R.A. Judy offers that “there is no moment in which flesh is not already entailed in some sort of semiosis, that it isn’t written upon or written into some order of signification.” 18 This is a strange bind. To elucidate, for those who have not read Judy or the Afropessimists before him, specifically Hortense Spillers, “flesh,” names the register at which the human body is engaged that marks Black existence—”before the “body” there is “flesh,” that zero degree of social conceptualization that does not escape concealment under the brush of discourse, or the reflexes of iconography.” 19 The flesh precedes the body; only when it becomes “body” can it be narrative, become subject properly, or—to be Lacanian about it—enter into language. The Black subject, as flesh, struggles both to enter the scene as “body,” as well as to maintain any form of autonomy as uninscribed flesh-as-material, let's say. To return to Judy, it is always-already “written-upon or written-into.”
~
Another way of putting this: the Black body enacts and represents to all of culture an ongoing failure in maintaining a separation between the material and the symbolic and between form and content. As Frank Wilderson stated in our interview in November last year, “it mars both of these categories . . . the slave corrupts the Symbolic Order.” He went on:
Blackness mars all that constitutes symbolic beings, precisely because symbolic beings glean their representational capacity from sucking our blood. There are no Blacks in the world, but there is no world without Blacks.
~
This essay doesn’t suggest that all Black art holds l’informe and other Bataillean concepts closely. It’s a bit depressing to have to admit that, because on the other side of that doorway lies the hard truth that many Black artistic practices either consciously or unconsciously participate in the project of liberal humanism that will always, always, always “suck their blood,” to use Wilderson’s phrase and leave them bleeding out. This is no one’s fault, and in a way, I hope that wedging this Bataille thing into Black art discourse, and into general art theory anew, might inspire other Black artists and scholars to reassess our practices–—and everyone else to pursue an absolutely counter-modernism and all its hypothetical counter-legacies from a true and decisive limit point—to find, draw out, and magnify those lurking base materialistic elements in order to extend and strengthen a notion of Black art that luxuriates in its outside-the-world-ness.
excerpts from, Black Bataille , Aria Dean.
