#selamawit d. terrefe

[yngsuk]

In [Julia] Kristeva’s thought, entry into the social order is predicated on abjection, or separation from the mother, which precedes and precipitates the child’s entrance into the Symbolic, or law of the Father. The Black, however, lacks a similar corporeal tie with the maternal, instead revealing the ontological, psychic, and material ruptures reflective of a political ontology borne of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. For Black motherhood is sutured to a history of property relations, rather than kinship ties, and is illuminated by the state’s and civil society’s reach which extends from and beyond the ship’s hole: the severing of kinship ties of ascent and the erasure of maternal claims to descendants, whether on the plantation or via the foster ‘care’ and carceral systems. Blackness as deathly marker within the Symbolic, Imaginary, and Real is so intimately tied to the metaphoric and material reality of the corpse (and we have thousands of bones laying in the bottom of the Atlantic ocean to support this claim) that [Hortense] Spillers’ elaboration of the reduction of African bodies into flesh illuminates a critical facet: the material and psychic violence attendant to the construction of racial Blackness—in and through chattel slavery and its successive iterations—precedes one’s subjective and phenomenological experience of it. For antiblackness as a political and ontological outcome of a series of historical events—Sub Saharan racialized slavery, the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and the birth of modern racial capital—is prior to one’s entrance, but perhaps not one’s formation, in language or the Symbolic Order. Temporal aphasia operates by way of retraction where what remains unsymbolizeable in language—the Real, or the violence that precedes the id for Black people—gives way to speculative theories such as from Spillers who reveals the distinction between searching for communicability versus the rules of order, for understanding and expression versus systems of power: language versus her aim to “posit a grammar of a different ‘subject of feminism’.” And if violence is the a priori psychic and ontological construction undergirding Blackness, our methods for interpreting and articulating not only the machinations of the Black psyche, but also Black intramural relations, must be attuned to the effects of these “high crimes against the flesh” of “African females and African males” who still register this foundational “wounding”—what Spillers defines relationally as “social irreparability.”

Selamawit D. Terrefe, Speaking the Hieroglyph

[ethnographiesofblacklife]

Afro-pessimism: “Afro-pessimism is a field of thought which takes seriously the historical reality that blackness is politically and ontologically coterminous with slaveness. According to the 2018 Oxford Bibliography entry on Afro-pessimism written by Patrice Douglass, Selamawit D. Terrefe, and Frank B. Wilderson III, afro-pessimism can be understood as “a lens of interpretation that accounts for civil society’s dependence on anti-black violence—a regime of violence that positions black people as internal enemies of civil society.” - taken from the Wikipedia article

- GC

[yngsuk]

For to speak of a Black unconscious is to see the world unfold at a destructive rate and against telos; with the barrel of a gun, the targeting light of a Taser, and the discomfort of civil society.

Selamawit D. Terrefe, Speaking the Hieroglyph