COMP 421 Lecture Notes - Lecture 11: Performativity, Social Death
27 May 2018
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Department
Course
Professor
Introduction
● Wilderson - trying to point out why Marxism cannot handle the black experience
● Body is commodified to the point where they cease to be subjects
● The black is precluded from the category of human
● Social death - unique to the slave, the law is not able to recognize the slave
○ Modern - “driving while black”
○ Blacks don’t need to be committing any crime to be criminalized
○ They are open to gratuitous violence
○ They don’t have rights to family ties (natal alienation)
○ Generally dishonored
● This condition does not end after slavery - myth of freedom
● Blackness is the name of that which is outside - it becomes mapped onto a particular
body though the history of slavery
● Black/non-black binary
○ Shows the uniqueness of blackness as opposed to other minorities
○ Unifies the category of the non-black
○ Society is predicated not on whiteness but on non-blackness
○ Anything that can separate itself from blackness
○ Figure that bears the burden of being outside the social order (Edelman)
● The violence of anti-blackness produces black existence
● If the problem is the structure itself (ontological) it cannot be solved by reformist
practices, than the necessary move would be to “end the world”
Sexton - The Social Life of Social Death
● How do we think about the human that doesn’t count as a human being?
● The idea of humanity is contingent on this being
● The way in which the social order works is by offering an invitation to the figures
excluded the opportunity to be included
● (27) Refusal to accept that invitation - to reject the distanciation of blackness
○ To do this would be to affirm the structure that excludes blackness
● Relationship to Berlant - cruel optimism - we embrace that which fucks us over
● Complicates the relationship of optimism and pessimism
● (28) relationship of social life and social death
○ Black social life cannot undo the position of social death that blackness inhabits
● “A living death is as much a death as a living”
● There is fugitivity - there is a black social life but it is lived in alternative spaces
(underground)
● (31) blackness is not the pathogen - the world is, and the desire for a world
● fact of blackness vs the lived experience of the black
● (33-34) everything is haunted from the afterlife of slavery (grammar and ghosts)
○ This structure is still coming into being through and as violence
○ Sharpe - within the structure of the museum there is black life (fugitive moments),
but that life is haunted by slavery - it cannot escape
Document Summary
Wilderson - trying to point out why marxism cannot handle the black experience. Body is commodified to the point where they cease to be subjects. The black is precluded from the category of human. Social death - unique to the slave, the law is not able to recognize the slave. Blacks don"t need to be committing any crime to be criminalized. They don"t have rights to family ties (natal alienation) This condition does not end after slavery - myth of freedom. Blackness is the name of that which is outside - it becomes mapped onto a particular body though the history of slavery. Shows the uniqueness of blackness as opposed to other minorities. Society is predicated not on whiteness but on non-blackness. Anything that can separate itself from blackness. Figure that bears the burden of being outside the social order (edelman) The violence of anti-blackness produces black existence.
