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A panel discussion with Gail Lewis, Miss Major, Zoé Samudzi and Hortense Spillers, chaired by Akwugo Emejulu

"What the world will become already exists in fragments and pieces, experiments and possibilities," says Ruth Wilson Gilmore. In conversation with Black feminist forebears, such as Audre Lorde, abolitionist scholars and activists Gail Lewis, Miss Major, Zoé Samudzi and Hortense Spillers, chaired by Akwugo Emejulu, explore how to dismantle the master's house - its material edifices and ideological architecture - and the construction of abolitionist futures in the present.

Lorde noted in 1984 that hegemonic, stratified forms of feminism can also constitute the master's house. How can fugitive forms of organising and thinking continue to confront white feminism, racial capitalism, the violent gender binary and the carceral state?

From Black Trans organising for post-incarceration re-entry services and against criminalisation, to Black feminist scholarship and psychoanalysis, to Black radical imaginations and political formations, the panel asks: What new tools and instruments can we fashion to help us dismantle the master's house and build architectures of freedom?

Find more info about the event series & speakers is here: https://www.silverpress.org/new-blog/2020/7/9/revolution-is-not-a-one-time-event

No tracklist provided

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The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House w/ Gail Lewis, Miss Major, Zoé Samudzi, Hortense Spillers & Akwugo Emejulu 3rd August 2020

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Playing Interview, Talk. A panel discussion with Gail Lewis, Miss Major, Zoé Samudzi and Hortense Spillers, chaired by Akwugo Emejulu "What the world will become already exists in fragments and pieces, experiments and possibilities," says Ruth Wilson Gilmore.

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"What I can say is that there are different layers of refusal; it begins with this violence I am responsible for in photographs; I find myself in a situation of impossibility, of doing what I have to do with these images. And then there is another layer over this; the context of the art world, the institutional context ... I find it very violent to be at this point of the program, I think about [whether] what I am presenting will offend somebody. It is very difficult to exist in this and outside of this; it is these different levels of refusal that come together and make me unproductive, as does spending a lot of time with those photographs and dematerializing them in many senses. Today was one experiment, which is a process of trying out things with these images. Even when talking and responding I feel like I am unproductive."

-Yasmine Eid -Sabbagh

they devoted time and attention to these photographs, otherwise barely seen, even by the people who originally owned or took them. A process of rethinking visual representation unleashed, considering how to make these images "visible" without making them public, and questioning the iconography of the Palestinian refugee created through images mainly produced by the United Nations Relief and Work Agency (UNRWA) and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).

×
My thanks to Natasha Ginwala and David Lloyd for their generous and helpful comments.

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e-flux journal 56th Venice Biennale - SUPERCOMMUNITY - Reading Art as Confrontation

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"What I can say is that there are different layers of refusal; it begins with this violence I am responsible for in photographs; I find myself in a situation of impossibility, of doing what I have to do with these images. And then there is another layer over this; the context of the art world, the institutional context ...

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It is impossible to present a complete picture of disaster or to apprehend it in its entirety. It is too complex to be taken in at a single glance. More fitting to make partial appraisals, to reckon it in fragments. Disaster has no single narrative because it is not a single, personal account of misfortune; it is greater than mankind, greater than the sum of all personal stories. It sweeps along, a raging whirlwind of numberless details and fragments of destruction. There is nothing personal about disaster, despite the great cruelty it visits on individuals. It does not single out anyone in particular, but instead it targets the collective spirit and hovers like a prophet of doom over the heads of all.

Disaster is a superhuman event, transcending the limits of man's endurance. It is fashioned by forces that men are not accustomed to dealing with in their daily lives, or perhaps forces with which they are familiar but that randomly or intentionally have suddenly become outside their control. If daily life is built on interconnected relationships of control and domination, then among the things that disaster lays waste is just this personal sense of empowerment, breaking the individual and crushing him; snatching the individual away from himself. The fragility which characterizes the disaster-stricken individual finds its home in the group, for the disaster-stricken group is a weak group, aware of its fragility, not trying to hide it, and at the same time grasping whatever chances circumstances allow for its survival. Disaster therefore is a communal event, in which stricken individuals band together in a stricken group and search for a new beginning. And in this way, it is also a political event, for disaster is a collective fumbling towards a new reality in which the individual might finally return to himself.

It is impossible to search for a solution for disaster, because it is not a problem, just as it is too big for its source to be located in the actions of any one party. It is no crime, with a perpetrator and a victim. It is a new history, or a radical change that cannot, under any circumstances, be modified, refuted, or even understood. Disaster is more complex than problems or crises, and calls, not for a response or solution, but a completely new beginning, a completely new language without which it cannot be addressed. The failure to find this new beginning and language leads to an impression that it is possible to overcome the disaster by managing it, i.e.: by searching for means to redress it.

Disaster management is the art of generating man-made disasters; natural disasters are unplanned, they strike like Fate. Man-made disasters are a string of totalitarian decisions and evil calculations, often made on the pretext of ameliorating the impact of a previous disaster or avoiding one to come. Man-made disaster is basically an assault on Fate, an attempt to tame it and dictate to it. The history of the universe is a string of "fateful" natural disasters, by whose grace life arose on earth. In other words, life, by one measure, is a cosmic disaster brought on by the blows of Fate, and cannot be separated from the death that dogs its steps, like the echo of the first disaster. Man-made disaster, meanwhile, is the engineering and management of death and destruction, by making them seem a pre-ordained destiny that no one can interfere with or change.

With time disaster can become invisible, impossible to detect in any one event, but that does not nullify its presence. Even in times of security and calm, disaster is there, for disaster does not obey the logic of a linear temporal progression. The instant in which the disaster occurs does not end with its passing, but persists in numerous forms. Disaster is both temporal and historical. It is the instant of a new history's formation. A point about which history turns: an origin. Disaster is not merely a major event that redirects the flow of history, but the precondition for the formation of the history to come, and thus, once past, disaster does not live on as a memory, but rather as memory entire, or rather the necessary condition for the formation of this memory.

Disaster-consciousness is an awareness of formation within the context of disaster; a consciousness not damaged by disaster, but honed. Disaster-consciousness does not seek to flee from disaster, nor to manage it like a crisis, but instead strives to set it in plain sight. It does not want to mend what is broken or to reclaim what has been taken. It does not want to ask for pardon or to forgive. It does not want purgatory or punishment. All it desires is to look disaster in the eye. This consciousness is like an island, borne within, and set apart from disaster.

Disaster calls for a new beginning, a new land, and the new land that it reveals is like an island-though not always a new world. Gilles Deleuze says that there are two kinds of islands: continental and oceanic. Both are formed by natural disaster, the first through the splitting away of part of the continental mass and the second-in many cases-by volcanic eruptions, which spew rock formations out from the depths of earth. The first is an offcut of the old landmass; the second is fashioned from new land. The very dynamic that draws man to these islands with the goal of populating them is the same that led to their creation: the desire to move away and be apart on the one hand, and on the other, the urge to create a new world. The island that welcomes inhabitants fully committed to their journey towards it-a dynamic that reflects the formation of the island itself-is capable of being a new beginning to a new world. But this does not always take place, as shown by Robinson Crusoe, who settled on a desert island where he created a bourgeois world based on ownership and Protestant ethics. Nothing on the island was of any use to Crusoe, so he fetched everything he could from the innards of his sinking ship and with them built an extension of the world he'd left behind. There is only one world in Crusoe's life, which he carries with him wherever he goes.

Disaster leaves us with an island or, at best, moves us to an island after destruction has brought an end to everything else. The essential characteristic of this desert island-a blank slate for the creation of a communal spirit-is that it is a new beginning or a second birth. Deleuze states that there are no second births because of disaster, quite the opposite: there is a disaster after the origin because there must be, from the outset, a second birth. He goes on to say that this second "origin" is more important than the first because it gives us the law of repetition and causality, whereas the first gives us nothing but moments. Or in other words, what makes life alive is not its force or strength, but its inbuilt capacity for death and its fragility in the face of disaster, and thus its ability to start, or be born, anew. The thing that makes history epochal are the blows of fate and disaster that befall it, without which it would be eternal and unchanging.

In the moment that mankind reaches a desert island, two disasters intersect: the disaster that prompted them to set out on their search and the disaster that formed the island. The new life, or birth, cannot take root at this intersection without a new language that can take one disaster and lead it into another: a language-driven transition that ensures that every disaster finds refuge in another, that converts disaster into something else. Men make the island the repository of their isolation and their distance from the old world; the island makes them bearers of its isolation and separation. The island gives men a living substance out of which can be fashioned a new world and men grant the isolated island an awareness of itself. The old language is not able to effect this transition, because it only sees the island as an extension of the old world and it will always attempt to manage the disaster, to reproduce its context and conditions in form capable of being controlled.

Identifying the concept of emptiness makes it easy to distinguish the island from Utopia. Utopia seeks out emptiness in order to fill it with a preconceived notion. Utopia has no interest in what might be found on the island. All it wants is an empty expanse of desert in which to build its world. Should Utopia find life on the island, it would simply ignore it and act as though it isn't there. But the desert island's emptiness does not preclude the life that exists there. It is deserted, but not devoid of life-all it lacks is the human project that makes the land flower. Deleuze states that the populated island can remain as deserted as it was in its pristine state if its human inhabitants are truly devoted to whatever it was that drew or drove them there, i.e.: if they remain devoted to their isolation, to their need for a new creation. If this is so, then the island shall remain deserted despite its inhabitants, and its inhabitants will become its own awareness of this state. So: the populated island will remain deserted until the day comes when its inhabitants forget they are living on an island, in which instant it will straightway grow verdant.

What message does the island have for the fertile plains? What can the second birth possibly tell the first? At best, the message will be empty, or full of unintelligible words, for between the two lies death and disaster. They are two self-made worlds, each with its own language. At worst, it will send out an invitation to settle there, the invitation Robinson Crusoe might send to convince others to come to his island and there reproduce their world instead of a new one. Thus do the plains claim another island.

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It is impossible to present a complete picture of disaster or to apprehend it in its entirety. It is too complex to be taken in at a single glance. More fitting to make partial appraisals, to reckon it in fragments.

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Arjuna Neuman & Denise Ferreira da Silva “Serpent Rain”

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Arjuna Neuman & Denise Ferreira da Silva “Serpent Rain”

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Nice interview about Serpent Rain

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Working Glossary while reading Denise Ferreira da Silva

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Working Glossary while reading Denise Ferreira da Silva

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Here is a shared document where you can add working definitions of Terms / Ideas / References while reading.

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Brief Description

Welcome to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP), which as of March 2018, has nearly 1600 entries online. From its inception, the SEP was designed so that each entry is maintained and kept up-to-date by an expert or group of experts in the field. All entries and substantive updates are refereed by the members of a distinguished Editorial Board before they are made public. Consequently, our dynamic reference work maintains academic standards while evolving and adapting in response to new research. You can cite fixed editions that are created on a quarterly basis and stored in our Archives (every entry contains a link to its complete archival history, identifying the fixed edition the reader should cite). The Table of Contents lists entries that are published or assigned. The Projected Table of Contents also lists entries which are currently unassigned but nevertheless projected.

The SEP's Publishing Model

The combination of features exhibited by the SEP publishing model distinguishes it from other attempts to build scholarly resources on the web. Our open access model has the following features: (1) a password-protected web interface for authors, which allows them to download entry templates, submit private drafts for review, and remotely edit/update their entries; (2) a password-protected web interface for the subject editors, which allows them to add new topics, commission new entries, referee unpublished entries and updates (updates can be displayed with the original and updated versions side-by-side with the differences highlighted) and accept/reject entries and revisions; (3) a secure web server for the principal editor, by which the entire collaborative process can be managed with a very small staff (the principal editor can add people, add entries, assign entries to editors, issue invitations, track deadlines, publish entries and updates, etc.); (4) a tracking system which logs the actions taken at the web interfaces, monitors the state of every entry, determines who owes work and when, automatically sends occasional, friendly email reminders, and provides a summary to the principal editor; (5) software which dynamically cross-references the SEP when new entries are published, and which periodically checks for broken links throughout the content; (6) software which automatically creates an archive every quarter, providing the proper basis for scholarly citation; and (7) mirror sites at universities in other parts of the world, which provide faster access to readers worldwide, provide access when the Stanford server is down for maintenance, and safeguard the digital content as extra backups. The SEP's publishing model therefore has the ability to deliver, with very low administrative and production costs, quality content meeting the highest of academic standards via a medium that is universally accessible.

Few dynamic reference works have been built to the specifications described in the previous paragraph. Most of the other encyclopedia projects available on the web lack some of the dynamic and scholarly features of the SEP. Either they (a) are costly and behind a subscription wall, invisible to search engines and so not as useful to academics and the general public; or (b) don't have an administrative system capable of screening new entries and updates prior to publication and ensuring that entries are responsive to new research; or (c) don't allow the authors/editors to directly contact the server to update/referee the content of the entries; or (d) lack a system of archives for stable, scholarly citation (thus, when entries change, the old content is just lost, and any citations to, or quotations from, prior content become impossible to verify); or (e) lack a university-based Advisory Board to vet the members of its Editorial Board.

The SEP's model may therefore represent a unique digital library concept: a scholarly dynamic reference work. A scholarly dynamic reference work differs from an academic journal, for academic journals (1) do not typically update the articles they publish, (2) do not aim to publish articles on a comprehensive set of topics, but rather, for the most part, publish articles that are randomly submitted by the members of the profession, (3) do not aim to cross-reference and create links among the concepts used in the articles they publish, (4) typically serve a narrow audience of specialists, and (5) do not have to deal with the asynchronous activity of updating, refereeing, and tracking separate deadlines for entries, since they are published on a synchronized schedule. Moreover, our reference work differs from preprint exchanges, for the latter not only exhibit features (1), (2), (3), and (4) just mentioned, but also do not referee their publications and so need not incorporate a work-flow system that handles the asynchronous refereeing process that occurs between upload and publication in a dynamic reference work. None of this is to say that electronic journals and preprint exchanges have a faulty design, but rather that a scholarly dynamic reference work is a distinctive new kind of publication that represents a unique digital library concept.

History

The SEP project began in September 1995 when John Perry was the Director of the Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI). Perry's suggestion that CSLI enhance its web presence by creating a (static) online dictionary of philosophy was taken up by Edward N. Zalta, who developed the idea into that of a dynamic reference work. Zalta then started designing the SEP to be an online encyclopedia that would satisfy the highest academic standards. After two years of support from CSLI, our prototype became a proof of concept that earned the first of a series of successful grant applications. (See the History of Grants below.) The addition of Colin Allen and Uri Nodelman to the project in 1998 resulted in significant enhancements to the design and implementation of our new academic publishing model. They introduced browser-based file-upload, workflow principles that categorized the state of every entry and possible state transitions, remote HTML editing, an engine which compares an original and revised entry side-by-side in the browser with the differences highlighted, etc. Paul Daniell programmed/developed the new search engine that the SEP brought online in September 2006.

See the masthead on the Editorial Information page, for a list of other people involved in the project.

History of Grants

10/1998-09/2000

#PA-23167-98

NEH/Preservation and Access Division

$131,400

10/2000-09/2003

#IIS-9981549

NSF/Information and Intelligent Systems
(with support from NEH)

$528,900

02/2002-08/2002

Officer's Grant

Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

$43,000

10/2003-09/2005

#PA-50133-03

NEH/Preservation and Access Division

$300,828

01/2005-12/2008

#CH-50156

NEH/Office of Challenge Grants
(awarded to SOLINET for the SEP)

$500,000

10/2005-09/2007

#PA-51255-05

NEH/Preservation and Access Division

$150,000

09/2005-08/2007

#2005-6238

William and Flora Hewlett Foundation
Education, Technology, Open Content

$190,000

Publications About the Stanford Encyclopedia

Information about our dynamic reference work can be found in the following papers and abstracts:

"From SEP to SEPIA: How and why Indiana University is helping the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy", by Colin Allen and Cecile Jagodzinski, inAgainst the Grain, 18/4 (September 2006): 42-43.

"The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: A University/Library Partnership in Support of Scholarly Communications and Open Access," by Edward N. Zalta, inCollege & Research Libraries News (a publication of the Association of College and Research Libraries), 67/8 (September 2006): 502-504, 507.

"I Hear the Train A Comin' ", by Greg Tananbaum, inAgainst the Grain, 18/1 (February 2006): 84-85.

Abstracts:

"Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: A Dynamic Reference Work", by Colin Allen, Uri Nodelman, and Edward N. Zalta, inProceedings of the Third ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (May 27-31, 2003), New York: Association for Computing Machinery Publications, p. 383.

"Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: A Dynamic Reference Work", by Uri Nodelman, Colin Allen, and Edward N. Zalta, inProceedings of the Second ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (July 14-18, 2002), New York: Association for Computing Machinery Publications, p. 380.

"Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: A Dynamic Reference Work", by Edward N. Zalta, Colin Allen, and Uri Nodelman, inProceedings of the First ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (June 24-28, 2001), New York: Association for Computing Machinery Publications, p. 457.

"Digital Workflow Concepts for Dynamic Reference Works", abstract of talk delivered by Edward N. Zalta at theAncient Studies - New Technology Conference, Salve Regina University, December 2000.

"The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: A Developed Dynamic Reference Work" (285K PDF document), by Colin Allen, Uri Nodelman, and Edward N. Zalta, inMetaphilosophy, 33/1-2 (January 2002): 210-228; reprinted inCyberPhilosophy: The Intersection of Philosophy and Computing, James H. Moor and Terrell Ward Bynum, (eds.), Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 201-218.

"Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy", by Edward N. Zalta,SPARC E-News (October/November 1999), published by The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, online publication. (This issue is now archived offline; the above link is to our preprint.)

"A Solution to the Problem of Updating Encyclopedias", by Eric Hammer and Edward N. Zalta,Computers and the Humanities, 31/1 (1997): 47-60. [Note: The ftp-based file upload system described in this paper was superseded by a browser-based file upload system which uses special password-protected web interfaces for the authors and editors.]

"Why Philosophy Needs a 'Dynamic' Encyclopedia", by John Perry and Edward N. Zalta, URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/pubs/why.html>, November 1997.

Acknowledgments

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is indebted to many people, both at Stanford and elsewhere, who have supported the efforts of the project in significant ways. First, and foremost, we'd like to thank Professor John Perry, who has served as the principal investigator on the SEP grants, provided high-level supervision on the project, serves as the SEP's advocate to the Stanford administration, and gave generously of his time in SEP fund-raising activities. After Perry served as the SEP's Faculty Sponsor for many years, the role finally turned over first to Helen Longino, and then to R. Lanier Anderson.

Web Design Assistance

In March 2014, the SEP launched a new website design. We are indebted to the team at Stanford Web Services, and especially Sara Worrell-Berg, Megan Miller, Anna Cobb, and Brian Young. They did a terrific job with the new design. In this connection, we are also indebted to Scott Stocker, Zach Chandler, Lisa Lapin, and John Etchemendy, for playing a role and helping to facilitate this initiative.

Fund-Raising Assistance

We are especially indebted to Patrick Byrne (Ph.D., Stanford, 1995) and The Byrne Foundation for a large and generous gift to the SEP, creating the John Perry Fund. The John Perry Fund forms an important part of the SEP's endowment. We are also deeply indebted to Michelle Wachs (J.D., Harvard, 1993) of Giving Solutions, whose tireless and enthusiastic efforts as the SEP's fund-raising consultant during the 2005-2006 and 2006-2007 academic years helped us achieve our fund-raising goals for those years. We were able to hire Michelle with funds from a generous grant by the Hewlett Foundation. We would also like to acknowledge the contribution of Javier Ergueta (M.B.A., Stanford, 1980), for his efforts and work in developing a business plan for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy during the first six months of 2002. Javier's time was paid for through a generous grant by the Mellon Foundation. Thanks go the following students in John Perry's Fall 2004 Proseminar, for their help and assistance in implementing an important element of the SEP's fund-raising plan: Dan Giberman, Tomohiro Hoshi, Alistair Isaac, Daniel Long, Lindsay McLeary, Sarah Paul, Josh Snyder, Quayshawn Spencer and Johanna Wolff.

Programming Assistance

The Associate Editor (Colin Allen) and the Senior Editor (Uri Nodelman) have been the Principal and Associate Perl Programmers, respectively, on this project since 1998. Paul Daniell not only developed a customized search engine for the SEP, but also developed the software that administers the Friends of the SEP Society. During the 2007-2008 and 2008-2009 years, Jesse Alama has contributed his programming skills, in addition to his document editing skills. Eric Hammer (Expedia.com) programmed on the project in its early years, from 1995 to 1997. During the 2000-2001 and 2001-2002 academic years, David James Anderson (M.A./Philosophy) wrote important Perl programs and made other contributions to the project. We'd also like to thank John MacFarlane for developing a program that produces PDF versions of SEP entries in two-column landscape mode.

Editorial Assistance

The SEP would also like to thank the following people: Nathan Tawil, Paul E. Oppenheimer, Jesse Alama, Ben Wolfson, Tamar Lando, Matthew Barrett, and Arezoo Islami have provided, and in some cases continue to provide, valuable editorial and document-editing assistance. Kirsta Anderson (M.A./Philosophy) served as Assistant Editor during the 2003-2004 academic year, and did an outstanding job in SEP communications and control, offering many suggestions on how to improve our workflow system. Also, Daniel McKenzie served as Assistant Editor during the 2004-2005 academic year, and did a great job juggling communications/control and copy-editing. Others, including Matthew Barrett and Justin Pront, have helped on a smaller scale with SEP editorial duties.

New Technologies Assistance

The Encyclopedia would like acknowledge and thank the researchers and programmers who are contributing to SEP-enhancement initiatives being pursued by the Indiana Philosophy Ontology project (InPhO) at Indiana University, directed by Colin Allen. Special thanks go to: Cameron Buckner, Ruth Eberle, Nubli Kasa, and Jaimie Murdock, Mathias Niepert, Scott Weingart. Using a combination of text mining, human feedback, and machine reasoning, the InPhO project is enhancing such critical functions as cross-referencing the SEP, classifying topics, and organizing its bibliographic database. We are grateful for the MathJax project which we are now starting to use for mathematical formatting in our entries. And we would also like to acknowledge John MacFarlane's work on pandoc, which has become an important part of our workflow in converting LaTeX document to HTML with MathJax.

The Encyclopedia would like to acknowledge the volunteer services of Gintautas Miliauskas, Greg Stokley, Jason Wu, Yong Wei Chong Gabrielle, and Emily Fox-Penner for carefully reading and copy-editing SEP entries and notifying us about typographical and other errors found therein. We'd like to thank Nathan Tawil, who helped design the Encyclopedia entry format when the project started in 1995, and who has assisted the Principal Editor in editing certain entries. We're also indebted to David Barker-Plummer, Mark Greaves, Emma Pease, Susanne Riehemann, and Lynn Allen for their many helpful suggestions concerning the Encyclopedia project and the construction of this Web site.

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About the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

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Welcome to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP), which as of March 2018, has nearly 1600 entries online. From its inception, the SEP was designed so that each entry is maintained and kept up-to-date by an expert or group of experts in the field.

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Denise Ferreira da Silva -- On Difference Without Separability

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Denise Ferreira da Silva -- On Difference Without Separability

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Excellent introduction to many of FdS's terms

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Denise Ferreira da Silva - On Difference withut Separability - 2016

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In this interview  Denise Ferreira da Silva discusses some of her ideas in relation to art. Thought I'd share, Ulrike

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In this interview  Denise Ferreira da Silva discusses some of her ideas in relation to art. Thought I'd share, Ulrike

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KS/SL: Starting off our inquiry into the philosophical, poethical, and artistic ramifications of your work, we want to ask: In your writing you problematize "racial critique" as something that does little more than diagnose devaluation. As far as we understand, your main opposition here is that racial critique remains entangled in the very universalist claims to truth that have characterized European modernity?

DFdS: When commenting on racial critique, I have in mind the kind of engagement modeled after Immanuel Kant's formulation of critique, which he describes as systematic exposition and assessment of the conditions of possibility for X; that is, of its grounds and limits. Since Descartes, but definitely from Kant on, this specific analytical procedure has supported the claim that the rational mind (reduced to understanding) has access to the universal laws of nature because it shares their formal constitution.

This presupposition is also shared by the kind of racial critique that stops at the diagnostic of the devaluation of human populations constructed as non-white/non-European. At its worst, it presents this devaluation as an effect of beliefs or ideology and, as such, a deviation from the universal (moral) principles said to rule modern existence; at its best, it presents devaluation as constitutive of modern thought, but then moves on to an argument based on the idea of incompletion (that universality is yet to be realized) or misapprehension (that a particular has mistakenly been taken for the universal). In both cases, universality is retained as the proper descriptor of the modern ethical program.

In so far as contemporary critical engagements - whether the Frankfurt School's, poststructuralism's, or Marxism's - are formal and borrow the format of the Kantian critique, they reproduce two movements that have been mapped out by Sylvia Wynter. The first one is what Wynter calls the secularization of rationality, and the second one the representation of the human through the workings of natural selection.

KS/SL: Could you give an example of these two movements?

DFdS: The first kind of racial critique I mention in my book Toward a Global Idea of Race is exemplified by the conception "racial discrimination." This tool of the sociology of race relations, prevalent in the USA in the 1940s/50s and '60s, captures an aspect of racial subjugation, which is in differential treatment, leading to the fact that the person and group discriminated against is barred from access to existing social benefits. Basically, the thesis behind the notion of racial discrimination is that it results from ignorance toward the racial subaltern conditions and a lack of enlightenment. As the theory goes, once the whole US population learned more about black folks' lives and were educated in their society's principles of universal freedom and equality, discrimination would disappear and universality both at the level of ideas and social functioning would be fully realized in the United States.

The concept of racism, in turn, exemplifies the second critique. The literature is extensive and varied and the task is complicated by the fact that racism is a concept that is elaborated in such sophisticated but distinct theories as Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism, Robert Blauner's Internal Colonialism, and Stuart Hall's article Race, Articulation, and Societies Structured in Dominance. Racism's origins are traced to a time in Europe before modernity, and its workings in the post-Enlightenment period usually seen as a result of a rallying by the state, capital, or interest groups (Oliver C. Cox, Michel Foucault, Aníbal Quijano).

To a lesser extent, the task is rendered difficult because of the more general tendency on the part of critical scholars to deploy racism as a descriptor of a social phenomenon that can be explained by the appropriate concept, such as class or ideology, for instance. Let me just say that to this day the best articulation of an analysis of racial subjugation - under the concept of racism - is Cedric Robinson's Black Marxism, precisely because he refuses to explain racial subjugation away as an aid to class exploitation. Tellingly, while his analysis does locate the origin of the notion of race in pre-modern Europe, what his tracing of the workings of race in merchant and industrial capital provides is the delineation of what he calls the Black Radical Tradition. Much like Frantz Fanon's, W. E. B. Dubois's, Hortense Spillers's, Saidiya Hartman's, Robin Kelley's, Nahum D. Chandler's, and Fred Moten's, Cedric Robinson's thought exemplifies the very tradition he has mapped, with a kind of racial critique that does not reproduce the reduction mentioned above.

KS/SL: Where do you see their most fundamental differences to a reductionist approach?

DFdS: Foregrounding racial violence (and not racial discrimination or racial exclusion), all of these works expose - in different ways, of course - that the principles of universal equality and universal freedom are not the ultimate grounds for modern existence, but that, in fact, their circulation is contingent upon the deployment of racial difference and cultural difference in order to delineate the proper ethical domain of application of the universal principles under which colonial juridical forms of total violence prevail. Read, for instance, Fanon's statement in the first chapter of The Wretched of the Earth (and I recommend the 1960s translation by Constance Farrington; the new translation is appalling) on the lack of an ideological moment of domination in the colonial context, since there, power is exercised through the weapons of the police and the army alone, without the words and ideas of the priest or the teacher.

KS/SL: How does art as critique fall prey to the limitations you just outlined in "racial critique"? Where - if anywhere - do you see alternative figures of aesthetic radicalization for contemporary art and aesthetic practices?

DFdS: I cannot answer the first part of this question because it does not work. It does not work because, as I tried to say in my previous answer, racial critique is just a variation of a type of engagement - that is, critique - as it was performed by Kant but also by Marx. In any event, because critique seems to be all we have, it obviously informs any work of art that explicitly attends to earlier and contemporary colonial or racial violence, global capital's current modes of exploitation, expropriation, and extraction; to the work the state performs for global capital, to the workings of cis-heteropatriarchy. It doesn't make sense to expect otherwise.

At the same time, I find that something else happens when criticality comes through creative work, when the imagination pursues the ends of critique. However, I find that to get it we may have to release the artwork from the grips of understanding (which is the mental faculty to which criticality is attributed) and allow it to follow the imagination - incidentally, my "we" refers to the artist, the critic, and the audience.

KS/SL: You attack specifically the idea of a "transparent subject" in Western modernity, but you also mention the critique of exactly this notion of the subject as constitutive for much continental philosophy throughout the 20th century. Michel Foucault or Monique Wittig, among many others, seem not unrelated to what Fred Moten formulated in a lecture on "Blackness and Nonperformance": "The subject who was never here, cannot then disappear, it can only haunt."

DFdS: Absolutely. Though I can locate what I am trying to do in a line of interrogation that passes through classical sociological and anthropological theorizing, as well as psychoanalysis and linguistics. I am much more interested in making sense of how the colonial (juridic and economic) context has done most of the haunting (of modern thought); it has been haunting every attempt at delineating the subject since the 16th century. For this is the sole reason why the subject could be articulated as such; that is, the subject could never "land," and be there, for had he been "there" he would not be transparent (self-determined and self-knowing).

KS/SL: Departing but also differing from French feminist writings, you state that your critique of self-consciousness "privileges exteriority as a determining moment in signification." Could you elaborate a bit more on the idea of exteriority?

DFdS: I quickly realized that my study of the notions of race and then nation had taken me beyond sociological and anthropological texts, where I thought I would find all that was necessary for the assembly of the concept in the 19th and 20th centuries. In those texts I read for gathering the US and Brazilian national discourses - published between 1875 and the late 1940s - many (if not most) times these two terms (race and nation) were employed as if they were interchangeable. I say as if because there was of course a difference in terms of the mode of address; that is, the nation usually appears in self-descriptions and calls to unified action, while race appeared in comparisons and attempts to make distinctions. In the case of the United States, the comparison was to England, of course, while, Brazil, on the other hand, was compared to the United States. Now, these two usages of these concepts at that moment, as we know, were collapsed in the German National Socialist discourse, in which the official (state) rendering of the nation was grounded in "purity." The latter is supported by the notion of racial difference; that is, it does not primarily invoke a common past and a common future, but an exclusive territory and a unique body. This means that racial difference allows for the articulation of exteriority in a kind of text - which I call the national text - that requests the formal position of interiority. For this reason, in the effort to make sense of these modes of address and their effectivity, both when articulated separately and in tandem, I had to move "backward," from the 19th-century science of man's construction of the body as a biological concept to George Cuvier's "science of life," in order to find how the biological itself was constructed.

What I found, among other things, is that the exteriority that the 19th-century version of racial difference conveyed had been crucial to modern thought all along - because it supported its claim to capturing the truth of all things in the world. But it was only in the post-Enlightenment period that the manufacturing of a scientific formulation of racial difference was possible, which deployed this difference (exteriority) in the writings of man/the human, without violating the attribute (self-determination) that supports the claim that the latter occupies a unique position in the world.

KS/SL: In line with Fanon, and more recently, writers like Frank B. Wilderson III, you advocate for an "end to this world." For someone like Wilderson, poetry as a mode of written language becomes a praxis for radically repositioning language, and for Saidiya Hartman, literature occupies a similar role. What is for you a medium of "ending," or an artistic practice of "ending" distinct from, say, deconstruction?

DFdS: I think the key point here is whether the "ending," which is the only reasonable thing one can ask of this racial capitalist world, must happen within or outside something, and whether this something that is retained is new or a part of this world.

For Fanon, man/the human is that which would be made anew after decolonization, and for Wilderson and Hartman, language and literature might play the same role; that is, of that "something."

I am very worried that we may not be able to stop the end of this world in which we exist; I am worried about the demolition of democratic structures that, though limited and perverse, provided at least an anchor to claims for social and global justice (from indigenous, migrant, LGBTI*, non-white populations everywhere) and could (at times) limit total violence; I am worried that insects and other species are becoming extinct, that rivers are drying up, that oceans are being suffocated by plastic, that fracking is destroying and threatening to contaminate large areas of underground water. This is a long list. However, I am invested - because I don't see how we will be able to exist otherwise - in the end of the world as we know it.

This new world will have to be rebuilt and recuperated from the destruction caused by the extractive tools and mechanisms of global capital.

KS/SL: Where in this ending do you place art and philosophy?

DFdS: If power is everywhere, basically because it is (as) everything as Foucault claims, then the task of ending can only and necessarily happen within and against the given institutional and monetary frameworks of art, the university, and (dare I say) social media. In addition to the major revolts and rebellions we know from history books, ways of ending also include minor revolts, moments, gestures of refusal and refuge. That is, I don't see why, like the university, contemporary art cannot also be a place for black study, in the terms proposed by Moten and Harney and practiced by black feminism.

KS/SL: In your text Toward a Black Feminist Poethics, you write that a black feminist poethical reading reflects on the artwork in relation to its arsenal of raciality but also considers how the artwork refuses to simply become an object of "empirical anthropology." What exactly do you mean by "empirical anthropology"?

DFdS: There is no short answer. But let me say from the outset that my concern is with the artist, in particular; with how, much like academics (and I am including myself here), the work of artists of color is mediated by the anthropological notion of cultural difference. When compared to the early 20th century, a major difference is that on the one hand the focus is less on the forms, materials, etc. than on the artist herself, while on the other hand there is also an emphasis placed on extraction, dispossession, and oppression. This is very important politically. Unfortunately, however, the radical force of this double movement is always at risk of dissipating under the pressure of the market logic that prevails everywhere - a logic that requires a great deal, including simplification.

There are many consequences of this, including the recourse to the familiar tropes of representation, which are not only already anthropological but also end up confirming this basis. For instance, there have been a few occasions on which I experienced or witnessed others forced into the position of having to resist being addressed as a "native informant" (to use Spivak's apt term), even when what they were articulating was an analysis of that very condition. That is, their critical response to being treated as "native informants" was taken as an "authentic" expression of their "native"/diverse experience. Incidentally, these occasions were not very different from those I found myself in as an academic. These are dangerous times. More immediately, I find there is a danger of missing the opportunity to take advantage of the radical openings that art can engender. It may seem a naïve statement. It is not. Back in the 1980s, ushered in by social movements and with the intellectual support of ideas deployed by a few European philosophers, academics in the social sciences and humanities announced the arrival of a postmodern moment, which would eventually transform academic and other institutional settings in North America, Australia, and New Zealand dramatically. As far as I know, the original notion of diversity and multiculturalism (articulated by Left or progressive North American thinkers) never quite made it to Europe, and only very recently has intersectionality entered the academic discourse. Of course, once these notions were appropriated and instrumentalized by the state, institutions, and corporations, it all went downhill. Still, some of us who made it through that period are still here, occupying spaces that would not have existed otherwise, now in the position of creating spaces that would not have been imaginable.

KS/SL: Do you have an idea of how to overcome the split between the global as universal and the singular artistic practices that are informed by social and political issue and practices, but which appear stripped of their complexity under the guise of the global as merely "culturally diverse"?

DFdS: Let's try this. The global is not a universal, a formal entity; the global is a material context, a configuration, which includes juridical mechanisms of total violence and legal constraint, economic mechanisms (extractive, industrial, and financial) that facilitate expropriation and exploitation, and the symbolic tools of raciality that delimit the reach of the modern ethical program ruled by the notion of humanity and the protections it enjoys.

That being the case, we are still able to think of a singular artistic practice as exemplary of a given moment (a point in space-time) in this configuration. There is no ontological (or ethical or aesthetic) role for cultural difference here. To be sure, this is what I find in Otobong Nkanga's, the Otolith Group's, and Carlos Motta's work, to name a few - that is, the refusal of cultural difference as the primary descriptor of that which they are imaging.

KS/SL: "Affectablity," not opacity, is your counter term for "transparency."

With regard to the recent rise of right-wing movements, parties, and governments, you refer to the "loss" of the position of a transparent I : "In the presence of racial difference, European (white) subjects no longer occupy the place of the transparent I; they become affectable subjects, gazing at the horizon of death, the ones whose ideas and actions are always already determined by the presence of an inferior 'other,' a racial subaltern whose body and mind refer to other global regions." It seems that under contemporary conditions, the "affectability" moves toward the establishment of ever-more subaltern positions. Is there a common ground (which does not mean a common reason) that could provide a starting point for breaking free from this continuous shift toward an increasingly affectable subject? We were thinking about Fanon and his idea of a better humanism, without having defined the foundation on which such a humanism could be based, or directed toward (if required)?

DFdS: This is the question, isn`t it? I mean, a possible formulation of the question is - and I think this is Sylvia Wynter's - whether the human is the sine qua non of any ethical program that takes into account the conjugated (in the sense of chemistry) modes of subjugation that proliferate in the global present. In my thinking experiments I try to find ways of escaping dichotomies - such as interiority/exteriority, self-determination/affectability, temporality/spatiality, etc. - that have been so central to the delimiting of man's/the human's privilege.

Of course, it is not a question of thinking without exteriority, but of thinking, as I try to do with "fractal thinking," about different scales simultaneously: cosmic, historic, organic, and quantic. For instance, while time (sequentiality) becomes irrelevant at the cosmic register, space doesn't make sense at the quantic level because whatever happens at that level cannot be attributed to something that has extension. "Deep Implicancy" as "Radical Immanence" is for me a way of imaging the world without the idea of relations, which always presuppose that things are inherently separate or separable. What if thinking took a step back, found itself as a part of the whole mess of it all that is the plenum and became happy with providing momentary resolutions at each instance according to an intention mediated by the given context?

KS/SL: One last question. At the moment we are witnessing the return of an overtly racist politics, declaimed by the heads of purportedly democratic states. In one of your earlier texts, No-Bodies: Law, Raciality and Violence, you talk about the "replacement of the phantasmagoric 'terrorist' towards the ubiquitous 'undocumented immigrant' under the 'security turn.'" You are referring to the military as implementing state violence against its own inhabitants, and you talk especially about the favelas in Rio de Janeiro, which as you state are called the Gaza Strip of Brazil by the locals. Then, of course, we have Orban, Trump, Bolsonaro et al. Is Bolosnaro just another, more radical player in this "security turn"?

DFdS: As you already noticed, Bolsonaro is merely another name in an already too-long list of heads of state who can be distinguished by their unabashed call for the deployment of total violence - whether of the state or of white nationalists - against distinct economically dispossessed populations of color. This is another moment in the security regime that we saw emerge after 9/11 - it has taken almost 20 years! In Toward a Global Idea of Race, I identify the two logics of racial subjugation from which we started: the logic of exclusion and the logic of obliteration. One of my arguments in the book is that both have operated throughout the 20th century and early 21st century, but the logic of obliteration, for many reasons, was given less attention, mostly because its function was replaced by the role of criminalization.

For most of the 20th century, cultural difference - according to the thesis that racial subjugation creates pathological social subjects - played a crucial role in explaining racial violence away as a response to criminal behavior on the part of the racial subaltern.

Well, we know all too well how it works; the scores of cases of police killings of unarmed black persons and the courts' acquittal of them are very clear. Anyway, I think that what is happening in Brazil - which is what has been happening in the Philippines for a while now - is an intensification of the logic of obliteration, which is announced at the same time as the new administration brings about the end of the last remaining labor protections, as well as the elimination of constitutionally guaranteed land rights for indigenous and quilombo communities.

KS/SL: Is this Brazil now?

DFdS: Let me end with a few questions: What happens when the state's primary role becomes not to protect the nation (the people) and their interests but to protect the corporation (their investors) and their interests? What kind of political counter discourses and practices are required to face this aspect of the "corporation-state" that is being put in place in Brazil, which can only be called the privatization (at the level of the individual citizen) of security through legal mechanisms that make the legal possession of guns accessible to a larger contingent of the population and expand the number of cases to which self-defense as a legal defense applies? What becomes of our charges of police brutality when the current Brazilian Minister of Justice releases a new security policy, which in addition to those conditions outlined above makes it the letter of law for police officers to shoot to kill on site/sight in their incursions into economically dispossessed urban spaces? And I have not mentioned the increased number of threats of, and actual violent actions taken against, indigenous peoples, LGBTI*, and environmental activists in Brazil in the past months. The very idea of social justice is in danger. The concept of social justice fits well within the nation state. But the security state is now firmly in place, with the sole mandate of protecting the economy; it is the "corporation-state," whose primary roles for global capital are to create juridical instruments and structures and mechanisms that facilitate extraction, expropriation, and exploitation and protect the interest of corporations and their investors. What are we going to do?

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An End to "this" World Denise Ferreira da Silva interviewed by Susanne Leeb and Kerstin Stakemeier

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KS/SL: Starting off our inquiry into the philosophical, poethical, and artistic ramifications of your work, we want to ask: In your writing you problematize "racial critique" as something that does little more than diagnose devaluation. As far as we understand, your main opposition here is that racial critique remains entangled in the very universalist claims to truth that have characterized European modernity?

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Denise Ferreira da Silva on Hacking the Subject

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BCRW's newest working group, Practicing Refusal: Thinking Beyond Resistance, kicks off with a public lecture by distinguished ethicist and feminist theorist, Denise Ferreira da Silva. Her talk engages what she sees as the fundamental challenge posed by black feminism: the questioning of a feminist critical grammar that re-produces any 'proper' apprehension of the female/the feminine and exposing the limits of what constitutes a 'proper subject'. Her presentation aims to dissolve what she calls the patriarchal form of the subject. Refusing gender as the only critical tool for describing females' socio-historical trajectories, Ferreira da Silva extends Hortense Spillers' reconfiguration of 'woman', the female and the feminine, in ways that dis/order of the modern grammar of the patriarch.

Denise Ferreira da Silva is associate professor at the Institute for Research on Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Social Justice, University of British Columbia. She is the author of Toward a Global Idea of Race.

More from this event:

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Denise Ferreira da Silva - Hacking the Subject: Black Feminism, Refusal, and the Limits of Critique | Barnard Center for Research on Women

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BCRW's newest working group, Practicing Refusal: Thinking Beyond Resistance, kicks off with a public lecture by distinguished ethicist and feminist theorist, Denise Ferreira da Silva. Her talk engages what she sees as the fundamental challenge posed by black feminism: the questioning of a feminist critical grammar that re-produces any 'proper' apprehension of the female/the feminine and exposing the limits of what constitutes a 'proper subject'.

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In this conversation between Otolith Group and Denise Ferreira da Silva they discuss the Equation of Value.

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In this conversation between Otolith Group and Denise Ferreira da Silva they discuss the Equation of Value.

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Department of Xenogenesis: The Equation of Value

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A beautiful  conversation between Valentina Desideri and Denise Ferreira da Silva in the context of Poethical Tarot --where they address a political or ethical question through an expanded Tarot, Reiki, Astrology collective reading. 

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A beautiful  conversation between Valentina Desideri and Denise Ferreira da Silva in the context of Poethical Tarot --where they address a political or ethical question through an expanded Tarot, Reiki, Astrology collective reading. 