THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH, VOL.3, ISSUE#15, MARCH-MAY/2023
The question of Black subjectivity strikes a discordant note, a Blue note within the socio-ontological harmony of established structures of meaning that exist in concert within the normative gaze of Empire.[1] For the question of Black subjectivity is the question of human ‘being’ in the face of objective violence and miseducation of soul that is meant to biopolitically pacify lived potentialities of emancipatory praxis against western imperialist power at the level of ontology. Thus, the assertion of Black subjectivity-as-human ‘being’ constitutes an exceptional antagonism against the normative gaze of modernity as imposed by a western imperialist continuum.
And yet, what we find in “the expanding field of Afropessimism” is that the exceptional antagonism between Black subjectivity and the normative gaze of western imperialist power, though accurately theorized as “an irreconcilable encounter”, is conceptualized as “the structural relation between Blackness and Humanity”[2] so as to sufficiently expose racist dehumanization as the imperial coherence of modernity. As a consequence of this attempt to ward off any metaphysical comfort the careless or cynical adoption of modern humanism affords, Afropessimist thought effectively cedes the discursive power to pose the question of human ‘being’ to the normative gaze of Empire.
No doubt, for who would argue against the Afropessimist proposition that our contemporary world is intimately structured by an anti-Black violence that shares no immediate analogue with workers, women, subalterns or even queers?[3] Surely not even Marx, who himself actually made clear near the end of Capital Vol.1, that “the veiled slavery of the wage labourers in Europe needed the unqualified slavery of the New World as its pedestal.”[4] As such, the very conditions of possibility that introduce oppositional conflicts within the imperial mainstream-as-civil society, such as the struggle for recognition of civil rights or even class struggle itself, are underwritten by a profound coloniality in the Raw and exacting racist dehumanization characterized by the socio-ontological imposition of chattel slavery upon human ‘being’. “For Black people, civil society itself – rather than its abuses and shortcomings – is a state of emergency.”[5]
At its core, this socio-ontological imposition of western imperialist power as it was then constituted through chattel slavery is structurally based upon the biopolitical pacification of human ‘being’ into ‘objecthood’. Indeed, for as the thought of Douglass reveals, “The first work of slavery is to mar and deface those characteristics of its victims which distinguish men from things, and persons from property. Its first aim is to destroy all sense of high moral and religious responsibility. It reduces man to a mere machine.”[6] This reduction of human ‘being’ to ‘objecthood’ is accurately theorized in Afropessimist discourse as social death[7] characterized by gratuitous violence that is not contingent upon prior transgression, by natal alienation that disregards familial bonds towards intentionally undermining structures of kinship and by general dishonor as an a priori disgrace that admits no possibility of redemption.
However, what makes Afropessimist thought so indispensable to the Black radical imagination is that it is predicated upon understanding social death as a continuously reconfigured positionality of existence that structures the very reality of Blackness in the world, which though originating in the imposition of western imperialist power as it was then manifest through chattel slavery, reveals itself in contemporary socio-historical phenomena like mass incarceration, cobalt mining in the Congo and the accumulative slaughter of ascendant humanity by neo-colonial police agents. For as prophetically disclosed in the thought of Douglass, “The slave having ceased to be the abject slave of a single master, his enemies will endeavor to make him the slave of society at large.”[8]
As such, social death is rendered ontologically equivalent to understanding Blackness as indistinguishable from Slaveness, then posited as key to locating the structural positionality of Blackness within the normative gaze of modernity as a fixed identity, as a rational signification of subhumanity or ‘race’ against which the biopolitical alterity that inscribes modern humanism emerges.[9]
Afropessimist thought thus functions as a trenchant reminder that modern humanism, is itself only legible as a humanism through allegiance to the biopolitical alterity of ‘race’ that affixes Blackness as an identity defined less by its achievements of cultural proliferation than by its paradigmatic position within a lived topography of imperial coherence as slavery and social death. “One cannot know Blackness as distinct from slavery, for there is no Black temporality which is antecedent to the temporality of the Black slave.”[10] And yet, is this not another way of confirming that there is no essence of racial identity prior to a western imperialist continuum that introduces ‘race’ into existence? Is it indeed not also the case that one cannot know Whiteness as distinct from the imposition of chattel slavery upon human ‘being’ by western imperialist power, for there is no White temporality which is antecedent to the temporality of a western imperialist continuum?
Indeed, there is no pre-existing categorical secular humanism for Black subjectivity to adopt that is not inscribed by western imperialist power. Rather, the assertion of Black subjectivity-as-human ‘being’ introduces socio-ontological potentialities of radical universality towards a slave Revolt against established structures of meaning that overturns the normative gaze of a western imperialist continuum upon which the modern humanism, liberal and/or conservative, of the slavemaster is grounded. For as the Truth of the anti-slavery dialectic of Douglass discloses, and to which the existential liberationist orientation of the thought of Sartre[11] and Fanon[12] avidly attests, human subjectivity-as-lived universal can only be introduced into existence through trial by fire, as constituted through emancipatory praxis against a western imperialist continuum and all its salient permutations. “The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims, have been born of earnest struggle. The conflict has been exciting, agitating, all-absorbing, and for the time being, putting all other tumults to silence. It must do this or it does nothing. If there is no struggle there is no progress.”[13] For although human ‘being’ is bestowed equally upon all, human subjectivity can only be born through struggle against adversity in the world as lived rhythm of praxis against the Real.
Afropessimist thought unapologetically theorizes a necessarily keen poststructuralist[14] inflected ontology of the normative gaze of western imperialist power as the structure of reality itself. For Afropessimism, and this by its own admission, is intent upon cultivating theory as a strictly explanatory orientation, by taking an unflinching look at that structural consistency of the normative gaze of modernity towards developing an accurate grammar of Black suffering. How this world became anti-Black since 1492 within the context of a western imperialist continuum and remains ardently so thanks to advanced neo-liberal capitalist globalization, and hence how it must be confronted, is not within the epistemic scope of its stated aims.
As such, “they perform a kind of ‘work of understanding’ rather than that of liberation, refusing to posit seemingly untenable solutions to the problems they raise.”[15] Does this mean that Afropessimism thus does not seek to change the world, merely explain the scope and depth of the world’s anti-Blackness? Or does it speak to an epistemic integrity and much needed deference of academics in relation to the possibility of insurgent thought arising from outside imperially sanctioned institutions of higher learning? On this, Wilderson himself is quite unambiguous, “I think more specifically, that professors are by and large categorically disqualified or unqualified to make pronouncements on resistance.”[16] Fair enough.
Afropessimist discourse wields this explanatory power as an epistemic provocation against imperial mainstream assimilationist oriented western Marxists and Gramscian inspired social activists of all communities who have fallen fast asleep at the wheel of revolution in the comforting trenches of civil society. “I’m not against Marxism, I believe that capitalist exploitation dominates the world and I’m against it – but I think that all these progressive groups come with an orientation toward the problem that does two things: first it crowds out what we have been talking about here; then, it polices the terrain of political discourse so that we can’t get a word in edgewise about how there is no solution that can be thought of to Black suffering.”[17] That this emancipatory hibernation by the so-called Left reeks with anti-Blackness speaks to an oppositional vision that never transgresses beyond the fixed parameters of modernity as imposed by the normative gaze of a western imperialist continuum.
However, Afropessimist thought, by effectively bringing these epistemic limitations to light, invariably suffers from a positivism it is not prepared to abandon.[18] Coming to terms with this positivist bent of Afropessimist thought is crucial before any further attempt is made to grapple with its theoretical orientation. For Afropessimist thought runs the risk of replicating the normative gaze through the same discursive effort that discloses Blackness as a fixed positionality of ‘race’ against which the horizon of human ‘being’ is violently exhausted by modern humanism.
As such, the Afropessimist reformulation of the exceptional antagonism existing between western imperialist power and the assertion of Black subjectivity-as-human ‘being’, as an antagonism between ‘the Human’ and ‘Blackness’, is the result of an epistemic inability to rid itself of a positivism that has the effect of discursively ceding the capacity to define what human ‘being’ means to the main source of socio-historical oppression against human ‘being’, rather than allow for constitutive potentialities towards disclosing what human ‘being’ means to arise from the genesis of resistance against the socio-historical oppression of human ‘being’.
Still, let us be wary of the growing chorus of partisan banter that seeks to ignore the theoretical strength of Afropessimism’s stalwart paradigmatic analysis which rightfully calls into question liberal narratives of social progress that see no emancipatory horizon beyond the fatalistic necessity of a triumphant assimilation into the imperial mainstream-as-civil society and its corresponding colorblind anthropology of ‘whiteness’. For as Wilderson accurately assesses, “the radical fringe of political discourse amounts to little more than a passionate dream of civic reform and social stability.”[19]
However, what happens when rather than challenge the sovereign legitimacy of a western imperialist continuum to determine what it means to be human in the absolute, we discursively cede the existential responsibility to constitute what human ‘being’ means to the normative gaze itself? Hegel provides us with a rare and unambiguous look into the working parameters of the normative gaze by positing that “The Negro is an example of animal man in all his savagery and lawlessness, and if we wish to understand him at all, we must abstract from all reverence and morality, and from everything which we call feeling. All that is foreign to man in his immediate existence, and nothing consonant with humanity is to be found in his character.”[20] As such, by claiming that “nothing consonant with humanity is to be found in” Black subjectivity, does that make Hegel an Afropessimist thinker?
Not quite, however, it does speak to the epistemic limitations of contemporary oppositional formations that replicate the master/slave dialectic of recognition at the core of their theoretical base. Originally the emancipatory thought of Douglass,[21] and more than a century later, the existential liberationist contributions of Sartre[22] ultimately break the cycle of Hegelian based dialectics of the slavemaster by disclosing the paradox of slavery. Indeed, effectively enslaving another human ‘being’ requires not only recognizing, but prioritizing the human condition the better to generate structures towards the violent systematic socio-ontological negation of human subjectivity. Once this paradox is properly grasped, then the mythology of the over abiding necessity of struggling to achieve recognition as Man within the context of the normative gaze of modernity can be rinsed off the face of humanity as pure ideological trappings of a slavemaster intent upon prolonging slavery by other means.
Chattel slavery at it most fundamental register consists in the biopolitical pacification of human ‘being’ into ‘objecthood’. Hence, Afropessimist thought begins from this premise of the Fact of Blackness – the imposition of ‘objecthood’ by western imperialist power upon human ‘being’ – as social death. To make its case, Afropessimism hones in on structural relations of property as preemptively inscribing all too obvious relations of coercive labor. For the imposition of ‘objecthood’ upon human ‘being’ (racist dehumanization) that slavery generates is the very condition of possibility for the reification and exploitation of the worker (alienation) that capitalism generates through the commodification of labor-power.[23] Through replicating and reconfiguring the objective violence and miseducation of soul that according to Douglass, not only creates slavery, but maintains, reformulates and continuously reproduces it, the normative gaze of modernity precludes Black people from human consideration, ethical reciprocity and legal redress.[24]
Indeed, “Afro-pessimism offers an analytic lens that labours as a corrective to Humanist assumptive logic. It provides a theoretical apparatus which allows Black people to not have to be burdened by the ruse of analogy—because analogy mystifies, rather than clarifies, Black suffering.”[25] What Afropessimist thought has difficulty conceptually grasping however, is that the very Fact of Blackness discloses an opening towards a radical universality of the human condition realized against the normative gaze of modernity precisely because the imperial mainstream-as-civil society “has a perverse and parasitic relation to the workings of anti-Black violence; it does not want Black land (as it does from Native Americans), or Black consent (as it does from workers), it wants something more fundamental: the confirmation of human existence”[26] through the imposition of structural-inert violence upon the assertion of Black subjectivity-as-human ‘being’.
As such, the exceptional antagonism of Black subjectivity is the question of human ‘being’ in the face of objective violence and miseducation of soul that “places us in a structurally impossible position, one that is outside the articulations of hegemony”[27] and thus meant to biopolitically pacify the socio-ontological possibility of emancipatory praxis against Empire. And yet, as human ‘being’ “outside the articulations of hegemony”, does this not then introduce an emancipatory burden of universality upon the assertion of Black subjectivity-as-human ‘being’ that transcends the hegemonic articulations of Man as imposed by western imperialist power?
The assertion of Black subjectivity-as-human ‘being’ disrupts any premise of materialist determinism that would reduce the lived rhythm of praxis that constitutes human subjectivity as equivalent to the Real of a self-identical substance undergoing change in causal correlation to the Real. Rather, Black subjectivity discloses human ‘being’ as situated consciousness that manifests radical ontological freedom as resistance that precedes essence through lived rhythm of praxis that constitutes human subjectivity as presence towards self, movement towards one another and engagement in the world as a singular trajectory of intentionality. Resistance thus precedes essence, particularly insofar as human ‘being’ initially discovers itself as existing through realizing potentialities of resistance against being overdetermined-from-without by the normative gaze.
The human condition is capable of sustaining a lived rhythm of praxis as trajectory of ‘being-in-the-world’ that challenges the very limitations of mortality, even as it implicates the temporality of situated consciousness against the Real. The constant decisions and types of commitment we make in the face of such a comprehensive ambiguity of nature, history and culture provide consistency and scope to this lived rhythm of praxis against the Real, thus introducing the very basis of human subjectivity. “You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was a made a man.”[28] As such, the Douglassian anti-slavery dialectic of Revolt rejects materialist determinism as the foundation of human action upon history. Therefore, resistance to slavery introduces a dialectical movement initiated by the irreducibility of human agency and its irreconcilability with the Real against the utmost severity of mortal limitations which certainly mediate our situation, yet never causally determine our situation. This, in spite of the fact, that the intentionality of human ‘being’ towards resistance against established power can nowhere ensure a fixed or obvious victory as a sociohistorical summit of achievement, for history is a disaster that often displaces the social trajectory of lived intentionality within an unforeseen scope of historical possibility. And yet, still, as radical ontological freedom situated against the Real, human ‘being’ is compelled and thoroughly condemned to face the absolute contingency of this world through lived rhythm of praxis, without guarantee and with full responsibility.
Let us here be careful however, and clearly differentiate between what we mean by subjectivity as opposed to what is often meant by identity. Subjectivity and identity are distinguished by their positionality in relation to the normative gaze that constitutes the Real. Identity is based on situated consciousness attempting to substantiate itself by relating itself to an often arbitrary and contrived harmony with the Real in fealty to the normative gaze, while subjectivity begins with situated consciousness in definitive resistance to any such harmonious acclimation to the normative gaze. Achieving harmony with the Real is indicative of being overdetermined-from-without by the normative gaze of a western imperialist continuum that constitutes the Real. This distinction should always be kept in mind when questions of Black identity arise in contrast to questions of Black subjectivity.
During one of his many experiences of being severely brutalized by a slave-breaker, Douglass once sought out the actual slave-master “humbly to invoke the interposition of his power and authority, to protect me from further abuse and violence.”[29] Now Douglass had no illusions about how “humanity fell before the systematic tyranny of slavery.”[30] And yet, fearing that “I should be killed by him”,[31] he sought protection within the context of his identity as a slave, even though such an identity only reaffirmed the Real of “systematic tyranny” structured upon restricting and disciplining his capacity for human subjectivity. In other words, had the slave-master granted Douglass his wish “to allow me to get a new home and to find a new master,”[32] and thus make him safe in his identity as a slave; who knows how much longer it would have taken Douglass to overcome the social death of slavery through the choice of being “resolved to fight”[33] the slave-breaker “come what might”?[34]
Douglass describes the effects of emancipatory praxis upon the constitutive movement of self-determination from structural positionality of imposed ‘objecthood’ upon human ‘being’ towards human subjectivity in no uncertain terms. “After resisting him, I felt as I had never felt before. It was a resurrection from the dark and pestiferous tomb of slavery, to the heaven of comparative freedom.”[35] Human subjectivity is thus constituted through a struggle of resistance to the normative gaze, not in a struggle of seeking recognition from the normative gaze. “Man is distinguished from all other animals, but in nothing is he distinguished more than in this, namely, resistance, active and constant resistance, to the forces of physical nature.”[36] This is the crux of the anti-slavery dialectic of Douglass in sharp contrast to the master-slave dialectic of Hegel. Hegel focuses on the mythic allegorical moment of slavery’s imposition and its Idealist implications, while Douglass hones in on the socio-ontological movement of Revolt against the concrete historical imposition of slavery upon human ‘being’ and its existential relevance.
Afropessimist thought illuminates the structural positionality of Black identity within a western imperialist continuum towards elaborating an accurate grammar of suffering in terms of a social death that characterizes the Black as analogous to the slave within the normative gaze of modernity. “Blackness is coterminous with Slaveness. Blackness is social death, which is to say that there was never a prior meta-moment of plenitude, never a moment of equilibrium, never a moment of social life. Blackness, as a paradigmatic position (rather than as an ensemble of identities, cultural practices, or anthropological accoutrement), cannot be disimbricated from slavery.”[37]
As such, Black liberation cannot be disimbricated from slave Revolt, as constituting a socio-ontological upheaval that ultimately discloses potentialities towards a profoundly radical universality of human ‘being’.[38] Inasmuch as slavery is social death, slave Revolt constitutes a resurrection of social potentialities through emancipatory praxis that introduces new conditions of possibility out of which to reconstitute human subjectivity by rupturing the normative gaze of a western imperialist continuum towards the opening of new social horizons and ontological registers of existence. “I was a changed being after that fight. I was nothing before; I WAS A MAN NOW. … He only can understand the effect of this combat on my spirit, who has himself incurred something, hazarded something, in repelling the unjust and cruel aggressions of a tyrant. … I had reached the point at which I was not afraid to die. This made me a freeman in fact, while I remained a slave in form.”[39]
As such, Afropessimist thought, and this is precisely why it is invaluable, refuses to ignore the Real of a western imperialist continuum that structurally negates the assertion of Black subjectivity-as-human ‘being’(freeman in fact) through objective violence and miseducation of soul towards sustaining Blackness as a lived positionality of social death(slave in form) buried in the underground of modernity.
However, Douglass ultimately reveals an anti-slavery dialectic that does not require “a meta-moment of plentitude” or “moment of equilibrium” as necessary preconditions from which to Revolt against “the unjust and cruel aggressions of a tyrant” through emancipatory praxis that constitutes human subjectivity as “changed being” from “nothing before”. And yet, the Real of western imperialist power is vital for understanding Black subjectivity-as-human ‘being’, for human ‘being’ is situated in the world. And it is through lived rhythm of praxis as resistance to the Real that we constitute human subjectivity. Outside of resistance to the Real, and especially in seeking recognition from the normative gaze of modernity as imposed by western imperialist power, there is only social death.
Again, Afropessimism conceives the power of its discursive legitimacy as being explanatory rather than emancipatory, even to the point of suggesting a wide unsurpassable gulf of meaning between these two orientations. Attempting to bridge this gulf by delving further into questions revolving around any possible emancipatory implications in relation to Afropessimist thinking, invites a disarming return to Fanon’s discursive appropriation of Cesaire’s apocalyptic and all too poetic warning of bringing about ‘the end of the world’.[40]
And yet, it is here, at ‘the end of the world’ that we dare not blink. For the ‘end of the world’ in this sense, doesn’t mean the same thing as Fukiyama’s triumphalist imperial proclamation of ‘the end of history’.[41] As such, there are no emancipatory imperatives from which to justify shying away from meeting the ‘end of the world’ head on and thus retreat into that Fukiyamist epistemic lethargy of advanced neo-liberal capitalist globalization.
The ‘end of the world’, with all its apocalyptic connotations alluded to over centuries and millennia through messianic theology of the Cause of God,[42] means nothing but bringing about the conditions of possibility from which a fundamental worldwide restructuring of the geohistorical limitations of modernity as imposed by a western imperialist continuum towards geonational egalitarian potentialities of world community, or in other words, a new world can be born. The ‘end of the world’ is thus not a particular event, but an ongoing geohistorical phenomenon that speaks to the emancipatory needs of everyday people suffering the world over under the yoke of Empire as the absolute horizon of socio-historical possibility.
“The problem envisioned here is situated in temporality. Both Blacks and whites become disalienated by refusing to let themselves be locked up in a materialist Tower of the Past. For many other Black people, disalienation will arise from resisting the Real as definitive. I am a man, and what I have to reconstitute is the entirety of the world’s past. I am not just responsible for the slave revolt in Santo Domingo.”[43] And yet, the Revolt of human ‘being’ against chattel slavery, be it in Haiti, Jamaica, Southampton, Virginia or Salvador de Bahia, speaks to Black liberation as a geohistorical imperative of emancipatory praxis towards introducing an unprecedented horizon of universality of the human condition into existence, without possible reconciliation within the imperial coherence of the world as it is contemporarily ordered according to the normative gaze of modernity. Indeed, inasmuch as slavery is social death, slave Revolt constitutes a rebirth of social possibility beyond the globalized structures of a western imperialist continuum.
[1] The normative gaze refers to the pre-reflective orientation and background order of things that provides everyday coordinates and constitutes the Real of lived Black experience through objective violence and miseducation of soul. Afropessimist thought draws from psychoanalytic vocabulary in its approaches at grasping the normative gaze with references to a ‘collective unconscious’, ‘libidinal gaze’, ‘psychic space called social life’, ‘position of the unthought’, etc.
[2] Frank B. Wilderson III, “Afropessimism and the End of Redemption”, The Occupied Times, March 30th, 2016. https://theoccupiedtimes.org/?p=14236
[3] “Afropessimism argues that Blacks do not function as political subjects; instead, our flesh and energies are instrumentalized for postcolonial, immigrant, feminist, LGBT, and workers’ agendas. These so-called allies are never authorized by Black agendas predicated on Black ethical delimmas.” Wilderson, “Afropessimism and the End of Redemption”, The Brotherwise Dispatch, Vol.3, Issue#3, June-Aug/2018.
[4] Karl Marx, Capital Vol.1, (New York: Penguin Classics, 1867, 1990) p.925.
[5] Wilderson, “The Prison Slave as Hegemony’s Silent Scandal”, Social Justice, Vol.30, #3, 2003.
[6] Frederick Douglass, “The Nature of Slavery”, My Bondage and My Freedom, (New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, 1850, 2005) pp.328-9.
[7] Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1982).
[8] Frederick Douglass, “The Day of Jubilee Comes”, The Portable Frederick Douglass, (New York: Penguin Classics, 1862, 2016) p.305.
[9] “Anti-Black violence is an ensemble of necessary rituals that are performed so that the human race can know itself as Human and not as a slave, meaning not as Black.” Frank B. Wilderson III Interviewed by Zamansele Nsele, Mail & Guardian, June 4th, 2020.
[10] Frank B. Wilderson III, “Afropessimism and the End of Redemption”, The Occupied Times.
[11] Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason Vol.1, (London: Verso, 1960, 1991).
[12] Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, (Grove Press: New York, 1961, 1963).
[13] Frederick Douglass, The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass Vol.2, (New York: International Publishers: 1857, 1975) p.437.
[14] Poststructuralism displaces the irreducibility of situated consciousness by granting constitutive primacy to the structural prefigurations of language. “Poststructuralism makes the case that language (Lacan) and more broadly discourse (Foucault) are the modalities which, in the first ontological instance, position the subject structurally. I have no qualms with postructuralism’s toolbox per se. What I am arguing for is a radical return to Fanon, to an apprehension of how gratuitous violence positions the ‘Savage’ and the Slave, and how the freedom from violence’s gratuitousness, not violence itself, positions the Settler/Master”. Wilderson, Red, White & Black, p.31.
[15] https://www.frankbwildersoniii.com/afropessimism/
[16] Quoted from a transciption of a radio interview with Frank B. Wilderson, III taped in October of 2014, in the midst of the ongoing anti-police struggles taking place in Ferguson, MO. Wilderson is in conversation with IMIXWHATILIKE hosts Jared Ball, Todd Steven Burroughs and Dr. Hate. An audio recording of the interview can be found under the title “Irreconcilable Anti-Blackness and Police Violence” on the show’s website:
http://imixwhatilike.org/2014/10/01/frankwildersonandantiblackness-2/ Transcription and zine layout by Ill Will Editions, November 2014. Minor edits have been made for length and readability. ill-will-editions.tumblr.com illwill@riseup.
[17] ibid.
[18] Positivism eliminates dynamics of power from epistemic scrutiny, divorces the knower from being implicated in the act of knowing, and rests upon claims that authentic knowledge is objective and/or positive, thereby reducing truth and meaning to empirically verifiable facts derived by logic, reason and sensory experience.
[19] Frank B. Wilderson III, Red, White & Black:Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010) p.6.
[20] G.W.F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, (Mineola, New York: Dover, 1837, 1956) p.93.
[21] “Must I undertake to prove that the slave is a man? That point is conceded already. Nobody doubts it. The slaveholders themselves acknowledge it in the enactment of laws for their government. They acknowledge it when they punish disobedience on the part of the slave. There are seventy-two crimes in the State of Virginia, which, if committed by a black man, (no matter how ignorant he be), subject him to the punishment of death; while only two of the same crimes will subject a white man to the like punishment. What is this but the acknowledgement that the slave is a moral, intellectual and responsible being? The manhood of the slave is conceded. It is admitted in the fact that Southern statute books are covered with enactments forbidding, under severe fines and penalties, the teaching of the slave to read or to write. When you can point to any such laws, in reference to the beasts of the field, then I may consent to argue the manhood of the slave.” Douglass, The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass Vol.2, (New York: International Publishers, 1852, 1975) pp.190-1.
[22] “However, the slave
acquires his animality, through the master, only after his humanity has
been recognized. . . . This is the contradiction of racism, colonialism and all
forms of tyranny: in order to treat a man like a dog, one must first recognize
him as a man. The concealed discomfort
of the master is that he always has to consider the human reality of his slaves
(whether through his reliance on their skill and their synthetic understanding
of situations, or through his precautions against the permanent possibility of
revolt or escape), while at the same time refusing them the economic and
political status which, in this period, defines human beings.” Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason Vol.1,
p.110-111.
[23] Wilderson, “Gramsci’s Black Marx: Whither the Slave in Civil Society?”, Social Identities, Vol.9, #2, 2003.
[24] “it is necessary to resort to these cruelties, in order to make the slave a slave, and to keep him a slave . . . and this can be done only by shutting out the light of education from their minds and brutalizing their persons.” The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass Vol.1, (New York: International Publishers, 1846, 1950) p.157.
[25] Wilderson, “Afropessimism and the End of Redemption”.
[26] Wilderson, “Afropessimism and the End of Redemption”.
[27] Wilderson, “Prison Slaves as Hegemony’s (Silent) Scandal”.
[28] Frederick Douglass, Autobiographies, (New York: Library of America, 1845, 1994) p.60.
[29] Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, p.174.
[30] Douglass, p.175.
[31] Douglass, p.176.
[32] Douglass, ibid.
[33] Douglass, p.184.
[34] Douglass, p.185.
[35] Douglass, p.187.
[36] Douglass, Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass Vol.4, (New York: International Publishers, 1865, 1955) p.181.
[37] Wilderson, “Afropessimism and the End of Redemption”.
[38] Adeleke Adeeko in his work, The Slave’s Rebellion: Fiction, History, Orature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), is the only other thinker I’ve read who attempts to make this connection when he writes - “If slavery is ‘social death’, as Patterson argues, what is slave rebellion?” p.20.
[39] Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, p.187. emphasis, capitalization and italics in original.
[40] Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, (New York: Grove Press, 1952, 1967) p.96.
Frank B. Wilderson Interviewed by Jared Ball, “Irreconcilable Anti-Blackness and Police Violence”
http://imixwhatilike.org/2014/10/01/frankwildersonandantiblackness-2/ Transcription and zine layout by Ill Will Editions, November 2014. Minor edits have been made for length and readability. ill-will-editions.tumblr.com illwill@riseup.
[41] Francis Fukiyama, The End of History and the Last Man, (New York: Free Press, 1992).
[42] My own ongoing theological readings of Bahai Faith seek to engage this socio-historical transition from messianic expectation to messianic intentionality during the 19th century as exemplified in the messianic Revolt of human ‘being’ against chattel slavery throughout the Americas and the simultaneous phenomenon of messianic Revelation of the Cause of God in Iran.
[43] Fanon, p.226. modified translation mine own.
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