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“The obligation is to live with death as an impossible possibility—why? Because of the legacy bequeathed to blacks by colonial racism—that black life is meaningless and so black death is meaningless—a legacy in which death is nothing.”

– David Marriott, Haunted Life: Visual Culture and Black Modernity

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Freud’s realization that meaning is simultaneously inscribed in two systems, the Ucs. and Pcs. systems, as well as representing different functions (for example, condensation [Verdichtung] [selection]; displacement [Verschiebung] [combination]), also conveys the image of speaking beings “consistently occupied,” as Laplanche and Leclaire put it, “in mastering the primordial unconscious without ever really succeeding—or if so, at what price…” In other words, what defines the I is a primordial form of mastery; or how the moi uses signifiers to try and master Repräsentanzen that are present and already there and have always been there: which means, mastery is implicated in the primal incarnation of the unconscious. Our conclusion from this has to be that while that process does not ensue from the effects of mastery, it nevertheless does follow on from the attempt to master, that is, mastery is precipitate in everything—love, hatred, power, violence, envy, and rule. As such, the drive is the unconscious’s way of enslaving itself. And this enslavement is perceived only in those traces, gaps, lacunae by which mastery works to mark and mask this impossible desire for a totalized, integrated unity.

David S. Marriott, from Of Effacement: Blackness and Non-Being

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Toni Morrison, Frantz Fanon and Claudia Jones, Sandra Brewster, 2021.

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When violence is the law, and not the effect of its enforcement, it presents the rules of narrative with a crisis; because what we have is a situation that resists retelling, for the simple reason that the narrative's causal principle, the ghost in the machine we call causal logic (or "because principle") of the story, is missing. This is how a Black story is jinxed. There is no ghost in the machine; the reason for the violence is beyond the grasp of reason. There's nothing "universal" about it; therefore, the only way to make it intelligible is to leave out the parts that may only be accepted by another Black person, and even then discreetly.

-Afropessimism, Frank B. Wilderson III

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The questions I want to ask historians, about the magnitude of the magnetization of death and slavery, are as follows: Is there something unrepresentable about slavery—about the deaths of slaves, their experiences, their longings, their fears, their prayers, their grammar of suffering—about slavery’s institutional logics, and slavery’s historical rupturing? Is this why death enters not only as an object for historians but also as an interpretative schema? Is it because both death and slavery represent limits in a certain imaginative enterprise—that which is “inexpressible, inscrutable, unmanageable, horrible”—that they are drawn together? Are death, slavery and blackness connected because of an analogous “unspeakability”? If this unspeakability is located within a social process, then the historical structure of analogy itself has a history, and the slave historian would be tasked with uncovering this fantasmatic interplay, and further still, tracking the ways that the legibility of the analogy may have been written in the incipient gestures of slavery, a condition of possibility for the structuring of slavery itself. A tension, between death derived from a system, and a problematic of death that drives a system, points to a doubling of death as it dances through the details each historian takes up. Does the (very political) division between life and death reflect other divisions like white and black, master and slave, present and past, or work to sustain (and even generate) the racialization of social positionalities and possibilities? What is the causality of a casualty?

Sara-Maria Sorentino, from The Sociogeny of Social Death: Blackness, Modernity, and its Metaphors in Orlando Patterson

“Inasmuch as recognition gives us access to being, it dominates being, exercises a power over it. But when Fanon says black being is given to be seen, because it is obliged by being for others [für andere, l’être-pour-autrui], he presents a refusal, a denigration. Consequently, since the only thing that makes us human concerns vision, we are taken aback to discover an alterity that makes being impossible, prohibited, excluded from the genus as thoroughly wrong, flawed, prohibited.”

– David Marriott, Of Effacement: Blackness and Non-Being

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What is vital to Fanon is that the myth of the Negro that organizes negrophobic identity appears to be needed: the imposition of a form on the nothingness lying at the seat of anxiety is not sufficient to render that anxiety tangible, or representable, but it is enough to bring into being its possibility as an appearance, whose form can then act as a reflection of the self rather than its radical destitution (witness in this respect Fanon’s emphasis on phobia as an attempt to give the void form as a representational possibility). Let us say that in the colony, negrophobia reveals obsessive ideas displaced along the lines of several associations and split between various Vorstellungen: the nègre is evil, filthy, dirty, cannibalistic, etc. Such would be the reason why the black object is overdetermined.

David S. Marriott, from Whither Fanon?: Studies in the Blackness of Being

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Hegel clearly divides the world up into cultures of recognition and cultures bound by vanishing; cultures who inscribe themselves on the map of world-spirit (geist), and cultures whose capricious and thoughtless fetishism only makes them hungry for basely material things, including the skin of their own flesh. Culture, in other words, is given a self-distancing function; by foregrounding the question of what it means to suffer genuine or excessive hungers, Hegel produces a narrative of fetishism that is the result of a consumption that consumes spirit as negativity and so is able to make contact with itself precisely insofar as desire remains empty, and fetishism as a kind of primal devouring, in which the dead (as remnants, as figurations) feed on the living, and all pleasure is a perpetual stream into mouth and stomach, leaving no room for thought or negativity. If spirit finds itself through separation, African fetishism—as a hunger for sameness, for kindred kind—prevents the development of religion, law, morals, and the idealizing spirit that sees the emergence of civil society and the nation-state. If the African fetish substitutes a natural object for a supernatural one, that is because in Africa substance is not yet consumed as substance, that is, negated (with all the value that that word carries for Hegel: appropriation, transformation, and so on), but merely gnawed on as if it were nothing more than a worldly thing. In Africa, therefore, Hegel discovers a hunger to which the world-historical life of spirit will always remain indigestible, inassimilable, and so literally unrecognizable: not-yet. […] Black fetishism, as Hegel defines it, has to be frightening and mesmerizing, because only as such can it be conceived and constantly (i.e., historically, teleologically, speculatively) consumed. Is there not fetishism, too, in this speculative nibbling?

David S. Marriott, from On Racial Fetishism

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David Marriott

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What is the cell? The cell is where blackness is situated. It is situated there within prejudice leading to error. If the cell obviously refers to the endless circling of watchtowers up above and endlessly brutal exposures to power and violence from below, this is not because the cell cages being, but because black beingness is like living in a cell without a lock. We see, then, that the cell is where black beingness learns to adapt itself to constraints—paradigms, rationales—that decree that black life is, in a very specific way, a wrong that is almost categorial, whose principal aim is to offend or to commit offense (to the moral law, the state, and to God). It is not surprising, therefore, that the cell is where blackness finds itself obligated, where it is forced to adapt itself to rules, penalties, and conventions. The cell is where black beingness adapts itself to the carceral and where hands and feet, eyes and ears, buttocks and genitals are bound, as are affects and emotions. But in the most unlikely way—that is, without precedent—the cell is where black life also never stops: never stops experiencing itself as incarcerated and never stops testing the locks. The cell is where biopolitical life is no longer manifest in existence, but falls away entirely. [George] Jackson speaks here of a time that is without temporality, but a time that is also, quite explicitly, purely immanent, without words, world, or universality. It is not by chance that many of his letters struggle to express this without, or that many of the letters necessarily relapse into a ferocious opposition to it. Jackson’s theory of the cell is of a life denied existence, fundamentally under siege, wretched, and where beingness cannot be thought as merely alive, or truly alive, but as an enduring that is unendurable, that is, a life that can no longer endure the schism between its own impotence and the bonds that tie life to itself. Here, the meaning of temporal verbs and adverbs show a causality without effect, and one that expresses pure constriction itself.

David Marriott, Three Forms of Poetic Exaltation (x)

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The languages of extravagance and excess by which the idea of black life is segregated takes on a new emotional power in postbellum America. The idea of profligacy—whether social or subjective—makes of thriftiness a moral duty, in which the very notion of self-restraint is racially determined: the act of reining in, or better still, the act of self-repression, encodes a social hygiene whose sources are racial and, therefore, not natural. Hence, the failure of blacks to acquire the skills necessary for the accumulation of capital or money is the result of a specific kind of civic failure, according to which the bestowal of liberty in postbellum America vanishes beneath another desire that precedes it, and that establishes blackness as the point where “a general looseness of the passions” matches a “propensity to gratify and satiate every thirst.” Where does this discourse of bling bling come from? From various sources, each of which institutes race as a moral value, as ideology: for the white bourgeois and worker, from the nineteenth century to the present, blackness is a degraded form of being that cannot as such conserve itself; or, it is seen as an impoverished way of being that can only be put to work as a supplementary labor (for of course work is niggerdom), which means that it cannot profit from itself as capital. In all these readings, blackness is seen as both exorbitant and impoverished, both decadent and deliriously perverse. Its lack of restraint suggests both the collapse of capitalist values and a threat that puts an end to civic duty: the substitution of private consumption for collective duty is here linked to a more general anxiety about an entity driven to negate the very idea of accumulation—hence the extravagant excess of a being that is seen to come from a nihilistic, menacing, undeserving need to consume everything. So when [Alexis de] Tocqueville spoke of the virtues of thrift as “interest rightly understood,” the word “rightly” denotes the racial recognition of both a frugality that liberates and a black consumption that can only enslave. Desires and passions are “masters which it is necessary to contend with,” he continues, but the slave has “learned only to submit and obey.” Or again: if freedom is “the end [telos] of all just restraint,” excess can never be free, for whatever the cost to ethics and the state, freedom can, paradoxically, only be just when it freely constrains or inhibits itself. In the history of race in America, decadence is not only the effect of bourgeois notions of excess but also the effect of the perceived unconstraints of black being and desire. It is therefore not surprising perhaps that a black counterdiscourse emerges in which blacks are urged to “cultivate honesty, punctuality, propriety of conduct.” If to be rightfully bourgeois means that one must cultivate signs of righteous self-government, which are taken as a natural fact, the belief seems to be that blacks can only earn their rightful place in society by turning en masse to a market-led devotion of thrift: in these counterdiscourses, blackness is thus identified as an active, rather than docile, labor, whose gratification is derived from the subjugation to market values. What is new here is the idea of black utilitarianism, which [Booker T.] Washington and other writers introduced and described. In the field of such rhetorical labor, masculinity, conceived as the productive form, is contrasted to the feminine space of thrift, which is the duty of the one who consumes. Here in the spending of thrifts real black men work; they are not castrated sojourners in the marketplace of capital.

David S. Marriott, from On Decadence: Bling Bling

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In psychoanalysis, there is never an appropriate expression for sexuality in the sense of a coming to presence. We use the word inarticulacy as a name not for a differend between adult and infans, but for what is not in the sense of a n’est pas. The n’est pas is not only enigmatic, or inarticulate, however; it is also envied, despised. In Freud’s Entwurf, too, the blacked-in figure [geschwärtz] is used both in this sense and as a metaphor for the untranslatable—the something that cannot be spoken but is always said as the real form of the unsayable, and this, in fact, is how it appears. It comes but never arrives without the violence of a seduction. But this is never simply a seduction; it is also a war—an excitatio a tergo—whose terror arrests all thought, but one that is never enough to render the infans incapable of giving in to it, even when its affect paralyzes reason and disturbs the ego. For it is not (the n’est pas is never chosen by desire, and what it awakens in me disturbs me: for it is a negative, interrogative, and emphatic transformation of what I am insofar as I truly am not). But for the infans, this “is not” fundamentally means sexuality insofar as it is not white, and notably black.

David S. Marriott, from On Solicitude

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[…] paramount to the evasive gesture that avoids direct confrontation with the structural predicament of Black suffering is also the ways that slavery and the slave are shored up in theory to vouch for general theorems that continue failing to adequately address antiblackness. […] In gender and queer theories, there is a persistent usurping of Blackness or the slave as an inessential factor when assessing how violence meets the subject. Blackness is used as a qualifying term of the racial extension of conditioning yet is refused primacy in thought. However, many of these theories struggle to provide evidence in support of the notion that slaveness can be inhabited by any subject in a manner that would suture the non-Black as construed by the gratuitous violence that meets Blackness. Yet we are to believe that general violability presupposes structural alignment with Blackness rather than differing relations of structural positionality, as afro-pessimists have argued. […] [A]fro-pessimism does not argue that the slave is the only violated category of modern violence. Instead, afro-pessimism asks, what does the violation of the slave make possible? The response to this is the full coherence of the world as we know it, while, at the same time, slave suffering is muted. Which is to say, the violation of the slave serves to clarify the meaning and violation of other conditions of suffering in ways other conditions cannot make sense of the violability of the slave. This does not suggest that violation is the sole possession of Blackness or that violation does not overdetermine the relations of Human subjects. Rather, it clarifies why, in the discursive fields of the studies of race, gender, and sexuality, Blackness appears as a fungible object taken up to provide evidence of general conditions or as that which must be disavowed to usher in nuanced ways of attuning to the problem. Why does the Black, Blackness, and slavery repeatedly appear allegorically or analogously in literature on violence? I contend that these appearances are symptoms of structural predicaments that are reductively couched as disciplinary investments or squabbles among theorists.

Patrice D. Douglass, from Engendering Blackness: Slavery and the Ontology of Sexual Violence