![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
This essay reads Richard Wright’s speculative novella, “The Man Who Lived Underground” (1940/1996), as an anagrammatical allegory of liturgical reading. By anagrammatical, I invoke Christina Sharpe’s understanding of how Blackness singularly “exists as an index of violability and also potentiality” in its foreclosure from the World’s grammar of anti-Blackness. With allegory (of reading), I draw attention to both (1) how Wright recasts Plato’s allegory of the cave in modern America and, following Paul de Man, (2) how Wright’s text is an allegory of un/readability. Finally, with liturgy, I draw on Giorgio Agamben’s understanding of mystery as a performance that (re-)enacts the text. This leads me to theorize that Wright’s anagrammatical allegory of liturgical reading brings the reader into speculative attunement to the Black messianic, which is a radical mode of fidelity to the Black’s singular positionality in aspiring to the un-veiling [apo-kalyptein] of the katechontic anti-Black World – toward gratuitous messianic freedom.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 For the initial articulation of this paradigm, see my “Notes Toward (Inhabiting) the Black Messianic in Afro-pessimism’s Apocalyptic Thought” (2019).
2 To clarify, Afropessimism understands Blackness as coterminous with Slaveness in terms of an onto-libidinal “relational dynamic” that is not reducible to the historical reality of chattel slavery (Wilderson, Afropessimism, 229). Thus, when I read Daniels as a (fugitive) Slave – and suggest the (non-Black) reader’s liturgical implication with him – I do so following this onto-libidinal analysis that finds the Black(/)Slave as, one could say psychoanalytically, the navel or quilting-point [point de caption] of the Human’s fundamental fantasy.
3 My understanding of political theology here follows Schmitt’s inaugural articulation (Political Theology), Giorgio Agamben’s more nuanced philosophical elaboration (The Kingdom and the Glory), and Adam Kotsko’s methodological refinement (Neoliberalism's Demons): this can perhaps be summed up as a genealogical interrogation of the immanent relay between theological and political concepts together with their ontological implications; to which I would add a consideration of the libidinal economy that produces and is reproduced by this relay (for libidinal accounts of political theology, see for example Slavoj Žižek [The Puppet and the Dwarf] and Eric Santner [The Royal Remains]).
4 Throughout “The Resistance to Theory,” de Man argues that the resistance to theory is a resistance to reading because of how (deconstructive) theory thematizes reading as always already (allegorically) occurring within the text in a way that simultaneously anticipates and displaces the position of the reader. In certain respects, I think de Man’s argument resonates with the contemporary resistance to (reading) Afropessimism (in good faith). For an adjacent consideration of Blackness and/as originary displacement (with a Derridean inflection), see Nahum Chandler’s X—The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Thought.
5 Etymologically composed of “contrary to-” [para-] and “glory/opinion” [doxa].
6 See Denise Ferreira da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race.
7 In my initial articulation of the Black messianic (2019), I draw on other contemporary continental theoretical readings of the Apostle Paul – such as Agamben (The Time That Remains), Žižek (The Puppet and the Dwarf), Critchley, The Faith of the Faithless – to elaborate what I find to be the apocalyptic-messianic signatures in Afropessimism and radical Black feminism’s thought.
8 Marriott describes Fanonian invention as abyssal in that the (Black’s) only alternative to the grammar (qua racial destiny) of anti-Blackness is to enter Blackness’s “abyssal significance” (x) – which I read as isomorphic with the anagrammatical. For further elaboration, see his final chapter, “The Abyssal”: "The abyssal is what gathers the universal and particular precisely by pulling them apart, by assigning each the limited transcendental coordinate of the other, coordinates that can only be misrecognized from outside the void by which each remains unseen by, or at the furthest reach from, the other" (315). And Marriott adds that "the abyssal is both the summit of what is known and a path into the unknown" (ibid.).
9 For an analysis of how the World (as a secularized Christian supersessionist construct) follows a logic of transcendence that is parasitic on Blackness (qua radical immanence), see Daniel Colucciello Barber’s, “World-Making and Grammatical Impasse.”
10 In addition to having already drafted this essay before the following, despite both the understandable backlash to Agamben’s downplaying of the global pandemic and Vincent Lloyd’s recent call to move engagements in political theology beyond him, my use of Agamben here is ultimately in the service of theoretically manifesting and elaborating dynamics that are already present in Wright’s text.
11 For a resonant contemporary study of kenotic mysticism that divests from the World into immanent nothingness, see Alex Dubliet’s, The Self-Emptying Subject.
12 Here, along with what precedes and what follows, I am first and foremost following Wright’s attempt to differentiate his own task from his admittedly oversimplified and homogenizing conception of the Black church, which I ultimately articulate in service of situating his affirmation of Black folklore as “sublimating” the Black church’s revolutionary function in Black (“mystical”) aesthetics. However, the nature of this distinction, at least for this essay, could be clarified by articulating it with a few different isomorphic dyads: (1) James Cone’s Black Power informed condemnation of the White church (which more or less parallels Wright’s historical [if hyperbolic] schematization); (2) the early Franciscan monks' tacit condemnation of the Church’s betrayal of a commitment to Early Christianity’s communal practice of a messianic form-of-life (cf. Agamben’s, The Highest Poverty); and, more subtly, Ashon Crawley’s immanent critique of Black Pentecostalism’s oppressive normative tendencies that he counters with his own “profanation” of it through/as the Black Radical Mystical Tradition” (The Lonely Letters, 61, 70). Also, see my “Apocalyptic Tabula Rasa of Black Messianic Invention” for a parallel distinction made within radical Black thought where I contradistinguish Fanon’s non-theistic anti-eschatological messianics from Cone’s theological eschatology of liberation (115–118).
13 See “Notes Toward (Inhabiting) the Black Messianic in Afro-pessimism’s Apocalyptic Thought,” 82–84.
14 See Warren’s, Ontological Terror.
15 Cf. Rom. 9-10: “Now, once I was alive apart from Law; but when the commandment came sin sprang to life And I died; and the Law that is for life – this I found to be for death;” this gesture also anticipates my invocation of Rom. 6:3 and 6:18 below on the nullifying baptism into messianic death that releases one from the Law into righteousness.
16 Warren calls the “Law of Being” that which, before and constitutive of the “being of law,” governs and polices the ontological integrity of the World through the onticidal projection of ontological terror that constitutes Black being as such (i.e., “the nonrelation between blackness and Being”; Ontological Terror 22).
17 Charles Athanasopoulos, private conversation, July 21st, 2020.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Andrew Santana Kaplan
Andrew Santana Kaplan (they/them/their) is a doctoral student in Comparative Literature at Emory University, studying at the intersections of radical Black thought/aesthetics, continental philosophy (of religion), political theology, deconstruction, and Lacanian psychoanalysis. Their project posits and develops “the Black messianic” as (1) a paradigm of allegorical and liturgical reading that excavates the politico-theological signatures of anti-/Blackness. Such reading aspires to (2) speculatively build a way for non-Blacks to iterably practice a radical kenosis of (their) Humanity and the World in fidelity to, as Frank B. Wilderson III puts it, Blacks' invitation to (learn the steps to) “the dance of social death.” And this path is pursued (3) in the name of gratuitous messianic freedom – or, in Jared Sexton's words, “the landless inhabitation of selfless existence.” In addition to their essay on “The Man Who Lived Underground,” Andrew has written on the television series Black Mirror and Alex Garland’s film Annihilation to theorize their immanent modes of liturgical reading that can attune and enable readers to embrace an antagonism toward the anti-Black World in fidelity to Blackness. Andrew’s writing has appeared in The Comparatist, Oraxiom: A Journal of Non-Philosophy, The New Polis, and Syndicate. They can be reached at [email protected].