Free Falling: Wilderson with de Man

ABSTRACT

Focusing on the work of Frank B. Wilderson III, this essay offers a new perspective on the central claims of Afropessimism by elucidating its implicit theory of language. Putting Wilderson’s “Raw Life and the Ruse of Empathy” into dialogue with the doctrine of linguistic positing elaborated by Paul de Man in his study of the Romantics, we see that Wilderson’s account of anti-Blackness identifies volatile signifying dynamics that many critical theorists have chosen to ignore. In his analyses of Black speech, Wilderson follows de Man in arguing that language is forever pushing—and frequently expanding—the limits of what can be said or done with words. This insight into the self-transgressive nature of linguistic formations proves crucial to the fight against racist logics of subjugation, which rely on a high level of discursive stability.

Notes

1 Throughout this essay, I follow Wilderson in capitalizing Blackness and Black.

2 For de Man’s reading of Fichte by way of Friedrich Schlegel, see “The Concept of Irony” 170–78.

3 See de Man’s “Aesthetic Formalization: Kleist’s Über das Marionettentheater,” esp. 289–90. The German Fall can also refer to the Fall of Man (der Sündenfall, literally the “fall into sin”), which in Kleist is closely related to the fall into a finite language.

4 See Arendt 446–47.

5 On the incidence of self-immolation in different regions of the world, see Romm, esp. 988.