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…
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 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…
While noncooperation is figured by Fanon as a kind of staging area for or a preliminary version of a more authentic “objectifying encounter” with colonial oppression (a kind of counter-representational response to power’s interpellative call), his own formulations regarding that response point to the requirement of a kind of thingly quickening that makes opposition possible while appositionally displacing it. Noncooperation is a duty that must be carried out by the ones who exist in the nearness and distance between political consciousness and absolute pathology. But this duty, imposed by an erstwhile subject who clearly is supposed to know, overlooks (or,…
In the trick of politics we are insufficient, scarce, waiting in pockets of resistance, in stairwells, in alleys, in vain. The false image and its critique threaten the common with democracy, which is only ever to come, so that one day, which is only never to come, we will be more than what we are. But we already are. We’re already here, moving. We’ve been around. We’re more than politics, more than settled, more than democratic. We surround democracy’s false image in order to unsettle it. Every time it tries to enclose us in a decision, we’re undecided. Every time…
In The painting of modern life T. J. Clark says Olympia has a choice, working against the definition of the prostitute offered by Henri Turot, for whom prostitution implies ‘first venality and second absence of choice’ (Clark 1984, 79). For Turot, further, the prostitute’s very existence depends upon the temporary relations she entertains with her customers, the subjects, relations that are public and without love. An absence of privacy, then, where privacy implies a self-possession aligned not only with reason, will, choice, but also with feeling or with the ability to feel. An absence of sovereignty where sovereignty implies a…
Refugees study change not only because they’ve been put through changes but also because changes are what they want and what they play and what they are. Refugees study a mode of study—the contrapuntal intersection of a set of interstitial fields, dislocation in a hole or a hold or a whole or a crawlspace. Such study is inhabitation that moves : by way of—but also in apposition to—injury, which is irreducible in the refugee though she is irreducible to it. There is, in turn, passage in acknowledging the theoretical practice of the one who emerges as if from nowhere, rooted in…
Perhaps this would be cause for black optimism or, at least, some black operations. Perhaps the thing, the black, is tantamount to another, fugitive, sublimity altogether. Some/thing escapes in or through the object’s vestibule ; the object vibrates against its frame like a resonator, and troubled air gets out. The air of the thing that escapes enframing is what I’m interested in—an often unattended movement that accompanies largely unthought positions and appositions. To operate out of this interest might mispresent itself as a kind of refusal of Fanon. But my reading is enabled by the way Fanon’s texts continually demand that…
So you pause at the recitation of lost names and the mumbled jargon where the rest of Uncle Toliver’s utterance remains unheard. In the space that jargon opens (a space off to the side or out-from-the-outside ; an appositional spacing or displacement of the encounter in the interest of a subjectivity whose presence remains to be activated ; a space not determined by the zero encounter that ruptures the subject or the nostalgic return to an other subject before the encounter ; a space where Uncle Toliver speaks through Tom and Henry—the sons of the master—and through the Workers of the Writers’ Project…
The work of blackness is inseparable from the violence of blackness. Violence is where technique and beauty come back, though they had never left. Consider technique as a kind of strain and consider the technique that is embedded in and cuts techniques – the (Fanonian as apposed to Artaudian) cruelty. The internal difference of blackness is a violent and cruel re-routing, by way and outside of critique, that is predicated on the notion, which was given to me, at least, by Martin Luther Kilson, Jr., that there’s nothing wrong with us (precisely insofar as there is something wrong, something off,…
Against the grain of the state’s monopolization of ceremony, ceremonies are small and profligate ; if they weren’t everywhere and all the time we’d be dead. The ruins, which are small rituals, aren’t absent but surreptitious, a range of songful scarring, when people give a sign, shake a hand. But what if together we can fall, because we’re fallen, because we need to fall again, to continue in our common fallenness, remembering that falling is in apposition to rising, their combination given in lingering, as the giving of pause, recess, vestibular remain, custodial remand, hold, holding in the interest of rub,…
Meanwhile, Reinhardt sees black as a kind of negation even of Mondrianic color, of a certain Mondrianic urban victory. Like all the most profound negations, his is appositional. This is to say that in the end the black paintings stand alongside Mondrian’s late work and stand as late work in the private and social senses of lateness. Insofar as blackness is understood as the absence and negation of color, of a kind of social color and social music, Reinhardt will have had no music playing, or played as he painted, or as you behold—neither Ammons’s strong left hand or Taylor’s…
Rester dans la cale c’est persévérer dans ce jeu de pratiques communes où la théorisation anticinétique est à la fois mise entre parenthèses et mobilisée dans une contemplation performative, (…) où l’absence hermétique de chez(-)soi se donne pour théâtre de dupes, maison de fous, asile. Le club, notre truc infracénobitique, notre chapelle de quartier, est une ligne dure de contacts constamment improvisés, une intimité de la dépossession et de la friction, dont la répétition mystique s’oppose à la règle ou, plus précisément, s’y appose, et participe d’une logique sociale concrète souvent (dé)considérée comme un simple tissu d’insanités (ce qui est,…
I speak of her placement, her position (within a structure), thereby raising, by way of a kind of submergence, the question of her agency, her transverse, auto-excessive intervention in the history of agency. To attempt to locate her agency is precisely to mark the fact that it lies, impossibly, in her position, in an appositional force derived from being-posed, from being-sent, from being-located. Her agency is in her location in the interval, in and as the break. This is what it is to take, while apposing, the object position with something like that dual force of holding and outpouring that…
It seems to me that this special ontic-ontological fugitivity of/in the slave is what is revealed as the necessarily unaccounted for in Fanon. So that in contradistinction to Fanon’s protest, the problem of the inadequacy of any ontology to blackness, to that mode of being for which escape or apposition and not the objectifying encounter with otherness is the prime modality, must be understood in its relation to the inadequacy of calculation to being in general. Fred Moten The Case of Blackness Criticism 50 Project Muse 2009 177–218 eng…
Such optimism, black optimism, is bound up with what it is to claim blackness and the appositional, runaway, phonoptic black operations-expressive of an autopoetic organization in which flight and inhabitation modify each other-that have been thrust upon it. The burden of this paradoxically aleatory goal is our historicity, animating the reality of escape in and the possibility of escape from. Fred Moten Black Op PMLA 123 Modern Language Association 2008 à partir d’une conférence de 2007 1743–1747 https://doubleoperative.files.wordpress.com/2009/12/moten-black-optimism_black-operation.pdf eng…
The black radical tradition is in apposition to enlightenment. Appositional enlightenment is remixed, expanded, distilled, and radically faithful to the forces its encounters carry, break, and constitute. It’s (the effect of) critique or rationalization unopposed to the deep revelation instantiated by a rupturing event of dis/appropriation, or the rapturous advent of an implicit but unprecedented freedom. Fred Moten Knowledge of freedom CR : The New Centennial Review 4 2004 269–310 eng…
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. Fred Moten Blackness and nothingness (Mysticism in the Flesh) South Atlantic Quarterly 112 2013 737–780 eng…
Movement like this isn’t parallel but off and out ; tangent as much as crossing ; asymptotic, appositional encounter. As soon as we call this line we’re on derailment we’ll begin to study how all this out root goes. Train circle, then bridge, then fall. Fred Moten The New International of Rhythmic Feeling(s) Sonic Interventions 18 2007 https://doi.org/10.1163/9789401205092_004 eng…