Hello There.
I wanted to write about your analysis of the paper and see what you think about it as part of a conversation. I did consider bringing out the Jean Luc Nancy more but I found the Nancy to be a good way into the rest of the conversation I wanted to have as a starting point, but I would be interested in knowing what ways you think I could have incorporated him more. Additionally, the question of “The End” as articulated earlier is, while not mentioned in the paper itself (and I’m curious about whether or not you believe speaking more fully about it would have made it a better paper) in my mind synonymous with Badiou’s Event. I think of the question: Will this ever end? as will there ever be an Event which opens up a new Infinity, one which does not consolidate the Black as the Limit Ordinal of the Human. Or rather, what Evental Rupture can occur that would de-axiomatizes the axioms of Man that quite frankly I believe Badiou himself is a part of?
I think part of Da Silva’s intrigue is forcing us to think the unthinkable and consider what it would take to make possible the impossible. Destroying determinacy as such? Is it possible to do? I don’t know. But is it necessary to do? I think so. And then, since she takes the imagination – which is historically a romantic maxim – and makes it concrete and embedded with the material entanglement of the World she offers the unleashing of the imagination free from determinancy, as a means to imagine the impossible which I think makes thinking such a non-determined World imaginable especially if one thinks of Octavia Butler’s Kindred in relation to Da Silva’s Black Feminist Poethics.
My ultimate goal with the things I write is to return to the work I find particularly important and try to revise, revisit, re-edit and find places and spaces to push and move space. I am thinking about doing a course or independent study or reading group where we read: 1) Kant’s Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics 2) Heidegger’s Basic Writings The First Chapter from Being and Time and What is Metaphysics 3) Badiou’s Being and Event and 4) Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition alongside Nahum Chandler’s The Problem of the Negro as A Problem for Thought and Calvin Warren’s Ontological Terror. The hope would be to return to this paper and develop it more with a fuller understanding after returning to the material subtending its logic. I believe that the approach of a “more considered pessimism” is something I really would like to share with the world especially if I had firmer grasp on what Kant, Heidegger, Deleuze and Badiou are trying to say and what they are trying to articulate in tandem and in critical dialogue.
I understand people’s particular investments in the Human and whereas though I believe I am wholly unsympathetic to redeeming it, I also believe it is impossible to not think with it since anti-Humanism is caught within the paradigm of Humanism itself. However, I found Freedom to be one of the final concepts sustaining any filial relationship I might have and many others have with Enlightenment Reason and Enlightenment logic. As in, they will dispense with every other major conceptual import from the Enlightenment but will keep Freedom because Freedom is pretty to maintain even if Freedom has traditionally been yoked to Reason and the Individual and the State and so on and so forth. So whereas though I understand investments, I am not invested myself because I find Freedom and Liberation to also be uncertain categories of thought that rest on axiomatics that have produced some of the most violent technologies, histories, and realities.
Thank you once again for your time. Enjoy the holidays and I’ll speak with you soon.
Mumble Theory 