CVBoz Deseo Garden







Yours, Mine, and Ours: Property, Perversion, and the Potentials of Racial Slavery







1.




In 1818, Judge Colcock wrote that “the peace of society, and the safety of individuals require that slaves should be subjected to the authority and control of all freemen, when not under the immediate authority of their masters.”1

What I mean to follow here is three-fold. First, the affiliation between the perpetuity of the Slave’s pain and the Rousseauian collective duty of a body politic to preserve property as “the most sacred of all citizens’ rights, and in some respects more important than freedom itself...because it is more closely connected with the preservation of life”.2 Second, how, if racial slavery is taken as the grammatical font of modernity’s conception of property (which is the case for this reading), the manner by which preservation is articulated in both legal and social practice is no longer reducible to something like maintenance (or improvement) without injury. A framework which enfolds maintenance and injury into the same ontology of property is required if we are to engage the full and enduring posture of slavery’s social contract in aesthetics, language, the methods for theorizing each.

Together, these two crises of property demonstrate more precisely a crisis of the limit. Not just between properties like land or chattel but also between properties of thought: before and after, life and death, joy and sorrow, pleasure and pain, so on and so forth. As an obvious effect, industries and social contracts reliant upon effective modes of recovery or defense pervade legal, economic, social, and aesthetic practices. I find property rights, like many other scholars of Blackness and racial difference, to be one of the more productive heuristics not just for an analysis of how (anti)blackness is figured but how (anti)blackness, as a crisis of the limit par excellence, determines the methods by which all modes of differentiation are made sensible through grammars of recovery, preservation, and defense (qua property relation). In other words, property appears to be the most conspicuous way modernity exercises its differential investments through and against the figure of the racial slave that is the object of pure, irreducible difference. To be certain, the property relation is not the primary focus of this abridged text but rather treated as an materialized metaphor, a symptom of which I argue no one (who is not a Slave) is free from expressing insofar as no one and no-thing is outside of a discourse of antiblackness. Which brings us to our third corollary: differentiation, while often theorized as a neurotic or anxious response to an Other or a conceptual assailant (such as death upon life, negation upon affirmation, non-appearance upon appearance, etc.), I argue more accurately emerges from a perverse mode of meaning-making. It is a method of preservation by way of transforming what


  1. Morris, Thomas D. Southern Slavery and the Law, 1619-1860. The University of North Carolina Press, 2004. p. 202.
  2. Siroky, David S., and Hans-Jörg Sigwart. “Principle and Prudence: Rousseau on Private


would otherwise be a forbidden violation, a metaphysical no-man’s land into an infinite conceptual resource for the maintenance of thought. I follow the many scholars who have articulated the Hold, the Atlantic, the baracoon, the plantation, or the very flesh of the slave as that vestibular impasse; as that which simultaneously allows for the World to emerge not paradoxically but precisely through its abyssal character. In this way, I argue that the activity and author of whatever differentiation must perform two moves: first, annul its most preferrable feature in the African slave and, second, disavow this differential barrier and imbue it with undead (everlasting) potential—if it or he wishes to keep “the peace of society”. Differentiation, then, cannot be a modality by which to rescue the slave from her abject potential. It is not sufficient (if not a form of violence in itself) to tell her that she is alive not dead, that she is Human not cargo, that she is and not not.

As Thomas D. Morris illustrates for us in Southern Slavery and the Law, 1619- 1860, Colcock along with many of his judicial contemporaries, by all accounts, upheld such statutes with respect to or in the interest of property law and common law. As I’ve gestured toward, the question or concern of the abuse and homicide of Slaves turned upon a Rousseauian appeal to property as a social and political binding agent. The “peace of society”, the legitimacy of the state, or what I read as the pleasure of the planter, rested upon the communal conservation of the Slave as that “particular species of property”3 absolutely exposed before the World (to borrow from Rizvana Bradley). Property as an instantiation of the logic of slavery was thus the “true pledge of citizens’ fidelity in fulfilling their obligations”.4

Title (or ownership) was historically set against and made every effort to supersede material possession in property law insofar as the Slave “‘does not pass by delivery, but by writing...’”5 Yet, what good were the legalities of title against the murderous ‘heat of passion’ to which the whole of the body politic had access or relied upon? What was the effect of Colcock’s delineation between master and freemen if not a discursive ruse? What were the limits or, rather, how efficacious were the ‘limits’ to the use of Slave property? To the empircist’s eye, the legal importance of the contract in the sale and management of slaves was meant to discourage wanton abuse or, at the very least, regulate its frequency through the threat of financial penalization (rarely incurred). At best, the value of title functioned as an interruption to its frequency or ideally ‘inspired’ one to interrupt the compulsion. That faced with the tedium of a court case (perhaps an exquisite tedium), freemen and masters alike would be encouraged to repress the will to exact pain upon a slave which, on paper, ‘belonged’ to another. At the heart of slave law rested the impossible task of dividing racial enjoyment like one did land. The inability to reconcile both the propertied non-ontology of the Slave and universality of mastery provided an infinite anima, an interminably modular discourse upon which to test new methods of disavowal. However, regardless of if these ‘interruptions’ to cruelty were on occasion observed,


3. Morris, Thomas D. Southern Slavery and the Law, 1619-1860. The University of North Carolina Press, 2004. p. 80.
4. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, et al. The Social Contract and Discourses. J.M. Dent, 1993.
5. Morris, Thomas D. Southern Slavery and the Law, 1619-1860. The University of North Carolina Press, 2004. p. 75.


their observation was never in the interest of the Slave but for the ‘benefit of the master’ or the community of masters. Restriction and benefit would, then, coalesce—or, more accurately, sublate (aufheben)—to engender a perverse grammatical structure of gratuitous violence. What then are the meta-discursive implications of a disavowed limit? The negation of an interruption? Which is to say a limit that is first affirmed, then repudiated. I speak here in psychoanalytic parlance of perversion’s structure where perversion is defined less as the diagnosis of a sexual pathology than by its nature as a subjective structure and therefore of discourse. Perversion, in short, accentuates the law (or the Father) only to, as Lucie Cantin writes, “demonstrate its uselessness.”6 The limit, that is, castration, “must first be stated in order for the subject to then be able to neutralize, devaluate, and ‘make nothing’ of it.”7 What is key here is that the limit is never disappeared insomuch as it is depreciated or distorted into a hollowed-out instrument (of language) and imbued with pure potential. The ‘useless’ delineation Colcock makes between ‘freemen’ and ‘masters’ ought to strike us here as a symptom of a perverse structure. The limit between ‘Freemen’ and ‘Masters’ is disavowed in the very same breath, in the very same announcement of its total potential, at the will of whoever may succumb to the heat of passion. If the Slave was subject to the ‘authority’ and ‘control’ of all civil subjects, then the distinction between the civil subject and the in-dividuated master only formalized a structure of disavowal to further permit the common use of the Slave in and through the law (of property rights). In sum, if the law not only permitted but communalized ‘the heat of passion’, what use was recourse to the delimitations of ownership and inheritance? Put another way these terms and their structures were affirmed so as to make nothing of them inasmuch as the cargo they regulated were always already made of nothing.

This conceptual assertion of the court (qua the people) appears to express a perverse rendition of a common maxim: SHARED SLAVES MAKE GOOD NEIGHBORS. As Gregg Lambert situates, the cruel enjoyment of one’s property (or instrument) is necessarily bequeathed and dispersed insofar as “desire requires a maximal extension of the will that assumes the form of a community of intelligent beings, just as the corresponding moral feeling necessarily requires the multiplication of bodies to convert this feeling into the form of a ‘general will’ (i.e., law).”8 To preserve the sanctity of property, that is perhaps indistinguishable from the preservation of life, its will must be made general or common. In order to preserve one must be perverse and necessarily (or by contract) pervasive.

2.



I take seriously what Afropessimist and Black feminist scholars have spent the better part of the past twenty-five years clarifying (if one takes only published literature to measure its chronology): the structural gratuity of suffering characteristic of Blackness and its vestibularity to the formation of the Human qua the World (No Slave, No World).


6. Apollon, Willy, et al. “Perversion and Hysteria.” After Lacan: Clinical Practice and the Subject of the Unconscious, State University of New York Press, Albany, 2002, pp. 155–165.
7. Ibid. p. 157.
8. Lambert, Gregg. “On the Right to Jouissance.” Lacan’s Cruelty: Perversion Beyond Philosophy, Culture and Clinic, Palgrave Macmil- lan, S.l., 2023, p. 81.

Argued by Frank Wilderson III, Selamawit Terrefe, Jared Sexton, Leah Kaplan, Patrice Douglass, and others, this “citational network”, as Sexton terms it, maintains that not only is the category of violation foreclosed to the Slave where sexual abuse and kinship structure are concerned (the Slave cannot be violated) but that the Slave is always already in violation where the law and ethics are concerned. The Slave is ambivalently structured, its suffering reaped on two fronts without notice. In a Derridian sense, gratuitous violence is a “prephenemonenological” “visitation”, wherein the Black is structurally receptive to “another’s visitation just where there has been no prior invitation, preceding ‘her’, the one arriving.”9 Accordingly, there is no barrier to the enjoyment of the Slave’s flesh, no ethical boundary or contractual proviso the body politic need respect, and no need for the community to wait for the Slave to transgress its ethical or social precepts for it to invoke ‘the whip’. The indispensability of this claim has pushed, directly and indirectly, most if not every field to their respective limits insofar as it applies a resolute pressure to answer: how does racial slavery and the “boundless utility” of Black flesh give rise to the coherence of thought and practice as such?

Said another way, what are the conceptual consequences of gratuitous violence upon the form(s) or practice of analysis? More specifically, how does this intervention that troubles a distinction between volition and violation alter the way we name our own psychical investments as writers or artists in defining the dynamic inheritances of slavery? We have named the discernible registers of the limit as it relates to property, contract, and subjective structure but what does its formal engagement entail? As some of the thinkers mentioned above have posed: what does it ask of our ‘hand’? How does the devisal of cruelty inform the manner by which we ‘grip the pen’? Surely, naming the hand as a method for building an analysis requires maneuvering to and fro scales of engagement and points of view, or shifts in suspicion. Every gesture, a shadow cast by the body of the framework. The thinkers of Afropessimism’s weave have, in peripheral literature and media (interviews, responses, conversations, podcasts, lecture Q&A’s, etc.), underlined the interpersonal repercussions and stipulations of theorizing through its accusations. Selamawit Terrefe’s remark from her conversation with Christina Sharpe is crucial here:

We can theorize, we can meditate on Black suffering, we can experience the violence, we’re marked. But we cannot be Afropessimists since the idea and reality of being is foreclosed to us: we’re non-being. The only people who can be and embrace it are particularly these white, male, young academics who are so excited. They’re excited by it. And it’s an invigorating theory because it’s a purely intellectual enterprise for them. This is something we have to experience and re-experience viscerally when we read Frank and Jared’s work. It’s a traumatic experience. But it’s not a trauma that is being imposed by us—by the theory or by those of us who write and critically engage with the work. It’s a trauma that we’re reliving because we’re never outside of this trauma.10


9. Derrida, Jacques, and Christine Irizarry. “‘When Our Eyes Touch...’ Signing a Question from Aristotle.” OnTouching - Jean-Luc Nancy, Stanford University Press, Stanford, Calif, 2007,

10. Terrefe, Selamawit. “What exceeds the hold?: An interview with Christina Sharpe.” Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowl- edge, no. 29, 2016, pp. 1–1, https://doi.org/10.20415/rhiz/029.e06.



In this way, gratuitous violence is not reducible to a lattice of sociological, psycho- sexual, economic, and historical ‘instances’ of antiblack cruelty to merely study or which outside the activity of study. Rather, it also characterizes and relentlessly structures the ways this very analysis ‘in the present’ is, too, always already violated by the libidinal exigencies of the master’s discourse. Afropessimism, as an extension of the Slave is, as Wilderson has articulated by way of Hartman, “the extension of the master’s project.”11 Accoridngly, nothing can be taken for granted, everything warrants suspicion if there is nowhere the whip cannot speak and nothing of its contributions that would not excite young white and non-black academics. Interrogating the limit means asking in what ways does its heuristic, however generative it may be and precisely because it possesses a generativity, participate in the aesthetic and psychical banalization of racial slavery as an infinite conceptual resource. Put differently, my critique may find use here in the concept of the limit (or any concept) and I may, at times, display a certain libidinal investment in its use. But to make meaningful shifts in suspicion means that I must mark how it is the utility of the concept is not my own. Rather, the economy of the concept finds libidinal utility in me to the extent that analysis essentially comes, a priori, with the expansion of racial- conceptual estate at the expense of my/the Slave’s general capacity. The (white) will of thought and its formalization not only confers the Slave but those formal properties which the Slave has been coerced into reconstructing, illuminating, demonstrating (for the reader or the gallery’s visitor): arguments, assumptive logics, interventions, etc. This is precisely Terrefe’s point regarding the academic hand that imposes the subsistent trauma of slavery: that Afropessimism is accused of holding the institutional capacity to re-traumatize its Black readers misses the point of its project entirely. As Colin Drumm rightly lays bare, “those who present an analysis of violence will be held personally responsible for its existence...”.12 When, in fact, the trauma is precisely in the libidinal dynamics that, in all of Afropessimism’s ferocity and ‘disagreeability’, see it repurposed still for white and non- Black analytic satisfaction (of which there is certainly a sexual/ized bearing). Returning to our earlier citation once more, Afropessimism effects or passes on only that it is passed by writing. In a Warrenian sense, it has Nothing to deliver insofar as it, as an output of the Slave but over which the Slave has no title, possesses Nothing—that the Slave is itself* possessed and conferred unto the general by the cruel, standardized economies of writing and discourse.

3.



Time or the haecceity of the event would constitute another calculus of difference, another imposition of a limit which cuts. This is not only relevant to the vulgar measurement of the time ‘before’ and ‘after’ plantation slavery but also to the local ways in which slavery was shaped by its libidinal and managerial vicissitudes. Although not always statutory, the rationale was that the plantation was ambivalently structured by the exaction of cruelty and the ‘generosity’ of recreation’s incorporation. Indeed, one cannot make this point without recourse—or indebtedness—to Hartman’s analysis in Scenes of Subjection. “The hours from sundown to sunup [the time of “leisure”] were as important,” she writes, “as those spent in the field in cultivating the productivity of the plantation household and maintaining social control.”13 This excerpt, alone, is allegorical for what it is I hope to outline here. It defines the coeval necessity of a temporal split (toward onto-regulatory ends) and the impossibility of its ostensibly more pleasurable half being at all distinct from the misery of the other. Much like the distinction between private and public Slave property, the distinction between the time of the Slave’s ‘work’ and the time of its ‘merriment’ would be, before everything, for the master’s managerial and libidinal benefit. These oscillations streamlined suffering, the utility of pleasure was not for the Slave’s redress. In this way, we return to my argumentation that differentiation as such, at the level of the prose and practice, becomes an unreliable (if not totally corrupt) escort through the treacherous waters of analysis.

As Hartman incisively demonstrates, the consequences of marking these false but no less structuring ‘limits’ for how we study slavery weigh upon the whole of the method. The scope of her analysis continues to treat much more than intra-disciplinary concerns; if one goes ‘all the way down’ there are consequences for the practice of study or studying practice as such. Specifically, with regards to an analysis predicated on or tarrying with a split or a limit, the undeniable permeability of these boundaries across the plantation forces us as writers and artists (who engage this history or history at all) to reconsider our attachments to differentiation and limitation as conceptual tools. Once again, the question is not of their use but the intractability of or bondage to their use.

There is, without a doubt, a chronic investment in this (industry of) separability— between suffering and pleasure, domination and agency, before and after, etc.—throughout a certain sect of Black studies scholarship and Black contemporary art which favors the positive this against a negative that. Or, in many cases, perverts separability and usurps negativity for the preservation of the social. Tyrone Palmer’s “Affect and Affirmation” gives this point the focus it desperately needs. As Palmer defines, affirmation “names a singular emphasis on productive capacity; a philosophical ethos and political orientation that prioritizes positivity and connection over and against detachment and destruction.”14 However, as we’ve introduced, this capacity or this compulsion to positivize does not efface or terminate the boundary between suffering and pleasure, before and after, etc. It is, as Palmer clarifies, more dynamic than this: “Affirmationism in this context is not solely, or even primarily, about an insistence on joy, pleasure, and other recognizably ‘positive affects’ (though there is no shortage of work with that focus). Rather, the pull of Affirmationism


11. Hartman, Saidiya V. Scenes of Subjection Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. W.W. Norton & Company, 2022. p. 71
12. Palmer, Tyrone S. “Affect and Affirmation.” The Affect Theory Reader 2: Worldings, Tensions, Futures, Duke University Press, 2023.p. 122.


is evident in how we read and contend with even so-called negative affects.”15 Negativity is not permitted to remain abyssal but must be mined for its potentiality, it must possess a generativity through its intractability. This is what is meant by the injunction for negativity to be movable it must, precisely in its non-appearance, be able to appear before a logic of exchangeability and inheritance. And Palmer is very clear that this negativity is not vague in its structure but has been given a unique home in the Slave: “the negativity that affect theory positions itself in opposition to, either as a corrective or diversion, is a Black(ened) negativity.”16 The iterations of this formulation in Black studies are extensive. Black flesh is, as Hortense Spillers famously put it, “that zero degree of social conceptualization.”17 It is the primary narrative of the “seared, divided, ripped-apartness” characteristic of those “undecipherable markings on the captive body [that] render a kind of hieroglyphics of the flesh whose severe disjunctures come to be hidden to the cultural seeing...”18 For David Marriott, by way of Fanon, Blackness elaborates a n’est pas (is not) whereby the Black is “the expression of a perpetual effacement”; it is a negated negativity that can only be known virtually, “drown[ed]...in abstraction”, to the extent that it is “incomprehensible to both reason and ontology...”19 Rizvana Bradley’s rendition addresses aesthetics directly: “Blackness,” she argues, “has no place in the ontology of the antiblack world and cannot be represented within modernity’s aesthetic regime; yet, paradoxically, this regime insatiably demands its labors and its appearance.”20 For Bradley, like Marriott, the insistence on the virtuality of Blackness is such that it is only ever known as “aberration [or] mistranslation”. And it is precisely this demand which Bradley et al. articulate that is wedded to a logic of disavowal.

Palmer’s intervention is critical to the extent that it names another method (or disciplinary tradition in/as Affect theory) by which a kind of conceptual limit, or perhaps that ‘horror’ which lies on the other side of this limit, is annexed or subjected to, what I’ll term, a conceptual minstrelsy. By this light, Hartman’s and Palmer’s argumentations ought to be read as structurally proportional (or in obvious conversation). To weave them together, “extravagant”21 conversions of “supposed ‘bad feelings’ into ‘good feelings’”22, which is to confer the worst of slavery unto best of possibility, “elide[s] the distinction between submission and willfulness in the denial of pain.”23 Negativity or destructive affects, necessarily articulated as or through Black(ness), are coerced into “step[ping] it up lively”24  for the perverse will of affirmationist judgment. To borrow from Julie Reshe, 


13. Ibid. p. 127.
14. Ibid. p. 131.
15. Spillers, Hortense. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics: Culture and Countermemory: The “Ameri- can” Connection, vol. 17, no. 2, 1987, p. 64, https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.2307/464747.
16. Ibid.
17. Marriott, D. S. Of Effacement: Blackness and Non-Being. Stanford University Press, 2024.
18. Bradley, Rizvana. Anteaesthetics: Black Aesthesis and the Critique of Form. Stanford University Press, 2023.
19. Hartman, Saidiya V. Scenes of Subjection Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. W.W. Norton & Company, 2022. p. 55.
20. Palmer, Tyrone S. “Affect and Affirmation.” The Affect Theory Reader 2: Worldings, Tensions, Futures, Duke University Press, 2023.
p. 128. 
21. Hartman, Saidiya V. Scenes of Subjection Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. W.W. Norton & Company, 2022. p. 55.
22. Ibid. p. 71.

“It is almost as if one has the right to speak only [emphasis mine] when she speaks on behalf of the deliverance from suffering.”25 Or what we might say is the derivation of deliverance out of suffering. If one does not speak toward this end, one simply remains undecipherable or accused of academic or aesthetic iniquity.

The disavowal of distinction is how the violence of racial slavery could and ought to be characterized and Palmer’s most imperative distillation comes through their use of disavowal as conversion. A kind of rhetorical, literary, aesthetic, and certainly embodied movement or reorganization of utility is at play. On its surface, it is easy to read this as a particular transposition of property or chattel over a given static boundary to its neighbor like handing sugar or oranges over the paling. However, returning to our earlier postulate, shared slaves make good neighbors, I want to read Hartman’s and Palmer’s conceptual wreathe as one that places the scene of scholarly, aesthetic, and affective conversion within and at the ‘site’ of the flesh; the Black displaces, or elaborates with greater precision, ‘the fence’ between properties, instances, signifiers, and affects. The palisade of slavery is ‘lifted’ or adjusted to reorganize the value, form, efficacy, and potentiality of cruelty. The force by which negativity is transformed into generativity must be attributed to, or at the very least cannot be disarticulated from, the ductile drives of racial slavery. The Black is not a fixed partition but an indeterminate limit whose very modularity is defined by its captivity to potential. This is precisely Rei Terrada’s point in Metaracial where they state (concerning Hegel) that “negativity encompasses both a psychic therapy of self- transformation for a new radical subject and a ‘real movement of history that abolishes the present state of things’ to make actual what consciousness cannot realize.”26 The fecundity of the abyss, which is also to say the disavowal of its pure impossibility, must remain open to the preservative and destructive needs of modernity’s body politic. In other words, without Slavery, according to modernity, society would not Know (peace). I therefore work to abandon an attachment to separability, the limit, the proviso if only through an unrelenting suspicion, a productive uselessness that might only ever further excite the World toward its own preservation.





















































  1. Reshe, Julie. “Welcome to Hell.” Negative Psychoanalysis for the Living Dead: Philosophical Pessimism and the Death Drive, Springer International Publishing AG, Cham, 2023, p. 4.
  2. Terada, Rei. “Around Political Identity.” Metaracial: Hegel, Antiblackness, and Political Identity, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL, 2023, p. 49.


























  1. Dean, Aria, and Frank Wilderson III. “Frank B. Wilderson III: In Conversation with Aria Dean.” November Magazine, www. novembermag.com/content/frank-b-wilderson-iii. Accessed July 2020.
  2. @drumm_colin (Colin Drumm). “those who present an analysis of violence will be held personally responsible for its existence by weak minded conformists who hide behind empty appeals to “complexity.” things are really not as complex as all that.” Twitter, 20

February 2022, 4:51pm, http://tinyurl.com/mvznje9v.

3.




Time or the haecceity of the event would constitute another calculus of difference, another imposition of a limit which cuts. This is not only relevant to the vulgar measurement of the time ‘before’ and ‘after’ plantation slavery but also to the local ways in which slavery was shaped by its libidinal and managerial vicissitudes. Although not always statutory, the rationale was that the plantation was ambivalently structured by the exaction of cruelty and the ‘generosity’ of recreation’s incorporation. Indeed, one cannot make this point without recourse—or indebtedness—to Hartman’s analysis in Scenes of Subjection. “The hours from sundown to sunup [the time of “leisure”] were as important,” she writes, “as those spent in the field in cultivating the productivity of the plantation household and maintaining social control.”13 This excerpt, alone, is allegorical for what it is I hope to outline here. It defines the coeval necessity of a temporal split (toward onto-regulatory ends) and the impossibility of its ostensibly more pleasurable half being at all distinct from the misery of the other. Much like the distinction between private and public Slave property, the distinction between the time of the Slave’s ‘work’ and the time of its ‘merriment’ would be, before everything, for the master’s managerial and libidinal benefit. These oscillations streamlined suffering, the utility of pleasure was not for the Slave’s redress. In this way, we return to my argumentation that differentiation as such, at the level of the prose and practice, becomes an unreliable (if not totally corrupt) escort through the treacherous waters of analysis.

As Hartman incisively demonstrates, the consequences of marking these false but

no less structuring ‘limits’ for how we study slavery weigh upon the whole of the method. The scope of her analysis continues to treat much more than intra-disciplinary concerns; if one goes ‘all the way down’ there are consequences for the practice of study or studying practice as such. Specifically, with regards to an analysis predicated on or tarrying with a split or a limit, the undeniable permeability of these boundaries across the plantation forces us as writers and artists (who engage this history or history at all) to reconsider our attachments to differentiation and limitation as conceptual tools. Once again, the question is not of their use but the intractability of or bondage to their use.

There is, without a doubt, a chronic investment in this (industry of) separability— between suffering and pleasure, domination and agency, before and after, etc.—throughout a certain sect of Black studies scholarship and Black contemporary art which favors the positive this against a negative that. Or, in many cases, perverts separability and usurps negativity for the preservation of the social. Tyrone Palmer’s “Affect and Affirmation” gives this point the focus it desperately needs. As Palmer defines, affirmation “names a singular emphasis on productive capacity; a philosophical ethos and political orientation that prioritizes positivity and connection over and against detachment and destruction.”14 However, as we’ve introduced, this capacity or this compulsion to positivize does not efface or terminate the boundary between suffering and pleasure, before and after, etc. It is, as Palmer clarifies, more dynamic than this: “Affirmationism in this context is not solely, or even primarily, about an insistence on joy, pleasure, and other recognizably ‘positive affects’ (though there is no shortage of work with that focus). Rather, the pull of Affirmationism


  1. Hartman, Saidiya V. Scenes of Subjection Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. W.W. Norton & Company, 2022. p. 71.
  2. Palmer, Tyrone S. “Affect and Affirmation.” The Affect Theory Reader 2: Worldings, Tensions, Futures, Duke University Press, 2023.

p. 122.

is evident in how we read and contend with even so-called negative affects.”15 Negativity is not permitted to remain abyssal but must be mined for its potentiality, it must possess a generativity through its intractability. This is what is meant by the injunction for negativity to be movable it must, precisely in its non-appearance, be able to appear before a logic of exchangeability and inheritance. And Palmer is very clear that this negativity is not vague in its structure but has been given a unique home in the Slave: “the negativity that affect theory positions itself in opposition to, either as a corrective or diversion, is a Black(ened) negativity.”16 The iterations of this formulation in Black studies are extensive. Black flesh is, as Hortense Spillers famously put it, “that zero degree of social conceptualization.”17 It is the primary narrative of the “seared, divided, ripped-apartness” characteristic of those “undecipherable markings on the captive body [that] render a kind of hieroglyphics of the flesh whose severe disjunctures come to be hidden to the cultural seeing...”18 For David Marriott, by way of Fanon, Blackness elaborates a n’est pas (is not) whereby the Black is “the expression of a perpetual effacement”; it is a negated negativity that can only be known virtually, “drown[ed]...in abstraction”, to the extent that it is “incomprehensible to both reason and ontology...”19 Rizvana Bradley’s rendition addresses aesthetics directly: “Blackness,” she argues, “has no place in the ontology of the antiblack world and cannot be represented within modernity’s aesthetic regime; yet, paradoxically, this regime insatiably demands its labors and its appearance.”20 For Bradley, like Marriott, the insistence on the virtuality of Blackness is such that it is only ever known as “aberration [or] mistranslation”. And it is precisely this demand which Bradley et al. articulate that is wedded to a logic of disavowal.

Palmer’s intervention is critical to the extent that it names another method (or

disciplinary tradition in/as Affect theory) by which a kind of conceptual limit, or perhaps that ‘horror’ which lies on the other side of this limit, is annexed or subjected to, what I’ll term, a conceptual minstrelsy. By this light, Hartman’s and Palmer’s argumentations ought to be read as structurally proportional (or in obvious conversation). To weave them together, “extravagant”21 conversions of “supposed ‘bad feelings’ into ‘good feelings’”22, which is to confer the worst of slavery unto best of possibility, “elide[s] the distinction between submission and willfulness in the denial of pain.”23 Negativity or destructive affects, necessarily articulated as or through Black(ness), are coerced into “step[ping] it up lively”24  for the perverse will of affirmationist judgment. To borrow from Julie Reshe, “It


  1. Ibid. p. 127.
  2. Ibid. p. 131.
  3. Spillers, Hortense. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics: Culture and Countermemory: The “Ameri- can” Connection, vol. 17, no. 2, 1987, p. 64, https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.2307/464747.
  4. Ibid.
  5. Marriott, D. S. Of Effacement: Blackness and Non-Being. Stanford University Press, 2024.
  6. Bradley, Rizvana. Anteaesthetics: Black Aesthesis and the Critique of Form. Stanford University Press, 2023.
  7. Hartman, Saidiya V. Scenes of Subjection Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. W.W. Norton & Company, 2022. p. 55.
  8. Palmer, Tyrone S. “Affect and Affirmation.” The Affect Theory Reader 2: Worldings, Tensions, Futures, Duke University Press, 2023.

p. 128.
  1. Hartman, Saidiya V. Scenes of Subjection Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. W.W. Norton & Company, 2022. p. 55.
  2. Ibid. p. 71.

is almost as if one has the right to speak only [emphasis mine] when she speaks on behalf of the deliverance from suffering.”25 Or what we might say is the derivation of deliverance out of suffering. If one does not speak toward this end, one simply remains undecipherable or accused of academic or aesthetic iniquity.

The disavowal of distinction is how the violence of racial slavery could and ought to be characterized and Palmer’s most imperative distillation comes through their use of disavowal as conversion. A kind of rhetorical, literary, aesthetic, and certainly embodied movement or reorganization of utility is at play. On its surface, it is easy to read this as a particular transposition of property or chattel over a given static boundary to its neighbor like handing sugar or oranges over the paling. However, returning to our earlier postulate, shared slaves make good neighbors, I want to read Hartman’s and Palmer’s conceptual wreathe as one that places the scene of scholarly, aesthetic, and affective conversion within and at the ‘site’ of the flesh; the Black displaces, or elaborates with greater precision, ‘the fence’ between properties, instances, signifiers, and affects. The palisade of slavery is ‘lifted’ or adjusted to reorganize the value, form, efficacy, and potentiality of cruelty. The force by which negativity is transformed into generativity must be attributed to, or at the very least cannot be disarticulated from, the ductile drives of racial slavery. The Black is not a fixed partition but an indeterminate limit whose very modularity is defined by its captivity to potential. This is precisely Rei Terrada’s point in Metaracial where they state (concerning Hegel) that “negativity encompasses both a psychic therapy of self- transformation for a new radical subject and a ‘real movement of history that abolishes the present state of things’ to make actual what consciousness cannot realize.”26 The fecundity of the abyss, which is also to say the disavowal of its pure impossibility, must remain open to the preservative and destructive needs of modernity’s body politic. In other words, without Slavery, according to modernity, society would not Know (peace). I therefore work to abandon an attachment to separability, the limit, the proviso if only through an unrelenting suspicion, a productive uselessness that might only ever further excite the World toward its own preservation.





















































  1. Reshe, Julie. “Welcome to Hell.” Negative Psychoanalysis for the Living Dead: Philosophical Pessimism and the Death Drive, Springer International Publishing AG, Cham, 2023, p. 4.
  2. Terada, Rei. “Around Political Identity.” Metaracial: Hegel, Antiblackness, and Political Identity, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL, 2023, p. 49.