Three important notes about this file

Alt Solves

The alternative solves the case

Moten ‘8 [Professor of Modern Poetry @ Duke,Fred, THE CASE OF BLACKNESS, Criticism, Spring 2008, Vol. 50, No. 2, pp. 177–218 //liam]

Sexton and Copeland turn to the Fanon of Black Skins, White Masks, the phenomenologist of (the lived experience of) blackness, who provides for them the following epigraph: I came into the world imbued with the will to fi nd a meaning in things, my spirit fi lled with the desire to attain to the source of the world, and then I found that I was an object in the midst of other objects. (Black Skins, 77) [J’arrivais dans le monde, soucieux de faire lever un sens aux choses, mon âme pleine du désir d’être à l’origine du monde, et voici que je me découvrais objet au milieu d’autres objets.]7 Fanon writes of entering the world with a melodramatic imagination, asPeter Brooks would have it—one drawn toward the occult installation of the sacred in things, gestures (certain events, as opposed to actions, of muscularity), and in the subterranean field that is, paradoxically, signaled by the very cutaneous darkness of which Fanon speaks. That darkness turns the would-be melodramatic subject not only into an object but also into a sign—the hideous blackamoor at the entrance of the cave, that world underneath the world of light that Fanon will have entered, who guards and masks “our” hidden motives and desires.8 There’s a whole other economy of skins and masks to be addressed here. However, I will defer that address in order to get at something (absent) in Sexton and Copeland. What I am after is something obscured by the fall from prospective subject to object that Fanon recites—namely, a transition from thing(s) (choses) to object (objet) that turns out to version a slippage or movement that could be said to animate the history of philosophy. What if we bracket the movement from (erstwhile) subject to object in order to investigate more adequately the change from object to thing (a change as strange as that from the possibility of intersubjectivity that attends majority to whatever is relegated to the plane or plain of the minor)? What if the thing whose meaning or value has never been found finds things, founds things? What if the thing will have founded something against the very possibility of foundation and against all anti- or post-foundational impossibilities? What if the thing sustains itself in that absence or eclipse of meaning that withholds from the thing the horrifc honorific of “object”? At the same time, what if the value of that absence or excess is given to us only in and by way of a kind of failure or inadequacy—or, perhaps more precisely, by way of a history of exclusion, serial expulsion

Cedes Power to Whites

Their claim that blackness is a site of absolute dereliction at the level of the real overparticularizes death and grants excessive power to whiteness- only double ghostedness produces effective politics and analysis of violence

Peterson ‘7 [Christopher, Lecturer @ University of Western Sidney, Kindred Specters: Death, Mourning, and American Affinity, //liam]

What I am calling redoubled ghostliness situates racial and sexual minorities in intimate contact with death. This heightened proximity to mortality is not only social, moreover, but material. As Karla Holloway observes in Passed On: African-American Mourning Stories, black Americans historically have had a “particular vulnerability to an untimely death,” from lynching to suicides, from police violence to disease. 25 Echoing Holloway, Abdul JanMohamed argues that African Americans are “death-bound-subject[s]...formed, from infancy on, by the imminent and ubiquitous threat of death.” 26 Tracing the emergence of this subject in Richard Wright’s fiction, JanMohamed argues that slaves, and by extension, “emancipated” black Americans, live under a constantly commuted death sentence. Drawing from Heidegger’s account of death in Being and Time, JanMohamed notes that, “if natural death marks the termination of life and, thereby, retroactively defines the entirety of life, then this is even more so the case for the slave because he faces the imminent presence of death on a mundane basis” (284). JanMohamed is certainly right that Heidegger’s account of death does not provide a detailed account of death’s unequal social and historical distribution. Yet, in “correcting” this elision, JanMohamed reduces death to its political deployment. He writes:¶ The existential description of death tends to be radically agnostic about the source or agency of death....For the slave, death is not an eventuality that somehow “comes” or “arrives” in the natural course of events . . . but rather something deliberately brought and imposed on him by another, by the master. (15) The problem with this formulation, however, is that it figures death as originally exterior to the slave, coming to inhabit him only via the master’s monopolistic violence. As Bauman astutely observes with regard to the modern interdiction of mortality, “we do not hear of people dying of mortality. They die only of individual causes, they die because there was an individual cause (138, his emphasis). Hence, we ought to say that the slave’s availability to death is first conditioned by his “having” a body, which means that death is both what “comes” or “arrives” and is what the master wields as a form of coercive control. 27 If finitude were “always embodied in the agency of the master,” then death would name a condition unique to the slave as such (294). Indeed, by insisting on a radical disjunction between the death that haunts all life and the historical particularity of the immanent death to which African Americans are uniquely bound, JanMohamed reinscribes the exceptionalist logic through which the master evades death by projecting it onto the slave. In short, JanMohamed’s analysis overparticularizes death, thereby reproducing the “state of exception” that he seeks to avoid. According to this logic, the master presides over the slave’s life and death all the while exempting himself from the death that he deploys. 28 While JanMohamed contends that the slave, unlike the master, “has always already been condemned to death in the present,” this presumes that the master’s ontology is not also always already put into question by the spectrality that disturbs each and every present (282). Death is not a “final punctuation mark that retroactively defines” the “syntax” of one’s life (298). On the contrary, death stretches along the syntax of each and every life according to incommensurate social and political grammars. To speak of the redoubled ghostliness of racial and sexual minorities, then, is not to subsume the particularity of social death under a universal being-toward-death that effaces political and social distinctions. Unlike what has often been said of death, spectrality is not the great equalizer. However, one cannot fully separate the particularity of social death from the generality of each subject’s being-toward-death,¶ as if finitude were reducible to its political distribution, or for that matter, to its external imposition. This does not mean that we should turn our attention away from the particular political and material losses exacted by the history of racism and heterosexism in America. Indeed, the readings of literary texts by Chesnutt, Morrison, and Faulkner offered in subsequent chapters bear witness to this violence while working to rethink the law’s erasure of minority kinship in relation to the absence that founds all social relations. Before turning to those literary readings, however, the remainder of this chapter aims to elaborate further how kinship is implicated in a dialectical negation that “precedes” any legal effacement of particular kinship relations.