This panel diagrams “to make a way out of no way” in terms of violence in “two acts.” Here, the two “acts” considered in the panel can be understood both in terms of (pre-)logical sequence and methodological intervention. If the gratuitous violence that defines Black social death’s longue durée constitutes the fundamental aporia of Black liberation, then this panel takes up Fanon’s imperative to lay hold of this violence as the pure means of making a way out. “Means” here is marked twice insofar as an adequate account of any Black radical means worthy of the name itself demands a renewed attention to method as the search for a way. Accordingly, this panel argues that when the World-forming historicity of anti-Black violence is properly understood in its transcendental register, then divine (or “daemonic”) violence appears as the pure mediality for simultaneously temporalizing and destituting its “total climate.”
This paper seeks to understand Mills' racial contract theory and extend it in the context of the U.S. More specifically, this paper will augment Mills’ racial contract theory by asserting that this contract is not just one that exists between Euro/white persons, but also between those that they subjugate, namely black people. To do this, this paper will engage Mills’ formulation of the racial contract alongside classical contract theory and various authors’ work on secularism in the United States. The core thesis of this paper is that rather than the racial contract being an agreement between white men, it is in the context of U.S. jurisprudence, an agreement between whites and blacks where the magic (that is: the religious force/violence) of the law is deployed to articulate that blacks have always already assented to their subjugation and as such have no legitimate legal claim to relief.
This essay looks at the question of Blackness as an anti-relational position insofar as social death organizes the landscape of being-in-the-world. I will turn to Morrison’s exploration of her character Sula to examine how black religious notions of sociality does not consider the ways that antiblackness configures Blackness as the ultimate symbol of abjection and positions the social death of blackness as the threat to all communal aspirations. How does a an inability to be organized into coherent legible communities maintain the aporia of social contracts,and represent the specter of violence structuring all claims of love, culture, and beloved community. Is Sula violent because she betrays or is she violent because she is inherently anti-relational and therefore can never stabilize the social contracts that are fundamentally built upon opposing her abject position in the bottom? To Whom can Blackness belong in community with, and what can be gleaned from understanding relationality itself as the violence that structures Blackness’s anti-relational positionality.
This paper develops a paradigm of anagrammatical liturgics as a mode of revolutionary suicide. It begins by introducing liturgy through Giorgio Agamben’s profanation of its theological economy, rendering it an inoperative praxis that puts its transfiguring potentialities to a new use. It then constellates this with Christina Sharpe’s notion of anagrammatical Blackness to theorize the way Black thought induces the collapse of one’s Human coordinates. Before elaborating this through David Marriott’s treatment of revolutionary suicide, the paper excavates his adoption of Werner Hamacher’s notion of afformative violence, yielding an im-performative praxis that destitutes the historical continuum and withdraws the singular into the multiple as the pure means of justice.
Thinking from the position of racial slavery and its concomitant questions surrounding emancipation, freedom, and sovreignty, how do we think violence beyond “means and ends”? This question emerges as a critical engagement with Benjamin’s brief yet groundbreaking examination of the fundamental question “What is violence?” It’s importance lies in an interrogation of the assumptive logics undergirding the subject of Benjamin’s conception of law and subsequently “divine violence.” By focusing on the antagonisms between the constitution of this subject and Du Bois’ subject in Black Reconstruction, one may find that the problematic of racial slavery not only augments but distends the appearance of divine violence-qua-general strike.