Oct 8
Afropessimism and the Prison of Political Desire
Author and scholar, Frank B. Wilderson III, PhD
If political desire and the critical theory that subtends it are to engage, rather than disavow, the difference between Humans who suffer through an economy of disposability and Blacks who suffer by way of social death, then we must come to grips with questions that are all too often incarcerated, held on lockdown, by political activism and radical desire: Why is anti-Black violence not a form of racist hatred but the genome; a therapeutic balm that the Human race needs to heal itself? Why must the world reproduce this violence, this social death, so that social life can regenerate Humans and prevent them from suffering the catastrophe of a kind psychic incoherence that always already usurps Black “existence”? Why must the world feed on Black flesh? How does one describe a loss that makes the world if all that can be said of loss is locked within the world?”
Pizza provided.
Sponsored by the Office of the Provost, EthIC, American Studies, Philosophy