The South Atlantic Quarterly 112:4, Fall 2013
doi 10.1215/00382876-2345261 © 2013 Duke University Press
Fred Moten
Blackness and Nothingness
(Mysticism in the Flesh)
Just Friends
In the past decade, the most exciting and generative
advance in black critical theory, which is
to say critical theory, is the announcement and
enactment of Afro-pessimism in the work of
Frank B. Wilderson III and Jared Sexton. Black
study such as theirs refreshes lines of rigorously
antidisciplinary in(ter)vention, effecting intellectual
renewal against academic sterility. When
wardens of established disciplines and advocates
of interdisciplinary reform fight to secure depleted
sovereignty in and over the same depleted real
estate—whose value increases as its desertification
progresses; whose value is set by the new masters
of another form of what Thomas Jefferson
called silent profit—and when note of this false
alternative is taken by those who offer nothing
but a critique of the very idea of a true one, Wilderson
and Sexton keep on pushing over the edge of
refusal, driven by a visionary impetus their work
requires and allows us to try to see and hear and
feel. This essay is dedicated to Sexton’s and Wilderson’s
work, out of love for the common project, out
of love for such rigorous devotion to the common
project, out of love for black people, out of love for
738 The South Atlantic Quarterly Fall 2013
blackness. I have thought long and hard, in the wake of their work, in a kind
of echo of Bob Marley’s question, about whether blackness could be loved;
there seems to be a growing consensus that analytic precision does not allow
for such a flight of fancy, such romance, but I remain under the impression,
and devoted to the impression, that analytic precision is, in fact, a function of
such fancy. And this, perhaps, is where the tension comes, where it is and will
remain, not in spite of the love but in it, embedded in its difficulty and violence,
not in the impossibility of its performance or declaration but out of the
exhaustion that is their condition of possibility. More to the point, if Afro-pessimism
is the study of this impossibility, the thinking that I have to offer (and
I think I’m as reticent about the term black optimism as Wilderson and Sexton
are about Afro-pessimism, in spite of the fact that we make recourse to them)
moves not in that impossibility’s transcendence but rather in its exhaustion.
Moreover, I want to consider exhaustion as a mode or form or way of life,
which is to say sociality, thereby marking a relation whose implications constitute,
in my view, a fundamental theoretical reason not to believe, as it were,
in social death. Like Curtis Mayfield, however, I do plan to stay a believer.
This is to say, again like Mayfield, that I plan to stay a black motherfucker.
Over the course of this essay, we’ll have occasion to consider what that
means, by way of a discussion of my preference for the terms life and optimism
over death and pessimism and in the light of Wilderson’s and Sexton’s
brilliant insistence not only upon the preferential option for blackness but
also upon the requirement of the most painstaking and painful attention to
our damnation, a term I prefer to wretchedness, after the example of Miguel
Mellino, not simply because it is a more literal translation of Fanon (though
often, with regard to Fanon, I prefer the particular kinds of precision that follow
from what some might dismiss as mistranslation) but also because
wretchedness emerges from a standpoint that is not only not ours, that is not
only one we cannot have and ought not want, but that is, in general, held
within the logic of im/possibility that delineates what subjects and citizens
call the real world (Mellino 2013). But this is to say, from the outset, not that
I will advocate the construction of a necessarily fictive standpoint of our own
but that I will seek to begin to explore not just the absence but the refusal of
standpoint, to actually explore and to inhabit and to think what Bryan Wagner
(2009: 1) calls “existence without standing” from no standpoint because
this is what it would truly mean to remain in the hold of the ship (when the
hold is thought with properly critical, and improperly celebratory, clarity).
What would it be, deeper still, what is it, to think from no standpoint; to
think outside the desire for a standpoint? What emerges in the desire that
Moten Blackness and Nothingness 739
constitutes a certain proximity to that thought is not (just) that blackness is
ontologically prior to the logistic and regulative power that is supposed to
have brought it into existence but that blackness is prior to ontology; or, in a
slight variation of what Chandler would say, blackness is the anoriginal displacement
of ontology, that it is ontology’s anti- and ante-foundation, ontology’s
underground, the irreparable disturbance of ontology’s time and space.
This is to say that what I do assert, not against, I think, but certainly in apposition
to Afro-pessimism, as it is, at least at one point, distilled in Sexton’s
work, is not what he calls one of that project’s most polemical dimensions,
“namely, that black life is not social, or rather that black life is lived in social
death” (Sexton 2011b: 28). What I assert is this: that black life—which is as
surely to say life as black thought is to say thought—is irreducibly social; that,
moreover, black life is lived in political death or that it is lived, if you will, in
the burial ground of the subject by those who, insofar as they are not subjects,
are also not, in the interminable (as opposed to the last) analysis,
“death-bound,” as Abdul JanMohamed (2005) would say. In this, however, I
also agree with Sexton insofar as I am inclined to call this burial ground “the
world” and to conceive of it and the desire for it as pathogenic. At stake, now,
will be what the difference is between the pathogenic and the pathological, a
difference that will have been instantiated by what we might think of as the
view, as well as the point of view, of the pathologist. I don’t think I ever
claimed, or meant to claim, that Afro-pessimism sees blackness as a kind of
pathogen. I think I probably do, or at least hope that it is, insofar as I bear the
hope that blackness bears or is the potential to end the world.
The question concerning the point of view, or standpoint, of the
pathologist is crucial but so is the question of what it is that the pathologist
examines. What, precisely, is the morbid body upon which Fanon, the
pathologist, trains his eye? What is the object of his “complete lysis” (Fanon
2008: xiv)? And if it is more proper, because more literal, to speak of a lysis
of universe, rather than body, how do we think the relation between transcendental
frame and the body, or nobody, that occupies, or is banished
from, its confines and powers of orientation? What I offer here as a clarification
of Sexton’s understanding of my relation to Afro-pessimism
emerges from my sense of a kind of terminological dehiscence in Orlando
Patterson’s (1982) work that emerges in what I take to be his deep but unacknowledged
affinity with and indebtedness to the work of Hannah Arendt,
namely, with a distinction crucial to her work between the social and the
political. The “secular excommunication” that describes slavery for Patterson
(1982: 5) is more precisely understood as the radical exclusion from a
740 The South Atlantic Quarterly Fall 2013
political order, which is tantamount, in Arendt’s formulation, with something
on the order of a radical relegation to the social. The problem with slavery,
for Patterson, is that it is political death, not social death; the problem is
that slavery confers the paradoxically stateless status of the merely, barely living;
it delineates the inhuman as unaccommodated bios. At stake is the
transvaluation or, better yet, the invaluation or antivaluation, the extraction
from the sciences of value (and from the very possibility of that necessarily
fictional, but materially brutal, standpoint that Wagner [2009: 1] calls “being
a party to exchange”). Such extraction will, in turn, be the very mark and
inscription (rather than absence or eradication) of the sociality of a life, given
in common, instantiated in exchange. What I am trying to get to, by way of
this terminological slide in Patterson, is the consideration of a radical disjunction
between sociality and the state-sanctioned, state-sponsored terror
of power-laden intersubjectivity, which is, or would be, the structural foundation
of Patterson’s epiphenomenology of spirit. To have honor, which is, of
necessity, to be a man of honor, for Patterson, is to become a combatant in
transcendental subjectivity’s perpetual civil war. To refuse the induction that
Patterson desires is to enact or perform the recognition of the constitution of
civil society as enmity, hostility, and civil butchery. It is, moreover, to consider
that the 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. This is to say that, yes,
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 transcendental aesthetic—cognate as they
are not with the failed but rather with the successful state and its abstract,
equivalent citizens—to be the fundamentally and essentially antisocial nursery
for a necessarily necropolitical imitation of life. So that if Afro-pessimists
say that social life is not the condition of black life but is, rather, the political
field that would surround it, then that’s a formulation with which I would
agree. Social death is not imposed upon blackness by or from the standpoint
or positionality of the political; rather, it is the field of the political, from which
blackness is relegated to the supposedly undifferentiated mass or blob of the
social, which is, in any case, where and what blackness chooses to stay.
This question of the location and position of social death is, as Sexton
has shown far more rigorously than I could ever hope to do, crucial. It raises
again that massive problematic of inside and outside that animates thought
since before its beginning as the endless end to which thought always seeks
Moten Blackness and Nothingness 741
to return. Such mappability of the space-time or state of social death would,
in turn, help us better understand the positionalities that could be said, figuratively,
to inhabit it. This mass is understood to be undifferentiated precisely
because from the imaginary perspective of the political subject—who
is also the transcendental subject of knowledge, grasp, ownership, and selfpossession—difference
can only be manifest as the discrete individuality
that holds or occupies a standpoint. From that standpoint, from the artificial,
officially assumed position, blackness is nothing, that is, the relative nothingness
of the impossible, pathological subject and his fellows. I believe it is
from that standpoint that Afro-pessimism identifies and articulates the
imperative to embrace that nothingness which is, of necessity, relative. It is
from this standpoint, which Wilderson defines precisely by his inability to
occupy it, that he, in a painfully and painstakingly lyrical tour de force of
autobiographical writing, declares himself to be nothing and proclaims his
decision, which in any case he cannot make, to remain as nothing, in genealogical
and sociological isolation even from every other nothing.
Now, all that remains are unspoken scraps scattered on the floor like Lisa’s
grievance. I am nothing, Naima, and you are nothing: the unspeakable
answer to your question within your question. This is why I could not—
would not—answer your question that night. Would I ever be with a Black
woman again? It was earnest, not accusatory—I know. And nothing terrifies
me more than such a question asked in earnest. It is a question that goes to
the heart of desire, to the heart of our black capacity to desire. But if we take
out the nouns that you used (nouns of habit that get us through the day),
your question to me would sound like this: Would nothing ever be with
nothing again? (Wilderson 2008: 265)
When one reads the severity and intensity of Wilderson’s words—his
assertion of his own nothingness and the implications of that nothingness
for his reader—one is all but overwhelmed by the need for a kind of affirmative
negation of his formulation. It’s not that one wants to say no, Professor
Wilderson, you are, or I am, somebody; rather, one wants to assert
the presence of something between the subjectivity that is refused and
which one refuses and nothing, whatever that is. But it is the beauty—the
fantastic, celebratory force of Wilderson’s and Sexton’s work, which study
has allowed me to begin more closely to approach—of Afro-pessimism that
allows and compels one to move past that contradictory impulse to affirm
in the interest of negation and to begin to consider what nothing is, not
from its own standpoint or from any standpoint but from the absoluteness
742 The South Atlantic Quarterly Fall 2013
of its generative dispersion of a general antagonism that blackness holds and
protects in as critical celebration and degenerative and regenerative preservation.
That’s the mobility of place, the fugitive field of unowning, in and from
which we ask, paraontologically, by way of but also against and underneath
the ontological terms at our disposal: What is nothingness? What is thingliness?
What is blackness? What’s the relationship between blackness, thingliness,
nothingness and the (de/re)generative operations of what Deleuze
might call a life in common? Where do we go, by what means do we begin, to
study blackness? Can there be an aesthetic sociology or a social poetics of
nothingness? Can we perform an anatomy of the thing or produce a theory
of the universal machine? Our aim, even in the face of the brutally imposed
difficulties of black life, is cause for celebration. This is not because celebration
is supposed to make us feel good or make us feel better, though there
would be nothing wrong with that. It is, rather, because the 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 animation of black operations, which are, in the first
instance, our undercommon, underground, submarine sociality.
In the end, though life and optimism are the terms under which I
speak, I agree with Sexton—by way of the slightest, most immeasurable
reversal of emphasis—that Afro-pessimism and black optimism are not but
nothing other than one another. I will continue to prefer the black optimism
of his work just as, I am sure, he will continue to prefer the Afro-pessimism
of mine. We will have been interarticulate, I believe, in the field where annihilative
seeing, generative sounding, rigorous touching and feeling, requires
an improvisation of and on friendship, a sociality of friendship that will have
been, at once, both intramural and evangelical. I’ll try to approach that field,
its expansive concentration, by way of Don Cherry and Ed Blackwell’s (1982)
extended meditation on nothingness; by way of Fanon’s and Peter Linebaugh’s
accounts of language in and as vehicularity; by way of Foucault’s
meditations on the ship of fools and Deleuze’s consideration of the boat as
interior of the exterior when they are both thoroughly solicited by the
uncharted voices that we carry; by way, even, of Lysis and Socrates; but also,
and in the first instance, by way of Hawk and Newk, just friends, trading
fours. Perhaps I’m simply deluding myself, but such celebratory performance
of thought, in thought, is as much about the insurgency of immanence
as it is about what Wagner (2009: 2) calls the “consolation of transcendence.”
But, as I said earlier, I plan to stay a believer in blackness, even as
Moten Blackness and Nothingness 743
thingliness, even as (absolute) nothingness, even as imprisonment in passage
on the most open road of all, even as—to use and abuse a terribly beautiful
phrase of Wilderson’s (2010: xi)—fantasy in the hold.
Mu First Part/Mu Second Part
To stay in the hold of the ship, despite my fantasies of flight.
—Frank B. Wilderson, Red, White, and Black
Where we were, notwithstanding,
wasn’t there . . .
Where we
were was the hold of a ship we were
caught
in. Soaked wood kept us afloat. . . . It
wasn’t limbo we were in albeit we
limbo’d our way there. Where we
were was what we meant by “mu.”
Nathaniel Mackey, “On Antiphon Island—‘mu’ twenty-eight part—”
There are flights of fantasy in the hold of the ship: the ordinary fugue and
fugitive run of the language lab, black phonographies’ brutally experimental
venue. Paraontological totality is still in the making. Present and unmade in
presence, blackness is an instrument in the making. Quasi una fantasia in
its paralegal swerve, its mad-worked braid, the imagination produces nothing
but exsense in the hold. Do you remember the days of slavery? Mackey
(2006: 65) rightly says, “The world was ever after, / elsewhere. / . . . no / way
where we were / was there.” Do you remember where we are? No way where
we are is here. Where we were, where we are, is what we meant by mu, which
Wilderson (2010: xi) rightly calls the void of our subjectivity, which we
extend, in consent beyond all voluntarity, in our avoidance of subjectivity.
And so it is that we remain in the hold, in the break, as if entering again and
again the broken world, to trace the visionary company and join it. This contrapuntal
island, where we are marooned in search of marronage, where we
linger in stateless emergency, is our mobile, constant study, our lysed cell
and held dislocation, our blown standpoint and lyred chapel. We study our
seaborne variance, sent by its prehistory into arrivance without arrival, as a
poetics of lore, of abnormal articulation, where the relation between joint
and flesh is the pleated distance of a musical moment that is emphatically,
palpably imperceptible and, therefore, exhausts description. Having defied
744 The South Atlantic Quarterly Fall 2013
degradation, the moment becomes a theory of the moment, of the feeling of
a presence that is ungraspable in the way that it touches. Such musical
moments—of advent, of nativity in all its terrible beauty, of the alienation
that is always already born in and as parousia, of the disruption in duration
of the very idea of the moment—are rigorous performances of the theory
of the social life of the shipped, given in the terror of enjoyment and its
endlessly redoubled folds. If you take up the hopelessly imprecise tools
of standard navigation, the deathly reckoning of difference engines, maritime
clocks, and tables of damned assurance, you might stumble on such a
moment about two and a half minutes into “Mutron,” a duet by Blackwell
and Cherry recorded in 1982. You’ll know the moment by how it requires
you to think the relation between fantasy and nothingness: what is mistaken
for silence is, all of a sudden, transubstantial.
It’s terrible to have come from nothing but the sea, which is nowhere,
navigable only in its constant autodislocation. The absence of solidity seems
to demand some other ceremony of hailing that will have been carried out
on some more exalted frequency. This is exacerbated by the venal refusal of
a general acknowledgment of the crime, which is, in any case, impossible,
raising the question of whether the only way adequately to account for the
horror of slavery and the brutality of the slaver, the only way to be (in Sexton’s
words) a witness rather than a spectator, is to begin by positing the
absolute degradation of the enslaved. This is not a trick question; it’s not
merely rhetorical. If the slave is, in the end and in essence, nothing, what
remains is the necessity of an investigation of that nothingness. What is the
nothingness, which is to say the blackness, of the slave that it is not reducible
to what they did, though what they did is irreducible in it? This is a question
concerning the undercommon inheritance of another world, which is given
in and given as fantasy in the hold. Those who are called into being by the
desire for another call relinquish the fantastic when they make the choice to
leave the hold behind. In resistance to such departure we linger in the
advent, in the brutal interplay of advent and enclosure. Marcus Rediker
offers us a scene of the interplay:
They resumed paddling and soon began to sing. After a while she could
hear, at first faintly, then with increasing clarity, other sounds—the waves
slapping the hull of the big ship, its timbers creaking. Then came muffled
screaming in a strange language.
The ship grew larger and more terrifying with every vigorous stroke of
the paddles. The smells grew stronger and the sounds louder—crying and
Moten Blackness and Nothingness 745
wailing from one quarter and low, plaintive singing from another; the anarchic
noise of children given an underbeat by hands drumming on wood; the
odd comprehensible word or two wafting through: someone asking for menney,
water, another laying a curse, appealing to myabeca, spirits. As the canoemen
maneuvered their vessel up alongside, she saw dark faces, framed by
small holes in the side of the ship above the waterline, staring intently. Above
her, dozens of black women and children and a few red-faced men peered over
the rail. They had seen the attempted escape on the sandbar. The men had
cutlasses and barked orders in harsh, raspy voices. She had arrived at the slave
ship. (Rediker 2007: 2)
Her name is Hortense. Her name is NourbeSe. Her name is B. The black
chant she hears is old and new to her. She is unmoored. She is ungendered.
Her mother is lost. Exhausted, exhaustive maternity is her pedagogical
imperative: “consent not to be a single being” (Glissant 2011: 5).
What’s required is some attempt to think the relation between fantasy
and nothingness: emptiness, dispossession in the hold; consent (not to be a
single being) in the; an intimacy given most emphatically, and erotically, in
a moment of something that, for lack of a better word, we call “silence,” a
suboceanic feeling of preterition—borne by a common particle in the double
expanse—that makes vessels run over or overturn. The temporal coordinates
2’29” and 2’30” mark the in-betweenness and mobile location of the
span, so we can consider that what is mistaken for silence can also be given
in and as nothingness in its full transubstantiality, but also the compression
and dispersion, the condensation and displacement, of caged duration, the
marking more emphatically of its beginning and end, and, especially, the
concentrated air of its propulsion that shows up as waiting, Erwartung,
embarrassment in our expectation, Blackwell’s antic, anticipatory pulse.
This moment of nothingness. “Unhoused vacuity” (Mackey 2001: 118),
metoikic vernacular, the rich materiality of the hold’s, the jug’s, emptiness,
its contents having fled in their remaining, fled as the remainder, the danger,
the supplement, votive and unelect. Blackwell offers what is held in mu
as the impossible to understand black thing, the Cherry thing as a seriality
of openings, a vestibular chain, a kind of spillway, as Hortense Spillers
might say.
I am concerned with the mu in “Mutron”—by way of an approach
through Rediker that describes Rediker’s attempt to describe what might be
called a birth into death, or an entrance into bare life or raw life, but which I
will insist, not despite but precisely because of its being the blood-stain’d
746 The South Atlantic Quarterly Fall 2013
gate through which the radically nonanalagous enters, is the impure immanence
of the undercommons’ (an)originary refrain—because the task of
continually instigating this flown, recursive imagining demands the inhabitation
of an architecture and its acoustic, an inhabitation given as if in an
approach from outside. What is required, and this is recited with such terrible
beauty in the work of Wilderson and Sexton, in echo of Lewis Gordon,
is not only to reside in an unlivability, an exhaustion that is always already
given as foreshadowing afterlife, as a life in some absolutely proximate and
unbridgeable distance from the living death of subjection, but also to discover
and to enter it. Mackey, in the fantastic sear and burned, spurred overhearing
of his preface to Splay Anthem, outlining the provenance and relationship
between the book’s serial halves (“Each was given its impetus by a piece of
recorded music from which it takes its title, the Dogon ‘Song of the Andoumboulou’
in one case, Don Cherry’s ‘Mu’ First Part and ‘Mu’ Second Part in the
other” [Mackey 2006: ix]), speaks of mu in relation to a circling or spiraling
or ringing, this roundness or rondo linking beginning and end; the wailing
that accompanies entrance into and expulsion from sociality; that makes you
wonder if music, which is not only music, is mobilized in the service of an
eccentricity, a centrifugal force, whose intimation Mackey also approaches,
that marks sociality’s ecstatic existence beyond beginning and end, ends and
means. Forgive this long series of long quotations from that preface, to passages
of which I remain imprisoned insofar as the range of phonemic, historical,
and parageographic resonance in mu get me to the elsewhere and
elsewhen that I already inhabit but which I have to keep learning to desire.
Actually, if you forgive me, there will be no need to thank me.
Multi-instrumentalist Don Cherry, best known as a trumpeter, includes
voice among the instruments used on the “Mu” albums and resorts to a sort
of dove-coo baby talk on one piece, “Teo-Teo-Can,” emitting sounds that
might accompany the tickling of a baby’s chin if not be made by the baby
itself. It recalls Amiri Baraka’s comment on hearing a John Coltrane solo
that consisted of playing the head of “Confirmation” again and again, twenty
times or so: “like watching a grown man learning to speak.” In both cases,
as with the Dogon trumpet burst and as it’s put in “Song of the Andoumboulou:
58,” one is “back / at / some beginning,” some extremity taking one
back to animating constraint. The antelope-horn trumpet’s blast and bleat,
Cherry’s ludic warble and Trane’s recursive quandary are variations on
music as gnostic announcement, ancient rhyme, that of end and beginning,
gnostic accent or note that cuts both ways.
Moten Blackness and Nothingness 747
But not only music. “Mu” (in quotes to underscore its whatsaid-ness) is
also lingual and imaginal effect and affect, myth and mouth in the Greek
form muthos that Jane Harrison, as Charles Olson was fond of noting, calls “a
re-utterance or pre-utterance, . . . a focus of emotion,” surmising the first
muthos to have been “simply the interjectional utterance mu.” “Mu” is also lingual
and erotic allure, mouth and muse, mouth not only noun but verb and
muse likewise, lingual and imaginal process, prod and process. It promises
verbal and romantic enhancement, graduation to an altered state, momentary
thrall translated into myth. Proffered from time immemorial, poetry’s perennial
boon, it thrives on quixotic persistence, the increment or enablement language
affords, promise and impossibility rolled into one (Anuncia/Nunca).
“Mu” carries a theme of utopic reverie, a theme of lost ground and elegiac
allure recalling the Atlantis-like continent Mu, thought by some during the
late nineteenth century and early twentieth century to have existed long ago in
the Pacific. The places named in the song of the Andoumboulou, set foot on
by the deceased while alive but lost or taken away by death, could be called
“Mu.” Any longingly imagined, mourned or remembered place, time, state, or
condition can be called “Mu.” . . .
Serial form lends itself to andoumboulouous liminality, the draft unassured
extension knows itself to be. Provisional, ongoing, the serial poem
moves forward and backward both, repeatedly “back / at / some beginning,”
repeatedly circling or cycling back, doing so with such adamance as to call forward
and back into question and suggest an eccentric step to the side—as
though, driven to distraction by shortcircuiting options, it can only be itself
beside itself. So it is that “Mu” is also Song of the Andoumboulou, Song of the
Andoumboulou also “Mu.” H.D.’s crazed geese, circling above the spot that was
once Atlantis or the Hesperides or the Islands of the Blest, come to mind, as
do John Coltrane’s wheeling, spiraling runs as if around or in pursuit of some
lost or last note, lost or last amenity: a tangential, verging movement out (outlantish).
The ring shout comes to mind, as do the rings of Saturn, the planet
adopted by Sun Ra, one of whose albums, Atlantis, opens with a piece called
“Mu.” (Mackey 2006: ix–xii)
Now I want us to try to think about the relation between Mackey’s and
Wilderson’s dialectics of held fantasy. Wilderson’s register is more explicitly
philosophical and, so, our registers might have to shift as well. Entrance into
the philosophy of the subject is also perilous, but it seems as if our belatedness
makes such peril necessary if the goal is to approach the ship and its
hold. Wilderson says:
748 The South Atlantic Quarterly Fall 2013
To put it bluntly, the imaginative labor of cinema, political action, and cultural
studies are all afflicted with the same theoretical aphasia. They are
speechless in the face of gratuitous violence.
This theoretical aphasia is symptomatic of a debilitated ensemble of
questions regarding political ontology. At its heart are two registers of imaginative
labor. The first register is that of description, the rhetorical labor
aimed at explaining the way relations of power are named, categorized, and
explored. The second register can be characterized as prescription, the rhetorical
labor predicated on the notion that everyone can be emancipated
through some form of discursive, or symbolic, intervention.
But emancipation through some form of discursive or symbolic
intervention is wanting in the face of a subject position that is not a subject
position—what Marx calls “a speaking implement” or what Ronald Judy calls
“an interdiction against subjectivity.” In other words, the 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 2010: 56)
He continues:
The Afro-pessimists are theorists of Black positionality who share Fanon’s
insistence that, though Blacks are . . . sentient beings, the structure of the
entire world’s semantic field . . . is sutured by anti-Black solidarity. . . . Afropessimism
explores the meaning of Blackness not—in the first instance—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; this meaning is noncommunicable because, again, as a position,
Blackness is predicated on modalities of accumulation and fungibility,
not exploitation and alienation. (58–59)
A certain kind of sociological desire is announced in this utterance, in echo
not only of Fanon, not only of Patterson, but of an anticipatory counterutterance
in Du Bois as well. What is our methodological comportment in the
face of the question concerning the strange meaning of being black when
the ontological attitude is already under a kind of interdiction with regard to
such being? A sociology of relations that would somehow account for the
radically nonrelational—but this only insofar as relationality is understood
Moten Blackness and Nothingness 749
to be an expression of power, structured by the givenness of a transcendental
subjectivity that the black cannot have but by which the black can be had; a
structural position that he or she cannot take but by which he or she can be
taken. The givenness and substantiveness of transcendental subjectivity is
assured by a relative nothingness. In a relationality that can only be manifest
as a general absence of relations, by way of a theoretically established noncommunicability
that is, itself, somehow given for thought by way of some
kind of spooky action at a distance (How else would we know this noncommunicability?
How else would it show up as the nonrelationality that structures
all relationality?).
Within this framework blackness and antiblackness remain in brutally
antisocial structural support of one another like the stanchions of an absent
bridge of lost desire over which flows the commerce and under which flows
the current, the logistics and energy of exclusion and incorporation, that
characterizes the political world. Though it might seem paradoxical, the
bridge between blackness and antiblackness is “the unbridgeable gap
between Black being and Human life” (Wilderson 2010: 57). What remains is
the necessity of an attempt to index black existence by way of what Chandler
(2007: 41) would call paraontological, rather than politico-ontological, means.
The relative nothingness of black life, which shows up for political ontology
as a relation of nonrelation or counterrelation precisely in the impossibility of
political intersubjectivity, can be said both to obscure and to indicate the
social animation of the bridge’s underside, where the im/possibilities of political
intersubjectivity are exhausted. Political ontology backs away from the
experimental declivity that Fanon and Du Bois were at least able to blaze,
each in his own way forging a sociological path that would move against the
limiting force, held in the ontological traces, of positivism, on the one hand,
and phenomenology, on the other, as each would serve as the foundation of a
theory of relations posing the nothingness of blackness in its (negative) relation
to the substance of subjectivity-as-nonblackness (enacted in antiblackness).
On the one hand, blackness and ontology are unavailable for one
another; on the other hand, blackness must free itself from ontological expectation,
must refuse subjection to ontology’s sanction against the very idea of
black subjectivity. This imperative is not something up ahead, to which blackness
aspires; it is the labor, which must not be mistaken for Sisyphean, that
blackness serially commits. The paraontological distinction between blackness
and blacks allows us no longer to be enthralled by the notion that blackness
is a property that belongs to blacks (thereby placing certain formulations
regarding non/relationality and non/communicability on a different footing
750 The South Atlantic Quarterly Fall 2013
and under a certain pressure) but also because ultimately it allows us to
detach blackness from the question of (the meaning of) being. The infinitesimal
difference between pessimism and optimism lies not in the belief or
disbelief in descriptions of power relations or emancipatory projects; the difference
is given in the space between an assertion of the relative nothingness
of blackness and black people in the face, literally, of substantive (antiblack)
subjectivity and an inhabitation of appositionality, its internal social
relations, which remain unstructured by the protocols of subjectivity insofar
as mu—which has been variously translated from the Japanese translation of
the Chinese wu as no, not, nought, nonbeing, emptiness, nothingness, nothing,
no thing but which also bears the semantic trace of dance, therefore of
measure given in walking/falling, that sustenance of asymmetry, difference’s
appositional mobility—also signifies an absolute nothingness whose antirelative
and antithetical philosophical content is approached by way of Nishida
Kitaro¯’s enactment of the affinities between structures and affects of mysticism
that undergird and trouble metaphysics in the “East” and the “West.”
Indeed, the content that is approached is approach, itself, and for the absolute
beginner, who is at once pilgrim and penitent, mu signals that which is most
emphatically and lyrically marked in Édouard Glissant’s phrase “consent not
to be a single being” and indicated in Wilderson’s and Mackey’s gestures
toward “fantasy in the hold,” the radical unsettlement that is where and what
we are. Unsettlement is the displacement of sovereignty by initiation, so that
what’s at stake—here, in displacement—is a certain black incapacity to desire
sovereignty and ontological relationality whether they are recast in the terms
and forms of a Lévinasian ethics or an Arendtian politics, a Fanonian resistance
or a Pattersonian test of honor.
Unenabled by or in this incapacity, Nishida’s philosophy folds sovereignty
in the delay that has always given it significance, putting it on hold,
but not in the hold, where to be on hold is to have been committed to a kind
of staging, a gathering of and for the self in which negation is supposed to
foster true emergence in “a self-determination of that concrete place of the
contradictory identity of objectivity and subjectivity” (Nishida 1987: 96).
What I term, here, a delay is understood by Nishida as “the moment [that]
can be said to be eternal . . . [wherein] consciously active individuals, encounter
the absolute as its inverse polarity, its mirror opposite, at each and every
step of our lives” (96). It is in echoing a traditional Buddhist teaching, which
asserts the nonself even against what are considered foolish declarations of
the nonexistence of self, that Nishida restages a standard ontotheological skit
in which sovereignty—whether in the form of the consciously active indi-
Moten Blackness and Nothingness 751
vidual or in that individual’s abstract and equivalent dispersion in the nation,
“the mirror image of the Pure Land in this world” (123)—takes and holds the
space-time, the paradoxically transcendental ground, of the everyday unreality
of “the real world,” where the sovereign’s endless show carries a brutally
material imposition. What remains to be seen is what (the thinking and the
study of) blackness can bring to bear on the relation between the un/real
world and its other(s). What if blackness is the refusal to defer to, given in the
withdrawal from the eternal delay of, sovereignty? What if Nishida’s preparatory
vestibule for a general and infinite self-determination is pierced, rather
than structurally supported, by (the very intimation of) the no-place to which
it is opposed in his own work? When Nishida argues that “the human, consciously
active volitional world makes its appearance from the standpoint of
the paradoxical logic of the Prajnaparamita Sutra literature,” which offers us
the phrase “Having No Place wherein it abides, this Mind arises,” he means
to assert the legitimacy of an idea or image of the whole that takes “the form
of the contradictory identity of the consciously active self and the world, of
the volitional individual and the absolute” (95–96). What if (the thinking
and the study of) blackness is an inhabitation of the hold that disrupts the
whole in which the absolute, or absolute nothingness, is structured by its
relation to its relative other? What if the nothing that is in question here
moves through to the other side of negation, in “the real presence” of blackness,
in and as another idea of nothingness altogether that is given in and as
and to things?
Both against the grain and by way of Fanon’s negation of the condition
of relative nothingness, which is instantiated in what he takes to be the white
man’s manufacture of the black, black study is attunement of and toward
blackness as the place where something akin to the absolute nothingness
that Nishida elaborates and a radical immanence of things that is not disavowed
so much as it is unimagined in that same elaboration converge. This
is to say that what remains unimagined by Nishida—not simply radical
thingliness but its convergence with nothingness—is, nevertheless, made
open to us by and in his thinking. Nishida helps prepare us to consider, even
in the nationalist divigation of his own engagement with the heart of a teaching
that has no center, that blackness is the place that has no place. “Having
no place where it abides, this Mind [of the Little Negro Steelworker] arises.”1
Things are in, but they do not have, a world, a place, but it is precisely both
the specificity of having neither world nor place and the generality of not having
that we explore at the nexus of openness and confinement, internment
and flight. Having no place wherein they abide, in the radically dispossessive
752 The South Atlantic Quarterly Fall 2013
no-place of the hold, in “Mutron,” Cherry and Blackwell touch intimacy
from the walls. In that break, the architectonic intent of the hold as sovereign
expression and recuperation breaks down. Feel the complete lysis of
this morbid body/universe. Touch is not where subjectivity and objectivity
come together in some kind of self-determining dialectical reality; beyond
that, in the hold, in the basho (the place of nothingness, that underground,
undercommon recess), is the social life of black things, which passeth (the)
understanding. In the hold, blackness and imagination, in and as consent
not to be a single being, are (more and less than) one.
We are prepared for this generative incapacity by Wilderson’s work,
where what distinguishes the sovereign, the settler, and even the savage
from the slave is precisely that they share “a capacity for time and space
coherence. At every scale—the soul, the body, the group, the land, and the
universe—they can both practice cartography, and although at every scale
their maps are radically incompatible, their respective ‘mapness’ is never in
question. This capacity for cartographic coherence is the thing itself, that
which secures subjectivity for both the Settler and the ‘Savage’ and articulates
them to one another in a network of connections, transfers and displacements”
(Wilderson 2010: 181). Absent the “cartographic coherence [that]
is the thing itself,” we must become interested in things, in a certain relationship
between thingliness and nothingness and blackness that plays itself
out—outside and against the grain of the very idea of self-determination—in
the unmapped and unmappable immanence of undercommon sociality.
This is fantasy in the hold, and Wilderson’s access to it is in the knowledge
that he can have nothing and in the specific incapacity of a certain desire
that this knowledge indexes. It remains for us to structure an accurate sense
of what nothing is and what it constitutes in the exhaustion of home, intersubjectivity,
and what Sexton calls “ontological reach” (Sexton 2011a). The
truth of the formulation that the black cannot be among or in relation to his
or her own is given in terminological failure. What’s at stake is how to improvise
the declension from what is perceived as a failure to be together to the
unmappable zone of paraontological consent. The promise of another world,
or of the end of this one, is given in the general critique of world. In the
meantime, what remains to be inhabited is nothing itself in its fullness,
which is, in the absence of intersubjective relationality, high fantastical or,
more precisely, given in the fugal, contrapuntal intrication that we can now
call, by way of Mackey and Wilderson, fantasy in the hold, where the interplay
of blackness and nothingness is given in an ongoing drama of force
and entry.
Moten Blackness and Nothingness 753
In a tradition of Buddhist teaching that goes back to the opening of
The Gateless Gate, a thirteenth-century gathering of ko¯ans (case studies that
take the form of stories, dialogues and/or questions meant to induce in the
initiate dual intensities of doubt and concentration), that drama emerges as a
deconstructive and deconstructed question, as exemplified in conventional
presentations and interpretation of “Jo¯shu¯’s Dog.” The ko¯an reads: “A monk
asked [Zen master] Jo¯shu¯ in all earnestness, ‘Does a dog have Buddha nature
or not?’ Jo¯shu¯ said, ‘Mu!’” (Yamada 2004: 11). Even when we take into account
Steven Heine’s warnings (Heine 2012) regarding the legitimacy of traditional
attributions and interpretations of the Mu Ko¯an—which require us to
consider both that it was not Jo¯shu¯ who responded to the question or that
Jo¯shu¯’s response was the opposite of mu and that, therefore, the negative way
that response is understood to open ought now to be closed—we are left with
an ontotheological possibility that blackness may well exhaust. There is an
appositional response, which this phantom query cannot properly be said to
have called, that persists in and as an echoepistemology of passage, a sociotheology
of the aneschaton, the instrumental interruption of telos by the universal
(drum) machine, Blackwell’s prompt out to the study of the last things,
the study carried out by the things that are last, by the least of these, whose
movement constitutes a critique of the general and necessary relation
between politics and death, a critique of the critique of judgment, a deconstruction
of the opposition of heaven and hell. Cherry brings the noise of the
end of the world in the invention of the earth. Though eschatology is understood
to be a department, as it were, of theology, it has been both displaced
by an administrative desire for the teleological and appropriated by a retributive
desire for a kind of finality of and in sentencing, each in its commitment
to sovereignty and the already existing structures that depend upon the very
idea. But it’s not that I want to enclose things in the dialectical movement
between beginning and end. Invention and passage denote an already existing
alternative for which we are not constrained to wait. We are already down
here on and under the ground, the water, as worked, unwrought nothingness
working fleshly releasement in a privation of feasting, a fragility of healing.
Mu is a practice of mysticism in the flesh; “Mutron,” the ritual Blackwell
and Cherry perform, is their concentration meditation. It indexes the specific
and material history of the drowned and burned, the shipped and held,
as the condition for the release not just of the prevailing worldview but of the
very idea of worldview, of transcendental standpoint and Pure Land. Cherry
and Blackwell are initiates, who in turn initiate us, in what it is to abide in
the social materiality of no place, of Having No Place, as a place for study.
754 The South Atlantic Quarterly Fall 2013
This shows up as a radical displacement of binary logic, moving through
negation, because the way of the hold is no via negativa. Rather, the hold is
distressed circuitry, an impedance or impediment of current, a placement of
the self’s or the settler’s or the sovereign’s dyadic currency in kenotic abandon.
“Mutron” is a way out of no way given in and as the exhaustion of what
it is to abide, where the first and the last are neither first nor last.
To remain in the hold is to remain in that set of practices of living
together where antikinetic theorizing is both bracketed and mobilized by
performative contemplation, as in the monastic sociality of Minton’s, where
the hermetic absence of and from home is given in and as a playhouse, a funnyhouse,
a madhouse. The club, our subcenobitic thing, our block chapel, is
a hard row of constant improvisational contact, a dispossessive intimacy of
rubbing, whose mystic rehearsal is against the rules or, more precisely, is
apposed to rule, and is, therefore, a concrete social logic often (mis)understood
as nothing but foolishness, which is, on the other hand, exactly and
absolutely what it is. Foucault’s meditations point precisely in this direction:
The ship of fools was heavily loaded with meaning, and clearly carried a great
social force. . . . The madman on his crazy boat sets sail for the other world,
and it is from the other world that he comes when he disembarks. This
enforced navigation is both rigorous division and absolute Passage, serving to
underline in real and imaginary terms the liminal situation of the mad in
medieval society. It was a highly symbolic role, made clear by the mental geography
involved, where the madman was confined at the gates of the cities. His
exclusion was his confinement, and if he had no prison other than the threshold
itself he was still detained at this place of passage. . . .
A prisoner in the midst of the ultimate freedom, . . . he is the Passenger
par excellence, the prisoner of the passage. It is not known where he will
land, and when he lands, he knows not whence he came. His truth and his
home are the barren wasteland between two lands that can never be his
own. . . . The link between water and madness is deeply rooted in the dream
of the Western man. (Foucault 2006: 10–11)
Deleuze has seized on this dimension of Foucault’s thought to probe how
for him “the inside [functions] as an operation of the outside.” Indeed, “in
all his work Foucault seems haunted by this theme of an inside which is
merely the fold of the outside, as if the ship were a folding of the sea. . . .
Thought has no other being than this madman himself. As Blanchot says
of Foucault: ‘He encloses the outside, that is, constitutes it in an interiority
of expectation or exception’” (Deleuze 1988: 81). Deleuze continues:
Moten Blackness and Nothingness 755
Forces always come from the outside, from an outside that is farther away
than any form of exteriority. So there are not only particular features taken up
by the relations between forces, but particular features of resistance that are
apt to modify and overturn these relations and to change the unstable diagram.
. . . [This is] “where one can live and in fact where Life exists par excellence.”
. . . [This is] life within the folds. This is the central chamber, which one
need no longer fear is empty since one fills it with oneself. Here one becomes
a master of one’s speed and, relatively speaking, a master of one’s molecules
and particular features, in this zone of subjectivation: the boat as interior of
the exterior. (Deleuze 1988: 100–101)
Passage, which is to say this passage, which is to say the passage
between these passages of Foucault and Deleuze, the passage between
these and those of Wilderson and Mackey, is given in the hold that Cherry
and Blackwell deconstructively reconstruct just so you’ll know that the music
and its performance was never about transcendence unless transcendence is
understood as immanence’s fugitive impurity. How would you recognize
the antiphonal accompaniment to gratuitous violence—the sound that can
be heard as if in response to that violence, the sound that must be heard as
that to which such violence responds? Wilderson asks the question again so
that it can be unasked; so that we can hear Cherry and Blackwell unask it in
and as intimacy in dislocation. Unasking takes the form of a caesura, an
arrhythmia of the iron system, that Blackwell presses into the interruptive,
already interrupted New Orleans continuum of his roll whose distended
rearticulation stretches out so you can go down in it enough to think about
what it means somewhere you’re only supposed to be going through, to be
contained in the atopic atemporality that propels you, as the immanence of
the transcendental hallway of our endless preparation, our experimental
trial, given as our ongoing study of how to speak, the terrible beauty of our
imprisonment in the passage, our life in the folds. Blackwell asks a question
that Cherry anticipates, but by which Cherry is driven and to which
Cherry responds in the bent, appositional reflection that unasks it. This
drama is revived in Wilderson’s questioning; the question is a seizure that
moves us to unask it. That unasking is mu not because the question’s terms
and assumptions are incorrect; not because the implied opposition of nothing
and something—where nothingness is too simply understood to veil (as
if it were some epidermal livery) (some higher) being and is therefore relative
as opposed to absolute—doesn’t signify; but because nothing (this paraontological
interplay of blackness and nothingness, this aesthetic sociality)
756 The South Atlantic Quarterly Fall 2013
remains to be explored; because we don’t know what we mean by it even
when we recite or record its multiphonic swerve; because blackness is
not a category for ontology or for phenomenological analysis. Wilderson’s
question—“Would nothing ever be with nothing again”—precisely in its
irreducible necessity, cannot be answered but can only be unasked in the
lyricism of that ill logic that black monks incessantly, thelonially, perform,
as difference without opposition, in “a black hole,” as Jay Wright says (Wright
2013: 56), “germ and terminal, expansive/in its nothingness.”
What would it be for this drama to be understood in its own terms,
from its own standpoint, on its own ground? This is not simply a question of
perspective awaiting its unasking, since what we speak of is this radical
being beside itself of blackness, its appositionality. The standpoint, the home
territory, chez lui—Charles Lam Markmann’s insightful mistranslation of
Fanon illuminates something that Richard Philcox obscures by way of correction,
Among one’s own, signifies a relationality that displaces the already
displaced impossibility of home and the modes of relationality that home is
supposed to afford (Fanon 1967). 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 nothing, have everything. To live,
in other words, within the general commonness and openness of a life in
Deleuze’s sense (hence the necessity of a philosophy of life; hence the necessity
but also the rigor of a disbelief in social death, where social death is precisely
understood as the imposition of the subject’s necessity rather than the refusal
of the subject’s possibility, which, in any case, the imposition founds and enforces.
At stake is the curve, the suppleness and subtlety, not only of contemplation
on social life but of contemplative social life; at stake is the force of an extraphenomenological
poetics of social life. And so we arrive, again and again, at
a profound impulse in Fanon that—as Chandler indicates in his reading,
which is the initial reading, of Du Bois—constitutes Du Bois’s horizon and
which appears in the various forms of that question whose necessity is so
fundamental that it must be unasked—the question of the meaning of
(black) being, the question of the meaning of (black) things. We study in the
sound of an unasked question. Our study is the sound of an unasked question.
We study the sound of an unasked question. In the absence of the ame-
Moten Blackness and Nothingness 757
nity (some pleasantness or pleasantry of welcome or material comfort), what
is borne in the emptiness or nothingness of the amenity (of which love or
soul is born, in exhaustion, as a society of friends), what are the other elements
of mu? Chant and ko¯an and moan and Sprechgesang, and babble and
gobbledygook, le petit nègre, the little nigger, pidgin, baby talk, bird talk,
Bird’s talk, bard talk, bar talk, our locomotive bar walk and black chant, our
pallet cries and shipped whispers, our black notes and black cant, the tenor’s
irruptive habitation of the vehicle, the monastic preparation of a more than
three-dimensional transcript, an imaginal manuscript we touch upon the
walls and one another, so we can enter into the hold we’re in, where there is
no way we were or are.
Lysis and Le Petit Nègre
Let’s try to come at the central, centrifugal chamber of the open/ing again,
this time by way of Linebaugh and Fanon.
“The most magnificent drama of the last thousand years of human history”
was not enacted with its strophes and prosody ready-made. It created a
new speech. A combination of, first, nautical English; second, the “sabir” of
the Mediterranean; third, the hermetic-like cant talk of the “underworld”;
and fourth, West African grammatical construction, produced the “pidgin
English” that became in the tumultuous years of the slave trade the language
of the African coast.
Linguists describe pidgin as a “go-between” language, the product of
a “multiple-language situation,” characterized by “radical simplification.”
“Il est meme né pour permettre une communication josque-là impossible,”
Calvet has written. . . . Where people had to understand each other, pidgin
English was the lingua franca of the sea and the frontier. Inasmuch as all
who came to the New World did so after months at sea, pidgin or its maritime
and popular cognates became the medium of transmission for expressing
the new social realities. . . . Pidgin became an instrument, like the drum
or the fiddle, of communication among the oppressed: scorned and not easily
understood by polite society. (Linebaugh 1982: 110–11)
In the interest of a radical restaging of what Linebaugh calls, after
Du Bois, this “magnificent drama,” Fanon initiates a complex critical disavowal
of the “new speech” it produces, beginning—but not paradoxically—
with an assertion of language’s irreducibly dramatic character. “We attach,”
Fanon writes, “a fundamental importance to the phenomenon of language
758 The South Atlantic Quarterly Fall 2013
and consequently consider the study of language essential for providing us
with one element in understanding the black man’s dimension of beingfor-others,
it being understood that to speak is to exist absolutely for the
other” (Fanon 2008: 1). In a philosophical register cognate with that of
Nishida, Fanon posits an “[existence] absolutely for the other,” in speech,
that is given in and as “absolutely nothing.”
Our only hope of getting out of the situation is to pose the problem
correctly, for all these findings and all this research have a single aim: to get
man to admit he is nothing, absolutely nothing—and get him to eradicate
this narcissism whereby he thinks he is different from the other “animals.”
This is nothing more nor less than the capitulation of man.
All in all, I grasp my narcissism with both hands and I reject the vileness
of those who want to turn man into a machine. If the debate cannot be
opened up on a philosophical level—i.e., the fundamental demands of human
reality—I agree to place it on a psychological level: in other words, the “misfires,”
just as we talk about an engine misfiring. (6–7)
But what if the situation we ought to hope to get out of is “that concrete place
of the contradictory identity of objectivity and subjectivity” of which both
Nishida and Fanon speak? What if the emergence of man is best understood
as the obsessive restaging not of the magnificent drama that Linebaugh
indexes but of an epiphenomenal burlesque in which self-determination is
enacted with murderous indirection? In a way that is, again, similar to that of
Nishida, Fanon’s gesture toward nothingness prepares our approach to these
questions. It can be said, then, that Fanon moves to distinguish the language
of farce from the language of tragedy; it remains for us both to learn from and
to augment his analysis, which continues by way of (the) man’s casual and
uninformed commentary on the social situation of the new speech.
It is said that the black man likes to palaver, and whenever I pronounce the
word “palaver” I see a group of boisterous children raucously and blandly
calling out to the world: children at play insofar as play can be seen as an initiation
to life. The black man likes to palaver, and it is only a short step to a
new theory that the black man is just a child. Psychoanalysts have a field
day, and the word “orality” is soon pronounced. . . . [In this] we are interested
in the black man confronted by the French language. We would like to
understand why the Antillean is so fond of speaking good French. (10)
When Fanon proceeds to isolate the new speech from its disavowal it is
because it is the disavowal in which he is interested. This is to say that the
Moten Blackness and Nothingness 759
new speech doesn’t yet show up for Fanon as an object of analysis; more precisely,
the new speech doesn’t show up as speech. After all, “To speak means
being able to use a certain syntax and possessing the morphology of such
and such a language but it means above all assuming a culture and bearing
the weight of a civilization” (1–2). And what’s at stake, in the very newness of
pidgin, is precisely its improvisatory refusal, rather than use, of “a certain
syntax” so that the given is given over to its poetic alternative; its construction,
rather than assumption, of a culture; its burial under the weight of civilization
and the unlikely, paradoxically animative, exhaustion of such inter(n)ment.
But while it can be said of Fanon that in this point in his text he
neglects the new speech he offers a profound understanding of (the provenance
of) a certain desire for the standard.
Monsieur Achille, a teacher at the Lycée du Parc in Lyon, cited a personal
experience during his lecture. . . . As a Roman Catholic, he took part in a pilgrimage.
Seeing a black face among his flock, the priest asked him: “Why
have you left big savanna and why you come with us?” Achille answered
most politely. . . . Everyone laughed at the exchange. . . . But if we stop to
reflect, we realize that the priest’s usage of pidgin calls for several remarks.
1. . . . A white man talking to a person of color behaves exactly like a
grown-up with a kid, simpering, murmuring, fussing, and coddling. . . .
Speaking to black people in this way is an attempt to reach down to them, to
make them feel at ease, to make oneself understood and reassure them. . . .
2. To speak gobbledygook to a black man is insulting, for it means he
is the gook. . . .
If the person who speaks to a man of color or an Arab in pidgin does
not see that there is a flaw or a defect in his behavior, then he has never
paused to reflect. (14–15)
The violence of insincere and unflattering imitation that materializes such
absence of reflection is vividly portrayed in Fanon’s text. However, infantilization
of the ones who utter the speech that, according to Fanon, cannot
be spoken, does not mean that the new speech is merely infantile. The implication,
here, that the new speech is also old is not a function of anything that
it retains other than an essential and irreducible vehicularity. Fanon’s concern
with the pathological desire to speak good French, seen in its relation to
the normal desire to be spoken to in good faith, understands the speaker’s
being absolutely for the other to imply reciprocity within the shared possession
of a language. Speech in bad faith moves in the wake of not listening, of
neither acknowledging nor recognizing the speaker’s capacity to be for or
with the one to whom he or she speaks. Such being for can be spoken of in
760 The South Atlantic Quarterly Fall 2013
terms of contemporaneity—implying not only joint ownership of a language
but also a shared spatiotemporal frame, transcendental aesthetic, body
schema, or home—but might be better elaborated in terms of the differentiation
of any given spatiotemporal frame, the shared and social construction of
an immanent aesthetic, within the constantly shifting schemata of a fleshly
historicity in which language moves to connect a vast, differential range of
unmoored unowning.
(This is why it’s important to note that this tragic [or tragi-comic] homelessness
of the new speech is something Fanon approaches in his analysis
of an exhaustion of return in Aimé Césaire’s poetry—return is exhausted
in descent, plunge, fall; a propulsive transport through the crush and density
of an absolute singularity, in the interest of avoiding “this absurd drama
that others have staged around me” [174]. What Fanon celebrates in Césaire,
however, are instances of language whose emphasis on rising is seen by
Fanon implicitly to assert the necessity of a departure from undercommon
linguistic sociality that traverses the distance between pidgin and poetry.
“Cesaire went down. He agreed to see what was happening at the very bottom,
and now he can come back up. He is ripe for the dawn. But he does not
leave the black man down below. He carries him on his shoulders and lifts
him up to the skies” [172]. Return, which had been reconfigured as descent,
is now surrogate to an elevation in and of language that enacts the rediscovery
of the meaning of the poet’s identity [175]. But there is profound
ambivalence in Fanon with regard to the mechanisms of uplift that he
reads in Césaire. Lysis is meant to stave off the interplay—which lyric often
induces—of narcissism and alienation that produces, and is grotesquely
reproduced in, the black man. Fanon alerts us to a breaking brokenness in
Césaire’s work that moves against the grain of the lyrical, upwardly mobile
self-determination that carries it. This is the ordinance and disorder that
the new speech affords. Paralyric sociality has no place in the sun. The night
holds fantasy, not identity. The new speech, which animates Césaire’s
poetry as well as Fanon’s invocation of Césaire in the interest of disavowing
the new speech, is where we discover, again and again, the various and
unrecoverable natality that we share. Fanon recognizes that what can’t be
recovered becomes [sur]real in not being itself. This corrosive insistence on
and in the new is where lyric and lysis converge in mutual submergence, but
Fanon is constrained to avow the disavowal that is encrypted in the desire
to speak good French. Later, I will return to the fallen poetics of return, its
high and dissident fidelity; now it remains necessary to concentrate on
Fanon’s analytic of speech in bad faith, which begins with his concern
Moten Blackness and Nothingness 761
with the white usage of pidgin, its effects on “privileged” blacks interpellated
by such speech, and, then, the ensuing commitment of those blacks
to “speaking good French.”)
Fanon takes great care to emphasize not just that the fact that there are
whites who don’t talk down to blacks is irrelevant for the study of the effects
produced by whites who do but that the purpose of his study of the Negro
and language is to “eliminate a number of realities” that occur as a function
of pathological behavior indexed to an inhuman psychology. He’s interested,
finally, in how pathological white behavior breeds or fabricates a kind of
pathological black behavior. Fanon is interested in acknowledging, isolating,
studying, and eradicating what Frederick Douglass (2000: 115) calls our
“plantation peculiarities.” Moreover, while this process may be initiated by
way of a psychological or psychoanalytic discourse predicated on the notion
of the inferiority complex, a discourse that might also be discussed as a kind
of misfire, in language that anticipates that of J. L. Austin—an infelicitous
speech act, one that fails, ultimately, to achieve an intention—ultimately,
Fanon appeals to a different metaphorics, a different language, the language
of the biochemistry and alchemy of nothingness, a language of and on the
experiment’s double edge. What if we conceive of the sold, old-souled child
who utters the new speech as having been submitted to the most brutal
forms of violent investigation: placed on a kind of endless trial, given over to
an interminable testing, the brutality of the biological market in which the
self-possession of a body is interdicted by fleshly dispossession, marking that
condition where to be grasped/held/owned is also to be studied? But what if
we simultaneously conceive of the child as a scientist, one engaged in experiments,
and in a metaexperimental undertaking of and in research predicated
on the embrace of precisely that dispossessive fleshliness that corresponds
to the fullest possible understanding of what Fanon refers to as
“absolutely nothing”—a nothingness without reserve, independent of the
desire to show up in and for the conventional optics wherein somebody is
delineated and identified? Then palaver would best be understood as the language
of the playground if the playground is more accurately understood as
a laboratory. This means considering “palaver” or “gobbledygook” not as
degraded forms of the standard but rather as modes of linguistic experimentation,
modes of linguistic theory given in experimental linguistic practice
that have at least two possible effects: the calling into existence of a kind of
carceral standard that will have been fabricated in the instance of a whole
range of administrative, normative, and regulatory modes and desires and
the equally problematic calling forth of certain acts of tone-deaf imitation,
762 The South Atlantic Quarterly Fall 2013
equal parts condescension and brutality, the production of a sound meant to
accompany an image/livery of subordination in the interest of self-determination’s
dumbshow.
What’s at stake, here, is the priority of anoriginally insubordinate,
jurisgenerative, as opposed to juridically systemic, linguistic experimentation.
Speaking “gobbledygook” to a black man is insulting if it takes pidgin
for gobbledygook, if such a sclerotic understanding, and the imprecision that
follows from it, imagines pidgin to be something other than a language of
study. Fanon bristles at the casualness of such a form of speech, the easy way
in which the informal is understood to be the occasion for a kind of brutal
informality on the part of the one who arrogantly deigns to understand it.
The absence of any intention to give offense is no defense, in his estimation,
for the absence of any intention not to give offense. One takes no care to
avoid the incidental or accidental suffering of the thing. And this is, finally,
evidence of a flaw, a moral defect; such lack of concern is rightly understood
to be pathological. But what must be clearly understood is that it is not pidgin
or le petit nègre that instantiates imprisonment at an uncivilized and
primitive level: it is, rather, the inaccurate, imprecise, and, for all intents and
purposes, absent reflection—wholly outside of any protocol of study, wholly
outside of the experimental social, aesthetic, and intellectual modalities that
determine the making of the language in the first place—of pidgin that constitutes
this particular prison house of language. This means that we must
then discuss the no less carceral effects that attend the disavowal of pidgin
that often attends the righteous refusal of its less than vulgar imitation.
Some might say that such imitation is merely an extension of pidgin’s experimental
force, but I would argue that it is more precisely understood as
always in service, always enacting the exaltation, of the standard. In this
instance imitation is the sincerest form of brutality. What remains is to consider
what it is for Fanon to have felt himself lapsing.
When I meet a German or a Russian speaking bad French I try to indicate
through gestures the information he is asking for, but in doing so I am careful
not to forget that he has a language of his own, a country, and that perhaps
he is a lawyer or an engineer back home. Whatever the case, he is a
foreigner with different standards.
There is nothing comparable when it comes to the black man. He has
no culture, no civilization, and no “long historical past.” . . .
Whether he likes it or not, the black man has to wear the livery the
white man has fabricated for him. (Fanon 2008: 17)
Moten Blackness and Nothingness 763
Fanon further elaborates:
The fact is that the European has a set idea of the black man, and there is
nothing more exasperating than to hear: “How long have you lived in
France? You speak such good French.”
It could be argued that this is due to the fact that a lot of black people
speak pidgin. But that would be too easy. . . .
After everything that has . . . been said, it is easy to understand why the
first reaction of the black man is to say no to those who endeavor to define
him. It is understandable that the black man’s first action is a reaction, and
since he is assessed with regard to his degree of assimilation, it is understandable
that too why the returning Antillean speaks only French: because he is
striving to underscore the rift that has occurred. He embodies a new type of
man whom he imposes on his colleagues and family. His old mother no longer
understands when he speaks of her pj’s, her ramshackle dump, and her
lousy joint. All that embellished with the proper accent. (Fanon 1967: 18–19)
What’s problematic in Fanon is the belief in the priority of the standard
except for the special case of the black for whom there is no standard,
where standard, in its priority, corresponds to patria and patrimony. This
will reemerge in Patterson’s discourse as the assertion of the absence of a
heritage (wherein a past is detached from or deprived of long historical duration)
and natal alienation. At stake, in a way that must be understood with
more precision than the phrase “black civilization” and whatever its impossibility
might signify, is the relation, or in Wilderson’s more precise formulation,
the antagonism between blackness and civilization. The famously mistranslated
title of Foucault’s opus L’histoire de la folie a l’âge classique has a
kind of relevance here in part because the ongoing and irrepressible event of
the nonstandard, the antestandard, given now in the language of the standard
as madness, as social psychosis, has blackness, also, for another name.
We might consider, here, the structural relation between name and livery,
designation and uniform, precisely in order to think about what historical
task their interinanimative imposition, which takes the form of a sumptuary
law, confers upon the ones who have been so burdened. At stake is the givenness
of the given’s constant disruption, which is prior to its naming; the gift
of a project whose conferral is prior to its venal imposition. This is a massive,
immeasurable problematic of responsibility.
Meanwhile, the phonics of pidgin is an epiphenomenon, not only
in that it is an effect of, but also in that it indicates, fabrication. Moreover,
it entraps what it indicates. In this view, it’s not just that pidgin is prison
764 The South Atlantic Quarterly Fall 2013
language but that being made to speak it imprisons. Imprisonment in pidgin,
the imprisonment that is enacted in being made to speak pidgin, is,
itself, an epiphenomenon of epidermalization, nothing more than its verbal
accompaniment. Implicit here, again, is the assumed priority of the
standard. One is made to speak pidgin in response to an imposition, in
response to speech uttered in bad faith. The standard rises as a kind of background
that pidgin fails pitiably and pitifully to represent. That failed representation
is then burlesqued and parodied by the white whose utterance—
whether in condescension or in a more direct kind of cruelty—is meant to
do nothing other than impose the subordination and incarceration that is
instantiated in the black man–as–good nigger’s speech.
In outlining a certain problematic of return, the problem of why upon
his return to the Antilles the privileged one desires to speak good French,
Fanon (2008: 18) describes one who sees himself as moving within a condition
in which suspicion of the black student’s erudite and standard speech is
confined only to the periphery of the university where “an army of fools”
reside. But the point isn’t that life in the university undermines any such
faith in the wisdom of its inhabitants; the point is that a set of assumptions
about class now edge into clarity. That the capacity for standard speech,
whether of another tongue or of one’s own, is aligned with the achievement
of a certain interconnection of class status and educational accomplishment.
One who recognizes that alignment, upon meeting the German who speaks
bad French, politely assumes that he is an engineer or a lawyer, that he has a
language, that he has standards, that he has a home. The black man is the
living embodiment and visualization of the absence of the standard, however,
and no such assumption can be made about him. But this lived experience
of the nonstandard, of the standard’s absence, does not mean that one
is unable either to see or to revere the standard and its idealized locale. The
army, as opposed to the ship, of fools that surround and protect the inner
sanctum of the metropole, the holy of holies, need neither know nor embody
the standard that they protect. It is, in fact, nearest and clearest to the one
who recognizes it as the site of “equal footing” (Fanon 2008: 19), where the
weak assertion of one’s capacity for feeling and reason is replaced by emphatically
proper linguistic performance.
Again, Fanon is concerned with the narcissism of the new returnee,
the social climber, as he or she links up with Arendt’s own stringent analysis
of the parvenu. That narcissism disallows a rigorous and requisite full
inhabitation of the zone of nonbeing, an “extraordinarily sterile and arid
region, an incline stripped bare of every essential from which a genuine new
Moten Blackness and Nothingness 765
departure can emerge” (Fanon 2008: xii). This incline, or declivity, or ramp,
bespeaks, again, the bio(al)chemical laboratory in which the black is made.
What remains in question is whether or not he or she is present at his or her
own making. How do we speak of that presence, of a real transubstantial
presence, in the same breath with which we describe sterility and aridity?
What if we choose—while also choosing not to assume the barrenness of—
the paraontic field? This incline, where experimentation in the interest of
securing the normal requires the production and imposition of the pathological,
where investigation in the interest of freedom demands incarceration,
is, or ought to be, a site of study. To speak of pidgin, then, as the language
of nothingness or of nonbeing, the language whose shadow delineates
the territory of the inexistent, is not to utter a decree that legitimizes skipping
the question concerning the constitution of that language or paralanguage
and moving straight to its reduction to the subordination it is supposed
to indicate. Four questions emerge: What is pidgin? Who makes it?
What pressure does it place on the very idea of the standard? Isn’t such pressure,
in fact, the making of the standard? These questions open us onto
another understanding of the experiment, which Fanon takes up both literally
and figuratively: “We have just used the word ‘narcissism.’ We believe, in
fact, that only a psychoanalytic interpretation of the black problem can reveal
the affective disorders responsible for this network of complexes. We are
aiming for a complete lysis of this morbid universe” (xiv).
In a paragraph that begins by asserting the necessity of psychoanalytic
interpretation for revealing the black man’s affective disorders/anomalies
we note this movement between consciousness and the unconscious,
cut and augmented by commitment to the trajectory of self-consciousness,
wherein “an individual must endeavor to assume the universalism inherent
in the human condition” (Fanon 2008: xiv). Edmund Husserl, G. W. F.
Hegel, and Sigmund Freud are present—but in a kind of Sartrean light, or
frame—beginning with that fateful, fatal interplay between the miraculously
self-positing individual and the uncut givenness of the standard. But
analysis is then cut by something, a natural process if not attitude: corrosion,
compromise of the cell’s integrity. “Nous travaillons à une lyse totale de
cet univers morbide” (Fanon 1952: 8). “We are aiming for a complete lysis of
this morbid universe” (Fanon 2008: xiv). “I shall attempt a complete lysis
of this morbid body” (Fanon 1967: 10). The two translations, one in its literalness,
the other in its avoidance of the literal in the interest of greater idiomatic
precision, allow us to linger in and consider the relation between
the universe and the body, between the transcendental aesthetic and the
766 The South Atlantic Quarterly Fall 2013
body that it makes possible and that makes it possible. It is as if both are, in
their morbidity, to be submitted to a radical breakdown.
The language of biochemistry permeates Fanon’s text, as it should.
The language of biochemistry is all bound up with the language of friendship,
the massive corollary problematic of like and unlike, rending the distinction
between friend and enemy that Plato gets to in “Lysis.” Lysis is to
separate, to break down walls, to refute, but also to redeem. The pursuit of
the meaning of friendship moves by way of bondage: “by the road which
skirts the outside of the wall,” thinking on or over the edge of the city,
there is “a palaestra that has lately been erected” (Plato 1961: 146). We made
a space, we formed a pit, “here, where,” “there where,” in the very place of
resistance (says Derrida [1998b: 24]). There’s all this lunatic noise Hippothales
is constantly emitting; Lysis is his means and his end, which is
interminable. Lysis defies ana according to Derrida (1998b: 19–20). Madness
is the condition within which the question of friendship arises. Madness
will have been the method—a resistance without meaning, lysis without
origin or end—no friend, neither first nor last. Is “Lysis” the invisible
bridge between Politics of Friendship and Resistances of Psychoanalysis?
Between Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth? The body
that questions, because it is a body that is in question, is an experiment.
This de/generative materiality, this unending differentiation, bears Hippothales’s
self-referential moan. Socrates autotunes it but always in the interest
of this interplay of questioning and unasking that is his sociodramatic
method. The matter for thought, here, is the matter of thought, which is to
say the madness of thought, fantasy in the hold, as Wilderson has it, the
witch’s flight, as Deleuze and Guattari (1996: 41) offers it for Kara Keeling’s
rigorous rematerialization.
For myself, I was rejoicing, with all a hunter’s delight, at just grasping the
prey I had been so long in chase of, when presently there came into my
mind, from what quarter I cannot tell, the strangest sort of suspicion. (Plato
1961: 162)
Can we possibly help, then, being weary of going on in this manner,
and is it not necessary that we advance at once to a beginning which will not
again refer us to friend upon friend, but arrive at that to which we are in the
first instance friends, and for the sake of which we say we are friends to all
the rest? (163)
Trane says that he plays multiple lines in the same head, plays the
same head multiple times, because he doesn’t know the one path to the
Moten Blackness and Nothingness 767
essential. Trane’s questioning and unasking, his experimental method—is
it Socrates’s method, too? Trane’s fantasy. He dreamed his treasure. Maybe
he knew there was no single way. Maybe he didn’t want there to be one way.
He didn’t want it to be one way; there were the other ways. Trane’s mysticism,
the polyvalent collectivity of his constant worrying of beginning,
instantiates the problem of ana-lysis, of improvisation as self-ana-lysis. Derrida
(1998b: 19–20) speaks of this nonpresence, which is insofar as it is
copresence, the real presence, interdicted and interpenetrative, of archetropic
return and philolytic nonarrival, where means and end, object and
aim, converge, Tao-like, in their mutual incompleteness within a social field,
as ensemblic consent, where the first is displaced by the last, by what is supposed
to have been relegated to the presupposed, already posited emptiness
of a vessel filled with nothing. A jug or a cup of earthenware or my son, their
otherworldly interventions, the otherworldly intervention of servants and
bearers, their thought of the outside, their disruption of closure, their suspension
of pursuit is dismissed, in common, as already (de)valued commonness’s
underside, which is animated by that whose form it takes: “mere idle
talk put together after the fashion of a lengthy poem” (Plato 1961: 166). Phenomenology’s
variously public and private debts to the transcendental subject
and to transcendental intersubjectivity are often manifest as impatience
with idle talk, idle chatter, even when such chatter is understood to be the
subhuman insignificance of those who are relegated to the fullest possible
employment, which evokes not only the wordlessness of the work song but
also the expropriated linguistic underlabor, expropriated within the general
project of exclusionary, self-possessive subjectivation, that is given in the
form of an implied response to the bad faith speech of antiblackness. This is
to say, and I think this is what Fanon is most pissed off about, and righteously
so, is that the doctor’s impertinent questions to his black patients
already imply an answer that would be given in the gestures that accompany
mute, impossible positionality. And so Fanon performs, in thought, such
questioning’s appositional unasking. This is the character of his complete
lysis. It is complete, but, as Wallace Stevens would say, in an unexplained
completion. This is the interminable as opposed to the last analysis, the
interminable analysis of the last, the anaeschatalogical sounding of the
unfathomable alternative. We still have to discover, we have to keep discovering,
what that sounding sounds like, in the ongoing refusal of a standpoint,
of a jurisdiction, for such hearing, in the ongoing critique of the critique of a
certain notion of judgment. The absence and refusal of the standpoint is
given in the sound of that sounding, which Fanon leads us to but to which he
768 The South Atlantic Quarterly Fall 2013
didn’t always listen. Here’s where the problematic of lyric disturbs and augments
lysis. Here’s where whatever it is that the pathologist means to examine,
in its own degenerative and regenerative differentiation, moves in disruption
of the pathologist’s standpoint. This is to say that the tools and protocols
and methods of the pathologist, however much they have made possible an
approach, cannot, shall we say, manage entrance into the zone of nonbeing.
From outside that zone, from the ruins of a standpoint, from one of the numberless
husks of an inhabitable possibility, lysis morphs into autopsy so that
nonbeing’s generativity—as it is manifest in noise, chatter, gobbledygook,
pidgin’s social refusal of imposed and impossible intersubjectivity—is taken
for sterility, its flow taken for aridity. But we will note the beauty and insistence
of Fanon’s animating claim, his animated clameur. “There is a zone of
nonbeing, an extraordinarily sterile and arid region, an inclined 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 2008: xii).
Naked declivity? Gradient centrifugation, as Mackey would have it.
The zone of nonbeing is experimental, is a kind of experiment, this double
edge of the experiment, this theater of like and unlike in which friendship’s
sociality overflows its political regulation. Destination down and out, whence
springs the difference that earthly beauty brings. Lysis, lyse, lycée—Socrates
and Lysis, Césaire and Fanon, somewhere between the lyceum and the academy,
a recitation of unrequited love.
Society, unlike biochemical processes, does not escape human influence.
Man is what brings society into being. The prognosis is in the hands of
those who are prepared to shake the worm-eaten foundations of the edifice.
(Fanon 2008: xv)
It is considered appropriate to preface a work on psychology with a
methodology. We shall break with tradition. We leave methods to the botanists
and mathematicians. There is a point where methods are resorbed. (xvi)
To absorb again, to dissolve and assimilate. “That is where we would
like to position ourselves” (Fanon 2008: xvi). This appeal to resorption,
another biochemical term/process that is free of human influence. Fanon
deploys biochemical metaphors for the ana/lysis of sociogenic products by
way of sociogenic means. And here’s the crux, making explicit what would
emerge from this overlay of social and biochemical processes, sociopsychoanalytic
and experimental practices. Is the laboratory, the encounter, the
experimental zone of nonbeing, the parontic or anontic zone? The other-
Moten Blackness and Nothingness 769
wise-than-being-ness of the experiment, which turns out to be ante-ethical
as well if ethics is even as Emmanuel Lévinas understands it, neither illness
nor death. This internal sociality of the experiment, a sociality and
sociology of the anontic, a social biopoetics of and in the experiment, is
given in the ongoing disturbance of language that is language’s anoriginal
condition. The experiment is poetic; pidgin is a poetics.
Consider the constraint of black poetry—of fantasy in the hole or whole
or hold or over the side. If it’s a constraint, how is it a constraint? It is, first of
all, a conceptual field, as Spillers would allow. A field in which, more precisely,
the concept of the object is a kind of imperative at the level of both
study and performance, in zones where neither the presumption nor the disavowal
of self—each in its own obsessive self-regard—are the limits of poetic
possibility, which is, itself, animated by both lyric and lysis, continually driven
toward new fields of exhaustion. We have to continually work—where aridity
is only insofar as it is inseparable from hyperhydration; where thirst and submergence
converge; in the hold on the open sea—through this interplay of
the establishment and the breakdown of the cell if we are ever to attend the
birth of an insurgency that Fanon prophesies and enacts. The splitting of the
cell is inseparable from the splitting of the ego that could be said to impose
narcissism while also constituting narcissism’s closure. There is a hydroptique
phono-optics of the general balm and it’s the general bomb!
It is as if Fanon is providing commentary on the unpublished notebook
of his own return, precisely in order to tell slant the experimental slant.
This powerful sociolinguistic self-analysis is a kind of jumping-off point, but
what I want to do is slow down and linger, for a little while, over the question
of the little Negro, which is a monument to the mind of the little Negro dockworkers
and fieldworkers, and work shirkers, and so on. The black man’s relegation
to pidgin understood as prison, as imprisonment in passage, or as
naked, experimental incline, or both, begs the question of the relationship
between blackness and the black man, the paraontological distinction that is
everywhere implicit in Fanon’s text, precisely at or as the point in which selfanalysis
becomes possible, that space Sexton talks about in which we discern
the distinction between vantage and view. But in neither Fanon nor Sexton
nor Wilderson, even in texts that we are constrained to call autobiographical,
and, moreover, nowhere in the cramped and capacious nowhere from which
the vast ante- and antiautobiographical field from and within which black
thought and black literature plots its escape and fantasizes its flight, can the
brutally unauthorized author be said simply to be talking about him- or herself.
He or she’s talking about the self, precisely in the service of a complete
770 The South Atlantic Quarterly Fall 2013
lysis of that morbid body and/in its morbid universe. Fanon says, “We are
aiming at nothing less than to liberate the black man from himself” (Fanon
2008: xii) which is to say the self that he cannot have and cannot be, but
against which he is posed as the occupant of no position. Is this liberation
complete in Fanon? Can self-analysis, which is the name Cecil Taylor gives
to improvisation, liberate us from the self, or does it only further secure our
incarceration? Again, this is a question that emerges not only in relation to
Fanon but also in relation to Olaudah Equiano and Mary Prince, Douglass
and Harriet Jacobs, Du Bois and Anna Julia Cooper, Wilderson and Hartman,
permeating through and in an autobiographical trace that continues to
animate the black radical tradition. On the other hand, the new black music
is this: find the self, then kill it, as Philip’s work instantiates. But, to echo
Ralph Ellison again and again, so few people really listen to this music. It is,
moreover, seldom that even the ones who make this music listen to it, hence
the ongoing challenge, the ongoing construction of the intramural.
I’m not sure that Fanon really listens or that, more generally, he really
senses the symposium he prepares for us. This preparation could be said to
take the form of a sacrifice in which he takes on the unpleasant task of rigorously
describing what’s so hateful in the way antiblackness mishears what it
overhears. Faulty recordings can’t help but trigger violent disavowal. The distance
between “I don’t sound like that” and “I’m not like that” is infinitesimal
in its immeasurable vastness. Does black speech, does the little Negro,
assume a culture or bear a civilization? If not, then how could it be speech?
What does it mean to consider that black speech is the sound of natal alienation,
the sound of being without a heritage, without a patrimony? It means,
first of all, that all these terms must be revalued, precisely from the already
exhausted perspective of the ones who are both (de)valued and invaluable.
When Fanon (2008: 2) speaks of “local cultural originality,” who or what is
speaking? Who speaks the possession of a language, of a culture, of (a) civilization?
Who speaks the necessity of a heritage such that its absence is understood
as relative nothingness? Fanon moves by way of a model of the subject
that is evacuated even as he writes. This is a James Snead formulation in a
sense; a Gordon formulation in another. Derrida speaks, too, out of Algeria,
of a problematic of accent, correspondent in its way to the Martinican swallowing
of r’s of which Fanon speaks. The dispossessive force of black speech
confirms, in one sense, and obliterates, in another, the “monolingualism
of the Other” (Derrida 1998a). My language is not mine, also, because its
undercommonness cuts me and mine. The trouble is that Fanon leaps from
an analysis of the social situation of pidgin in France, its force as a verbal
Moten Blackness and Nothingness 771
adjunct, to a visual imposition, without investigating the social situation of
the making of pidgin and without raising the question of its structure, its
syntax, its logic. It is simply assumed to be both subsequent and subordinate
to the standard in its givenness. Is it possible for the new returnee actually to
think about pidgin? Another way to put it is that Fanon prepares us for Glissant
in his lysis of the morbid body, which begins with an attention to language
that is then carried through in his investigation of the structure of
epidermalization, of which the supposed imposition of pidgin and the imposition
of the desire for French, in their interinanimation, form a kind of verbal
supplement and servant.
“Dirty nigger!” or simply “Look! A Negro!”
I came into this world anxious to uncover the meaning of things, my
soul desirous to be at the origin of the world, and here I am an object among
other objects.
Locked in this suffocating reification, I appealed to the Other so that
his liberating gaze . . . would give me back the lightness of being I thought I
had lost. . . . Nothing doing. I explode. Here are the fragments put together
by another me. . . .
We were given the occasion to confront the white gaze. An unusual
weight descended on us. The real world robbed us of our share. In the white
world, the man of color encounters difficulties in elaborating his body schema.
The image of one’s body is solely negating. . . .
“Look! A Negro!” . . .
“Look! A Negro!” . . .
“Look! A Negro! . . .
“Maman, look, a Negro; I’m scared!” Scared! Scared! Now they were
beginning to be scared of me. I wanted to kill myself laughing, but laughter
had become out of the question. (Fanon 2008: 89–91)
Fanon investigates what it is to be eager to grasp, to uncover, while having
been robbed of the capacity to have a share. No past, no future, nonexistent,
“my originality had been snatched from me” (2008: 108). The failed
natality of the fabricated explodes so that the mechanism (the instrument,
the toy) can, at the very least, piece itself together. This is the itinerary of
Fanon’s black deconstruction, which ends in an image of inquisitive reassembly,
as if the futurial project of blackness that he forecloses was always
meant to live on only in and through him. The reification he decries suffocates
in the absence of other aspiration. This attends the bodily schema’s
collapse into an epidermal-racial schema. In the aftermath of this interplay
772 The South Atlantic Quarterly Fall 2013
of implosion and explosion, Fanon’s lesson takes the form of a postmortem
reconstruction. This is forensic phenomenology: autopsy, eyewitness,
unflinching determination of the cause of our sociality, which is taken for
our death, given in or initiated by a metaphorics of biochemistry and supplemented
by figures of text and textile. The pigmentation alluded to at the
beginning will now be applied to newly woven cloth so that livery can be
made in the service of a strict visual determination. Fanon sees it all so
clearly, now, and the irony, of course, is that the eyes he sees with are not his.
One sees only from the Other’s perspective, with the other’s instruments,
that which is of the other’s fabrication. How do we account for this forced
borrowing of normative sense, normative senses, and the forms they take?
Moreover, what remains silent in this ocular field? Does Fanon step out of
the brutal structural adjustment this regime of credit enforces? The forensic
knowledge that underwrites this postmortem is an imposition/gift conferred
on “the occasion to confront the white gaze.” What if consciousness of
double consciousness is an effect of paraontological considerations? What if
this auspicious Du Boisian beginning is thrown offtrack in Fanon, but precisely
in the service of its placement in and on multiple tracks? Here, I think,
is how the distinction between sociology and sociogeny turns toward a sociopoetic
cognizance of the real presence of the people in and at their making,
where that retrospective ascription of absence that Fanon’s inhabitation of
the problematic of damnation, which is activated in his return to his native
land, is given in and to a lyrical, analytic poetics of the process of revolutionary
transubstantiation that begins with the experience of the nonnative’s
nonreturn to the village and to the consensual exsense of its social speech,
where and by way of which we study what it is to live in what is called dispossession.
This is a problematic that shows up in relation to mu, to nothingness,
as well as in relation to the question of being, its unasking, (and the
unmasking of the one who frames it).
John Donne (1977: 73) says, “If I an ordinary nothing were, / As
shadow, a light, and body must be here. // But I am none; nor will my sun
renew.” In the absence of what is taken for light, in the absence of the
thought, the scheme, that is called a body, how do we describe extraordinary,
or absolute, nothing? Is this certain uncertainty, an inability to distinguish
oneself from one’s things that implies, more precisely and more urgently,
that disruption of the distinction between self and thing that makes possession
possible? The body schema manifests itself as (a breakdown in) the
relay between (knowledge of) the necessity of grasping and the capacity to
grasp where necessity and capacity each denote, in turn, a relay between
Moten Blackness and Nothingness 773
knowing and acting. No ontological reach, no epistemological grasp. Meanwhile,
it is precisely this implicit knowledge (of the difference between self
and thing) that enfleshes questions. Linebaugh speaks of this nonsense, the
extrasensorial assertion, which must have emerged in the ship’s hold, which
was a language lab, a zone of experimental, audiovisual intonation but
also—and it is Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley (2008) who approaches this
almost complete unapproachability—a scene, an erotic vestibule, a prison
house of violent pleasure, where flesh is rendered in the absolute exposure of
a terrible open secret. Linebaugh’s critics, some in their best old-fashioned
Marxist ways, anticipatory of Patterson’s dismissive relegation of lore in the
interest of data, say no, nothing could ever come of such formal deprivation
(other than the poverty of the informal, which they have neither the capacity
nor the desire to think in its incalculable rhythm). To which I would answer
yes. Only nothing. Only that less and more than subjective and subjected
sociality. Fantasy in the hold. And this is to say, basically, at the level of Sexton’s
real intellectual and social aims, if not at the level of the specific critical
objects of our work, I am totally with him in locating my optimism in appositional
proximity to his pessimism even if I would tend not to talk about the
inside/outside relationality of social death and social life while speaking in
terms of apposition and permeation rather than in terms of opposition and
surrounding. Perhaps this difference turns out to bear and make some
greater difference if it is accompanied by another kind of attunement to some
other, broader notions of enjoyment and abandonment; perhaps the difference
can be made clearer by way of the brilliance of Sexton’s interpellation of
Gordon’s brilliance.
And yet, this is precisely what Gordon argues is the value and insight of
Fanon: he [Fanon] fully accepts the definition of himself as pathological as it is
imposed by a world that knows itself through that imposition, rather than
remaining in a reactive stance that insists on the . . . heterogeneity [or difference]
between a self and an imago originating in culture. Though it may
appear counterintuitive, or rather because it is counterintuitive, this . . . affirmation
[of the pathological] is active; it is a willing or willingness, in other
words, to pay whatever social costs accrue to being black, to inhabiting blackness,
to living a black social life under the shadow of social death This is not
an accommodation to the dictates of the antiblack world. The affirmation of
blackness, which is to say an affirmation of pathological being, is a refusal to
distance oneself from blackness in a valorization of minor differences that
bring one closer to health, to life, or to sociality. (Sexton 2011b: 27)
774 The South Atlantic Quarterly Fall 2013
A complete, which is to say a lyric, lysis of our living flesh and earthly
sociality, which is often taken for a morbid body or a morbid universe,
requires us to recognize that blackness is not reducible to its social costs; it is
also manifest in a set of benefits and responsibilities. And if I said that the
serially epigraphic positing of our wretchedness doesn’t come close to getting
at how bad it has been and how bad it is, thereby extending, rather than
foreclosing, the overseeing and overlooking of slavery and its afterlife, I
would do so by indexing not only the imposition of cost but the interdiction
of benefit. Paying implies capacities to have and to relinquish that are irreducible
to expropriation. Choosing to be black implies paying the cost; it is a
kind of ethical gesture to claim this dispossession, this nothingness, this
radical poverty-in-spirit. This is what Afro-pessimism performs, in and as
theory—an affirmative gesture toward nothingness, an affirmation of negation
and its destructive force. It implies and demands a negative political
ontology that is manifest as a kind of affirmative nihilism.
Nevertheless, my first impulse in reading Wilderson’s long, Trane-like
recitation in Incognegro of his exchange with his friend and colleague Naima
was to ask, in a kind of Quinean rebuttal, why are we something rather than
nothing? But the real task, and I follow in the footsteps of Sexton in taking it
up, is to think about the relation between something and nothing or, if you’d
rather, life and death. Is life surrounded by death, or does each move in and
as the constant permeation of the other? But this is not even precise enough.
The question is, Where would one go or how would one go about studying
nothing’s real presence, the thingly presence, the facticity, of the nothing
that is? What stance, what attitude, what comportment? If pessimism allows
us to discern that we are nothing, then optimism is the condition of possibility
of the study of nothing as well as what derives from that study. We are the
ones who engage in and derive from that study: blackness as black study as
black radicalism. In the end, precisely as the end of an analysis, the payment
of a set of social costs will have coalesced into the inability properly to assess
the nothingness that one claims. Blackness is more than exacted cost. Nothing
is not absence. Blackness is more and less than one in nothing. This,
informal, informing, insolvent insovereignty is the real presence of the nothing
we come from, and bear, and make.
Consider the relation between nothingness and exhaustion as Deleuze
(1997) describes it by way of Samuel Beckett: the real presence, the presence
of the thing in exhaustion, its differential ecology, its “echo-muse-ecology,”
to quote Stephen Feld (1994), its clamor, its clameur, its claim, its demand, its
plaint, its complaint, its working and layering and folding, as in Jacques
Moten Blackness and Nothingness 775
Coursil’s an(a)themic inclination, which also trumpets a movement from
the subject of politics to the subject of life.2
To be subject to life might be
understood as a kind of being enthralled by generativity. What the biopolitical
continuum (the trajectory of sovereignty’s illegitimate, speculative dissemination)
attempts to regulate, suppress, and consume is the social poetics,
the aesthetic sociality of this generativity. The care of the self, which can
be figured as a kind of dissident member of the set of the self’s various technologies,
is part of the history of sovereignty as surely as the biopolitical
deconstruction of sovereignty is an extension of that history. Another way to
put it might be that biopolitics is already given in the figure of the political
animal; that the move from natural history to biology is a held trajectory;
that the regulation of generativity is already given in the idea of a natural
kind. Teleological principle, which is meant to disrupt and disable the catology
that accompanies biopolitics, reestablishes its ground and impetus,
which is sovereignty. This asserts something that has to be worked through:
the relationship between teleological principle and sovereignty, which will
be established not by way of recourse to God as sovereign creator but by way
of an appeal to transcendental subjectivity as a kind of manager (of anoriginal
creativity or generativity). What’s interesting and implicit here, what
Immanuel Kant is always working toward and through, is the political subject
as a natural kind, the political subject as the subject of natural history,
natural history as a field that is presided over by the political animal. The
mobile hold and block chapel of pidgin, the little Negro’s church and logos
and gathering, this gathering in and against the word, alongside and through
the word and the world as hold, manger, wilderness, tomb, upper room, and
cell: there is fantasy in all of these, which makes you wonder what happens
when you put your fantasy on hold, when what is seen and sung of beingunheld
is, at once, not held onto and not passed on.
Just Friends, Encore
Insofar as I am concerned, by way of a certain example to which Sexton
appeals in order to explain (away) the difference that lies between us, with
what surrounds, with what the nature is of surrounding and enclosure, I am
also, of necessity, concerned with the relation between the inside and the
outside, the intramural and the world. The difference that is not one is, for
Sexton, a matter of “ontological reach.” Perhaps he thinks of that difference
as set-theoretic, a matter of calculating over infinities with the understanding
that the infinity of social death is larger, as it were, than that of social life;
776 The South Atlantic Quarterly Fall 2013
that the world is bigger than the other world, the underworld, the outer world
of the inside song, the radical extension and exteriority that animates the
enclosed, imprisoned inner world of the ones, shall we say, who are not poor
in world but who are, to be more precise, poor-in-the-world. Black people are
poor in the world. We are deprived in, and somehow both more and less than
deprived of, the world. The question is how to attend to that poverty, that
damnation, that wretchedness. I invoke Martin Heidegger’s formulation
regarding the animal, that it is poor in world, up against the buried contour
of his question concerning the way that technology tends toward the displacement
of world with a world-picture, in order to make the distinction
between the animal’s status and our own, which some might call even more
distressing. What is it to be poor in the world? What is this worldly poverty,
and what is its relation to the otherworldliness that we desire and enact, precisely
insofar as it is present to us and present in us? Sexton characterizes
this worldly poverty as attenuated ontological reach, but to say this is tricky
and requires care. Poverty in this world is manifest in a kind of poetic access
to what it is of the other world that remains unheard, unnoted, unrecognized
in this one. Whether you call those resources tremendous life or social life in
social death or fatal life or raw life, it remains to consider precisely what it is
that the ones who have nothing have. What is this nothing that they have or
to which they have access? What comes from it? And how does having it
operate in relation to poverty?
At the same time, for Sexton, recognition of this attenuation (which
marks that fact that the tone world is, as it were, surrounded by the deaf
world) is already understood to indicate possession, as it were, of ontological
reach. Maybe there’s another implicit distinction between ontic extension
and ontological grasp. But who but the transcendental subject can have that
grasp or attain the position and perspective that corresponds to it? Husserl,
at the end of his career, when his own attainment of it is radically called into
question, speaks of this exalted hand-eye coordination as the phenomenological
attitude; a few years earlier, when his career was much nearer to its
fullest height and he could claim to be master of all he surveyed—modestly,
on the outer edges of his work, under the breath of his work in a way that
demands a more general attunement to the phenomenological whisper—
Husserl spoke of it in these terms: “I can see spread out before me the endlessly
open plains of true philosophy, the ‘promised land,’ though its thorough
cultivation will come after me” (Husserl 1982: 429). Marianne Sawicki
is especially helpful, here, because she so precisely teases out the implications
of his imagery. “By means of this spatial, geographical metaphor of
Moten Blackness and Nothingness 777
crossing over into the ‘new land,’ Husserl conveys something of the adventure
and pioneer courage that should accompany phenomenological work.
This science is related to ‘a new field of experience, exclusively its own, the
field of “transcendental subjectivity,”’ and it offers ‘a method of access to the
transcendental-phenomenological sphere.’ Husserl is the ‘first explorer’ of
this marvelous place” (Sawicki n.d.).
We should be no less forthright in recognizing that such positionality is
the desire that Fanon admits, if only, perhaps, to disavow, when he conducts
his philosophical investigations of the lived experience of the black. Two questions
arise: Does he disavow it? Or is it, in its necessity, the very essence of
what Wilderson calls “our black capacity to desire”? Certain things about the
first few paragraphs of Fanon’s phenomenological analysis seem clearer to
me now than when I was composing “The Case of Blackness” (Moten 2008).
The desire to attain transcendental subjectivity’s self-regard is emphatic even
if it is there primarily to mark an interdiction, an antagonism, a declivity, a
fall into the deadly experiment that will have been productive of “a genuine
new departure” (Fanon 2008: xii), the end of the world and the start of the
general dispossession that will have been understood as cost and benefit. But
that desire returns, as something like the residual self-image of the phenomenologist
that he wants to but cannot be, to enunciate the (political) ontology
he says is outlawed, in what he would characterize as the neurotic language of
the demand, called, as he is, to be a witness in a court in which he has no
standing, thereby requiring us to reconsider, by way of and beyond a certain
Boalian turn, what it is to be a specta(c)tor. Elsewhere, I misleadingly assert,
Fanon is saying that there is no and can be no black social life. I now believe
he says that is all there can be (Moten 2008: 177). The antephenomenology of
spirit that constitutes Black Skin, White Masks prepares our approach to sociological
or, more precisely, sociopoetic grounding, as Du Bois, say, or later Walter
Rodney would have it, by way of the description of the impossibility of
political life, which is, nevertheless, at this moment and for much of his
career, Fanon’s chief concern. The social life of the black, or of the colonized,
is, to be sure, given to us in or through Fanon, often in his case studies, sometimes
in verse, or in his narrative of the career of the revolutionary cadre. It is
as if Fanon is there to remind us that the lunatic, the (revolutionary) lover, and
the poet are of imagination all compact. They occupy and are preoccupied
with a zone of the alternative, the zone of nonbeing (antic disposition’s tendency
to cut and displace organic position) that asks and requires us to consider
whether it is possible to differentiate a place in the sun, a promised land,
a home—or merely a place and time—in this world, from the position of the
778 The South Atlantic Quarterly Fall 2013
settler. Is it possible to desire the something other than transcendental subjectivity
that is called nothing? What if blackness is the name that has been
given to the social field and social life of an illicit alternative capacity to desire?
Basically, that is precisely what I think blackness is. I want it to be my constant
study. I listen for it everywhere. Or, at least, I try to. If I read Sexton correctly,
after trying to get underneath the generous severity of his lesson, he
objects, rightly and legitimately, to the fact that in the texts he cites I have not
sufficiently looked for it in the Afro-pessimistic texts toward which I have
sometimes gestured. In the gestures I have made here I hope I have shown
what it is that I have been so happy to find, that projection or relay or amplification
carried out by the paraontological imagination that animates and agitates
Afro-pessimism’s antiregulatory force.
Black optimism and Afro-pessimism are asymptotic. Which one is the
curve and which one is the line? Which is the kernel and which is the shell?
Which one is rational, which one is mystical? It doesn’t matter. Let’s just say
that their nonmeeting is part of an ongoing manic depressive episode called
black radicalism / black social life. Is it just a minor internal conflict, this
intimate nonmeeting, this impossibility of touching in mutual radiation and
permeation? Can pessimists and optimists be friends? I hope so. Maybe
that’s what friendship is, this bipolarity, which is to say, more precisely, the
commitment to it. To say that we are friends is to say that we want to be
friends. I want to try to talk about the nature and importance of the friendship
I want, that I would like us to have, that we are about to have, that in the
deepest sense we already more than have, which is grounded in and enabled
by that commitment even as it is continually rethought and replayed by way
of our differences from one another, which is held within and holds together
our commonness. The difference has to do with the proper calibration of
this bipolarity. Sexton is right to suggest that the far too simple opposition
between pessimism and optimism is off, and that I was off in forwarding it,
or off in forwarding an imprecision that made it seem as if I were, having
been seduced by a certain heuristic and its sound, thereby perhaps inadvertently
seducing others into mistaking an alternating current for a direct one.
The bipolarity in question is, at every instance, way too complicated for that,
and I really want you to hear what we’ve been working on, this under-riff
we’ve been trying to play, to study, to improvise, to compose in the hyperreal
time of our thinking and that thinking’s desire. There is an ethics of the cut,
of contestation, that I have tried to honor and illuminate because it instantiates
and articulates another way of living in the world, a black way of living
together in the other world we are constantly making in and out of this
world, in the alternative planetarity that the intramural, internally differenti-
Moten Blackness and Nothingness 779
ated presence—the (sur)real presence—of blackness serially brings online
as persistent aeration, the incessant turning over of the ground beneath our
feet that is the indispensable preparation for the radical overturning of the
ground that we are under.
Notes
This essay has its genesis in a three-part miniseminar given at the University of California,
Irvine, under the auspices of the Critical Theory Institute. I would like to thank all the members
of the institute and all of those who attended the seminar. As an opening invocation, I
played a version of the song “Just Friends” recorded by Coleman Hawkins and Sonny Rollins
in 1963 (Sonny Meets Hawk!, BMG France 74321748002, 2000).
1 This sentence gestures towards a convergence I keep imagining between Fanon’s
analysis of le Petit Nègre and Thornton Dial’s sculptural Monument to the Minds of the
Little Negro Steelworkers. At stake is the possibility of another reinitialization of the
interplay of critique and celebration in black life and thought.
2 I have been thinking of Jacques Coursil’s (2007) Clameurs, in which his “solo” trumpet
is accompanied by Fanon’s percussive disturbance of the very logic of the question
in a way that can be heard in its proximity to Cherry’s and Blackwell’s duet.
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