Expecting Blows: Sylvia Wynter, Sociogeny, and Exceeding Marxist Social Form

This article examines the relationship between Sylvia Wynter’s sociogenic principle and the question of “social form” in the critique of political economy. Despite their diverging emphases (the symbolic over the material, the slave over the laborer, sociogeny over social form), both Wynter and Marx pursue theoretical modes of inquiry that account for how empty reality principles reside over the reproduction of historical content and consciousness. In turning to the disavowed terms that heterodox Marxism, from value-form to world-systems theory, seeks to resuscitate, Wynter retains elements of Marxism’s interest in social forms reimagines the terms through which Marx’s critique can be made legible. Wynter does not just pluralize Marxist categories; she posits a new totality (the plantation paradigm) that begins and stays with negation as the liminal condition blackness incarnates. Her indeterminate break from Marxism, and its English feudal and industrial centers of gravity, thus opens political thought through a sustained agnostic interest in the transcendental horizon of “being” and “non-being” as such, exploring how “being” presents to us its own conditions for understanding its political, historical, and material form

‘Pathology without Pathos’: Transvaluating Blackness and Metaphors of Disease

In this article, I diagnose anti-black determinants that link and delink black populations to the discourse of disease, focusing on the AIDS crisis and epidemiological genealogies of causation. Against the pathologizing of black cultural choices, the liberal-Left has disaggregated the conjunction of blackness with disease. In implying an extra-social element to race, however, such a strategy runs the risk of conceptually and politically removing race from the conditions of its emergence: the violent global abstractive forces of slavery that experimentally deployed blackness as disease, infection, virus, risk, and contaminant in the first instance. Drawing from Saidiya Hartman’s theorization of ‘fungibility’ and Sylvia Wynter’s reading of ‘bios’, I propose an alternative to de-pathologizing. If race does not precede its cohabitation with slavery’s herculean experiment in human sorting, then a more explanatory starting point might be forged by diagnosing the circular causal mechanisms by which blackness causes its own pathology. I close with a call to explore ways the disease metaphor has been activated for black revolutionary struggle—how slavery’s biological experiment in controlling human reproduction (life, death, and sexuality) is always also turned against its founding violence as an emancipatory biological weapon

The Idea of Slavery: Abstraction, Analogy, and Anti-Blackness

"The Idea of Slavery: Abstraction, Analogy, and Anti-Blackness" retheorizes the history of the idea of slavery by illuminating the interplay between the three poles that make up my subtitle. Instead of conceiving of slavery as "timeless," or as historically particular, I highlight the effects of the historical abstraction of slavery (from the contingency of social status to the necessity of ontology) and trace the origins of this abstraction in the materialization of anti-blackness and the increasing analogizing of slaveness. In my survey of "the timeless slave," from Aristotle to Arendt and Agamben, I argue that Aristotelian philosophy only elaborated anti-blackness as a "virtual" problem. Blackness, both inside and outside the modern vortex, comes to function less as the negation of sovereignty or subjectivity than as an absent form whose "figurative capacities" sustain the state, the commodity form, and the institutions of civil society. By mobilizing Marx's concept "real abstraction," I provide a window into the centrality of slavery for the consolidation of the modern episteme, and because this window prefigures our interpretative frameworks, I shift the totality from capitalism to anti-blackness. The black slave toggles the abstraction of slavery, registering the modern materialization of metaphor and bearing what appear to be constitutive aporias.My first chapter, "The Natural Slave," thus marks attempts to return to the Greek concept of the political as gestures immanent to the problem and development of anti-blackness, rather than solutions to it. Subsequent chapters take up an intellectual field (political theory and political economy, respectively), situate racial slavery at that field's conditions of emergence, and trace figural distortions to slavery, refracting attendant methodological, political, and philosophical questions through contemporary debates on the status of race and the potential of republicanism in the Atlantic world. These key discursive fields offer up theoretical objects—the "political slavery" of tyranny and the "wage slavery" of capitalism—whose symptomatic orbit around blackness generates modern man, fashions his racial variants, and comes to mediate the formal complexities of time, space, being, representation, and death