THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH, VOL.3, ISSUE#11,SEPT-NOV/2020
In response to sequestering all philosophical endeavor within formal rationality as sanctioned Academic thought, insurgent philosophy deliberately resists the dogmatic presupposition that firm adherence to an analytical logic, which develops linearly towards a well foreseen conclusion, is the absolute hallmark of intellectual rigor. Such epistemic coercion aids in pacifying the intentionality of insurgent thought by brutally policing the Black radical imagination until its very structure facilitates the laundering of emancipatory potentialities into a merely oppositional equilibrium within the normative gaze of established power.
Indeed, in anticipation of potentialities towards the existential refraction of Black liberation theory into emancipatory praxis, insurgent philosophy unceremoniously ruptures the overdetermined coordination of thought as dissolved into specialized disciplines upheld by institutional watchdogs as the boundaries of reason itself.
As such, and in spite of any well-meaning encouragement to dilute the confrontationally enigmatic and often fragmentary style of conceptually dense thoroughgoing critique that characterizes the discursive intensity of insurgent philosophical prose, there is no inherent epistemic value in allowing Black radical thought to be regulated in advance of the emancipatory trajectory of thinking itself, especially without regard to the purpose such thought is directed towards and whatever adversity such thought is meant to overcome. “The appeal to science, the rules by which it functions, the absolute validity of the methods to which it owes its development, together constitute an authority which penalizes free, untrammeled, ‘untrained’ thinking, and will not allow the minds of men to dwell on matters that do not bear the stamp of its approval. Science, the means to autonomy, has degenerated into an instrument of heteronomy.”[1] In this sense, we must resist authorizing the scientific merit of systematic thought when it epistemologically forestalls the interrogative freedom of interpretative rigor.
Therefore, insurgent philosophy revels in a refusal to exercise any discursive leniency upon either academics or so-called typical readers, for it necessarily demands acute levels of concentration from the reader towards dispensing with settling for either an academic or a typical understanding of our contemporary world. Or are we now expected to believe that western imperialist power has no vested socio-historical interest in ideologically maintaining the intellectual fidelity of academics who aid in manufacturing consent while simultaneously orchestrating the intellectual pacification of everyday people as common sense and conventional wisdom?
No doubt, in the critical cultivation of philosophical disdain for what is often described as ‘the typical reader’, do we not hear philosophy itself grappling with its own overdetermination-from-without based on pedestrian standards of language and logical regulations of analytic thought that perhaps apply to good journalism, effective activism and/or equally sound pedagogy, but fall short of approaching the inhospitable summits of insurgent philosophical endeavor? “Thought has allowed itself to become, as it were, intimidated, and no longer possesses the self-confidence to go beyond the mere reproduction of what is anyway.”[2] When philosophy overrides its discursive orientation towards Truth with a pragmatic concern for reaching ‘the typical reader’, are we supposed to feign surprise at the debasement of the Black radical imagination imprisoned in typical books, written in typical language, meant to convey typical outlooks that cultivate a typical relation to established power ie. unreflective subservient complicity?
And yet, as difficult as it is to find thinkers within the Academy, and let us be fair in admitting that enough do in fact exist, who write with emancipatory relevance and epistemic freedom from disciplinary constraints, financial incentives, careerist considerations and imperial prestige, it is even more difficult to find thinkers outside of the Academy who don’t pander to thought at its lowest common denominator in the name of vain cultural nationalist attempts to reach the dominated non-resisting masses by humbly indulging popular culture on its own self-aggrandizing terms of success, and thus by default epistemologically capitulate to the normative gaze of Empire.
The normative gaze inundates both academic thought and typical thinking with an unarticulated deference to formal rationality and established structures of meaning, at the expense of epistemic movement towards interrogations of the Real and enunciations of Revolt.
As such, insurgent philosophy introduces disequilibrium within the very epistemic coherence of philosophy as a specialized academic discipline and ruptures its legitimating authorization of the normative gaze into formal rationality being passed down from generation to generation as typical thought within a tradition. Under such conditions, philosophy strains with difficulty in recognizing itself outside the simulacrum of its own obituary as ghostwritten by the Academy after an incessantly Nietzschean funeral for metaphysics replete with a eulogy that as a consequence proclaims the ‘end of philosophy’ by its evolution and dispersal into the independent sciences as academic disciplines.[3]
However, insurgent philosophy begins with the Blues metaphysic, as a rejection of the very premise of such a funeral, and thus opens epistemic potentialities for the rebirth of philosophy itself, to the frustration of Academics, by introducing conditions of possibility for transcending the reification of specialized disciplines towards more socially relevant modes of intellectual engagement.
No doubt, insurgent philosophy – even at its most basic – is not the kind of thought that appeases academics or ‘the typical reader’. For insurgent philosophy exerts demands upon the reader, who then in overcoming any discursive intimidation through close difficult readings, begins to experience an understanding of the Real that ceases to be academic or typical.
As such, let there be no talk of a retreat from indispensable dialogue with everyday people or the Academy. Black liberation theory, in venturing forth unremittingly from the socio-ontological underground of modernity, confronts the normative gaze of a western imperialist continuum without need of established structures of meaning as its epistemic foundation, save the trajectory of its own discursive movement towards emancipatory praxis. Insurgent philosophy channels the exceptional antagonism of lived Black experience and discursively disrupts the geohistorical equilibrium that conceals the universality of human ‘being’, thus revealing the Blues metaphysic as a vast reservoir of socio-ontological Revolt that allows the emancipatory intentionality of Black radical discourse to constitute the necessary rigors of thought, and not the other way around.
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