Thing, n., OED Online, Oxford University Press.
A reminder to the speculative realists: wishing the subject out of existence by holding onto an independent object without attending to how one informs the other is not enough for announcing a whole new philosophical age. For an extended engagement with speculative realism, see Denise Ferreira da Silva, Notes Toward the End of Time (London: Living Commons, 2017).
Take, for instance, the increase in the number homicides in Chicago last year, which has been attributed to, among other things, the unwillingness of police officers to work in the city’s black and brown neighborhoods (see →). But, of course, the city’s police officials are very quick to blame anti-police brutality mobilizations (see →).
With this move to claim The Thing—which here refers to Hegel’s formulation of it, as will be clear later in this text—I am proposing a radically immanent “metaphysical” point of departure inspired by the failures of quantum physics, which expose the fundamental indeterminacy of the reality beyond space-time, at the quantum level, that is the plenum. For elaboration of this argument, see Denise Ferreira da Silva, “Toward a Black Feminist Poethics: The Quest(ion) of Blackness Toward the End of the World,” The Black Scholar, vol. 44, no. 2 (2014).
For an analysis of police brutality as the mode of deployment of racial violence characteristic of the liberal modern state, see Denise Ferreira da Silva, “No-bodies: Law, Raciality and Violence,” Griffith Law Review, vol. 18, no. 2 (2009): 212–36.
“Crumbling Through Powdery Air,” a lecture by Otobong Nkanga, Städelschule, Frankfurt, July 14, 2015. (Recording provided to the author by Clare Molloy.)
See Denise Ferreira da Silva, “Blacklight,” in Otobong Nkanga, Luster and Lucre, eds. Clare Molloy, Philippe Pirotte, and Fabian Schöneich (Berlin: Sternberg Press, forthcoming).
David Lloyd, “Race Under Representation,” Oxford Literary Review, vol. 13, no. 1 (1991): 62–94; 64.
Such as, for instance, the exhibitions “Crumbling Through Powdery Air,” Portikus, Frankfurt, September 2015; and “Comot Your Eyes Make I Borrow You Mine,” Kadist, Paris, June 2015.
Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Toward the Human, after Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument,” CR: The New Centennial Review, vol. 3, no. 3 (2003): 257–337.
For an account of these pillars, see Denise Ferreira da Silva, “On Difference without Separability,” Incerteza Viva: 32nd Bienal de São Paulo, exhibition catalogue, eds. Jochen Volz and Júlia Rebouças (São Paulo: Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, 2016), 57–65.
For descriptions of the four causes, see Aristotle, Metaphysics (London: Penguin, 1998).
This is accomplished though Descartes’s famous thought experiment, his systematic doubt. See René Descartes, Meditation on the First Philosophy: Philosophical Essays and Correspondence (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2000): 97–141. How it does so is evident in the account of his method provided in “Rules for the Direction of the Mind,” ibid., 2–28.
René Descartes, “The Treatise on Light,” in The World and Other Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 6.
G. F. W. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History (Kitchener: Batoche Books, 2001), 113.
Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Logic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 82–98.
See, for instance, Kant’s analogy for how synthetic judgements work: “x is therefore the determinable (object) that I think through the concept a, and b is its determination or the way in which it is determined. In mathematics, x is the construction of a, in experience it is the concretum, and with regard to an inherent representation or thought in general x is the function of thinking in general in the subject.” Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 51.
“There is in the soul a principium of disposition as well as of affection. The appearances can have no other order and do not otherwise belong to the unity of the power of representation except insofar as they are amenable to the common principio of disposition. For all appearance with its thoroughgoing determination must still have unity in the mind, consequently be subjected to those conditions through which the unity of representations is possible. Only that which is requisite for the unity of representations belongs to the objective conditions. The unity of apprehension is necessarily connected with the unity of the intuition of space and time, for without this the latter would give no real representation. The principles of exposition must be determined on the one side through the laws of apprehension, on the other side through the unity of the power of understanding. They are the standard for observation and are not derived from perceptions, but are the ground of those in their entirety.” Ibid., 53.
For a discussion of racial difference in regard to Kant’s framing of aesthetics, see Lloyd, “Race Under Representation.”
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason.
G. F. W. Hegel, Hegel’s Science of Logic (Amherst: Humanity Books, 1969).
The argument in this and the following section is presented in Denise Ferreira da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007).
For an elaboration of this view of blackness as a Thing, see Denise Ferreira da Silva, “Towards a Black Feminist Poethics.”
This is the case with Hegel’s and Marx’s renderings of dialectics, in which negation (opposition) appears as contradiction. In both, the distinction is between opposed presentations of the same form: for instance, in Marx’s account of capitalism, property (or the means of production) is the form, while the fundamental oppositional social entities are defined in terms of whether they have a positive or negative position in regards to it: respectively, having property (capitalists) or not having it (the proletariat).
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (London: Pluto Press, 1986); Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism (London: Zed Press, 1983); Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics, vol. 17, no. 2 (1987): 65–81; Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); Fred Moten, In the Break (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003).
For black study, see Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons (Wivenhoe: Minor Compositions, 2013).