“Homelessness is coming to be the destiny of the world.”156
What is required to think the political relevance of Blackness as a problem of and for authenticity for marginalized B/black experiences, especially those horrifically unnamable or invisibilizing experiences at the heart of racial subjection? In “Chapter 3: Beauty to Set the World Right: The Politics of Black Aesthetics,” Paul C. Taylor gives an overview of some of the political questions of racialized life explored in black aesthetics to show the variety of discursive strategies that emerge from assemblages of racialized experience-- cultural nationalist,
revolutionary socialist, and liberal integrationist, for example. While Taylor notes that “the dialectical political reflections of…deconstructive feminism, queer theory, and postcolonialism are powerful influences in the tradition’s present”157 there is no sustained attention paid to these even where these theories might be the most relevant--namely in Taylor’s treatment of
judgements of bodily beauty. Early on in Black is Beautiful in his analysis of ‘black invisibility,’
Taylor following theorist bell hooks, writes:
The symbolic machinery of whitely misperception tends to obscure this intra-racial diversity, as does the propaganda machinery of pro-black image-management. These mechanisms of homogenization return us to the terrain of the positive image debate, only now informed by the insights of intersectional analysis…The whole point of the classical racialist symbolic apparatus especially as embodied in the stereotypes and stock characters discussed above was to deny the complexity of black people. This meant not denying the specific individuality of single persons, as we saw above in connection with the denial of personhood. It also meant ignoring the multiple dimensions along which those single individuals might imagine their life plans.158
Specifically, I mean to develop Taylor’s treatment of the concerns of ‘black aesthetics’ insofar as they are translatable to the concerns of professional academic philosophy by attending to the erasure that continues to function through the mode of patriarchal, white supremacy and its white-ly gaze. I am motivated to read Taylor’s chapter on sarkaesthetic judgements critically to show how the entanglements of invisibility and stereotype are important for discovering
resources and values that may shape further commitments that are not only important to theorizing ‘black aesthetics,’ but may also illuminate problems (considered by Adrian Piper through her artwork and philosophy) which require investigation and analysis of the relationship between appearances and the recognition of personhood, in general.
156Martin Heidegger, “Letter on “Humanism”(1946),” trans. Frank A. Capuzzi in Pathmarks, ed.
William McNeil, (Chicago: DePaul University Press, 1998), 258.
157 Paul C. Taylor, Black is Beautiful: A Philosophy of Black Aesthetics, (Hoboken: Wiley and Sons, 2016), 81.
158Paul C. Taylor, Black is Beautiful: A Philosophy of Black Aesthetics, Ibid., 63.
Towards thinking about authenticity of B/black aesthetic form(s), I work to circumspectly prepare the way for ethical approaches that preserve the possibilities of letting truth resonate, that I think follow through on DuBois’s insights that:
1. Truth is not only that which is objectively free from error, but also organizes value, including but not limited to the value of beauty.
2. Free societies, wherein the interrogation of truth is cultivated, cannot exist within the context of the White supremacist state.
This reading of the potential of aesthetic forms becoming revelatory of the erasure or covering over of potential life paths, tracks well with Taylor’s account of the specific variety of
authenticity, or the own-ness of Eigentlichkeit which he takes to concern agents. Taylor’s account of the highest grade of authenticity—authenticity in agential volition—is functional in nature, derived from exemplars, and is described as context-dependent, non-arbitrary, and assembled across migrations has the following four features: 1.Contingency; 2. Context;
3.Responsibility; and 4.Anti-moralism.
But in working out the return to the question of being for ‘Da-sein’ in worlds not circumscribed by Heidegger's Hitlerian historicity, I offer a hermeneutics indicated by the discourse around the early work and reception of the artist Kara Walker. Walker’s work shows up as the possibility for understanding significantly disclosive regions that preserve the
unnamable or what might provisionally be called Black stranger(ness) through a radically different understanding of contingency, context, responsibility and anti-moralism than the one Taylor takes up through post-analytic and American naturalist traditions.
I do this in order to better “capture and explore the thought that figures like Sartre and Heidegger encourage...”159 which Taylor claims inspires his account of authenticity because the insights I have gleaned from studying Kara Walker’s art are useful to capturing even greater complexities of authenticity to organize the epistemological and political implications of aesthetic formations as they are presented in Black is Beautiful. As Heidegger writes:
The handing down of a possibility that has been in retrieving it, however, does not disclose the Da-sein that has been there in order to actualize it again. The retrieve of what is possible neither brings back “what is,” past nor does it bind the “present” back to what is “outdated.” Arising from a resolute self-projection, retrieve is not convinced by
“something past,” in just letting it come back as what was once-real. Rather, retrieve responds to the possibility of existence that has been-there. But responding to the possibility in a resolution is at the same time, as in the Moment, the disavowal of what is working itself out today as the “past.”160
Here, what is strange, uncanny, or perhaps unnamable is unfolding, unconcealing, and continues to outpace the disciplining of bodies suggested by the way Taylor understands responsible and future-oriented uptake of the past:
159Taylor, Ibid.,147
160Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh. Albany: State University of New York Press,1996), Line 385, 352
After critical acceptance of contingency, a kind of heuristic particularism is the second key to experiential authenticity. As I’m thinking of it, authenticity is a virtue, which is to say that the idea of authentic is properly speaking the idea of an authentic agent, which serves as a resource for self-examination and self-care. Asking what an authentic agent would do helps us deliberate about the options available to us…[still]…Authenticity talk is a heuristic device for action-guidance, not a decision procedure or bright-line standard of evaluation.161
Even beyond questionably relative autonomy attributed to Hemings alongside the still and oft-used gendered characterization of her animal-like lasciviousness, what is the assemblage that could authentically work towards shaping the Pragmatist’s philosophical constructive process of liberation out that experience, while also attending to the epistemic status of transgenerational trauma and disciplining of black bodies, specifically in the horror of the systemic sexual abuse of black bodies retrieved and unfolding from slavery’s aftermath? Here, sexual abuse is of interest because it is intended not only to discipline bodies that are legally determined as non-agential bodies, but also to create even more racialized bodies (colloquially referred to as “an increase” no different from the increase in revenue from the production of plantation agriculture) through the regular use of the Black female sexed body.162 That is, what assemblage could give rise to responsible uptake, or authenticity as a virtue, from the experience that one is the progeny of slaves who will, by birth, be subjected to and subjugated through the
“one-drop rule”--the legal definition for Black racial identity?
Although, Martin Heidegger’s work is characteristically remembered through the lens of his association with Nazi Germany and rejected by many philosophers as a source out of which any thinking on ethical life may arise, I think that Heidegger’s return to the question of being may be provocative for emancipatory projects beyond the source of world-becoming that Heidegger identifies in the event of the German Volk. In particular, Heidegger’s understanding of truth as projected thrownness in Being and Time (1927) and as the poetic preservation of truth as a letting-be in the essay “Origin of the Work of Art” (1935-1936, “Addendum,”1956) can be radically disruptive of long-standing but incorrect or incomplete scientific knowledge
(constitutive of the species viewed onto-existentiality in scientific racism for example) helpful to interrogating what it means to be engaged in the radical search for new values in the domain of
‘the ethical’ or ‘the political’ heretofore under-thought by attending to those same toxic discourses of racialism.
I will show how poetic truth can be generative for accounts of opening out radically authentic projects of liberation (the not-yet freedom as it is understood from the project of historical progress announced by European Enlightenment) from the unnameable event of horror
161 Paul C. Taylor, Black is Beautiful: A Philosophy of Black Aesthetics, (Hoboken: Wiley and Sons, 2016), 148.
162After the1808 federal ban on the importation of new slaves in the U.S., the rape of female sexed slaves became more frequent as those newborn Black children would inheirit their slave status through the lineage of the mother (established in the Southern states through the adoption of the legal principle of partus sequitur ventrem). See also Hortense J. Spillers, “Shades of Intimacy: What the Eighteenth Century Teaches Us,” Keynote Lecture, “The Flesh of the Matter: A Hortense Spillers Symposium,”
Cornell University, Ithaca, NY. https://www.cornell.edu/video/hortense-spillers-shades-of-intimacy- eighteenth-century.
which in authenticates Black flesh which prominent members of that project also failed to recognize. Beyond understanding truth as a correct definition or the prescribed application of technical know-how, which I think captures what Taylor means by a “heuristic device about action guidance,” this poetic truth, which I hope to show is also at work in Walker’s art, works towards untold destinies that move beyond the possibilities of the Western metaphysics
underlying regulative ideas in Enlightenment modernism, and which I contend, have been inherited by the criteria for Afro-modernism at work in Taylor’s Anglophone analytic pragmatic theorization of black aesthetics.
Unfortunately for Philosophy, Heidegger’s interrogation of Being works out a recapitulation to Eurocentrism through Heidegger’s identification of the German race as the people in whom the destiny of the World is entrusted. This recapitulation exemplifies Heidegger’s own falling-prey to the honorifics of the German nation-state’s greatness. In
Emmanuel Faye’s Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy (2005), in the chapter on Heidegger’s lectures from 1933 to 1935 subtitled “From the Question of Man to the
Affirmation of the People of the German Race” Faye decries Heidegger’s supposed apologists to show that Heidegger exchanges any supposed philosophical contribution on the question of overcoming Western metaphysics for the polemics of National Socialist indoctrination-- based on a perverse anthropology of man that glorifies the German Volk. In particular, Faye writes:
In his unpublished political education seminar in the winter of 1933-34, he unreservedly assimilates the relation between being and identities to the Hitlerian Führerstaat.
Moreover, in his classes Heidegger takes up the question inherited from Kant, “What is man?” only to reduce it to the question “Who are we?”--this “we” designating precisely the völkisch existence of the German people beneath the Hitlerian yoke. The only answer Heidegger gives to the question is his affirmation that “we are the people” (wir sind das Volk), the only people, that still have, according to him a history and a destiny, the only
“metaphysical people…163
Thus we witness, in the courses and seminars that are ostensibly presented as
“philosophical,” a progressive dissolving of the human being, whose individual worth is expressly denied, into a community of people rooted in the land and united by blood. The unpublished seminar of 1933-1934 goes on to identify the people with a “community of biological stock and race” (Stammesgemeinschaft und Rasse). Thus through Heidegger’s teaching, the racial conceptions of Nazism enter philosophy.”164
Instead, I propose to work from the interrogation of ‘Being’ for the history of a people
unrecognizable from Heidegger’s racist imaginary. How is ‘Being’ working itself out from the epoch of racialization reverberating as the transgenerational scene from whence the ongoing violence against bodies racialized as Black have their inaugural gash. In the analysis that follows, I focus on the earlier work of Kara Walker’s oeuvre when she hand cut black-paper into
silhouettes to depict weird and titillating images of intimacy and violence, opening out the overwhelming feelings from/of ‘monstrous intimacies’ (pace Christina Sharpe).
163Emmanuel Faye, Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy in Light of the Unpublished Seminars of 1933-1935, trans. by Michael B. Smith, (New Haven: Yale University Press), 2011, 2
164Emmanuel Faye, Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy in Light of the Unpublished Seminars of 1933-1935, 2
Kara Walker’s black on white characters (what Shape calls Walker’s dialectically black black characters and black white characters) show up, not merely to recollect the settled accounts of the past but rather to de-distance history through her own terrified glance and intentional hand. The torrid, stretched, and sharply expressed figures appear in silhouettes across white gallery walls creating scenes that work because the figures mimic characters that are all recognizable through stereotypical, Southern U.S.-plantation-appropriate racialized caricature. They are as familiar as they are fantastic, nightmarish, and disgusting.
Walker’s figures which are never quite fully characters apophatically show themselves-- denying any intention to speak for themselves or to narrativize a historical theme that is at the same time indicated or insinuated. From the scenes of these black cut-outs, the viewer must work up the courage to face an unnamable horror gathered up from Walker’s glance--her imagined drama of the originary scene, this undercommons of racialized slavery’s founding role in modernity. Observers must leave the realm of gallery-going art-appreciator and step into the stream of fate, to become witness to and responsible for determining their own-most destiny out beyond any politically correct responses--any of which must seem insufficiently responsive to the historical disfigurement (or is it the disfigurations of History) that Walker makes so elegantly available.
Images, such as those in the piece Gone, An Historical Romance of a Civil War as it Occurred between the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart (1994)165 evoke the shame of violation and share the unspoken truth of slave-master sex, of the abuse of young black girl children and the helplessness of their mothers to stop this abuse (even as their mothers simultaneously attempt to protect and discipline their children’s bodies to protect them or improve their lot). Another work, such as Slavery! Slavery! Presenting a GRAND and LIFELIKE Panoramic Journey into Picturesque Southern Slavery or “Life at Ol’ Virginny’s Hole’(sketches of Plantation Life)” See the Peculiar Institution as never before! All cut from black papr by the able hand of Kara Elizabeth Walker, an Emancipated Negress and leader in her Cause, (1997)166, portrays scenes of the violence of slave revolt and emancipatory awakening, evoking the horror and chaos of slaves actualizing the moment of their own freedom.
But even as the scenes of Slavery! Slavery! celebrate the violent grab for power, what is fascinating here is that Walker’s work does not necessarily revel in the celebration of a cessation of one form of violence that exchanges itself for another—pitting subjugation against revolt, for example. Instead, what is unleashed in the work is the way that violence undulates. Mesmerized by the complex, dynamic, and even amorous ways of the chaos of violence becomes unlocked from a past that can never be fully accounted for. Instead, Standing-in the Clearing or Openness (Geschlossenheit) of the work, the violence of the past, the violent presence of the past, and its connection to violence in contemporary life boldly un-conceal how freedom does not arrive in any one linear, progressive narrative of overcoming. Reminiscent of the double withdrawal
165Kara Walker, Gone, An Historical Romance of a Civil War as it Occurred between the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart, Cut paper and adhesive on wall, 13 x 50' (396.2 x 1524 cm) overall, 1994, Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY.
166 Kara Walker, Slavery! Slavery! Presenting a GRAND and LIFELIKE Panoramic Journey into Picturesque Southern Slavery or “Life at Ol’ Virginny’s Hole’(sketches of Plantation Life)” See the Peculiar Institution as never before! All cut from black papr by the able hand of Kara Elizabeth Walker, an Emancipated Negress and leader in her Cause, 1997, Cut paper and adhesive on wall, 12x85 ft (3.7 x 25.9 m) overall, Collection of Peter Norton and Eileen Harris Norton.
through material disguise (gendered props) and non-synchronous exposure (reading from her adolescent journal) investigated through the appearing of Piper’s Mythic Being in their iterations as streetworks, Walker’s works twists free of memorializing and concretizing ‘the past’ to instead invoke, illuminate, and inaugurate originary time for unknown horizons.