Abstract

The four essays collected in this dossier are directed upon the contemporary understandings of blackness, as an ontology, a phenomenology, or a historicity. In the order of their presentation they encompass and situate what seems first to limit black being or overflow it, but which, when questioned, that is, disclosed, or unconcealed, does not fit into this logos, nor is ordered by it, even making what is most discernable about blackness in its past, future, or present, seem imaginary, moored in a non-present,and presence, but in ways which make the non-being that marks blackness as sign, affect, or speaking being, unthinkable except as an appearing, a manifestation, an identity.As a dossier directed upon the present philosophical understanding of blackness, each paper seeks to unanchor blackness from the meanings and presuppositions that it normally calls forth. Beyond what is discernable, or ready-made, each paper addresses structures that make (and have made) blackness discernable as the always given to be seen, as meaningless speech, as pathology, as a concept beyond reason.The dossier opens with a question: what kind of disturbance does blackness present to being? Why does it seem to madden reason, or call forth frenzy? In Calvin Warren’s essay, “The Karen Call,” what comes into correlation with blackness are various kinds of emergency that structure white thought and presence but that belie witnessing and intelligibility, and in whose chain of significations can be discerned an ontological privilege that constitutes the world. To appear emergent, it seems, all blackness has to do is become one with the myth that bans or compromises it; a manifestation in which subject-object relations are already polarized by the dangers that deploy it in dramas of emergency. Once blackness becomes emergent, there is no escape, for it comes up against what Warren, reading Heidegger against the grain, suggests is a racial destiny of Being. To appear black is forthwith to resemble an es gibt that is indissociable from threat, falsehood, fantasy, and obliteration. To that extent, blackness attests to a kind of ontological emergency without surcease or hope, and one whose trace remains in every moment or glimpse; whose technical modality and structure always returns us to the call that is neither speech nor gaze, word nor symbol, but represents an extimacy that is undeconstructable, beyond utterance, meaning, or reparation.Such extimacy seems to induce a crisis in the philosophical notion of being itself. In Axelle Karera’s essay, “Paraontology,” the question asked is why blackness cannot be contained or fitted into ontology itself; or, if philosophy is ontology, why does blackness seem to signify an irreducible resistance to it?How does such resistance occur? If blackness can only be presented as “paraontology,” a word that seems to shelter ontology at the same time as it presents the search for a new order of being, what does the para teach us about blackness as disorder, resistance, or identity? What is its philosophical genealogy and affiliation, and why does the para itself seem to never get beyond its own conciliation, or filiation to philosophy, whose ordering and racist historicity thereby remains the seme and mark of the para as interval, trope, and index? Or, put more simply, can blackness ever resist its own resistance as trope, conjuncture, or representation? Retracing that genealogy through the work of Oskar Becker, Karera uncovers a surreptitious repetition in black uses of the word, in whose weave can be discerned a fascist interference that not only undermines the fugitivity of the resistance so claimed, but one that unwittingly repeats a fascist ontology of world, history, and being.1 It’s a startling, deeply disturbing claim. But the apparent echoing of the Heideggerian bell in black significations of ontology suggests that what is being reabsorbed here is not so much a radical difference but a concept that remains justified and in fee to, pardoned and annulled by, a white notion of being. What, then, can it mean to think blackness as para? Nothing more than a philosophical confusion that confuses l’être qui fuit, that is, the lack that Lacan says cannot be completed or resisted, for an appositional fantasy of displacement. Here everything that is deemed black has to be made meaningful in apposition to ontology, but everything that is black must also, it seems, always return apposition to the white para of ontology; to be black and appositional would, it seems, produce only the disavowal of the philosophical genealogy that always already determines it.One would be right to distrust such claims—the moralism of the refusal, and the scandal of the faux resistance by which the para hides behind its own whited-out screen.In the third contribution to the dossier, the question asked is what would it mean for blackness to repair itself, to let go or retrieve and so redeem its own historical conjuncture? How do we refer to an irreparable past, that is, a past that keeps on coming back, but one that has no sign or signified, no memory that can recapture or reveal it, or simply rejoin us to it without remainder? Rinaldo Walcott’s essay, “‘Retrospective Significance,’” revisits the reparations debate as a question of black being. Instead of repair, he finds desolation and emptiness, or what he calls a staggeringly incoherent rhetoric of coherency. It’s a paradox that addresses what it means to remember or to forget a nothing; if blackness is nothing, how does one reconnect with it, bond with it, compensate it in its historic devastation? What would it mean to receive meaning from such devastation, to express it if this nothingness is absolute, or absolutely valueless? If ontology is a structure, then blackness, Walcott suggests, expresses nothing less than a “slave-ness” that continues to confront and disturb us absolutely, irrevocably. As such slave-ness is the trace that remains as a sign of the irreparable. As a trace, and not a sign, slave-ness becomes the primordial signifier of being, nation, history, and diaspora. But it is what makes it irrecuperable that defines its value and difficulty for the very language of reparation. Walcott pursues this difficult, enigmatic thread through the work of black thinkers on diaspora and identity. He concludes: black being cannot be dissociated from the disturbance it offers value, conscience, and any thought of alterity.The final and fourth contribution returns to the question of blackness as the trace or thread (the monstration) of being. How does one follow the thread (montrer) of blackness if it is always already withdrawn from being? David Marriott’s essay, “Ontology and Lalangue,” evokes Lacan’s concept of lalangue in pursuit of this enigmatic equivocation between letter and signifier, philosophy and psychoanalysis. Showing how both discourses have sought to master this exorbitance as master and/or free it as slave, I show how blackness is extinguished by the very words used to precipitate it into being. The slavish audacity of this lalangue is then shown to disarticulate, or more exactly, withdraw from ontology, but only so that whiteness can be presented and proclaimed all the more as the un-representable truth and logic of Dasein. This way of excluding blackness while preserving whiteness is not only central to philosophical and psychoanalytic understandings of language, Marriott argues, but this way of manifesting itself without manifesting itself is also crucial to the racialization of the logos as such.What is essential here is the way a meaning that is beyond meaning or representation is inserted into a problematic of mastery and servitude that advances-conceals a racial genealogy but in ways that makes the being of blackness an enigma. As such, blackness becomes an exorbitance that is always effaced in its monstration. More, its revelation must necessarily be unrecognized as the very locus of knowledge and truth. In that sense, what would it mean to figure, or to speak, this n’est pas without the consolation of being, meaning, truth, or logic? What would it mean to represent it as situated or defined by the language of ontology? Is black speaking being always in a relationship to and simultaneously the manifestation of a lalangue of lalangue?