Abstract

In Epidermal Capital: Formations of Subjectivity in Political Philosophy and Culture I argue that the formation of racial identities and subjectivities is, in large part, a double process: material and philosophical. The material part of this double process is manifested as the unequal relations of production, distribution, and consumption of social goods and capital which objectively enable and circumscribe the life chances of specific identities. The philosophical part of this double is the process that legitimizes relations of domination and subordination through, in the words of Frantz Fanon, epidermalization. The processes of epidermalization produce and reiterate the idea of race and the practices of racism that overdetermine an embodied subject's relation to the material and political structures of society. ;In Epidermal Capital I make three provisional arguments about the ontology of the black subject in modern political philosophy. First, I argue that the problematic of subjectivity, that is, in large part, the subject of liberalism as a political project and of post-enlightenment philosophy in general, is grounded by the exclusion of blackness from the legitimated problematic of modern subjectivity. The consequence is the formulation of whiteness and its inherent equation with subjectivity. Second, the formation of blackness as ontologically distinct from the problematic of legitimate subjectivity and its exclusion from consideration as a subject worthy of full participation in the public sphere are grounded in the arrest of blackness. That is, blackness is grounded in the official and anecdotal literature of representations and practices that define the placement of blackness as outside of history; as naturally primitive; and as incapable of forming rational judgments. And third, the arrest of blackness is merged with bodies identified racially as black through a complex series of violence-inflected institutional and cultural representations and practices that effectively place blackness and black people in a precarious relation to the idea and manifestation of liberal subjectivity