boundto(leap)

afropessimism. blackened space. black vestibularity.

[myminorityfeelsminor]

- Jatella

[xuperjr]

[anarkittyy]

In your view, how is “civil society” faring at the moment?

The police stations may be burning and the anarchists might be fighting the pigs in hand to hand combat, but civil society itself is actually being strengthened through these pitched battles, because the idea of democracy is being battled over so fiercely (whether it’s the need to get rid of Trump or the demand for freedom of assembly in places like Portland) that, ironically, the American project, civil society, is being shored up and reinforced even as blood is being spilt in the streets and teargas chokes the air. —-Frank Wilderson in conversation with Aria Dean

[publicatiosui]

"Isn’t this the answer to the question “what are we?” We are habits, nothing but habits—the habit of saying “I.” Perhaps, there is no more striking answer to the problem of the Self."

Deleuze, on Hume

[shitiunderline]

“I shall risk this proposition: each time forgiveness is at the service of a finality, be it noble and spiritual (atonement or redemption, reconciliation, salvation), each time that it aims to re-establish a normality (social, national, political, psychological) by a work of mourning, by some therapy or ecology of memory, then the ‘forgiveness’ is not pure - nor is its concept. Forgiveness is not, it should not be, normal, normative, normalizing. It should remain exceptional and extraordinary, in the face of the impossible: as if it interrupted the ordinary course of historical temporality.”

— Jacques Derrida, Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness 

[superheroesincolor]

“I sure did live in this world.“ 

"…What have you got to show for it?" 

"Show? To who? I got my mind. And what goes on in it. Which is to say, I got me." 

"Lonely, ain’t it?" 

"Yes. But my lonely is mine. Now your lonely is somebody else’s. Made by somebody else and handed to you.”

           -Toni Morrison

[SuperheroesInColor linktr.ee / FB / IG / Twitter / Twitch / Support ]

[jvmdf]

[allthings2911]

R.I.P. YOUNG DOLPH

[philosophybits]

“I am not a prisoner of History. I must not look for the meaning of my destiny in that direction. I must constantly remind myself that the real leap consists of introducing invention into life. In the world I am heading for, I am endlessly creating myself.”

— Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks

[boundto-leap]

the Fanonian leap is the inspiration for this blog space. as David Marriott reminds us:

“Invention, because it is a radical transformation, is not reducible to economy or strategy, and therefore, we might want to say, yet another form of political calculation. Nor is it a mode for utopia, whose possibility can now b resurrected in a myth of perfectibility, when the oppressed take a dialectical leap into the ‘the open air of history.’

This is why invention is not reducible to any kind of teleological schema. Despite the primary role which history plays in the meaning of colonial subjection, clinging to its truth or whatever happens to be regarded as its truth can only be imprisoning, or backward-looking, for the inventor.

Although none of Fanon’s texts are explicitly devoted to this configuration, the ethical-political implications of invention can be seen throughout Fanon’s work, although it is less obvious what these implications might be. I want to argue that this situation is already inventive, insofar as it gives rise in Fanon’s work to a singular politics of invention, and one premised on a leap that is neither a catastrophe or a fall, advent or realization and is mostly incomprehensible to what came before.

From there it is but a step to the notion that invention *is* revolution and that the true task of politics is to embrace or demand this imperious leap. Political reinvention, on this view, begins with interruption or embrace and not memory or recollection, and cannot but appear as violent to the use of traditional concepts, in politics, of negation and affirmation.

Therefore, if one says—as Fanon has just said—that this invention can never be ‘enslaved’ by the past, and it’s meaning circumscribed by history, what the leap implies is a situation of radical indecision whose emergence introduces something entirely new into the world”

From “No Lords A-Leaping: Fanon, CLR James, and the Politics of Invention”

No Lords A-Leaping: Fanon, C.L.R. James, and the Politics of Invention

What happens to Fanonism when, instead of resistance or liberation, it becomes a discourse of invention? What happens to Fanon’s critique of

[stream]

Atlanta S01E09 “Juneteenth”

[negrosunshine]

“…nothing is ever made available only to black people, no matter how hard we may try to cultivate the esoteric or mimic the proprietary. We have no sanctuary for such contemplation. I do not think black artists are saying that this is their exclusive province, but rather that they wrestle with the ethical question of representing the victims and effects of anti-black violence in ways that few non-black people (and maybe even many black people) ever come to appreciate. Meanwhile, what is taken to be black is taken for granted, openly available to all. That is a matter of virtually unrepresentable power, but it is also a structural impossibility to forestall the dissemination of signs, for better or worse.”

— Jared Sexton, “The Rage: Some Closing Comments on ‘Open Casket’”

[gravalicious]

“What characterizes the discourse of white supremacy and antiblackness is a certain superintensity of attention, an exorbitant single-mindedness concerning the centrality of interracial sexuality to all things. It lingers too long on the topic, looks and speaks too often, with too much passion, at scenes of “frenzied, interminable copulation” (Young 1995, 181). In fact, white supremacy and antiblackness seem to exist in large part through this prolonged activity, perhaps even as this very mode of watching, ranting, and brooding: white supremacy and antiblackness as surveillance, extraordinary vision, an unending meditation. To repeat: the obsession with inter-racial sexuality is far more than a preoccupation or a lurid fascination. It is an essential social and psychical process, a political operation of the first order. It is the proper occupation of the subjects of white supremacy. Without this obsession, there would be no markers of identity, no conceptual matrix to determine the bounds of race and gender at least. That is to say, we obsess necessarily over interracial sexuality to the extent that “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy” (hooks 1992) structures our social formation even as the stakes of this common obsession vary radically depending on who is in question, which subjects, where, and when.”

— Jared Sexton - Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism (2008)

[notchainedtotrauma]

“Black is generous and generative, inclusive and encompassing. Black is color, noncolor, and all colors. All colors are initially, eventually black, but they cannot give or give back unless and until they see themselves and others as such. Black is and is not (only) itself. To see or not to see is the question of blackness itself: “You could build a world out of need or you could hold / everything black and see.”

— from All Black Everything by Jared Sexton

[gravalicious]

“To speak in more personal terms – and autobiography will return as a question throughout – for some twenty years now my researches have been concerned with the history of black thought, without my being altogether convinced that history or thought could ever grasp this thing called blackness. I should like to say that this situation is one not of ambivalence but of the impure relation of blackness to thought, which involves the way in which blackness is conceived and through which it is often represented, which is at once a metaphoric form and politico ontological concept. This notion is that of a void that arises in the midst of being and that reveals something fallen or waiting to fall.[4] Not only is blackness considered fallen, but even the concept of its existence has no meaning prior to this fall, since it posits a fallenness that, even before it happens, has always already fallen and so knows itself to be an event that never as such happens but is always awaited. This is the case (casus) of blackness – meaning its fall or lapsus – whose occurrence has been historically determined as a void haunting spirit, concept, or representation, and that has come to signify its own absence, or absence itself. No salvation is expected for this fallenness, no redemption for its advent, no recognition for its nothingness. I do not believe, as a matter of fact, that any historical work on the notion of blackness can proceed without considering this image (or the ideas by which we recognise the metaphor), nor do I believe that the representational image of blackness, heir of a certain metaphysics, at once generic and formal, ideological, and abstract, can be divested of its notion, which preserves it from history without deflecting it toward meaning. Hence, in order to deal with this historical notion of representation, that blackness must, in time, correspond with a fall that occurs even before its advent – a fall that, as we know, has always been vertiginously marked by an X, in the sense of an abyssal structure – it is this image that I seek to question or, more specifically, cast doubt on: the notion of a fallenness always awaited, which was more an image of desire than it ever was a political or historical truth.”

— David Marriott - The X of Representation: Rereading Stuart Hall [New Formations, Number 96/97, March 2019, pp. 177-228(52)]

[lefildariane]

Derrida (Kirby Dick & Amy Ziering Kaufman, 2003)

[oncleo]

“« La négativité a toujours été déterminée par la dialectique — c'est à dire par la métaphysique — comme travail au service de la constitution du sens. Avouer la négativité en silence, c'est accéder à une dissociation de type non classique entre la pensée et le langage. Et peut-être entre la pensée et la philosophie comme discours ; en sachant que ce schisme ne peut se dire, s'y effaçant, que dans la philosophie »”

— Derrida, L’écriture et la différence, “Cogito et histoire de la folie”, note p. 55.

[endlessandrea]

"In writing The Anarchy of Colored Girls Assembled in a Riotous Manner what I wanted to make visible is a long history, a long tradition of Black women’s radical anti-state struggles. There is a way these struggles fall out of view, because they are illegible to the interpretive grids of a Marxist tradition and even to the grid of a certain Black historiography, that is looking for signs of activity and agency under the aegis of the Black worker. Very much in the spirit of Fugitive Feminism, I am looking at forms of practice that are trying to flee certain organised terms for making sense of them. One might be the category of 'woman', another might be the category of 'worker', another might be the category of 'citizen'. So, I am thinking about The Anarchy of Colored Girls as really trying to unearth and tap into an imagination of freedom that is so much more capacious than what we usually imagine: the desire for a radical other way of being in the world. The desire for a different planetary set of arrangements. For the most part, people don’t imagine that ordinary folks have that capacity for imagination. That they don’t have desires that are that enormous. Looking at everyday practice, I try to attend to and unearth those dreams that fueled their waywardness. A waywardness that could only be understood as criminality, or pathology, or disorder, or feeble-mindedness, as opposed to waywardness as the latent text to a practice of creating the social otherwise, of living the social otherwise.”

— Hartman, Saidiya V. (2018b): "Saidiya Hartman on Fugitive Feminism." Video-Interview mit dem Institute for Contemporary Arts, London. Gefilmt von Jason Hirata. Transkript: A.P. n.p. URL: https://vimeo.com/281249079. (letzter Zugriff: 21.1.2019)