Otherwise than Blackness: Feeling, World, Sublimation

Tyrone Palmer

Otherwise than Blackness: Feeling, World, Sublimation

This essay thinks through the centrality of the concept of "the World" to theorizations of affect and the presumed correlation between feeling and world—that is, the notion that affective experience is necessarily generative of world(s)—that operates as an uninterrogated maxim in both contemporary and classical theories of affect. Focusing on the figure and question of the World and its grammars of relation(ality) and becoming, this essay considers the implications of an insistence on worlding in the context of anti-Blackness. It argues that the sustenance of the very concept of theWorld necessitates a foreclosure of Black affect's destructive drive. Black affect is therefore an impossibility within theWorld, as that unbearable negativity which drives us toward its necessary destruction. In light of this, the essay argues further that the tendency toward an uncritical embrace of affect as a mode of world-forming within strains of Black critical theory—represented by turns to "the otherwise"—performs a sublimation of Black affect's radical negativity, as encapsulated in the desire for the End of the World.

Otherwise than Blackness: Feeling, World, Sublimation Tyrone S. Palmer Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences, Volume 29, Number 2, December 2020, pp. 247-283 (Article) Published by Duke University Press For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/782715 [ Access provided at 20 Feb 2021 19:10 GMT from Columbia University Libraries ] Otherwise than Blackness Feeling, World, Sublimation tyrone s. palmer There is no a priori connection between sentience and relation; no natural link between feeling and world. Patrice Douglass and Frank Wilderson, “The Violence of Presence: Metaphysics in a Blackened World” The question of affect—its scale, its modes of transmission, its circulatory power—is indelibly tethered to the question of “the World.”1 In its dominant conception, affect is the connective thread between bodies and worlds, the immanent potential of matter that conﬁrms one’s Being-in-the-World. The affective encounter is deﬁned by the grammars of relation and becoming; affect indexes the ceaseless possibility enfolded in the relational event, the unnameable forces and intensities that proliferate through the constant ﬂow of becoming. The subject of affect, then, is largely one of afﬁrmation: of potential; the inherent relation of all things; the power and capacity “to affect and be affected” that is, in itself, an openness to the World.2 The World comes into being through the affective encounter—affect marks “the complex assemblages that come to compose bodies and qui parle Vol. 29, No. 2, December 2020 doi 10.1215/10418385-8742983 © 2020 Editorial Board, Qui Parle 248 qui parle december 2020 vol. 29 no. 2 worlds simultaneously”;3 its central function is “the making and mediation of worlds.”4 Following this, it would seem that one cannot conceptualize affect without a supplementary conceptualization of the World as the ground of its unfolding. Some theoretical renderings go so far as to posit that the World is itself purely affect.5 This relationship between affect and World, therefore, takes the status of an organizing law, and a notion of affect that does not depend on a relational World has yet to be fully articulated. Without anchoring itself in the World, subjectivizing the World as an agent in or byproduct of the transfer of affect, or positioning affect as that which makes the World possible, affect theory, as a discursive formation, struggles to sustain coherence. This essay interrogates the presumption of “the World” within affect theory, as well as the corollary terms—relation(ality), becoming, and potential—that provide its grammars of articulation. Of particular concern to me is the givenness of the World in affect theory; the ostensibly self-evident status of the World as actuality that is reiﬁed through the affective encounter. This givenness is upheld by the presupposition of an a priori relation between feeling and world—that is, an underlying assumption that affective transmission is necessarily relational, and that that relation hinges on attachment to the World. This presumed relation manifests in the widespread idea that to experience the passage of affect is to feel bodily intensity as a positive force of connection to a larger world. This force of connection is rendered universal and persists even at the site of extreme violence, which is thought to push one to the margins of the World without ever fully breaking the relational chain.6 Within this framework, affect subtends the regulative idea of the World as a relational container of all things and thus stands as the very matter of relationality. A turn to affect as embodied matter is said to eschew the transcendental in favor of the (pure) immanence of materiality, yet in actuality it enshrouds immanence in a transcendental logic. This logic forecloses, by deﬁnition, an understanding of intensities that shatter and rupture relational capacity: intensities that do not register as worldly connection but point toward an essential expulsion from the World. More pointedly, this coercive “logic of affect”7 precludes a reckoning with the vicissitudes of Blackness. By rendering affect’s function Palmer: Otherwise than Blackness as solely in the production of the World, it disallows the possibility of affect outside and against the world; of nonrelational affect; of Black affect. This essay broaches the possibility of a nonrelational conception of affect by thinking these problems through an attention and ﬁdelity to Blackness as the limit case of relation(ality). Relation(ality), here, indexes a self-evident logic of transcendence in which all things are connected.8 As a concept, relation(ality) has been widely and divergently theorized—from Immanuel Kant to Édouard Glissant9—but what persists throughout these theorizations is the naturalization of relation(ality) as the inevitable order of things; what Rei Terada rightfully identiﬁes as a “metaphysical relation” that is “often referred to as though it were an actually existing infrastructure inhering in the global totality of entities” and “treats any appearance [or invocation] of non-relation as an isolationist heresy.”10 From the dominant perspective of metaphysical relation, nonrelation(ality) is a non sequitur: since everything is connected and entangled, even the most abjected sign can be recuperated into the relational fold. This metaphysical relation is the lingua franca of affect theory. As Brian Massumi notes: “If there is one key term [in the discourse on affect], that’s it: relation. When you start in-between [as in the affective event], what you’re in the middle of is a region of relation.”11 The rendering of affect as relational essence is representative of a pervasive tendency toward “conceiving of relation . . . as transcendental and real [which] is so prevalent that it is difﬁcult to see its impact; and when its impact is seen, it is usually celebrated in liberal terms, as if connection in principle to all things were necessarily good, and even ethical . . . constituting the very possibility of communicability.”12 Relation(ality), as the capacity for communicability, forms the very basis of subjectivity, as that which is prior to the subject. Yet throughout this constant appeal to the power of relation(ality) and its “prior”-ness—its status as presubjective, prepersonal, prediscursive, and so on—there is little recognition of the essential fact that, as Zakiyyah Iman Jackson argues, “the ongoing production and nulliﬁcation of black mater is the condition of possibility for relation and the dialectics of the Subject.”13 In other words, the banishment of Blackness from the fold of relation(ality) is what allows 249 250 qui parle december 2020 vol. 29 no. 2 its emergence.14 Blackness must be objectiﬁed and incessantly obliterated to yield transcendental relation, which in turn “helps to create and maintain the concept ‘world.’”15 In focusing on the concept of the World, I seek to unthink its centrality to the broader ﬁeld of critical theory as a “real object” by considering Blackness as that which gives the World its conceptual coherence while also being continually produced through a protocol of worldly destruction. In this ﬁguration, Blackness is the very matter that the World sees as its aim to obliterate, and therefore Black existence is violently positioned “out of the world.”16 This positioning of Blackness as necessarily outside the World has stark implications when considering the question of Black affect, which this essay labors to unpack. Some of the central questions driving this inquiry are as follows: If affect is primarily about a connection to the World—the world-making and/as mediating capacity of feeling— what happens to the theory of affect if we displace this relation from its claim to universality? What happens when we trouble the presumption of relation? Can a theory of affect outside the mandate of a universal capacity for relation be articulated? How does the assumption of the World and one’s being in it, in and through the affective encounter, explain or contend with Blackness as that which constitutes the World’s outside through a structural violence that shatters relational capacity? How does the continued insistence on “another world” functionally reproduce the problem of worlding itself as key in the persistence of the anti-Black paradigm? What is a grammar for feeling outside and against the World; for a mode of feeling without the illusion of transcendence? What language, if any, is available to apprehend an affective structure of nonrelation to the World? What, if any, explanatory power does affect have for those positioned as the affectable object of the World’s unrelenting drive toward death and destruction? I argue that Blackness presents us with a mode of thinking (and experiencing) feeling at the wayside of the World. Turning to and defamiliarizing the concept of the World is a necessary move toward understanding affect’s centrality to the order of knowledge that furthers the anti-Black paradigm. When brought to bear with the question and reality of Blackness, the radical “openness” to the World Palmer: Otherwise than Blackness represented by affect is shown to have an unthought racial underside; this purported openness rests on a foreclosure of Blackness and the relentless exposure of Blackness to gratuitous violence. The structural abjection of Blackness functions as the unthought condition of possibility for “affect theory” as a discrete discursive formation, as well as for our ability to articulate affect as concept and phenomenon in excess of the explicit “theory of affect.” In other words, the argument here is meant not merely to acknowledge the unmarked whiteness of affect theory but to point to the racial logics underlying the (political) ontology of affect itself. In what follows I further interrogate the presumed correlation between feeling and World as it operates within Continental philosophy and Black critical theory, and trace the implications of an uncritical reproduction of this mode of thinking for the ﬁeld of Black studies and the question of Black affect. I argue that the sustenance of the very concept of the World necessitates a foreclosure of Black affect’s destructive force. Black affect is therefore an impossibility within “the World,” as that unbearable negativity which drives us toward its necessary destruction. In light of this, I argue that the critical tendency toward an embrace of affect as a mode of “worldforming” within strains of Black cultural studies and performance theory represents a sublimation of Black affect’s radical negativity— its obliterative “potential” in, as, and through incapacity.17 The Beginning of an End Almost midway through his surrealist long poem exploring the scope of life in the colonial context, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Notebook of a Return to the Native Land), the Martinican philosopher, poet, dramatist, politician, and progenitor of the Négritude movement Aimé Césaire poses a question that begs a revelatory answer: “What can I do?”18 Mired in the abyssal, ruinous landscape of the colony, its arid, desolate, blackened space where whiteness (and/ as death) engulfs all possibility (where, as a colonial subject, one stands “imprisoned in whiteness . . . defying the white screams of white death” [NR, 16]), the speaker—ostensibly a textual stand-in for Césaire—ﬁnds himself in the throes of an existential quandary: 251 252 qui parle december 2020 vol. 29 no. 2 What can one do in the face of such horrors, when they appear to blanket the whole of existence? When life in the colony is characterized by inertia, by an unmoving suspension in the “waters of abjection” (NR, 26); when merely staying alive requires unspeakable effort; when life itself is marked by its seeming futility, made indistinguishable from “death without sense or pity” (NR, 14), what course of action could one possibly adopt? After posing the question of possibility—of what can be done—the speaker acknowledges that the severity of the colonial situation necessitates action: “One must begin somewhere,” he states—the implication being that there is no other viable option but to begin—but “begin what?” (NR, 22; emphasis mine). If the colony persists through the abjection and instrumentalization of Black existence—the imposition of an ordering of reality that valorizes white over Black; that produces Blackness as a ﬁgure of waste, “the vomit of slave ships” (NR, 28); that in its very constitution lies outside the hallowed halls of humanity—what must commence to overturn this order of things? What has the power to upend the dominant terms of reality itself? The answer to this question is given in the form of a chiasmus: “The only thing in the world worth beginning: // The End of the world of course” (NR, 28). To “begin,” the World itself must end. The mutual imbrication of beginning and end is worth noting here. The End of the World is a beginning in itself: in Césaire’s call, beginning and end function not in a teleological or linear manner (from beginning to end) but as collapsed signs of a paradigmatic break.19 The End that Césaire calls for is not laid out in any certain terms. On the contrary, it is an event of radical contingency and uncertainty, without the promise of something new in place of the World that must end. All that is known of the End of the World is that it is “the only thing” worth beginning, and that the World carries within it the seeds of its own end. Rather than answer the question of what is to be done programmatically, with a prescriptive gesture that lays out an adaptable blueprint for decolonization, Césaire’s answer intimates that the scale of the problem at hand exceeds the ﬁeld of political action; it is a problem of and for metaphysics, and it will take the End of the World—and, by extension, the destruction of metaphysics—to escape the terror and destitution Palmer: Otherwise than Blackness wrought by colonial modernity and its creation of the anti-Black World.20 Césaire’s phrasing renders this a foregone conclusion: “The End of the world of course,” as if to suggest that knowledge of the necessity of the World’s end is commonly held or patently obvious. However, on close reﬂection, it is a radical assertion that raises a number of essential questions worth deeper consideration: What, if anything, comes “after” the End of the World? Must it necessarily be another world, or might the End of the World be the end of anything we could ostensibly call a world; the end of everything? What affective structure underlies this revolutionary desire for the End of the World? And what, in Césaire’s vision, does the World signify so that its end can be thought as a necessary given, as the only answer to the problem of coloniality and its “thingiﬁcation” of Black existence?21 Stated differently, precisely what is this World that must end? Throughout Césaire’s Notebook, the idea of the world is invoked as a sign of whiteness’s overarching power in the colonial context. The World here names an ensemble of processes that function to ensure Europe’s domination of the globe and the genocidal mode of its expansion. It also names a space of enclosure and violently imposed order—“a perfect circle . . . and enclosed concordance” in which the colonized are ensnared (NR, 36). The World appears throughout to be the object of a complicated and conﬂicted relationship for the colonized; it is an uninhabitable, deathly space that at the same time depends on Blackness in both a material and a conceptual sense: Blackness functions as the raw material of the World, as what makes the World possible even as it is denied a place or ground within it. Césaire gestures toward this when he observes that “not an inch of this world [is] devoid of my ﬁngerprint” (NR, 15). In other words, the World, as a metonym for colonial modernity, is in a very material sense built on the expropriation of Black labor (in the material and psychic senses), while also being marked by Blackness more broadly as its constitutive outside. The “ﬁngerprint” of Blackness is inscribed on the World as its condition of possibility; Blackness makes and is unmade by the World. Europe’s domination of and through the World depends on Blackness occupying its underside, 253 254 qui parle december 2020 vol. 29 no. 2 and the widespread enforcement of a structure of power wherein the colonized masses are made to experience themselves as the World’s refuse, its perennial outside. As Césaire states: Europe has force-fed us with lies and bloated us with pestilence, for it is not true that the work of man is done that we have no business being in the world that we parasite the world that it is enough for us to heel to the world (NR, 44) The moment of Négritude narrated within the poem sees the emergence of an oppositional consciousness that tasks itself with refuting the dominant logic that Europe has instituted, whereby the colonized are ﬁgured as “parasites” of the World and held at its heel without access to Being-in-the-World. Therefore what the colonized desires through Négritude, in Césaire’s rendering, is the articulation of a world outside Europe’s despotic grasp—a “Black World”—and a “humanism made to the measure of the world.”22 The desire for a “Black World”—one that is not imbricated at its core with the anti-Black machinations of modernity but that contrarily afﬁrms Blackness and the historical heritage of “Black Civilization”—is at the root of Négritude’s philosophical system. Latent in this demand for a Black World is the acknowledgment that the World as it is in the colonial context has a color: it is shockingly white. The imprisoning whiteness Césaire references throughout Notebook can be read as a metonym for nothing other than the World itself—and this is why it must end. In turning to Césaire here, I am particularly interested in the afterlife of his call to begin the End of the World—its continued resonance as both political mantra and enigmatic philosophical proposition. His insistence on the End of the World as the only thing worth beginning has served as a clarion call for decolonization, both in the historical instance of mid-twentieth-century anticolonial movements (Césaire was a widely read ﬁgure whose inﬂuence across the Black Atlantic in terms of raising Black consciousness through Négritude cannot be understated), and in the contemporary context of broader Palmer: Otherwise than Blackness theoretical calls for decoloniality, as well as within work that falls under the umbrella of what is often termed “the Black radical tradition.”23 It has been reiterated, repurposed, and arguably further radicalized most notably by Frantz Fanon, Césaire’s student, who, throughout his corpus of anticolonial philosophy, further insisted that the World, wrought by colonial modernity, must end, and that that end can only come about through decolonization as an irruption of “cleansing” violence, a “program of complete disorder”24 that ushers in a state of tabula rasa—a wiping out of everything, a complete resetting of the terms of the social through “a substitution that is absolute and irreversible.”25 The insistence on and articulation of an absolute substitution marks something that exceeds the capacity of language to describe or thought to hold onto, indeed something that exceeds conceptualization. To my reading, it distills and is therefore emblematic of a desire and a drive that pervade Black cultural and political forms and psychic life: namely, a desire for the destruction of “the World” as the horizon of possibility. The demand for the End of the World (articulated in Césaire’s statement) generates a surplus that can only ever be satisﬁed through this tabula rasa as complete rupture; a revolution on a scale heretofore unseen and therefore outside any of our attempts to grasp it.26 This desire, rooted in an unshakable acknowledgment that the World as it stands cannot stand, manifests in innumerable, multivalent ways. I am interested in thinking closely with this desire as essential to the experience of Blackness under modernity. In naming the End of the World as a structure of desire, I mean to locate why the World persists as a consistent object of ﬁxation within the antiracist/ anticolonial imaginary. To further understand this, it is essential to think beyond commonsense notions of the World as an empirical reality or as synonymous with various conceptions of an ordered whole (the globe, the universe, etc.). In conjunction with its aforementioned rendering by Césaire and its widespread invocation within Black critical thought, it is imperative to consider the World’s conceptual history within Continental philosophy to understand the problems of assuming a correlation between feeling and world, and why Blackness demands and desires the End of the World. 255 256 qui parle december 2020 vol. 29 no. 2 On World(ing) The concept of the World and its ensemble of questions—What is(n’t) it? Why is it? What are its conditions of emergence? What deﬁnes being within it? What possibilities are there without it?—has been a central preoccupation throughout the corpus of Western philosophical thought. While it is far beyond the scope of this essay to provide a comprehensive (or even cursory) genealogy of the various ways of envisioning and conceptualizing the World across the history of philosophy,27 for our purposes the World can be thought of as a concept said to encapsulate the totality of things. In addition to being the principal term within the ﬁeld of metaphysics, it is the nodal point in the study and conceptualization of “reality” as the ﬁeld of possibility. While it has been theorized widely and divergently, the common ground that the manifold conceptions of the World share across various contexts and permutations is its status as a transcendental structure of containment; as a concept its purpose is to hold the totality of things in relation as an (ordered) whole.28 As Sean Gaston notes, “[There is] a long tradition of using the concept of world within a classical logic of containment. . . . In the history of philosophy, it is a concept that attempts . . . to balance a sense of authentic immersion and necessary transcendence.”29 The World, then, is both the ﬁeld of the possible and the ground on which Human existence unfolds—it is the name given to “the paradigmatic operations by which reality is structured, positioned, and rendered sensible . . . govern[ing] the very conditions of possibility for expression or position . . . [and as such,] even purportedly universal terms, such as humanity, social life, and . . . being itself, are operations of the world.”30 In other words, the concept of the World reigns over and inﬂects all of the categories with which one apprehends existence, meaning, and social standing. The World is chief among the metaphysical categories to and by which Blackness is rendered ontologically captive. Within recent conversations that fall under the umbrella of “speculative realism,” the question of the World as it has preoccupied philosophical thinking has been framed in terms of the problem of correlationism—a tendency to conceptualize the World solely in its Palmer: Otherwise than Blackness correlation to thought, rather than as a thing-in-itself that exists independently of its conceptualization.31 While philosophical critiques of the problem of correlationism have tended to focus primarily on the thought-world correlate as the organizing principle within post-Kantian philosophy, another mode of conceptualizing the World is the focus of my critique here: one that centers on a correlation between feeling and world as mutually constituting.32 The feeling-world correlate—the link between feeling and world as one of afﬁrmation, wherein feeling is what registers and conﬁrms the World as totality—marks a number of traditions and genealogies of thought preceding and including the current “affective turn.”33 In The Felt Meanings of the World: A Metaphysics of Feeling, the philosopher Quentin Smith posits a theory of feeling as the ground of metaphysical thinking, against what he perceives as the hegemony of reason, which he identiﬁes as central to a tradition of “rationalist metaphysics.”34 Smith argues that the Western philosophical tradition writ large—from Plato to Martin Heidegger—has been characterized by an understanding of the meaning of the World as only ascertainable through the faculties of reason and rationality, fundamentally organized around an answer to the question of “why” the World exists. The metaphysics of reason approaches this question through the search for a rational meaning that exists outside the World (God, consciousness, etc.). Under the auspices of rationalist metaphysics, Smith contends, “The world we experience as correlating to our feeling-sensations becomes represented as the world as reasoned about, and the sensuously felt features of the world that correlate to our feeling-sensations, the feeling-tonalities, are left unrecognized.”35 In other words, feeling is subsumed under reason, and the discrete knowledge of the World-whole revealed in feeling— the “perspective inherent in feelings themselves”—is ignored or seen as an inadequate means of knowing the World.36 Displacing this dominant mode of understanding the World, Smith posits a turn to a “metaphysics of feeling” in which the meaning of the World is felt rather than logically deduced through the operations of reason— the dominant tendency that he argues necessarily leads to “nihilism” and a “metaphysics of rational meaninglessness.”37 Rather than thought or logos, he posits feeling (affects, sensations, moods, etc.) 257 258 qui parle december 2020 vol. 29 no. 2 as the ground for knowing the World and its “importance.”38 Within Smith’s rendering of the metaphysics of feeling, the World’s signiﬁcance registers through bodily affect and sensation, its “felt meanings,” which do not deign to answer the question of “why” the World exists but ﬁnd in feeling the “resonance” of the World as mattering. While the metaphysics of reason sees as its goal the transcendence of the World so that it may be properly “understood” as a whole from a vantage point that lies outside it, the metaphysics of feeling functions as a mode of knowing “the wholeness of the world itself” from within the totality.39 Smith’s turn of phrase (“metaphysics of feeling”) is useful, since it distills a quite pervasive logic. While he is not generally engaged within the ﬁeld, I turn to him here because I ﬁnd a number of instructive commonalities between his text and the discourse of affect theory. His text predates the formalized “turn to affect” that, in a sense, has heeded the call for a “metaphysics of feeling.” Affect theory’s self-historicization as a response to the mode of understanding the World through language (as “rational meaning”), toward the possibilities inherent in feeling, resonates with Smith’s general argument. Across the corpus of affect theory, which includes such disparate tendencies as the post-Deleuzianism of Brian Massumi and the phenomenologically informed work of Sara Ahmed,40 the worlding dimensions of affect are consistently invoked—so much so that, at base, the discourse can be characterized as fundamentally about the reiﬁcation of World. Smith’s metaphysics of feeling and “affect theory” as a discrete discursive ﬁeld thus both share the logic of endowing feeling with the capacities of reason, thinking feeling as a mode of bodily knowledge that reveals an immutable truth about being of/ in the World. There is also a shared disavowal of the negative operative here, encapsulated in the assumption that (the metaphysics of) feeling does not yield nihilism (whereas the metaphysics of reason does), and that nihilism is inherently “bad” and “unproductive.” By setting up a binary between the inevitable meaningless of rationality and the inherent, felt meaning(s) of the World revealed through an attunement to affect, Smith forecloses the possibility of ascertaining a meaninglessness in and through feeling, of Blackness as producing what we might call a felt antagonism to the World that Palmer: Otherwise than Blackness does not cohere as “meaning.” Additionally, the metaphysics of feeling (and by extension affect theory) replicates the aforementioned problem of correlationism, merely shifting focus from thought to feeling as revealing a “truer” sense of the World. This shift in emphasis—from thought to feeling; from the rational mind to the sensorial body—does nothing to displace the problem of the World as the assumed center and ground of (Human) life and interaction. Much like the metaphysics of feeling, the turn to affect is positioned as a challenge to “the inherited Western philosophical idea that the fundamental relation of human beings to the world and to others is one of knowing,”41 and therefore aims to displace the privileging of “knowing” qua understanding/logos. Yet even within this displacement of knowing, the assumption of a “fundamental relation of human beings to the world” is unchecked; relation and World function here as naturalized terms that are taken as givens, with the veneer of empirical fact. The World invoked across the metaphysics of feeling, affect theory, and so forth, even as it is tied to a purportedly universal capacity for feeling, is never a universally available conception. Being-in-the-World is articulated along the lines of race, and Blackness marks the limit, the constitutive outside, of the World. This writing of Blackness as antithetical to World is a consistent—often unacknowledged—trope within the foundational works that build the concept as it circulates within critical-philosophical vocabularies and therefore forms the very architecture of the World. World(ing) is an achievement, a capacity, that Blackness is rendered, time and again, as fundamentally lacking by deﬁnition. One such example of prime importance, particularly for its centrality to thinking the question of Being/ontology, can be found in the work of Heidegger. In The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics Heidegger expounds on Dasein’s “world-forming” capacity as what separates the Human from the realm of the “world poor” animal and the “worldless,” inanimate stone.42 In constructing a taxonomy of worlding capacity at the level of speciation, Heidegger calciﬁes a conception of World that holds throughout disparate strains of Western thought. Calvin Warren, reading Heidegger’s work for its implications on the question of Black being, notes that “black being lacks . . . [the] historical 259 260 qui parle december 2020 vol. 29 no. 2 place (there-ness) that situates the human being in the world. Black being, then, lacks not only physical space in the world (i.e., a home) but also an existential place in an antiblack world. The black is worldless in this way, bordering on something between the worldlessness of the object and the world poorness of the animal.”43 Blackness, then, emerges to the World as the paradigmatic ﬁgure of worldlessness. I contend that the wordlessness of Blackness should not be met with a quixotic push to discursively endow the Black with worlding capacity, but should instead be seen as a crucial opportunity to think critically about the supposed universality of this capacity in the face of Black worldlessness, and to push against the coerciveness of the World’s underlying logic of relation(ality). In other words, to think through the implications of existence without World within a context where it is assumed a priori in every (theoretical) movement and gesture. The logic of the World as a structure of containment extends to the literal captivity of Blackness in the ﬁrst instance as that which articulates the World scale. This explains why, as Frank Wilderson argues, what the Black demands is not freedom within the World but “freedom from the World”—what he terms “gratuitous freedom.”44 So long as the World persists as a concept that organizes thinking and being, Blackness occupies a position of antagonism. Otherwise than Blackness This is all to say that the World, and Blackness’s place “within” it, should not be taken for granted in our critical analyses, as the very articulation of the World-concept necessitates the abjection and abjuration of Blackness as sign of the unworldly; as that without the capacity for World. Blackness’s status relative to the World of the (affective) encounter is therefore a consistent site of contestation. The status of Blackness as that endlessly debased and violable matter in whose debasement the World ﬁnds its sustenance ﬁxes Blackness in a position of antagonism to the World, regardless of whether or not that antagonism is actively recognized. Blackness marks a position of essential irreconcilability with/in the World and its grammars of articulation. Therefore the call for “the End of the World” cannot be reduced to an apocalyptic hysteria or seen as an investment in an Palmer: Otherwise than Blackness eschatological telos, nor can it be named as a concrete “end” in itself (i.e., something one can simply point toward or bring into representation). What the End of the World signals is a radical uncertainty, an Event we have no language to articulate, which does not promise a “new beginning” in its stead but only ever calls for the beginning of an end, a tabula rasa. For our purposes, a focus on the concept of the World illuminates the problem of affectivity since, as stated earlier, the primary function of affect is the continual creation of World within affect theory. Along these lines, the call for the End of the World—for a gratuitous “freedom from the World”—should also be understood as a call for emancipation from affect as a modality of structural captivity. In its “worlding” function, affect incessantly reproduces the World as a saturated ﬁeld of anti-Blackness. Yet in spite of this problematic, the World is consistently invoked not as an object of antagonism but as a horizon of possibility within certain strains of Black critical theory.45 In an exemplary article entitled “Resonance: Neutrinos and Black Life,” the Black performance theorist Ashon Crawley metaphorically invokes the quantum phenomenon of the neutrino—the smallest known elementary particle, “capable of passing through an enormous number of atoms without causing any reaction”46 and that therefore “cannot [be felt by humans] with the sensual registers already discovered”47—to rethink the dominant terms through which feeling and sensation are conceptualized. The neutrino, for Crawley, provides an opening toward thinking the possibilities inherent in feeling as a modality of relation to the World. The neutrino’s smallness—its simultaneous ubiquity and imperceptibility to the registers of the human sensory apparatus—resonates with the essential smallness of human existence in relation to the World, against the broad expanse of the universe.48 While the neutrino cannot be felt from the standpoint of “a normative thinking of sense perception,” Crawley contends that “thinking otherwise” might allow for “feeling . . . that which heretofore has [been] assumed to be unfelt.”49 The neutrino as metaphor allows Crawley to offer a mode of thinking Blackness and feeling together that produces “otherwise possibilities for [ascertaining] our relation to worlds.”50 Blackness, in this rendering, becomes through feeling as relation. Underscoring this point, he poses the question 261 262 qui parle december 2020 vol. 29 no. 2 “What can we be if we privilege feeling as the grounds for thinking relation to one another”?51 Feeling here is said to index a general “refusal of containment,” a “radical abundance” that exceeds the logics and grammars of capture that structure and produce Black existence. Crawley in fact states that the conception of feeling he is after “exceeds the ability to capture”—it is “feeling what cannot be seen, feeling what cannot be heard, feeling what cannot be touched with the normal registers, with a normal conception of spacetime.”52 Such a mode of a feeling, for Crawley, somehow exceeds the grammars with which we are equipped to comprehend feeling— it is a mode of feeling beyond feeling, a pure, transcendental sensation that does not index a particular sensory mode but encompasses all of them in an almost synesthetic manner. The privileging of feeling (in opposition to capture) as a nexus to other means of knowing and experiencing the World and Blackness’s place within it is positioned as a radical gesture, challenging anti-Black logics that characterize the “normative” modes of thinking feeling and sense perception. But is this not precisely what the turn to affect has entailed: a privileging of feeling as the primary mode of relation between subjects, objects, and the World of the encounter, as what binds all forms of matter and refuses containment through signiﬁcation? It is not clear how exactly Crawley’s conception of feeling differs from the metaphysics of feeling outlined earlier—the conceptualization of feeling as that which registers the World as totality, which I have argued operates as an often uninterrogated maxim throughout critical theory at large. In fact, Crawley’s descriptions of feeling beyond the registers of nameable sensation as the “grounds for thinking relation” could be taken verbatim from many key texts within the corpus of affect theory. Furthermore, his description of feeling’s transformational power raises a key question: How does an embrace of that which has been consistently contested and weaponized against Black people—the depth of our very capacity to feel—serve as an emancipatory ﬁguration of Blackness?53 How precisely does the rendering of Blackness as an abundant mode of feeling differ from pathological renderings of Blackness as the space of hyperaffectivity? It is telling that Crawley frames his question in terms of a possibility of Palmer: Otherwise than Blackness being—“what can we be”—a phrasing that, perhaps unknowingly, carries within it the tacit acknowledgment that the being of Blackness within the World as it stands cannot be borne; that the being that Blackness is is not, to invoke Fanon.54 It is this not that Blackness is, what David Marriott elucidates as the “n’est pas” of Blackness, that negativity without reprieve or possibility for transformation (a “non-negated negativity”) that cannot be known as such, that Crawley ostensibly desires to be otherwise than.55 Feeling as posited by Crawley, then, offers transcendence vis-à-vis that (lack of/void within) being, that being that is not. This is why feeling becomes a means to think Blackness as “celebratory mood and movement” that “refuse[s] enclosure”; feeling for Crawley is quite literally the means through which Blackness escapes—and thereby transcends—itself. Though it is presented as a radical reorientation of the terms with which we approach feeling—apparently “open[ing] us up . . . to sensual registers we have not yet had the occasion to name”56— Crawley’s rendering of Blackness as a mode of “feel[ing] through the world” resonates with a general imagining of feeling as the connective thread between bodies and worlds with which this essay opened, and therefore reinscribes the very containment in and through anti-Blackness that it so fervently desires to escape. Crawley’s conception of feeling as an immutable, immanent truth that reveals a connection to the World carries within it a number of assumptions worth unpacking, if only brieﬂy. Implicit in his invocation of feeling as the ground of relation is also a notion of feeling as transparent truth, moving us from Black affect’s unthinkability toward the immediately and immanently knowable-as-felt.57 This assumption operates as though the mere phenomenological experience of “feeling something” is revelatory in itself, as if feeling in itself (and a radical ﬁdelity to said feeling) has the power to “[undo] the violence of settler-colonial, anti-Black racial logic.”58 Feeling in this rendering is restorative; it wrests Blackness from a world in which it is made the paradigmatic ﬁgure of nonbeing toward an elsewhere wherein Blackness is made the very ground of Being. Crawley explicitly ties this revelatory feeling to the question of Being when he states that thinking Blackness as and through relational feeling yields a mode of Being that “produces[s] itself through entangled 263 264 qui parle december 2020 vol. 29 no. 2 relationality”—a mode of being(-together) that refuses “selfpossession and private property.”59 Yet in his conjuring of this mode of feeling, Crawley’s language is not fully elaborated. For example, what does it mean to “structure existence” in and around feeling, and what is Being here, that it can be (re)claimed solely through a shift in epistemology? In place of addressing these questions, he makes continual reference to an “otherwise,” a positive potential that is always present but never attained, perpetually deferred. “Otherwise” here marks “[an] irreducible possibility [and] capacity . . . to be something else . . . to live fully, freely, and vibrantly.”60 To “be something else,” again, ﬁgures here as an aspiration without contending with what the desire is to be something else (something more) than.61 Though never named as such, Blackness operates here as that which negates life, a deathliness that forecloses “liv[ing] fully, freely, and vibrantly” and that therefore one must be otherwise than. But what does “thinking otherwise about the world” do when confronted with its brutal facticity?62 My turn to Crawley here should not be taken as signaling his exceptionalism, or singularity, within the ﬁeld. On the contrary, his argument for and turn toward a conception of feeling as relational force and sensation as a modality of understanding “the World”—of forging a Black space within and through the World against the constraints of a seemingly totalizing anti-Black order— is a theoretical tendency that has come to deﬁne the ﬁeld of Black cultural studies in general and Black performance theory in particular.63 Throughout much work in Black performance theory, the relational power of affect is invoked to point toward how performance—variously construed both as staged presentations and, more abstractly, as “doing things in the world”—creates “new worlds,” resisting and refusing modernity’s mandate of Black captivity. While this move is certainly understandable—after all, why should the entitlements of unfettered Being-in-the-World be the sole domain of whiteness and its aspirant “junior partners”?— in application it functions to downplay, at best, or to ignore outright the violence that saturates Blackness in the ﬁrst instance, in favor of a relentless positivity. Therefore it is imperative to interrogate closely this tendency to invoke affect as central to an ongoing project of making new worlds—worlds that purport to “refuse” anti-Black Palmer: Otherwise than Blackness violence for the allure of “otherwise possibilities.” Speciﬁcally, I am interested here in what subtends the tendency toward embracing feeling and sensation as modes of transcendence: what (perhaps unconscious) wish guides the gesture?64 The task one faces in answering these questions is to begin to name the desires and disavowals necessary for these critical moves, to pinpoint what is turned away from in the turn to affect, feeling, and sensation as pathways to the (always nebulously deﬁned) otherwise.65 To put it more crudely, we must think the turn to “the otherwise” otherwise. We must trouble the notion that the ﬁeld of sensation is open and equally available to all, and somehow outside the dictating terms of ontometaphysics, as well as the pervasive idea that sensation in itself is somehow an antidote to violence rather than a means of its diffusion.66 The “otherwise,” as it operates within contemporary Black critical thought, is often a further retrenchment of the obliterative logics of anti-Black modernity, a more palatable, perhaps even pleasurable, yet no less shattering form of terror. It is precisely this point that insistent turns to pleasure within Black critical theory seem to ignore, or at the very least suppress, in favor of an afﬁrmative rendering of pleasure as an antidote to violence, an end in itself, or a surplus to violence rather than an extension of it.67 Crawley names “the otherwise” as “the always possible plentitude of alternative . . . modes of being [and] ways of life.”68 In other words, “otherwise” is the ﬁguration of possibility as panacea, as remedy to the problem Blackness poses for Being. But what are the stakes and implications of a conception of Blackness as purely sensational—and a celebratory register of sensation at that? What must be foreclosed to come to a conception of Blackness as celebration? Mightn’t what Crawley and the many others who reproduce this logic of celebratory transcendence are so eager to escape be that which Blackness brings to bear on the World that so persistently seeks its obliteration? In other words, what if what is being refused, in and through the embrace of affect as relationality, is Blackness itself? If desire is what mobilizes every theoretical and philosophical gesture—if the very act of philosophizing is itself a product of the machinations of desire—then the desire inherent in critical moves toward embracing affect as a mode of relation within Black studies is a (paradoxical) desire for anti-Blackness that masquerades as its refusal.69 265 266 qui parle december 2020 vol. 29 no. 2 The mantra “another world is possible” has come to occupy the status of scripture within contemporary discourse. Often this dictum is thought of in gendered terms as representative of a Black feminist laboring toward the future—the expanse of Black feminist inquiry and critique boiled down to a pithy principle about the alwayspresent otherwise.70 Yet the logic behind this statement is worth further interrogation, despite its embrace as self-evident truth. Is there a possible world “for” Blackness, or does the very notion of the World subsist through the foreclosure of a Black(ened) possibility? This question gets at the heart of the issue at hand. That the World is anti-Black is a discursive-material reality and a theoretical proposition that impacts every aspect of social standing, every category of thought. Anti-Blackness is the condition of emergence for Thought as such. Yet often in the realization of an anti-Black World—in the (sometimes reluctant) acknowledgment of the ongoing catastrophe of modernity within certain strains of Black critical theory—there is an explicit desire for another World, one that somehow moves past this current order unscathed, that restores relational capacity and “humanity” without truly questioning the genesis of these terms and whether these things ought to be desired at all. Though Crawley does not explicitly call for “another world,” his notion of the otherwise as an “always possible plentitude” is emblematic of this desire and critical tendency. What this persistent call fails to realize is that the very constitution of “World” hinges on anti-Blackness, and therefore any possible world will have anti-Black violence as its foundation and fulcrum. Embedded in the very concept of the World is a preemptive strike against its own undoing; the World exists to be critiqued and therefore to leave open the possibility of “another world,” one ostensibly not fueled by domination, genocidal violence, and an anti-Black imperative. This openness of the World, as concept—its preordained answer to any call for its destruction in and through the constant deferral of the possibility of its transformation—is a means by which the World reproduces itself as the domain of all possible positions, as the container for reality in toto. As Daniel Barber argues, the World’s inherent possibility for renewal and transformation—that there will and can always be another world—furthers the anti-Blackness of the World and its Palmer: Otherwise than Blackness logic of “the possible.”71 In the assertion of the World’s foundational anti-Blackness and the call for its necessary end, I read a realization that “the End of the World” would entail the end of all possible worlds, the end of worlding as a project of Human ontogenesis. Returning to Césaire’s call, the desire for the End of the World in all of its manifestations portends an affective structure that cannot be borne yet must be, a radical negativity that is essential to (the experience of) Blackness. Anything that one might call “Black affect” lies in and “emerges” from that space of nonrelational negativity. It is precisely because of this that Black affect is unthinkable within the World and often rendered unthinkable to ourselves. This includes the various ostensibly “afﬁrmative” iterations of Black affective experience that are often invoked as a rejoinder to critical analyses that foreground structural violence. Pleasure, joy, and the like cannot be disentangled from an essential negativity; they do not negate the negativity of Blackness but exist as extensions of it. Black affect emerges at the limit of thought, in the recesses of desire. It is the by-product of a negativity that redounds upon itself, a destructive drive that does not herald a new mode of creation or generativity. If, as David Marriott argues regarding the aforementioned n’est pas of Blackness, “the thing that blackness is not—and accordingly, our relation to it—is the mark of a rupture that is both exterior and radically intimate, an abyss that is situated at the limit of judgment, thought, and desire: a monstrance without center or end,” the question at stake here becomes an impossible one of how to “relate” to, how to “be” with/in such a “monstrance,” and, for our purposes, how one’s theoretical gestures are positioned vis-à-vis this limit of thought and desire.72 What I want to highlight at this juncture is one widespread inclination in contending with this abyssal limit— what I identify as the sublimation of Black affect in the turn toward feeling and sensation as relational capacity. Creation ex Nihilo The psychoanalytic concept of sublimation is particularly useful for thinking through how the radical negativity of a Black desire for the End of the World is transmuted into the creation of “otherwise 267 268 qui parle december 2020 vol. 29 no. 2 worlds” of possibility in and through affectivity. While sublimation as a concept is the source of much uncertainty and contestation within the corpus of psychoanalytic thinking,73 in simple terms it names the process whereby an excessive (libidinal) drive is (partially) satisﬁed through its redirection. The instinct or drive that is sublimated is diverted toward a “socially valued” outcome: in the classic Freudian example, non(re)productive and/or socially taboo sexual instincts are sublimated toward the processes of artistic creation and aesthetic production.74 Sublimation, then, is seen as central to the workings of civil society, in that it is at the root of the Human’s productive capacity to make “something out of nothing.” In other words, the social subsists through the sublimation of that which threatens its disruption. Without subjection to the process of sublimation, the drives and instincts in question are thought to lead to profound neuroses and modes of behavior that radically break from dominant social codes. Sublimation therefore marks the displacement of the negative to yield some positive and productive form of creation and equilibrium; it names a process wherein negativity is made generative through its transposition; it functions as an “escape valve” for otherwise destructive impulses.75 In this sense sublimation is said to serve a reparative function, in that its aim is to “restore the ‘good’ object that has been shattered by the destructive instincts.”76 In the Lacanian rendering of the concept, which is especially useful for our purposes, sublimation “[changes] not the object [toward which the drive is directed] but its position in the structure of fantasy. . . in other words, sublimation does not involve directing the drive to a different object, but rather changing the nature of the object to which the drive was already directed.”77 Stated differently, sublimation involves not a complete changing of the object but a shift in orientation toward said object within the unconscious. In the case of Black affect, then, a world sutured to and by anti-Blackness as an organizing principle thus becomes, through the process of sublimation, the very ground for new modes of existence, pleasure, and aesthetic creation. The drive toward the destruction of the World is transmuted and thereby yields the reiﬁcation of the World as horizon of possibility. The World, as the sublime object in this instance, is “elevated to the dignity of the Thing [and therefore] exerts a power of fascination which ultimately leads to death and destruction.”78 Palmer: Otherwise than Blackness The insistent attachment to the World, against the desire for its destruction, is a further retrenchment and reproduction of the violence of anti-Black modernity through a continued allegiance to World(ing) as generativity. This is the workings of sublimation, which yields “the satisfaction of the drive through the inhibition of its aim”79—in other words, through this process the drive to destroy the World is “satisﬁed” (though never fully so, which explains the constant recurrence of this process) in and through its denial. The partial satisfaction of the drive is located in the invocation of the otherwise world of possibility—the move from the World-as-is to the World-as-possible—whereby “the demand to encounter an immeasurable affective intensity [i.e., the affective drive toward the World’s destruction] is converted into a demand to better relate to the world; the negativity of encounter with the unthinkable is converted into the possibility of renewed relation.”80 In identifying this process of sublimation as it relates to Blackness and the World, we see its ultimately pernicious effects even as it operates as a mechanism of defense, precisely because the sublime object—the World—necessitates Black abjection for its continual reproduction. This is the makings of a double bind, wherein the sublimation of the drive replicates a “cruel” and torturous mode of attachment to the World—an attachment that is quite literally deathly.81 In The Colonization of Psychic Space: A Psychoanalytic Social Theory of Oppression, the philosopher Kelly Oliver applies the concept of sublimation directly to the situation of racial violence and structural oppression. Oliver sees sublimation as a privilege that is denied to the “marginalized” through the mechanisms of “social oppression” and its colonization of the interior space of the psyche. Sublimation is a necessary process for idealization,82 and together both processes form the basis of social life. Without sublimation and idealization, Oliver argues, “we can neither conceptualize our experience nor set goals for ourselves. . . . We cannot imagine our situation otherwise. . . . We cannot resist domination.”83 Sublimation is essential to the logic of “the otherwise.” Through its redirection of the negative and nonproductive drives, it allows for the constant imagining of a something else as an endless resistance to perpetual 269 270 qui parle december 2020 vol. 29 no. 2 domination. In this rendering, “sublimation [is identiﬁed] with the ability to revolt against the authority of the social in order to authorize oneself as a legitimate subject with agency . . . a powerful potential site of resistance to domination.”84 Stated differently, sublimation is at the root of the Subject’s becoming; one’s ability to sublimate marks one as a “legitimate subject with agency,” and it is this possibility that is foreclosed through the colonization of psychic space. Racial domination thus functions to disallow sublimation in order to keep the marginalized trapped within themselves, unable to divert their bodily drives and affects into the realm of the social and thereby “become beings who mean.”85 This rendering of sublimation poses a critical problem when thought alongside Blackness: if sublimation is key to subjectivity—the very process through which one ascends into the realm of social meaning—then how does one account for the continued foreclosure of Black subjectivity in and through sublimation? Oliver notes further that “through sublimation, bodily drives and their attenuating affects become discharged in signifying practices; and insofar as signiﬁcation depends on the discharge of drives, through sublimation drives become signs.”86 The logic undergirding this conceptualization of sublimation when thought alongside Blackness is that the drive to “make useful” Blackness’s nongenerativity—the modes of feeling that register from the perpetual obliteration of Black being—will endow the Black with the subjectivity that is a priori foreclosed to them. Sublimation is therefore positioned as a means of bringing Blackness into signiﬁcation, to make Blackness “knowable” as a positive force of relation and accordingly make “something” out of the ignominious inheritance of nothing(ness) singular to Blackness.87 Through sublimation the destructive drive of Blackness is made a sign of celebratory possibility and boundless potential for creation. In Oliver’s rendering, “sublimation is necessary for beings to enter the realm of meaning.”88 But how can Blackness be brought into meaning in any positive sense when, as Calvin Warren instructs, “the very structure of meaning in the modern world—signiﬁer, signiﬁed, signiﬁcation, and sign— depends on anti-Black violence for its constitution[?] Not only does the trauma of the Middle Passage rupture the signifying process, Palmer: Otherwise than Blackness but it also instantiates a ‘meaningless’ sign as the foundation of language, meaning, and social existence itself.”89 Stated differently, Blackness can only come into meaning through its distortion and negation, through its refusal. The violence of anti-Blackness is what makes meaning possible. Sublimation as a process “has to do with the redemption of material reality, which in itself is seen as fallen, depressing, or meaningless. . . . [It is] the retrieval of positive meaning in afﬁrmation of force.”90 Here again, as with Smith’s metaphysics of feeling, we see the turn to affect functioning as a means of warding off an essential meaninglessness that Blackness is nonetheless tasked with holding. Sublimation functions as a means of redemption for the abject reality of Black existence, which explains the widespread tendency toward its operationalization in our critical gestures. Conclusion The context of Black affect’s emergence and diffusion is a violence beyond the limit of what is bearable, a violence that exceeds, conditions, and ultimately cannot be named as such within the order of representation or frames of thought that structure the World. If affect is an unnameable intensity that exceeds the grasp of language— the forces and drives that bind the World as a relational totality— this unnameable intensity, outside representation, is fractured and structured by the mandate of anti-Blackness. Far from being prior to the concerns of raciality, the “prediscursive” space that affect is purported to reside within is saturated by Blackness. Despite its pretenses toward universality, affect as force is tethered to the logics of raciality that create and sustain the World. In contrast to an unmarked affect as universal relational essence, “Black affect” might then be the name we give to those ﬂeshly intensities that register the catastrophic violence that produces and subsumes Black existence. The move toward an unmarked, universalized affect as expressive of relational capacity functions as a distancing from and sublimation of the destructive force of Black affect—its chaotic, nonsensical drive toward a mode of destruction without the promise 271 272 qui parle december 2020 vol. 29 no. 2 of generativity or of “another world.” This is why Black affect is unthinkable within “the World”; the World cannot contend with thinking its own destruction, only ever its positive transformation and renewed possibility. The consistent turn to feeling as afﬁrmation and the sensational as a mode of transcendence-within-immanence serve as an obfuscation of the violence that buttresses the World and positions Blackness as its outside. Any consideration of the problem of Black affect is therefore haunted by the following question: how does it feel to carry within the ﬂesh the knowledge that the World’s meaning inheres in your destruction? To turn to the World (as an elsewhere or an otherwise) is to turn toward that destruction in the guise of liberation. Blackness yields a mode of feeling that intensiﬁes one’s outsideness to the World, a felt antagonism to the World. This antagonism functions as the genesis of a Black desire for the End of the World in all of its manifestations, a desire for the end of worlding. This destructive impulse that threatens the stability of the social, this relentless negativity that portends its upheaval, is the driving force of Black affect. How one contends with this force takes various forms, be they sublimation, repression, resignation, passivity, or an unequivocal embrace. But the force of this negativity cannot be denied, and it behooves us to think alongside it, even as it marks the limit of thought. ...................................................... tyrone s. palmer is a postdoctoral fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities and lecturer in the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Critical Ethnic Studies, Souls, and Callaloo. Acknowledgments I would like to thank Mlondi Zondi, Jesús Luzardo, Le’ah Kaplan, John Gillespie, Selamawit Terrefe, Axelle Karera, my colleagues at the Heyman Center/Society of Fellows, and the editorial board of Qui Parle for their comments and suggestions on various iterations of this essay. Palmer: Otherwise than Blackness Notes 1. I use quotation marks here to defamiliarize the term. Hereafter quotations should be assumed and will appear only for further emphasis. As will become clear, I take “the World” here to mean not a given material reality or a thing-in-itself but a conception meant to contain the totality of all things “in relation”—what Heidegger terms the “domain of all domains”—one that, I argue, is constituted through and held together by an anti-Black imperative. That the World takes on the appearance of dominating the entire ﬁeld of reality is representative of a Western imperial, humanist grip on the very terms of conception and phenomenality through the ﬁeld of metaphysics. The World thus marks an ensemble of processes that necessitates the violent abjection and domination of Blackness for its articulation as a coherent, ordered whole. The capitalization of World throughout aims to differentiate this metaphysical understanding of the World from its more colloquial usage, though the assumptive logics behind such uses are entangled with the metaphysical. 2. Brian Massumi notes that “to affect and to be affected is to be open to the world, to be active in it and to be patient for its return activity. This openness is also taken as primary. . . . To begin affectively in change is to begin in relation, and to begin in relation is to begin in the event” (Politics of Affect, ix; emphasis mine). 3. Seigworth and Gregg, “Inventory of Shimmers,” 6. 4. Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 8. 5. See Mullarkey, Post-Continental Philosophy, for an excellent explication of this tendency in the writings of Brian Massumi, Gilles Deleuze, Henri Bergson, and Michel Henry. 6. In The Body in Pain Elaine Scarry offers a rejoinder to this understanding of the relationship between World and violence. While her text is not generally considered “affect theory,” her theoretical rendering of the world-destroying function of torture is important to the study of affect and violence. Yet even within this radical example— wherein violence is understood in terms of its destructive capacity (at the level of “self” and “world”)—it is assumed that prior to the act or situation of torture there is a world one inhabits that is subsequently destroyed or lost. I am troubling the assumption of the World as something self-evident or universal. As I argue, Blackness marks that ﬁgure of worldlessness before any given act or experience of extreme violence, since the production of Blackness is of an ontology subsumed 273 274 qui parle december 2020 vol. 29 no. 2 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. by violence. Douglass and Wilderson’s brief discussion of Scarry is insightful in this regard. See Scarry, Body in Pain; and Douglass and Wilderson, “Violence of Presence.” See Redding, Logic of Affect. The use of the parenthetical formulation relation(ality) is meant to index both relation as the overarching logic and relationality as that which emerges from it. While I certainly do not mean to conﬂate Glissant’s conception of relation with Kant’s, there is a deﬁnite continuity between Glissant’s notion of relation as “a totality that is not approachable” (Poetics of Relation, 174) and Kant’s conception of the World-whole as relational totality. The notion of relation as the logic that holds everything together (even in its chaotic difference qua opacity, as per Glissant) is what I am writing against here. Terada, “Toward a Critique of Relation.” Massumi, Politics of Affect, 50. Terada, “Racial Grammar of Kantian Time,” 273. In another context Terada notes that relation is essential to the logic of postracialism (“Toward a Critique of Relation”), an insight that resonates with my general argument concerning the coercive universality of relation and its centrality to the persistence of the anti-Black paradigm. For an especially astute critique of the coercive logic of relation and its “naturalization,” see Karera, “Blackness and the Pitfalls of Anthropocene Ethics.” Jackson, “Theorizing in a Void,” 621. Calvin Warren notes that within the domain of ontometaphysics, Blackness operates “as pure function . . . [which] helps the human remember its relation to Being” through its inhabitation of the “void of relationality” (Ontological Terror, 32). Terada, “Toward a Critique of Relation.” Mbembe, On the Postcolony, 173. I use quotation marks here to mark a potential as a placeholder, a potential that is not “positive” or even necessarily “generative”—that is, not rooted in the assumption of something emerging out of it—but possesses the most reductive sense of a happening. This understanding of potential breaks with the conﬂation of potential with capacity (and therefore as inherently positive), which characterizes many postDeleuzian usages of the concept, which pervade affect theory in particular. Palmer: Otherwise than Blackness 18. Césaire, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, 22 (hereafter cited as NR). 19. Daniel Barber refers to this as “[an] immanence of start and end . . . [that] undoes the very division that gives sense to start and end as well as to the ﬁeld of possibility that emerges within their gap” (“World-Making and Grammatical Impasse,” 191). 20. Warren strikingly argues that Black captivity at the advent of the New World marks the “perfection of metaphysics,” the ﬁeld of which is “unthinkable without anti-blackness” (“Black Nihilism,” 237). 21. On colonization as thingiﬁcation, see Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 42. 22. Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 73. On the limitations of Négritude consciousness, see Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, esp. chap. 5. 23. See Robinson, Black Marxism. 24. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 36. 25. Marriott, “The X of Representation,” 420. See also Marriott, Whither Fanon?, for its deconstruction and rigorous expansion of the concept of tabula rasa as it operates in Fanon’s corpus. 26. For Jacques Lacan, desire is the excess inevitably produced in the articulation of need in speech, as demand. Desire is a surplus that can never be fully satisﬁed—it cannot be articulated in language and is therefore necessarily always “beyond demand.” By way of deﬁnition, Lacan states that “desire is neither the appetite for satisfaction nor the demand for love, but the difference that results from the subtraction of the ﬁrst from the second, the very phenomenon of their splitting [Spaltung]” (Écrits, 690–92). 27. For more along these lines, see Gaston, Concept of World. 28. Recent theoretical turns have put signiﬁcant pressure on the idea of the World as totality. For instance, Timothy Morton argues that in the wake of global warming and climate catastrophe, “the structures that hold the fragile ﬁction of world together have evaporated,” and “the ‘world’ as the signiﬁcant totality of what is the case is strictly unimaginable” (Hyperobjects, 108–9). This marks, for Morton, “the End of the World,” though his use of the phrase has a different tenor from the Césairean “End” that this essay is concerned with. 29. Gaston, Concept of World, 161–64. 30. Barber, “Creation of Non-being.” 31. In After Finitude, the foundational text in the conversation, Quentin Meillassoux deﬁnes correlationism as “the idea according to which we 275 276 qui parle december 2020 vol. 29 no. 2 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other” (5). Correlationism therefore functions as a denial of the possibility of “an [absolute] knowledge of the thing in itself independently of our subjective access to it” (Meillassoux, Time without Becoming, 10). In her brilliant critique of correlationism, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson contends that “the reigning hegemonic conception of the human thought-world correlate . . . [is an] essential onto-epistemic aspec[t] of antiblackness historically and contemporarily” (“Sense of Things,” 21) and that this correlate persists through the foreclosure of what she terms “the Black mater(nal)” (5) as its enabling condition of possibility. Ray Brassier notes, “Correlationism need not privilege ‘thinking’ or ‘consciousness’ as the key relation—it can just as easily replace it with ‘being-in-the-world,’ ‘perception,’ ‘sensibility,’ ‘intuition,’ ‘affect,’ or even ‘ﬂesh’” (Nihil Unbound, 51). The feeling-world correlate that I name here, then, can be thought of as one variation of a larger philosophical problem. Examples abound, from Spinoza’s rendering of affect, to Deleuze’s theorization of the sensory-motor schema, to Heidegger’s Stimmung (mood), and so on. In fact, one can read the entire canon of phenomenology as rooted in the notion of the Subject’s encounter with/in the (physical) world, narrating the body’s experience as it encounters objects in the surrounding world, pushing and blurring the distinction between the self-contained body and what surrounds it. Smith, Felt Meanings of the World. Smith, Felt Meanings of the World, 36. Smith, Felt Meanings of the World, 18. Smith, Felt Meanings of the World, 6. Smith notes that “importances are not values” but “appreciative feeling[s]” that reveal the “wholeness of the world itself” (Felt Meanings of the World, 20–21). Smith, Felt Meanings of the World, 21. Sara Ahmed “approaches emotion as a form of cultural politics [and] world making” (Cultural Politics of Emotion, 12). See also Palmer, “What Feels More than Feeling?,” for my summation of the various strains of affect theory and their foundational anti-Blackness. Zerilli, “The Turn to Affect and the Problem of Judgement,” 261. Heidegger argues that “the stone is worldless [weltlos]; the animal is poor in world [weltarm]; man is world-forming [weltbildend]” Palmer: Otherwise than Blackness 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. (Fundamental Concepts, 177). As Smith states, “For Heidegger, the world in its a priori structure, in its worldhood, belongs to the a priori constitution of Dasein” (Felt Meanings of the World, 11). Warren, Ontological Terror, 179–80n3 (emphasis mine). Wilderson, Red, White, and Black, 141. While this concept is not fully elaborated by Wilderson, I ﬁnd it important and provocative to think alongside because it indexes the scale of the problem at hand. The invocation of World as “horizon,” speciﬁcally in Black performance theory, is clearly linked to the work of the queer of color scholar José Esteban Muñoz. See speciﬁcally Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, in which he theorizes “queerness” as a utopic horizon of otherwise possibilities. Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Neutrino,” www.britannica.com/science /neutrino. Crawley, “Resonance,” 48. Crawley here collapses “world” and “universe,” a tendency that Markus Gabriel characterizes as a fallacy. Gabriel states that “the universe is not the whole. Strictly speaking, the universe is somewhat provincial. By the universe, I understand the experimentally accessible object domain of the natural sciences. Yet the world is considerably bigger than the universe” (Why the World Does Not Exist, 8). Crawley, “Resonance,” 55. Crawley, “Resonance,” 52. Crawley, “Resonance,” 50. Crawley, “Resonance,” 53. The phrasing “emancipatory ﬁguration of blackness” is borrowed from Saidiya Hartman, who articulates a key concern of thinking Blackness with characteristically poetic force when she inquires: “Is an emancipatory ﬁguration of blackness possible? Or are we to hope that the entitlements of whiteness will be democratized?” (Scenes of Subjection, 118). Feeling as transcendence is one such entitlement of whiteness that is discursively democratized in moves like Crawley’s. Fanon notes that “the Negro is not. Any more than the white man [Le Nègre n’est pas. Pas plus que le Blanc]” (Black Skin, White Masks, 231). Marriott, Whither Fanon?, 223. Marriott describes the n’est pas variously as a “rupture or void in the subject” (62); “the not yet, that blackness signiﬁes . . . [which] has no signiﬁable meaning, even though it continues to generate potentially fatal interpretive effects” (344); 277 278 qui parle december 2020 vol. 29 no. 2 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. “the mark of a negativity that cannot be phenomenalized as the work of negation [in the Hegelian sense], and by virtue of the fact that its very enunciation and inscription signify how the blackest part cannot in any sense either be meant or give way to a deﬁnable or reversible meaning” (121); and “a desire not to be” (115). Crawley, “Resonance,” 53. For further elaboration on the unthinkability of Black affect, see Palmer, “What Feels More than Feeling?” Crawley, “Resonance,” 56. Crawley, “Resonance,” 56. Crawley, “Resonance,” 50. There is further work to be done on the concept of “the otherwise” as it circulates within Black studies and its relationship to Emmanuel Levinas’s conception of the otherwise (e.g., Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence) and his critique of ontology. Crawley, “Resonance,” 55. For some key examples of (this tendency in) Black performance theory beyond Crawley, see DeFrantz and Gonzales, Black Performance Theory; Nyong’o, Afro-fabulations; and McMillan, Embodied Avatars. The logic undergirding Black performance theory as a ﬁeld seems to hold that the transformative power of performance ceaselessly creates “new worlds” that resist and escape the enclosure of anti-Black violence. I am thinking here with Jared Sexton’s observation that there is an often unacknowledged “special force that the consolation of transcendence—be it cultural, economic, geographical, historical, political, psychological, sexual, social or symbolic—brings to bear on the activity of thinking, no less of speaking and writing, about those whose transcendence is foreclosed in and for the modern world” (“Unclear Word,” 5). The “turn” toward is always simultaneously one away from. See Butler, Psychic Life of Power, 106–31. Hartman’s work on seduction and the diffusion of terror is especially useful here (Scenes of Subjection, esp. 79–122). See, e.g., Nash, Black Body in Ecstasy; Johnson and Lindsey, “Searching for Climax”; and Stallings, Funk the Erotic. Crawley, “Resonance,” 50. The question of desire’s relationship to philosophizing is of particular interest to me. See Lyotard, Why Philosophize?, for an elaboration of Palmer: Otherwise than Blackness 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. this relationship. The desire for/attachment to relational affect and “the World” within Black studies resonates with what Lauren Berlant might call a kind of “cruel optimism” (Cruel Optimism). This is apparent in the popular insistence that “Black feminism will save us all”—a widespread mode of thinking in popular left-political discourse. The question that this raises for me is as follows: why does the onus for the perpetual transformation of the World fall on those who are “at the bottom,” to reference the Combahee River Collective’s characterization of the Black female position? This points to the logic of worlding as parasitic on Black suffering. For example, see Nadasen, “Black Feminism Will Save Us All.” See Barber, “World-Making and Grammatical Impasse.” Marriott, Whither Fanon?, 225. In their dictionary of psychoanalytic terms Jean LaPlanche and J.-B. Pontalis note that “the lack of a coherent theory of sublimation remains one of the lacunae in psycho-analytic thought” (Language of Psycho-analysis, 433). LaPlanche and Pontalis, Language of Psycho-analysis, 431. Evans, Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, 198. This refers to LaPlanche and Pontalis’s summation of Melanie Klein’s rendering of sublimation (Language of Psycho-analysis, 433). Evans, Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, 198. Evans, Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, 198. Copjec, Imagine There’s No Woman, 30. Barber, “World-Making and Grammatical Impasse,” 199. Here I am referencing Berlant, who states that “all attachments are optimistic” in that they retain an investment in the world: “Optimism [is] the force that moves you out of yourself and into the world” (Cruel Optimism, 1). Predictably, Berlant does not go so far as to critique attachment to and investment in the world as such; rather, she paints it as a given result of affective attachments. LaPlanche and Pontalis deﬁne idealization as the “process by means of which the object’s qualities and value are elevated to the point of perfection . . . [which plays] a vital part in the setting up of the ideal agencies within the subject” (Language of Psycho-analysis, 202–3). Oliver, Colonization of Psychic Space, xx (emphasis mine). Oliver, Colonization of Psychic Space, 85 (emphasis mine). Oliver, Colonization of Psychic Space, xxi. Oliver, Colonization of Psychic Space, 89. 279 280 qui parle december 2020 vol. 29 no. 2 87. This resonates with the Lacanian understanding of sublimation as a mode of creation ex nihilo, which is elaborated in Lacan’s 1959–60 lecture series devoted in large part to the concept and “problem” of sublimation (Ethics of Psychoanalysis). 88. 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