Andrew Santana Kaplan | Emory University (original) (raw)
Interviews by Andrew Santana Kaplan
Political Theology Network, 2023
This is a transcript of an in-person interview conducted for an online symposium on "Narrating Ca... more This is a transcript of an in-person interview conducted for an online symposium on "Narrating Catastrophe." It has been edited for length and citations
Articles by Andrew Santana Kaplan
Black Theology Papers Project, 2024
This paper considers John Brown as a paradigmatic respondent to James Cone’s and Frank Wilderson’... more This paper considers John Brown as a paradigmatic respondent to James Cone’s and Frank Wilderson’s charges for the Human to “become Black.” More precisely, this paper takes Du Bois’s reading of John Brown as a meditation upon what Nahum Chandler describes as the “soul of an ex-White man.” For Du Bois, Brown’s taking up of the “Negro question” proceeded to shape his entire existence. By drawing on Giorgio Agamben’s messianic conception of “form-of-life” and Afropessimism’s elaboration of the “Negro question” through the paradigm of social death, this paper offers a reading of Du Bois’s Brown as a form-of-life-toward-social-death.
Chiasma: A Site for Thought, 2023
This essay extends my ongoing elaboration of what I call the Black messianic as a paradigm that e... more This essay extends my ongoing elaboration of what I call the Black messianic as a paradigm that emerges from the constellation of Afropessimism and political theology. The iteration at play here enfolds and intensifies the deconstructive quasi-transcendental structure(s) of the apocalyptic, hauntological, and messianic by attending to modernity's singular specter: the Black-Slave. I deploy these "hyperconceptual" ideas from Jacques Derrida's late "theological turn" to speculate on how the Human can accept the modern Slave's invitation to what Frank Wilderson calls the dance of social death. The exigency of this invitation is marked by Afropessimism's contention that Humanity cannot simply undo its anti-Black structural positionality/capacity as long as the World persists. In another attempt to inhabit this aporia, the apocalyptic hauntology of Black messianicity names a vertiginous experiment in which the Human can perhaps begin to deconstruct its parasitic capacity for presence through an iterable mode of "dying" to the World in an impossible fidelity to Black social death's nonbeing-in-worldlessness.
Political Theology, 2022
This essay advances my project on “the Black messianic” in Afropessimism’s apocalyptic thought th... more This essay advances my project on “the Black messianic” in Afropessimism’s apocalyptic thought through a meta-commentary on Agamben’s The Mystery of Evil ([2013] 2017) and The Kingdom and the Garden ([2019] 2020). The first study interrogates the history of (mis)reading 2 Thessalonians 2 where the Apostle Paul announces the messianic “mystery of lawlessness” that is being concealed and delayed by the katechōn. This argument anticipates Agamben’s later study, which argues that the legacy of Augustinian original sin as the irremediable alienation of humanity falsely conceals and thus restrains messianic access to the Garden. However, in the wake of racial slavery, annotating Agamben’s thought with Afropessimism reveals that access to the Garden has in fact become foreclosed. And yet, when modernity's anti-Black original sin is understood as the katechōn, Agamben’s reading of the messianic mystery of lawlessness can help us contemplate Afropessimism’s invitation to the dance of social death.
The Comparatist, 2021
If, as Frank Wilderson suggests, the White (or non-Black) is the personification of Life as such—... more If, as Frank Wilderson suggests, the White (or non-Black) is the personification of Life as such—or, put otherwise, that Life is the grammar of the Human’s fundamental fantasy—and to lose one’s Human coordinates is to become Black and die, then _Annihilation_ (2018) can be read as a cinematic allegorical-liturgy of traversing the Human’s fundamental fantasy of Life qua anti-Blackness. Within Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, the fundamental fantasy is what constitutes the Symbolic coordinates for the Subject’s Imaginary coherence, keeping the Real(’s) absence of coordinates at bay. Written and directed by Alex Garland, _Annihilation_ presents a radical refraction of the Human’s fundamental fantasy—which the viewer is iteratively implicated in—by rendering a mode of ex-sistence with/in the Real-in-the-Symbolic that decomposes the Human’s Imaginary coherence. By considering Afropessimism’s paradigmatic analysis of modern Subject/World formation, I believe that, analogous to Carl Schmitt’s contention that all modern political concepts are secularized theological concepts, all modern (non-Black) theoretical and aesthetic-cultural formations are allegories of anti-/Blackness. Therefore, if the Lacanian Real unconsciously indexes the site of Blackness, and the World’s Symbolic-Imaginary grammar of Being (qua Life) is configured through the parasitic foreclosure of Blackness, then _Annihilation’s_ radical refraction of Life can be read as an allegory of anagrammatical Blackness. I speculatively propose that such an allegory, in this exemplary case, can liturgically attune (non-Black) viewers to inhabiting (the) Real(’s) absence of coordinates in fidelity to the generalized abolition of anti-Blackness.
Political Theology, 2021
This essay reads Richard Wright’s speculative novella, “The Man Who Lived Underground” (1941), as... more This essay reads Richard Wright’s speculative novella, “The Man Who Lived Underground” (1941), as an anagrammatical allegory of liturgical reading. By anagrammatical, I invoke Christina Sharpe’s understanding of how Blackness singularly “exists as an index of violability and also potentiality” in its foreclosure from the World’s grammar of anti-Blackness. With allegory (of reading), I draw attention to both 1) how Wright recasts Plato’s allegory of the cave in modern America and, following Paul de Man, 2) how Wright’s text is an allegory of un/readability. Finally, with liturgy, I draw on Giorgio Agamben’s understanding of mystery as a performance that (re-)enacts the text. This leads me to theorize that Wright’s anagrammatical allegory of liturgical reading brings the reader into speculative attunement to the Black messianic, which is a radical mode of fidelity to the Black’s singular positionality in aspiring to the un-veiling [apo-kalyptein] of the katechontic anti-Black World—toward gratuitous messianic freedom.
Oraxiom: A Journal of Non-Philosophy, 2020
Modernity is structured around a prior decision to which it is constitutively blind: the World’s ... more Modernity is structured around a prior decision to which it is constitutively blind: the World’s anthro-philosophical foreclosure of blackness. This is Afro-pessimism’s non-philosophical insight, informing its oraxiomatic demand to destroy the World. That is, this demand is the coincidence—or, in François Laruelle’s terms, superposition—of an oracle and an axiom. As such, Afro-pessimism’s apocalyptics should be understood etymologically as well as connotatively: its apo-kalupsis is an axiomatically immanent “un-veiling” of the World’s hallucinatory anti-black grammar, which constitutes Society as the restrainer (katechon) holding back the end of the World. Afro-pessimism’s apocalyptic-revelation thus oracularly exhibits both the hallucination of anti-blackness and the abyssal indeterminacy of the Real this hallucination veils. The structural antagonism between hallucinatory anti-blackness and the Real yields Afro-pessimism’s demand for a clean slate that fundamentally breaks (from) the anti-black World in the name of abyssal gratuitous freedom. Before Laruelle’s non-philosophical demand for a tabula rasa, Frantz Fanon oraxiomatically invoked it as the fundamental (pre)condition of decolonization qua the introduction invention into existence. In this way, I suggest Fanon is practicing a christo-fiction of black messianic invention that precedes and subtends any non-philosophical messianics in the wake of racial-chattel-slavery.
The Comparatist, 2019
This essay aspires to put in contact two contemporary movements in radical political thought. The... more This essay aspires to put in contact two contemporary movements in radical political
thought. The first is Afro-pessimism, coined by political theorist Frank B. Wilderson III, to name a set of thinkers who theorize racial slavery as modernity’s singular constitution, which invented anti-/Black positionality as the World’s fundamental structure of antagonism. The second is the contemporary turn to Paul by continental philosophers who attempt a modern reinterpretation of the Apostle’s apocalyptic announcement of the messianic event as a paradigm for radical politics. This essay will argue that, on the one hand, Paul’s apocalyptic-messianic framework can both elucidate and situate how Afro-pessimism uncompromisingly inhabits its antagonistic non-relation to the World as such. On the other hand, Afro-pessimism can show how Blackness is “the position of the unthought” that contemporary Paulinism is unconsciously parasitic upon—circumscribing its theorists’ attempt to radically formulate apocalyptic-messianic fidelity in the modern World. The motivation for staging this encounter lies in their shared conviction that true justice demands the end of the World. My essay aspires to dialogically elucidate this shared conviction by constellating their homologous theses, which reveals what I call "the Black messianic." I argue that if it is still possible, in the wake of racial slavery, to hear the Apostle’s summons to messianic existence and outlaw justice, then, in modernity, Afro-pessimism is its paradigmatic mode of fidelity.
Conference Presentations by Andrew Santana Kaplan
MLA, 2024
This paper pursues a close reading of W. E. B. Du Bois's 1920 speculative fiction, “The Comet,” i... more This paper pursues a close reading of W. E. B. Du Bois's 1920 speculative fiction, “The Comet,” in relationship to the “nonevent of emancipation” and Afropessimism’s accompanying displacement of political economy for libidinal economy. Du Bois imagines an apocalyptic event where a comet crashes into New York City, which appears to kill the entire population—save one Black man, Jim. As Jim heads toward Harlem in search of his family, he encounters a White woman, Julia, who is the only other apparent survivor. Du Bois uses this post-apocalyptic scene to un-veil – from the Greek apo-calypsis – both the artifice of the color-line and how the World’s infrastructure turns this fantasy into law. Du Bois’s speculative exercise highlights the importance of understanding Afropessimism’s call for the end of the World as emanating from its revelation of “the position of the unthought.” Further, Du Bois’s revelation coincides with Afropessimism’s contention regarding the primacy of libidinal economy in the following way: even after the apparent end of the World, Julia’s negrophobic unconscious persists in her incapacity to accept a post-apocalyptic existence with Jim. However, in equal measure, “The Comet” exhibits why it is essential to abolish the socio-political infrastructure of anti-Blackness as the condition of possibility for Julia’s gradual working-through of her negrophobogenic-being-in-the-World. And yet, this apocalypse proves to be nonevental when it turns out that, at the end of the story, the World has survived, to Julia’s distinctly regressive relief. Even so, this paper argues that “The Comet” allegorically demonstrates an essential difference between the non-event of emancipation and the non/event of apocalypse: while emancipation could only ever reinscribe Black non-personhood by granting “access” to the Human, the Black apocalypse may be “nonevental” only insofar as its scope could be curtailed by the Human’s counter-revolutionary investment in its fundamental fantasy of the World.
Political Theology Network Conference, 2023
This essay attempts to clarify the contentious intramural relationship between Radical Black Femi... more This essay attempts to clarify the contentious intramural relationship between Radical Black Feminism’s and Afropessimism’s theorizations of Blackness. I retrace the implications that Afropessimism derives from Radical Black Feminism as a question of fidelity to Hortense Spillers’ most fundamental insights into what she theorizes as the ungendered captive flesh. In section one, I reconstruct a latent debate between Denise Ferreira Ferreira da Silva and Jared Sexton to tease out the ethico-political differences between Ferreira da Silva’s formulation of “everything for everyone” and Sexton’s response: “nothing for no one.” In section two, I introduce my own paradigm of anagrammatical liturgics to thematize and elaborate how Afropessimism induces an ethics of radical disinvestment from the World at the registers of reading and writing. In the final section, I show how the gravitational force of ungendered thought is animated in the anagrammatical liturgy of revolutionary suicide as a theory of Black community that entails the absolute letting go of sense and value toward the end of the anti-Black World.
American Academy of Religion, 2022
This paper’s title takes its inspiration from Jean Vioulac’s, Apocalypse of Truth: Heideggerian M... more This paper’s title takes its inspiration from Jean Vioulac’s, Apocalypse of Truth: Heideggerian Meditations (2021) [Apocalypse de la vérité (2014)], which is his first book translated into English. Vioulac mobilizes the biblical conception of apocalypse as revelation (apokálypsis) against the Greek conception of truth as disclosure (alētheia). For Vioulac, the Pauline thought of apocalypse entails a leap into a wholly other thinking—marked by the modalities of faith, flesh, mystery, abyss, and absence—wherein which nothingness is no longer held at bay as mere privation but instead indexes “the Undisclosable’s positivity.” While this contemporary French philosopher does not discuss how our modern epoch of anti-nothingness is shaped by racial slavery, I propose that Vioulac's text can be read in part as an unconscious allegory of anti-/Blackness. In particular, Vioulac’s thinking of apocalypse as an attunement to abyssal absence deeply resonates with Afropessimsim’s political ontology of social death and its attendant demand for the end of the World. I thus propose this constellation as a means understanding and elaborating Afropessimism’s apocalyptic thought as a poetics of revelation.
Society of Phenomenological and Existential Philosophy, 2019
This paper is a meditation on the unique modality of demand—which is not only situated in contrad... more This paper is a meditation on the unique modality of demand—which is not only situated in contradistinction to the standard modalities of possibility, necessity, and contingency, but as a modality that precedes and short-circuits their metaphysical construction. I draw on Agamben’s elaboration of this modality to contemplate Afro-pessimism’s singular demand for the end of the World. Afro-pessimism is defined by this demand because its paradigmatic analysis of anti-Blackness renders intelligible the conditions of impossibility for Black Lives to Matter in the World, conditions which are defined by civil society’s Human(ist) coordinates. I argue that while Afro-pessimism’s demand is conceived as impossible within the World’s anti-Black grammar/horizon, Agamben’s elaboration of this modality can help one better understand how this impossible demand gestures toward an unthought potentiality that Blackness incarnates and the World, accordingly, forecloses.
Book Chapters by Andrew Santana Kaplan
![Research paper thumbnail of The Questioning Concerning Anti/Black Technology in Black Mirror's "Black Museum" [PROOFS]](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/94930237/thumbnails/1.jpg)
](Humanity in a Black Mirror: Essays on Posthuman Fantasies in a Technological Near Future, 2023
This chapter charts a philosophical path through Martin Heidegger, Giorgio Agamben, and Bernard S... more This chapter charts a philosophical path through Martin Heidegger, Giorgio Agamben, and Bernard Stiegler to pursue the question concerning modern technology as a means of preparing readiness to inhabit the crack in the screen of Being that Black Mirror iteratively fractures. However, this path of questioning must attend to the position of the unthought--i.e. the Black-Slave--if it wants to truly understand what Black Mirror reveals. The “black” in Black Mirror—as the season 4 finale written by Charlie Brooker, “Black Museum,” paradigmatically shows—also signifies the blackness of racial slavery that is the foundation of the modern world’s fundamental fantasy. Accordingly, this chapter seeks to show, on the one hand, how black being is essence of modern technology and, on the other hand, how this is the unconscious knowledge that Black Mirror repeatedly exhibits.
Reviews by Andrew Santana Kaplan
Reading Religion, 2024
Book Review of Anne Margaret Castro’s The Sacred Act of Reading: Spirituality, Performance, and P... more Book Review of Anne Margaret Castro’s The Sacred Act of Reading: Spirituality, Performance, and Power in Afro-Diasporic Literature
Political Theology Network, 2023
This is a transcript of an in-person interview conducted for an online symposium on "Narrating Ca... more This is a transcript of an in-person interview conducted for an online symposium on "Narrating Catastrophe." It has been edited for length and citations
Black Theology Papers Project, 2024
This paper considers John Brown as a paradigmatic respondent to James Cone’s and Frank Wilderson’... more This paper considers John Brown as a paradigmatic respondent to James Cone’s and Frank Wilderson’s charges for the Human to “become Black.” More precisely, this paper takes Du Bois’s reading of John Brown as a meditation upon what Nahum Chandler describes as the “soul of an ex-White man.” For Du Bois, Brown’s taking up of the “Negro question” proceeded to shape his entire existence. By drawing on Giorgio Agamben’s messianic conception of “form-of-life” and Afropessimism’s elaboration of the “Negro question” through the paradigm of social death, this paper offers a reading of Du Bois’s Brown as a form-of-life-toward-social-death.
Chiasma: A Site for Thought, 2023
This essay extends my ongoing elaboration of what I call the Black messianic as a paradigm that e... more This essay extends my ongoing elaboration of what I call the Black messianic as a paradigm that emerges from the constellation of Afropessimism and political theology. The iteration at play here enfolds and intensifies the deconstructive quasi-transcendental structure(s) of the apocalyptic, hauntological, and messianic by attending to modernity's singular specter: the Black-Slave. I deploy these "hyperconceptual" ideas from Jacques Derrida's late "theological turn" to speculate on how the Human can accept the modern Slave's invitation to what Frank Wilderson calls the dance of social death. The exigency of this invitation is marked by Afropessimism's contention that Humanity cannot simply undo its anti-Black structural positionality/capacity as long as the World persists. In another attempt to inhabit this aporia, the apocalyptic hauntology of Black messianicity names a vertiginous experiment in which the Human can perhaps begin to deconstruct its parasitic capacity for presence through an iterable mode of "dying" to the World in an impossible fidelity to Black social death's nonbeing-in-worldlessness.
Political Theology, 2022
This essay advances my project on “the Black messianic” in Afropessimism’s apocalyptic thought th... more This essay advances my project on “the Black messianic” in Afropessimism’s apocalyptic thought through a meta-commentary on Agamben’s The Mystery of Evil ([2013] 2017) and The Kingdom and the Garden ([2019] 2020). The first study interrogates the history of (mis)reading 2 Thessalonians 2 where the Apostle Paul announces the messianic “mystery of lawlessness” that is being concealed and delayed by the katechōn. This argument anticipates Agamben’s later study, which argues that the legacy of Augustinian original sin as the irremediable alienation of humanity falsely conceals and thus restrains messianic access to the Garden. However, in the wake of racial slavery, annotating Agamben’s thought with Afropessimism reveals that access to the Garden has in fact become foreclosed. And yet, when modernity's anti-Black original sin is understood as the katechōn, Agamben’s reading of the messianic mystery of lawlessness can help us contemplate Afropessimism’s invitation to the dance of social death.
The Comparatist, 2021
If, as Frank Wilderson suggests, the White (or non-Black) is the personification of Life as such—... more If, as Frank Wilderson suggests, the White (or non-Black) is the personification of Life as such—or, put otherwise, that Life is the grammar of the Human’s fundamental fantasy—and to lose one’s Human coordinates is to become Black and die, then _Annihilation_ (2018) can be read as a cinematic allegorical-liturgy of traversing the Human’s fundamental fantasy of Life qua anti-Blackness. Within Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, the fundamental fantasy is what constitutes the Symbolic coordinates for the Subject’s Imaginary coherence, keeping the Real(’s) absence of coordinates at bay. Written and directed by Alex Garland, _Annihilation_ presents a radical refraction of the Human’s fundamental fantasy—which the viewer is iteratively implicated in—by rendering a mode of ex-sistence with/in the Real-in-the-Symbolic that decomposes the Human’s Imaginary coherence. By considering Afropessimism’s paradigmatic analysis of modern Subject/World formation, I believe that, analogous to Carl Schmitt’s contention that all modern political concepts are secularized theological concepts, all modern (non-Black) theoretical and aesthetic-cultural formations are allegories of anti-/Blackness. Therefore, if the Lacanian Real unconsciously indexes the site of Blackness, and the World’s Symbolic-Imaginary grammar of Being (qua Life) is configured through the parasitic foreclosure of Blackness, then _Annihilation’s_ radical refraction of Life can be read as an allegory of anagrammatical Blackness. I speculatively propose that such an allegory, in this exemplary case, can liturgically attune (non-Black) viewers to inhabiting (the) Real(’s) absence of coordinates in fidelity to the generalized abolition of anti-Blackness.
Political Theology, 2021
This essay reads Richard Wright’s speculative novella, “The Man Who Lived Underground” (1941), as... more This essay reads Richard Wright’s speculative novella, “The Man Who Lived Underground” (1941), as an anagrammatical allegory of liturgical reading. By anagrammatical, I invoke Christina Sharpe’s understanding of how Blackness singularly “exists as an index of violability and also potentiality” in its foreclosure from the World’s grammar of anti-Blackness. With allegory (of reading), I draw attention to both 1) how Wright recasts Plato’s allegory of the cave in modern America and, following Paul de Man, 2) how Wright’s text is an allegory of un/readability. Finally, with liturgy, I draw on Giorgio Agamben’s understanding of mystery as a performance that (re-)enacts the text. This leads me to theorize that Wright’s anagrammatical allegory of liturgical reading brings the reader into speculative attunement to the Black messianic, which is a radical mode of fidelity to the Black’s singular positionality in aspiring to the un-veiling [apo-kalyptein] of the katechontic anti-Black World—toward gratuitous messianic freedom.
Oraxiom: A Journal of Non-Philosophy, 2020
Modernity is structured around a prior decision to which it is constitutively blind: the World’s ... more Modernity is structured around a prior decision to which it is constitutively blind: the World’s anthro-philosophical foreclosure of blackness. This is Afro-pessimism’s non-philosophical insight, informing its oraxiomatic demand to destroy the World. That is, this demand is the coincidence—or, in François Laruelle’s terms, superposition—of an oracle and an axiom. As such, Afro-pessimism’s apocalyptics should be understood etymologically as well as connotatively: its apo-kalupsis is an axiomatically immanent “un-veiling” of the World’s hallucinatory anti-black grammar, which constitutes Society as the restrainer (katechon) holding back the end of the World. Afro-pessimism’s apocalyptic-revelation thus oracularly exhibits both the hallucination of anti-blackness and the abyssal indeterminacy of the Real this hallucination veils. The structural antagonism between hallucinatory anti-blackness and the Real yields Afro-pessimism’s demand for a clean slate that fundamentally breaks (from) the anti-black World in the name of abyssal gratuitous freedom. Before Laruelle’s non-philosophical demand for a tabula rasa, Frantz Fanon oraxiomatically invoked it as the fundamental (pre)condition of decolonization qua the introduction invention into existence. In this way, I suggest Fanon is practicing a christo-fiction of black messianic invention that precedes and subtends any non-philosophical messianics in the wake of racial-chattel-slavery.
The Comparatist, 2019
This essay aspires to put in contact two contemporary movements in radical political thought. The... more This essay aspires to put in contact two contemporary movements in radical political
thought. The first is Afro-pessimism, coined by political theorist Frank B. Wilderson III, to name a set of thinkers who theorize racial slavery as modernity’s singular constitution, which invented anti-/Black positionality as the World’s fundamental structure of antagonism. The second is the contemporary turn to Paul by continental philosophers who attempt a modern reinterpretation of the Apostle’s apocalyptic announcement of the messianic event as a paradigm for radical politics. This essay will argue that, on the one hand, Paul’s apocalyptic-messianic framework can both elucidate and situate how Afro-pessimism uncompromisingly inhabits its antagonistic non-relation to the World as such. On the other hand, Afro-pessimism can show how Blackness is “the position of the unthought” that contemporary Paulinism is unconsciously parasitic upon—circumscribing its theorists’ attempt to radically formulate apocalyptic-messianic fidelity in the modern World. The motivation for staging this encounter lies in their shared conviction that true justice demands the end of the World. My essay aspires to dialogically elucidate this shared conviction by constellating their homologous theses, which reveals what I call "the Black messianic." I argue that if it is still possible, in the wake of racial slavery, to hear the Apostle’s summons to messianic existence and outlaw justice, then, in modernity, Afro-pessimism is its paradigmatic mode of fidelity.
MLA, 2024
This paper pursues a close reading of W. E. B. Du Bois's 1920 speculative fiction, “The Comet,” i... more This paper pursues a close reading of W. E. B. Du Bois's 1920 speculative fiction, “The Comet,” in relationship to the “nonevent of emancipation” and Afropessimism’s accompanying displacement of political economy for libidinal economy. Du Bois imagines an apocalyptic event where a comet crashes into New York City, which appears to kill the entire population—save one Black man, Jim. As Jim heads toward Harlem in search of his family, he encounters a White woman, Julia, who is the only other apparent survivor. Du Bois uses this post-apocalyptic scene to un-veil – from the Greek apo-calypsis – both the artifice of the color-line and how the World’s infrastructure turns this fantasy into law. Du Bois’s speculative exercise highlights the importance of understanding Afropessimism’s call for the end of the World as emanating from its revelation of “the position of the unthought.” Further, Du Bois’s revelation coincides with Afropessimism’s contention regarding the primacy of libidinal economy in the following way: even after the apparent end of the World, Julia’s negrophobic unconscious persists in her incapacity to accept a post-apocalyptic existence with Jim. However, in equal measure, “The Comet” exhibits why it is essential to abolish the socio-political infrastructure of anti-Blackness as the condition of possibility for Julia’s gradual working-through of her negrophobogenic-being-in-the-World. And yet, this apocalypse proves to be nonevental when it turns out that, at the end of the story, the World has survived, to Julia’s distinctly regressive relief. Even so, this paper argues that “The Comet” allegorically demonstrates an essential difference between the non-event of emancipation and the non/event of apocalypse: while emancipation could only ever reinscribe Black non-personhood by granting “access” to the Human, the Black apocalypse may be “nonevental” only insofar as its scope could be curtailed by the Human’s counter-revolutionary investment in its fundamental fantasy of the World.
Political Theology Network Conference, 2023
This essay attempts to clarify the contentious intramural relationship between Radical Black Femi... more This essay attempts to clarify the contentious intramural relationship between Radical Black Feminism’s and Afropessimism’s theorizations of Blackness. I retrace the implications that Afropessimism derives from Radical Black Feminism as a question of fidelity to Hortense Spillers’ most fundamental insights into what she theorizes as the ungendered captive flesh. In section one, I reconstruct a latent debate between Denise Ferreira Ferreira da Silva and Jared Sexton to tease out the ethico-political differences between Ferreira da Silva’s formulation of “everything for everyone” and Sexton’s response: “nothing for no one.” In section two, I introduce my own paradigm of anagrammatical liturgics to thematize and elaborate how Afropessimism induces an ethics of radical disinvestment from the World at the registers of reading and writing. In the final section, I show how the gravitational force of ungendered thought is animated in the anagrammatical liturgy of revolutionary suicide as a theory of Black community that entails the absolute letting go of sense and value toward the end of the anti-Black World.
American Academy of Religion, 2022
This paper’s title takes its inspiration from Jean Vioulac’s, Apocalypse of Truth: Heideggerian M... more This paper’s title takes its inspiration from Jean Vioulac’s, Apocalypse of Truth: Heideggerian Meditations (2021) [Apocalypse de la vérité (2014)], which is his first book translated into English. Vioulac mobilizes the biblical conception of apocalypse as revelation (apokálypsis) against the Greek conception of truth as disclosure (alētheia). For Vioulac, the Pauline thought of apocalypse entails a leap into a wholly other thinking—marked by the modalities of faith, flesh, mystery, abyss, and absence—wherein which nothingness is no longer held at bay as mere privation but instead indexes “the Undisclosable’s positivity.” While this contemporary French philosopher does not discuss how our modern epoch of anti-nothingness is shaped by racial slavery, I propose that Vioulac's text can be read in part as an unconscious allegory of anti-/Blackness. In particular, Vioulac’s thinking of apocalypse as an attunement to abyssal absence deeply resonates with Afropessimsim’s political ontology of social death and its attendant demand for the end of the World. I thus propose this constellation as a means understanding and elaborating Afropessimism’s apocalyptic thought as a poetics of revelation.
Society of Phenomenological and Existential Philosophy, 2019
This paper is a meditation on the unique modality of demand—which is not only situated in contrad... more This paper is a meditation on the unique modality of demand—which is not only situated in contradistinction to the standard modalities of possibility, necessity, and contingency, but as a modality that precedes and short-circuits their metaphysical construction. I draw on Agamben’s elaboration of this modality to contemplate Afro-pessimism’s singular demand for the end of the World. Afro-pessimism is defined by this demand because its paradigmatic analysis of anti-Blackness renders intelligible the conditions of impossibility for Black Lives to Matter in the World, conditions which are defined by civil society’s Human(ist) coordinates. I argue that while Afro-pessimism’s demand is conceived as impossible within the World’s anti-Black grammar/horizon, Agamben’s elaboration of this modality can help one better understand how this impossible demand gestures toward an unthought potentiality that Blackness incarnates and the World, accordingly, forecloses.
Humanity in a Black Mirror: Essays on Posthuman Fantasies in a Technological Near Future, 2023
This chapter charts a philosophical path through Martin Heidegger, Giorgio Agamben, and Bernard S... more This chapter charts a philosophical path through Martin Heidegger, Giorgio Agamben, and Bernard Stiegler to pursue the question concerning modern technology as a means of preparing readiness to inhabit the crack in the screen of Being that Black Mirror iteratively fractures. However, this path of questioning must attend to the position of the unthought--i.e. the Black-Slave--if it wants to truly understand what Black Mirror reveals. The “black” in Black Mirror—as the season 4 finale written by Charlie Brooker, “Black Museum,” paradigmatically shows—also signifies the blackness of racial slavery that is the foundation of the modern world’s fundamental fantasy. Accordingly, this chapter seeks to show, on the one hand, how black being is essence of modern technology and, on the other hand, how this is the unconscious knowledge that Black Mirror repeatedly exhibits.
Reading Religion, 2024
Book Review of Anne Margaret Castro’s The Sacred Act of Reading: Spirituality, Performance, and P... more Book Review of Anne Margaret Castro’s The Sacred Act of Reading: Spirituality, Performance, and Power in Afro-Diasporic Literature