#wilderson

[kyuka-bse]

[wesandersonconfessions1]

And they'd hold hands as well

[owen-wilson-appreciation-club]

IM GONNA THROW UP 😭😭😭

[anti-oben-willer]

I have returned. I am ready to continue the hatred.

[pyvs]

felt that deja vu?

[just-a-leech-boy]

@moldmoldfoldfold @pyvs @owen-wilson-appreciation-club

[athousandgateaux]

Black people embody (which is different from saying are always willing or allowed to express) a meta-aporia for political thought and action. For most critical theorists writing after 1968, the word aporia is used to designate a contradiction in a text or theoretical undertaking. For example, Jacques Derrida suggests an aporia indicates 'a point of undecidability, which locates the site at which the text most obviously undermines its own rhetorical structure, dismantles, or deconstructs itself.' But when I say that Black people embody a meta- aporia for political thought and action, the addition of the prefix meta- goes beyond what Derrida and the poststructuralists meant— it raises the level of abstraction and, in so doing, raises the stakes... Afropessimism, then, is less of a theory and more of a metatheory: a critical project that, by deploying Blackness as a lens of interpretation, interrogates the unspoken, assumptive logic of Marxism, postcolonialism, psychoanalysis, and feminism through rigorous theoretical consideration of their properties and assumptive logic, such as their foundations, methods, form, and utility; and it does so, again, on a higher level of abstraction than the discourse and methods of the theories it interrogates. Again, Afropessimism is, in the main, more of a metatheory than a theory. It is pessimistic about the claims theories of liberation make when these theories try to explain Black suffering or when they analogize Black suffering with the suffering of other oppressed beings. It does this by unearthing and exposing the metaaporias, strewn like land mines in what these theories of so- called universal liberation hold to be true. If, as Afropessimism argues, Blacks are not Human subjects, but are instead structurally inert props, implements for the execution of White and non- Black fantasies and sadomasochistic pleasures, then this also means that, at a higher level of abstraction, the claims of universal humanity that the above theories all subscribe to are hobbled by a meta- aporia: a contradiction that manifests whenever one looks seriously at the structure of Black suffering in comparison to the presumed universal structure of all sentient beings. Again, Black people embody a meta- aporia for political thought and action— Black people are the wrench in the works.

Frank B. Wilderson III, Afropessimism, pg. 13-15

[freudycat]

america is pretty fucking ~ wild-erson ~

Hi! Sorry for the late post. Last week, we found out that my grandpa was going to die really, really soon, and I honestly couldn’t bring myself to do anything. I’m sorry if I don’t sound as upbeat in this post -- I just really am not feeling it, but I need to force myself to do something so I can feel less guilty about doing absolutely nothing while I mope around. Also, just as a heads up, we might be flying over to my grandma’s home to give her some support, so I might not be able to update for a while.

Anyways, for today, I guess we can talk about Frank Wilderson. His writing is actually pretty interesting, and I really enjoyed reading his book Red, White, & Black. To be Frank (hehe), he does base a lot of his philosophy off of a few other authors, so I’ll explain their ideas as I explain Wilderson’s theories. Oof. Those teachers who say that you can’t plagiarize are really punching the air right now LOL.

Wilderson’s thesis level claim is that Blackness is ontological, in that it exists in a fixed state that can’t be changed. Basically, it is a permanent state of being that means that one is constantly subject to systems of violence and oppression. 

Then, he takes the concept of epidermalization from Frantz Fanon. Epidermalization describes the theory that there is a psychological response that is associated with a certain skin color. So, this falls within a symbolic order of a spectrum of what is “white” vs what is “Black”. A person would either react with extreme hatred or extreme attraction to Blackness. Wilderson uses this to justify how everybody is influenced by this system.

He also takes some ideas from Orlando Patterson. Patterson believed that there was an ontological conception of what is “white” (humanity, rationality) and what is “Black” (disrespectful, nonhuman). These conceptions led to social death, which Patterson says is the current state of Black people. 

There are three pillars of social death: natal alienation, which is how Black people were taken from African and were stripped of their culture; gratuitous violence, which is where the hatred of Blackness requires that there be more violence than necessary to satisfy the psychic desire to commit said violence; and general dishonor, which is where Black people are devalued by white people. 

I’m definitely not doing either of these scholars justice by just summarizing a tiny fraction of their work (but then again,, I’m doing that for every philosopher I’m talking about on this blog,, oof), and I hope to revisit them in the future!

Anyways, going back to Wilderson. He believes that there are two types of “death”, so to speak. One type is the social death as described by Patterson, where it is violence from individuals. The other type is political death. This is basically violence from the state itself.

He uses the phrase structural antagonism, which refers to the system and the general infrastructure of the state. It is antagonistic because it is the opposition of the slave to the master. He believes that the system of slavery has never really been abolished, but rather, has been reincarnated into different forms (ie, slavery => Jim Crow laws => prison industrial complex). 

This has a few impacts. First is “objective vertigo” -- it is the sense in which you never feel as if your identity is tied to a meaningful system. Because the state and the individuals all are against you, it is hard to think of yourself as human. Then, there is the material harm, which results from the fact that violence will be exerted against you. Because the entire system is built upon the social and political death of Black people, general reform would be impossible. 

Wilderson doesn’t really describe any implementable solutions to these problems. Oof. I don’t know how accurate his claims are, but even just by looking at what’s happening on the news, I can see why he might have made those claims. 

Anyways, I hope you at least learned something from this post! Thanks for reading :)