain provisions of the Voting Rights Act by Congress after the 2013 Shelby County v. Holder Supreme court case. 6. Lisa Marie Cacho, in her work Social Death: Racialized Rightlessness and the Criminalization of the Unprotected, finds herself in a similar position

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while using the term ‘social death’ explicitly. She focuses on criminalization writ large, where we may include black people, but also immigrants. Her argument is ultimately a critique of the neo-liberal state and practices of exploitation forced onto these irredeemable laborers (Cacho 2012). This falls under the ruse of analogy precisely in terms of the subjective integrity, while degraded, still intact in Butler’s analysis. Wilderson’s most striking and powerful articulation of this ‘ruse’ can be found in Red, White, and Black, where he sets this term in conversation with the most significant political event acknowledged in the West. Of the Holocaust he writes, “The ruse of analogy erroneously locates Blacks in the world—a place where they have not been since the dawning of Blackness … The violence that turns the African into a thing is without analog because it does simply oppress the Black through tactile and empirical technologies of oppression … Jews went into Auschwitz and came out as Jews. Africans went into the ships and came out as Blacks. The former is a Human holocaust; the latter is a Human and a metaphysical holocaust” (F.  B. Wilderson III 2010, 37–38). 7. See again, ‘Prolegomena to any Future Cosmology’ for a fuller contextualization of these metaphors. 8. Interestingly, in a 1972 essay Patterson argues that there is indeed a uniqueness to black Americans regarding the legacy of chattel slavery and, in a way that somewhat anticipates Hortense Spillers, that the lack of a distinctive cultural heritage gives black Americans the capacity to give up the desires for a past and conjure a truly unique future. However, Patterson sees this as a choice that black people can make and thus still separates himself from Wilderson’s adaptation of his concept of social death by implying an existential agency in light of their continued condition. See Patterson (1972). 9. He sees this in Patterson’s own account of manumission, where he argues freedom is not ever achieved by the slave, but remains in the economy of the master class, explaining, “the free person is not purchasing the slave from her/his master. The social and legal capital manifest in the slave’s movement from captivity to ‘freedom’ is a transaction between members of the master class, one in which, though no longer chattel, is still not constituted as a subject of transaction. She is merely the object of transaction. She is not or has never been a subject of conveyance” (F. B. Wilderson III 2016). Also see Frank Wilderson III, “Social Death and Narrative Aporia in 12 Years a Slave” (F. B. Wilderson III 2015). 10. To be clear it is not as if there are not remnants of something like a culture before contact with Europeans. Yet what remains in these practices and artifacts is hardly a cultural condition that need to be recognized as such in any positive sense. Fanon describes these effects of colonialism: “The set-

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ting up of the colonial system does not itself bring about the death of the native culture. Historic observation reveals, on the contrary, that the aim sought is rather a continued agony than a total disappearance of the preexisting culture. This culture, once living and open to the future, becomes closed, fixed in the colonial status, caught in the yoke of the oppression. Both present and mummified, it testifies against the members. It defines them in fact without appeal … Thus we witness the setting up of archaic, inert institutions, functioning under the oppressor’s supervision and patterned like a caricature of formerly fertile institutions … These bodies appear to embody respect for the tradition, the cultural specificities, the personality of the subjugated people. This pseudo-respect in fact is tantamount to the most utter contempt, to the most elaborate sadism” (Fanon 1967, 36). Furthermore, in references to a lack of a prior plentitude, which I suggest is what is described by Fanon in this above citation, Wilderson writes, “There’s no such thing as a Black person making a demand in space or in time that would have an auditor out there, because the collective unconscious is not ready to accept that Black people had something that could have been appropriated, which is to say that the collective unconscious is not ready to accept that Blacks are human” (Wilderson III 2014). 11. Wilderson also notes how in fact legibility has become more and more obscure through time, writing, “as civil society matures, we move historically from the obvious technologies of chattel slavery to universal suffrage, the discourse of human rights, and the concept of universal access to civil society, the ante anti-black violence which is necessary to the elaboration and maintenance of White (and non-black) subjectivity gets repressed and becomes increasingly more and more unavailable to speech and conscious discourse” (F. B. Wilderson III 2015, 144). 12. Wilderson cites David Eltis for inferring this point in the introduction to Red, White, and Black (F. B. Wilderson III 2010, 13). 13. This preceding argument is reconstructed from an article I wrote for Public Seminar from March 2021 (Mubirumusoke 2021). 14. In an article of the New York Times we see the limits of upward class mobility among black boys and the vulnerability of black boys of means to end up poor. C.f. Badger et al. (2018). 15. It would be remiss to mention the connection of slave catchers as one axis in the development of modern-day police; see Jill Lepore’s article “The Invention of the Police” (Lepore 2020). 16. Kara Keeling observes a similar relationship between the circularity of such violent events and the affective nature of antiblackness through a reading of Frantz Fanon. She contends the temporality of colonization is a closed circle of anticipation and explosion where past traumas continue to overdetermine the present by reinforcing the affective constitution of their

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problematization, for example, the shame of being black. Her reading of Fanon is insightful and her arguments about temporality map well onto the readings of vulnerability attempted in this chapter, but they also fall short of the concerns, inasmuch as its focus seems to be the individual’s experience (Keeling 2003). 17. Wilderson astutely observes, “It as though by cataloguing horrific acts of violence in a manner that is properly gendered, one that relegates castration and police assassination to Black men … and rape to Black women, our political discourse can offer us the protection of a sanctuary that we otherwise might not have. It is not, of course, sanctuary from actual rapes, castration, or murder but the sanctuary of gendered recognition and incorporation which emplotment in a normal political discourse, a normal poem, provides” (F. B. Wilderson III 2016). 18. One can find another example of the expansion of policing to a broader sense of social ordering in Jacques Rancière’s Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy—although for Rancière policing is a neutral term, whereby “[it] is not so much the “disciplining” of bodies as a rule governing their appearing, a configuration of occupations and the properties of the spaces where these occupations are distributed” (Rancière 1999, 29).

References Badger, Emily, Claire Cain Miller, Adam Pearce, and Kevin Quealy. 2018. Extensive Data Shows Punishing Reach of Racism for Black Boys. The New York Times, March 19. Bataille, Georges. 1991. The Accursed Share. Trans. Robert Hurley. Cambridge: Zone Books. Buchanana, Larry, Quoctrung Bui, and Jugal K. Patel. 2020. Black Lives Matter May Be the Largest Movement in U.S. History. New York Times, June 3. Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. ———. 2004. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso. Cacho, Lisa Marie. 2012. Social Death: Racialized Rightlessness and the Criminalization of the Unprotected. New York: New York University Press. Cunningham, Vinson. 2020. The Argument of ‘Afropessimism’. The New Yorker, July 13. Douglass, Patrice D. 2018. Black Feminist Theory for the Dead and Dying. Theory & Event 21 (1): 106–123. Fanon, Frantz. 1967. Toward the African Revolution. Trans. Haakon Chevalier. New York: Grove Press. Hartman, Saidiya V. 1997. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Keeling, Kara. 2003. ‘In the Interval’: Frantz Fanon and the ‘Problems’ of Visual Representation. Qui Parle 13 (2): 91–117. ———. 2019. Queer Times, Black Futures. New York: New York University Press. Kelling, George L., and James Q Wilson. 1982. Broken Windows: The Police and Neighborhood Safety. The Atlantic, March. Kilpatrick, Connor. 2015. Let Them Eat Privilege. Jacobin Magazine, April 11. https://jacobinmag.com/2015/04/1-­99-­percent-­class-­inequality. Lepore, Jill. 2020. The Invention of the Police. The New Yorker, July 13. Mackenzie, Catriona, Wendy Roger, and Susan Dodds. 2014. Vulnerability: New Essays in Ethics and Feminist Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Marriott, David. 2000. On Black Men. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2007. Haunted Life: Visual Culture and Black Modernity. London: Rutger University Press. McCarthy, Jesse. 2020. On Afropessimism. Los Angeles Review of Books, July 20. Moten, Fred, and Stefano Harney. 2013. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study. Wivinoe: Minor Compositions. Mubirumusoke, Mukasa. 2021. How ‘White Priviliege’ Obscures Black Vulnerability. Public Seminar. March 11. https://publicseminar.org/essays/ how-­white-­privilege-­obscures-­black-­vulnerability/. Accessed 11 Oct 2021. ———. 2022. Prolegomena to Any Future Cosmology. Philosophy Today 65 (1). https://doi.org/10.5840/philtoday2021108428. Patterson, Orlando. 1972. Toward a Future That Has No Past: Reflections on the Fate of Blacks in America. The Public Interest 27: 25–62. Rancière, Jacques. 1999. Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy. Trans. Julie Rose. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Said, Edward K. 1979. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books. Sexton, Jared. 2008. Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Sexton, Jared, and Steve Martinot. 2003. The Avant-Garde of White Supremacy. Social Identities 9 (3): 169–181. Singh, Nikhil Pal. 2005. Black Is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Spillers, Hortense. 2003. Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Taibbi, Matt. 2020. Where Did Policing Go Wrong. TK News, June 1. https:// taibbi.substack.com Warren, Calvin. 2018. Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation. Durham: Duke University Press. Wilderson III, Frank B. 2003. Gramsci’s Black Marx: Whither the Slave in Civil Society. Social Identities 9 (2): 225–240.

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———. 2007. The Prison Slave as Hegemony’s (Silent) Scandal. In Warfare in American Homeland: Policing and Prison in a Penal Democracy, ed. Joy James, 23–34. Durham: Duke University Press. ———. 2008. Biko and the Problematic of Presence. In Biko Lives!: Contesting the Legacies of Steve Biko, ed. Andile Mngxitama, Amanda Alexander, and Nigel C. Gibson, 95–114. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2010. Red, White, and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms. Durham: Duke University Press. ———., interview by Jared Ball, Todd Steven Burroughs and Dr. Hate. 2014. ‘We’re Trying to Destroy to the World’: Anti-Blackness and Police Violence After Ferguson: An Interview with Frank Wilderson. Irreconcilaboe Anti-­ Blackness and Police Violence. Camden, (October). https://imixwhatilike. org/2014/10/01/frankwildersonandantiblackness-­2/ ———. 2015. Social Death and Narrative Aporia in 12 Years a Slave. Black Camera 7 (1): 134–149. ———. 2016. Afro-Pessimism and the End of Redemption. https://humanitiesfutures.org/papers/afro-­pessimism-­end-­redemption/. Accessed 1 Aug 2021.

CHAPTER 3

The Black Home as Black Social Space/Time

Rather than conceptualizing ‘the Black’s’ lack … as a problem to be solved or a crisis to be addressed, or a cause for pessimism or optimism, it might be understood as one of the crucial operations of what we might here grasp as the cut of Black existence: it might cleave an opening in the present order of meaning and being through which another structure, another world, perhaps might be ‘preciously assembled.’ Rather than seeing this as any celebration of ‘the new,’ we can grasp this as an excavation of some of that which never was, but might have been. It accumulates. It refuses to (o). And still is, lying in wait. (Keeling 2019, 174) —Kara Keeling, Queer Times, Black Futures

I. Introduction Descartes’ Meditations is often considered the inaugural scene of modern subjectivity. Less often is it recognized as a scene of domesticity. It’s easy to ignore how, as he initiates his estrangement into hyperbolic doubt, Descartes also evokes an image of domestic comfort. He is seated in his night gown by a fire with his papers and it is this environment that facilitates his meditative posture, an environment of “leisurely tranquility” (Descartes 1998, 59).. His ability to strip himself of all dogma and arrive at the limits of indubitable truth—an ability that would serve as a beacon for many succeeding conceptions of self in the western world—takes place at home, both in place and in feeling. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Mubirumusoke, Black Hospitality, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95255-6_3

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Following the initial excursion into hyperbolic doubt of the first meditation, there is that infamous moment in the second meditation where Descartes, still from the comforts of his home, reiterates the subordinate position of the senses to the mind by calling into question the men he sees crossing in the square outside of his window. By this point Descartes has already determined the mind, the ability to doubt and judge, to be the truest and most certain faculty humans possess. Therefore, when he sees men crossing in the street, when he perceives these strangers and their strangeness cast shadows of doubt on his homely sense of self certainty, he asks “But what do I see aside from hats and clothes, which could conceal automata?” but then quickly concludes, “Yet I judge them to be men” (Descartes 1998, 68). Here, as he had in the first meditation, Descartes insists the senses are far from trustworthy, but the faculty of judgment erases potential doubt, not only of himself as a thinking thing, but of those he perceives outside himself. The ability to see those men as men, to establish at the very least an initiating relationality with other people, relies not simply on the ability to think; the ability to think clearer than he had ever done before, is also facilitated by the conditions of being at home, even when confronted, albeit indirectly, by strangers. In the chapter “Non-Cartesian Sums: Philosophy and the African-­ American Experience” from Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race, Charles Mills contends that the Cartesian self, or ‘sum’, narrating the meditations occupies a position that the (western) philosophical tradition takes for granted. Descartes is allotted with the capacities to doubt oneself, one’s materiality, and remain certain of one’s existence; and this capacity/experience is taken to be universal. To contrast these circumstances and presumptions, Mills offers the unnamed black male protagonist from Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. This black man cannot possibly doubt the world, his body, or the strangers that may be walking by in the street because of the contingency of  his—what we could call extra-­ ordinary—vulnerability (Mills 1998, 8). Black people are ‘invisible’ to the world, without relation, and according to Mills, this invisibleness is not the failure of white sight, of the senses, but just as with Descartes, it’s the result of the judging capacity. While the Cartesian sum may judge the men crossing the square to indeed be men despite the uncertainty of perception, we cannot be too sure if such doubt, of self or other, could be circumvented when it comes to the problem of blackness.1 “No doubt, you’ll hardly believe I exist” writes Ellison’s invisible man (Ellison 1995, 13).

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Now, from this position of dispossession where black people cannot afford to doubt their own existence—at least on a sentient level—while the rest of the non-black world must always deny their existence—at least at certain ontological level—one may wonder what we should make of the question of domesticity, of the home, and its relation to blackness and selfhood or even the possibility of the relationality of blackness by in large. In this chapter, we will explore the contours of a black conception of self as the denial of a certain sense of domesticity; not, however, to completely abandon the possibility of a home for blackness, but to blacken the idea of the home. While Mills, in his contrast to Descartes’ true and indubitable sum, focuses on the invisible nature of Ellison’s protagonist, we cannot forget that in Ellison’s remarkable prologue to Invisible Man, the protagonist, despite all that is denied to him, is also with home. There he explains, “I found a home—or a hole in the ground if you will. Now don’t jump to the conclusion that because I call my home a ‘hole’ it is damp and cold like a grave; there are cold holes and warm holes … I say this all to assure you that it is incorrect to assume that, because I’m invisible and live in a hole, I am dead” (Ellison 1995, 6). He is not dead, well not exactly, and he has a home, meaning despite the limits or even the impossibility of black subjectivity, he still occupies a form of non-being that implies some sense of domesticity. We will deal with the nuances of his non-death below, but for the moment I will emphasize that the invisible man preambles this story of invisible black self-hood, of one of the most memorable articulations of the displacement of blackness, from a home—albeit a strange one, ‘a hole in the ground’. This home is definitively underground and flooded with stolen light that does not eliminate his spectrality, but instead illuminates his spectral condition. To anticipate the rest of the chapter, we can say his black home is a re-placement of time (the prologue), displacement of space (the basement), and of being (spectral invisibility). The ‘black home’ is not like any traditional or metaphoric conceptions of home and that is precisely the effect of its infusion by black social life. It is not the fortified fortress of a ‘national home’ reserved for a liberal, neo-liberal, or even alienated subjectivity; rather, the ‘black home’ exists before, beyond, and along borders with contrasts and contradictions; illusiveness and instability; as debt and theft. It’s a spacing or spatiality, not in a physical sense, but a reframing of the phenomenological conception of space: instead of a relation of concern and familiarity (Heidegger 1962, 138) it is a spacing and temporalizing that is fugitive, escaping all metrics of a human relationality. This is to say black people are always

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simultaneously of a certain place and time, but only insomuch as blackness transgresses the normative frameworks of place and time; the black home of black people emerges on account of their proximity to and paraontological distinction from this fugitive blackness from which they are not alienated, but which they embrace as always alien, unknowable, unownable, unsettling, non-settling, and more. Admittedly, in a world where black life is constitutively of no concern and made more than unfamiliar, but, in fact, abject—“Look a Negro!” (Fanon 1952, 93)—it’s hard to imagine how in any sense black people inhabit a space or time like home. In fact, Calvin Warren argues within a phenomenological/Heideggerian framing that ‘black being’ is fundamentally without a place; it is an outlaw, an object or equipment for humans, and, consequently, without a world (Warren 2018, 65–76). The black home, therefore, and Warren would agree, could not be located by a schema of being-in-the-world—again, in the Heideggerian sense, where humans find familiarity in their experience so that they can discover and engage with beings. Furthermore, the black home is not the uncanny (unheimlich);  rather, this chapter will argue the black home is a being-­ before-­the world, a being-out-of-this-world, it attends to a new cosmology by means of a paraontological fugitivity. In order to develop this conception of the black home we will follow two intertwining roads, returning first to afropessimism and then introducing the work of Fred Moten. Starting with a pointed reading of Saidiya Hartman’s earlier writings and a reengagement with Frank Wilderson, we will trace the seemingly limited scope of black subjectivity and domesticity as framed by afropessimism. Then, turning to Moten and his reflections on blackness, we will discuss an excessiveness that escapes the metaphysics of subjectivity as it is politically rooted, and which opens the spatiotemporal possibilities of the black home through sociality in light of and in contrast to Moten’s own understanding of a black homelessness and an impossible domesticity. ‘Home’ provides an idea of spatiality and temporality that can go unaddressed in modern descriptions and conceptions of the self.2 Blackness cannot be conceived of in a vacuum like the traditional reading of Descartes but must take into account these aspects that the home affords, however with particular attention to their elusive and elastic, stolen and borrowed, capacities that follow from their blackening. Blackness reverberates within

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these realms and through these improper relations; the ‘black’ of ‘black home’ colors them in a very specific valence, whereby the black home is a spacing and temporalization of possibility that is always elsewhere because of the uniqueness of paraontology.3 Irredeemably displaced, always out of time, this chapter contends the black home entails a black social spacing and temporalization or ‘timing’ that does not extend from (or ground) the autonomous liberal subject and its self-assurance, but instead emerges within darkened vulnerability and fugitivity: “It is as close to home as you’ll get, it is a transient resting place, an impossible refuge, for those forced out, pushed on, displaced always. They stay but never settle” (Hartman 2019, 23). The black home remains haunted; it remains dilapidated from neglect. There is no safety of origins for the black home, only it’s an ever-shifting abgrund and in constant re-­ creation by an elusive blackness that makes possible the impossible, namely black social life as black escape, from black celebration. Breaking from the explicitly political realm, where black people are far from anything like agents of civil society, the black home gets its strength, at bottom, from a rejected and objectionable  social milieu. Unownable, the black home is the emblem of a different, wonderful, fugitive  kind-of social mobility. Absent political relationality, the black home facilitates black social relatability through difference. The black home is painted with a blackness that does not deny vulnerability, but instead acknowledges it to understand black sociality amidst dispossession and political death.

II. The Unthought, the Dispossessed: No Home, No Domesticity To get a sense of what the black home entails it would behoove us to address the strongest objections to black domesticity and/as the possibility of traditional political subjectivity for black people. This requires reengaging the afropessimism that served as the framework for the entire chapter on extra-ordinary vulnerability (Chap. 2). Following the analysis of Chap. 2, it may appear there is nothing salvageable in terms of a black sense of self, although this concept was never addressed directly. This section will provide an assessment of the question of a black subjectivity and black life more generally from the afropessimistic position, starting with some of Saidiya Hartman’s earlier writings, which are undoubtedly of strong influence upon Frank Wilderson’s afropessimist framework.4

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In an interview with Frank Wilderson titled the “Position of the Unthought,” Hartman articulates the subject position of black personhood to be, as the title suggests, unthought. Speaking initially of the slave and what her research yielded, she explains: [I]t just seems that every attempt to employ the slave in a narrative ultimately resulted in his or her obliteration, regardless of whether it was a leftist narrative of political agency - the slave stepping into someone else’s shoes and then becoming a political agent - or whether it was about being able to unveil the slave’s humanity by actually finding oneself in that position. (Hartman and Wilderson III 2003, 183)

According to Hartman, the experience of the slave could never be articulated as a subject in itself; rather, the slave can only occupy the subject position of some other form of agency or by an actual agent, and hence not be a slave, or vice versa. The most infamous example that Hartman provides of the latter phenomenon is presented in Scenes of Subjection with the figure of abolitionist John Rankin. Rankin wants to empathize with the unimaginable violence of slavery by imagining himself in the position of the slave. However, this attempted imaginative practice of empathy, no matter how good hearted, exposes the vulnerability at the heart of the slave position via white affectations. Hartman explains: Empathy in important respects confounds Rankin’s effort to identify with the enslaved because in making the slave’s suffering his own, Rankin begins to feel for himself … by exploiting the vulnerability of the captive body as vessel for the uses, thoughts, and feelings of others, the humanity extended to the slave inadvertently confirms the expectations and desires definitive of the relations of chattel slavery … the ease of Rankin’s empathic identification is as much due to his good intentions and heartfelt opposition to slavery as to the fungibility of the captive body. (Hartman 1997, 19)

The slave remains an object of exploitation even through these sympathetic motives because its existence is predicated upon fungibility, that is, vulnerable to manipulative machinations reserved to its status as a sentient object. Or as Hartman states, “the fungibility of the commodity makes the captive body an abstract empty vessel vulnerable to the projection of other’ feelings, ideas, desires and values; and as property, the disposed body of the enslaved is the surrogate to the master’s body since it guarantees his disembodied universality and acts as the sign of his power and dominion”

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(Hartman 1997, 201). Rankin’s attempt to make slave suffering legible through empathy counter-intuitively erases that suffering and, instead, reverts attention  and power to himself precisely because the slave is an object of his mastery and not a subject with relational capacity, thus making empathy ineligible for his intended goal. The transfer of attention to himself does not expose the extremity of the suffering, but instead ostensibly replaces it, as one may do with a commodity. In other words, black suffering is eluded by the openness of the black body to be replaced by other signs and bodies. Chattel slavery provides the possibility and the desire to possess and don blackness as a sentimental resource and a locus of enjoyment in the libidinal economy. It is in this sense that the slave remains ultimately unthought. For Hartman in Scenes even emancipated black people occupy a position that recycles their subjection within the narrative of certain national investments clouded by semantics of freedom. In other words, ‘free blacks’ were called emancipated, but practices of subjection and exclusion were quick to follow and once again, they were only given voices under an integrationist model that occludes the real gratuitous violence that situates them, as she says, in a “paradox of agency.” In Scenes, Hartman describes a double Dutch, where black people appear to stand on one leg for a moment of seeming relief only to have the rope of antiblackness swoop down and ultimately reveal that blacks do not even have one leg to stand on. As if the condition of black people pre- and post-emancipation was not enough, in the “Position of the Unthought” interview Hartman suggests Scenes of Subjection is, in fact, an allegory for the current condition of black people. We get a better sense of this revelation in the book she published after Scenes of Subjection, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route, which follows Hartman’s return to Ghana in the hopes of filling the void of an absence of home and foundation that she felt as a black American descendant of slavery. Hartman abandons the trajectory of subjectivity in the United States to explore a more primordial scene of domesticity in Mother Africa. What is significant about this absence of home to Hartman’s experience can be articulated in terms of Heideggerian phenomenology, whereby in the United States, and in inevitably Ghana, she realized she is not like ‘Dasein’, who has a sense of home by means of being-in-the world. This sense of home, of course, is not exclusively in relation to a physical place, although one could imagine why Hartman, in her feeling of displacement in America, would hope that returning to the physical continent of Africa

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and immersing herself with its people and their history, may evoke the feeling of home she desired. That temperament, or ‘state’ of ‘being-in’, can come in many ways but fundamentally entails a sense of familiarity and understanding, or of ‘concern’. Being-in-the-world is a way of dwelling so that the world is available to humans (or Dasein) to live, explore, and complete projects (Heidegger 1962, 88–89). However, since Hartman’s experience of homelessness is not and has never been of being-in-the-world, her feeling is also not that of which Heidegger describes as a feeling of the uncanny or umheimlich that translates more literally as ‘unhomely’ or what he also calls a ‘not-being-at-­ home’. The uncanny is a feeling in the mood of anxiety where humans come to terms with their freedom, their openness, as unbounded (Heidegger 1962, 233). The uncanny, however, only comes about in contrast to an initial feeling of being-in-the-world, of familiarity, blackness however is not familiar, or unhomely, but abject. Instead, the homelessness Hartman implies in Scenes and will describe in Lose Your Mother, her black non-being, her abjectness, is similar to the status of entities, objects, or equipment, as Calvin Warren explains: Black being is both a necessary instrument for the human’s self-constitution and an object of ferocious hatred, since it bears nothing of the metaphysical order … the alien [another word for black being in this instance] is precisely this improper position, as out of place, and, in essence, inhabiting no place within the world at all. (Warren 2018, 53–53)

This description by Warren is almost analogous to Hartman’s understanding of the position of the unthought. The enslaved do not have human possibilities, and modern black people like Hartman retain that legacy. Hartman writes in the prologue to Lose Your Mother: If slavery persists as an issue in the political life of black America, it’s not because of an antiquarian obsession with bygone days or the burden of a too-long memory but because black lives are still imperiled and devalued by a racial calculus and a political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago. This is the afterlife of slavery—skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverished. I, too, am the afterlife of slavery. (Hartman 2007, 6)

And toward the end of the text, she reiterates:

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I, too, live in the time of slavery, by which I mean I am living in the future created by it … History doesn’t unfold with one era bound to and determining the next in an unbroken chain of causality … So the point isn’t the impossibility of escaping the stranglehold of the past, or that history is a succession of uninterrupted defeats, or that the virulence and tenacity of racism is inexorable. But rather that the perilous conditions of the present establish the link between our age and a previous one in which freedom too was yet to be realized … If slavery feels proximate rather than remote and freedom seems increasing elusive, this has everything to do with our own dark ties. If the ghost of slavery still haunts our present, it is because we are still looking for an exit from the prison. (Hartman 2007, 133)

A certain strangeness follows the descendants of the captives and the haunting of slavery was carried through her childhood and adulthood in America. In fact, one of the ways Hartman describes the slaves is as strangers. The Africans sold by other Africans were not kin or friends; they were strangers with ties severed or denied. As one could imagine, she also feels this strangeness returning to Ghana, where, while she initially hopes for a homeland, she is greeted as a foreigner and remains a foreigner. As she says in the opening chapter titled “Afrotopia,” “what place in the world could sate four hundred years of yearning for a home” (Hartman 2007, 33)? Homelessness, thus, is another name for the unthought subject position that situates black people and their paradoxical agency. Black people, haunted by slavery and the terror that it induced, remain unthought for Hartman because they have no home, no memory of their homeland, are without any story of origins, they are not ‘in-the-world’ familiarly or uncannily; they have proverbially ‘lost their mother’, inherit an impossible domesticity, they are abject, they have no way, and as she says of herself, there remains no remedy for this homelessness (Hartman 2007, 199). The vividness of Hartman’s homelessness comes to the fore as she narrates her encounters within and around the Elmina Castle. The Castle haunts Hartman’s narrative. It was erected by the Portuguese in the fifteenth century and then commandeered by the Dutch, who took over and advanced the slave trade from the fort. The Castle was the central place where captured slaves were corralled before being sent across the Middle Passage to the Americas. The horrors of the Africans who were captured by other Ghanaians and sold to the Europeans to be held captive at Elmina Castle, torn from kin, home, and civility weighs heavily on Hartman as she repeatedly harkens to the imagery of the captives chained in its dungeons,

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losing all sense of identity, and preparing to float to their death. With a tragic turn of irony, the houses of black people that emigrated to Ghana from America were often within view of the Castle and for a time Hartman resided with an expatriate in a house set in this very predicament. While staying with an expatriate named Kohain in one these misplaced houses, she reflects “I wanted to imagine a present not tethered to a long history of defeat but this was difficult to do with Elmina Castle dominating the shoreline … Secretly I hoped that I wasn’t too late to believe in freedom dreams” (Hartman 2007, 107). Following this expressed desire of hope to herself, this secret,  the narrative shifts to a conversation Hartman has with a filmmaker named Khalid from Atlanta. In this conversation, Khalid asks “‘It’s so beautiful, isn’t it’” (Hartman 2007, 107). Hartman’s hope disappears as she asks if he is referring to the Castle. He says he was referring to the ocean, which he describes as vast, and she retorts that it is loud. The Castle and the burden of the captive slaves is deafening for Hartman; death and darkness cloud her vision. Even the ocean, which Khalid sees as vast and plentiful, can only be the loudness that keeps her up at night, the screams of those stolen and forgotten. Khalid goes on to explain that he visited Elmina Castle because he had felt a call from ancestry, that he was bringing all the captives back home with him; he analogizes the experience with visiting his grandmother and feeling like the rest of his family is with him (Hartman 2007, 108). Hartman responds that she has never felt more alone, that place is not for grieving and rest but the place where one has lost their family. As she tears up, Khalid makes a gesture of kinship, or maybe friendship, saying, “Sis, It’s alright. Don’t forget we’re survivors” (Hartman 2007, 108). In this exchange, Khalid alludes to a black kinship that is not limited by sanguinity, location, or time, in other words, he intimates the possibility of a black home escaping through and beyond natal alienation, gratuitous violence, and dishonor. He speaks of his captive kin, analogizes these captives with his grandmother, and extends a hand of familial identification to Hartman as their shared experience is configured by being out of time and out of place. But Hartman does not accept these analogies of kin and ultimately of a sort of fugitive social life. She can only feel alone, unthought of alongside a history of unthought people. The existential grief and solitude expressed by Hartman in her search for wholeness a century after emancipation reflects the unthinkability of black people as subjects, of an agency that does not extend from their social death, a mood that is more than ‘uncanny’, unhomely, it is a place with no possible home. Like some contorted metaphor of the imagery and ideals found in  Immanuel Kant’s

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Perpetual Peace,  Khalid sees a horizon,  but Hartman can only see the graveyard, and the black subject position, ultimately unthought, seemingly has no agency beyond the paradoxical expression of its own negation. In Lose Your Mother, Hartman provides an existential elaboration of the improper position of the unthought, of the slave that remains as not-in-­ the-world and without home, but the fullest elaboration of the unthought, homelessness, and denial of domesticity comes from her interviewer for “The Position of the Unthought,” former student, and intellectual inheritor, Frank Wilderson III.  In Red, White, and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonism, Wilderson takes some of the observations and conclusions concerning the position of the slave made by Hartman in Scenes of Subjection, while also incorporating a number of other theorists, to articulate the political ontology of afropessimism. Many of the structural claims about afropessimism were discussed and elaborated in Chap. 2 and, therefore, do not need to be repeated; instead, we will turn our focus from extra-ordinary vulnerability broadly to the claims against the possibility of black political subjectivity specifically, which are crystalized in Wilderson’s denial of black domesticity. The afropessimist school situates blackness ontologically in a position that is without any political relation and therefore, intuitively, black people without any political agency. In Red, White, and Black, Wilderson explains: “Afropessimism explores the meaning of Blackness not … as a variously and unconsciously interpellated identity or as a conscious social actor but as a structural position of noncommunicability in the face of all other positions” (Wilderson III 2010, 58). Here Wilderson articulates  the difference between subjects with a structural positionality that have the potential for a certain agential status in civil society and thus can communicate their freedom or pain discursively and the position of black people, who instead reside in a structural position outside civil society and are denied these capacities. This, of course, describes the constitutive extra-ordinary vulnerability discussed in the previous chapter, but now we can explore further how such a positionality prohibits the capacities of the black self for Wilderson. Black people are not in position of any subjectivity, not even the unfreedom of the Marxist or Lacanian subaltern subjectivity; instead, they are constitutively dispossessed and excluded from performative expressions in the political register (Wilderson III 2010, 7;67). For Wilderson, through a reading of Ronald Judy, even the familiar narrative whereby black people attempt to articulate a sense of agency through a narrative of resistance, for example, the slave narrative, the results are not political agency, but instead black people are subsumed by the

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ontologically empty category of blackness, that is, black non-being (Wilderson III 2010, 38–44). In clarifying the structural parameters of this ontological condition, Wilderson expands the scope of the black positionality and its relation to white positionality to the idea of capacity. He writes: Whiteness is parasitic because it monumentalizes its subjective capacity, its lush cartography, in direct proportion to the wasteland of Black incapacity. By ‘capacity’ I have meant something more comprehensive than ‘the event’ and its causal elements and something more indeterminate than ‘agency’. We should think of it as a kind of facility or matrix through which possibility itself—whether tragic or triumphant—can be elaborated … White (Human) capacity, in advance of the event of discrimination or oppression, is parasitic on Black incapacity: Without the Negro, capacity itself is incoherent, uncertain at best. (Wilderson III 2010, 45)

Another way of understanding what Wilderson means by capacity is to imagine the totalizing environment of possible legibility or the conditions of possibility, even for those who are politically marginalized. White capacity is more than the decisions or actions that are afforded any specific agents, whether they belong to a ruling or subordinate identity. It is the umvelt where even imagining agency, or the institution of oppressive machinations, takes place.5 Furthermore, this white capacity is founded upon ‘black incapacity’, black non-being, black captivity, black abjectness. Attempting to attribute a humanism, reserved for non-blacks, to black people under these conditions is a categorical mistake. Under the auspices of cultural studies’ use in film theory, Wilderson calls attention to this mis-­ categorization, explaining: Black has sentient capacity but no relational capacity. As an accumulated and fungible object, rather than an exploited and alienated subject, the Black is openly vulnerable to the whims of the world, and so is his or her cultural ‘production.’ What does it mean—what are the stakes when the world can whimsically transpose one’s cultural gestures, the stuff of symbolic intervention, onto another worldly good, a commodity of style. (Wilderson III 2010, 57)?

In other words, for Wilderson, those black cultural objects, interventions, movements, and aesthetics embraced as rebellious and inventive or contributive to a black subjectivity do not contain the power, or even the

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potency, that we may attribute to human behavior. They are instead immediately objectified; they are superficial, not substantive. Black people are recognized as sentient beings, but not ones who can affect the milieu of the human, they do not have that relational capacity for exchanges that transform. Sorrow songs become jazz become pop music and yet black relation to violence remains gratuitous not contingent. Or as Wilderson states, “[structural, or absolute, violence] is not a Black experience but a condition of Black ‘life’. It remains constant, paradigmatically, despite changes in its ‘performance’ over time—slave ship, Middle Passage, Slave estate, Jim Crow, the ghetto, and the prison-industrial complex” (Wilderson III 2010, 75). The picture Wilderson paints of the impossibility of black subjectivity becomes vivified when he juxtaposes the position of blackness to whiteness in terms of the fundamental displacement of subjectivity theorized in the twentieth century. In film theory, for instance, Lacanian psychoanalysis is used to describe the subjective capacity of whiteness as a move from empty to full speech, a move where Lacan’s interpretive framework disrupts civil society as it discovers a fundamental alienation for the subject. In the libidinal economy, the alienated subject creates a narcissistic ego when it believes their words, or ‘empty speech’, are the bearers of truth. However, when the self recognizes that words only provide a symbolic relation, and this self realizes that it is always already outside itself because it is constituted through relation—and not through a self-formation using words— then it achieves Lacanian full speech. Through a reading of Fanon, Wilderson argues that the sort of narcissism that founds this possible transition from empty to full speech is not afforded to black people, there cannot be a narcissistic slave and therefore there cannot be an alienated slave. While for Lacan and the white subject position, language is the space in which positionality or human capacity is framed, for blacks, according to Fanon, violence has reserved this role: “[The black position] is less a site of subjectification and more a site of desubjectification—a species of absolute dereliction, a hybrid of ‘person and property’, and a body that magnetizes bullets” (Wilderson III 2010, 77). The site of desubjectification is the effect of paradigmatic violence, it is the arid zone of non-being that Fanon describes, “stripped bare of every essential from which a genuine new departure can emerge. In most cases, the black man cannot take advantage of this descent into a veritable hell” (Fanon 1952, xii) [my emphasis].

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Under these conditions, ‘in most cases’, it should be of no surprise that Wilderson will go on to dismiss the possibility of a black home,6 or black domesticity, since there is no space nor time for a black subject, alienated or otherwise. The domestic is a realm reserved for the white human, where relational capacity is possible, where kinship relations are recognized, where one can be free of gratuitous violence, in other words for those who are not ‘socially dead’. Wilderson addresses black domesticity, or rather its impossibility, in moments of his analysis of cinema, in particular what he calls slave films, which are feature films with black directors, with black central figures who are caught up in ethical dilemmas, and that take place in the western hemisphere (Wilderson III 2010, 95). He contrasts films that he finds to have accurate articulations of blacks relations to white civil society as rooted in antagonism—for example, those who were part of the LA Rebellion film school—with those who fail to do so—in this category he discusses the films Antwone Fisher and Monster’s Ball. Wilderson contrasts Antwone Fisher with Bush Mama in Part 2 of Red, White, and Black to highlight the possible approaches and projects of understanding blackness’ relation to civil society. Beginning with Antwone Fisher, he recognized that this film is not an attempt to bring the ‘Slave’ into humanity, but instead presumes the protagonist’s humanity, albeit not fully realized, which then must be brought into full being by resolving ethical dilemmas with the world and other characters. The violence that prohibits Fisher’s ascent into full masculinity, however, is never seen as white, but instead articulated over against black femininity. Whiteness is excluded from the narrative and, instead, black women, in this case the abusive black mother, are a placeholder for dialectical sublation into manhood. Therefore, the narrative, in trying to veer away from using whiteness as a frame of reference, instead articulates a completely autoimmune understanding of black deprivation, a version of black-on-black crime, which even includes deploying a figure of state violence, in this case a military officer personified by Denzel Washington’s character. Wilderson, uses the 1988 Street Terrorism Enforcement Prevention Act, or STEP, as an analytic to describe how black life is reduced to the carceral. The STEP act entailed that any household—through any vague association—that harbors a ‘gang member’ can be subject to punishment. The law extends the spatial carceral logic of the slave quarters to the parents through the children, ostensibly removing the possibility of black domesticity by means of contemporary natal alienation and we see this extension performed in Antwone Fisher, where

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[civil society] maps and remaps a grid of captivity across spatial dimensions of the Black ‘body,’ the Black ‘home,’ and the Black ‘community.’ The guarantee of coherence for civil society requires that, for the Black, there be no inside to civil society and no outside to policing. If there is no outside to policing then there can be no outside to guilt or criminality, there can be no contemplation of civil access, of life or ‘contemporaries.’ The integrationist narrative is therefore a narrative of disavowal. In order to produce an artificial subjectivity outside of guilt and criminality so that a legible ‘Black’ story can be told—in short, for the film to contemplate the young naval serviceman’s life as the life of a citizen and not as a Slave—Antwone Fisher follows the same steps as STEP: it reterritorializes the Black home as slave quarters. But it also liberates Black male characters from a priori and paradigmatic criminality (1) by exalting and celebrating their embodiment as agents of state violence and policing (in this film it is the Navy), (2) by reproducing a vertical continuum of Black femininity (from tragic ‘mulatta’ down to Sapphire and Aunt Jemima), and (3) by ascribing to the ‘lower’ registers of that continuum the administration and embodiment of the Slave estate (dark-skinned Black women who raped him, chained him to a post, and whipped him, who shot and killed his father, who birthed him in prison, and who abandoned him to the world). (Wilderson III 2010, 112)

With the structures of gratuitous violence and alienated kinship, how is it possible for Antwone Fisher to imagine something like a black home outside of a fickle and temporary mirage formed by service to the chief enactor of antiblack violence, namely the state? For Wilderson, there is no possibility of black domesticity that is not ultimately a mirage distracting from the condition of the relationally barren slave quarters, which maps the bare cartography of extra-ordinary vulnerability; the space and time of blackness is null. The black home cannot be a space like Descartes’ study for Wilderson, where a sense of security and familiarity facilitates and ultimately grounds the cogito and its relationality, that is, the safety and belonging that comes from being a thinking thing with the capacity for recognizing those outside his window—those white neighbors—as one’s too. The time of the black home is essentially the time of slavery according to Wilderson, since the logics transcend time resulting in the historical stillness discussed in the previous chapter. In fact, the impossibility of black domesticity secures white civil society, that is, its coherence and mastery, because the integrity of whiteness is calculated through methods of exclusion; the possibility of white affirmation is black negation, whether it be through fear mongering, literal destruction, or even consumption of blackness—c.f. John Rankin above.

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In his reflections on Haile Gerima’s Bush Mama Wilderson finds another approach to black cinema with no illusions of the denial of black people’s exclusion from civil society, the failure of black domesticity is on full display. In Bush Mama there is no obscuration that the only sense of intimacy with white civil society is through black retaliative violence, not cultural production, and that violence is the only legitimate response by black people under their condition of extra-ordinary vulnerability in civil society. This relation to violence, Wilderson contends, does not enact but captures the spirit of the Black Liberation Army and the slave revolt as well. These events are attuned to the fact that when it comes to the power structure of this political ontology, the discursive or symbolic realm does not address the structural relations of white to black, only the violence of the Real can shutter its foundations. The violence in Bush Mama, however, is prefaced by the conditions that the protagonist find themselves. The protagonist, Dorothy, returns home from work and kills a white police officer who raped her daughter, Luann, and she is sent to prison. There is more than just this scene of interracial violence that frames Wilderson’s ability to articulate the political ontological stakes of his analysis but see how he describes the limits of black domesticity when reflecting on the rape of Luann. He writes: Luann’s encounter with the policeman confirms, through the spectacle of child rape, what the film’s cinematic form has worked so diligently to build: the fact that ‘Black home’ is an oxymoron because this notion has no structural analogy with a notion of White or non-Black domestic space. The absolute vulnerability of Black domesticity finds its structural analogy—if it can be metaphorized as an analogy—with that domain known as the slave quarters: a ‘private’ home on a Master’s estate: a building with walls and a door, the vulnerability of which is so absolute that it can be considered neither ‘private’ nor ‘home’. Home then, offers no sanctuary in the film’s libidinal economy because captivity is a constitute element of the characters’ lives. (Wilderson III 2010, 127; my emphasis)

There simply cannot be a place for a black home, in any traditional sense at least, if there is this open vulnerability. Where is there sanctuary, a position to center and structure one’s agency, for black people under these conditions? Black houses are under constant police surveillance and black people open to the threat of incarceration; they are the slave quarters that remain under the purview of the master, and as such are no place like

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home. That is, if one is looking for a structural integrity that is a structural analogy to the (white) home. When Wilderson questions the metaphor of analogy as an aside, it is because he wants to argue that the vulnerability of black domesticity in the present is structurally the same, not an analog. However, what if there is a sense of blackness that is beyond analogy and beside ontology, a black home that eschews the structure of this logic altogether? Can the concept of home have integrity with no secure structure, or deconstructed, if you will? Can a black home embrace its displacement and untimely character? Before we answer these questions, lets return to Wilderson, who extends this prohibition specifically in terms of black femininity, which he emphasizes as not analogous to white femininity, and, furthermore, a direct threat to the domestic space. The black women’s suffering cannot be analogized, since it is rooted in gratuitous violence. For even the most radical white feminism—which Wilderson attributes to Leopoldina Fortunati’s Marxist feminism—white women’s suffering does register, in this case in the form of wage exploitation. Or in other words as a worker whose alienation is just further obscured by capitalism. White women and black women are essential to the reproduction of the relations of production through child rearing, but the latter do not lay claim to their children because of natal alienation that makes them completely outside reliable relationships of kinship. Black women do not secure a domestic space like white women, even if the white women’s security is one of alienated worker. Black femininity—such as the Dorothy character of Bush Mama or Safiya Bukhari-Alston imprisoned as a member of the BLA, whom Wilderson also contemplates—however is potentially dangerous to the white domestic space (Spillers 2003, 228): [Bukhari-Alston] stood before her jailers as a threat to the security of the free world because her existence, or more precisely her living death, threatened the conceptual framework of White sexuality writ large, which is to say, only through her death can White women know themselves as women and White men know themselves as men. Her structural position threatens the security of the White domestic scene, the White home—the purest distillation of the state. (Wilderson III 2010, 134)

The only relations that black persons, or black women specifically, have to domesticity is their support in the libidinal economy through their social death, or their threat through total violence.

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To be clear, this violence cannot be interpreted as black people challenging use-value in a Marxist sense, although it may sound appealing to suggest that black death is a challenge to a kind of market value in the political economy and perhaps approaching Fortunati’s analysis. In The Death-Bound Subject: Richard Wright’s Archeology of Death, Abdul R.  JanMohamed, through a reading of Richard Wright, suggests the slave’s death is equivalent to wages in a capitalist society and that the use value of his death is the only thing that cannot be appropriated by the master, therefore, “the use-value of death is twofold: it permits the slave to find the only exit from the confinement of social-death, and it allows him to develop a consciousness of freedom that cannot be appropriated by the master” (JanMohamed 2005, 19). For Wilderson, however, it is not use-value that is at stake in this threat of violence, since the gratuity of violence rejects this sort of material approximation that would give value both to the murder of the master or to black people’s taking of their own life through sacrifice, whether it be motivated religiously, politically, or existentially. Black suicide, no matter the intention or motivation, will only further reify the libidinal economy of black death, not provide a semblance of freedom in the currently constructed political paradigm. Instead, the total violence that Dorothy and Bukhari-Alston offer is a threat to the hegemony of domesticity by whiteness in civil society precisely because it threatens whiteness; not the use-value of the slave, who may as well wither away. For Wilderson, there is no black home in any sense to be recovered; there is only the call for the total destruction of domesticity in its only legible form, which is that of the white home. Wilderson refers to this destruction as a dance with death, which black people, through certain cinematic strategies or political movements, have invited whites to participate in too, although as a threat to the world as they know it, said invitation had never been taken up—with perhaps the exception of, Wilderson suggests, the Weather Underground, who may have recognized the ethical dilemmas of white civil society and wanted to destroy the structural relation of black incapacity to the integrity of their white capacity through violent insurgency (Wilderson III 2010, 138).7 Nevertheless, despite these failures, the dance with death remains the only possibility of approaching freedom for black people, the only form of black political agency that is not just ‘borrowed institutionality’ from gender, class, or sexual orientation. The dance with death will need to undermine all recognizable forms of agency and the capacity that

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grounds them, since the entire political ontology of the human is framed by white supremacy and extra-ordinary black vulnerability. This is a dangerous endeavor, since it is a refusal to affirm on all fronts.

III. Fred Moten and Blackness: Unsettling Foundations of the Black Home Is there nothing left of the black home after the afropessimist intervention? Better yet, is there nothing right with black life? When Wilderson is speaking of the black subject position he is not speaking of black selfhood as it may be experienced day to day. He is not speaking of black community or life as an experience of the living dead literally; nevertheless, he leaves little resources to think of what may be possible for black people outside of social death except for insurgent violence. In the “Position of the Unthought” interview, responding to a description of blackness as negation articulated by Hartman, Wilderson does stave away from the most hyperbolic understanding of pessimism exclaiming, “In my own work, obviously I’m not saying that in this space of negation, which is Blackness, there is no life. We have tremendous life. But this life is not analogous to those touchstones of cohesion that hold civil society together” (Hartman and Wilderson III 2003, 187). And yet, exactly what this ‘tremendous life’ may look like remains opaque (and furthermore, do black people need an analogy to civil society, want it?). Perhaps, we should be compelled to look at his biographical accounts in Incognegro: A Memoir on Exile and Apartheid and Afropessimism. However, tremendous would hardly describe the way his first-person accounts narrate his experiences in South Africa and the United States. With that said, the appeal to a black home is not to look for some hopeful counterexample to his or any black person’s life experiences that are inevitably mired by the reality of an antiblack chokehold. With every step of the following argument there is an agreement with Wilderson’s condition of civil society. In fact, the black home as will be articulated below, would ostensibly be applicable even to Wilderson’s experiences at Dartmouth, in Minnesota, in California. To get to this conception of the black home we will start by challenging not his biography, but the limits of the theoretical foundations set in Red, White, and Black, where we are presented with a conception of the black person in the ontological

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position of ‘the Slave’, that is, completely severed from meaningful relations of kin and predicated on a gratuitous violence that would deny any analogous political agency, community, or social life. This lack of life, the barren outlook of black life at the ontological level, has not gone unnoticed or unchallenged. The strongest and most direct respondent to the contemporary afropessimist position is theorist and poet Fred Moten. In an offering he, at least at one point, called ‘Black Optimism’, ‘Black Operations’, or ‘Black Ops’ for short, Moten offers an alternative to the seemingly conclusive positions offered by Wilderson all the while remaining quite close and sympathetic to the general arguments and descriptions that set the framework for afropessimism.8 In the essay “The Case of Blackness,” one of Moten’s earliest conversations with the afropessimist position, he recognizes and acknowledges that black people, or blackness more specifically, has always and continues to be pathologized. However, amidst this pathologization, alongside the question of what is wrong with black people, has always resided a black radicalism that characterizes the movement of blackness proper. Black radicalism is the performance of the critique of ‘the proper’, ‘normative’ or ‘the standard’ in general from the always already improper, that is, the critique of the default criteria of what one may call the human, justice, even history. From the perspective and operations of this radicalism Moten proposes we can think a black social life that goes unacknowledged by the afropessimist tradition by embracing impropriety. With Moten’s considerations, I set the proverbial foundations and acquire the tools to build up the “black home” proposed above. Moten’s account of blackness and black social life provide two significant contributions by locating blackness outside and prior to the political ontological schema described by the afropessimist tradition, while simultaneously articulating this blackness as essentially social. These two moves open a space for recognizing what we can possibly call the black self: a fugitive social im-positionality adjacent to the afropessimist positionality, a social sense of blackness beyond any existential subjective experience. Moten’s challenge to afropessimism continues the ontological discussion of blackness and black people, who are denied a fundamental subjectivity and as such remain external to the laws and justice of civil society as it exists in the paradigm of antiblackness. However, what is at stake for Moten is a more nuanced reading of the ontological than what appears under the guise of Wilderson’s afropessimistic political ontology. Recall Wilderson’s argument that the structural position of ‘the Black’ is built from the arguments of Fanon, who states in the “Introduction to Black

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Skin, White Masks, that the black man ‘is not’, that, to cite again, “There is a zone of nonbeing, an extraordinarily sterile and arid region, an incline stripped bare of every essential from which a genuine new departure can emerge. In most cases, the black man cannot take advantage of this descent into a veritable hell” (Fanon 1952, xii). Of course, this ‘zone of nonbeing’ is an articulation of the non-being in an existentialism register, that is, non-being as a human who may freely pursue projects in bad or good faith à la Sartre, and, therefore, he declares in the opening passage of Chap. 5, “The Lived Experience of the Black Man,” “my soul desirous to be at the origin of the world, and here I am an object among other objects” (Fanon 1952, 89). At these moments, and for Wilderson it is only at moments, Fanon makes his paradigmatic claims about blackness and ontology and not just existential experience. Wilderson contends, these moments articulate that the relation of blacks to humans is not one of degree but one of kind: That is to say “Black Human” remains an oxymoron regardless of political victories in the social order or the psychic health of the mind; not because of the intransigence of White racism, or the hobble of the talking cure in the face of hallucinatory whitening, but because were there to be a place and time for Blacks, cartography and temporality would be impossible. (Wilderson III 2008, 111)

Fanon and Wilderson’s articulation of the paradigmatic position of blackness that exists before or below any other political identities denotes the limits of a human ontology, or political ontology, Moten concurs that there is indeed a problem with ontology for black people. However, through his reading of Fanon, he contends the objectification of blackness over against the human reveals not merely an impossible political cartography and temporality for black people, but, first and foremost, that blackness unveils and makes possible a step beyond and before these measures of humanity and ontology. Moten wants to approach blackness from the level of what he calls in this essay the paraontological. He attributes the concept to Nahum Chandler, who, through a reading of Du Bois, argues the fashion in which black people fail to occupy any stable identity displaces any claim to an ontology as founded on purity or ideality. One of the ways Chandler explains the phenomenon is by explicating how black people in America are fundamentally out of the order of identity, oscillating between the

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failure of being either simply African or simply American, that is, white/ human. Black people are exorbitant to any ideal sense of being, they are, for instance, ‘both/and’ as well as ‘neither/nor’ African American, thus not only destroying the essence of the concept of race but showing the limits of being in general (Chandler 2014, 37). The paraontological escapes traditional ontology and its logic by means of what Moten describes as a ‘fugitive movement’: This fugitive movement is stolen life, and its relation to law is reducible neither to simple interdiction nor bare transgression. Part of what can be attained in this zone of unattainability, to which the eminently attainable ones have been relegated, which they occupy but cannot (and refuse to) own, is some sense of the fugitive law of movement that makes black social life ungovernable, that demands a paraontological disruption of the supposed connection between explanation and resistance. (Moten 2018, 142; my emphasis)

While it is difficult to glean in precise terms what Moten intends to articulate about blackness and black people—who “occupy blackness but refuse to own it”—with this ‘explanation’ of fugitive movement, we still get a sense of the paraontological as alluded to by Chandler. The paraontological is not the status of a being, but of disruption. It is unwieldy and interruptive of the way resistance relates to explanation. Blackness and its characteristic fugitive movement is not of the ‘zone of nonbeing’ as we saw in Fanon, but the ‘zone of unattainability’, thus questioning whether black being or non-being are a thing at all, or whether their very unattainability, their rejection of essence is all there is to blackness. The refusal of black social life to be fully present and its characterization by Moten as a fugitive movement that does not simply oppose or violate the law but remains in a sense outside and fundamental to the law as a constitutive movement go hand in hand. While blackness, or the fugitive blackness of black social life, for Moten precedes and originates separately from the many different articulations of the constitutive difference, non-origin, and non-presence at the core of thinking and being that twentieth-century thinkers such as Derrida, Deleuze, and Heidegger theorized in their writings; nevertheless, there are some similarities in construction and therefore, it is not surprising that when he begins to write about blackness in this fugitive mode, Moten takes us to a reading of Heidegger, specifically the essay “Das Ding” from

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the Bremen Lecture series of the 1950s. With this move toward a thinking of ‘things’ in the Heideggerian sense of this period, Moten wants to go beyond not just the Heidegger of Being and Time discussed above in terms of ‘being-in’  and the uncanny, but also the political ontology of Wilderson’s afropessimism that focuses on the denial of black capacity and relationality and which is grounded in the rendering of black people as fungible objects. Instead of thinking of black people as merely either agential subjects or passive objects, he wants to consider blackness as relation or spacing between Heideggerian Dasein and das ding. Moten writes: What I am after is something obscured by the fall from prospective subject to object that Fanon recites—namely, a transition from thing(s) (choses) to object (objet) that turns out to version a slippage or movement that could be said to animate the history of philosophy. What if we bracket the movement from (erstwhile) subject to object in order to investigate more adequately the change from object to thing … What if the thing sustains itself in that absence or eclipse of meaning that withholds from the thing the horrific honorific of “object”? At the same time, what if the value of that absence or excess is given to us only in and by way of a kind of failure or inadequacy— or, perhaps more precisely, by way of a history of exclusion, serial expulsion, presence’s ongoing taking of leave—so that the non-attainment of meaning or ontology, of source or origin, is the only way to approach the thing in its informal (enformed/enforming, as opposed to formless), material totality? Perhaps this would be cause for black optimism or, at least, some black operations. Perhaps the thing, the black, is tantamount to another, fugitive sublimity altogether. (Moten 2018, 144–145)

The move that Moten inaugurates in this passage is subtle and yet aims to disrupt the binary and dichotomies implicit in afropessimism’s ontology. Instead of simply adopting Wilderson’s grammar that begins with the violence employed by the human subject over and against the slave object, Moten, through his elusive, interruptive, and doubling prose, hints to and ultimately attends to the possibility of a general philosophical, but also historical, grammar of this fugitive movement of blackness from ‘thing’ that transitions to an object, or the change of object to thing.9 Moten articulates a reversal, where instead of a top-down movement from subject to object, that is, imparting some sort of agential capacity to the disposable object, he proposes a movement from the bottom-out-and back, that is, from the elusive ‘absent or excessive’ things to objects. In this movement from an unsettled or fugitive articulation of ‘the black’ to the

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possibility of the object and subjects, Moten sees an attunement for black people to recognize their existence—due to their proximity to blackness and this fugitivity—as fundamental in-difference.10 And as we saw above, Moten places Fanon in this history of philosophy—what we may want to call a history of metaphysics considering his evocation of Heidegger—that concerns itself mainly with objects. The object belongs to a representational thinking, according to Heidegger, and in this mode of thinking the object is only or simply that which stands forth, it is there for humans, or Dasein, as readily available but not as something that engages with any active tension with humans, at least from a relational perspective. The ‘history of exclusion’ and ‘serial expulsions’ connects blackness to the pathology recognized and diagnosed by Fanon originally, with a philosophical and historical prejudice toward those objects that have been interpreted as self-present, ready to hand, or standing reserve. However, blackness resists this objectification as such; it is the primordial possibility of creating the object, he writes: “I am after a kind of shadow or trace in Fanon—the moment in which phenomenology strains against its own, shall we say, reification of a certain philosophical experience, its own problematic commitment to what emerges from making, in order to get at ‘a meaning of things’” (Moten 2018, 146–147). The meaning of things is a bit oxymoronic, since thingliness begets meaning, but he is looking, or better listening, for that constitutive absence, the excessive materiality of meaning, the phonic materiality, that animates and exceeds even the most meaningless/meaningful/material utterance—for example, a scream or a noisy ocean.11 The meaning of things is out of time and place because it occurs before reification and objectivity, not in terms of temporal succession but in terms of the possibility of making, violently, black objects that can be found in the dark ‘shadows’ or ‘traces’ of a thinker like Fanon. When referring to Fanon, Moten specifically has in mind the chapter in Black Skin, White Masks that—in its most recent translation by Richard Philcox—has been rendered “The Lived Experience of the Black Man” but was famously was previously translated as “The Fact of Blackness.” Here, Fanon gives account after account of the manner in which his blackness has reduced him to an object, which includes the oft cited example of the young white boy who screams ‘Look! A Negro’ which prompts the phenomenological reflection of his experience of his body being returned to him as it exists for the white person, that is, as an object of distortion and disfigurement (Fanon 1952, 93). What is at stake in turning to things and the shadows is the connection of blackness to that generative excessive

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movement of fugitivity that opens up the very possibility of the Fanon who explodes and the others who put his fragments back together. When reflecting on Fanon’s phenomenological recitation of his lived experience in this chapter, Moten wants to go beyond and before the experience of Fanon’s objecthood to the fugitive blackness that haunts the scene and the capacity of his reassembling and also to account for all the other people that dwell near but also far from it, namely black people. He explains: So I’m interested in how the ones who inhabit the nearness and distance between Dasein and things (which is off to the side of what lies between subjects and objects), the ones who are attained or accumulated unto death even as they are always escaping the Hegelian positioning of the bondsman, are perhaps best understood as the extra-ontological, extra-political constant—a destructive, healing agent … this dangerous supplement, as the fact out of which everything else emerges, is constitutive. It seems to me that this special ontic-ontological fugitivity of/in the slave is what is revealed as the necessarily unaccounted for in Fanon. So that in contradistinction to Fanon’s protest, the problem of the inadequacy of any ontology to blackness, to that mode of being for which escape or apposition and not the objectifying encounter with otherness is the prime modality, must be understood in its relation to the inadequacy of calculation to being in general. (Moten 2018, 149–150; my emphasis)

In this rich/dense passage, Moten insists that those inhabitants, who do not quite fit into Fanon’s racial bodily schema, require a movement away from the traditional ontological and political, from the objecthood that we find in Fanon’s account of his lived experience and its Sartrean existentialist residue, to the ‘constitutive’ moment of the fleeting blackness, a ‘prime modality’ which is ‘not the objectifying encounter with the other’ but is available through—or at least thinking through—the position of the slave. There is no agency or anxiety of choice existentially or ontologically. The slave and its paraontological relation to blackness reveals that it is neither the human friend nor the enemy; neither lord nor bondsman—terms that are subject to their own translation debate. The slave precedes war and recognition and therefore is ‘extra-political’. Also notice how Moten channels Heidegger by trying to destabilize the entire metaphysics of subject/object by speaking of Dasein and things, ‘which is off to the side’— the ‘para’ of paraontology. Black people, in their nearness to blackness through their practices, their subjection, their ethical experience, are attuned to this paraontological conundrum of being neither/nor, both/ and, thus recognizing ‘the inadequacy of being in general’ better than the Black Forest philosopher himself.

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Forgive this extended exposition, but it is critical to read how Moten’s philosophical poetics, his black study, introduces an entirely new landscape for reconsidering the positionality of the black/slave by identifying blackness at the paraontological level. In terms of the general economy of white supremacy described in the previous chapter, I propose that this conception of blackness as irruption, excessive, and fugitive offers an alternative general economy that operates be-side the conception of extra-ordinary vulnerability. It’s on the other side of the black hole, which is white supremacy. To be specific, what Moten here discusses under different names and guises but essentially alludes to, is an excessive, extra-­ontological understanding of blackness as a generous exo-economy that undergirds and exceeds the political ontology, political economy, and grammar of white supremacy. Before black vulnerability and exploitation—and yet nearby and refracted from—or one may say, before ‘the condition of their possibility’, is a fugitive movement that is precisely the non-present condition of possibility that allows for the impressions of oppression and objectification to take place but does not overdetermine them  in terms of blackness. Perhaps this is why Moten does not even bother to mention white supremacy or whiteness consistently in his writings. Logically before the anti-human politics of civil society, and the policing that characterizes it, is the excessive richness of possibility that is blackness. While the general economy of white supremacy begets our current political ontology that ultimately rests in a certain disposition toward black people as inherently inferior objects, the conditions of possibility of white supremacy—of any political ontology, of agency in general—follows from the paraontological irruption of a fugitive black exonomy. The ontological operations of white supremacy according to afropessimism describe the movements and techniques of a system of violent exclusion. When we think of the different techniques discussed in the previous chapter and the existential and ontological elaborations in terms of positionality, agency, and domesticity discussed earlier in this chapter, we were left with nothing except the descriptions of a bleak history of the experiences of black people in the West. And yet we see Moten argues the very pathologization of blackness, its history of being a term and concept that denotes abjectness, disease, and deformation, is in fact the hidden resource of all the possibilities posited in the metaphysics of antiblackness: The brutal history of criminalization in public policy, and at the intersection of biological, psychological, and sociological discourse, ought not obscure the already existing ontic-ontological criminality of/as blackness. Rather,

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blackness needs to be understood as operating at the nexus of the social and the ontological, the historical and the essential. (Moten 2018, 150)

The nexus, of course, is that fugitive movement, criminal in its darkness, in its non-presence, in its aggression toward norms and standards. The criminality that Saidiya Hartman considers the only possible form of agency conceptualized for the slave is bleak; however, the transgression of stealing away to see a loved one is a hint at these fugitive breaches described by Moten at the paraontological level which truly shake the foundations of possibility in a openly criminal fashion (Hartman 1997, 55, 68–69). And as the logic of the general economy dictates, blackness is necessarily excessive in its openness “It turns out, then, that the pathological is (the) black, which has been figured both as the absence of color and as the excessively, criminally, pathologically colorful (which implies that black’s relation to color is a rich, active interanimation of reflection and absorption)” (Moten 2018, 182). Again, through the description of its excess, pathology but also criminality, blackness, or black social life, calls forth possibility not only for ‘the absence of color’ but also for the richness of color as ‘reflection and absorption’. It is at the foundation of all possibility, not just black possibility; it is the foundation of ‘humanity’, not just the slave or any alternative conception of a ‘black humanity’. Blackness is not merely anti-­ human as Wilderson proposes but is the possibility of the human, the subject, and the object. It is in this sense that Moten above, perhaps enigmatically, insists that black people do not ‘own blackness’.12 Its disruptive force is not something to own or be possessed by anyone. Its constitutive fugitivity slips through the fingertips of not only white civil society but black slavery, even though the slaves inhabit its trace. However, at this point, just as Wilderson and afropessimism left us wondering about a more robust account of black experience, Moten’s fugitive blackness still leaves a lot to be desired when considering what may be ‘black social life’.13 If black people do not own blackness, if it is something outside of the reach of their fingertips, if it is not embodied, how should we figure a relation to blackness? From the “Case of Blackness” we can learn some vital information about black social life, before we turn to Moten’s essay “Blackness and Nothingness: Mysticism of the Flesh.” In the former, Moten tells us, “Black(ness), which is to say black social life, is an undiscovered country” (Moten 2018, 170); this displacement, its undiscovered status, allows us to think of not only its fugitivity but also the manner in which it nevertheless demands attention and search—that

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is, insomuch as it is undiscovered, it is not simply the event horizon of a black hole but deep into the singularity, worthy of exploration, even if always at a distance and unknowable. Also, despite the generative force for all humanity that Moten attributes to blackness, black people specifically have a privileged relationship to this fugitivity and disruptive force; referring to the “colonized, the enslaved, and the enclosed” Moten says “what is claimed in the name of blackness is an undercommon disorder that has always been there, that is retrospectively and retroactively located there, that is embraced by the ones who stay there while living somewhere else. Some folks relish being a problem” (Moten 2018, 150).14 Those who ‘relish being a problem’ also dutifully oppose oppression and objectification. This position is reserved for black people; they are resistant in their social life and live ‘somewhere else’ and in “Blackness and Nothingness” we learn that this social life is precisely that which stands opposed to the social death that provides the centripetal force of afropessimism and that leads us to appreciate the elsewhere that is the black home. “Blackness and Nothingness” is an essay Moten wrote in response to and in conversation with Jared Sexton’s “The Social Life of Social Death: On Afro-pessimism and Black Optimism” and other afropessimist responses to his work.15 For our purposes, what is most important in Moten’s response is the strong invocation of black social life in comparison to the social death of the afropessimists. He returns to Orlando Patterson and deduces that the status of slave life is not one of ‘social death’ but of political death. He attributes this slippage to a misreading by Patterson of Hannah Arendt, who in her own work marks a stark difference between the political and the social, or private, that Patterson does not pick up on. Here Moten explains at length: What I am trying to get to, by way of this terminological slide in Patterson [of social and political], is the consideration of a radical disjunction between sociality and the state-sanction, state sponsored error of power-laden intersubjectivity … [To have ‘honor’ for Patterson] is to become a combatant in transcendental subjectivity’s perpetual civil-war … [T]he unspoken violence of political friendship constitutes a capacity for alignment and coalition that is enhanced by the unspeakable violence that is done to what and whom the political excludes … I am in total agreement with the Afro-pessimistic understanding of blackness as exterior to civil society and, moreover, as unmappable within the cosmological grid of the transcendental subject. However, I understand civil society and the coordinates of the transcenden-

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tal aesthetic … to be the fundamentally and essential antisocial nursery for a necessarily necro-political imitation of life. (Moten 2018, 194–195)

Just as in “Case of Blackness,” Moten asserts that blackness does not belong or operate within the confines of civil society, and blackness’ fugitive moments precedes any political ontology that rests alongside and sometimes fueled by the white supremacist libidinal economy described by Wilderson and Sexton. However, in locating the actions and participants of civil society within the transcendental horizon of the political and not the intimately social, Moten makes a very specific claim about the political and the nature of subjectivity. The political remains the space of the transcendental, homogenous, ‘autonomous’ subject and is essentially anti-social. This disagreement with Patterson, which is also essentially a disagreement with Arendt, is also articulated in Moten’s reading of the latter in “Refuge, Refuse, Refrain” of The Universal Machine. There he recognizes in Arendt’s “Reflections on Little Rock” and On Violence a tendency to exclude black vulnerability and disruption by deeming them non-­ political at the expense of any sociality, ultimately endorsing their pathologizing without reprieve. Arendt has an innovative reading of Kant’s sensus communis, where she finds that it is the reflective judgment of Kant’s aesthetics, not determinative judgments, that allows one to judge members of community in general without a concept, without the reduction of moral judgment, and therefore more normatively, at a communicable level. Moten, however, sees in her criticism of Elizabeth Eckford’s memorable walk at Little Rock High and her reflection in On Violence an antiabolitionism: Arendt’s … critique of abolitionism manifests itself as the commitment to institution that are founded on the exclusionary essence of the supposedly universal consensus, itself an effect of the most egregious abstraction of them all, the fiction of the general interest. If abolitionists condemn American institutions, they do so because those institutions gave their tacit consent to slavery and to the consensus universalis upon which it was founded. (Moten 2018, 91)

The universal consensus, grounded in her reading of Kant, leaves open the possible—and for the United States necessary—exclusion of black people from civil society through violent repression that extends from the public, or the political, into the private of social, since black sociality is public, that

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is, always vulnerable to gratuitous violence. However, her anti-­ abolitionism cannot capture the social, even as she tries. The institutions she is committed to are political institutions, they are the civil society of intersubjective relations predicated on violent exclusion framed as self-­ determination. Later Moten notes how Patterson recognizes that the slave is outside of the human community, outside of the political realm, but that does not mean their inclusion is a predicate of their respect, their recognition, and thus desirable. Thus, the social death—which Wilderson elevates to its most radical formulation—that has become so essential to contemporary reflections on exclusion and the formation of a people or a nation or a race, is in fact rooted in the metaphysics of a modern political subjectivity insomuch as the political designates the proper, the official, the easily or not so easily identifiable; that is, it designates a sense of being that requires the exclusion of black people from political ontology as those essentially improper  and without worth so that the proper humans can duke it out for their own recognition. Instead of the tone of lament—via exclusion—that follows from Wilderson’s account of afropessimism and social death, Moten refuses to settle on binary constructions and the principle of non-contradiction by listening and dancing to a black social life in the break of the general antagonisms of the political and the ontological writ large. ‘Intersubjectivity’, ‘transcendental subjectivity’, ‘civil society’—these belong to a grammar of the political that indeed is a grammar of suffering, most poignantly for those excluded. However, social life, black social life, exists outside of the confines of the political order precisely in as much as it challenges the ontology of modernity as essentially a political ontology rooted in objectification. Therefore, when Wilderson argues, for instance, that social practices and cultural objects do not escape the centripetal force of political ontology, that black performance does not overcome the negation of blackness he is describing the phenomena and their resonances within the political  as Arendt does  according to Moten. Indeed, black music and dance will not in themselves prove positive in rearranging the political hierarchy, and, furthermore, negrophilic attachments to black culture may play into the white supremacist libidinal economy; nevertheless, the character of a black sociality  goes beyond the political, a performativity of blackness as object  that black people are attuned to, is not pure negation or merely black objectification, but paraontological in its escape from a full and complete reduction to the political because of the way it challenges ontological purity. In the end, blackness is “irreducibly social” and its non-analogous relationship to the subjects and humans of civil society may in fact be a celebration (Moten 2018, 194).

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IV. The Black Home a. Celebration Moten’s illumination of the ‘irreducibility’ of black sociality plays a crucial role for the conception of the black home. With traditional accounts of the liberal autonomous agent, the constitutive role of space, sociality, and even history, for the most part, go unaccounted for or underappreciated. However, the concept of home already evokes a sense of sociality, materiality, spatiality and temporality. In the home, one’s actions and decisions take place within an excessive economy of desires and inspiration that precede and exceed any one place or time even though they evolve and revolve around a conception of location and temporality. It is in this respect that I want to begin to suggest that the black home helps conceptualize the nature of blackness and black selfhood against the transcendental autonomous subject that dominates modern conceptions of agency, even though in the end these characteristics of home will be seen in a much different light. In the realm of the political—that is, civil society, institutions of the state, and so on—the grammar of black suffering is decidedly set upon exclusions and oppressions and, therefore, there is no true or tangible sense of the black self when one aims to conceptualize it within the terms or the desires to participate in this realm. However, at the level of the social, there is a sense of black life and a black self, even in these shadows, precisely because black sociality  is beyond individuation. The two are mutually constitutive: this self is exposed by a social communion, which, of course, implies otherness. Consequently, through the black home, the paraontological relationship of the black self and black social life to blackness come together, even though this home is never settled because it is black, and blackness is always unsettling. In social life, black people’s affirmation is undeniable, even amidst hardship and the terror of civil society. We might even contend that black social life is something to be celebrated or, better, the very meaning of celebration. In “Blackness and Nothingness” Moten provocatively introduces the idea of celebration to his conception of black thought. He writes: Our aim, even in the face of the brutally imposed difficulty of black life, is cause for celebration … [T]he cause for celebration turns out to be the condition of possibility of black thought, which animates the black operations that will produce the absolute overturning, the absolute turning of this motherfucker out. Celebration is the essence of black thought, the anima-

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tion of black operations, which are in the first instance, our undercommon, underground, submarine sociality. (Moten 2018, 197; my emphasis)

Now, Moten does not give any extensive articulation of what he may mean by celebration, or even who he may include using the possessive pronoun ‘our’. However, the term may be a great way to start thinking of the self beyond individuation or individualism that we have in mind.16 The possibility of black thought, of black sociality and selfhood, despite the circumstances that civil society has placed on black people, is almost impossible to conceive and therefore its existence is undoubtedly a means for celebration. And yet, Moten appears to contend that celebration is not simply the reaction to black social life but in reality the essence of its possibility, that blackness as the condition of possibility and black social life as its manifestation can only exist as celebration. In other words, possibility as blackness, the “turning of this motherfucker out,” is not a reason for celebration but always is celebration. Therefore, the existence or actions of the black self, as manifest in the fugitive movement of black social life and the spacing/temporalizing of the black home, are not a means for celebration like a traditional political subject may celebrate themselves after the purchasing of a home or the birth of a child. The black self through black social life is celebration as the exuberant condition of possibility of always and necessarily being be-side oneself together; it is a celebration so common, so mundane, there is not even the possibility of black celebrities. Celebration, which is the ‘animation of black operations’ and black optimism as black thought, should not be seen as an opposition to afropessimism, but may be helpfully distinguished from a concept of political hope, afropessimism’s true antagonist. Modern political ontology may be conceptualized as a politics of hope, a politics whereby the principles of modernity, which include the democratic nation state and the capitalist political economy, have settled on hope as the coercive force that motivates political subjectivity. Hope for citizenship and for economic success reifies a subject formation and a capacity that correlates with the despair of afropessimism as its explicit consensus fluctuates it terms of a politics of politeness. Returning to his reflections on Arendt and her politics of consensus universalis Moten writes, “[If] hope cannot be kept alive, this need not lead to despair since what is beyond hope, in terrible enjoyment, is an absolute sufficiency, an irreducible optimism, given in more in less, in everything in nothing, as scheme and variation, critically anticipating, speculatively accompanying, on the edge of arrival, never to return” (Moten 2018, 74).

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Black optimism, as irreducible as black sociality, lays beyond hope, not in the sense as a further extension along the same trajectory, but in an expanse beyond trajectory, beyond telos, an exonomy without return, a celebration that is so much more than hope. Hope cannot be extracted from the nihilistic, solipsistic, individualistic milieu of the political ontology that overdetermines so much of the experience of being human, of human beings, today. Celebration, as optimism and sociality, is not really a transcendence of the temporal logic of hope, nor, as I understand it, is it an analogy for an emotional articulation of optimism; that is, it is ‘not black joy’, at least in the colloquial sense of an existential reprieve from the toils and alienation from society. The idea of black celebration may invoke a feeling, but it is not an affect, positive or negative. It is not an escape from a day of toiling physical or affective labor, it is an escape into the night, it’s both big and small, life before, after, and in-between death, it’s, in effect, a broadening of the impossible giving attention to those other truths; it is an inauguration, an inaugural midnight dance that never ends and only absconds from basement to basement, which in the end would be the most celebratory understanding of celebration, since whether you’re happy, sad, or mad, it is always more, it’s always past midnight. b. Homeless or the Black Home? The paraontological nature of blackness as fugitive, the disavowal of ownership, the rejection of the modern liberal and therefore neoliberal subject should leave one to believe that a structure of the home, even as trope or metaphor, would be unappealing if not antithetical to Moten’s project. Indeed, this would be correct. However, as black study may teach us, as opposed to something like critique, there is always movement and therefore it would be foolhardy to stick to one place or one limit; instead in this section, we will follow Moten’s different engagement with the home to trace the outline of its black im-possibility. In the groundbreaking, subterranean, work written with Stefano Harney titled The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study, Moten provides perhaps his most aggressive opposition to the home. The book itself confronts the objectifying forces of government and the university, framing a modern world where capitalism and governmentality overdetermine the traditional strategies of resistance and study. In response, the essays provide an understanding of blackness and black study that works through the undercommons—as opposed to the idea of ‘the

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commons’ invoked by Hardt and Negri to describe the modern proletarian subject’s global interpellation that Wilderson confronts in his critical analysis of Monster’s Ball—where criminality and planning challenge professionalism and policy. The former are modes of fugitivity, refusing the structures of modernity indirectly and constantly, while the latter are modes of subjection, reifying bourgeois individuality. In The Undercommons’ study of blackness, the home represents a figure of bourgeois society where monogamy, heteropatriarchy, creditors, and a certain stagnation find comfort. Fugitive blackness stands outside of these practices, structures, and ideologies that ultimately isolate and alienate as opposed to commune, socialize, and abscond from the essentialism implicit in the stability and ownership of the home. Blackness embraces a sort of bad debt, the debt that we all share and that can never be forgiven, since the debt we have for each other is not good for credit but is good for recognizing our necessary indebtedness to each other (Moten and Harney 2013, 61). A creditor can calculate a mortgage debt, but bad debt is beyond calculation. How does one calculate the debt they owe to their parents, caregivers, friends? This sort of debt cannot be confined to the thresholds of the home, a place memorialized by the debt that is owed, when or if extended to black people. The colonial settlers make a home, the unsettled black fugitive rejects it, rejects domesticity as a symbol of belonging to. Blackness has no origin, just improvisation, and therefore seemingly no home. This is why Moten, in an interview titled “The General Antagonism” conducted by Stevphen Shukaitis and positioned as the last section of The Undercommons, embraces homelessness: I think what I’m gonna do is embrace homelessness for the possibilities that it bears, hard as that is, hard as they are. Homelessness is hard, no doubt about it. But, home is harder. And it’s harder on you, and it’s harder on every-god-damn body else too. I ain’t so concerned, necessarily, about the travails of the settler. The horrible difficulties that the settler imposes upon himself are not my first concern, though in the end they are a real thing. It’s the general “imposition of severalty,” to use Theodore Roosevelt’s evil terms, that I’m trying to think about and undermine. He knew that possessive individualism – that the self-possessed individual, was as dangerous to Native Americans as a pox-infested blanket. Civilisation, or more precisely civil society, with all its transformative hostility, was mobilized in the service of extinction, of disappearance. The shit is genocidal. Fuck a home in this world, if you think you have one. (Moten and Harney 2013, 140)

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His hostility to the idea of home is clear and runs through many of his writings. Its associations to settler colonialism, manifest destiny, self-­ possession, and civil society are incompatible to the sense of fugitive blackness that tarries in the no place of the hold of the ship. Blackness would be an embrace of statelessness and embrace of the uncharted and unmapped no-place to which blackness abandons. Homelessness, or what he also calls in “The Case of Blackness” “irremediable homelessness” (Moten 2018, 150), therefore, seems like the intuitive alternative to the concept of home as Moten understands it, the epitome of rejecting place and possession, the epitome of study and blackness as a rejection of the modes of thinking and identity that one associates with desires of origin, of ‘belonging to’, of ownership that is domesticity and that as we saw with Wilderson was never afforded black people anyway. In this vein, Moten will invoke the idea of homelessness in its relation to blackness and black sociality again in the concluding pages of “Blackness and Nothingness: Mysticism of the Flesh”: Can this sharing of a life in homelessness, this interplay of the refusal of what has been refused and consent, this undercommon appositionality, be a place from which to know, a place out of which emerges neither self-­consciousness nor knowledge of the other but an improvisation that proceeds from somewhere on the other side of an unasked question? But not simply to be among’ one’s own; rather, also, to live among one’s own in dispossession, to live among the ones who cannot own, the ones who have nothing and who, in having another, have everything. (Moten 2018, 212)

Black people and their relation to blackness implies a unique homelessness, without return and without ownership, which does not generate a desire for self-consciousness or self-knowledge, their undercommons allow for “something other than the phantasmatic object-home of assimilationist desire—which is rightly seen by [Saidiya] Hartman simply to be the extension of those ravages and that brutality—[but instead is something] to which we can appeal, to which we have always been appealing, in flight, or, deeper still, in movement” (Moten 2018, 240). Homelessness thus is not simply an imposition by the paraontological displacement and dispossession of blackness, but it is a desire to not participate in that history and structure of brutality that violently conditioned black people to the outside. It is in this sense he responds to Hartman above, who asks, “what place in the world could sate four hundred years of yearning for a

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home” with the contention, that no place could—since blackness is always already without home—and we should keep it that way. To be on the outside is another way of articulating Moten’s position on homelessness and also introduces us to his conception of impossible domesticity. In the essay “Uplift and Criminality,” Moten follows a thread in Du Bois’ thinking of ‘black urban pathology’, black elitism, and rural black life. Moten responds to an accusation of Du Bois’ urban elitism by arguing that instead of embracing rural life idealized over against urban life elitism or vice versa, there is a reciprocal relation between city and rural life along the lines of pathologization. A certain criminalization pervades black social life that places it always already on the outside, that is, without origin or home, city or rural, or as he writes, “The question of the city is inseparable from that concerning what it is to be, at once, of and outside of the house, of an impossible domesticity, of the broken generations/s of the metoikos … [of] errant criminality that is the law of the outside” (Moten 2007, 340). The impossibility of domesticity of course follows along the same articulation that we saw Wilderson above deny domesticity, except, of course, this impossibility is recognized not simply as a denial of the coordinates of civil society, but also of a ‘errant criminality’ that describes black social life more generally. In this instance, criminality is the political-ontological conditionality of the slave, while ‘errant criminality’ is the paraontological excess that occurs prior to the lawfulness of any particular law, that forms the law as a necessary principle of organization before the law, and this form of criminality that is not just prohibition, but also condition, describes the figure of the impossible domestic: [I]t is the impossible domestic who is indexed, the one who does the labor of the house that is constitutive of the economy and yet remains irreducibly outside of the economy of the house, not just a stranger, but outside the law, outside the law’s protection even if open to the law’s assault. This is what I mean by criminality—the status of the outlaw in all of its constitutive force in relation to the law, the house, the commune, the family; the status of the outlaw in all of the deconstructive force and danger to the law and the house of its originary imagination. This criminality is essential and historical. The outlaw, the impossible domestic, is before the law but not subject to it because she is not under its protection. She is rather the law’s object, or more precisely, the thing or gathering or vessel of and before the law, up ahead and destructive of it. She can be prosecuted. But she cannot and chooses not to prosecute. Citizenship is denied to the thing who dienes citi-

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zenship. She enacts an originary apposition to, a denial-in-abolition of, citizenship. The impossible domestic apposes the citizen-subject. (Moten 2007, 341)

The impossible domestic. The outlaw. The black maternal figure who occupies this impossible position in an impossible domesticity is not banned from the house in an antagonistic opposition to that domestic life as a mere mirage that could be approximated but never achieved. Rather impossibility modifies domesticity by means of its constitutive function and aporetic form. She does all the work that makes the house function, but the laws of the house must always be threatened precisely because she remains constitutively outside the logic of its rules. This has material precedence for black women in that this history is formed by their reproductive capacity being reified and stolen from them only to recreate the circumstances of the world from which that theft must be repeated. A historical lineage with no origin, no homeland, and yet creator of the homeland and securer of the original law that first and foremost must ban the forever outsider, ‘metoikos’, hence appositional to the citizenship and the subjectivity of modernity. And yet one wonders if the impossible black domestic is, indeed, homeless. It’s not that Moten, in his invocation, trivializes the conditions of homelessness that are far too real. Rather, his metaphoric invocation makes one wonder if black social life implies a homeliness where fugitivity passes through and by. If blackness is fugitive and cannot be owned, one wonders if ‘homeless’ does not superimpose the qualities of blackness onto black people, who are black by means of their proximity to, and paraontological distinction from,  a fugitive blackness.  The black home captures the tension of black people’s relation to the essentially fugitive blackness that absconds in that they are at home with a blackness that escapes them. In this configuration, black domesticity is indeed still impossible, but this is because the black home is never settled, it is unsettling. The black home is not a place of ownership, self-possession, or domination.17 It also necessarily remains outside of civil society, but not via the implied oppositionality of homelessness, but by means of a constitutive blackness that enraptures its impossibility, it is a truly appositional figure: the home of and for the outside in the misplacement and untimely movement of being outside, or outside  of being. One could even read Moten as endorsing this possible formulation when he writes of the black domestic: “She is outside the house she structures and makes possible by entering, and she is outside her own impossible home within this ‘national’

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homelessness by leaving” (Moten 2007, 343). Impossible home is another name for the black home, a home one is always escaping from and yet also always running to, it’s the outside that is almost indistinguishable from an inside because of a constitutive yet illusive blackness. The spacing of the black home, which is also a timing or temporalization, refers to the fashion in which fugitivity opens totally new vistas of relation through its continuous escape. This requires we think conditions of black sociality beyond the boundaries of the traditional dimensionalities of space or time, since blackness is never of its time or its place/space, as it always on the move. We cannot locate the black home in a certain place or time because blackness’ fugitive quality always escapes those dimensions and in its wake is the black home from where we recognize black people as always being both of and distinct from the categories or standards of that time and place, the black home spaces these impossible dimensions. The black home exceeds the general laws of the white home, the general economy of white supremacy, exhibiting a generous exoeconomy, a law breaking exonomy. We can find the space for home if we return to Moten, in his reading of “Das Ding,” where he moves rather quickly from the characterization of the jug as the thing that gives—that is, Heidegger’s rather opaque rhetorical move to suggest the thing is not simply the representational object of humans, but a ‘thing’ that gifts more than itself in as much as its finitude is mediated by an openness—to being as thing that resists its own objectification. In this movement he mentions Heidegger’s evocation of the fourfold of earth, sky, divinity, and mortals as that which precedes representation, as the possibility of the event, but he stops at the explanation of the fourfold as that which the thing ‘gathers’ for or as the event (Moten 2018, 148). The role of the fourfold as a condition of possibility, however, is necessary to the reflections of the thing, even if Moten will focus on its holding rather than giving. As Andrew Mitchell explains in his comprehensive account of the fourfold, The Fourfold: Reading the Late Heidegger, “The members of the fourfold name the conditions by which the thing extends into a world of relations (as appearances, as mediated, as meaningful, as with others), they coalesce in the emergence of the thing into this world” (Mitchell 2015, 12). While resisting constructing a one-for-one correspondence of the four elements of the fourfold into a thinking of blackness, what is important is that the fourfold is essential to understanding the conditions upon which relations of the Heideggerian thing can emerge, even if Moten’s blackness is to the side of Dasein and things, as opposed to subject and objects.

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The Moten thing ‘abides’ to a different set of circumstances of non-relation, namely to an abiding where the conditions of its emergence are not gathered but held back so that blackness remains fundamentally fugitive. From this perspective, the black home, while retaining its posture to blackness’ displacement, to its out-of-this-­world conditionality, holds time and space back from any fullness and thus contextualizes the fugitive borders from which we recognize its great escape in a similar fashion to the fourfold. Instead of an event of fundamental gathering, the black home marks a spacing and temporalizing of contradictory and vertiginous escape through refusal. Or to state it more plainly: if fugitive blackness escapes and black sociality is made possible through and as this escape, then the black home is how we recognize—it is that which makes legible its fundamental illegibility—the black quality of these black phenomena in their displacement (the wrong side of the tracks) and mistiming (if only he had not gone to the store then … or black people time … or afro-futurism … and more) when it comes to the purity of ontology. Unlike the Heideggerian fourfold that precedes all that presents, the black home appears as the wake of blackness’ escape. It is the misplacing and imperfect timing of a black sociality that escapes through writing, by dancing, with eating, while praying, in hiding. The history of blackness is a history of the receding echoes of black celebration that is before time and overtime, misplaced and displaced; it is a history that reverberates off the ever receding and (four or so) fugitive walls of the black home. Black sociality escapes the nation, the homeland, the domestic, the big house, to the homely outside that only feels right in as much as there is not much left. The ‘black home’ invokes a sense that some thing is always leaving and is always returning too, although it only exists—if that’s the word—in this motion, since it is the vertiginous movement of fugitivity that produces it. The black home is not a feeling of safety by boarders, but is a refuge in escape. It is neither an ownership nor a disownment, but a kind of mis-owning, since it always missing from the cartographies of mappable geographies and pages of history that remain open to ownership and is instead hidden in/by poetic landscapes (McKittrick 2006, 22). But the black home is there and Moten knows it, he denies its homeliness and calls it the hapticality in the hold of the ship. But it is all around the hold of those shipped: “it is to have been moved by others, with others. It is to feel at home with the homeless, at ease with the fugitive, at peace with the pursued, at rest with the ones who consent not to be one” (Moten and Harney 2013, 97). Moten and Harney are most certainly studying Spillers

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in this last formulation from The Undercommons. She juxtaposes the metaphorical and metaphysical suspension of Africans in the Middle Passage, stripped of identity and gender, that is, ungendered; they are ostensibly objects or cargo banished from the realm of the domestic where gendering actually takes place. In as much as the blackness we’re studying takes place in the hold, “the human cargo of the slave vessel—in the effacement and remission of African family and proper names—contravenes notions of the domestic” (Spillers 2003, 214). And yet we also know from Spillers that despite, or in light of, the ungendering of the female slave, the positionality of black women, the impossible domestic, that is, “both mother and mother dispossessed,” comes with potential to articulate what I am calling the black home on “insurgent ground” through the “monstrosity (of a female with the potential to ‘name’)” (Spillers 2003, 229). This insurgent naming would resist the patronymic tradition of a symbolic ordering and, instead, look closer to the potentiality of an anagrammatical wake work, as Christina Sharpe may put it (Sharpe 2016, 77). The anagrammatical as a rearranging and impossibility of meaning does not mark a homelessness, but a blackened home where the impossible domestic continues to make something or no-thing from the scraps created, which are also those left behind. Like Moten, that no-thing can be in a touch of a brother’s scared hand while crossing the street, or a glance that alerts danger is around the way. The impossible domestic, is not only a stranger (metoikos), but also a host, who roams in and out and around the black home as it escapes, which one may also say abides by the demonic grounds of black cartographies that Katherine McKittrick, via Sylvia Wynter, comes to describe as deep spaces and poetic landscapes; the cartographic struggles not simply from but of the (creation of the) margin, which is also an impossible limit before and never a part of the dominant geographies of the political landscape, since it is a ‘land’ of escaping. The black self can be formulated even if fleeting or transitively in the black home through the figure of the impossible domestic. C.  Riley Snorton describes the aporetic figure of the black mother, or the impossible domestic, through the concept of a fugitivity set in motion by the transitive relation of black and trans, writing: [T]he complex figuration of the black mother … maps blackness as an impossibly public experience, even as she also delimits the possibility of a black interiority. In this sense, the black mother is a metonym for black sociality, an emblem of race as a problem and product of the social … her repre-

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sentation reproduces the borders between a black self, endowed with an interiority, and racial blackness, as it is always and only given by the social. (Snorton 2017, 106–107)

The black mother, the impossible domestic, the captive maternal, ‘reproduces the borders’ of the black home, which, of course, are never finite, are  impossible to set in time or place or  through gender; an interiority, that I contend, is always outside. The black home, again, is not a place but the spacing and timing of an elusive reproduction, of black sociality, where the community convenes in passing a way. We can locate the black home in these different writings and with these different writers because it is always there, even if it is never here. The black home does not ground the capacity of the subject, at least not the modern liberal subject, but it is the abgrund, whereby fugitive black sociality comes in and out of focus, as transitive and a traversal as Snorton may put it, in literature, in memory, with feeling (Snorton 2017, 57). Blackness is the condition, and the black home is the spacing and timing amidst an extra-ordinary vulnerability— hence its porous and transivity—whereby a black self may begin to emerge fractured and always in the wake of others. The black home has a centrifugal force that disperses people from past and present and the future; allowing tangible bodies and apparitions to circumnavigate its constitutively excessive architecture. With anticipation, we can finally return to Saidiya Hartman, and find scenes from/of the black home in her latest work Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval. With not so much as a departure from the works cited above but answering the questions that have remained unthought with her method of critical fabulation, Hartman returns to the archive to trace the contours of the unthought through stories of black women at the turn of the twentieth century. Combining chorus with a fabulous narrative from archival traces, she accounts for the fugitive wayward lives of black women in an album that “is an archive of the exorbitant, a dream book for existing otherwise” (Hartman 2019, xv). The black home is not a place, it is a spacing out(h)er space, the other side of the black hole of white supremacy, it is the spacing of and for black social life … to escape, necessarily existing beyond boundaries and limits by means of their transgression. What Hartman achieves methodologically with Wayward Lives exposes the excessive counterweight of the black home to the excess of extra-ordinary vulnerability through fabulation, which is nothing less than a spacing and temporalization of what is as what may have been.

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The fugitive black social spacing called the black home traced by Hartman is not simply made of the forgotten debris of the black archive, she too, by nature of her participation, designates a vanishing limit that is indistinguishable from the archive all the while constitutive of it. Like many of the women in the text, she too is out of time. This was taking place as much as in Scenes and Lose Your Mother, as it is in Wayward Lives. She could only write these works in the (dis)comfort of our (un)own(able) (black) home. The intertwined nature of the endeavor, the haptic relationship with these women (but also Khalid), the intimacy, the inability and the non-desire to focus the blurred and receding lines of identity and individuation, are the steps to a dance of nothing else but the excessive exorbitant social cosmo-graphing of the black home  that is never here, but always there. Wayward Lives is bursting at the binding with prose and descriptions of the excessive, whereby the materiality of the text could never contain the ‘deep spaces’ of the black home. Listen to the tension in the paper as the words wrestle from the pages, turning the book inside out and unveiling the space and time of the unthought. It starts at very beginning of the text: The Negro quarter is a place bereft of beauty and extravagant in its display of it … No one ever settles here, only stays, waits for better, and passes through; at least, that is the hope. It is not yet the dark ghetto but soon only black folks will remain …. In the slum, everything is in short supply except sensation. The experience is too much. The terrible beauty is more than one could ever hope to assimilate, order, and explain. (Hartman 2019, 4)

(Note the negation of beauty then its affirmation in its negation, note the appeal to hope, then the affirmation in its excessiveness.) Also in the middle: North and south were just directions on a map, not placeholders that ensured freedom or safety from the police of the white mob … this excessive generosity was a race trait. Even when used a cast away, black women too easily pardoned those who had wronged or disappointed them; even the roughest were openhanded. This capacity to share all they had and expect nothing transformed private homes into places of refuge that welcomed all, indifferent to judgments regarding who was worthy and who was no-good. (Hartman 2019, 173,184; my emphasis)

And the end where an aspiring dancer and singer named Mabel—from Jersey City, but who felt at home in Harlem—is described through the

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principled excessive gesture, the gift: “the utter dissolution of the bounded, discrete self was the gift” (Hartman 2019, 324). Or the final chapter titled “The Chorus Opens the Way.” Not a way but the only way, that is, the wayward as a social opening: unbounded celebration of a black homely feeling without boundaries, like two black hands touching/touched.18 This is not being-in-the-world, nor is it not-being-in-the-world, it is a being-out-of-this-world as an escaping from political, existentialist,  and phenomenological ontology by means of a fugitive spacing and timing of the unknowable and irredeemable black home(land). The spacing of the black home is not the description or inclusion of physical space or time, but the way these spaces qua location and time qua duration could never contain the fugitive movement of invitation that transformed the conceptions of the “slums,” the “Negro quarters,” the self, against any metaphysical static containment and toward life, social life, black social life. The fugitivity that circumscribes the black home is not the search for freedom, it’s not an escape to or from anywhere; it is just escape—the kind of escape Tracy imagined through that impossibly fast car—together. The black home calls forth a communion of people of past and present and sometimes future by means of the dissolution of their individuation; even though this communion emerges in the context of a dark excommunication which is the reality of racial politics under the rule of antiblackness. The blockbusting, redlining, and subprime loans may take black people out of houses, they may put them on the street or back to grandmas, but these tactics cannot destroy the unsettled and unsettling black home. Hartman tells us: For white folks—settlers and masters and owners and bosses—property and possession were the tenets of their faith. To be white was to own the earth forever and ever. It defined who they were and what they valued; it shaped their vision of the future. But black folks had been owned, and being an object of property, they were radically disenchanted with the idea of property … As items of cargo, they had experienced first-hand the ugliness and violence of the world as seen through the ledger and double-entry bookkeeping … The things they valued most had no price on them. (Hartman 2019, 272)

A home is not a house, a home does not accumulate credit or debt, it has no price, or owner, a home is ‘where the heart is’, and the black heart(h) bleeds through time and space: across the Atlantic in the hull of the ship, from the South to the North and back, on railroads above and below ground, from the slave quarters to the ‘big house’, on the backs of horses and in the backs of police cars.

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The black home is not a location—although it feels southern: Underground Railroad, Elmina Castle, in and around the hold of the slave ship, government housing, the black church, white mansions, and the dilapidated dwelling at the edge of the freeway or on the other side of the tracks. The black home is not of this world, it is out-of-space and yet capacious for all. The black home implies that black people are released in a displacing sociality that evokes both a primordial intimacy with other people of immediate and distant relation, and a shared sense of vulnerability and gloom that nevertheless is celebration. Blackness, black pride, black celebration is that impossible sense of self, life, and love that exists both in moments and  in times of tragedy and triumph. Impossibility not only invokes Wilderson’s contention that the black subject is structurally impossible in the schema of white supremacy and civil society, but also describes a disposition toward a life that does not seem possible to live, and yet is lived anyway. Extra-ordinary vulnerability exposed not simply the fragility of the black person as object that black people must endure due to antiblackness, but it also leads us to think through how the fungible porous black self belongs to the transitive and traversing black home, maintained and sustained through the shared experience of impossible vulnerability with black people overtime and underground. c. The Black Home in Beyoncé’s “Lemonade” It’s hard to convey the capaciousness of the black home in the dimensions explored so far and, therefore, we turn now to an aesthetic expression that can help vivify this concept, namely Beyoncé’s 2016 visual project “Lemonade” (Beyoncé 2016). “Lemonade” premiered on HBO on April 23, 2016, with Beyoncé’s album sharing the same title released after its airing. The visual project contains many layers: with the audio album, in abridged form, serving as the soundtrack, the project also includes narration recited by Beyoncé through the poetry and prose of Somali poet Warsan Shire, all alongside visuals of an overwhelming amount of black cultural, historical, and performative allusions. The generosity of “Lemonade” as an aesthetic gift was immediately met with an equitable amount of generous fanfare while also inspiring an avalanche of thought pieces and online discussions focused on Beyoncé’s feminism, or lack thereof. The most notable of the criticisms of “Lemonade” was leveled by bell hooks in a now defunct blog titled “Moving Beyond Pain,” where she argues the production and the

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feminism cultivated was nothing more than a commodity in a neoliberal endeavor of money making.19 Regardless of the perceived intended audience, namely black women, the underlying target, suggests hooks, was consumers and “Lemonade” manipulates black women and their bodies, ultimately contributing to the structural domination of black women under capitalism. Alice Wallace shares hooks’ criticism, writing: Beyoncé is, first and foremost, a brand. No matter how connected people feel to her and all she represents, she is a businesswoman. In addition, she is a capitalist, and uses issues of the day to propel herself to further greatness. As feminism got a wave of renewed popularity, Beyoncé quickly affixed the title of feminist to herself. She did not go to great lengths to live it, but chose to perform it. However, there is no way to know that it is real. (Wallace 2017, 195)

These criticisms key into an inevitable and necessary recognition of the powerful capitalist machinery that black entertainment, and Beyoncé paradigmatically, plays a part of. There is no question that regardless of the proposed imagery, the hegemonic hold of capitalism on modern social relations recreates the dynamics of a rapacious consumer fueling the individualizing branding and profit of Beyoncé. Therefore, it is rational to conclude that despite a racial continuity between Beyoncé and the apparent targeted audience, black people and black women specifically, the former has a predatory relationship to the latter, and that, furthermore, in light of the racial continuity, both fall under a deeper metaphysical bond beyond the rubric of Marxist analysis that reduces both actors to the fungible commodity of the socially dead slave. Therefore, even if we cannot know if Beyoncé’s feminism is real, as Wallace contends, we can faithfully say that her place within the larger political ontology of white supremacy is inescapable as she too is inevitably consumed like her audience not just for the material gains of the music industry, but the affective fortitude of antiblackness found in exploitation and consumption that is performed as black feminism. However, following the argument of this chapter, this of course cannot be the end of the story. Wallace, hooks, and other criticisms that follow the path of political economy—and those that we anticipate would go beyond to political ontology—cannot go ignored, they describe an undeniable dynamic that saturates the reception and consumption of “Lemonade,” but following this dimension also provides the opportunity to interrogate the limits of the commodity form when regarding fugitive blackness.

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C. Riley Snorton, argues that the fungibility of blackness has an intimate relation to fugitivity given the ungendering of blackness, whereby the fungible may pass into the fugitive, as transitive and the fugitive may intersect with the fungible, as a transversal (Snorton 2017, 57). While Snorton focuses on this phenomenon in terms of the specific historical cases of black persons such as Mary Jones, Mary Ann Waters, and Harriet Jacobs, for “Lemonade” we see that its aesthetic fungibility passes into a fugitive blackness that resists a reduction to commodification and thus objectification. The proximity of black people to the creation of “Lemonade,” whether their place on screen or its aesthetic and historical references or its cultural allusions and imagery, initiates a motion that overwhelms the consumptive calculus and gives way to the spacing and timing of the black home by the mere fact that the unveiled aesthetic object is an ever expansive and fugitive diasporic trans-historical sociality. When one steps back from “Lemonade” and attempts to reduce its performance to certain elements, undoubtedly a critique of capitalism is available; however, if one steps into “Lemonade” and its generous holdings, one realizes its contours are not graspable; one is overwhelmed not simply by the execution of the details, but the details of the details, that is the endless proliferation of blackness’ performance, which is not only referenced but generated synchronically and diachronically, escaping the limits of form and content by means of its blackness. The successive visual juxtaposition of southern black gothic, Yoruba iconography, dancing, and unapologetic destruction, in addition to the sonic dissonance of trap, blues, spoken word, acceptance speech, and country found within and without “Lemonade” exhibit the transitive movement of fungible object to fugitive blackness in that they upend the principle of non-­ contradiction revealing a black celebration that simultaneously gestures to limitation, but only to overwhelm the threshold of any figurative spatiality and temporality and give way to a spacing and timing, that is, the black home, that makes any such a presentation possible in the first place. In this respect, I would go beyond Johanna Hartmann, who suggests that since “Lemonade” is an “intermedial collage,” the “intermedial references are a means of cohesion that are responsible for the unified character of the visual album,” and say rather that said “unification and cohesion” is one perspective of the fugitive and porous nature of the borders and thresholds of “Lemonade” (Hartmann 2016). The black home emanates from “Lemonade” not insomuch as the latter forbids the commodification of blackness as consumable and distributive object, but insomuch as it

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exhibits the im-possibility of said objectification. That is to say, the commodity form’s very possibility emerges from a blackness that could never be reduced to this objectification because of the very nature of its extra-­ ordinary vulnerability to being more, before and after violent interpellation. The critiques of the commodity form, or black objectification via hooks or Wilderson will never and should never be dismissed absolutely. They will return and should return continuously and fervently, but we cannot fail to recognize that this movement, this inevitable return of the metaphysics of antiblackness, is generated by the fugitive movement that is blackness, that is made legible by the black home. This black home is necessarily present throughout “Lemonade” and its 11 chapters, Intuition, Denial, Anger, Apathy, Emptiness, Accountability, Reformation, Forgiveness, Resurrection, Hope, and Redemption. At first glance the chapters frame a narrative of the protagonist, played by Beyoncé, dealing with infidelity in a marriage and the process of reconciliation with herself and her husband. While this popular interpretation of the visual album as narrating a story of the emotions and affects following a woman discovering, confronting, and ultimately reconciling with an unfaithful husband is evident, the following will only trace moments where the movements of the ineffable black home can be described. The first tracing will be the interplay between the singularity and seeming individuality of the protagonist and black sociality as they are brought together and pushed a part almost simultaneously by the black home. As “Lemonade” opens, Beyoncé is by herself: first with her head against a car, next on her knees on a stage, and then alone in a field of tall grass that stretches above her. However, alone may be closer to all-one, since between these visual images of Beyoncé are also other images with no immediate context given, but one can feel the weight they contribute to this montage. The first: a black-and-white image of a chain attached to what appears to be wooden scaffolding with trees looming above it shot from below with the song of birds off in some distance gives off the sense of an ancient grounding amidst a larger reality. The second: there is the sound of the wind and tall grass wrestling and then women singing staccato, which comes to an end, the images are this time in color with the grass in the foreground and an abandoned overgrown stone edifice, at one moment framed as below surface level and then the next askew, lurks in the background. The edifice is not easily discernable but somewhere in the recesses of your mind it screams of a holding stock from an unforgiven time, and yet at the same time, the rich

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colors carry their own weight as they draw the viewer to the past from the present. The weight of these images and the aporetic chronology of these opening scenes is the black home. We feel the hold as it gives an elusive context to these few seconds of sequence between the initial image of Beyoncé against the car and Beyoncé on the stage and in the field. We do not see other people, but the edifice and scaffolding tell us they were there, against their will. The fugitivity of blackness goes forward, then backward, then forward again in this montage, since one does not see or hear what they saw and heard first in this sequence (or did not see and hear) until what happens second and third. What they see and hear is a landscape of pain, bucolic terror (Hartman 1997), escaping from the screen but making legible a Beyoncé amidst a spectral black sociality that is tugging her apart to an expanding unthought past and place. Again, this is the black home.20 As “Lemonade” continues and the first lyrics appear Beyoncé seemingly unveils to the watcher that she has lost trust in someone close. “Pray I catch you whispering, I pray you catch me listening.” Coupled with the image of her moving below the green and brown waves of grass, the scene conveys a sense of loneliness, abandonment in an earthly sea. These opening and early parts of “Lemonade” seemingly emphasize Beyoncé as a singular individual. At moments her pain, grief, and developing anger suggest to the viewer that the travesty of the broken relationship with her lover is a very personal, singular experience. However, if one tethers themselves too tightly to this given narrative, one may overlook that a black sociality is also given in resistance to the former. As “Intuition” begins the video is montaged and alongside these images and scenes of Beyoncé alone—and the feelings of existential abandonment they conjure—there are moments where the viewer is ushered to an old southern property, the Madewood and/or Destrehan Plantation in Louisiana, and within the cavernous interior of the dilapidated stone edifice. In these passing moments, black girls and women, dressed in southern gothic attire, appear still. We do not know these women, we cannot know these women, their past is irredeemable. In some moments it is just their bodies, others they are staring off within a soft focus, at another moment one women is staring blankly into and beyond the viewer. In their striking silence and stillness, emphasized by an earthy rich color tone that shifts from black and white and the sounds of crickets and humidity then accompanied by the song “Pray You Catch Me,” a sense of constitutive, ancient, and yet also futural blackness drifts across the visual, providing an almost imperceptible

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movement traced by the cameras. The fugitivity of this montage, which is not more than three minutes into the visual, takes the form of the unknown/known for these women: we do not know their place in the visual album, their place on earth, their place in time, but their blackness draws the viewer toward them as familiar inasmuch as they recede. One dimension of this movement are the visual allusions to Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust, which also features black women in the visual environment of landscapes that evoke the legacy of slavery, revealing the tensions between past and modernity. But they also evoke the black diaspora not just visually but through intertextual references. What Jamie Ann Rogers names ‘diasporic communion’, which she argues is evoked in “Lemonade” and Daughters of the Dust, she may also name ‘fugitive black sociality’, as she writes: [T]exts such as Lemonade and Daughters function as trans-historical and trans-geographic sites and performances of what I am calling diasporic communion. Diasporic communion might be thought broadly as a process of transmission of stories, histories, and cultural codes via inter- and extratextual exchange that generates intimate relationships across time and space among diasporic subjects, even if those relationships are only imagined … diasporic communion, as I develop it here, is immanent and autonomous; in other words, it is itself unmoored, reflecting the texts’ preoccupations with movement, origin, and (un)rootedness. (Rogers 2020, 132–133)

Diasporic communion, therefore, shares with black sociality this fugitive movement in as much as one recognizes the sociality within the fundamental displacement that blackness evokes. The allusions to Daughters of the Dust, are another dimension to this displacement, since this is an extratextual reference that contains its own intertextual allusions and excesses. Working with and against each other, the inter/extra-textuality only further highlights the ever-expanding spacing and imperfect timing of the black home, its richness, porousness and yet, also its incompleteness and restrictiveness in as much as these references also continually bring attention to the objectification of black people. In this respect, in addition to diasporic communion, one may also call upon, selectively, Valorie D. Thomas’ concept of diasporic vertigo, which she uses in her reflections on “Lemonade” to describe the contradictory and disorientating nature of the black diaspora amidst antiblackness, as she explains:

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[D]iasporic vertigo is the preeminent spatiotemporal and critical ethos that defines the core aesthetic principles of the audiovisual and poetic rhetorics of the black Atlantic which Gilroy argues is fundamentally flowing, hybrid, limitless and exceeds borders, nations, and fractured colonial social constructs. Vertigo aestheticizes dislocation and disorientation as the psychogeographic experiences that shape African diasporic imaginaries. (Thomas 2018, 51)

This dimension of diasporic vertigo captures in description the overwhelming movement of black sociality.21 Along with the dimensions of Roger’s diasporic communion cited above, these concepts themselves entail an intertextuality, that while necessarily incomplete and partial, within this chapter, also calls attention to the black sociality of which we are studying. And the black home is that spacing and temporalizing or the scene of the unbounded restriction of black sociality that inhabits its insides and outsides, its beauty is in this tragedy, black social life gives birth to a political death, which it spites and also acknowledges in an incomplete intermingling of vertigo. Next in the visual, the title “Intuition” appears and then Beyoncé recites Warsan Shire: “I tried to make a home out of you, but doors lead to trap doors a stairway leads to nothing” (Beyoncé 2016). In one sense she is clearly speaking of her lover and as the poem continues it seems increasingly clear, but let’s stay with this line. The protagonist attempted to make of him a place where she would feel safe, warm, and loved; however, the ambiguous use of the pronoun you and the evocation of home highlight the fragility of the existential interpretation. As the protagonist begins to recite these lines she is not on screen. ‘You’ suddenly seems to vacillate between the second person pronoun and the impersonal pronoun, the listener, the viewer, the world is indicted with Beyoncé’s failed attempt. There is no traditional home for blackness, for the black woman implicated with domesticity, but made impossible by the blackness that remains. Beyoncé’s line describes the scenes of the impossible domestic, there is no black home to be made on this land, in this country, on this planet, but one is always trying; different doors and stairways, if only to stow away for a moment, if only to be led to no (w)here. The black women that appear in the visual on these southern properties before Beyoncé reappears support this idea of the impossible domesticity, they are all black women deemed to be ultimately outside of the symbolic order of gender and whiteness within the home. They contrast Beyoncé’s ambiguous

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comfort, laying in a bathtub clearly too small by modern standards, as she reappears and begins to sing “Pray You Catch Me.” They anticipate and disrupt this fraught, impossible, domestic scene as they line up outside of these houses together, alone and all one. This is different than Hank and Leticia at the threshold of the house in “Monster’s Ball” eating ice cream after she finds out his relation to her husband’s death. In that scene, Wilderson explains, Billy Bob Thornton’s character signifies white vitality over against the social death of Berry’s blackness even if the intent is a shared ethical dilemma (Wilderson III 2010, 290). It is the silence and stillness of these women that makes them linger in one’s mind even while Beyoncé appears to have seemingly achieved some domestic solitude. This is not reconciliation with the past or herself; instead, the black women appear motionless and on guard, with nature and Beyoncé in the background, as gatekeepers invoking a sense of impossible hospitality, a sense of an impossible nature, and a sense of an impossible past. Beyoncé is the host, of these places and of the visual, but inasmuch as she cannot be untethered from these images of black women outside, she is also the stranger, the hostile, the unnatural, always already outside and inside, past and present. This sort of impossible dimensionality is held together in its separation that is the uncomfortable spacing and untimely timing of the black home. In the second chapter Denial, the individualism of the narrative still holds the most gravity. It begins with Beyoncé standing on the precipice of a building wearing the same sweatshirt she was wearing in the fields and on the empty vaudeville stage, she stares over the edge of the precipice, removes her hood, and then falls off the side of a building pummeling toward the concrete, only for the concrete to give into a water-filled bedroom where she confronts a sleeping version of herself on a bed and in a bedroom that very well could be in the house mentioned above, as the opening lines to another Shire poem is read: “I tried to change ….” There is potentially a lot taking place in this sequence: a birthing under water, a splitting of the subject with her double, a life after death, but what resonates strongest is the way the transition from southern home to city in the first chapter foreshadows a slower transition from a certain individualistic sorrow and rage to a collective recollecting of self that follows the move from city to rural southern home. We learned from Moten and his reading of Du Bois above, that the pathology of blackness does not distinguish itself in these seemingly distinct landscapes  and so this movement from city to rural life marks a certain  sameness through difference and we learned from Nietzsche that some of us are born posthumously (Nietzsche 1968).

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Nevertheless, this introspective moment of her underwater dissolution and reemergence leads to one of the most infamous and celebrated scenes of “Lemonade,” where Beyoncé is sporting a yellow dress that alludes to the Yoruba deity of water and sensuality, Oshun (Thomas 2018). Oshun is known for her temper when wronged and Beyoncé embodies this temperament as the song “Hold Up”—describing a woman scorned and livid lyrically, alongside an upbeat almost triumphant sounding track—plays as she smashes a cityscape with a bat and ends with her driving a monster truck over several cars. This scene is orientated primarily through the perspective of an individualized sense self, with the protagonist’s romantic tragedy animating an individuating, personal, anger. This self, while evoking true and real emotions, also conveys a sense of artificiality; she exhibits a vengeful justice that is empty and hollow like the facades she passes on what appears to be a sound stage. She exhibits fantastic abandonment and feats of strength with her bat; and while black people look on with admiration and encouragement, there remains a distance. They are outside, but without the intimacy of the women from the plantation; they are not participants in coming to terms with the protagonist’s emotions and sense of self. While this scene is very powerful, rich, and even celebratory, it takes place in the facade of the  city, a hub of self-interested neoliberalism, another political space of displacement for black people as they migrated north for better opportunity, only to be corralled into dark corners, their homes blackened by disenfranchisement. The black home is necessarily present, but not nearly as clearly if the chapter is taken in isolation. The strongest allusion to its presence visually is Beyoncé’s embodiment of Oshun, a diasporic figure that appears both in and out of place: in place amidst her vengeful wrecking spree, emerging from water, but out of place in the modern city landscape, its artificiality, and proximity without intimacy. This subtle indecisiveness shakes the contours of the black home just enough to gesture to one of the more pronounced instances of its fleeing presence. In the next chapter, Anger, groups of black women return but this time in motion. A troop of parade dancers marching down back roads, another group of women in a parking garage donning all-white gowns and attached to one another by tied sleeves. These images serve as a transition as the theme of Tchaikovsky’s “Swan Lake” fades from the previous scene of destruction and the words of Warsan Shire are again recited to introduce the track “Don’t Hurt Yourself,” where the themes of improbable love, resentment, and antipathy bubble to the surface again. Instead of focusing

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on the tension between the explicit individuality and the implicit sociality, we can now trace the contours of the black home through bodies. The emergence of the dancing women is profound and as “Don’t Hurt Yourself” plays out, we see that the women are not just observing in isolation as before but they are participating through dance. The dancing takes the individualistic self-centering rage of “Hold Up” into a larger spacing of black sociality through the dissolution of self through movement. Dancing calls attention to the black body as not simply a locus of pain and extra-ordinary vulnerability, but also of expression as and through performance, in this sense the object, as Moten insists, does indeed resist. In fact, it creates beauty through and as this pain, in the dark undercommons of a parking garage, by dancing with other bodies. Black sociality is vivified by the attached white garments of the dancers, flowing in the dark, reminiscent of the white froth in the wake of  a ship. Their flowy garments conjure a tangible representation of Hortense Spillers’ sense of flesh as the zero-degree remnant of the violence set over against the captured body, that is riveted to the hull of the ship but also escapes overboard (Spillers 2003, 206). Their movement, in dance, mimics the swaying of bodies at and under the sea, yet there is something more than the political violence that this imagined flesh conjures, as Weheliye insists, “the flesh is not an abject zone of exclusion that culminates in death but an alternate instantiation of humanity that does not rest on the mirage of western Man as the mirror image of human life as such” (Weheliye 2014, 43). And as this alternation the dancer’s attachment also evokes Merleau-Ponty’s notion of flesh, which is not material, but a primal ‘element’ of ontology that is adjacent to the political ontology of western humanism. For Merleau-­ Ponty there is a chiasmic reversibility that resists oppositional alterity between subject and object, seer and seen, self and other (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 104). Invoking the former and the latter senses of flesh, these two hands are intertwined, touching/touched, in and by blackness and its chiasmic quality, where irreconcilable difference is what holds this world together by stretching it apart. Black sociality unveils a primordial a non-­ coincidence, or “incessant escaping” (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 148) however, not between object and subject, as we find in Merleau-Ponty, but this flesh is an escaping from object through object, object and thing, unseen and unseeable, other without and other within, predicated by the very nature of blackness’ negation or pathology, its spacing and timing in the hull of the ship. This ontological hiatus, is, as Merleau-Ponty insists, “not an ontological void, a non-being”; it is rather the paraontological

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movement of blackness that makes possible a black sociality, framed by the spacing and timing of the black home underground (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 148). The different dimensions of this sociality, synchronic and diachronic, multiplicity and singularity, language and perception, song and dance,22 fold into one another, and the ‘hieroglyphics of the flesh’ recited through their dance bear witness to the metaphysical and political antagonism of the world of knowledge, the alienation of intersubjectivity (Weheliye 2014, 132). To be clear, not all touch is the same, and it is not obvious Merleau-Ponty considers the violent touch of whiteness, misogyny, heteronormativity, and more, but through the prism of blackness, and the aesthetic medium of dance specifically, the chiasmic quality of black flesh is magnified by expressing visually and haptically what, honestly, is already understood but not always seen, that black persons are always already animated in their extra-ordinary vulnerability by black sociality to feel differently; these dancers feel different.23 In “Lemonade,” the embrace of black aesthetic performance expresses itself in many different dimensions: the intermedial presentation of song, dance, and cinematography are the intuitive ones. However, one illuminative element of the black aesthetic that is not as intuitive, but just as present is phonic materiality, a concept developed by Fred Moten in In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition and that was alluded to above as one expression of the impossible reduction of blackness to commodification. Phonic materiality is a performative power, a repetition of difference in each performative act that always already disrupts scenes of objection and the possibility of origin by means of its confluence with blackness, in other words it disrupts ontology. In the essay “Black Mo’nin’” Moten describes how the photo of Emmett Till resonates with phonic materiality and deconstructs the facticity of black death through the iterability of the performative act that follows from the photo’s reproducibility—as the photo is a kind of reproduction of the reconstructive period in America via the inauguration of the ‘civil rights period’ and its visual reproduction in newspapers, magazines, and so on. The phonic materiality is that which escapes meaning in the inevitable reproduction not just of the photo, but of the whole event; it slices through the political to the social through the aesthetic: Looking at Emmett Till is arrested by overtonal reverberations; looking demurs when looking opens onto an unheard sound that picture cannot secure but discovers and onto all of what it might be said to mean that I can look at this face, this photograph. This is to say not only look at it but look

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at it in the context of an aesthetics, look at it as if it were to be looked at, as if it were to be thought, therefore, in terms of a kind of beauty a kind of detachment, independence, autonomy, that holds open the question of what looking might mean in general, what the aesthetics of the photograph might mean for politics. (Moten 2003, 198)

Phonic materiality is the “overtonal reverberation” that necessarily precedes and exceeds the photograph itself. One can hear the tones as much as one can see them: there is an inherent synesthesia found in blackness. Phonic materiality is the confluence of visuality, sound, and feeling, the way one hears the texture of a photograph or feels the sounds as they reverberate off one’s retinas, off one’s body, off one’s heart; it’s a beautiful synesthetic mess. In Moten’s phonic materiality as a kind of syn(a)esthetics, the possible beauty of said photo is solicited irrespective of intent or genre, the photo sounds interminably precisely because its context always escapes its medium. Instead of simply provoking horror, he contends the picture offers affirmation, “not of, but out of death” and he continues, “Black Art, which is to say Black Life, which is to say Black (Life Against) Death, which is to say Black Eros, is the ongoing production of performance” (Moten 2003, 209). The primordial shriek of Till’s mother, Ms. Bradley, at the sight of her son’s corpse is divisive and productive as it reverberates in the performative act of blackness, a black maternal ring. In “Lemonade” there is one scene that cannot resist the performative phonic materiality of blackness as Moten articulated it through his listening to Emmet Till’s ‘barbaric’—a term we will explore in the last chapter—photograph. The Resurrection chapter begins with a number of images of black women again on a southern property dressed is southern gothic garb. There is a moment where we see photos strewn across the ground and James Blake begins to sing the song “Forward.” Then the visual turns to the interior of a home where a number of black women hold photos of black men and children. We know of some of these women and their deceased: the mother of Michael Brown, Lesley McSpadden; the mother of Eric Garner, Gwen Carr; the mother of Trayvon Martin, Sybrina Fulton. Above Moten leaps from “Black Art” to “Black Life,” to opposing “Black Death,” and lastly to “Black Eros”; these terms, blackened, create a consolation, reverberating through the performativity of not only that photo, but of these photos. They also have and will be recreated in different times and spaces and the phonic materiality resonates but also is amplified; they participate in the aesthetic performance that is “Lemonade.”

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Black Art as Black Life fighting against Death in the name of Eros is in the sound of Lesley McSpadden’s tears, in the dancing of Serena Williams, in a bat named Hot Sauce. Black aesthetics traverse different modes of materiality and perception—never alone—giving life and sound to the walls of black homes decked with photos of the deceased, all the while grieving women sit without uttering a word. There is an emotional dissonance on display in this scene: having a photo of one’s deceased hanging and framed in someone else’s house, but the black home, black love, is something else. Of course, the black home is not the physical place of this scene nor any of the many houses present in the visual album, it is the staging that makes blackness’ fugitivity tangible throughout. These black mothers are indeed at home, although they don’t appear at home. They are impossibly domestic; just passing through, a time, a space, a feeling, a taste, a color of displacement, exile, and home. In the Redemption chapter, the black domestic qua grandmother becomes the bearer of blackness’ escape, as we see young women and girls interacting with older black women throughout a southern house. A poem begins with the instructions for lemonade, and like any good recipe it feels as it were carried down from one generation to another, a movement of being out of time. The recipe, as it is transferred through daughters, alludes to the continuous possibility from impossibility that is the black maternal. The recipe of lemonade is one example of making something out of the nothing and sharing that something with others through time and space. Grandma “spun gold out of this hard life, conjured beauty from the things left behind, found healing where it did not exist,” or as Hattie White, Beyoncé’s grandmother-in-law professes at her birthday, “I was served lemons but I made lemonade” (Beyoncé 2016). Possibility emerges from an impossible existence of blackness, from the extra-­ordinary vulnerability of black people. Grandma unveils the wealth of creativity, space, time and resistance that emerges as black social life, which is then reflected in the scenes of these black women occupying but never owning, if only for an album, the black home, together. As Redemption transitions from the poem about grandmothers into the final song “All Night,” there are no more black-and-white visuals. In full rich color, ‘chromatic saturation’, we once again see the women of the black home; however, this time in modern attire as opposed to the southern gothic style they had donned until then. With this concluding song, we see the true possibilities of blackness come to fruition as full color. The

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song begins and the visual transitions from the southern property, its landscapes and people, to Beyoncé singing alone in a field where the sun is setting, montaged with home videos of her with her husband and daughter and also videos of other people and other couples embracing in everyday settings; however, there is a marked difference when it comes to the other couples: the people are not just black. Throughout the entire visual the screen time is dominated by black people, mostly black women. In these final moments of full pathological/deviant color and vividness, as Beyoncé sings about forgiveness and desire, the lovers in this segment are of all different races and are engaged in all different types of ‘non-normativel’ relationships. The possibility of black life, of blackness as possibility, reaches a pinnacle in this final song as we see it transgress the political in the name of the social, where we see the black home make intimate time and intimate space for all.

V. Conclusion: Sunset at the Threshold As the sun is setting in the final moments of Beyoncé’s “Lemonade,” we are left at the threshold. The viewers, in fact, never see it set; instead, it is the ever-elusive fugitive limit of the black home. It is always welcoming, but it also always dangerous, since this welcome is not a choice—it is as natural as the sunset; it is, in fact, the specter of the very real violence of the political that the social attempts to escape, but the ethical must engage. The radical vulnerability discussed in the previous chapter is not dismissed or unacknowledged in the trope of the black home, but instead we see conditions of possibility that emerge from blackness in its own right, which include violence and terror. The afropessimist tradition provides profound insight into the circumstances of black people; however, ultimately the unthought and dispossessed demand fuller expression in terms  of the social life that overwhelms and escapes. The black home, indeed, is drenched in a darkness reflected in the many tragic circumstances that plague and, in fact, constitute blackness and the history of black people in the modern world. Nevertheless, the reality of social life cannot be denied, and the black home frames the way this black social life departs from traditional autonomous individuality and sets the foundation for understanding a black ethical experience that is always at the threshold of an antiblack political ontology.

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Notes 1. Peter Westmoreland gives an impressive and comprehensive account of Descartes’ statements on foreigners. While Descartes is writing before a more familiar concept of race that would develop a century or two later, his reflections on Descartes’ understanding of epistemic inferiority gives some insight on how Descartes may respond to the savage or barbarian as opposed to the stranger outside his window (Westmoreland 2021). 2. One may ask with such a counter-intuitive notion of home, why choose this term. Well, on the one hand, there are still compelling arguments that even the blackened home serves some of the foundational functions of possibility that the notion home carries with it, which I describe later in the chapter, even if those desirable qualities of safety and security are not available, and, on the other hand, it’s hard to say I chose the word ‘home’. I just don’t know if there is a self of the kind that makes such a clear declarative choice; instead, the term and concept arose in a more passive way, as much writing does. Hardly does it feel like I chose the word ‘home’ in the way I would choose other things, like what to eat. In the end, the term ‘home’ presents itself in same fashion ascribed to the black home as a concept: fleetingly available; but not for me to have or to take, but instead only to accept its invitation even if it stays for only a little while. 3. Of course, this invocation of spacing and temporalization calls attention to Jacques Derrida’s famous description of différance as constitutive of a ‘spacing’ or interval whereby signification is made possible by always being differed and different from and to itself; constituted by the trace of a past or future, time and place that is never present (Derrida 1982). Below we will see how fugitive blackness resonates with this understanding of différance but is motivated first and foremost by its proximity to black people. 4. I emphasize earlier work, since Hartman’s latest contribution, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval, provides a clearer opening to rethink the condition of the unthought as also a condition of possibility, which Hartman performs through a method she introduces in the essay “Venus in Two Acts” as critical fabulations (Hartman 2008). In, “Venus in Two Acts,” Hartman describes the absences that seemingly cannot be filled because different kinds of violence left the enslaved black women that may have been found in the archive to be ostensibly erased or inaccessible by historical practices. The proposed new method challenges the norms and boundaries of the archive, acknowledging its originary violence but looking beyond it by going through (with)it: “The intention here isn’t anything as miraculous as recovering the lives of the enslaved or redeeming the dead, but rather laboring to paint as

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full a picture of the lives of the captives as possible. This double gesture can be described as straining against the limits of the archive to write a cultural history of the captive, and, at the same time, enacting the impossibility of representing the lives of the captives precisely through the process of narration. The method guiding this writing practice is best described as critical fabulation” (Hartman 2008, 12). 5. Through her own reading of Orlando Patterson, Sharon Patricia Holland makes the same conclusion, namely that after the end of slavery, non-blacks used the imaginative work of the libidinal economy to suture their own sense of subjectivity upon black people as a non-entity (Holland 2000, 15–16). 6. See this passage from his essay “Biko and the Problematic of Presence”: “The Black ‘homeland’ is a fated place where fated Black bodies are domiciled. It is the nowhere of no one. But it is more—or less—for “homeland” cartography suffers from a double inscription. The “homeland” is an Absence of national Presence drawn on the Absence of continental Presence; a Black ‘nation’ on a Black ‘continent’; nowhere to the power of two. Lamenting Africa’s status as terra nullius in the Human psyche, Sartre wrote, ‘A great many countries have been present in their time at the heart of our concerns, but Africa … is only an absence, and this great hole in the map of the world lets us keep our conscience clean.’ Just as the Black body is a corpus (or corpse) of fated WHEN (when will I be arrested, when will I be shunned, when will I be a threat), the Black ‘homeland,’ and the Black ‘continent’ on which it sits, is a map of fated WHEN ‘battered down by tom-toms, cannibalism, intellectual deficiency, fetishism, racial defects, slave ships, and above all else, above all ‘Sho good eatin’.’ From the terrestrial scale of cartography to the corporeal scale of the body, Blackness suffers through homologies of Absence” (Wilderson III 2008, 99). As this chapter develops, I will extend an argument of fugitive escape as opposed to absence to understand the possibility of a black home(land). 7. Interestingly enough, in an interview with Jacobin Magazine, Mark Rudd, a member of the Weather Underground, seems to express some regret regarding the tactics taken, since it seemingly did not amount to anything substantial and suggests organization and not the sort of violence they employed was the real way to make change. His response speaks to a discrepancy of experience and the structural questions that the Weather Underground addressed. Also, of interest, Rudd explains that after being on the run for two-and-a-half years, in April of 1975 when he turned himself in there were no charges or jail time (Rudd and Uetricht 2021). Rudd’s experience of the Weather Underground in 1975 and now in 2021 stands in stark contrast to the Black Liberation Army and Wilderson’s account of their trials and persecutions in “The Vengeance of Vertigo: Aphasia and

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Abjection in the Political Trials of Black Insurgents.” Rudd’s ability to reassimilate with such ease and to reconsider the scope of structural imagination in no way approximates the fate of the BLA members and the ‘aphasia’ that marks their non-­relatable positionality as non-political agents, or political abject objects, in the face of state (Wilderson III 2011). As Wilderson argues, for some vertigo is a subjective experience one may go in and out of, for example, Rudd, while for black people vertigo is objective, the condition of their existence, for example, David Gilbert and Judy Clark (Wilderson III 2011, 3). 8. The shift from afro to black may seem negligible, but there is something significant in the ubiquity of blackness that transcends ‘afro’, which infers ethnic identities that we know were ossified by the political machinations of modernity. 9. There is much that may be gleaned from this comparison of afropessimism’s concept of political ontology to the political ontology of Carl Schmitt, particularly how the political precedes the state (Schmitt 1996). 10. In the ‘Preface’ to Universal Machine, Moten also describes this movement from object and subjects to things, to ‘no-thing’ as a swarm which not only highlights the indistinct contours of propriety to the object of study, namely blackness, but, as a swarm, intimates a sense of the sociality that anticipates our discussion below (Moten 2018, IX). The ‘in-­difference’ of/ toward black people that fugitivity begets is not restricted to the laws of being ‘in’ as when one thinks of the dimensions of space and time or at least not restricted in the traditional or phenomenological sense. Fugitivity is always escaping and this escape from tradition and even phenomenology is close to the sort of limitations that Heidegger eschewed in his famous ‘kehre’ articulated not long before the Bremen Lectures. Refusing ‘being­in’ by being ‘in-difference’ has to do not only with the violent exclusion of racial politics that help orient black people to this in-difference, but also with the paraontological escape of blackness from a metaphysics reliant on ‘being-in’ holds on to. As the black home develops later in this chapter, the idea of being in or out, while helpful to an extent, cannot not capture the essence of blackness—nothing can really. Just know, that it is not simply that blackness is antithetical to the human, as an afropessimism would suggest, blackness is not simply the antagonist to history, philosophy, or metaphysics, it is an elusive possibility that the history of philosophy, through its battle with objects and objectivity, has always struggled to articulate. 11. Moten, in the introduction titled “The Resistance of the Object,” for In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition, does not yet employ the language of ‘things’ but he does derive the concept of phonic materiality through a rereading of Saidiya Hartman’s own reflections on sound in the introduction to Scenes, where he argues Hartman’s attempt to

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silence the scream of Aunt Hester to focus on the more mundane scenes of subjection fails to mute the phonic materiality of black objection. Phonic materiality will be discussed at more length below, but its notable to recognize that the qualities of the thing, or thingliness, are precisely found in the these confounding logical possibilities that contest their inherent logic of presence and reification, so that the black object, and black people by proxy, always already undo the limits imposed by the political to silence, to reify, to subject through objection (Moten 2003). In an interesting and rigorous rebuttal to Moten’s refiguring of Hartman and Aunt Hester’s scream in this introduction and in much of Moten’s work, Parisa Vaziri argues this move by Moten to focus on the ideality of the feminine scream ultimately does unjustified and perhaps unjustifiable violence to the black feminine in the name of the familiar appositional response of post-structuralism to claims of absolute meaning. Whereas Hartman in Scenes labors to articulate the irreducible violence of black objection, idealized in black feminine violence, Moten ultimately objectifies this objectification for ends that ultimately erase this violence. Vaziri explains: “Hartman is never dogmatic about what counts as violence, nor does she hierarchize models of black suffering; but it would seem that the tolerance for diffusion’s ambiguity necessarily disappears violence altogether at the threshold of meaning—where all is dissolved but ‘meaningless aurality’, whose meaning and value Moten nevertheless hopes to preserve and, precisely, as a feminist gesture. In exchanging one form of feminist ‘materiality’ for another, Aunt Hester is thus inadvertently retooled for new theoretical purpose; but as substrate for abstraction, she remains beyond memory—still unthinkable (Spillers). It is the way in which she remains unthinkable that circumscribes a plausible question about how (poststructuralist) theory distributes unthinkability upon a hierarchical scale of value. Does theory’s ongoing fascination with the meaning/nonmeaning break betray an affirmation of the livability and fertility that the space holding the slash presumably bears for all? What does such a presumptive affirmation bury and leave buried” (Vaziri 2016)? Vaziri’s intervention proposes a challenging response to Moten’s ‘move’ to ‘the thing’, ‘phonic materiality’, and even fugitivity. However, what Vaziri marks as the inevitable inversion of non-sense over facticity, I would argue, misplaces agency and value in what Moten attempts to articulate as opposed to what (his) writing does. Aunt Hester’s scream is never ‘buried’ or ‘left behind’ even though Moten, along with Hartman, cannot help but ‘contaminate’ the facticity of the scream in its recreation. Phonic materiality is a ‘poetic’ placeholder for the conditions of possibility of hearing the very real and violent scream of Aunt Hester and the many other unknown and unknowable violations that inaugurate, again and again, black objectification. The problem of absorption or erasure or the impossible empathy of antiblackness is not to be overcome, pathologized,

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or celebrated. Vaziri seems to acknowledge as much, and yet she suggests Moten’s writing nevertheless ‘draws’ black feminism into aporia forcefully and this diminishes the problem of ‘redress’ (Vaziri 2016). I would argue, in fact what is at stake with Moten’s fugitivity is the way black people have come to articulate the demand for redress in light of both objectification and the manner in which black objectification is structured to always be a disappearing problem that black people continue to call attention  to. Fugitive sociality does not celebrate black survival over against black violence, it highlights the perpetual disguising of the impossibility of redress and thus serves as the only means to figure redress as impossible by the ­current political ontology and demands for another world, even as these demands may fade away into ‘nonsense’. 12. Once again, we see the richness of Saidiya Hartman’s thought, who proposed this very fact in Scenes of Subjection, but with a very different inflection, when she states, “These performances of blackness are in no way the ‘possession’ of the enslaved” (Hartman 1997, 57). 13. Here, I think what Moten says about black social life can be contrasted to what George Bataille has in mind when he thinks of community through inner experience and Jean Luc Nancy in “Inoperative Community.” For Bataille, this community takes place through a recognition of the ecstatic self that exists outside of the possessive and internalized nature of the sense of self dictated by the delimiting nature of knowledge. While Nancy attributes the same limitations that Bataille attributes to the knowledgeable subject and the discursive practices that inscribe it, Moten would attribute to the reading of blackness; however, the paraontological goes a bit further, since Bataille’s anthropological prejudices align him with a sense of whiteness that prohibits a sense of the paraontological in the form of fugitive blackness where ecstasy is not only temporary and impossible but also fugitive by means of blackness’s relation to black people in modern political metaphysics (Bataille 1988; Nancy 1991). 14. This, of course, is a twist on W. E. B. Du Bois’ famous proclamation in The Souls of Black Folk, where he imagines white folk asking him, as a black man, “How does it feel to be a problem?” 15. Sexton in this article is responding primarily to Moten’s “The Case of Blackness” and argues quite convincingly that afropessimism may be closer to ‘black optimism’ than Moten leads one to believe. Afropessimism is less interested in the intramural of black life and more in the antagonistic divide of political ontology. However, he maintains that the starting point is the main issue and here I remain close with Moten, who suggests that while the political is a necessary dimension to address it is not the whole picture and one loses quite a bit in black studies when that other side is not

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explored, since the political is constantly questioned and motivated by the social. It is not a matter of a negative dialectics as it is a thorough deconstruction. Read here one poignant passage from Sexton, “Black optimism is not the negation of the negation that is afro-pessimism, just as black social life does not negate black social death by inhabiting it and vitalizing it. A living death is as much a death as it is a living. Nothing in afro-pessimism suggests that there is no black (social) life, only that black life is not social life in the universe formed by the codes of state and civil society, of citizen and subject, of nation and culture, of people and place, of history and heritage, of all the things that colonial society has in common with the colonized, of all that capital has in common with labor—the modern world system. Black life is not lived in the world that the world lives in, but it is lived underground, in outer space. This is agreed. That is to say, what Moten asserts against afro-­pessimism is a point already affirmed by afropessimism, is, in fact, one of the most polemical dimensions of afro-pessimism as a project: namely that black life is not social, or rather that black life is lived in social death. Double emphasis, on lived and on death. That’s the whole point of the enterprise at some level. It is all about the implications of this agreed-upon point where arguments (should) begin, but they cannot (yet) proceed” (Sexton 2011, 28). [my emphasis] 16. The neoliberal individualism of modernity of course still reigns in everyday conceptions and understanding of the self, including black selves, although in their extra-ordinary vulnerability there is an inevitable tension that creates paradoxical experiences. For instance, transgressions against black people are articulated and felt at the level of the deeply personal; even when they are unintentional. This is because their precarity entails that such violence is inevitable, one’s existence is saturated by violence in such a way that all interactions serve the libidinal economy of antiblack violence and neoliberalism individualizes the way this violence is internalized. Now, neoliberalism has a similar effect on all people, the safety of nationalism or race or gender often functions as a retainer for these affective currents but cannot be separated from an individualism, the branded sense of self, that is the most effected and that must be defended, since it is the individual that is isolated as the only means of preservation, moral direction, and responsibility. The façade of individuating identities that one cycles through, however, does not work for black individuals and black social life sheds light on a reality beyond this individualism that escapes in moments where blackness escapes, when one feels a deep connection to the way this violence dissolves into the anonymity of the black of the night; when one realizes their experience could’ve been anyone’s. has been everyone’s, it’s not sublimated by nationality, sexuality, gender, or any identity, at least if one is attuned to these vibrations. Counter-intuitively, the dissolution of

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the individualistic or egoistic self, leads to the sort of arrogance and boldness we find in black aesthetics. The expressed arrogance of the emcee or the singer or musician comes not from the individual genius, but from the black fugitive social nature of the self that can be bold because they really are so much more than the ‘other’. 17. In “Home, Houses, Nonidentity: Paris is Burning” Chandan Reddy offers a queer critique of home. Separating themselves from the Marxist (Althusserian) and liberal reading of the US white home as a place of material and social reproduction, they offer a critique from the perspective of gender, race, and lastly ‘queers of color’ through a reading of “Paris is Burning” and reject the US ‘home’ for the houses of the ball circuit. These ‘houses’ were alternative spaces, not in the spirit of a return or recreation of home or even oppositional, but sites— ‘non-identical supplements’—to remember the violence of the home and to leave it behind and pursue alternative ways of living and pleasure. Reddy is obviously correct to argue that queerness was not necessarily welcomed in US households, white or non-­white. In fact, queerness was often met with downright hostility, but the black home as developed in this chapter is not to deny the traumatic experiences of expulsion nor is it to offer an alternative domesticity. It traces the paraontological spacing from which blackness in all its beauty and ugliness presents itself. In other words, Reddy’s criticisms of domesticity and the development of a queer of color understanding of home that recognize contradiction as a possibility of subject formations are correct, but they do not capture the larger picture that is the focus of this chapter where contradiction is a component of black celebration as both pleasure and terror (Reddy 1998). 18. The significance of this metaphor will be apparent in the next section after an engagement with the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. 19. Matthew Salzano offers one of the more interesting elaboration of hook’s criticism by framing her intervention under the concept of the feminist killjoy. Salzano argues that hooks counters the immediate affective response and reception of happiness—which is individualizing and closes off possibility and therefore is a negative affect—with a positive killjoy affective energy that “challenges neoliberal criticism by focusing on collective context rather than individual rhetorical competition among critics, thus encouraging collective knowledge production” (Salzano 2020, 52). 20. One cannot ignore the auditory dimension of the rather arresting visuals even before the songs formally start. Johanna Hartman describes the auditory as “in a soundscape of presences and meaningful absences.” And then continues, “Lemonade thus presents not so much a sequence of songs but rather a soundscape that combines natural sounds, instrumental music, and singing and juxtaposes it to visual and auditory stillness and pauses that install a contemplative rhythm into the visual album” (Hartmann 2016).

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21. I say this dimension, since Thomas also argues that said vertigo implies and anticipates an “existential equilibrium” as the possibility of healing (Thomas 2018, 51). The notion of black sociality and the black home developed thus far, however, in no way implies or anticipates equilibrium, but instead embraces the vertiginous movement, c.f. Wilderson III (2011) as the possibility of the black home and black sociality through moments of escape without the need or desire for reconciliation or equilibrium. 22. Merleau-Ponty, while pointing to literature and music specifically, more generally heeds that the aesthetic tends to the invisible, the shared difference, in a less derivative way than explication (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 149). The absence of dance, even in reference, however, is surprising, since the body and flesh is an even more visceral way of articulating the phenomenon that already resists explication. This is not a new phenomenon in western thought though; dance was also infamously absent from Hegel’s aesthetic lectures. 23. I reserved my focus to the dancers in the parking garage, but dancing prevails throughout the visual album and in the following chapter, Apathy, perhaps the most famous dance sequence occurs, with Serena Williams in Madewood dancing to “Sorry.” In this chapter there are a group of women painted in Ori dancing on a bus and Serena Williams dancing in front of Beyoncé. Sarah Otula argues the placement of Beyoncé amidst Serena, while well intentioned still recreates problematic hierarchies, writing, “during those moments in which she is sitting on her throne, the video cannot escape the implications of the way it frames Serena’s dancing. Serena, a large, muscled, dark-skinned woman dances for a comparatively slenderer light-skinned woman wearing a braided blonde weave while sitting on a throne. Once again, Beyoncé’s important work of prioritizing blackness and African identity falls in tension with the implicit subjugation of darkskinned bodies to her own exceptionalness marked as such by a Eurocentric neoliberal regime of competition” (Olutola 2019, 110). While I would agree that this visual may and must be able to be interpreted from the perspective of neoliberal competition, the tension she highlights is not in opposition to ‘prioritizing blackness’ but is in fact the possibility of prioritizing blackness for the reasons stated above. The black sociality is the condition of possibility of their comparison, there is continuity in their dance even within the optics of hierarchy. Beyoncé is as much as a stranger as she is a host in this scene of hospitality, precisely inasmuch as she shares the proximity to blackness that the other women do in their extended resistance to never really be singular, in perception, history, and so on.

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References Bataille, Georges. 1988. Inner Experience. Trans. Leslie Anne Boldt. New York: SUNY Press. 2016. Lemonade. Directed by Beyoncé Knowles Carter, Kahil Joseph, Melina Matsoukas and Mark Romanek. Performed by Beyoncé. Parkwood Entertainment. Chandler, Nahum Dimitri. 2014. X-The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Thought. New York: Fordham University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1982. Différance. In Margins of Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Descartes, René. 1998. Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy. Trans. Donald A. Cress. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company. Ellison, Ralph. 1995. Invisible Man. New York: Vintage Books. Fanon, Frantz. 1952. Black Skin, White Masks. Trans. Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press. Hartman, Saidiya V. 1997. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 2007. Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route. New York: Farah, Straus, and Giroux. ———. 2008. Venus in Two Acts. Small Axe 12 (2): 1–14. ———. 2019. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval. New York: W.W. Norton and Company. Hartman, Saidiya V., and Frank B.  Wilderson III. 2003. The Position of the Unthought. Qui Parle 13 (2): 183–201. Hartmann, Johanna. 2016. Sound, Vision and Embodied Performativity in Beyoncé Knowles’ Visual Album Lemonade. European Journal of American Studies 12 (4). Heidegger, Martin. 1962. Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper Perennial. Holland, Sharon Patricia. 2000. Raising the Dead: Readings of Death and (Black) Subjectivity. Durham: Duke University Press. JanMohamed, Abdul R. 2005. The Death-Bound Subject: Richard Wright’s Archeology of Death. Durham: Duke University Press. Keeling, Kara. 2019. Queer Times, Black Futures. New  York: New  York University Press. McKittrick, Katherine. 2006. Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1968. The Visible and the Invisible. Ed. Claude Lefort and Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Mills, Charles W. 1998. Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

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Mitchell, J. Andrew. 2015. The Fourfold: Reading the Late Heidegger. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Moten, Fred. 2003. In The Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Tradition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 2007. Uplift and Criminality. In Next to the Color Line: Gender, Sexuality and W.E.B.  Du Bois, ed. Susan Gillman and Alys Eve Weinbaum, 317–349. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 2018. The Universal Machine. Durham: Duke University Press. Moten, Fred, and Stefano Harney. 2013. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study. Wivinoe: Minor Compositions. Nancy, Jean Luc. 1991. The Inoperative Community. Trans. Peter Connor, Lisa Garbus, Michael Holland and Simona Sawhney. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1968. Twilight of the Idols and the Anti-Christ. Trans. R.J. Hollingdale. New York: Penguin Books. Olutola, Sarah. 2019. I Ain’t Sorry: Beyoncé, Serena, and Hegemonic Hierarchies in Lemonade. Popular Music and Society 42 (1): 99–117. Reddy, Chandan. 1998. Home, Houses, Nonidentity: Paris is Burning. In Burning Down the House: Recycling Domesticity, ed. Rosemary Marangoly George. Boulder: Westview Press. Rogers, Jamie Ann. 2020. Diasportic Communion and Textual Exchange in Beyoncé’s Lemonade and Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust. Black Camera: An International Film Journal 11 (1): 130–157. Rudd, Mark, and Micah Uetricht. 2021. Mark Rudd’s Lessons from SDS and the Weather Underground for Today. Jacobin. Salzano, Matthew. 2020. Lemons or Lemonade? Beyoncé, Killjoy Style, Neoliberalism. Women’s Studies In Communication 43 (1): 45–66. Schmitt, Carl. 1996. The Concept of the Political. Trans. Charles Schwab. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Sexton, Jared. 2011. The Social Life of Social Death: On Afro-pessimism and Black Optimism. Intensions 5 (Fall/Winter): 1–47. Sharpe, Christina. 2016. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Durham: Duke University Press. Snorton, C. Riley. 2017. Black on Both Sides: a Racial History of Trans Identity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Spillers, Hortense. 2003. Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Thomas, Valorie D. 2018. Unenslavable Rapture: Afrxfuturism and Diasporic Vertigo in Beyoncé’s Lemonade. TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies 39 (Spring): 48–69.

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Vaziri, Parisa. 2016. Blackness and the Metaethics of the Object. Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge (29). https://doi.org/10.20415/ rhiz/029.e16. Wallace, Alicia. 2017. A Critical View of Beyoncé’s ‘Formation’. Black Camera: An International Film Journal 9 (1): 189–196. Warren, Calvin. 2018. Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation. Durham: Duke University Press. Weheliye, Alexander G. 2014. Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human. Durham: Duke University Press. Westmoreland, Peter. 2021. Descartes, the Savage, and the Barbarian: On Race and Epistemic Inferiority. Philosophy Today n/a. https://doi.org/10.5840/ philtoday20211014430. Wilderson III, Frank B. 2008. Biko and the Problematic of Presence. In Biko Lives!: Contesting the Legacies of Steve Biko, ed. Andile Mngxitama, Amanda Alexander, and Nigel C. Gibson, 95–114. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2010. Red, White, and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms. Durham: Duke University Press. ———. 2011. The Vengeance of Vertigo: Aphasia and Abjection in the Political Trials of Black Insurgents. Intensions: 1–41.

CHAPTER 4

Black Hospitality

It is astonishing that recoil is not the dominant posture, surprising, in other words, that black history has been marked so prominently by a spirit of tremendous generosity, an ethics of inclusion, a willingness to connect across the color line—politically, culturally, or socially—on whatever terms of humanity are available. It is a truly amazing aspect of the historical record that black people have managed to foster such catholic disposition in the face of unremitting domination, exploitation, and appropriation from friends and foes alike, though we must add immediately that any such ‘hospitality’ emerges not simply despite the circumstances but also because it is compelled by them, a compulsory hospitality. (Sexton 2008, 149) —Jared Sexton, Amalgamation Schemes In short, these Antilleans have been unable to locate the sublime infinity and authority or moral law within themselves precisely because colonial racism imposes on them, through the notion of duty or patriotic loyalty, an impossible demand which can never be satisfied justly … The moral law is no longer certain of itself in the Antilles not, or not only, because of the interdependency between law and hysterical violence, but because of the way in which colonialism has introduced a traumatic kernel, or aporia, into those Antilleans already at war with themselves … what is it about colonial authority that allows it to generate forms of inner unreason at the level of agency rather than Kant’s inner freedom of moral law? What is it about the autonomous imposition of duty in a

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racially unjust society that turns the black subject into a peculiarly abject, masochistic, obscenity? (Marriott 2000, 89) —David Marriott, On Black Men

I. Introduction The previous two chapters focused on two aspects of the structure of black ethical life, namely extra-ordinary vulnerability and the black home, the political and the social. These two aspects help frame the argument of this chapter, where the ethical experience of black people in America is best described through a non-intuitive formulation of Jacques Derrida’s concept of unconditional im-possible hospitality, a ‘black hospitality’. In Chap. 2 I described the nature in which black people, under the structures of a general economy of white supremacy, are constituted by an extra-­ ordinary vulnerability, which is fundamentally beyond the traditional scope of the vulnerability of the subject as articulated in theorists like Judith Butler. In the third chapter, I argued, despite and in light of this extra-ordinary vulnerability, there remains a black sociality articulated through a fugitive spacing and temporalizing known as the black home. The black home is the trace left behind by black social life and the condition for a black sense of self that is not merely in contrast to the traditional subject’s political ontology, but is before and beyond the concept of the subject all together. With ‘extra-ordinary’ vulnerability and the ‘black home’ the intentions were to begin an outline of black ethical life that was of course accurate, but that would also set the scene for a robust picture of black ethical life as an impossible unconditional hospitality. This picture, unfortunately, is not very difficult to imagine to be honest. We are given ample examples: the extra-legal extermination of black life (Tamir, Walter, Renisha, Trayvon …), the collective processing and mourning (Ferguson, Baltimore, Everywhere), and an impossible unconditional hospitality (Eric, Sandra, Charleston). This chapter outlines an area of black thought that often gets underappreciated or even unrecognized considering the profound and conspicuous effect that black political subordination has on everyday life. The political agency of black people, or lack thereof, remains an indispensable area of study, of course; however, there is also a place to think again of how black people, under this subordination, are ethically interpellated. We know that many of the most influential black thinkers of the past 30 years have recognized the limits of thinking the ethical when it comes

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to black experience, specifically in as much as black people have been reduced to objects. However, this chapter contends that there is still room to ask, “What is the ethical life of black people in an antiblack world?” Eschewing the tradition of moral philosophy that focuses on specific duties and moral attitudes, this chapter describes how black people are orientated ethically in response to the outside world. In order to do so, Jacques Derrida’s response ethics as impossible hospitality offered the best framework to work within. The turn to Derrida after these previous two chapters may seem awkward, if not foolhardy. Moreover, claiming that the foundation of black ethical life requires unconditional hospitality seems dangerous. To answer this latter concern first, the experience of unconditional hospitality does not imply by any means that black people are asking for or beckoning their own oppression or subjection. Black people do not greet and welcome their subjugation with open arms or with a smile and an open door. Nor is unconditional hospitality what we find in a black theology, like that of James Cone, where one would most likely first look. James Cone argues, when discussing agape and the way to interpret the second commandment to ‘love thy neighbor’ after recognizing the love, and thus worth, one receives as a child of God, “To love the white man means that the blackman confronts him as a Thou without any intentions of giving ground by becoming an It” (Cone 1997, 60; author’s emphasis). Instead, as the previous chapters help set up, black hospitality follows in the wake of blackness and recognizing that the vulnerable position—the ‘It’ in Cone’s terms—is the means for revelation (structurally) before confrontation. The hospitable host, while vulnerable, is not powerless in the way that Cone would suggest and that he would like to reject in his understanding of Christian love. Instead, the host, by the very means of her vulnerability, her it-hood or ‘thingness’—which is also the condition of her porous and impossible structure within the black home—exhibits a power from the other within, that is, black sociality, to welcome the stranger to their condition and their possibility. This welcome may take many forms, including violent uprising, but as opposed to Cone, who argues said violence is “the black man’s attempt to say Yes to his being defined by God in a world that would make his being into nonbeing” (Cone 1997, 63), black hospitality’s ‘Yes’ is an affirmation of the paraontological, the consent to not be a single being as Glissant and Moten may say, in a world that does indeed embrace a kind of interplay of being and non-being. This is precisely why Derrida proves to be so helpful. From his very first published works

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Derrida has been a thinker of the margins, the excluded, the exorbitant, the aporetic, and in his thinking of hospitality, in certain ways, we will see these characteristics shine through and illuminate the black home as structured by unconditional hospitality and the response of the other within, as opposed to seeing this hospitality as willfully advocating black people’s subjugated position or as confrontation through negation by advocating for a ‘thou’ for ‘thou’ moral philosophy. Derrida develops his conception of unconditional hospitality through a reading of Emmanuel Levinas in a thoughtful and thought-provoking memorial text Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas. There Derrida re-­conceptualizes Levinas’ ethics, which he says in passing always reminded him of a sort of hospitality. Derrida adopts this term indirectly, but in doing so introduces a new ethical lexicon and proposes an aporetic structure common to his other reflections on politics and ethics.1 There are many details and layers that Derrida explores when discussing hospitality in a number of different texts and interviews; however, the primary aporetic structure that leads to the ‘impossible’ follows from the fact that the constitutive conditions of enacting hospitality, of being a hospitable host through welcoming the other—a welcoming can be in the form of acknowledgment or greeting— necessarily undermines this fundamental principle which demands unconditional openness to the other. This is to say, the possibility of being hospitable in any way, of being the best host, of satisfying the fundamental principles guiding ethical behavior, cannot take place because all nominal, metaphorical, or traditional norms of hospitality violate the ultimate condition, which is complete openness. To introduce language, communication, or acknowledgment introduces a condition upon welcoming the guest; for example, they understand your language or gesture, and therefore violates the unconditional welcoming. The possibility of hospitality, the response of the host which extends hospitality to the other, is in fact conditioned by it being impossible to satisfy its demands: this is the aporia. Now, while Derrida seems to imply at times that unconditional hospitality as the structure of ethics applies to any and all ethical relations of host and other, this chapter insists that it is particularly fruitful for understanding the experience of black people in an antiblack context. As the subjects of a long history of racial discrimination, violence, and terror, black people have occupied a particularly extreme position as ethical agents, specifically, insomuch as they have and continue to be subject to unimaginable psychological and physical vulnerability. In Derrida’s unconditional hospitality we come across a structure that can account for an

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ethical life rooted not only in (1) an extreme vulnerability similar to the positionality of black people, but his hospitality features two other qualities that shed light upon the dark reality of black ethical life: (2) the always already transgressive act in unconditional hospitality, which, at once, describes the aporetic structure and experience of impossibility described above, also describes the aporetic experience that follows from the pathologization, that is, criminality and fugitivity, of blackness discussed above; (3) the initial gesture of hospitality that does not extend from the self-­ same host, but from the other within is, at once, crucial to a Derridian criticism of the traditional autonomous subject, but also concerns how black selfhood as black sociality invokes an otherness within that is ever persistent and resistive in its reduction. These three aspects highlight the ways in which the antiblack political order has come to structure black ethical life, whereby the white supremacist political ontology interpellates an excessively vulnerable black person, who is always already a criminal, but also never self-same, since that criminality follows not just from without by racist imposition but from within as a constitutive characteristic of the fugitivity of blackness and black sociality against the conscripts of lawfulness or boundaries. Black hospitality drapes Derrida’s unconditional hospitality in an unexpected shadow by taking into account how the very real suffering of black people under white supremacy not only anoints black ethical life as ethical experience par excellence, but also brings to light and to life in another way the aporetic features of a metaphysics particular to the West and its project of purity. This last contention—that the project of purity and western metaphysics has foundations in black suffering, or in the ‘the problem of Negro’— will be the launching pad for this chapter and provide the argument for black positionality as the black host. The blackening of Derrida’s hospitality will begin with Nahum Chandler’s X: The Problem of the Negro as a Problem of Thought, where he reads W. E. B. Du Bois as exposing an aporetic conceptualization and experience for black people that highlights not only the failure of the project of white purity that was at the center of defining the human from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, but also how this failure can expose the limits of ontology altogether. It was Chandler whom Moten attributed the idea of paraontology that helped frame his reading of blackness and black sociality as fugitive and, therefore, this pivot to Chandler is simultaneously a step forward in the argument of this book, while also a step back to further explore the stakes of

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blackness as deployed by Moten.2 Chandler as much as Moten helps to reconfigure the positionality of black people’s experience as an indispensable aporetic signifier for modernity. Chandler’s conception of ‘the Negro’ is the first step in articulating the non-intuitive architecture of black hospitality which places the black person in the position of the host as opposed to the position of the guest, that is, ‘the Other’. In the history of discourses produced from the perspective of marginalized groups, it is commonplace, maybe even natural, to consider their experience and positionality from the outside looking in, as the ‘Other’ to the ruling sovereign subject—typically white, male, cisgender, heterosexual, and so on. It would, therefore, be intuitive when reflecting upon Derrida’s unconditional hospitality to analyze the experience of black people from the perspective of the guest who asks for hospitality and is not afforded it because of the oppressive and exclusionary power of antiblackness—and this intuition is supported by Derrida, who more than once situates the demand for welcoming the guest, explicitly and implicitly, in terms of the politics of the border and the excluded immigrant.3 However, when we consider the positionality of blackness and black people in western thought proposed by Chandler, it would now not only be intuitive, but strategic, to consider them from the paraontological aporetic position of the host. That is if you accept Chandler’s argument for the re-­positioning of the Negro at the aporetic center of western thought and strategic if you accept the argument of the disorienting capacity of blackness and black social life despite dispossession in civil society and political ontology. This would mean, following Wilderson, ethics, in fact, is best conceptualized and most effectively understood from the position of blackness and the unethical from antiblackness (Wilderson 2010, 49). Therefore, this chapter will begin with Chandler and his arguments for placing blackness, or the Negro problem, as a central and indispensable figure in the metaphysics of western thought. From Chandler there will be a move to an in-depth and thorough analysis of Derrida’s conception of hospitality and translate it into the perspective of black ethical life as black hospitality. This chapter will provide an account of the lexicon, structure, and central issues that arise through Derrida’s many discussions of hospitality, while also arguing for interpreting these qualities from the perspective of black people and blackness. Crucial to this analysis will be the three qualities described above that darken, or better yet, blacken Derrida’s conception of hospitality.

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II. The Negro as Problem for Thought: Aporetic Blackness The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line. What exactly W. E. B. Du Bois might have meant by this statement/solicitation from Souls of Black Folks has garnered reflection and reconsideration ever since it was written. A most ambitious and radical interpretation comes from Nahum Chandler in X: The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Thought. As the title suggests, Chandler takes Dubois’ original provocation that seems to appeal to the level of a social and moral issue to the level of thought in general, and western thought in particular. In convincing manner, Chandler reads the figure of the Negro, the black person, in Du Bois’ work in a non-intuitive light, where what appear to be ontic descriptions of the black person and their experience reveals the unstable foundations of ontology altogether. Or as he says in the “Anachrusis” of the text, what takes place in Du Bois thought is a “making tremble of the logic of being” (Chandler 2014, 9). To shed some light on this oblique description of Chandler’s project, it is clear from the epigraph to the first chapter that his reading of Du Bois owes credit to, or at least was inspired by, Jacques Derrida and the deconstructive project. As we know, one of the hallmark deconstructive approaches in the early writings of Derrida consists of rethinking, reconsidering, rereading, and, consequently, deconstructing, the rigid hierarchal binary oppositions that tend to lurk under the surface and orientate the reasoning for the legitimacy, accuracy, and worthiness of a proposed philosophical position. For the epigraph, Chandler chooses a passage from the Positions interview where Derrida discusses this phenomenon. Derrida describes how deconstruction recognizes the specious foundation of a proposed hierarchical opposition, and instead of simply neutralizing the opposition of the two terms, equalizing their apparent worth or significance and, therefore, depoliticizing the opposition, deconstruction at first flips the hierarchy to show the speciousness of putting the first term over the other, and then this leads to the next move that is an exposition of the difficulty of distinguishing the two terms to begin with. These moves are all in the service of unveiling the constitutive spacing of difference, that is, the working of différance. Chandler will employ this technique to the problem of the Negro and its ‘opposition’ to whiteness. This is not a destruction of the hierarchy  per se, but a deconstruction of the

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dichotomy’s original hierarchical rigidity by identifying the way the terms move closer and further away without a dialectical resolution. In the reversal of any hierarchy a doubling takes place that unveils a constitutive spacing. Let’s take, for example, the classic dichotomy of good over evil. Suppose then it is always good to love thy neighbor and evil to kill the innocent. Well one may reason that the best, most assured, way to ensure the love of one’s neighbor would be to kill every other person, including oneself, because of the potential threat others pose to one’s neighbor. Therefore, what is first proposed as evil can be recognize as what is really the good, insomuch as it secures the original proposition of what is good, namely, to love thy neighbor by securing the neighbor from potential hate. With this realization, the evil of ‘good over evil’ is replaced by a newly emergent ‘evil’ of ‘evil over good’. In this reversal, however, deconstruction calls attention to and allows for the questioning of the possibility of a hierarchy of good over evil that would depend on a univocal, singular understanding of the subordinate position of evil that the initial proposition offers. It is impossible to settle on an understanding of evil that does not oscillate between its initial subordinate position that forbids killing and its secondary superior position that actually demands it. ‘Evil’ is both conceptions and neither at the same time. The movement of deconstruction is not simply a matter of arguing that evil has been a strawman in an unjustified hierarchical order where what was once derided under the name of evil finally gets its due respect and triumphantly stands over a subjective conception of the  good. This, of course, only leads to another unsubstantiated hierarchy; instead, Derrida calls attention to how a concept like evil in this example can be mobilized in such a way as to expose the impossible distinction, or interval, between the evil that is both the same and different in its two positions of the hierarchy. This doubling and aporia, which allows evil, in this example, ‘to be’ both never quite itself and never its other, orientates Chandler’s reading of Du Bois and the ‘Negro problem’ in this chapter. The title of the first chapter of Chandler’s book in its entirety is “Of Exorbitance: The Problem of the Negro as a Problem of Thought.” The aporetic structure described above in the example using evil is a phenomenon that Chandler will continually trace in this chapter through a reading of Du Bois; opening the hierarchical dichotomies proposed and

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examined in his book to an exorbitance and excess beyond the oppositions of white and black, human and Negro. Exorbitance and excess, of course, were crucial to the description of the black home, as we saw in Moten, but also in Saidiya Hartman, who has a penchant to describe the darkest and most difficult black situations as also beyond traditional boundaries, transgressive of laws that were juridical and normative, and affectively overwhelming. Are not excess and exorbitance—of ontology or sociality and violence—akin to the doubling of evil described above? Is not blackness the exorbitant, ‘extra-evil’, constitutive component of modern socio-­ politico-­ethico life? Before an exploration of exorbitance, the chapter, begins with the notion of problematization; specifically, how beginning in the sixteenth century the problematization of existence, or what qualifies as ‘human’ in western thought, ran parallel to the emergence of slavery. In response to the emergence of the questioning of the human and the establishment of slavery, a discourse of thought Chandler identifies as Africanist proposes a challenge to the exclusion of black people from humanity and subjectivity. This assertion is indeed crucial in as much as the possibility of black people identifying themselves in the subject position posits “a problem to the problematization of their own itinerary of existence” which entail “enacted or enabled the elaboration of a fundamental questioning of the possible character and order of social and historical being in general” (Chandler 2014, 13).4 In other words, the possibility of Africanists to assert their own existence as subjects or humans disrupts the socio-historical discourse of western thought that asserted existence and being belonged only to white or European identity. With this move, we feel the first tremblings of being. Now Chandler’s next move in his exploration of the disruptive force of ‘the Negro’ takes aim at contemporary writers on black identity; specifically, how they have come to disparage the original Africanist intervention, accusing these older positions of being caught in an untenable essentialist position on identity. Their position is that identities are not homogeneous singular essences, etched in stone clearly and distinctly, but rather are heterogeneous amalgamations of different qualities. This assertion by the contemporary critics of the early Africanists amounts to an attempt at reversing the binary by highlighting the heterogeneity of blackness and, unwittingly, establishing their own essence. This is precisely what Derrida forewarns us against in the selected passage from Positions of Chandler’s epigraph. Chandler does not fall for the inverted argument and explains of the contemporary Africanist position:

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[I]t naively implies that a nonessentialist discourse or position can be produced. As such, it presupposes an oppositional theoretical architecture at its core, in the supposed and self-serving distinction between a discourse or position that does not operate on the basis of an essence and those that do. It thus all the more emphatically presupposes a simple essence as the ground of its discourse, in both conceptual and practical, that is, political terms. (Chandler 2014, 14; my emphasis)

The non-essentialist Africanist position attempts to neutralize the hierarchy of existence polarized in the distinction of the  European from the Negro by essentializing the opposition between the heterogeneous black with the homogeneous white. In an attempt to undermine a discourse on the essence of blackness, this form of critique only reinscribes the essentialist distinctions; we get an essential heterogeneous blackness that feigns an opposition to homogeneity. This, Chandler recognizes, requires a ‘political’ turn, and it is precisely the political ontology of afro-pessimism that this project aims to disrupt and that mimes this essentialist movement. The political, that is, the ‘friend/enemy distinction’, finds itself in these oppositions because it reduces its conceptual framework to a Manichean dichotomy in the hopes of a political recognition through self-identity— even if this recognition takes place through antagonistic negation as is the case of afropessimism. In reality, the discourse of the Negro never emerges on a stable ground, but rather emerges within what Chandler articulates using an aural metaphor: a ‘cacophony’ surrounding the question of identity and the ability of identification in general (Chandler 2014, 14). He warns us, just as Derrida has numerous times, that when attempting to question the oppositional qualities of a binary one cannot simply deny the reality of the disfavored half of the binary, saying simply that blackness, or ‘that’ blackness, does not exist only magnifies the conceptual field in which it has emerged as legitimately articulating the differentiation at stake. It legitimizes the ossification of blackness through its attempted negation. To say that blackness is not this specific thing buttresses a discourse that says Negros are some-thing—some object let us say—and the conceptual groundwork of distinguishing the Negro from the other remains intact on grounds of its affirmation through negation. At this point, the choice to engage Chandler before turning to the question/problem of hospitality should be clearer. The aporetic positionality of the host will refract throughout the cacophonous emergence of the discourse on the Negro, where the instability of self and other, European

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and black, host and guest reverberate within the general economy of the white supremacist political order but throughout constitutive fugitive blackness. The paraontological black sociality that emerges through the porous black home is the host of black ethical life. Nevertheless, continuing with Chandler’s argument, he comes to crystalize the problem of the Negro in its more radical disruptive form from within the project of purity and this will crystalize the argument for a black host. The discourse of the Negro developed in a more defined form by the end of the eighteenth century going into the nineteenth century (Chandler 2014, 21).5 There are a series of questions that outline this discourse: the public questions that directed this discourse were (1) whether black people were human and how should they be judged when comparing them to other humans (intellect, body, etc.), and (2) whether black people’s relation to humans are of a fundamental or relative difference. Behind these is the foremost question: ‘what is human’ (Chandler 2014, 21)? One may ask are Negroes inferior due to society or nature and, if so, in either case, what should be done if they are emancipated? A corollary question would ask the status of the white European American juxtaposed to black people, which is never quite articulated formally, but comes to light bleakly via the laws against miscegenation. The foremost question, however, is also an ontological one, ‘what is a human?’ is also ‘how does one determine a being?’ The distinction of beings must be absolute from this perspective to create the hierarchy desired, that is to say, the terms must be complete and oppositional. This presumes the possibility of an oppositional distinction in thought and also the social practice of realizing this distinction through practices of subordination and oppression (Chandler 2014, 22). When it comes to the distinctions of being predicated on race, white is the pure and coherent term, the norm which helps determine social identities through power, authority and law and “according to these premises, even if by multitudinous and contradictory movements of logic, even if considered human, the Negro is produced as an exorbitance of thought: an instance outside of all forms of being that truly matter” (Chandler 2014, 23). The Negro can be named and identified by reason, but remains outside of reason. These questions and the commitments that allow the discourse of white purity to gain traction form the discourse of the Negro. Again, we see this logic and explication within the afropessimist political ontology, but their meditation on exorbitance does not go far enough. According to Wilderson and Sexton and their reading of Fanon, black people are denied existential being, they are ‘non-being’, they are denied

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humanity as the pursuit of projects and the white supremacist general economy places the practices of this denial outside of reason. However, according to Chandler, ‘the Negro’ need not be affirmed as existing; instead, the affirmation of whiteness marks the Negro’s exorbitance and liminal character. Moreover, one need not name a foundation for this postulation, because it is mobilized through a presumption of a solid foundation and a telos toward the metaphysical opposition of the purest of white as the highest term and the Negro structurally below and metaphysically outside. However, the outside—and this is crucial—is not a simple outside, an oppositional outside, for Chandler or Moten; instead, blackness challenges the distinction of inside and outside, and this marks the ‘truest’ sense of exorbitance. This takes us finally to Du Bois, whose work is exemplary at the level of irrupting the white purity discourse, since it addresses so many different figures of the Negro. I include these arguments by Chandler, even though we already have a sense of the problem of the Negro, because these non-­ intuitive reflections on the seemingly all too familiar Du Bois help dispose us to the unfamiliar construction of black hospitality while displaying the truly remarkable dynamism of blackness found  in Chandler’s reading. Now, according to Chandler, Du Bois combines the micrological understanding of the American Negro as a type of knowledge without an essence and the macrological understanding of Africanist studies as infiltrating the development of all modern systems (Chandler 2014, 31). In both of these registers, Du Bois will propose a differential positioning through the figure of the double upon which the discourse of the Negro can be elaborated, and interventions can be made. Chandler calls the reader’s attention to one of the first double gestures in Du Bois’ oeuvre which is found in the conceptual organization of “The Conservation of Races.” In this essay, Du Bois shows how the concept of race is confounded with that of the Negro. The Negro, while thought of as emerging historically by Du Bois, nevertheless is articulated as an ideal that will never be truly realized in the future (Chandler 2014, 33). Du Bois strategically hesitates to affirm this ideal, since race is always articulated in terms of mixtures, malleability, and historically specific properties (Chandler 2014, 33). At work in this logic of conservation is the necessary affirmation of the Negro in past and present, by postulating an apparent ideal to come. Therefore, while critical of the concept of race, Du Bois nevertheless must use it to elaborate the historicity he is interested in. This

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leads to a specific aporia that pertains to his articulating and founding a discourse he is attempting to question. Chandler explains, “The conundrum is simply the logical aporia that requires that he speak as if that which he wishes to bring under one coherent analytical frame already exists as such an epistemological (or reflective) entity” (Chandler 2014, 34). In other words, Du Bois must at the same time posit and discuss the concept of race, even though his ultimate goal is to explain how such a concept does not and cannot exist in itself; that is, race is always contingent on historical articulations and different mixtures of identity, and therefore is always to come. Thus, through a development of the discourse of the Negro an incommensurable doubling of the Negro occurs, where one needs to posit an initial concept of the Negro in order to catalyze an argument that explains the Negro never was and never will be precisely because of the aforementioned contingencies. These different conceptions of the Negro do not describe the fungibility of the object of blackness exclusively as commodity or conduit as we found in Wilderson or Hartman’s description of the failures of empathy, but instead they mark the fugitivity of blackness and black social life as black people cannot be simply  ossified and objectified for specific ends because they are never quite being or non-being. They are a specter of those that never were quite black, those who are not black enough, and those who will never be black, but are nevertheless circumscribed by political ontology as ‘black’. This deconstructive spectrality of the Negro, which in fact stems from blackness and not the black person, is really a fugitivity at the very core of the question of being, but also of western thinking, and western reality. In other words, black people are indeed the host of western thought not from the outside, but from illuminating the interplay of this inside and outside as they are both being and yet never actually being because of their relation to blackness. This is the fundamental conundrum of thought in general. In addition to this first gesture of lending credit6 to a concept to illuminate the deconstruction of that very concepts coherence there is a second gesture: Du Bois consistently dramatizes the character of the lives of Negros in terms of both their experience and their place in social systems so that their excessiveness to the racial ontology is thematic and also to provoke and solicit, as opposed to found definitively, racial distinctions (Chandler 2014, 34).7 This dramatization of the excessiveness of black life comes to an apex most memorably in the opening chapter of Souls  (as cited by Chandler):

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The Negro is … born with a veil, and gifted with a second sight in this American world—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness … It is a peculiar sensation, this double consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity … One ever feels his twoness—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. (Chandler 2014, 36)

While tragic, Du Bois recognizes that this doubleness was also a good, a gift; that gift which a good host offers their guest.8 The second sight is a gift of another possible cosmology. However, what we also read in this passage traces the splitting of ‘the Negro’, that is, the failure of a ‘true self-­ consciousness’, the battle of a home that remains hostile to your very inhabitation, a self that is never quite one’s own, that refuses, or rather, eschews ownership. A self that is always beside oneself because of the unwelcoming experience of the denial of the myth of an autonomous self. Again, we see how the instability—or we should say impossibility—of the Negro as a being, and thus its status as a ‘problem of thought’, does not begin and end with a psychological dissolution and its political incapacity. The ontological impossibility of the Negro that Chandler identifies in his reading of Du Bois runs deeper and logically precedes political incapacity in the way described by Wilderson. The doubling of the Negro that configures its positionality as both/and, neither/nor an American or a Negro describes the fugitive constitutive movement that is Moten’s conception of blackness, the possibility of black social life, and the host that traverses, although does not quite inhabit, the black home. This movement logically precedes the political ontology of white supremacy, even as its ontic consequent; this movement is the dark abyss out of which both any conception of an object and of a subject could emerge. The exorbitant movement initiated by the Negro’s experience of displaced fugitivity is the blackness that black people attend to as the exorbitant host of the exorbitant black home. In other words, it is the figure of Negro that has proximity to this movement insomuch as its ontic positionality is determined ontologically by objectification and displacement. These conditions lend to black people feeling firsthand the reverberations of the impossible grounds upon which their non-specific identity—or paraontological being in general— lay. It is for that reason and in this disposition that black people are

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afforded the position of host and the gift of ‘second sight’. Black people see, feel, and hear the hypocrisy of their oppression and the fallaciousness of racial hierarchy precisely in as much they host this undecidable impossible position of ‘being’ both/and, neither/nor an American and a Negro—an impossible position for all thought and being, but unveiled in discriminatory and objectifying practices, discourses, and libidinal explosions. The constitutive displacement of the Negro, thus, entails a critical distancing, a ‘freedom and responsibility’, that emanates from its very own extra-ordinary vulnerability in that black people come to recognize the limits of their own ‘subjectivization’—and/or/as objectification—through the undecidable threshold of its violent inclusion and exclusion into and from white civil society and western thought (Chandler 2014, 37). The undecidable status of the Negro as ‘both/and’, as well as, ‘neither/nor’ simply black and American (or ‘Western’) that Du Bois provides us in Souls clarifies the primary objective of this section, namely, illuminating the positioning of black experience in the non-intuitive position of the hospitable host. Chandler’s reading of Du Bois and the Negro question lends itself to this central role in as much as it is this figure of the Negro— and not the fantastic white, autonomous, and sovereign male—that is crucial to revealing the constitutive aporetic underbelly of western thought. Specifically, how the question of being and thought are wrapped up in the question of the Negro. Possibility in general begins with aporia for Derrida, and, therefore, that’s another angle of the same argument for how the aporetic structure of blackness would figure black people as that of the host in configuring the schema of the im-possibility of an ethics of unconditional hospitality and lead to an understanding of black hospitality as ethics par-excellence.

III. Derrida, Hospitality, Blackness Derrida’s concept of hospitality is developed initially through an engagement with Emmanuel Levinas. In the memorium “Adieu” Derrida first speaks of hospitality— in addition to friendship, grace, and the gift—to describe the generosity of Levinas’ character generally and as orientating his philosophical reflections specifically in light of, and perhaps despite of, an infinite and ever-present distance from the other that beckons responsibility and care. However, it is only in the text “A Word of Welcome” which Derrida delivered a year after “Adieu”—which accompanies the

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original address in a collection titled Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas—that he gives his first large outline of his own specific conceptualization of an unconditional hospitality. Derrida admits that the term hospitality rarely appears in Levinas’ seminal text Totality and Infinity, where the latter argues ethics, not ontology, to be first philosophy (Derrida 1999a, 21). However, despite its infrequency in Levinas, hospitality will not only serve as the central theme of Derrida’s reading of the former in Adieu, but also, ultimately be the primary signifier for the structure of ethics for the latter and himself. Beginning with a general outline of how one could conceive of hospitality functioning in an ethical framework there are two (seemingly) distinct participants: the host and the guest. Now, unconditional hospitality as such is not a virtue that either participant obtains or cultivates as one may see in Aristotle and his contemporary proponents, or one specific law or rule of ethics, as one may find in Kant’s moral philosophy and some consequentialist theories.9 Unconditional hospitality for Derrida refers to ethics itself, its very possibility, and it demands that the host be hospitable or welcoming to the guest (Derrida 1999a, 4). At first blush, the host is fundamentally passive and responsible to yield all power to the infinitely other by extending an unconditional welcome (Derrida and Dufourmantelle 2000, 25). However, the unconditional nature of Derrida’s hospitality has a very unique quality in his account of ethicality and is what eventually leads to aporia. By unconditional he wants to distinguish his interpretation from a ‘traditional hospitality’ that entails certain precepts and qualifications in order for hospitality to take place, specifically the demand that the guest show gratitude through reciprocation. In an interview, “Hospitality, Justice and Responsibility,” Derrida analogizes traditional hospitality with gift-giving in as much both practices fall into a cyclical economy where one gives with the expectation of receiving something in return. At stake in a traditional economy of hospitality, where the host opens their home under the conditions or with the expectation that they will receive a gift, for example, a bottle of wine, is mastery: “The host remains the master in the house, the country, the nation, he controls the threshold, he controls the borders, and when he welcomes the guest he wants to keep the mastery” (Derrida 1999b, 69). For Derrida, this desire for mastery that takes place in the traditional economic model is precisely what needs to be

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resigned for a true, pure, and unconditional hospitality to take place. How could one be welcoming if they make demands or have expectations and conditions upon which that welcome and hospitality is extended? a. The Vulnerable Host Hospitality, therefore, must be completely open, true hospitality will be unconditional, demanding nothing of the other. The parameters by which Derrida recognizes unconditionality cannot be compromised to any degree, so much so he ponders in Of Hospitality, “We have to come to wonder whether absolute, hyperbolic, unconditional hospitality doesn’t consist in suspending language” (Derrida and Dufourmantelle 2000, 135). Even the extension of a hello to the guest, so the logic goes, would instigate an expectation of exchange with the other or presume something about the other, that is, their language, and that would jeopardize this openness and reify one’s mastery. “Does hospitality consist of interrogating the new arrival?” asks Derrida, “Does it begin with the question addressed to the newcomer: what is your name … or else does hospitality begin with the unquestioning welcome, in a double effacement, the effacement of the question and the name” (Derrida and Dufourmantelle 2000, 27, 29). No questioning, no name, the other is always welcomed. Therefore, even the oft-celebrated southern hospitality of the US would fail the standards of the unconditional, as one could imagine that under a welcoming coral from the southern sun, it’s at the very least expected that a level of decorum or deference will be returned. ‘Yes sir’ or ‘Thank you Ma’am’ fall into this economy of exchange, fall into the conditional. Well then, does Derrida truly believe one must open themselves to all or any other? In fact, he indeed does. In that same interview cited above he says: If, however, there is a pure hospitality … it should consist in this opening without horizon, without horizon of expectation, an opening to the newcomer whoever that may be. It may be terrible because the newcomer may be a good person, or may be the devil; but if you exclude the possibility that the newcomer is coming to destroy your house … there is no hospitality. (Derrida 1999b, 69)

The possibility of unconditional hospitality requires that one be open to anything and anyone. Philosophically what is at stake for Derrida is

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undermining the traditional attributes of sovereignty, mastery, or autonomy that are implied in the idea of the subject, in this case the ethical subject. In this structure, the host recognizes to what extent his or her identity and agency is from the start mediated by the other, and in this respect compromised, never fully one’s own, never to be owned. The vulnerability of the host under these parameters cannot go understated. The host risks his or her house, his or her life in the name of welcoming the other and for Derrida that risk is absolutely necessary. This would be driving a hard bargain to say the least and some have objected. Malek Moazzam-Doulat in his essay “Future Impossible: Carl Schmitt, Jacques Derrida, and the Problem of Political Messianism” asks “Can we never say no? Can we affirm an absolute openness to whatever is to come with so much danger, so much monstrosity behind us and on our horizon” (Moazzam-Doulat 2008, 5). For any person this would be a reasonable question. As host, must one really open themselves completely to the machinations of the Other? With these questions in mind, the outline of black hospitality begins to come into focus. There is an uncanny parallel between the seemingly hyperbolic description of vulnerability placed upon the host in Derrida’s politically and socially un-situated unconditional hospitality and the lived experience of material and libidinal vulnerability of black people under the conditions of antiblackness. Must black people open themselves completely to the dangerous other? Or do they always already do so? Recall Chandler offers a convincing argument for why one should consider ‘the Negro’, that is, the positionality of blackness, as a central figure of western metaphysics, as central to configuring the discourse on the human, and, thus, an appropriate candidate for the refigured position of the host. Within the realm of Derridian ethics the scope of this positionality of blackness finds its first concrete justification through the former’s description of the host’s extraordinary vulnerability, where the risk of hospitality for the other is constitutive to its unconditional status. For black people, the demands of an ethics of unconditional hospitality—an exposure to the world exacted upon the experience of a displaced or misplaced  and untimely host—are structured by antiblack racism (and also fugitive black sociality, but that will be later). In the second chapter of this project, in distinction from the rubric of vulnerability ethics described by Makenzie, Roger, and Dodds, black vulnerability is first described as both occurant and pathogenic, the former meaning a constant manifestation of vulnerability and the latter

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systematic. Antiblack racism and white supremacy have a deep-rooted history of oppression that affects the daily lives of black people in these two ways as we are constantly reminded by the surveillance and systematic incarceration of black bodies for example. However, also recall the overarching element of extra-ordinary vulnerability predicated on Jared Sexton’s contention that white supremacy exists as a general (or hyper) economy, an excessive infinite source of different specific machinations of antiblack affective and material aggression. The general economic formulation of white supremacy takes the occurant and pathogenic characteristics of vulnerability and exposes their source as a non-rational affective commitment to black political death through abjection, gratuitous violence, natal alienation, and dishonor. The extra-ordinary vulnerability imposed by white supremacy grounds the demands for an unconditional hospitality specifically for black people in a way that offers the first challenge to Derrida’s approach. The actual ethical life of black people exists under such extreme conditions that it fits seamlessly into the ethically and politically abstracted outline of Derrida’s unconditional hospitality. Referring back to the epigraph to this chapter, Jared Sexton in Amalgamation Schemes asserts: [I]t is astonishing that recoil is not the dominant posture, surprising, in other words, that Black history has been marked so prominently by a spirit of tremendous generosity, an ethics of inclusion, a willingness to connect across the color line—politically, culturally, or socially—on whatever terms of humanity are available. It is a truly amazing aspect of the historical record that Black people have managed to foster such catholic disposition in the face of unremitting domination, exploitation, and appropriation from friends and foes alike, though we must add immediately that any such ‘hospitality’ emerges not simply despite the circumstances but also because it is compelled by them, compulsory hospitality. (Sexton 2008, 149) [my emphasis]

Interestingly enough, this realization of his appears in the conclusion of his second chapter, a ‘quick aside’ as he finishes his thoughts on the practices of coercion and miscegenation. Nevertheless, it speaks volumes; offhandedly, he locates in this short passage the grounds for the unconditional ethics of black hospitality with shocking precision. The history of black generosity, particularly as an ethics of inclusion for all people to join in celebration and in pain—as found, for instance, in the

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politics of Dr. Martin Luther King—can be dumbfounding. However, it is imperative to note that what Sexton also identities as an “ethics of inclusion”—a ‘welcoming’—does not just concern a peculiar disposition of black people through history to be generous and inclusive, but is, in fact, also a ‘compulsory hospitality’. The ‘compulsory hospitality’ that black folk offer is not the result of, for example, a strategic stereotype to justify black exploitation materially. Rather, the compulsion of black openness, generosity, and, yes, an ethics of hospitality follows—at this moment and at this place where political ontology impedes upon ethicality—from the constitutive vulnerability imposed by antiblackness. The extra-ordinary vulnerability of black people places them in a position to bolster the responsibility of the host for an unconditional hospitality that has been imposed upon them. Insomuch as political racial hierarchies persist, black people take the form of fungible objects for libidinal and economic exploitation and as sentient responsive beings that are interpellated as offering themselves and inviting their exploitation. The white supremacist general economy continually uses different and evolving institutions and practices to situate black people in a subordinate, submissive role, to deem them objects and welcoming this role in relation to its other, or otherness, in general. In this sense, it is not difficult to see an openness in black behavior and ethical life that can be conceived of as being hospitable, and under the machinations of, antiblackness, conceiving of this hospitality as ‘compulsory’. Furthermore, the contention that the hospitality of the host may have compulsory component—in the sense that the host’s hospitality is a response to the other and the circumstances of this otherness—actually maps quite well onto Derrida’s proposed schema of unconditional hospitality. In this regard I have in mind the Derridian ‘yes, yes’ structure, or the always already affirmation of the other. In the “A Word of Welcome” from Adieu, Derrida writes: [S]ince [the welcoming of the other] opens itself to the infinity of the other, an infinity that, as other, in some sense precedes it, the welcoming of the other (objective genitive) will already be a response: the yes to the other will already be responding to the welcoming of the other (subjective genitive), to the yes of the other. This response is called for as soon as the infinite-always of the other is welcomed … this “as soon as” does not mark the moment or threshold of a beginning, of an arche, since infinity will already have been pre-­

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originarily welcomed. Welcomed in anarchy. This responsible response is surely a yes, but a yes to be preceded by the yes of the other. (Derrida 1999a, 23; my emphasis)

Here, Derrida explains that the ‘yes’ or the unconditional welcoming of the host offered to the other—the unconditional hospitality demanded by the parameters of a true hospitality—is, in fact, compelled not simply by the demands of an ethics of hospitality, but also is a response to the ‘preoriginary’ circumstances of otherness. This is to say, that the mortal and finite host, any ethical actor, is actually responding with their welcoming first and foremost, to the circumstances of the infinite openness of otherness that necessarily precedes it. Hospitality, therefore, does not take place out of the blue; instead, it must be understood as circumscribed by an initial ‘otherness’, which the host may, or may not, recognize, is the ‘preoriginary’ grounds for its welcoming. One cannot pre or post-judge the other who comes knocking at the door as Moazzam-Doulat suggests, rather the host is in fact a response because the first ‘yes’ is always already there. Whether you recognize a bear, a Nazi, or a grandma on the other side, there is no way of telling for sure their real intentions or identity for one, but more importantly their otherness extends far beyond the way they may present themselves as they extend into the infinity of the other. This is a good place to mention that we need to realize that the guest of the black host is not necessarily a white person. It is absolutely undeniable that different machinations of antiblackness—whether actions performed from perceived personal sentiments or as conduits of an institution—can and will be carried out by any person of any color, not only in the context of Wilderson’s ‘junior members’ but, for an easy example, think of black police officers. Therefore, it is important to keep in mind that the pre-original otherness that I am arguing can stand in for antiblackness is truly infinite, that is, without limit, in its manifestations and guises. Even though a black person’s car window may be transparent and when a black officer approaches this black host they may be inclined to be more at ease; at the end of the day, as Derrida suggests, you can never know if the guest may come and wreck the place, may be a monster. For Derrida, the ‘pre-orginary’ welcoming accounts for the host’s always already status as situated in a world with unlimited and unknowable circumstances, a historical situatedness; for the black host of black hospitality in the politically situated circumstances of black people, the infinite other—or what may be better described as ‘otherness’ considering its

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infinite quality—that makes possible its unconditional hospitality is none other than the infinite general economy of white supremacy. Its non-­ rational exorbitant logic precedes the welcoming extended by the black host, with a welcoming of its own. Of course, something that cannot be ignored, which is implied by resituating the structure of Derridian unconditional hospitality in a framework that explains the experience of black people, is that this ascribes a pre-originary ‘welcoming’ [yes] offered by this otherness that is the general economy of white supremacy and a responding ‘welcoming’ [yes] made by the black host. Although white supremacy seems the furthest from anything like a welcoming of black people, we need to remember Wilderson’s contention that white civil society, and the human/subject capacity that it allows for, achieves any semblance of its coherence and its possibility from black subjection. The political death of black people provides the libidinal and material economic foundation upon which antiblackness can expend its energies and manifest in its different forms and institutions. In this sense, it is hard to imagine the pre-original ‘yes’ of white supremacy as anything other than a welcoming of black people! Their objectification is welcomed as one always already welcomes the rain to water their garden, even if in the end the circumstances of this infinite otherness, the arid terrain of white supremacy, has at its core nothing other than hostility. As for the second yes, or the ‘welcoming’ of the black host in response to the first yes, this is not a ‘positive’ or ‘encouraging’ affirmation to one’s own subjection. Rather it is an affirmation that the black host recognizes, in some sense or another, that it is not merely compelled by the circumstances of white supremacy that circumscribes it politically, but instead emerges from the fugitive black social beyond that constitutes it. We will return to this ‘in some sense’ later, but at this point recognize at least this: that while perhaps there are some circumstances where we would say that a person willfully accepted their demise, in the end, black people always recognizes the world of subjection that it is fleeing, even with a demise that may not bring political redress or hope, but may point to new cosmological dimensions. In the end, when Derrida writes of hospitality in his wide sweeping appeals to the host as always desiring to be “master of the household, master of the city, or master of the nation, the language, or the state, places from which one bids the other welcome” (Derrida 2006, 248) he overlooks the experience of black people who carry the burden of hosting  because of their proximity to blackness. Black hospitality cannot be

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interchanged with the experience of just any host. The extremes of their extra-ordinary vulnerability, rooted in white supremacy and antiblack racism, impose a ‘compulsory hospitality’ that not only brings to life Derrida’s opaque unconditional hospitality, but also highlights the stakes of a response ethics grounded in an impossible welcoming or gratitude. b. The Impossibility of Black Hospitality or Transgression at the Threshold The use of impossible is deliberate as it is the next component to address in Derrida’s account of unconditional hospitality. From as early as Speech and Phenomena, Derrida has identified an ‘im-possible’ structure where the possibility of certain concepts actually follows from their impossibility, which is to say, for example, the possibility of communicating with another person is contingent on the impossibility of any perfect complete indisputable transference of information, that is, pure communication. This structure appears again memorably in his later works that reflect on topics such as gift-giving, democracy, forgiveness, and, of course, hospitality. When the requirement of the host to be unconditionally open in welcoming the other is first introduced—an openness that forbids even something as seemingly harmless as a hello—this undoubtedly seems like an impossible task. However, usually this impossibility is taken as an issue of perfectibility, as if the task while impossible, can be approximated. In On Hospitality Derrida, however, is clear, that it is not an issue of approximation, as when Kant employs regulative ideas. Derrida writes, “pure unconditionality appears inaccessible, and inaccessible not only as a regulatory idea, an Idea in the Kantian sense and infinitely removed, always inadequately approached, but inaccessible for the structural reasons, ‘barred’ by the internal contradictions” (Derrida and Dufourmantelle 2000, 169). Instead of an issue or question of perfectibility, the structure of the ‘im-possible’ makes it so the project of unconditional hospitality, its possibility, undermines the non-conditional pre-requisite. This is why Derrida often accompanies his explication of unconditional hospitality with another type of conditional, that is, the insurance claim: ‘if such a thing exists.’ Derrida describes the impossibility structure in Of Hospitality as such: [I]t is as though the laws (plural) of hospitality, in marking limits, powers, rights and duties, consisted in challenging and transgressing the law of hos-

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pitality, the one that would command the ‘new arrival’ be offered unconditional welcome … the law [of unconditional hospitality] is above the laws. But even while keeping itself above the laws of hospitality, the unconditional law of hospitality needs the laws, it requires them. This demand is constitutive. It wouldn’t be effectively unconditional, the law, if it didn’t have to become effective, concrete, determined, if that were not its being as having-­ to-­be …. In order to be what it is, the law thus needs the laws. (Derrida and Dufourmantelle 2000, 75–79)

Structurally the ‘aporia’, or the impasse, that is in the structure of hospitality that Derrida articulates here exists because a hospitality, that is, if it is to be true and not conditioned by rules, regulations, and obligations, must be unconditional hospitality, that is, the host must look beyond “marking limits, powers, rights, and duties.” Nevertheless, Derrida argues the unconditional law of hospitality, demands also that hospitality take place in the world, that the finite host/master identify themselves as such and actually extend welcoming, “effectively, concretely, and determinately” through the laws of hospitality. In other words, unconditional hospitality constitutively demands its own defeat, or the possibility of any hospitality always already undermines the ultimate law that says the host shall not regulate, presuppose, or demand anything from the guest. Not only is it inevitable that the host acknowledges the guest, but it is also necessary. The law is not merely regulative, but as an ethic, must be done now, in real time and in a real place. Consequently, hospitality begins at its collapse, with a hello, a handshake, a ‘come in, please’; or, to use Derrida’s own nomenclature, hospitality begins with a transgression; it is wedded to its own hostility—hence the neologism of the title of Derrida’s essay cited above, “Hostipitality.” Transgression as a concept plays an important role in the group of European thinkers of difference that Derrida belongs to, although he, himself, in the 1980’s dismissed the relevance or potency of the term.10 Nevertheless, in considering the position of black people at the threshold of the black home in black ethical life, transgression still has currency. Transgression occurs in black hospitality when the black host, constituted by black sociality in the black home, responds, in any way to the guest, or the other, who is always already saturated or constituted by the political parameters of antiblackness. The black host transgresses the political parameters, that is, the law, which is not constituted or restricted to formal juridical statutes because, (1) as extra-ordinarily vulnerable, any action, including no action, will always be interpreted as aggression or

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criminality—for example, hands up, don’t shoot; and (2) the fugitive nature of blackness is criminal, or lawless, itself. Under these conditions, where the black host is hailed as always already criminal under their political interpellation, that is, made excessively vulnerable by their constitutive hostility to the purity of whiteness, the fugitive black sociality, which exceeds political ontology as paraontological fugitivity, responds transgressively through a second ‘yes’. At the threshold, therefore, before the thrash of the political but also in response to its conditions, is a flash of the paraontological transgression and a disruption of modern political ontology embodied in the welcoming black host but made possible by fugitive black sociality. Transgression, as a constitutive moment and inaugural act of black ethical life, is vital to the way blackness asserts itself, specifically this second sense of transgression which is the fugitive criminality of blackness in the shifting framework of paraontology that is formative but also outside of ‘the law’ and, thus, not restricted to the libidinal or material limits of political ontology.11 For a model of how this transgression may play out, let us return to Saidiya Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection, specifically the account of Sukie, who—in a scene recounted by another slave, Fannie Berry—is reported to have exposed her private parts at an auction block. As Hartman astutely observes in this transgressive act: Sukie’s actions place her outside the law because she defies the fundamental tenant of slavery: the slave is subject to the master’s will in all things. This breach of law enacted in the insolent disregard of the block’s decorum, interestingly enough, provides the only possibility of emergence of the subject, since criminality is the only form of slave agency recognized by the law. Thus, the fashioning of the subject must necessarily take place in the violation of the law, as consequently, will, criminality, and punishment are inextricably linked. (Hartman 1997, 41)

Hartman describes here an impossible paraontological phenomenon, but one not foreign to black thought, namely the emergence of a black self through an act of transgression, specifically the contradictions of a willful transgression by those objectified and condemned to political death. Sukie both is hailed by the unconditional law of antiblack compulsory hospitality and, simultaneously, transgresses it with her act of indecency; this is a second yes, a second welcoming that completes the scene as black hospitality. Later in Scenes Hartman contends that other ‘minor transgressions’, for example, attending dances or seeing lovers, take place outside the ‘political

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proper’  and  this must be understood  as an allusion to  a  black ethical life (Hartman 1997, 63–64). The political, as we know, is never proper for black people but Sukie’s transgressive flash is also not proper to a singular identity of ‘an emerging subject’ or even agency as Hartman suggests, but instead it is a fugitive social re-action of hospitality. The flash evokes a black sociality that traverses and transgresses time, which is exhibited not only in  the retelling  of the story by  Fannie Berry but also in its transcription by Hartman who is attentive to the constitutive gaps of the black archive,12 and occupies a contradictory spacing, which is exhibited in the idea of the auction block as a space of violence that also seemingly demands  decorum. These two dimensions  together describe  the black home in its relation to a constitutive black social fugitivity. Time and space are additionally displaced in so much as the auction block and the recollection of this story evokes at once a repetition of the timelessness and vacuousness of the hold of the ship, but at the same time the action imagines a time and space where the black ungendered body can act irresponsible of the political objectification of the black body by highlighting untenable contradictory standards. Admittedly, on one level, Sukie’s flashing seemingly operates merely as spectacle in the register of the symbolic, which Hartman very much recognizes inasmuch as one of the main theses of Scenes identifies how the spectacle fulfills an obscurest role for the larger political ontology of black subjection. Frank Wilderson would probably endorse this register of interpreting Sukie’s actions too. When he writes of transgression in Red, White, and Black, he neuters any revolutionary potential for black people by locating it as a primary tool for humans, in a Lacanian framework, to move from empty to full speech, that is, to recognize their fundamental alienation within the symbolic and reject any true sense of self within the imaginary (Wilderson III 2010). The contingent violence that remains symbolic in Sukie’s act, however, is only the political register of signifying transgression, the criminality that is outside the ‘political proper’ is actually the aporetic nature of this act that calls upon black fugitive sociality and solicits the emergence of the ethical as im-possible. Hartman adds a layer to the criminality of the rebelling object by further explaining: By staging this rebellion in the domain of sexuality, Sukie fills in the details of the ‘horrible picture,’ that which dare not be spoken without risk of breaching decency … By lifting her skirts, Sukie complies with the demand to expose herself display her body to potential buyers, but she subverts submission and compliance by alluding to the hazards that awaited the buyer. (Hartman 1997, 41) [my emphasis]

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Sukie’s ungendered black woman’s body traces, and exposes, if only for a moment, the contradictory limits of her overwhelming political subjection as owned object that can break laws and an abject sexual object that can break decorum and she does this by proverbially speaking at the moment of unconditional hospitality, a time where language is forbidden, and yet necessary, according to Derrida. Criminal is the way that blackness upsets not just any norm, but the logic of normativity; it upsets the logic of law since under these circumstances the law  is always transgressed and yet should not be able to be transgressed. With Sukie as host, we are also reintroduced to the impossible domestic, the black domestic, where ungendering and  the always already  unmooring of the black home are recognized through these contradictions. This is all to say that Sukie’s act appeals to the excessive fugitive paraontological blackness that cannot be completely comprehended simply in terms of a lude gesture. Her body is at once always open for violation and exempt from human norms as object and yet restricted by extra-legal and social norms that are not proper for an object, especially not proper for an object to seemingly decide to object to. It may be indecent for a table to not have a tablecloth, but the objectification of that table would tremble if it could expose itself by some volition of its own. The irony of demanding/expecting decorum from a slave, that is, social mores from a fungible object, exposes the limits of political objectification in a fleeing fugitive moment of blackness that says she along with the other black people that have and may always approach ‘the auction block’ are more than an object, although also not quite ‘a human’, and subsequently certain ‘hazards await’. This is an ethical claim, an impossible invitation, at the fleeting interstices of being and blackness. You may treat and have her as an object, but she and her body can respond in a tenor of objectivity that escapes the object’s essential nature. At play is Moten’s fugitivity, which is an openness  as escape; an invitation by the very nature of its escape from being  fully understood. Was she protesting her objectification? Was she reifying it by the expected violent response? At this limit of self-knowledge, pain, and pleasure, could we ever, could Sukie, as Rakim may put it, know-the-ledge  that separates objectivity from the abyss of fugitivity? Only the impossible remains. The reduction to pleasure, the reality of pain, the extra-legal response, and the contortions of reproduction navigate an impossible limit of the ungendered body that the white gaze cannot bear, but in the end cannot turn away from. Sukie’s vulnerability cannot be understated, what she does entails a constitutive risk of body and mind, but also the entire logic of her captivity.

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One may compare this to another transgressive moment of exposure, namely the flash of Madame Edwarda in Georges Bataille’s story of the same name. The story of “Madame Edwarda,” from 1956, is prefaced by Bataille with an explanation of how he figures sexual pleasure as the prohibition par excellence, as it exposes humans to their limits which are often obscured by reason, the mind, and the possibility of sublation. Sexuality is not idealized, but eroticism can service the undoing of the dialectical oppositions of pleasure and death by exposing the limits of humans and individuality, that is, the exposure of non-being, “Pleasure would be a puny affair” writes Bataille, “were it not to involve this leap, this staggering overshooting of the mark which common sense fixes … the act whereby being—existence—is bestowed upon us in an unbearable surpassing of being, an act no less unbearable than that of dying” (Bataille 2003, 140). Ecstatic pleasure has the liberatory possibility of surpassing being, to reduce humans to the nothing or non-being that connects them all beyond the individuating and utilitarian projections of the mind, of rationality. God is another name of the extension beyond being, the horror of ego death, of incomprehensibility, of limitless limits. Which is why Madame Edwarda, the woman of the brothel the protagonist visits and who exposes herself in a fashion similar to Sukie, proclaims “‘I’m God’” (Bataille 2003, 150). Edwarda in this story offers the confluence of pleasure and pain, becoming dark only in the cloak of shadows and night, as she engages in sexual acts and violently pummels the protagonist as he chases her. Bataille uses Edwarda’s scene of exposure and the rest of the story to represent the possible ecstasy of ego-death and community offered to the (white) male protagonist through the fears and pleasures of self-annihilation beyond comprehension; she was a vision of God that necessarily leads to a self-­ obliterating frenzy. The confluence of pain and pleasure that Hartman attends to does not congregate in the singular experience of the observer, the human, but in the incongruence of the experience of the slave. The indistinction of pain and pleasure outlines not just an ecstatic impossibility as it does for Bataille, but the fundamental political position of black people, of the subjected and the objectified, as object of pleasure and projected pleasure through the production of pain. Sukie’s exposure, therefore, does not merely set the grounds for the destruction of the human’s ego, but is the fugitive escape of the object, of the captive, of blackness. The exposure of Sukie is not parodic, but gratuitous and as such does not announce she is God, or even that God is dead, but if there is a God, He is the ever-returning white political ontology, white

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ontotheology, of subjection that forces these irreconcilable affective energies onto her whom makes being tremble as blackness escapes in the resonance of a black sociality. Hartman also contends: The gesture to the teeth down there calls attention to the bestializing display of black bodies in the market, the sexual violation of slave women, and the intersection of enjoyment and terror. This revolt sated at the site of enjoyment and the nexus of production and reproduction exposes the violence of the trade’s spectacle in what merits being called a deconstructive performance. (Hartman 1997, 41)

First and foremost, ‘this revolt’ is not singular, instead it reveals a black sociality that takes place through the black home via the auction block, where production and reproduction converge not merely in Sukie but all black bodies. ‘This revolt’ rings true in the trembling legs of the other captive bodies that always already bare themselves on the auction block, in the fields, the houses, the quarters, the hold, i.e. the black home. This transposition  to other black bodies is not  a principle of fungibility, but the ex-position of a fugitive black sociality made evident by the pain and pleasure expressed in Sukie’s exposing of  her smiling teeth—which may bite back in innumerable fugitive ways. ‘This revolt’ is also an invitation to the other to observe not just the unethical world of antiblackness, but the more elusive ethical im-­possibility that escapes that world and its worldliness; the invitation to be other than human escapes in fugitive moments like these and it can only be acknowledged in and through passing because of its impropriety. Sukie is not freed in this act, in fact, the condition of her unfreedom is brought into full relief, but there is something else besides her political unfreedom, that is, a fugitive escape. This is to say, the fugitive nature of blackness that cannot be contained, that which is a thinginess that transcends objectivity, is also traceable through the revulsion of the other that cannot bear to witness and yet must; and also in the transmission of a story of blackness doing the impossible, that is, of revolting from a position of non-being, if only for a moment, as escape; not freedom. The political conditions are never fully transcended but are instead highlighted in a flash; and that flash is a beckoning, an ethical invitation, for all to embrace black hospitality.. The ethics of Sukie’s transgression is where the political ontology of whiteness, the first yes, is transgressed, for a moment, by a second yes of

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black social fugitivity. Sukie is the transgressive host and the criminal stranger, as she is forced to welcome the other at the threshold, but she also brings to light the im-possibility of an unconditional black hospitality through a gesture at the social level that unveils the intangible and fugitive breech of decorum that is blackness. She is constitutively indecent and improper, and the impossible flashing of her black body vivifies this sordid ontology—which is just one of many names for paraontology. The act’s fugitive brevity is not a temporal iteration, but a logical anomaly, an escaping moment, where the object bears resistance to an idea of the human that cannot be reconciled with itself or its ‘other’. In this sense she welcomes her guests to the auction block—the black home—to the realities of black life, the impossibility of domesticity, with a curtsey and a threat. That ethical moment does not come to us, now, firsthand, directly, but escapes through the archive, through black social life, through Fannie, through Hartman, through the others within … the black home. Again, transgressive acts of black hospitality do not take place at the political ontological level or merely in the symbolic register; instead, they expose the political in sometimes exorbitantly violent, but often mundane and everyday, acts of ‘welcoming’.  These acts of black hospitality  take place in common courtesy or violent contestation of the ‘Other’s’ violation, with different fugitive scenes of rejection in and by the black home. Most importantly we need to emphasize that these acts of transgression are not just irresponsible acts that serve to highlight the historical hostility aimed towards black bodies. Criminal blackness is the only way we can recognize the structural role of transgression in relation to the unconditional law of hospitality. Criminal blackness both gestures to an idea of criminalization that is affiliated with black people throughout history in an attempt to systematically oppress and undermine  them, while  also ultimately escaping this political reduction. Or as Moten explains, “the brutal history of criminalization in public policy, and at the intersection of biological, psychological, and sociological discourse, ought not obscure the already existing ontic-ontological criminality of/as blackness” (Moten 2018, 150). Black hospitality, and the transgression it begets, articulates the black, fugitive, criminal ethical life outside of, but related to this history of pathologizing black people. Now, listen to George Yancy as he espouses transgression’s profundity: There is no attempt here to propound an idealist, ahistorical conception of agency/resistance or one grounded in a mere fleeting private moment of joyous transgression while the social and material conditions of oppression

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go unchallenged. My point is that there is something powerful to be said about the initial moment the black self proposes, reflectively generates other ways of being in the world especially within the context of those white iconographic frameworks that perpetuate distorted and dehumanizing depictions of the black self. (Yancy 2008, 113)

These transgressions are not for the vanity of individual satisfaction or as one-off acts of deviance. They are done with the effects of exposing the  contradictions of the  political order that has condemned the black body, the black soul, and the black home. They are not what initially generates ‘other ways of being’ per se, they are instead facilitated by the other ways of being that follow in the wake of an escaping paraontological sociality of blackness. They are not ‘fleeting private moments’ in time but fleeting social moments that are always out of time, that is, out of the linear time of the human. Sukie’s defiance is expressed through all black people of past, present, and to come at the same time; that is, her ethical transgression resonates through and through out the sociality of the black home as an act that challenged the narratives of complacency and practices of violence that attempt to delimit the space of blackness to the politics of the auction block and undermined her social sense of self through physical restraint, psychological torture, and public humiliation. In an echo of Yancy, I repeat what Moten identifies as the paraontological fugitive movement of blackness as not “simple interdiction nor bare transgression” but a specific “zone of unattainability, to which the eminently attainable ones have been relegated, which they occupy but cannot (and refuse to) own, [blackness] is some sense of the fugitive law of movement that makes black social life ungovernable, that demands a paraontological disruption of the supposed connection between explanation and resistance” (Moten 2018, 142). There is no full explanation for Sukie’s resistance, since it comes from a fugitive ‘law’ that cannot be governed or anticipated, since it is not a ‘simple interdiction nor bare transgression’. Sukie’s indecent exposure is the lightning strike that disrupts the link of explanation and resistance because the object is not supposed to resist, but it did and there were people there (Fannie Berry, but also the nameless others of the black archive) near the ‘zone of unattainability’, the black home, and they felt blackness escape.

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c. Black Sociality as Self-interruption Another name for the black sociality of the black home which is the second ‘yes’ of the host of black hospitality is self-interruption from the other within. In Adieu Derrida asks, “Is not hospitality an interruption of the self?” and he continues on the next page, “One will understand nothing about hospitality if one does not understand what ‘interrupting oneself’ might mean, the interruption of the self by the self as other” (Derrida 1999a, 52). Self-interruption is the last crucial component to hospitality to discuss, but note, he is not referring to the interruption that may come about through the hostility of the guest at your door; instead, it is the interruption of ‘self as other’. He reiterates this contention in the “Hospitality, Justice, Responsibility” interview, stating: “there would be no responsibility or decision without some self-interruption, neither would there be any hospitality … as master and host, the self in welcoming the other, must interrupt or divide himself or herself. This division is the condition of hospitality” (Derrida 1999b, 81). By self-interruption, Derrida has in mind the manner in which the host is always already other to themselves in the sense that they are constituted through history and community and, therefore, to welcome the guest from without, one needs to call upon the other within.13 To invite the other within, this self-­ interruption, is not a form of recognition, it’s not a matter of getting to know the other, it’s a form of estrangement from the knowable that opens up new possibilities in the name of what cannot be ultimately known, but is needed, through fugitive black sociality. This is precisely what is meant by the black sociality of the host of the black home. The black home embraces the otherness within as the fugitive black sociality described in the previous chapter. The black home is the spacing and timing that allows black social life to emerge and interrupt the guise of the individual autonomous black host with the recognition of an ever-pervasive otherness that slips away through time and space, through the echoes of those before and beyond, but which facilitates the transgressive yes and welcoming of the other without. Interruption is a pause for the irruption of black sociality throughout and within the home of possibility. Geoffrey Bennington reminds us that for Derrida “‘I’ am only insofar as I already harbor (welcome) the Other in me”—with this ‘other’ being the history, community, the tradition one inherits, thus showing how one is never self-same (Bennington 2000, 44). The ‘Other in me’ for the black host  disrupts identity by a constitutive disjuncture that

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challenges the violent hierarchy brought about by a political ontology grounded in what Moten correctly identified as the political death of black peoples. Black social life, as this other within, is the excessive fugitivity of blackness that welcomes the other without as the refusal to be the monadic autonomous consuming neoliberal self, the refusal of political agency and intersubjectivity by means of the fugitive social life we find emerging from the street corner, the porch, the basketball court, the kitchen, the classroom, just being together. One cannot deny the existence of the human political ontology that weighs so heavily on black life, responsibility necessitates that one recognizes the reality and power of white supremacy’s general economy of subjection. However, instead of a traditional resistive capacity in the name of the political agent, black sociality offers a resistive capaciousness, an alternative general economy or exconomy of blackness from another universe which entails by the very nature of its fugitive excess that the hospitable black host always see life differently in blackness’ traces, that they leave the question of impossibility (ethics or otherwise) open, that they keep the black home open for the guest because that is the only black home that may be, even if it takes place through hostile defiance, since it is always hostile to recognizing the human as human and only hospitable to the other as other. Now, catch your breath, and listen: [T]he case, and the lived experience of blackness—which might be understood here as the troubling of and the capacity for the rehabilitation of the human—converge as a duty to appose the oppressor, to refrain from a certain performance of the labor of the negative, to avoid his economy of objectification and standing against, to run away from the snares of recognition. This refusal is a black thing. (Moten 2018, 180)

The welcoming is a version of responsible refusal—a black Bartleby—and its counter-intuitive operations is one aspect of why exactly it is a ‘black thing’. The black host can be responsible for the guest only if one is irresponsible to oneself as a self, only if the black host irresponsibly exposes themselves to the dangers of without through ‘the other within’ which is a refusal of the human, of its rehabilitation. This otherness dissembles the fantasy of a fully autonomous self-present subject; that is, it misrecognizes the human without from within by opening the pain and joy of the inoperative, unavowable, fugitive history and communion of black social life. Honest ethics, that is, the ethics of the incapacitated and irresponsible,

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that is, black hospitality, needs this self-othering to articulate the infinite scope of the host’s responsibilities to the fugitive social life that haunts its every decision, but most importantly, this otherness is also resistance insomuch as it demands of all others the possibilities and necessity of seeing, doing, and living differently. Even when the others do not live up to these demands, as they often do not.

IV. Conclusion: Black Hospitality and Moral Decadence Black ethics is impossible and yet it is the only ethics. At the threshold of a black home that is never safe, blackness escapes, black people resist, despite and in light of their condition as extra-ordinarily vulnerable. Black hospitality releases the inoperative tension of the political and the social through an impossible ethics, a generous ethic, that we come to recognize as black through the black home, but still, as an im-possible ethics, we can never quite put our fingers on it. That is expected, since it bends the limits of logic, hospitality, subject, and body in so many ways that every touch seems irresponsible. The generosity of black hospitality is so beyond comprehension, so excessive, it breaks from the decorum of moral subjectivity as we often know it. It’s an ethics of moral decadence. Follow me for a second. David Marriot contends, “if blackness denotes a profligacy that exceeds the moral economy of the subject, this is because it broaches the limits of being in general” (Marriott, On Decadence: Bling Bling 2017). In fact, blackness does exceed the ‘moral economy of the subject’ but its pathology and depravity is in that it resists the limits of being as it broaches it, unleashing a black sociality that transgresses the inter-subjective politics of civil society, or the moral laws of ethical life as Hegel would’ve had it. This excessiveness as decadence is frightening and fuels the cycle of black subjugation, and this is why Marriot continues further along, “Blackness, understood as decadence, must be restricted and resisted, made to respect force, for without opposition it will open civil life to the chaos of a demotic thematization whose consumption promises only pathological enjoyment” (Marriott, On Decadence: Bling Bling 2017). Blackness is decadence, it must but cannot be restricted and resisted; however, this is also to say blackness as celebration anticipates pathological enjoyment. It is gaudy and disrespectful of normative force, exceeding the sterility of political life, of political correctness, through or

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over the political with a robust unaccountable arrogance. Celebration does not come correct, its wrong and its subterranean, below the surface, escaping full exposure because full exposure would be devastating for all. Just a flash. “Bling Bling” is an an[a]esthetic welcoming and black hospitality is its ethics, but it is also an ethic, the practice of inviting everyone to move along the tremors of celebration because it’s the always already welcome of another other—there is no celebration without this welcoming— to feel the decadent terror of intersubjective obliteration and social fugitivity, if only for a moment. Black hospitality is a waste of time, it’s a waste of money, it’s a waste of you, it’s a waste of me, it is no-thing special and everything great founded in moral decay.

Notes 1. Here I have in minds his work on forgiveness, democracy, the gift, and so on. C.f. Jacque Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness; Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason; Derrida, The Gift of Death and Literature in Secret. 2. This is not to say that Chandler is the singular or the primary influence on Moten’s thinking of fugitivity, sociality, and so on. Even a cursory reading of Moten will show that he was influenced by many thinkers, like Nathaniel Mackey, Saidiya Hartman, and many more in the development of his thought. Instead, Chandler is just one of many possible threads to pull in order to unveil the fugitive blackness that Moten describes. 3. C.f. Jacques Derrida, “Derelictions of the Right to Justice (But what are the ‘sanspapier’ lacking?)”; Jacques Derrida, “Hospitality, Justice, and Responsibility: A Dialogue with Jacques Derrida”; Jacques Derrida, “Hostipitality.” 4. It would be interesting in the future to trace the different ways Chandler employs the importance or role of ‘questioning’ versus the importance and role of a ‘problem’ and ‘problematization’ in his writing. There are times they seem interchangeable, but I imagine ‘the Negro question’ and ‘the Negro problem’, for instance, have similar but different genealogies, same for ‘the problem of being’ and ‘the question of being’. 5. Chandler points out that this discourse is not defined in completion or an exact systematicity, but rather is constituted through a recurrence of key terms and concepts. 6. I borrow this language of ‘lending credit’ to describe this phenomenon from Derrida’s reading of the Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo in his essay “Otobiographies” in the collection The Ear of the Other. Chandler recognizes that around the time of Du Bois there were European thinkers, for

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example, Husserl, Freud, Saussere, and Weber, who were also challenging ideas of the a priori and signs, but they did not recognize the uniqueness and profundity of Du Bois’ use of the particular to extrapolate to the level of the universal, from the Negro to being. He, however, does not add Nietzsche to this list. In Derrida’s essay, among other revelations of Nietzsche’s preoccupation with difference, Derrida identifies a passage in the Preface to Ecce Homo, where Nietzsche infamously proclaims that no one has truly heard or saw him, that he lives on his own credit, and that perhaps it is a prejudice that he lives at all. Here we see Nietzsche placing himself and his life under question. The certainty of his identity, of his life, cannot be afforded by others who are not him, and, moreover, even himself. He is not certain of his existence; he can only offer some credit, live off the presumption that indeed the person he says he is, who writes, is in fact Friedrich Nietzsche. Acknowledging the gap between the Nietzsche that lives and thinks, between he who thinks and writes, between he of now and then and later, results only in the prejudgment that he indeed ‘lives’ in any colloquial sense as presented or in the present, so to speak. Here too we feel being tremble. C.f. Derrida (1985) and Nietzsche (1989). 7. I must mention the uncanny proximity to Nietzsche once again. Lend an ear to this passage from Ecce Homo, “This dual series of experiences, this access to apparently separate worlds, is repeated in my nature in every respect: I am a Doppelganger, have a ‘second’ face [sight] in addition to the first. And perhaps also a third” (Nietzsche 1989, 225). 8. Commentators such as Shamoon Zamir and Ernest Allen, Jr. argue that the account of double consciousness in “Of Our Spiritual Strivings” is, in fact, not intended to universalize black experience, but instead refers to a specific historical and class psychology of the black middle-class elite (Zamir 1995, 116) (Allen 1997, 52). The goal of reconciling the trajectory of one’s blackness and humanness through a mutual recognition that would reconcile two-ness was reserved for the ‘Talented Tenth’ (Zamir 1995). While Zamir provides a convincing argument that in fact this was Du Bois’ intended demographic, it is difficult to deny that this discordance resonates with most black people’s experience in America. The institutional and systematic structures infiltrate the psychology of the individual and community of blackness alike, who have to ask themselves why indeed they understand themselves as potentially free and equal and yet, incomprehensibly, also understand themselves as perhaps never free and excessively vulnerable to the subjection of a racist enterprise. In this respect I agree with Kevin Quashi’s position that suggests doubleness is a general condition of black subjectivity that highlights its generally public nature, as he suggests, “In double consciousness, the twoness of black subjectivity … is a kind of pathology, a fractured consciousness that is overdetermined by a public

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language of black inferiority” (Quashie 2012, 14) Doubleness, for Quashi, is essentially a description of blackness as public (read also social) and resistive to white supremacy. 9. Hospitality, in this register, becomes a duty that emerges from the external demand of law; however, “for it to be what it ‘must’ be, hospitality must not pay a debt or be governed by a duty: it is gracious … this unconditional law of hospitality, if such a thing is thinkable, would then be a law without imperative, without order and without duty. A law without law” (Derrida and Dufourmantelle 2000, 83). 10. In conversation with Michael Clifford at the Collegium Phaenomologicum in 1987, he referred to the concept as a ‘tired notion’ (Clifford 1987, 223). 11. In his extensive meditations on Lacan—who would qualify as one of the European thinkers of difference—in the second chapter “The Narcissistic Slave” of Red, White, and Black, Wilderson argues that transgression is limited to the Human as the means of recognizing full speech as opposed to empty speech, where in the former one comes to terms with the conception of the self as outside oneself. The position of the black supposedly does not have access to such transgressive power, since transgressions are contingent violence (Wilderson III 2010, 76). Rather, only absolute violence in Fanon’s sense would completely challenge the meta-structure, the political ontology. This chapter argues in favor of black transgression as the revelation of absolute violence’s intentions, but in the only way possible, which is fugitively. In other words, while Lacanian transgression reveals to what extent one is stuck in the symbolic order, constituted by it, black transgression comes from the Real as a glimpse beyond this ordering, this cosmological arrangement. 12. Stephen Best addresses the place of rumor in the black archive in a most compelling and astounding rethinking of time and possibility. While Hartman does not describe Fannie Berry’s account as rumor, the mere nature of its retelling illuminates what Best highlights and can be read in terms of a temporal deconstruction. He writes: “It has been one of the defining purposes of the archive to posit the slave as knowable while also rendering inaccessible some aspect of either her voice or her intention—to preserve and suppress in the name of governance. This paradox is one of the reasons we tend to think of the archive of slavery as degraded and so much of slave history as irretrievable lost. It also goes a considerable way toward explaining why the moans, stutters, and shouts that inaugurate the black tradition tend to be foregrounded as a failure of speech”; “Rumor in the archive: an appearance made possible only in its disappearance; an aspiration registered at the moment of its suppression; a power that reaffirms itself by liquidating its sources” (Best 2018, 122–123).

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13. Cynthia Willett argues that an issue of the post-modern is that the sense of alterity that destabilizes the Other is still narcissistically dependent on the self. For Willett, this undermines the deconstructive decentering the subject. However, the other that interrupts the black host is an already displaced by a socially and culturally deconstructed home, and therefore, need not fall victim to this legitimate danger (Willett 1995, 6).

References Allen, Ernest, Jr. 1997. On the Reading of Riddles: Rethinking DuBoisian ‘Double Consciousness’. In Existence in Black: An Anthology of Black Existentialism, ed. Lewis Gordon. New York: Routledge. Bataille, Georges. 2003. My Mother, Madame Edwarda, the Dead Man. Trans. Austryn Wainhouse. London: Marion Boyars. Bennington, Geoffrey. 2000. Interrupting Derrida. New York: Routledge. Best, Stephen. 2018. None Like Us: Blackness, Belonging, Aesthetic Life. Durham: Duke University Press. Chandler, Nahum Dimitri. 2014. X-The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Thought. New York: Fordham University Press. Clifford, Michael R. 1987. Crossing the Boundary: Foucault and Derrida on Transgressing. Philosophy Today 31 (3): 223–233. Cone, James. 1997. Black Theology and Black Power. Maryknoll: Orbis Books. Derrida, Jacques. 1985. Otobiographies. In The Ear of the Other, ed. Christie V. McDonald. Trans. Avital Ronell and Peggy Kamuf. New York: Schocken. ———. 1999a. Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas. Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Nass. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 1999b. Hospitality, Justice and Responsibility: A Dialogue with Jacques Derrida. In Questioning Ethics: Contemporary Debates in Philosophy, ed. Mark Dooley and Richard Kearney, 65–83. London: Routledge. ———. 2001. On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness. Trans. Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes. London: Routledge. ———. 2002. Dereliction of the Right to Justice (But What Are the ‘sans-papier’ Lacking?). In Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews 1971–2001, by Jacques Derrida, ed. Elizabeth Rottenberg. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 2005. Rogues: Two essays on Reason. Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 2006. Hostipitality. In The Derrida-Habermas Reader, ed. Lasse Thomassen. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. ———. 2008. The Gift of Death and Literature in Secret. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Derrida, Jacques, and Anne Dufourmantelle. 2000. Of Hospitality. Trans. Rachel Bowlby. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

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Hartman, Saidiya V. 1997. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press. Marriott, David. 2000. On Black Men. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2017. On Decadence: Bling Bling. e-flux Journal 79. Moazzam-Doulat, Malek. 2008. Future Impossible: Carl Schmitt, Jacques Derrida, and the Problem of Political Messianism. Philosophy Today 52 (1): 73–81. Moten, Fred. 2018. The Universal Machine. Durham: Duke University Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1989. On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, ed. Walter Kaufmann. Trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J.  Hollingdale. New  York: VIntage Book. Quashie, Kevin. 2012. The Sovereign of Quiet: Beyond Resistance in Black Culture. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Sexton, Jared. 2008. Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Wilderson, Frank, III. 2010. Red, White, and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms. Durham: Duke University Press. Willett, Cynthia. 1995. Maternal Ethics and Other Slave Moralities. New  York: Routledge. Yancy, George. 2008. Black Bodies, White Gazes: The Continuing Significance of Race. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield. Zamir, Shamoon. 1995. Dark Voices, W.E.B.  DuBois and American Thought, 1888–1903. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

CHAPTER 5

Barbarism and Beloved

We are the subjects of our own narrative, witnesses to and participants in our own experience, and in no way coincidentally, in the experience of those with whom we have come in contact. We are not, in fact, ‘other’. (Morrison 1994, 133) —Toni Morrison, “Unspeakable Things Unspoken” If I hadn’t killed her she would have died and that is something I could not bear. (Morrison 1987, 200) —Toni Morrison, Beloved

I. Introduction Beloved, one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century, will be the focus of this chapter. The recipient of an innumerable number of accolades and critical responses it may seem trivial to add another voice to the already over-abundance of commentary; nevertheless, the novel offers overwhelming generosity when thinking blackness and black hospitality and thus demands critical attention once again. There is a virtuous circularity to this project with this final chapter focusing on Toni Morrison’s Beloved, which was published in 1987, the same year as the essay that inaugurated this project, Hortense Spiller’s “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American

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Grammar Book.” Aside from being published the same year, both Morrison and Spillers, on the eve of American global hegemony, offer a critical turn back to slavery to tell us more about the present. However, as this project returns to 1987, it has a new bearing on black ethical life that was not yet developed in the Introduction. In this engagement with Beloved, black hospitality as black ethics, as the only ethics, will be center stage in light of and despite of the limitations of the political realities that circumscribe the writings of both authors. As a work of literature, Beloved vivifies the task of this project, namely to account for the ethical life of black people amidst a world of antiblackness. It’s this vivacity of Beloved that made this chapter crucial to rounding off the argument for understanding black ethical life as black hospitality. Beloved tells the story of Sethe and her family as it came together at Sweet Home in Kentucky, a plantation owned first by the ‘benign’ Mr. Garner and then the cold calculated schoolteacher, and also how it fell apart at 124 Bluestone Road on the outskirts of Cincinnati, Ohio. The novel begins in 1873, eight years after the end of the civil war, and the majority of the plot takes place at 124 Bluestone Road, a house originally occupied by Sethe’s stepmother Baby Suggs, who had her freedom bought by Sethe’s husband and her son Halle. Sethe arrived at 124 Bluestone 18 years prior to 1873 with her daughter Denver to meet her other daughter Beloved and her two sons Buglar and Howard, all of whom were runaways from Sweet Home. The incident that drives that plot is the infanticide of Beloved only 28 days into Sethe’s arrival at 124 Bluestone. Sethe chooses to take her child’s life rather than have slavery take her. The incident isolates the occupants of 124 and the house becomes hostile, with Beloved haunting the house first as an apparition and then as a young woman. Alongside this ghost story is the arrival of Paul D, who is Halle’s brother and also was a slave at Sweet Home. We learn of his trial and tribulations following his attempted escapes from captivity and he comes to try and comfort Sethe, only to be cast out by Beloved like all the other men of 124. As much as the plot already revolves around a few homes and a uniquely black ethical dilemma, one can already anticipate how black hospitality will be deployed to describe the impossible ethical experience that frames the novel. This will certainly be the case, and the freedom, precision, and dexterity that literature provides as an aesthetic expression is crucial to sharpening the contours of black hospitality as read through Beloved. However, the black hospitality found in the novel itself will only be one dimension

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of this sharpening, occupying the second half of this chapter. The following section that begins the chapter argues how the novel as a form of black expressive art itself is a manifestation of the impossibility of black hospitality. In other words, not only is black hospitality discussed as taking place within Beloved, but the novel also exists as black hospitality, that is, as an ethical aesthetic object.

II. Beloved as Black Hospitality or the Barbarism of Black Art “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” (T. W. Adorno 2000, 210). Theodor W. Adorno’s pronouncement is perhaps the most recognizable intersection of aesthetics and ethics of twentieth-century (western) philosophy and with it a precedent is set: the impossible poem, the impossible work of art. Now we know that Adorno tempers his declaration a bit in Negative Dialectics when he explains that perhaps suffering indeed has a right to expression and “hence it may have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems” (T. W. Adorno 1973, 362). Nevertheless, the temperament that Adorno articulates for this intersection of art and ethics after Auschwitz remains, as he does not yield from the significance of the event on our moral and aesthetic life or life in general even if upon reflection he seems to have become a bit more attuned to the blackness that pervades and evades western metaphysics.1 Aesthetics after Auschwitz for Adorno bears a tremendous weight, which is also a tremendous wait for a time and place free from the dominance of instrumental reason and its blinding effect on humanity as the core guiding principle of the Enlightenment.2 There indeed is something barbaric in poetry and art after Auschwitz, but the barbarism of the modern world did not begin nor even crystallize after this world historic event. A barbarism in the aesthetic runs deep, before, after, and through Auschwitz in the form of blackness. There is something barbaric in black aesthetics, something unwieldy and untamed, some may call it pathological or hear its illegible utterances as somehow both always outside of the polis and yet through the polis (ba ba ba … black). Black art is barbaric in the sense that it challenges the metaphysics of humanity and lacerates the world and therefore is not ‘world historic’ per se. As referenced in Chap. 2 of this project, Wilderson insightfully contrasts the events of the Holocaust with the Middle Passage in terms of a metaphysical distinction, whereby there is a conception of Jews before and

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after the events of World War II, but the transformation of blacks from ‘Africans’ has no analogy—it is a metaphysical holocaust as opposed to a human one (Wilderson III 2010, 38). From this we may conclude the barbarism of blackness, which finds itself in black art, is not merely the barbaric treatment of a people before or after an event, but rather reflects the barbaric creation and  creativity  of a people, of  a world, the modern lifeworld. “It’s not simply that human life originated in Africa in anthropological terms” Morrison tells us, “but that modern life begins with slavery.” (Morrison 1993, 178) Put another way, the barbarism of blackness reflects the profundity of not only the creation of black people as objects of political subjugation but also the emergence of a fugitive unwieldy black social life. This barbarism is the uncivil and generous core of blackness, the impossible irresistible resilience of a blackness that escapes. It follows then that the barbarity of black art is not analogous to representing or tapping into an animal nature found in primitive or original ‘man’ or the unethical savagery that accompanies the pre-human condition over against the rational—a place in time that Adorno correctly asserts can never be retrieved with any purity anyway (T. W. Adorno 2018, 77). Barbarity is the anti-human excessive generosity of blackness, the impossibility of blackness, that refuses the metaphysics of idealized western humanity through the always already hospitable and hostile ethical demands that accompany blackness. If barbarism implies a lack of  modern humanity, what blackness lacks is the genocidal principle of modern humanity, the lack is a space and time for otherness not as  ‘the other’ antagonist but as a fugitive sociality that is always before and excessive to modern humanity. In a way reminiscent to the colonist’s encounter with Indigenous Americans, the generosity of blackness is taken for granted as less than human, when in fact it is only the expression of all that is more than human because of its embrace of a constitutive escape. Black art as the ever-exceeding Middle Passage is Beloved and it is much more. Beloved not only contains the themes of an ethics of impossible hospitality but also is an expression of said impossible black hospitality. This pairing of Adorno’s reflections on aesthetics with blackness is not arbitrary nor is it novel. Adorno’s writings on jazz music in particular are notorious and has been subject to debate and condemnation for decades. Within this vibrant discussion, Fumi Okiji’s Jazz as Critique: Adorno and Black Expression Revisited shares a disposition toward blackness and its generosity amidst the contradiction of black life explored thus far in this project and will prove helpful in elaborating the arguments of the black aesthetic as black hospitality. As the title suggests, Okiji is primarily

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concerned with jazz music and its possibilities as a form of radical art and expression over and against Adorno’s rejection of it as inextricably tied to capitalist cultural production and individualism. The majority of Adorno’s most criticized jazz writings occur before the infamous decree of “Cultural Criticism and Society” and some changes in his views seemed to have occurred, so admittedly it is not completely fair from a historical perspective to map these conversations onto each other as if his criticism of jazz occurred after his questioning of ethics and aesthetics after Auschwitz. And yet the critical and sociomusical nature of jazz and improvisation that Adorno cannot recognize pre-WWII does convey how blackness and black social life completely escaped Adorno’s plane of thought. Okiji recognizes in jazz and black music more generally the generosity of blackness and black life. She writes in her introduction: Black music is sociomusical play. It is not so much that it represents black life or an alternative human future; rather it demonstrates to us how to acquit ourselves towards blackness (and toward another world). It shows us how we might go about dispositioning ourselves, so that we might know how it feels to be a conflicted subject. (Okiji 2018, 5)

What Okiji reserves for black music in this passage is lock step with the argument of blackness regarding black hospitality and what it offers as a structure for black ethics. In other words, what Okiji highlights as the critical possibilities of black expression is this orientation toward a new posture of being that requires a recognition of the contradictions that blackness contains, and black people live in. The ‘disposition’ toward contradiction she alludes to is the generosity of the black host, of black sociality, of the ‘Negro problem, despite political death. Adorno’s disruptive declarations in the shadow of Auschwitz concerning ethics and aesthetics could not capture this possibility, this black ethical ‘lifestyle’, but Okiji’s project —which I will avoid the violence of summarizing here—attunes itself to the ethical im-possibilities that is black expression. For Adorno jazz and improvisation is the high point of individual expression in an age of individualism and subsumption by capitalist ideology. Okiji sums Adorno’s position up nicely, writing: For Adorno it is the lived reality of ever-increasing isolation and the petering-­ out of self-determination that discredits the image of jazz as liberation. How can the music speak in such triumphant tones when faced with the facts of wholesale alienation and degradation? This is what Adorno finds so objectionable. The jazz musician as redeemer, spinning off-the-cuff musical

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retorts in opposition to the rigidity of the popular song forms, is misleading; the opposition is a straw man, the musicians being wholly dependent on that which he critically reworks. In fact, he reaffirms, through the reiteration of the individuality myth, his allegiance to the establishment. (Okiji 2018, 20)

For Okiji, this interpretation follows from Adorno’s focus on the bourgeoisie as the class of emancipatory potentiality and his lack of any attempt to understand the historical reality of black people and their political exclusion from the western order. In the blues and in jazz this conception of the jazz soloist as the individual redeemer is not applicable to black life; its objectification refuses such reduction. The jazz soloist plays off and through the iterative performance via their communal relation to the entire band and audience, none of whom take precedence over the other. There is an ethics of impossible hospitality in this disposition, a black ethics of openness and generosity, which for Adorno, as a stand in for more general antiblackness, can only be interpreted as hostility. Okiji describes through jazz specifically, but black expression more generally, the performance of black hospitality as the aesthetic insomuch as she recognizes in jazz music a welcoming embodied in the performance despite a hostility found in critics. The irreducibility of black expression is the barbarism that cannot be rationalized, and which breaks through in the different iterations and idiosyncrasies found even in the jazz standards. However, there is a minor contestation with Okiji’s articulation of the jazz standard that will help elaborate the aesthetic nature of black hospitality even more. The chapter “Storytelling, Sound, and Silence” is used to challenge the idea that jazz fits into traditional music theory’s interpretation of the story as a complete and internally coherent narrative with beginning, middle, and end. For Okiji the story does not follow this enclosed rational structure, nor does the jazz standard, even with its identifiable structure. For Okiji, first and foremost, “the story teller and jazz musician are listeners,” (Okiji 2018, 75) meaning their practice begins by turning outward, not inward, and therefore, “the notion that a story is started and finished by a single soloist fails to account for the communal nature of oral traditions, of which storytelling must be considered a prime example … The story is at once ‘already there’ and slowly revealed … The story presents a complex of repetitions, which can be seen as a sort of concertinaed heterophony” (Okiji 2018, 70–71). Here Okiji again taps into the generosity of blackness as an impossible conclusiveness expressed through black art. The black song, or in this case the jazz standard,

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contains improvisations and affective resonance beyond representation with the likes of “extra-linguistic” sounds that accompany its performance that are always new and changing. The contestation of Okiji is not in this rich description of black song and story as open, which conveys the spirit of a black hospitality for the other without (standard music interpretation and capitalist cultural production) from the other within (improvised black music sociality), but the departure is in the limitations she ascribes to black expression idealized or limited to song. In this same chapter, Okiji echoes other literary theorists that designate the novel as a sign of modernity that attempts to close off the more generous structure of story writing, she explains, “[Walter] Benjamin accounts for a fall into speechlessness that began during the nineteenth century, as the spoken word of storytelling retreated into novel form. The novel perfectly isolates author from reader, sidestepping the problems of communicability and compounding the silence” (Okiji 2018, 73). Beloved is ostensibly a novel in as much as “A Love Supreme” is a song, but should it be excluded from the generosity and depth of black expression that is attributed to Davis, Coltrane, Holiday or Shepp? There is no way it does not make its own noise; it contains the same challenges, contradictions, and generosity of a jazz standard. Morrison herself acknowledges as much when she describes her work as black despite its difference from music: I always wanted to develop a way of writing that was irrevocably black. I don’t have the resources of a musician, but I thought that if it was truly black literature, it would not be black because I was, it would not even be black because of its subject matter. It would be something intrinsic, indigenous, something in the way it was put together—the sentences, the structures, texture, tone—so that anyone who read it would realize it. (Morrison 1993, 181)

Her writing is unquestionably black and pulls from the same well, albeit with different ‘resources’, of blackness as jazz. In fact, I would venture to say that the same black hospitality that can be found in jazz, specifically as black expression’s welcoming of otherness despite its hostile exclusions by the capitalist mode of production and antiblack objectification can be found in all black expressive forms. The aestheticization of black ethics as hospitality found in the generosity of jazz music is also found in Beloved (and Jazz). Despite the idealized form of the novel changing the nuances of Okiji’s understanding of ‘the story’, Beloved breaks from those novel restraints in its form, content, and context. It is a barbarism unto itself.

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Beloved is far from the first narrative regarding slavery nor the last, but it inaugurates a retelling of this history, of this story, plummeting into the never-ending wealth of blackness as an impossible origin. The sort of retelling that is also a listening can be found in the inspiration of the novel. The central plot point of Beloved comes from a reading of the tragic life events of Margaret Garner that Morrison first calls attention to in The Black Book (1974). Garner was a slave that escaped with her four children from Kentucky in 1856 and made it as far as Cincinnati, where her owner, Archibald K. Gaines, and police officers caught up to them in a house of a free black man named Kite. Cornered, Garner grabbed a butcher knife and killed her youngest daughter and attempted to kill the rest of her children and herself rather than return to slavery (May 1999). It is important to keep in mind that when Morrison takes up Garner’s story in particular and the realities of slavery in general, she is working with an archive that was purposefully obscured, overlooked, and ultimately incomplete. Beloved, thus, as an inspired fiction, uses literary techniques that attend to the erasure and real-life horror of enslaved  persons that often went unaccounted or forgotten; for example, she employs the ambiguities of multivalent narration, the intricacies of temporality, and even the material manifestation of the spiritual. As Maggie Sale explains “Beloved presents a new way of conceiving of history, one that refuses master versions of history … Beloved does not assert a ‘definitive’ version of the Margaret Garner case, the historical event upon which the novel is based, but rather offers several contradictory  versions of Garner’s (h)istory, which exists simultaneously, yet complimentary” (Sale 1998, 178; author’s emphasis). Morrison herself explains she is attempting to unveil the events too horrible to account for in the popular slave narratives, events that her contemporaries, white or black, do not wish to remember, however, without describing these horrors, particularly the infanticide, in an obscene or pornographic way (McKay 1999, 10). Morrison’s narrative choices are a form of listening, just like Okiji’s storyteller, to those who cannot bear witness, to a blackness that is too dark, but also persists to shine through in her breath snatching prose. Also, while geared to the past the narrative remains tethered to the present. Dennis Childs challenges the idea that Beloved is simply a neo slave narrative, that is, the genre where contemporary writers reimagine slavery and the period of reconstruction, and instead he argues that Beloved is a ‘narrative of neo-slavery’ insomuch as when it, for example. references the chain gang, the slave ship, and other carceral techniques during

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slavery, it highlights the direct genealogy of slavery to the modern carceral system. Using the term ‘living death’—as opposed to social death or even political death—Childs recognizes in Beloved the practices of exploitation that render black people vulnerable continuously, from antebellum to post-bellum America, in the ways already discussed in Chap. 2. He writes, “The inclusion of the category of living death within the techniques of state and corporate killing also allows us to attend to the ways in which today’s modern version of mass human warehousing—that is, the penitentiary—represents an extension of rather than an antithesis to Middle Passage genocide” (Childs 2009, 277). Childs finds Morrison employing an understanding of temporality that is orientated toward the future through the past insomuch as it addresses how emancipation does not exclude the exploitations of black bodies, for example, the chain gang, and also how she simultaneously alludes to later and contemporary machinations of exploitation specifically in terms of imprisonment. He writes: To fully understand what I mean by the “future orientation” of Beloved and the role of imprisonment in producing the forward-haunting aspects of the novel, we must first identify what can be thought of as Morrison’s use of strategic anachronism in the chain gang scene. With this term, I am referring to her intentional placement of a punitive regime normally associated with the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth century into the context of the late antebellum period. The mechanism that the Alfred, Georgia, prison camp authorities use to entomb Paul D and his fellow captive fugitives, the “box” that “resembles a cage,” has a real postbellum historical referent: the portable chain gang “cage,” or “moving prison,” many of which were built in Georgia and distributed throughout the southern states. (Childs 2009, 285)

With this observation made by Childs, we see how the chain-gang scene specifically uses allusion, or ‘strategic anachronism’, to retell the story through contemporary eyes. While turning backward, Morrison also listens to the contemporary, again in a way similar to Okiji’s storyteller. The well attuned audience listens as well and what they hear are the repetitions of antiblack technologies that fortify extra-ordinary vulnerability, but more urgently they hear and participate in a chorus with the past and Morrison by means of a black sociality that fugitively escapes any one time, any one origin, and instead circulates and escapes. The novel feels like home, but it’s impossible to settle on whether the now or the past are directing the narrative, whether the here or there of the United States is its background.

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This play between the past and present, here and there, or what must be told and cannot be told through the storytelling of this telling story is the barbarism of Beloved that Adorno initially found impossible to express after Auschwitz and what I would say Okiji locates as a lacuna in his writings on jazz. It’s a Herculean task that Morrison achieves by taking the Garner event and refashioning it in a way that says the quiet parts out loud through literary devices and genres such as allusion, slave narrative, metaphor, and even silence—remember there is no explicit reenactment of the infanticide. This approach, however, is not a silence that cuts the author off from the audience as Okiji attributes to the novel, but that cuts the author open to convey the impossible horrors of America’s past, present, and possible, but not necessary, future by means of an extra-ordinary vulnerability. By never vividly describing the infanticide or sexual assault and many other instances of violence that are/were constitutive, Beloved performs and vivifies an impossible hospitality that is nascent in this tension: it welcomes the world through the presentation of this story, a necessary component of the creation of the modern imaginary, and yet it is also a past that must be forgotten by the “all-inclusive” American dream; it is a hostility that threatens the democratic ethos of the modern world that America represented and is seen as such, more implicitly than explicitly. We can read Beloved as a response to Adorno’s contention in Minima Moralia when he writes: The coming extinction of art is prefigured in the increasing impossibility of representing historical events.... The impossibility of portraying Fascism springs from the fact that in it, as in its contemplation, subjective freedom no longer exists. Total unfreedom can be recognized, but not represented. Where freedom occurs as a motif in political narratives today, as in the praise of heroic resistance, it has the embarrassing quality of impotent reassurance. The outcome always appears decided in advance by high politics, and freedom is manifested ideologically, as talk about freedom, in stereotyped declamations, not in humanly commensurable actions. Art is least to be saved by stuffing the extinct subject like a museum piece, and the object, the purely inhuman, which alone is worthy of art today, escapes its reach at once by excess and inhumanity. (T. W. Adorno 2005, 43–45)

Beloved does the impossible, by representing historical events, not as such, but through invention, dispersal, and silence. A sort of total (political) unfreedom can and is represented but not recognized, and as such the ethical resonates through the fugitive sociality of Morrison and her

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readers’ impossible relation to Gardner persists. The barbarism of Beloved as black expression is excessive; not ‘inhuman’, but extra-human, or in-and-­without-the-human, as the novel not only tells us of a ghostly baby’s venom but itself is an apparitional object that cannot be bound by its references, its bindings, its author, or its reader. There is no subjective freedom, but there is fugitive social escape and the novel welcomes so much more despite the hostility of antiblackness, of the modern political ontology. This is all to say that not only do we find the themes and components of impossible hospitality on display in the narrative, plot, setting, or characters of the novel, but the novel itself is a conflagration of ethics and aesthetics that can be nothing other than a performance of the barbarism of black hospitality echoed through the repetitive subjection and resistance of black people as a token of black expression. Beloved is the echo of an indecipherable barbaric scream that cannot be silenced and finds a spectral presence in the most hostile and the most intimate moments of this novel. The scream is ultimately a hostile welcoming of the other into the impossible life that black expression offers as an ethics. Black expression, whether song, dance, fashion, literature, poetry, always has this potential ethical nature that Okiji correctly finds in jazz music. Beloved is not a fable or parable of virtue, or vice, nor is it a categorical imperative, or happiness calculator; it is an ethical-aesthetic irruption of barbaric proportions.

III. Black Hospitality in Beloved a. Extra-Ordinary Vulnerability There are innumerable themes and tropes in Morrison’s Beloved; however, the forever returning reality of vulnerability impresses itself upon the reader with unmatched intensity. Within the first three pages, Morrison, subtly and yet unmistakably, describes the protagonist Sethe exchanging ten minutes of sex for an engraving of a forever unfinished epitaph: “Beloved” (Morrison 1987, 5). I need not rehearse the arguments from Hartman, but only remind the reader that the captive black body, regulated by gratuitous violence, announces itself politically as a fungible object under antiblack racism. In this case we may presume this exchange results from a dearth of economic resources, but that is not definitive—it may very well be the only compensation the engraver was willing to except. In any case the vulnerability of black people knocks the breath out the reader

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at the very beginning and there is little opportunity as the story unravels to gain it back. The objectification and violation of the black body through sexual exploitation is only one manifestation of vulnerability which includes precarity of mental health, freedom, employment, emotions, and so on. However, sexual violence returns insistently throughout the novel. Her daughter Denver articulates the scope of this vulnerability explicitly, finally recognizing the feelings of her mother when she realizes, “that anybody white could take your whole self for anything that came to mind. Not just work, kill, or maim you, but dirty you” (Morrison 1987, 251). In her own words, Denver reiterates the relation of gratuitous violence to what I named extra-ordinary vulnerability in terms of sexual violence. That anybody white could do anything at any time for any reason is a vulnerability that police black people specifically beyond reason or limit, and to ‘dirty’ can be an analogy for the abject as a condition that reaches beyond physical violation to an entire state of impurity. Nevertheless, if we follow Sethe and her maternal lineage we read how sexual assault specifically is continuously employed to reify her objectification. Still in the very first chapter, Sethe recalls another sexual assault to Paul D, who was also a former slave at Sweet Home, and is the brother of Sethe’s now disappeared husband, Halle. As Sethe and Paul D refamiliarize themselves with each other, Sethe recalls an incident before she escaped to join her already departed children, where the sons of schoolteacher— the second man in charge of the Sweet Home plantation, who exhibited a particular calculated and instrumental, one may even say modern, ruthlessness—held Sethe down and ‘stole her milk’ from her breasts (Morrison 1987, 16). Sethe reiterates the trauma of this event over against the physical beating she received, which for Paul D was the highest transgression. The physical beating was one thing, but the molestation and stolen milk revealed another level that captures the spectrum of gender specific violence that took place. She goes on to recall the horror which her husband Halle endured, who had to watch with no recourse to retaliate, his impotency another understanding of vulnerability, but also the silence of Mrs. Garner, the wife of the former head of Sweet Home whom she attempted to confide in. The Garners are portrayed as particularly thoughtful masters, but Mrs. Garner’s silence reiterates the reality of slavery as not only a condition but a political ontological status, where even a seemingly benign master cannot resuscitate the abject non-relation that made black people extra-ordinarily vulnerable without upsetting the metaphysical and affective dynamics that secure the ‘Mrs.’ in Mrs. Garner.

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Following the maternal line, we also learn that Sethe’s mother, whom she has very sparse and vague recollection of, was also subject to sexual violence. Speaking to Beloved and Denver, Sethe recalls all she can from first-hand experience: seeing her  mother in the fields, learning of the marking on her chest, and that she was hung—perhaps for trying to flee— however, the knowledge of her mother’s rape comes from the wet nurse Nan, and again this lacuna of knowledge that reverts to storytelling highlights both a vulnerability in terms of precarity of knowledge creation and the openness of storytelling through the other within. “[Sethe’s] mother and Nan were together from the sea,” writes Morrison, “Both were taken up many times by the crew. ‘She threw them all away but you’” (Morrison 1987, 62). In addition to revealing to the reader a familial lineage of infanticide that narratively and temporally preceded Sethe’s own actions, we once again are reminded of the vulnerability of the black body that precedes, and even prevents any sort of arrival. The plantation may provide a logic and geography of capture, but blackness, in terms of both its vulnerability and its possibility, began before one touched land or was even sold. The metaphysical transformation of Africans to black is represented through the Middle Passage and the open sea provides an effective metaphor for the spatial, temporal, and metaphysical displacement and disorientation of blackness, of the black home. To be sure, while sexual exploitation is often associated with the assault committed by men upon women it is not lost on Morrison to explore the extent to which gender does not unilaterally determine the scope of antiblack sexual violence, even if it does index the techniques and disproportional uses. Paul D recalls his time in Alfred, Georgia, along a prison chain gang of black men who were forced to their knees in the morning to perform oral sex on the prison guards per demand. Some slaves chose to lose their life and Paul D recalls vomiting his first day and receiving a blow from the butt of a rifle in response. The events of sexual violation and its dispersal along gender identities can all be recounted in different ways; however, the novel form and Morrison’s storytelling opens up the affective well in a way that allows her to commune with the reader and the past through the depth of the characters and the lyricism of her prose. The constitutive resilience expressed both in the survival of Sethe, her mother, and that of Paul D is not exclusive or rooted in their individuality. We know that not everyone did in fact survive, and it was not necessarily by their choice or personal qualities. Whether speaking for and of Halle, Sethe’s siblings, the other men on the

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chain gang, or, in a way, the ‘sixty million and more’, black ‘survival’ speaks to the social excessive generosity of blackness that carries on in those fortuned characters whose story is told in first and third person, to Morrison herself, and the readers, who also are fortunate to come upon the generosity of blackness that is this story. Their treatment both is barbaric and yet belongs to an instrumental reason used for the maintenance of white supremacy; their survival, or better their life, is also the barbarism articulated in the previous section. This other side of extra-­ordinary vulnerability is the barbaric fugitive sociality of blackness. The story of Beloved and the novel form are not attempting to be firsthand true factual accounts even if portions of the story are inspired by documented events; nevertheless, the story and all its constitutive parts still relay an honesty about the condition of black people. Their varied extraordinary vulnerability speaks through the characters from the author to the reader and back, through time, space and the wide-open black silence that is in between. Of course, these examples are only a small snippet of the ways in which extra-ordinary black vulnerability manifest in Beloved. Whether it be the scene where we learn of Sixo’s burning (Morrison 1987, 226)—who yells out seven-o as he dies that can be read as another allusion to the futurity of racial violence—or schoolteacher’s demand of his sons to divide Sethe’s characteristics along the lines of human and beast (Morrison 1987, 193). The pervasiveness of antiblack vulnerability permeates not only the vicious white owners and their children, but also the benign slave owner and the black community on the outskirts of Cincinnati who do not warn Sethe about the arrival of the slave catchers (Morrison 1987, 157), or even Sethe’s own infanticide. Consistently and persistently the vulnerability of black people is exposed in Beloved and Morrison uses the novel form to trace the dynamism of this everyday vulnerability dramatically.

IV. The Black Home … 124 Bluestone Road Chapter 3 of this project rejects the modern liberal western conception of the subject and in its place was a conception of the black home that ruminated in the depths of the afro-pessimist tradition, but then ultimately turned to Fred Moten, and others, to articulate a conception of black fugitivity and sociality. The narrative and character construction proposed in Beloved exhibits an understanding of the black home as this alternative to traditional modern subjectivity. The paraontological status of blackness as fugitive and social emerges from the impossible reconciliation of

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blackness, black people, and antiblackness. Morrison uses literary devices, character development, and even introduces super-natural phenomena to emphasize the extent to which the self is extended beyond traditional parameters and attends to a fugitivity and sociality expressed through the black home. As we know the trope of the home for the self is nothing new; however, similar to Cynthia Willett’s understanding of Morrison’s use of home, where she contends, “The term ‘home’ names better than love or compassion the sense of connection that is for Morrison both spiritual and selfish and that compels the individual to encounter sources of meaning outside the self that also lie within” (Willett 2008, 36), the black home takes into account the dark history, present, and future of displacement, violence, and the consequent expressions of appeal to the others without through the other within that characterizes black hospitality.  a. The Space/Time of Beloved Beloved begins with the sentence, “124 was spiteful” (Morrison 1987, 3). And it certainly was. The house itself is the center of the tragic narrative of infanticide, assault, betrayal, and the haunting of different types of apparitions connected to a slavery that could never be all that  far away. The house belonged to a white man named Mr. Bodwin but was rented by Baby Suggs, who was bought her freedom by her son Halle some years previous. This mixed inheritance is also represented in the location of 124 Bluestone Road on the outer edge of slavery temporally and geographically. It is located near the Mason/Dixon line through its proximity to Cincinnati, Ohio and we are brought to it ten years after the proclamation emancipation, eight years after the end of the civil war, 18 years after Sethe’s arrival and infanticide. Emancipation is conceptualized as moving temporally forward and ordinally northward; away from a certain inflection of the black home that is the plantation, to a whole other type of devastation and haunting that would be created in the North. This is to say, the location of 124 Bluestone is in the North, but insomuch as it is on the edge or even the precipice of the South attends to the liminality and vulnerability of the escaped and freed slaves that occupy it. The liminal is another way to conceptualize black social spacing, the metaphorical freedom of the North is always on the edge of vulnerability. The fugitivity that gives black social life its robust character is predicated on its liminal relation to the vulnerability, as containment and objectification, it escapes and 124 brings this to life in literary form. 124 is the space and

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spacing for most of the action of the novel, and in that sense, as Yvette Chistiansë says, “the narrative emanates less from a character than from a place, a house saturated with spite” (Christiansë 2013, 3). The characters and the location are free in name, at times, but still subject to the intimate devastations of slavery nearby. Sethe’s act of infanticide that takes place in the woodshed of 124 calls attention to this liminal spatiality, her action is on the one hand that of a person free to choose to prevent the exploitation of slavery and, on the other hand, the unfreedom of slavery for herself and her children insomuch as the only ‘free’ choice she can make is to end life or return to slavery. In this sense, Sethe’s act takes place at a threshold: informally free, her actions take place at the limits of the free world and the enslaved through a black fugitive sociality found in her relationship with her children and against the slave catchers, both of whom she is always approaching and yet also running away from. This is the dark black social spacing that allows her actions to take place and make sense even though at the same time they do not and cannot make sense. Sethe’s decision at the threshold highlights a persistent doubling that takes place in the narrative in relation to this liminality. Michael Hogan describes 124 as, “a site riddled by paradox: both white house and black house, safe house and slaughterhouse” (Hogan 2010, 129). This kind of paradoxical doubling speaks specifically to the blackening of the home through vulnerability. Citing Hogan again, he states, “124 is dangerous because it promises what it cannot provide: refuge for its inhabitants. As a free-standing American house, it promises protection; as home to African American slaves, the disenfranchised and dehumanized, it cannot possibly deliver” (Hogan 2010, 130). Vulnerability permeates the house, which is to say the black home, and the occupants of 124 precisely because it is a house of but not for black people. Time and time again, we see how—or when—the home, even though a place of sociality and communion and remembrance of the past, is never safe for the occupants. Nancy Jesser hits the nail on the head when she exclaims, “As long as white people set the limits, African American attempts to transform their houses, their communities, and their minds into safe and open spaces remain subject to a re-assertion of the narrative of slavery” (Jesser 2004, 84). This means we cannot forget that these darkened foundations cannot be avoided by choice of location—north or south—which is why Morrison employs the useful tropes of limits and doublings. These tropes capture how black social spacing is both constricting and expanding within and beyond political death. In the words of Baby Suggs, “not a house in the

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country ain’t packed to its rafters with some dead Negro’s grief” (Morrison 1987, 5). This includes not only 124 Bluestone, but also Sweet Home, the plantation where Sethe meets her husband Halle, and where Baby Suggs lives with Halle and the rest of her sons until her freedom is bought. The irony of a plantation named Sweet Home is not lost on the reader or the occupants, especially inasmuch as Paul D and Baby Suggs, while acknowledging that Mr. Gardner, their original owner, treats them relatively well, that in the end they were slaves.3 Paul D infamously recalls that Garner proudly announced to other farmers that his niggers were men as opposed to boys and Paul D seemed to take that to heart, but in the end they were no free men and were still subject to working the land like any other slave (Morrison 1987, 11). Even Baby Suggs, who recites fond memories of the improved treatment of her sons and her ability to become free, realizes, nevertheless, “for the sadness was at her center, the desolated center where the self that was no self, made its home” (Morrison 1987, 140; author’s emphasis). ‘The self that is no self’, this doubling, results from those conditions of slavery that refuse her a sense of self, particularly the effects of her being separated from her children that she recites directly after the above quotation. The non-self that is Baby Suggs can only reside in the blackness that made her a home (in both senses), which is the site for sociality and fugitive escape amidst grave conditions.4 Morrison also traces the contours of the black home through her keen attention to temporality, most notably, the manner in which the past saturates the present and the future. As the story of Sethe, Paul D, the occupants of 124 and Sweet Home unravel, Morrison continually finds way to emphasize the way the slavery haunts them, that is, their identity, their choices, their sense of self. Within the first few pages, Morrison introduces one of the most memorable signifiers of slavery in the novel: the scars on Sethe’s back. Sethe introduces her scarred back to Paul D in the first chapter metaphorically as a chokecherry tree, which she explains was named by Amy Denver—who, we later learned, helped her escape into freedom while pregnant with Denver, who is Amy’s namesake. Paul D is confused by the reference at first, but eventually it becomes clear she is referencing her scarred back, which expresses not only the physical toil and vulnerability that she endured for her freedom and carries along with her to the present, all though she cannot see it because it is behind her, but also points to the future in its naming. The name, while appealing to a very real referent [Prunus virginiana], also holds within it the color of blood and a

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shrewd reference to the choking to death that takes place in tree lynchings, which was an all too popular terrorizing practice used during slavery (Sethe tells us her mother was lynched and Paul A is lynched), but also an important and significant referent to the racial violence and terror of reconstruction, Jim Crow, and even today. Sethe’s sense of self; therefore, cannot be reduced to her present status as a ‘freed’ slave; instead, she carries on her back a haunting reality of the violence she endured, she is threatened to endure, and that threatens her future through her immediate children, and family to come, who too cannot breathe. In Sethe’s body, in her physical self, the long trajectory of antiblack racism exists and affects her reality. She will not leave or run from 124 anymore she exclaims to Paul D, just as she cannot leave behind or run from her scar (Morrison 1987, 15). This characterization of Sethe speaks to the conception of the other-within of black sociality—it is the other of a degraded black history and unpromised futurity that is always escaping the grasps, always on the back of the host of the black home  as time goes on for herself and/as other/s. Sethe, the impossible domestic, will make a home of what she has and let history as antiblackness come as it always does. The scar represents the limitations of her choices, the branches an attempt to collapse the black body into itself like long arms, but the scar is also an acknowledgment of where the potentialities of decisions—never quite her own—may come from, that is, from the depths and intervals of an inescapable black escape. That tree represents the infinite machinations of antiblackness that continue to bloom year after year, following black people wherever, whenever. Sethe’s scar and its inventive naming represents only one of various techniques that Morrison uses to highlight the non-linear temporality of the black home, the encircling whirl wind of black domesticity. Time passes through the bodies and homes of its occupants, some of whom are alive and others of who are dead. Beloved, the namesake of the book and an apparitional figure, does the most significant work and is the most tangible figure used by Morrison to emphasize how history, personal and impersonal, come to affect the construction of the black home. The victim of infanticide, Beloved is Sethe’s third child and slain daughter. She is the apparitional object that is present by her absence in 12(3)4 Bluestone Road. She instigates the departure of Sethe’s sons and is banished once, by Paul D.  She is also the complex young woman that comes to occupy and consume 124, until she is made to disappear, once again.5 Beloved’s multiple forms of presence and

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absence in 124 come to determine Sethe’s sense of self through a fugitive black sociality that is shared but never quite there, manifested in the impossible circumstances she has faced as a mother, a slave, and an escaped black woman. We first learn of Beloved on the first page of the novel as she, in the form of a ghost, scares away Sethe’s boys. While initially nameless, we soon learn her name as it is partially carved into a gravestone. Sethe is not completely straightforward with Paul D about the cause of Beloved’s death when he arrives at 124 and eventually frees the house from the apparition (or the apparition from the house). However, we learn soon enough she is indeed the third child of Sethe, killed in an effort to be saved from slavery by her mother. It is clear this decision made by her mother does not rest easy for the dead child and she stayed at 124 in apparition form as a constant reminder to her mother, her sister, and to the reader of how the horrors of slavery and the impossible decisions it demands weigh heavily and do not simply disappear. The extent to which the non-physical form of Beloved, and the many “rememories” she begets, determine the actions of the characters does not go missed.6 Beloved’s destructive haunting fits in the house and the rememory of Beloved’s death, which is a form of haunting itself, has left the remaining women of 124, Denver and Sethe, seemingly isolated. For ten years these women are apart from their community by physical, emotional, and spiritual exclusion, which to some extent is the result of the stoic pride of Sethe and to some extent is the petty pride and condemnation of the rest. The physically non-present form of Beloved that ravages 124 appears to be strictly a reminder and punishment for her murder, the vengeful response of a young child that paid the ultimate cost for circumstances truly beyond her comprehension. This of course darkens the home in a very specific way, highlighting for the reader one specific event that has paralyzed Sethe. Beloved dis-embodies an impossible domesticity  as the outlaw that sets the laws of the house and Sethe carries that responsibility. However, when the apparition arrives in the physical form, the black home darkens considerably more, as we come to see how Beloved and her infanticide carry the burden of slavery through a line of mother-daughter relationships that make sociality and fugitivity seem almost impossible when confronted with the flesh. Beloved returns in her physical form to 124 shortly after Paul D’s exorcism of her non-physical existence. While at first enjoying a relationship with both a Sethe broken by guilt and rememories and an 18-year-old

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Denver stunted by living in isolation for years, Beloved becomes increasingly obsessed with Sethe, demanding all of her attention and sustenance until in the final chapters Sethe is barely functional, expending all her energy attempting to prove her love and rid her guilt. She is completely overwhelmed and consumed by the physical rememory of Beloved as she reduces Sethe to the limits of her physical individualized self. However, Morrison makes clear as the narrative moves that the Beloved that returns is not simply Sethe’s slain daughter. Instead, we see how Beloved extends the temporal dynamics of the black home to the slave ship itself, underlining the significance of the Middle Passage. Readers and commenters of Beloved cannot help but home in on the significance of the dynamic personhood of Beloved. Reverence for this dynamism focuses specifically on how Sethe’s returned slain daughter embodies both an allusion to a future that is always in jeopardy for black people and a history that may be forever anchored in their hearts. The former allusion is to Beloved the victim of infanticide whose life was taken too quickly, and the latter allusion is the Beloved that recalls the imagery and experience of being in the hull of a slave ship. The apparitional quality of even this physically present Beloved speaks directly to the literary strategies Morrison employs to tell this story. The ghosts and skeletons of slavery that have gone unaddressed or ignored and that continue to plague black people even today are provided a sophisticated and poignant conduit through the character of Beloved, who, in light of the unimaginable horror of slavery and its aftermath, could really only be conjured fantastically in different forms. Beloved’s return addresses a primary issue of the novel that runs directly through Sethe and the infanticide, but also runs through the other protagonists in different ways, namely how does one deal with the past that is slavery, how are they constituted through this othering within. For Sethe, particularly as a mother, in a social normative position that begets life and must make the difficult choice of having children—or just as possibly not make the choice—under a regime of terror, her memories weigh heavily on the maternal lineage she finds herself in. Rossita Terzieva-Artemis articulates the difficulty of Sethe’s task concisely, writing, “[For] Sethe as a mother what is at stake is the ability to overcome memory, but paradoxically, without losing this memory, and simultaneously, to survive in the and against the rememorying of the past” (Terzieva-Artemis 2010, 193). As a mother, Sethe sees herself as having a special responsibility for her children, not only for Beloved, who had been sacrificed, but also for

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Denver, who too suffers under the circumstances of 124, and Howard and Buglar who attempted to escape again. Sethe cannot simply forget her past—Beloved will not allow her to—so her character leads her into the struggles of a mother trying to work through her memories by means of a black fugitive sociality—which is not easy, no one said it would be easy—as opposed to simply reject them or return to them alone in the way a traditional agent may be compelled to try and do. Not only does Beloved open this opportunity by returning in fantastic form, which Sethe tries and ultimately fails to appease on her own, but Beloved does this also by returning as a captive African woman who has endured the Middle Passage.7 A large constituency of commenters have come to agree that indeed Morrison intends the returned Beloved to be not only the daughter that has come back from the other side but also an African woman, who describes her travels from Africa in the hull of the ship. In Part II, where Beloved provides her only first person  account, of  an event that has no resources for a first person witness, she describes herself as crouching, as there never being a time when she is not crouching and how a dead man lays upon her, how light pierces through cracks—presumably from the deck of the ship—and how ‘men without skin’ push other people off the ship, presumably unsellable because of their physical and mental degradation (Morrison 1987, 210–213). It is generally accepted that Morrison attributes this past and history to Beloved to emphasize the universal context for black Americans of the tragic decision made by Margaret Garner and the novel that it inspired. Beloved thus is not just Sethe’s daughter or mother—who we may recall from above, performed her own infanticide— but instead, as Deborah Horvitz explains, “Beloved stands for every African woman whose story will never be told. She is the haunting symbol of the many Beloveds—generations of mothers and daughters—hunted down and stolen from Africa; as such, she is, unlike mortals, invulnerable to barriers of time, space, and place” (Horvitz 1998, 93). Beloved, thus, stokes the fire of a history that is both broad and yet never fully present and it demands of the characters and the readers to recognize that the horrors of black people’s past cannot be forgotten even if they cannot be remembered. This history affects decision making and self-conception and thus insight can be gained from Cynthia Willett, who asserts, “the ghost from the Middle Passage is part projection, but she is also part real … the soul extends outwards beyond itself and its time” (Willett 2001, 206). One can interpret Willett’s contention in terms of the black home, and how black

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Americans embody and ground their identity and capacities within the history of slavery, in the depth of the hull of ship. There is no other way to understand the conditions in which black people find themselves, the actions and decisions that they make or befall them, without this history in mind. In this respect, the ‘other within’ cannot be simply sublated, Sethe cannot dialectically overpower Beloved as mother or daughter, nor can she have them overwhelm her.8 Instead, there is a not so hidden fugitive sociality between the characters that sees a mutual deconstruction of identity, an orientation toward the contradicted subject, a world beyond present construction. Rossita Terzieva-Artemis explains this relationship to the past incisively: Morrison … demonstrates that there is no placebo effect of forgetting, and, equally, no remembrance can effectively silence a sore memory that sometimes outcries the deed itself. Thus, the rememorying of the past is breaking up with the present and, equally, breaking up with the impossible future of forgetting. (Terzieva-Artemis 2010, 193)

Sethe’s relationship to Beloved and even the reader’s relationship to the novel and to the history of slavery more generally is an opened ended back and forth practice of acknowledgement and self-destruction that affects the prospects of self-understanding and action in the future as much as the present. One cannot outrun one’s past; instead, black people are in constant negotiation with it through fugitive movement. It is impossible to discuss the different components of the black home in discrete categories. Space overlaps, contaminates, and stretches out time, which as we see above is also an allusion to the other within described differentially through metaphor and stylistic prose, which is also a main component of fugitive black social spacing. The black home escapes the over saturated confines of a political ontology of death by simultaneously begetting a paraontological fugitive black sociality that is often still dark, a spacing that is always on the move in time and space. As we have already seen and will continue to see, the paraontological slide that begets the possibility of black sociality moves between the impossible reconciliation of the black slave and fugitive blackness. With that said, there remains the scenes at 124 on the edge of Cincinnati, where the ‘freed’ blacks of this community play a persistent and necessarily shifting role in the understanding of a dynamic fugitive black sociality as celebration. There are two sequences to consider: first the events that

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follow Sethe’s arrival 18 years previous to when the novel starts that lead to the death of Beloved and secondly the last exorcism of Beloved. After a truly trying escape from Sweet Home, Sethe arrived at a lively, supportive 124 Bluestone Road; it appeared as if she was accepted into the community with nothing short of genuine hospitality and as such the potentiality for a sense of self and community not completely over determined by slavery, perhaps, seemed to be a possibility. Her sons Howard and Buglar arrived before her when 124 Bluestone was still central to this community of former slaves and Baby Suggs, the ‘unchurched preacher’, brought community and warmth in her sermons in the Clearing. The Clearing invokes as much of the black home as 124 itself; both in its name, that is, the clearing out of light by a fugitive social  blackness, but also in  Baby Suggs’ infamous sermon which brought the community closer through a contiguous, weeping, laughing, dancing, flesh in the translucent shadow of an escaping blackness. However, by the time Paul D arrived, the house and the Clearing was barren and isolated by the rest of the community. The tides of hospitality and generous community began to shift after an impromptu dinner at 124. What began as simply an occasion to make a few pies—thanks to an excursion by Stamp Paid to retrieve strawberries—turned into a feast for 90 people and the mere abundance—which was once cherished in the Clearing—of “laughter, goodwill, and food for ninety, made them angry” (Morrison 1987, 137). The community was resentful of Baby Suggs’ generosity. To  host such an event  was too prideful and at  the root of this resentment, of course, is slavery. There are suggestions that Baby Suggs probably was not beaten the same as the other black people, also she lived in the home owned by the white Bodwins, and she had not even escaped but was bought and given free papers. Her “reckless generosity” and “uncalled-for pride” led to the feeling from the community that Baby Suggs did not have the proper history, the true credentials, and this allowed her to apparently act as if slavery was not literally around the corner (Morrison 1987, 137). When fugitive blackness absconds and celebration is nigh, positive affects are not guaranteed—its escape is always as much as a pulling apart as it is a pulling together. While counter-intuitive, this genuine affective response by the community follows from black celebration in as much as it gives social life to the black condition and experience. Black celebration is not the act of celebrating anything; it’s not the joyous feeling that often accompanies celebration, but it illuminates the reality of black

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paraontological being so that this community can hold itself together in light of and despite of Baby Sugg’s generosity, from the Clearing to 124 and back. Nancy Jesser contends that the community is looking for an equality of pain and oppression, not freedom and blessing and therefore, she explains, “the very openness and generosity, which demanded a structural change in the white-owned two-story house, became the source of Baby Sugg’s isolation from the community” (Jesser 2004, 82, 79). In other words, her generosity, her hospitality, is taken as hostility, and even though the resentment is expressed by black people, it is undoubtedly rooted in the metaphysics of antiblackness from which blackness escapes. Black fugitive sociality is part in parcel of this affective response by the community because of its generosity and social dynamism, when it gives there is no governor to limit how it can be experienced. Blackness escapes the individual and the community, providing enough difference to incorporate the good, the bad, and the ugly that is always lurking beyond the precipice of any black person’s self-realization through and as other(s). Fugitive black sociality as celebration is possibility and generosity beyond identity, but as such it is always and necessarily vulnerable to the violence of the other’s capacity to over determine the dark past of black people as their identity. This get-together was the beginning of a long-term isolation that includes Sethe’s infanticide of Beloved. Sethe had been there only 28 days when schoolteacher, a nephew, the sheriff, and a slave catcher—the apocalyptic four horsemen—arrived. For black sociality there can never be the prospect of something like mutual recognition and Amy Green believes Baby Suggs’ get together was an affront to this vulnerability, she explains, “Baby Suggs transgresses by setting too much stock in the future, by displaying a ‘reckless generosity’ … Baby Suggs inadvertently offends by placing too much stock in hope, by loving too much at a time when nothing could be counted on” (Green 2010, 122). Again, this is an instance where the unwieldy, untamed, ‘reckless generosity’ of blackness, represented by this gift from Baby Suggs, also highlights the paraontological tension of  black people and blackness. And while we understand that blackness posits possibility, the conditions in which it does, through the memories and effects of slavery, framed by this expression of gratuity, sets into motion a return to tragic events that could never be sublated. The constitutive risk of black sociality comes about all too clearly when Sethe saw the apocalyptic arrival of schoolteacher and his gang. Nancy Jesser puts it succinctly when she explains, “Momentarily, the house is

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successful in providing a protected space for the community … But when the yard is invaded by slavery’s institutional forces, triggering Sethe’s desperate actions, the house becomes both an unapproachable and inescapable space—hard” (Jesser 2004, 77). Following the infanticide, Sethe’s relation to the community and her sense of self that emerges is one of isolation or stoicism as Willett contends, the home is a “hard space” to live in (Willett 2001). They did not like Baby Suggs’ sense of pride with her feast and this feast led the community to turn their heads when schoolteacher arrived instead of warning the people of 124 that trouble was on the prowl (Morrison 1987, 157). They did not like Sethe’s sense of pride either, as she was taken away and arrested with her head held high. In her exclusion from formal and casual relations within the community she does not have strong formative and comforting bonds to buttress her sense of self. This sequence of events does not destroy black social fugitivity; it only highlights the impossible dimensions of its precarious and disappearing contours as configured through the black home that is always a gathering and separating through space and time. Beloved’s second exorcism bookends this prior sequence and fills out the turbulent dynamics of fugitive black sociality. By the end of the novel Beloved had all but consumed Sethe physically and spiritually. Beloved would spend time with Denver, but eventually she turned all her attention to Sethe, who would appease any desire of hers in the hopes of making up for her choice 18 years previously. But  Beloved is a desire with no real object. She began to boss Sethe around and speak of the horrors of the other side and terrorize the family. She was the embodied physical rememory of the impossible limits of antiblackness that had pushed Sethe and as Beloved grew in size, to the point of appearing pregnant and even appearing to be her mother, Sethe shrank physically (Morrison 1987, 150). Her physical  body and non-physical sense of self shrank as she was isolated from a more robust understanding and engagement with  fugitive  black sociality. The tides of sociality and generosity finally return in a more affirmative light when Denver has had enough and at 18 years old decides she must venture back into town, reestablish a link with the community, and began to provide for Sethe and Beloved. Jesser explains, “Denver must ‘go out of the yard’ … hell isn’t others; others are the only defense. When Denver leaves the yard and approaches Lady Jones … she sets into motion a process that brings sustenance to 124 and begins to reintegrate Denver into the larger community through a network of generosity” (Jesser 2004, 88). The recommencing of community does not offer a break from the

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political ontology of social death but shows how an embrace of and attunement towards fugitive black sociality can turn toward the other worldly character of blackness which can embody a deep reservoir of affective responses. We see this embrace at its apex when the rest of the women of the community catch word from Denver—who breached the threshold of the blood family—that Beloved is terrorizing Sethe and they decide to act. Led by Ella they head to 124 and when they arrive, they are reminded of the times of Baby Suggs’ hospitality. Among this community of women, a hazy Sethe goes to attack Mr. Bodwin, whom she mistakenly believes will take her Beloved. Instead of infanticide, she chooses to attack the confused identity of this white man because he could be any white man, any white being, any human being, any slave catcher, any police officer. And this time she is surrounded physically and in spirit by the fugitive black community that welcomed her and she welcomed all those years ago. With this welcoming/hostile gesture, Beloved disappears although she could never be forgotten. This is another commencement of the same old black celebration.

V. Barbaric Black Hospitality Thus far the act of infanticide performed by Sethe, inspired by the real-life story of Margaret Garner, has been discussed, but not in terms of the central argument of this project, namely the register of ethics. Sethe chose to take her child’s life rather than submit to schoolteacher and his posse and return to slavery. This of course is a terribly difficult action to  frame  in terms of an ethical judgment, if not impossible. It is far from just a spin on the classic trolley problem. Nevertheless, Deborah Horvitz argues for two mutually exclusive paths to consider morally in this act: either Sethe is completely accountable for the child’s death or slavery alone killed Beloved (Horvitz 1998, 97). This is far too simplistic. It does not take into full account the complexity of the condition of blackness described throughout this project as both overdetermined by a political ontology  of antiblackness and rooted in a paraontological fugitive blackness. The relation of these two spheres would make Horvitz’s perspective too reductive, too Manichean, in scope. Terry Otten and Cynthia Willett provide two remarks more fitting, although perhaps in more complex ways than they intended. The former contends, “Sethe could not have remained innocent no matter what she chose” (Otten 1989, 90), and the latter writes, “The extremity of the circumstances of the sacrifice makes it impossible to

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decide the ethical character of the act” (Willett 2001, 222). Black hospitality, as described in Chap. 4 , attempts to capture the specific valence of these two characterizations. On the one hand, the condition of antiblackness criminalizes blackness as always already transgressive and, therefore, it is insightful how Terry Otten recognizes that there is no non-transgressive response for the  black  host.  On the other hand,  Cynthia Willet, correctly identifies impossibility as a defining characteristic, although for black hospitality impossibility is structural and not just the effect of contingently extreme circumstances. Impossibility is not  a metaphor for a uniquely high gradation of circumstantial challenges to the decision, like a complication of the trolley problem. The impossibility follows from the limits of an agency prohibited by political circumstances that lead to aporia: the demand for complete openness that is embodied in the former-yet-always-a-slave positionality of Sethe and her children and the reality that any attempt to articulate a response must be interpreted as hostile to the conditions as they are currently constructed, that is, an escaped object. Schoolteacher and his three henchmen consider Sethe and her children property to be returned. When they arrive at 124, there is little doubt they demand complete and utter unconditional openness from Sethe insomuch as she and her children are first and foremost fungible objects regardless of any sentient qualities they may express. This vulnerability qua object is undeniable, but the act of transgression, the circumstances to which it may be possible for one to understand the infanticide as an act of unconditional hospitality is more than difficult—it is in fact barbaric. The act of infanticide is undeniably a transgression of law—it is murder; furthermore, as a slave, and even more so as a runaway slave, any action or sign of agency by this property could and would be seen as transgressive to their status as objects, as criminal to their status as slaves and yet  insofar as agency is only afforded in criminal actions, her criminality is acknowledged by the very nature of its transgressive quality, this highlights the fugitivity of blackness. Moreover, even if Sethe willfully complied, it is not hard to imagine the resentment in schoolteacher for even having to show up. Lastly, Sethe’s act in particular, the killing of her baby, is ultimately seen as the destruction of schoolteacher’s property which is perhaps the most egregious interpretation of this action as an offense in terms of antiblack political ontology.9 Returning to Terry Otten, they capture the peculiarity of this political-ethical circumstance when writing, “The moral authority of Beloved resides less in a revelation of the

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obvious horrors of slavery than in a revelation of slavery’s nefarious ability to invert moral categories and behavior and to impose tragic choice” (Otten 1989, 83). There indeed is a moral inversion taking place: what if we understand Sethe’s hostility, which is understood formally as the infanticide, as a gesture of hospitality, as welcoming of the other into the black home, through a decision of the other within the black home? The infanticide circulates and circumscribes the entire story of Beloved and in this sense every character, scene, and act must be seen through the reverberations of this impossible decision. Unlike a Kierkegaardian dilemma of the existential choice to kill Isaac, the impossible decision that Sethe must make and that she does make is not her own leap of faith, but an experience whereby an entire fugitive sociality participates in the ‘barbaric’ act to live and let die. Morrison tells us in reference to ‘this incident’ that “the questions about community and individuality were certainly inherent in that incident as I Imagined it. When you are the community, when you are your children, when that is your individuality, there is no division” (Morrison 1993, 177). There is no division. You and I included. The narrative structure of Beloved, complimented by the novel form, where the temporality and spatiality of slavery continuously loops around this act from before and after, South to North to South again, until neither Beloved nor Sethe nor the reader can breathe, articulates how none of the characters of and outside of the community, before or after the act, the author, nor the reader can simply put the past behind them or the future in front of them. They too make this decision or rather this decision makes them, this cut that separates every page and every word and opens up a wound that could never heal and asks everyone to continue to listen to this story where an unbearable barbaric blackness sounds off. This mandates that we do not see Sethe’s decision as good or bad, right or wrong, but as a fugitive criminal cry from and for a different ethical universe altogether, a difference that can only be seen in and through blackness against the shadow of the ‘enlightened’ humans that always already forged these circumstances. This mandate can be found in Morrison’s story, in the characters, the structure, the setting, the plot and the style. Black expressiveness, as exemplified in the dramatized rewriting, rereading, and retelling of Margaret Garner, opens up the absurdity of a western antiblack regime in a way that is most contradictory and illuminative of black ethical life, that is, in light of its darkness. With fear and trembling, the other within invites the other without into the barbarism of the black home, which is generous enough

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for murderers, saviors, murder/saviors,  unlearned preachers, musicians, dancers, dancing, children, laughter, tears. Fugitive black sociality offers this invitation that was already sent through Sethe’s own mother and will be sent again by many of the impossible domestics who open the door of the black home they would never own, for their children to enter a hostile world that needs to objectify them but cannot retain them. Truly barbaric, this is a story of unconditional hospitality.

Notes 1. In regarding life, Adorno continues, “But it is not wrong to raise the less cultural question whether after Auschwitz you can go on living—especially whether one who escaped by accident, one who by rights should have been killed, may go on living” (T. W. Adorno 1973, 363). Here Adorno’s question of life is not the question of what to make of the living dead, the (politically) dead as blackness was described above, but of the condition of guilt after the luck of surviving or the specter of death in a world of nuclear weapons and instrumental reason. The barbarism of living after Auschwitz places the moral burden of guilt on the survivors. For blackness it is not a matter of guilt or shame of those left living (although that too exists), but of the generosity of those who are the (politically) dead. 2. We find Adorno’s critique of instrumental reason as a product of the Enlightenment most memorably in Dialectic of Enlightenment written with Max Horkheimer, but we see a more tempered critique also in his Aesthetic Lectures from 1958 to 1959, where he explores the dialectical tension between art and nature, as the former attempts to free the latter from hegemonic instrumental reason even if the former is itself a form of instrumental reason. Or as he writes, “art’s attempt to object to the ever-advancing control of nature itself involves an element of that control, and as very ­substantial, a truly central aspect” (T. W. Adorno, Aesthetics 2018, 50). The dialectical tension between art as reason attempting to escape reason makes the artists task extremely difficult and their influence even smaller as they too are beholden to the historical circumstances from which they wish to contest in the name of a nature that they want to release from their control. 3. Paul D says so explicitly when reminiscing with Sethe of their past, “It wasn’t sweet and it sure wasn’t’ home” (Morrison 1987, 14). 4. I do not want the violent history of slavery to completely overdetermine the black home of Beloved, and as we will see below, there is the possibility for a space of sociality. I therefore agree with Nancy Jesser, who recognizes both sides of the coin, when she explains, “The story itself … embodies a system and process by which houses, which are born out of violence and (repeated)

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trauma, which preserve memory and history, can be transformed into homes where violence need not be the only source of connection … The home is a place where horror becomes embodied, and where sustaining humans’ connections can be found” (Jesser 2004, 76). 5. In this respect I disagree with Elizabeth B.  House, who does not believe Beloved is this multivalent existence, but rather is a young woman who had escaped slavery traumatized and stumbled upon 124 (House 1998). 6. Sethe uses the term rememory to take into account specifically poignant events in her history that she cannot let go of; one may say living-history or living memory. Jan Furman provides a helpful description of rememories as moving the opposite direction than normal memory, in as much as memory bridges present to past, while rememories carry the past to the present. She says, “Re-memories often replace existing life, becoming more authentic than the present” (Furman 1998). 7. Jennifer Holden-Kirwan argues that indeed Beloved is not only the returned daughter but Sethe’s African mother from the fact that the melody that Beloved hears in the Middle Passage and recites in Sethe’s home is the same melody that Sethe hears as a child while in the presence of her mother and/ or her mother’s people (Holden-Kirwan 1998, 420). 8. Mag G. Henderson agrees with this maternal ordering and its use to project a lineage to the past when she writes, “The image of motherhood function heuristically to explain or ‘trace’ Sethe’s history and that of the community along ‘motherlines’” (Henderson 1999, 95). 9. Margaret Garner was, in fact, charged with destruction of property and returned to slavery (May 1999).

References Adorno, Theodor W. 1973. Negative Dialectics. Trans. E.B. Ashton. New York: The Continuum International Publishing Group. ———. 2000. Cultural Criticism and Society. In The Adorno Reader, ed. Brian O’Connor, 195–210. Malden: Blackwell Publishing. ———. 2005. Minima Moralia: Reflection on a Damaged Life. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. New York: Verso. ———. 2018. Aesthetics. Ed. Eberhard Ortland and Trans. Wieland Hoban. Cambridge: Polity Press. Childs, Dennis. 2009. “You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet”: Beloved, the American Chain Gang, and The Middle Passage Remix. American Quarterly 61 (2): 271–297. Christiansë, Yvette. 2013. Toni Morrison: An Ethical Poetics. New York: Fordham University Press.

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Furman, J. 1998. Sethe’s Rememories: The Covert Return of What Is Best Forgotten. In Critical Essays on Toni Morrison’s Beloved, ed. Barbara H. Solomon. New York: G.K. Hall & Co. Green, A. 2010. Crying, Dancing, Laughing: The Breaking and Reunification of Community in Beloved. In Critical Insights: Toni Morrison, ed. S. Iyasere and M. Iyasere. Pasadena: Salem Press. Henderson, M. 1999. Toni Morrison’s Beloved: Re-membering the Body as Historical Text. In Toni Morrison’s Beloved: A Casebook, ed. W. Andrews and N. McKay. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hogan, M. 2010. Built on Ashes: The Fall of the House of Sutpen and the Rise of the House of Sethe. In Critical Insights: Toni Morrison, ed. S.  Iyasere and M. Iyasere. Pasadena: Salem Press. Holden-Kirwan, J. 1998. Looking into the Self that Is No Self: An Examination of Subjectivity in Beloved. African American Review 32 (3): 415–450. Horkheimer, Max, and W.  Theodor Adorno. 2002. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr and Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Horvitz, D. 1998. Nameless Ghosts: Possession an Dispossession in Beloved. In Critical Essays on Toni Morrison’s Beloved, ed. B.  Solomon. New  York: G. K. Hall & Co. House, E. 1998. Toni Morrison’s Ghost: The Beloved Who Is Not Beloved. In Critical Essays on Toni Morrison’s Beloved, ed. B.  Solomon. New  York: G. K. Hall & Co. Jesser, N. 2004. Violence, Home and Community. In Bloom’s Guides: Toni Morrison’s Beloved, ed. H. Bloom. Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers. May, S. 1999. Margaret Garner and Seven Others. In Toni Morrison’s Beloved A Case Book, ed. W. Andrews and N. McKay. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McKay, N. 1999. Toni Morrison, ‘Site of Memory’. In Toni Morrison’s Beloved: A Casebook, ed. W. Andrews and N. McKay. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Morrison, Toni. 1987. Beloved. New York: Vintage Books. ———. 1993. Living Memory: A Meeting with Toni Morrison. In Small Acts: Thoughts on the Politics of Black Cultures, ed. Paul Gilroy, 175–182. New York: Serpents Tail Publishing. ———. 1994. Unspeakable things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature. In Within the Circle, ed. Angelyn Mitchell. Durham: Duke University Press. Okiji, Fumi. 2018. Jazz as Critique: Adorno and Black Expression Revisited. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Otten, T. 1989. The Crime of Innocence in the Fiction of Toni Morrison. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. Sale, M. 1998. Call and Response as Critical Method: African American Oral Traditions and Beloved. In Critical Essays on Toni Morrison’s Beloved, ed. B. Solomon. New York: G. K. Hall & Co.

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Terzieva-Artemis, R. 2010. In Search of New Subjectivity: Identity in the Novels of Toni Morrisons. In Critical Insights: Toni Morrison, ed. S.  Iyasere and M. Iyasere. Pasadena: Salem Press. Wilderson III, Frank B. 2010. Red, White, and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms. Durham: Duke University Press. Willett, Cynthia. 2001. The Soul of Justice: Social Bonds and Racial Hubris. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. ———. 2008. Irony in the Age of Empire: Comic Perspectives on Democracy and Freedom. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.

CHAPTER 6

An Epilogue on Friendship

I couldn’t help but notice what appeared to be a passing smile when Frank Wilderson, in an interview promoting his latest book Afropessimism, explained to the interviewer how he enjoyed an endorsement, or ‘blurb’, to this new project that was from none other than Fred Moten. Now, of course, there is no real good reason not to believe these two thinkers of blackness would not be admirable of each other’s work. Chapter 3 of this book may imply a different conclusion, as, admittedly, the two thinkers are set up as theoretical interlocutors engaged in the most serious of debates, that of black life, and maybe, just maybe, to some readers this chapter was to be read as recreating the fundamental antagonism that characterizes one of the main insights of Wilderson’s work. In that chapter, I described Wilderson’s reflections on the antagonism of blackness and non-blackness as akin to the friend/enemy Schmittian distinction. But Wilderson’s humility in the face of Moten’s endorsement, this scene of friendship, is not one side of the friend/enemy distinction, the ‘either you with us or against us’ type of friendship. From my perspective it is—if I may borrow Moten’s qualifier—a kind of fugitive friendship. I can think of other faint smiles that trace this idea of fugitive friendship. One began at a conference where I shared an early version of Chap. 3 and a black scholar approached me, an unsure, uneasy, graduate student, and encouraged me to pursue these ideas and also to think more about Wilderson’s arguments on domesticity. This was the final semester of grad

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school and I had not had the chance to incorporate her suggestions into the dissertation; however, I do remember, when returning to that chapter, getting a chance to see a blurb by this very same scholar on an important book to this project and I could not help but smile. This smile was reciprocated years later as I sat, where I do now while completing this project, and listened to a great panel with this scholar. I felt compelled to ask a question, maybe motivated by the ever-pervasive misplaced desire for recognition, but when the moderator read my question, I think I saw a smile on her face and heard one in her response. I have no idea if this occurred, but that’s not important. Her apparitional smile was part of a tremendous invisible arc in which our two paths were included for a small moment. It was the tracing of a fugitive friendship. Not all friendships are met with smiles; some are met with scowls. That’s at least what I hear in Aretha Franklin’s returned greeting to Otis Redding, which she spells R.E.S.P.E.C.T. It is probably hard to imagine Franklin’s rendition of “Respect” as a gesture of friendship in any traditional sense. And yet, what else could it be. Fugitive friendships hold difference and sameness together by means of an impossible proximity. Franklin need not change a single word to make this song totally different, while being the same, while being more honest. Her strident demands overpower Redding’s almost pitiful pleas while singing the same lyrics heard again. If you still doubt this as a gesture of friendship, listen to Redding himself at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, who prefaces his performance of “Respect” by saying, “This song is a song that a girl took away from me. A good friend of mine … This song she just took this song, but I’m still going to do it anyway” (Redding 1967). It’s hard to say that she took anything from Redding, but something substantial escaped for Redding in her rendition. Her response was soft in terms of the signifier traces, but loud in terms of the signified. This is nothing more, nor nothing less than the friendship I have in mind. Maybe you do not believe, or understand, where I am going, or where I am coming from, but I'm still going to do it anyway.  By fugitive friendship I do not mean to isolate or idealize the random, unforeseen, or imagined intramural interactions of black people or the figurative call and response of renowned black singers. Fugitivity is far too capacious to settle on any examples. In fact, it precedes and exceeds any traditional friendship  anyways, any relationship, even the most intimate, like parent to child. One of the most formative observations on friendship for myself is found in Love in the Time of Cholera by

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Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Fermina Daza, in an unhappy marriage, gives birth to her first child, who was her only source of solace in her isolation. As Garcia Marquez explains: She took refuge in her newborn son. She had felt him leave her body with a sensation of relief at freeing herself from something that did not belong to her, and she had been horrified at herself when she confirmed that she did not feel the slightest affection for that calf from her womb the midwife showed her in the war, smeared with grease and blood and with the umbilical cord rolled around his neck. But in her loneliness in the palace she learned to know him, learned to know each other, and she discovered with great delight that one does not love one’s children just because they are one’s children but because of the friendship formed while raising them. (García Márquez 1988)

Daza finds refuge in the love she has from her child, not because of birth, but because of that most intimate friendship. Perhaps the violence of natal alienation that constitutes black people’s experience in America is not simply that one’s child can be taken away at any moment or that no kinship relations are respected in any biological register, but the violence is that of a denial of friendship, a denial of growing together with the other and apart from the self. Perhaps also this violence highlights the inherent fugitivity of all relationships, all family relations, all friendships. And not to mention the kind of violence of those vignettes from the introduction. Who am I to recount those lives and deaths in the name of hospitality? What violence would it be to call them friends, even in this black, fugitive, sense? And what of the endless black people who I did not, could not name. There is something deeply unsettling about how we are compelled to remember every name, every date, of the deceased. How we create a rolodex of horror in our memory just in the hopes of remembering … potential friendships, forever lost friendships. The demand of black hospitality from the other within to other without does not come from anyone, out of anywhere. Nevertheless, it is a demand to make friendships a little less precarious without so we can embrace the precarity within. This is neither positive nor negative, neither joyous nor somber. This project was never a project of redemption, to redeem black lives from political death. It shares the unknown, the unescapable escape of a blackness that tethers us together and also keeps us apart from

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ourselves and one another. No longer a politics of the friend and enemy, it would be an ethics of the fugitive friendships of black ethical life. These friendships lead with neither an optimism nor pessimism, nor even hopefulness; they are a terrific, sublime welcoming of all and many. It may be all uphill from here, but that is better than all downhill from over there. So come as you will, stay as long as you can, take all that you can carry; let’s dance and smile and scowl together again.

References García Márquez, Gabriel. 1988. Love in the Time of Cholera. Trans. Edith Grossman. New York: Vintage Books. Redding, Otis. 1967. “Respect” Live at Monterey Pop Festival 1967. Performed by Otis Redding. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7BDw-­H_hUzw

Index1

A Abject, 26, 37, 39, 41, 44, 45, 47, 48, 52, 54, 57, 59, 60, 64, 78, 82, 83, 127, 134n7, 169, 194 Abolition, 1, 5, 8–10, 14, 16, 19, 59, 111 See also Freedom Accumulation, 46, 52, 55, 56 Adorno, Theodor, 28, 185–188, 192, 211n1, 211n2 “Cultural Criticism and Society,” 187 Aesthetics, 25, 28, 86, 103, 118, 120, 124, 128–130, 138n16, 139n22, 184–188, 193, 211n2 See also Art Affect, 27, 41, 42, 87, 107, 121, 138n19, 161, 200, 203–205 Africa, 8, 9, 33, 48, 54, 81, 133n6, 186, 203

Afropessimism, 25–27, 38, 45, 62, 78, 79, 85, 94, 97, 102, 106, 134n9, 136n15, 152 See also Wilderson III, Frank B. Agape, 145 Agency, 36, 48, 51, 63, 66, 69n8, 80, 83–86, 90, 92, 94, 100, 101, 105, 135n11, 144, 160, 167, 172, 175, 209 See also Subjectivity Alienation, 4, 12, 13, 39, 46, 49, 50, 54–56, 84, 87, 88, 91, 107, 128, 161, 168, 187, 217 Allen, Jr., Ernest, 178n8 Anagrammatical, 114 See also Sharpe, Christina Analogy, 69n6, 84, 90, 91, 93, 107, 186, 194 Antagonism, 7, 52, 54, 55, 57, 88, 104, 128, 215

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Mubirumusoke, Black Hospitality, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95255-6

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220 

INDEX

Antiblackness, 2, 5, 7, 14, 17, 19, 20, 25, 28, 29, 34, 41, 44, 45, 53, 58, 59, 64, 65, 67n1, 70n16, 81, 94, 100, 117–119, 121, 123, 135n11, 148, 160, 162–164, 166, 171, 184, 188, 193, 197, 200, 206–209 See also White supremacy Antwone Fisher, 88, 89 Aporia, 6, 136n11, 146, 150, 155, 157, 158, 166, 209 Arendt, Hannah, 102, 103, 106 Art and aesthetics, 185 B Bad debt, 65, 108 Banal, 26, 43–45, 48 Banality, 61, 106, 135n11, 172 Barbarism, 183–211 Bataille, Georges, 42, 51, 67n1, 136n13, 170 The Accursed Share, 42 “Madame Edwarda,” 170 Being, 4, 16, 82, 85, 100, 169, 171, 187 and blackness, 4, 16, 82, 86, 100, 169, 171, 187 See also Ontology; Paraontology Bennington, Geoffrey, 174 Berry, Halle, 125 Best, Stephen, 179n12 Beyoncé, 27, 33, 118–131, 138n20, 139n23 Black expression, 28, 187–189, 193 See also Art Black home, 17–27, 75–131, 144–146, 151, 153, 156, 166, 168, 171–176, 196–208, 210, 211, 211n4

and black self, 77, 85, 94, 105, 106, 114, 115, 118, 167, 173 See also Hospitality Black joy, 107 Black Liberation Army, 90, 133n6, 133n7 Black Lives Matter, 17, 34 Black Optimism, 94, 97, 102, 106, 136–137n15 See also Moten, Fred Black pathology, 5, 40, 45, 98, 101, 110, 125, 127, 176, 178n8 Black social life, 13, 77, 79, 94, 96, 101, 102, 104–106, 110, 111, 115, 117, 124, 130, 131, 137n15, 137n16, 144, 148, 155, 156, 172–175, 187, 197 See also Moten, Fred Bland, Sandra, 23–25, 34 Body, the and blackness, 127, 194, 195 and dance, 127, 139n22 Borrowed institutionality, 63, 92 Broken windows policy, 65 See also Police Brown, Michael, 34, 41, 60, 129 Bukhari-Alson, Safiya, 91, 92 Bush Mama, 88, 90, 91 Butler, Judith, 26, 29–30n3, 35–40, 50, 68n4, 69n6, 144 C Cacho, Lisa Marie, 68n6, 69n6 Capacity, 4, 27, 35, 46, 49, 52, 59, 61, 69n8, 76, 78, 81, 85–89, 92, 97, 99, 102, 106, 111, 115, 116, 148, 164, 175, 204, 206 and incapacity, 8, 92, 156 Capitalism, 12, 13, 54, 56, 91, 107, 119, 120

 INDEX 

Celebration, 22, 23, 79, 104–107, 113, 117, 118, 120, 161, 176, 177, 204–206, 208 Chandler, Nahum, 5, 15, 16, 27, 28, 95, 96, 147–157, 160, 177n2, 177n4, 177n5, 177n6 Childs, Dennis, 190, 191 Civil society, 10–14, 34, 42, 43, 45, 47, 50, 52–56, 58–61, 63, 64, 66, 70n11, 79, 85, 87–90, 92–94, 100–106, 108–111, 118, 137n15, 148, 157, 164, 176 Colorblind, 33 Commodity, 56, 80, 81, 86, 119, 121, 155 See also Objectification Community, 3, 20–22, 25, 34, 37, 38, 63, 65, 89, 93, 94, 103, 104, 136n13, 170, 174, 178n8, 196, 198, 201, 204–208, 210, 212n8 Cone, James, 145 Criminality, 18, 19, 22, 23, 89, 100, 101, 108, 110, 147, 167, 168, 172, 209 Critical fabulation, 115, 132–133n4 See also Hartman, Saidiya D Dance, 92, 104, 107, 116, 127, 128, 139n22, 139n23, 193, 218 See also Beyoncé; Body, the Dasein, 81, 82, 97–99, 112 See also Heidegger, Martin Daughters of the Dust, 123 Deconstruction, 137n15, 149, 150, 155, 179n12, 204 See also Derrida, Jacques Deontological, 35 See also Ethics Derrida, Jacques, 5–7, 17–19, 24–28, 96, 132n3, 144–152, 157–166, 174, 177–178n6, 179n9

221

Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, 146, 158 and deconstruction, 149 On Hospitality, 165 Positions, 149, 151 Descartes, Rene, 75–78, 89, 132n1 Destrehan Plantation, 122 Dialectic, 11, 14, 137n15 Dialectic of Enlightenment, 211n2 Diallo, Amadou, 60, 61 Différance, 98, 132n3, 149 Difference, 15, 16, 40, 50, 51, 56, 57, 85, 96, 102, 127, 149, 153, 166 Discursive, 46, 51–53, 61, 67, 90, 136n13 Domesticity and impossible domestic, 78, 110, 111, 124, 169, 201 and Moten, Fred, 27, 78, 110 and Wilderson III., Frank B., 27, 78, 85, 88, 90, 91 See also Home; Hospitality Douglass, Patrice D., 62, 63 Du Bois, W.E.B., 15, 16, 27, 28, 95, 147, 149, 150, 154–157, 177–178n6 “The Conservation of Races,” 154 The Souls of Black Folk, 136n14 E Economy, 41, 42, 52, 53, 55, 56, 81, 87, 90–92, 103, 104, 133n5, 137n16 and ‘exonomy,’ 100, 112 and general economy, 26, 39, 41–45, 48–50, 53, 54, 57, 100, 101, 112, 144, 153, 154, 162, 164, 175 and libidinal economy, 13, 41, 42, 52, 53, 55, 56, 81, 87, 90–92, 103, 104, 133n5, 137n16 and restricted economy, 42, 43, 45, 49, 55

222 

INDEX

Ellison, Ralph, 76, 77 Invisible Man, 76, 77 Elmina Castle, 83, 84, 118 Emancipation, 33, 48, 84, 191, 197 See also Freedom Emanuel AME Church, 16, 17 Empathy, 80, 81, 135n11, 155 Enlightenment, The, 2, 8, 185, 211n2 Ethics, 10, 11, 36 as black ethical life, 66, 144, 145, 147, 148, 153, 166, 167, 172, 184, 210, 218 and blackness, 5, 160 and deontological, 35 and ethical life [Sittlichkeit], 7, 11 and response ethics, 25, 145, 165 as unethical, 3, 4, 8, 14, 22, 23, 66, 171, 186 and utilitarianism, 35 and virtue ethics, 67 and vulnerability ethics, 25, 26, 160 Excess, 14, 39, 43, 44, 60, 63, 64, 97, 101, 110, 115, 151, 175, 192 Exorbitance, 35, 151, 153, 154 F Family, 2, 10–13, 18, 29n1, 29n2, 55, 58, 84, 110, 114, 184, 200, 207, 208, 217 See also Kinship; Natal alienation Fanon, Frantz, 38, 46, 66, 67, 69–70n10, 70–71n16, 78, 87, 94–99, 153, 179n11 Black Skin, White Masks, 94–95, 98 Flesh, 2, 3, 39, 43, 44, 46, 127, 128, 139n22, 201, 205 See also Merleau-Ponty, Maurice; Spillers, Hortense Floyd, George, 34, 35, 38, 60, 61, 65

Forgiveness, 19, 20, 121, 131, 165, 177n1 Fortunati, Leopoldina, 91, 92 Fourfold, The, 112, 113 Franklin, Aretha, 216 Freedom, 4, 5, 8–12, 14, 46, 48, 52, 55, 69n9, 81–85, 92, 116, 117, 157, 171, 184, 192–194, 197, 199, 206 Freud, Sigmund, 54, 178n6 Friend/enemy, see Schmitt, Carl Friendship, 23, 102, 157, 215–218 Fugitivity, 14, 21, 25, 28, 78, 79, 98, 99, 101, 102, 108, 111–114, 117, 120, 122, 123, 134n10, 135–136n11, 147, 155, 156, 167, 169, 172, 175, 177, 177n2, 196, 197, 201, 207, 216, 217 See also Moten, Fred Fungible, 2, 39, 47, 54–57, 64, 68n4, 86, 97, 118–120, 162, 169, 193, 209 G Garcia Marquez, Gabriel, 217 Garner, Eric, 20–23, 34, 60, 65, 129, 184 Garner, Margaret, 190, 192, 194, 199, 203, 208, 210, 212n9 Gender and (un)gendering, 62 Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, 36 Gramsci, Antonio, 51, 54, 55 Gratuitous violence, see Social death; Violence Guest, 7, 18, 19, 21–24, 26, 27, 146, 148, 153, 156, 158, 159, 163, 166, 172, 174, 175

 INDEX 

H Harney, Stefano, 64, 65, 107, 108, 113 Hartmann, Johanna, 120, 138n20 Hartman, Saidiya, 27, 38, 46, 61, 64, 68n4, 78–85, 93, 101, 109, 115–117, 122, 132–133n4, 134–135n11, 136n12, 151, 155, 167, 168, 170–172, 177n2, 179n12, 193 and critical fabulations, 115, 132–133n4 Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route, 81 Scenes of Subjection, 61, 80, 81, 85 “Venus in Two-Acts,” 132n4 Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval, 115, 132n4 Hegel, Georg W.F., 7–14, 29n1, 139n22, 176 Philosophy of History, The, 9, 29n1 Philosophy of Right, The, 7, 10, 14 Heidegger, Martin, 77, 82, 96–99, 112, 134n10 Being and Time, 97 “Das Ding,” 96, 112 Historical stillness, 47–49, 89 Holland, Sharon Patricia, 133n5 Holocaust, 69n6, 185, 186 Home and the black home, 17, 19–27, 76–131, 144–146, 151, 156, 166, 168, 169, 171–176, 195–208, 210, 211, 211n4 and domesticity, 77, 79–93 See also Hospitality Homelessness, 52, 78, 82, 83, 85, 108–112, 114 hooks, bell, 118, 119, 121, 138n19

223

Hope, 3, 81, 83, 84, 106, 107, 116, 121, 135n11, 152, 164, 206, 207, 217 Hospitality as compulsory, 161, 162, 165, 167 and guest, 7, 19, 27, 158 and host, 25, 27, 139n23, 146, 147, 158, 162, 164, 166, 174 and hostility, 22, 27, 166 and “Hostipitality,” 166 as im-possible, 5, 6, 10, 25, 27, 125, 144, 145, 165, 186, 188, 192, 193 and invitation, 22 and stranger, 139n23 and threshold, 165 and unconditional, 18, 19, 22, 25, 27, 28, 144–148, 157–166, 172, 209, 211 Hull of the ship, 117, 127, 203 Humanism, 48, 53, 54, 86, 127 I Illegible, 38–40, 48, 51–53, 57, 59–61, 64, 185 Immigrants, 7, 51, 69n6, 148 Impossible/im-possible, 3, 6, 7, 10, 12, 17–19, 23, 25, 27, 29, 49, 62, 67, 68n4, 78, 79, 95, 106, 107, 110–112, 114, 115, 118, 124, 125, 128, 130, 135–136n11, 136n13, 144–146, 150, 156, 157, 165, 167–169, 171, 176, 184–186, 188, 190–193, 196, 200, 201, 204, 207, 208, 210, 216 Indigenous Americans, 186 Infanticide, 29, 184, 190, 192, 195–198, 200–203, 206–210 Infinite, 26, 39, 157, 161, 163, 164, 176, 200

224 

INDEX

In-the-world, 7, 10, 15, 36, 69n6, 78, 81–83, 85, 109, 117, 137n15, 166, 173 Irrational, see Rationality J Jacobin Magazine, 133n7 JanMohamed, Abdul R., 92 Jazz, 87, 186–189, 192, 193 Jefferson, Thomas, 9 Judy, Ronald, 85 Junior members, 42, 58, 59, 64, 163 K Kain, Philip J, 11, 12, 14 Kant, Immanuel, 103, 158, 165 Keeling, Kara, 67n2, 70–71n16 Kierkegaard, Søren, 210 Kilpatrick, Connor, 56 King, Rodney, 29n3, 41 King, Tiffany Lethabo, 12–13 Kinship and blackness, 14, 84, 171 and family, 84 See also Natal alienation L Lacan, Jacques, 54, 87, 179n11 LA Rebellion film school, 88 Lemonade, see Beyoncé Levinas, Emmanuel, 146, 157, 158 Liberalism, 10, 48 Libidinal economy, see Economy Long Chu, Andrea, 9 M Madewood Plantation, 122 Manichean, 5, 152, 208 Marriott, David, 51, 176

Martin, Trayvon, 34, 43, 65, 129 Martinot, Steve, 42–44, 60, 61, 63, 64 Marxism, 54 and materialism, 54 McKittrick, Katherine, 113, 114 Memmi, Albert, 42 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 127, 128, 138n18, 139n22 Metaphysics, 5, 18–20, 68n3, 78, 98–100, 104, 121, 134n10, 136n13, 147, 148, 160, 185, 186, 206 Middle Passage, the, 2, 50, 87, 185, 186, 191, 202, 203, 212n7 Mills, Charles, 76 Mitchell, Andrew, 112 Moazzam-Doulat, Malek, 160, 163 Mollendorf, Darell, 9 Monster’s Ball, 88, 108 Moral decadence, 176 Morality, see Ethics Morrison, Toni, 25, 28, 183, 184, 186, 189–200, 202–205, 207, 210, 211n3 Beloved, 25, 28, 29, 183–211 The Black Book, 190 Moten, Fred, 5, 27, 64, 65, 78, 93–114, 125, 127–129, 134n10, 134–136n11, 136n13, 136–137n15, 145, 147, 148, 151, 154, 156, 169, 172, 173, 175, 177n2, 196, 215 “Black Mo’nin,” 128 “Blackness and Nothingness (Mysticism in the Flesh),” 101, 102, 105, 109 and Black Optimism, 94, 97, 106, 107, 136–137n15 and black social life, 94, 96, 101, 102, 104–106, 110, 111, 136n13, 137n15, 156, 173, 175 and haptic, 116

 INDEX 

In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition, 128, 134n11 and phonic materiality, 98, 128, 129, 134–135n11 Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, 2, 13 Mundane, see Banality N Nancy, Jean Luc, 136n13 Natal alienation, see Social death Negative Dialectics, 137n15, 185 Negro question, the, 2, 35, 50, 157, 177n4 Negro, The and the Negro problem, 148, 150, 177n4, 187 and the Negro question, 2, 35, 50, 157, 177n4 Neo-liberal, 77 Nietzsche, Friedrick, 68n3, 125, 177–178n6, 178n7 Ecce Homo, 177n6, 178n6, 178n7 9/11, 36, 37, 50, 51 Nonrelation, 57 Normativity, 169 O Obama, Barack, 33, 48 Objectification and blackness, 95, 98 things, 112 Okiji, Fumi, 186–189, 191–193 Ontic, 46, 68n4, 149, 156 Ontology, 2–6, 14, 22, 26–28, 36, 37, 39, 46, 48, 53, 61, 62, 66, 67, 85, 90, 93–95, 97, 100, 103, 104, 106, 107, 119, 127, 131, 134n9, 136n11, 136n15, 144, 147, 148, 152, 153, 155, 156, 162, 167, 168, 170–172, 175, 179n11, 193, 204, 208

225

and ontotheology, 171 and paraontology, 5, 27, 172 and political ontology, 2–6, 14, 22, 26–28, 36, 37, 39, 46, 48, 53, 61, 62, 66, 67, 85, 90, 93–95, 97, 100, 103, 104, 106, 107, 119, 127, 131, 134n9, 136n11, 136n15, 144, 147, 148, 152, 153, 155, 156, 162, 167, 168, 170, 171, 175, 179n11, 193, 204, 208, 209 P Paraontology, 5, 27, 99, 147, 167, 172 Pathology, see Black pathology Patterson, Orlando, 38, 46, 47, 49, 52, 69n8, 69n9, 102–104, 133n5 Performativity, 36, 129 and blackness, 68n4, 104 Phenomenology, 81, 98, 134n10 Phonic materiality, see Moten, Fred Police, 1, 20–24, 29n2, 35, 41, 43, 44, 52, 57, 58, 60–66, 70n15, 71n17, 90, 116, 117, 163, 190, 208 and policy, 65, 66 Political death, 27, 38, 67, 79, 102, 124, 161, 164, 167, 175, 187, 191, 198, 217 See also Social death Political ontology, see Ontology Production, 55, 86, 90, 91, 118, 129, 138n19, 170, 171, 187, 189 Purity, 4, 5, 95, 104, 113, 147, 153, 154, 167, 186 Q Quashi, Kevin, 178n8, 179n8

226 

INDEX

R Race, 15, 16, 33, 34, 43, 47, 54, 66, 96, 104, 114, 116, 131, 132n1, 137n16, 138n17, 153–155 Rancière, Jacques, 71n18 Rationality, 8, 9, 39–44, 53, 64, 170 Redding, Otis, 216 Reddy, Chandan, 138n17 Relationality, 35, 39, 50, 51, 77, 79, 89, 97 See also Nonrelation Rememory, 201, 207, 212n6 Respectability politics, 43 Revolt, 1, 9, 90, 171 Rice, Tamir, 41, 60, 65 Rogers, Jamie Ann, 123 S Said, Edward, 36 Schmitt, Carl, 5, 9, 18, 23, 50, 59, 83, 99, 108, 134n9, 152, 160, 161, 215–218 Sexton, Jared, 26, 38, 39, 41–45, 49, 60, 61, 63, 64, 67n1, 102, 103, 136–137n15, 153, 161, 162 Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism, 42 “The Avant-Garde of White Supremacy,” 42 Sexuality, 13, 91, 137n16, 168, 170 Shakur, Assata, 58 Sharpe, Christina, 114 Shire, Waran, 118, 124–126 Singh, Nikhil Pal, 33, 34 Slavery, 2, 8, 9, 13, 16, 27, 38, 47, 49, 50, 52, 54, 69n8, 70n11, 80–83, 89, 101, 103, 123, 133n5, 151, 167, 179n12, 184, 186, 190, 191, 194, 197–202, 204–208, 210, 211n4, 212n5, 212n9 Snorton, C. Riley, 5, 114, 115, 120

Social death, 8, 13, 38, 39, 43, 45–53, 59, 69n6, 69n8, 81, 84, 88, 89, 91, 92, 94, 102, 104, 125, 137n15, 161, 191, 193, 194, 208, 217 and dishonor, 39 and gratuitous violence, 39, 46, 84, 104 and natal alienation, 39, 46, 84 and Patterson, Orlando, 38, 46, 47, 49, 69n8, 102, 104 and political death, 38, 102, 191 Space/spatiality, 17, 21, 23, 44, 63, 70n10, 71n18, 76–131, 168, 173, 174, 186, 196–198, 203, 204, 207, 210, 211n4 Spillers, Hortense, 2, 3, 38, 46, 47, 55, 62, 67–68n3, 69n8, 91, 113, 114, 127, 135n11, 184 and ethics, 184 and flesh, 2, 3, 46, 127 “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Gramma Book,” 2, 67n3, 183 Stranger, 76, 83, 110, 114, 132n1, 139n23, 145, 172 See also Guest Subjectivity desubjectification, 87 subjectivation, 16 Sublation, 8, 9, 12, 14, 22, 54, 88, 170 See also Dialectic Suicide, 24, 92 T Taylor, Brionna, 34, 38, 57, 60, 65 Things, see Objectification Thomas, Valerie D., 123, 124, 126, 139n21 Threshold, see Hospitality Till, Emmet, 128

 INDEX 

Time, 2, 3, 11, 17, 19, 21–24, 26, 27, 29, 33, 35, 48, 50, 51, 58, 60, 62, 67n2, 68n3, 70n10, 70n11, 77–79, 83, 84, 87–89, 95, 97, 105, 112, 113, 115–118, 121, 123, 126, 129–131, 132n3, 133n4, 133n6, 133n7, 134n10, 150, 152, 155, 166, 168, 173, 174, 177, 177n4, 177n6, 179n12, 185, 186, 191, 194–196, 198, 200, 203–205, 207, 208 Transgression, 19, 20, 22, 24, 25, 28, 36, 37, 39, 49, 51, 52, 64, 96, 101, 137n16, 165, 179n11, 194, 209 U Uncanny (unheimlich), 78, 82, 84, 160, 178n7 Ungendered, see Gender Utilitarian, see Ethics V Vertigo, 123, 124, 134n7, 139n21 Violence, 8, 39, 43, 45, 46, 49, 50, 59, 81, 84, 88, 89, 91, 94, 104, 161, 193, 194 and gratuitous violence, 8, 39, 43, 45, 46, 49, 50, 59, 81, 84, 88, 89, 91, 94, 104, 161, 193, 194 and spectacular violence, 49, 61, 63 See also Social death Virtue ethics, see Ethics Vulnerability and blackness, 6, 23, 26, 29n3, 48, 53, 64, 79, 89, 160, 196 and ethics, 25, 26, 35, 160 and extra-ordinary vulnerability, 23, 25, 26, 46, 48, 76, 79, 85, 89, 90, 100, 115, 118, 121, 127,

227

128, 130, 137n16, 144, 157, 161, 165, 191, 192, 194, 196 Vulnerability: New Essays in Ethics and Feminist Philosophy, 40 W Warren, Calvin, 67, 78, 82 Washington, Denzel, 34, 88 Weather Underground, the, 92, 133n7 Weheliye, Alexander G., 127, 128 Welcoming, see Hospitality White supremacy, 6, 7, 9, 17, 26, 28, 34, 38, 40–45, 48, 51, 54, 57, 58, 61–64, 67n1, 68n3, 93, 100, 112, 115, 118, 119, 144, 147, 156, 161, 164, 165, 179n8, 196 as political ontology, 28, 48, 93, 100, 119 Wilderson III, Frank B., 3, 4, 13, 26, 27, 34, 38, 39, 47, 49, 51, 54–56, 58, 59, 64, 66, 67, 68n4, 69n6, 69n9, 70n10, 70n11, 70n12, 71n17, 80, 85–93, 95, 125, 133n6, 134n7, 139n21, 168, 179n11, 186 Red, White, and Black: Cinema and the Structure of US Antagonisms, 3, 68n4, 85 Willett, Cynthia, 180n13, 197, 203, 207–209 Williams, Serena, 130, 139n23 Wynter, Silvia, 114 Y Yancy, George, 172, 173 “Yes, Yes,” 162 Yoruba, 120, 126 Z Zamir, Shamoon, 178n8