Mimetic Apprehension: Care, Inclination and the Weather of Antiblackness

ABSTRACT

In this article I further Adriana Cavarero and Nidesh Lawtoo’s discussion of “mimetic inclination” to consider the way a person can be known in their uniqueness. Cavarero says that we receive a sense of the uniqueness of another by relating their narrative. I suggest that this also reveals a sense of the uniqueness of the one narrating, and that this can be understood as a practice of care. This narration is, as a consequence, distinct from representation (which itself is distinct from mimesis) and is better described as apprehension. By drawing on Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, I detail a primary form of care connected to apprehension that is engendered by what Sharpe calls “the weather of antiblackness”. Morrison both details this form of care in Beloved and practises it herself in her storytelling. This expands feminist analyses of vulnerability, providing critical resources for rethinking existence apart from its colonial and patriarchal articulation.

KEYWORDS:

• Vulnerability
• Adriana Cavarero
• inclination
• Beloved
• antiblackness
• care

How can we think (and rethink and rethink) care laterally, in the register of the intramural, in a different relation than that of the violence of the state?¹

Irremediably open to wounding and caring, the vulnerable one exists totally in the tension generated by this alternative.²

They shifted shapes and became something other. Some unchained, demanding other whose feet knew her pulse better than she did. Just like this one in her stomach.³

During conversations in New York in 2017 and Verona in 2018, Nidesh Lawtoo and Adriana Cavarero discussed the concept of mimesis, and what bearing it might have for Cavarero’s oeuvre. In the interview that resulted from these conversations, Lawtoo notes that mimesis traditionally carries a split meaning: either it signifies the representation of reality, or the process of imitation.⁴ Lawtoo is particularly interested in the latter understanding of mimesis, as it opens out onto a consideration of subjectivity that may provide critical purchase for intervening in dominant conceptions of subjecthood in the Western imaginary. If this affective mimesis is essential to humanness, then the relation between you and I becomes critical. I am affected by you, just as you are affected by me. In a move central to much of what is called poststructuralism, for Lawtoo the distinction between you and I is troubled, particularly when we consider that mimetic imitation precedes the formation of the I. A condition of the emergence of this “I” is imitation, for example, in those initial years where the baby responds to their primary carers, who respond to the baby in turn.⁵ In his Homo Mimeticus Lawtoo calls this a kind of “mimetic pathos”, and while exemplarily seen in the infant (and their doting carers) Lawtoo argues that it is essential to a “human body” throughout this human’s life.⁶ For Lawtoo, this relay of affectability speaks to themes in Cavarero’s work, namely maternity, embodiment and the consequent vulnerability of any embodied existent. To be vulnerable, for Cavarero, is to be open to wounding or caring, revealing an essential dependency to all human life that is often unbalanced. Exemplified in the stereotype of the mother leaning over the child, for Cavarero, like Lawtoo, these forms of inclination never leave us and may open new imaginaries distinct from the rectitude of the autonomous, independent ontology central to the macro-narrative of the West.⁷

Lawtoo suggests that there is also a mimetic inclination at play in the relational ontology of vulnerability that Cavarero proposes.⁸ Cavarero, however, is wary of the dissolution or substitution of self that she understands as being suggested in the imitative understanding of mimesis.⁹ For Cavarero, existence is totally relational.¹⁰ However, phenomenologically, Cavarero insists on a uniqueness of personal identity that remains whatever the effects imitative mimesis may have on one’s subjectivity. It is this insistence articulated across her work that makes Cavarero both an idiosyncratic and particularly generative scholar. She follows the contours of much continental and poststructural thought but deviates in significant ways. She speaks of a unique existent but is deeply critical of the Individual celebrated in Western liberal traditions. She insists on relationality but refuses the dissolution of the essential truth of a person’s singularity. At the crux of this idiosyncrasy is the concept of uniqueness: who a person is, as distinct from what they are. Borrowing directly from Hannah Arendt, for Cavarero uniqueness both places a person in irrevocable relation, and resists any dissolution of who they, in their singularity, are.¹¹ Uniqueness is not a semblance, a mimetic representation that either imitates a more essential hidden truth or reveals the absence of any essentiality. Uniqueness is given, lived, in and of the world, mundane.

Cavarero’s reticence to embrace an understanding of mimetic inclination may be unwarranted. For Lawtoo, like Cavarero, the figure of homo mimeticus already complicates a hard distinction between the dissolution of the subject and the reification of the Individual. Lawtoo notes that “Homo mimeticus is […] not only passively subjected to the affective experience of imitation; it can also actively resist the powers of imitation and keep them at a distance, at least in theory if not always in practice”. For Lawtoo, a “pathos of distance” traces a tension between the mimetic and the anti-mimetic, and it is between these poles – rather than being consigned to the former – that the subject finds themself.¹² Further, Lawtoo’s concept of mimesis helps clarify a tension in Cavarero’s philosophy. If a person’s uniqueness should be the essential locus of any ethics or politics, how does one represent another in their singularity? To know what someone is straightforward, particularly in the Western liberal culture that places so much weight on the “what” of identity when navigating politico-ethical issues. But to know “who” they are, not in juxtaposition to difference, but as a vitalising of identity running counter to the stultification proper to liberal approaches to managing difference, is more complicated. In her seminal monograph Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood Cavarero insists that it is the telling of another’s story that offers a sense – un sapore – of who a person is.¹³ Fragile, fleeting, precarious, but undeniable, this sense of another’s uniqueness is gifted to them and, for Cavarero, is something all existents desire. But critically, this gift also gestures towards mimetic issues, first in that it is a narrative and so, in a certain sense, a representation, and second, because it suggests a relay between the one gifting a sense of another’s uniqueness and the one gifted this sense. In the gifting, in the “mimetic pathos” that is opened by the gift of the relating of another’s narrative, the uniqueness of the one narrating is also revealed, just as a plurality reveals the uniqueness of each existent that is a part of that plurality. It is this incidental reciprocity that makes the act of narration less a representation, and more what I call an apprehension: an inclined reaching and seizing of another, where if I touch another in this moment of connection I am also touched, seized. Apprehension, then, could properly take its place within the “mimetic turn” that Lawtoo outlines.¹⁴ The structure of subject observing object – central to European colonialism, the scientific revolution and the scholarship of the Enlightenment philosophes – is refused. Operative in this concept of apprehension are its everyday resonances. To apprehend is to perceive, or to know; but as Judith Butler notes, it is “less precise” than recognition.¹⁵ While the act of apprehending another’s uniqueness is in most cases an affirmative moment, it is also haunted by the violences of arrest, as I have argued, and will argue again in what follows.¹⁶ Finally, one may be apprehensive, unsure, or affected by a sense of foreboding. These are feelings that touch on the break with the stereotype (still powerfully operative) of the subject who knows, and through knowledge achieves mastery. As we relinquish control we may be apprehensive, but born from this apprehension are the resources to imagine the world anew. In either case, narrative – whether in the form of the biography, the novel, the poem, or other visual or aural poetics – can be a critical site from which forms of apprehension can be practised. A variation on mimesis, this moment of contact carries ethico-political import, in that it is a transformation of how existence is understood – not simply represented but lived. I suggest this apprehension is a form of care, linked to a primary care that subtends the binary of care and wound that is central to Cavarero’s account of vulnerability.

In Toni Morrison’s classic novel Beloved, this primary form of care becomes inescapable. Beloved’s plot is well known. Set in the United States and spanning the legal abolition of slavery in 1865, Beloved centres on Sethe, an ex-slave who escaped the plantation and fled north. When the master of the plantation attempts to recapture Sethe, Sethe tries to kill her children, succeeding with her two-year-old daughter whom she will name Beloved – the only word Sethe could afford to have inscribed on her daughter’s gravestone. Sethe enacts this infanticide to keep her children safe from the horrors of enslavement. Beloved then haunts the house that Sethe, her remaining children Denver, Howard and Buglar, and her husband’s mother Baby Suggs live in. After Paul D, an ex-slave from the same plantation Sethe grew up on, returns and exorcises the ghost of Beloved, a young woman around the age of eighteen, also named Beloved, appears and is taken in by Sethe, eighteen years after her baby’s death.

If for Cavarero an ethical disposition emerges in the tension between the choice of care or wound, embodied in the posture of the inclined mother reaching out to her child, then Sethe’s actions seem either to be the limit of this ethics, or its ultimate exemplar. Cavarero says:

[t]he alternative between care and wound, as well as that between love and violence, is […] entirely inscribed in inclination as a predisposition to respond. Extroverted, stooped, responsive – this posture is typical of a self that bends itself over the other, conspicuously abandoning its own balance.¹⁷

Sethe’s infanticide makes clear that an ethical schema structured around this tripartite of care-or-wound can be rendered inoperative by the extreme violence of slavery; what Christina Sharpe has called the weather of antiblackness. For Sharpe, “the weather is the totality of our environments; the weather is the total climate; and that climate is antiblack”.¹⁸ Sharpe notes that following the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, which required officials in free northern states to aid southern slave masters in the capture of runaway slaves, “slavery is enforced as the law of the entire United States. Its atmospheric density increased; slavery undeniably became the total environment”.¹⁹ Sharpe mobilises the figure of “the wake” to account for the ongoing legacies of transatlantic slavery: a period of history that, despite receding into the past, continues to leave a turbulence that expands ever outwards, overwhelming the present to such an extent that the distinction between past and present, as Sharpe notes drawing on Michel-Rolph Trouillot, is unclear.²⁰ The legacies of slavery continue to condition the world in a manner that renders Black life disposable and privileges whiteness as the implicit norm of humanness, as evidenced in antiblack police brutality, the disproportionate incarceration of Black people, and experiences of quotidian racial violence and abandonment. However, Sharpe also attends to the wake’s multivalence, noting that a wake is also a process of collective mourning, where people come together to care for one another and to take care of the memory of the one who was lost.²¹ Indeed, Sharpe insists on holding these two meanings simultaneously. The wake as an act of mourning is not outside the wake of enslavement, but nor is it reducible to the effects of this wake and its ongoing violences. At the extreme, as seen in Morrison’s Sethe, the wake may render the clean distinction between caring and wounding indistinct. However, to live in this wake and to attend to this indistinction – to “insist Black being into the wake” – also necessitates care.²² As such, when to care may be to wound, or to wound may be to care, and when the notion of “choice” founders on the shore of suffocating domination – when choice betrays its implicitly rectitudinous, self-supporting and, consequently, consenting, agentic and willful personhood – inclination takes on another valence that is anticipated by Cavarero even as it unsettles the exemplars she mobilises.²³ In Beloved, what becomes apparent is a form of care that subtends the choice of care or wound. This care – essential to the apprehension of another, often despite violent extant conditions – contributes to the “poetic revolt” of European colonial imaginaries and their material effects, opening a door for Cavarero’s scholarship to do the same.²⁴

Care and Wound

As I have noted, for Cavarero inclination is a posture that attends to the vulnerability of another: their capacity to be wounded, but also their capacity to be cared for. Eager to avoid the reduction of vulnerability to an innate feminine propensity for care, or an innate masculine propensity for wounding, Cavarero insists that the possibility of both these responses is what makes a consideration of our constitutive vulnerability valuable. In Cavarero’s words, “[t]o think the maternal merely as care […] not only risks repeating the stereotype of the self-sacrificing woman; it also, and above all, obscures the ethical valence of inclination, which consists in the alternative between care and wound”.²⁵ It is between these “two poles” of response that, for Cavarero, vulnerability needs to be thought: “[i]rremediably open to wounding and caring, the vulnerable one exists totally in the tension generated by this alternative”.²⁶ For Cavarero, the vulnerable one, exemplarily embodied in the newborn infant, exists in this tension prior to its resolution, which is inevitable: when confronted with a defenceless, helpless existent we are solicited into an either / or that leaves no room for refusal, “[a]s though the null response – neither the wound nor the care – were excluded”.²⁷ For the helpless, defenceless, utterly dependent being, to do nothing is to wound, and, as paltry as it may be, to do anything other than nothing in supporting the newborn is in some way to care. However, Morrison presents us with an existent who does not live this tension between care or wound prior to its inevitable resolution; Beloved is totally encompassed by the indeterminate oscillation of care and wound surrounding Sethe’s act. If for Cavarero “[t]he ‘vulnerable creature’ carries the vulnus, the wound, in its very name, which seems to destabilize the ethical alternative”, it only does so to the extent that it makes clear that to wound and to care are two sides of the same coin, one scandalous, one ordinary.²⁸ Whereas for Sethe, in a very real way, “the absence of wound or care were not even thinkable”.²⁹

By bringing Cavarero’s account of inclination to bear on Morrison’s Sethe, one might say that this is to privilege once again the perpetrator of violence rather than the victim; something Cavarero attempts to correct in her deployment of the category of “horrorism” that maintains a relation to her thoughts on vulnerability and her account of inclination. One might say, for example, that from the perspective of the yet-to-be-named Beloved, she experiences first the wound, and that she is defenceless to this wounding; that in Cavarero’s words “[e]ven though, as bodies, vulnerability accompanies us throughout our lives, only in the newborn, where the vulnerable and the defenseless are one and the same, does it express itself so brazenly”.³⁰ In this way Sethe’s acts would be understood as a form of horrorism, an “ontological crime”: the simultaneity of the wounding of the defenceless and the disfiguring of the body.³¹ Sethe would then be brought into proximity with the figure of Medea, a comparison intimated in the reception of an 1867 portrait of Margarate Garner, on whom Morrison based Sethe.³² However, in either the case of Margaret Garner or Sethe the comparison is inaccurate. As Cavarero makes clear, Euripides’ telling of the story of Medea not only makes her infanticide inescapable, but also positions it as the concluding act of horrorism in a chain of bodily disfigurement and killing by one who is “foreign, savage, and barbarous”.³³ Neither Sethe nor Margaret Garner conform to the broader contours of the myth, even if tropes of foreignness, savagery and barbarousness were at play in the white reception of Garner’s story.³⁴ In her reading of Medea, Cavarero seeks to read past the misogyny of the Western tradition: she notes both that despite Medea’s killing of her children, “there is also the story of a loving mother […] standing behind the icon of infanticide into which Euripides has made her for millennia”; and that the horrorist violence of the myth did not emerge from “beyond the bounds of Greece”, as Euripides would have it, but is, rather, central to the Western tradition.³⁵ At the last, Medea’s children are “recognized by her from a standpoint of care”.³⁶ However, more pertinent for both Sethe and Margaret Garner is the weather of antiblackness that pervades any consideration of care and wound, victim and perpetrator. The atmospheric violence concomitant with this weather condition not so much reorients who should be considered victim and who should be considered perpetrator, but pulls at the coherence of this binary as a primary distinction for those who are encompassed by extreme and often unilateral racial violence. In other words, as well as demonstrating the intimate proximity of wound and care, Morrison also challenges the conditions within which we can make sense of the stakes of Cavarero’s account of horrorism; that within the ongoing “horrorist catastrophe” that was transatlantic slavery, Sethe’s infanticide is a lacuna that escapes Cavarero’s schema.³⁷

This can also be seen in Cavarero’s understanding of the maternal / natal relation as asymmetrical. Cavarero says,

[f]or the infant, in essence, this is a relation of dependency that is as crucial as it is unconscious and unidirectional; it is a complete passivity in the face of the acts, whether benign or malignant, performed by the one who inclines over him. In this respect, the infant – especially the newborn – embodies, in an exemplary way, the other as defenseless.³⁸

Cavarero continues later in the same chapter:

[t]o lean over the infant is to lean over another who cannot wound in return. This relation is without any reciprocity; it is structurally asymmetrical. Maternal inclination does not decide for good or evil; it simply bends over the infant, outlining a scene in which good and evil, care and wound, enacted with full and unilateral power, cannot contemplate any retaliation.³⁹

Cavarero emphasises asymmetry to avoid a conception of relationality that presumes two independent, upright, self-balancing individuals. From the start, for Cavarero, we are consigned to another – mimetically so, as Lawtoo would say – vulnerable in the extreme to either wounding or caring, inculcating a responsiveness from our primary carer one way or the other. Beloved, as she will come to be known, is evidently subject to a unidirectional relationality exemplified in Sethe’s care-as-wounding. However, in Morrison’s narrative Beloved then returns, a haunting that oversteps the bounds of the properly spectral to embody herself, present in Sethe’s life to such an extent that the roles of mother and daughter are switched, and it is Sethe as mother who is rendered defenceless, wasting away as Beloved’s belly grows.⁴⁰ Saidiya Hartman has highlighted the vulnerability of the figure of the Black mother in her consideration of the violences to which Black women were subject to in their dual roles as carers of their own children and as carers for white children whom they often nannied, both before and after slavery’s legal abolition. In Hartman’s words, “[t]hose of us who have been ‘touched by the mother’ need acknowledge that her ability to provide care, food, and refuge often has placed her in great jeopardy and, above all, required her to give with no expectation of reciprocity or return. All that we have is what she holds in her outstretched hands”.⁴¹ To emphasise the asymmetrical relation of mother and newborn, as Cavarero does, is to risk obfuscating this violence, enabling a picture of a mother free of the violences coterminous with the weather of antiblackness, protected from this weather by her own implicit racialisation as white. Of course, Cavarero confines this asymmetry to the dyadic relation of mother and child; there may be other forces at play beyond the purview of Cavarero’s exemplary scene which do not necessarily call this scene into question. Nonetheless, accounting for these forces is important, since if the mother is to offer resources to rearticulate existence beyond the sovereign figure of the European tradition, processes of racialisation are not incidental to this task. As Morrison makes clear, as well as being wounded herself, Beloved wounds Sethe, demands an absolute care that Sethe can never satiate, exhausting Sethe’s capacity to nourish her daughter and in doing so imperilling Sethe’s life.⁴² This is not to conflate these two forms of wounding, nor to draw an equivalence between Sethe and Beloved, nor, in Cavarero’s words, to “announce the usual and suspect symmetry” of two self-balancing individuals.⁴³ Beloved and Sethe’s relationship is never symmetrical, and the question of dependence is at its core. If, following Hartman, “[a]ll that we have is what she holds in her outstretched hands” then this maternal figure is also inclined, sustaining an unbalanced relation. However, the weather of antiblackness maximises the vulnerability of the Black mother that accompanies this unbalanced gesture of caring. In other words, Beloved’s improper return in the flesh (as opposed to her appropriate, disembodied, spectral presence within the house of 124) makes clear that the weather of antiblackness can bring care into an intimate proximity both with the wounding of another and with one’s own vulnerability to wounding. Inclination can account for this relation, but the relation also places a torsional force on Cavarero’s account of vulnerability.

Care “in the flesh”

The scene of infanticide that Morrison places at the heart of her novel does not of necessity renounce Cavarero’s important insistence on a reorientation of inclined vulnerability around birth rather than death. Sethe’s actions suggest not that death is, after all, the appropriate and only frame through which to understand natality and maternity in the context of slavery, even though, for Sharpe, “for many in the wake the cradle and the grave continue to be produced as the same space”.⁴⁴ Rather, what becomes evident is that the absolute lines between birth and death, care or wound, response or abandonment, and victim or perpetrator cannot always be sustained in the context of the weather of antiblackness, the violence concomitant with this climate, and the civil and legal maxim of partus sequitur ventrem that, as Sharpe makes clear, maintains its legacies into the present.⁴⁵ Indeed, the coherence of a schema that rigorously separates caring and wounding depends upon the destabilisation of living this very separability for particular people. This expands and contorts Cavarero’s account, forcing it to consider the “implicit norm of whiteness that underpins her own discourse on birth”, while also affirming Cavarero’s insistence that vulnerability needs to be rethought: away from a coincidental, substitutable chain between wound, death and killing; and towards a defencelessness, a helplessness, a nakedness, where there is no reason for battling warriors to be the go-to personas to illustrate this scene.⁴⁶ The conceptual chain oscillates between wound and care, and the mother and child become the figures better able to illustrate its valence as a way of understanding the human condition. We could say then that despite Sethe wounding the yet-to-be-named Beloved, she nonetheless does not consign her and Beloved to “a bellicose and virilist imagery”.⁴⁷ Sethe has nothing to do with the temptation to kill that is provoked by the face of the Other as Levinas understands it.⁴⁸ If Sethe wounds and cares, she does not do so as both warrior and mother, just as Medea “has nothing in common with the warriors of the Iliad and their world”.⁴⁹ However, neither, following Cavarero, does Sethe assert a form of maternity that would implicitly sustain a norm of whiteness, obscuring the weather of antiblackness that subtends any choice of care or wound and forces them into an intimate relation. Sethe wounds and cares for Beloved who is free of wrinkles, smooth, even in her return as an eighteen-year-old woman, in contrast to the chokecherry tree scarring on Sethe’s back.⁵⁰ This is a juxtaposition resonant with Cavarero’s insistence that vulnerability encompasses both the touch of caring and wounding. But contrary to Cavarero’s typical illustration of her schema, the possibilities of both these forms of touch are sustained in the indeterminate oscillation of Sethe’s actions.

Following Hortense Spillers, we might say that Sethe stands “in the flesh, both mother and mother-dispossessed”.⁵¹ To stand “in the flesh, both mother and mother-dispossessed” is, for Spillers, the consequence of partus sequitur ventrem: that the status of enslavement was inherited from the mother.⁵² For Spillers this resulted in the simultaneous privileging of Black maternity but also the undermining of the conditions that would allow “maternity” to be a sensible category; that is, being in possession of a body that would cohere (and cohere around) normative gender identity, rather than being reduced to flesh by the violences of enslavement that send the body, its discursive and iconographic representation, and its coterminous gender norms into disarray. Importantly, Spillers’ account of the flesh is orientated around a paradox: while the flesh emerges as the body is exposed to violence (as a person is “reduced” to flesh), for Spillers the flesh is also the target of this criminal violence – what she calls “high crimes against the flesh”.⁵³ As Spillers says, “before the ‘body’ there is the ‘flesh’, that zero degree of social conceptualization that does not escape concealment under the brush of discourse, or the reflexes of iconography”.⁵⁴ This is significant as it means that the flesh carries meaning beyond the body’s sheer exposure to violence: in Saidiya Hartman’s words “[t]he flesh is produced by the violence of racial slavery and yet it brings into view a new mode of relation”.⁵⁵ This relation, as Hartman goes on to suggest, is a form of care: always in proximity to violence, always leaving the Black mother vulnerable to this violence, but not finally reducible to this violence. Following Spillers, by refusing the refusal of the body and inhabiting the flesh – by tarrying with the seeming paradox of existing as “both mother and mother-dispossessed” – Sethe could be said to “[gain] the insurgent ground as female social subject”.⁵⁶ This is an insurgency that can figure another posture of inclined singular vulnerability; a manifestation of who it is that comes after the subject.⁵⁷

Cavarero is not wrong to emphasise maternal caress as an overlooked but crucial aspect of vulnerability: Beloved’s tonal force is structured around Sethe’s violation of this touch. Instead, Beloved makes apparent another aspect of inclination that comes to the fore when one considers the weather of antiblackness that pervades in the wake of transatlantic slavery: an intimacy of wounding and caring that heightens Cavarero’s account of vulnerability, and makes possible an apprehension of who it may be that comes after the subject, in the flesh, without falling back onto a norm of whiteness. To make sense of who this is, however, requires a consideration not only of the binary of wound and care – a binary that can only fully function in a world presumed to be absent of the weather of racial violence – but also a consideration of the way a form of care must necessarily subtend the negotiation of the intimacy of wounding and caring. There was, in other words, a care that Sethe carried that was a condition for her confronting the impossibility of untangling care and wound; and the practising of this care is lived in the flesh as an escape from Being, an escape from the body, attentive to one’s singularity.

“They shifted shapes and became something other”

How does the weather of antiblackness preclude the possibility of understanding Sethe’s action as a choice? Sethe refuses the choice of care or wound because the violences attendant to this weather means that caring is already wounding, or that wounding is already caring, even if these only reach a total intimacy, an absolute coincidence, in moments that cannot properly be called exceptional.⁵⁸ Her action is then of the order of non-action, of the order of “nonperformance” as Fred Moten has articulated it in conversation with Sora Han.⁵⁹ Sethe’s refusal of choice is a refusal of an ethic that itself depends on antiblackness for its coherence, which is at the same time the weather condition that means Sethe has no choice except the non-choice – the “rough choice”, to quote Morrison’s Stamp Paid – that she is left with.⁶⁰ This means re-emphasising Cavarero: to do nothing is to wound, and to do something might be to “enact” a non-action, a nonperformance, that cannot be said to be either wounding or caring; but nor can it properly be said to be wounding and caring, nor even said not to be wounding and caring. Rather, Sethe’s non-action is an indeterminate oscillation between care and wound. It suspends the choice’s resolution, interrupting its telos, and reveals that the capacity to make a choice – the sovereign decision – is premised on the forced incapacity of others to do likewise. None of this is to valorise this non-act, nor to claim an equivalence between Sethe’s non-act and the numerous other instances of caring and wounding throughout Beloved that do not so obviously maintain such an indeterminacy: Baby Suggs and Stamp Paid’s presence outside the woodshed, solicited as care-givers following Sethe’s non-act; or Baby Suggs’ entreatment to those attending her Call to love their flesh; or Baby Suggs’ caring touching of Sethe, in contrast to the wounding touch of the spectral presence in the clearing; or the community’s intervention to stop Sethe wasting away in her care for Beloved; or the community’s support offered to Denver; or Hi Man’s call that signals the moment of escape from the prison camp; or Amy and Sethe’s bringing Denver into the world as they “did something together appropriately and well”.⁶¹ Rather, it is to recognise that Sethe’s refusal of the choice of care or wound itself required a form of care.⁶² Her non-act’s “terrible beauty”, the care necessary to negotiate the indeterminacy of care and wound, signals the end of one conception of the subject and heralds not an alternate subjecthood – not another Being thought from the perspective of the metaphysics of European modernity – but the destruction of the philosophical system that sustains the subject, premised as this system is on a determinacy and a separability that Sethe’s non-act belies.⁶³

In the wake of this destruction, what is the care necessary to apprehend who it is that comes after the subject, in the flesh?⁶⁴ If a first order of care can be understood in its juxtaposition to wounding, and if a second order can be understood as the negotiation of the times when this juxtaposition is rendered indeterminate, then a third order can be understood as the apprehension of the practising of these two former orders of care. This third order – and the complexities of practicing this care in the wake of transatlantic slavery – has been central to recent Black feminist scholarship, not least in the work of Hartman and Sharpe. Exemplarily articulated in Hartman’s “Venus in Two Acts”, at the extreme it necessitates what Hartman calls “critical fabulation” in order to apprehend another’s life without reproducing the violences that overwhelm this life and its fleeting appearance in the archives of slavery.⁶⁵ For Sharpe, it involves attending to

forms of Black expressive culture […] that do not seek to explain or resolve this exclusion in terms of assimilation, inclusion, or civil or human rights, but rather depict aesthetically the impossibility of such resolutions by representing the paradoxes of blackness within and after the legacies of slavery’s denial of Black humanity.⁶⁶

Sharpe attends to these issues throughout her In the Wake, frequently invoking Morrison’s Beloved as she does so. In one such instance, Sharpe draws attention to the figure of the antelope that Morrison mobilises in her novel.⁶⁷ As Sharpe notes, the Antelope was a slave ship, notable because, on one of its voyages – one of the over thirty-five thousand recorded voyages slave ships took – its “original goal” was “thwarted” because of “human agency”, what one can assume was rebellion from some of its two-hundred and fifty-nine abducted Africans, over half of whom were children.⁶⁸ The passages in Beloved that Sharpe highlights mobilise the antelope as a representation of Sethe’s unborn child, Denver. Sethe does not know why she thinks of the child as an antelope, speculating that the image emerges from her early life on the Sweet Home plantation, of which she carries only fleeting memories of “song and dance”. The dance that they danced, her mother included, was the antelope, Sethe says, and as they danced “[t]hey shifted shapes and became something other. Some unchained, demanding other whose feet knew her pulse better than she did. Just like this one in her stomach”.⁶⁹ What form of “mimetic inclination” is at play here?⁷⁰ The one in Sethe’s stomach dances like an antelope, dances the antelope, shifting its shape and becoming something other, something that is not chained, something that makes demands, something whose proximate intimacy is so absolute that it might know Sethe’s pulse better than Sethe does. This signals a fundamental imbrication of the singularity of Sethe and the one in her stomach that could tip Cavarero’s attention to the uniqueness of the singular existent over the edge of a clear distinction between one and another, depending on how you look at what she is saying. Through a shape-shifting, a contortion, a pivoting off the secure standpoint of the vertical axis in a manner that throws the coherence of a rectilinear geometry into question, Sethe’s mother and those others enslaved on Sweet Home dispossess themselves of something they never possessed in the first place: a sense of body that only coheres within a representational economy of discourse and iconography, to paraphrase Spillers, and that is sent into disarray by the extreme violence concomitant with the weather of antiblackness.⁷¹ Instead, like those present at Baby Suggs’ Call, the other they become is another not first of body but of flesh; a convocation of their singularity that encompasses those dancing together as well as the one dancing within Sethe, spanning both space and time. For Morrison, as Sharpe highlights, there is a fundamental relationship between this song and dance of enfleshed existents and the existent Sethe carries within her: each a form of care; each attentive to the singularity of one another, in the flesh; and each demonstrating a plurality of relation that is integral to this singularity. The practising of this care is simultaneously a refusal of body and Being in the name of who it is that is in the flesh. For both those who dance and the one dancing within Sethe, the weather of antiblackness, the weathering of antiblackness, is an occasion for this song and dance; it makes this song and dance urgent. While the atmosphere of this weather, its “climate” or its “ecology”, is, as Sharpe makes clear, antiblack, it nonetheless “necessitates changeability and improvisation”.⁷² The song and dance are forms of improvisation, forms of changeability, forms of shape-shifting, that are mimetically lived in the flesh, apart from the standpoint of the body, and are shared between the one held within Sethe and all those others held in the wake of the hold, as both Morrison and Sharpe suggest.⁷³

Indeed, by considering the movement of both Sethe’s mother and the antelope-like existent within Sethe, this song and dance can be brought to the fore of Cavarero’s discussion of inclined vulnerability, placing “flesh itself” at its centre. It is easy to pass over the fact that for Cavarero inclination not only signifies a fundamental relation, nor only that this relation is so often unbalanced, but also that the act of inclining is in motion. By contrast, in the stereotypes of maternal inclination that abound in the Western tradition,

[the mother] reposes in tranquility, in a static and perfect equilibrium. Indeed, when the figure is that of the Madonna bent over baby Jesus, a figure popularized by religious art, she stays immobile and crystalized, in a ‘frozen state’, as if maternal inclination were not a movement but an originary and natural mold, an archetypical posture.⁷⁴

The stereotype of maternal inclination is not something to be settled on, inclination here frozen as a static pose and the correct posture for a “new relational ontology of the vulnerable”.⁷⁵ This frozen inclination is proper to what Spillers would think of as the body of discourse and iconography.⁷⁶ Rather, the frozen image of inclination may be used to deconstruct the tradition that would support the stereotype, revealing inclination as a mobile concept that may also signify, precisely, mobility; a mobility that is proper to the flesh.⁷⁷ In ordinary circumstances, the one vertical and self-balancing cannot move (lest they topple over), whereas the one inclined toward another is nothing other than movement: “a continuous interweaving of multiple and singular dependence”.⁷⁸ Whether or not Sethe’s wounding or caring of Beloved is finally indeterminate, she is in motion as she inclines to respond to the infant, which for Cavarero would demonstrate the irrevocable relation they manifest.⁷⁹ The song and dance of Sethe’s mother and the antelope Sethe carries within her, as “[t]hey shifted shapes and became something other”, would also be such a movement, their shape-shifting lending inclination another valence that reveals the way care – which is necessary in a world constituted in one’s violent abjection, but also precedes and exceeds this violence – articulates not only another ethic but the simultaneous imbrication of the ethical, the ontological, the aesthetic and the political, which might finally render each, as discrete categories of thought, inoperative. Lived in motile flesh, this is a care that is the necessary condition of the unresolvable negotiation of the inescapable alternative between care and wound that Cavarero confronts one with. To negotiate this unresolvable tension requires care, a care that takes a step apart from the binary of care and wound, a care made apparent in the weather of antiblackness but not finally determined by this antiblackness. This care is lived in movement, in the flesh, and to make it apparent as Morrison, Hartman and Sharpe do is to apprehend who is in the flesh, a form of contact that is not static but necessitates the movement from one to another. To apprehend this care requires one to be attentive to the polyphony of “seizing” in the Latin praehendō, which is at the heart of apprehension’s etymology. This may be a violent arrest but may also be the inclined reaching of the mother’s “outstretched hands”.⁸⁰ The imbrication of care and wound, then, is already inscribed in apprehension. In either case, to apprehend is not to know what someone is, but to touch who they are, and mimetically to be ineluctably touched in return.⁸¹ The care that is practised by the one apprehending another’s negotiation of care or wound – looking back at a fragment of a life, which is at the same time a looking around and a looking forward; or an overlooking of the optics that would overwhelm this life – is not a care of a fundamentally different kind to that practised by those in the flesh, in their reciprocal touches, whether in their “outstretched hands” or on the breath of the logos that is always already phone (itself always already noise) as “[t]hey shifted shapes and became something other”.⁸² In both care understood as the apprehension of another – exemplarily practised by Morrison – and the care of those who comprehend one another – seen in the lives of those, like Sethe, whom Morrison narrates – there is a negotiation of the indeterminacy of caring and wounding brought about by the weather of antiblackness, and this negotiation is a caring; in Sharpe’s words, the sounding of “an ordinary note of care”.⁸³

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Sharpe, In the Wake, 20.

2 Cavarero, Horrorism, 30.

3 Morrison, Beloved, 37.

4 Cavarero and Lawtoo, “Mimetic Inclinations,” 184–5.

5 See Lawtoo, “Bataille and the Birth of the Subject.”

6 Lawtoo, Homo Mimeticus, 37.

7 Cavarero, Inclinations, 129; Cavarero and Lawtoo, “Mimetic Inclinations,” 186.

8 Cavarero and Lawtoo, “Mimetic Inclinations,” 195.

9 Ibid., 195–6.

10 Ibid., 186.

11 Arendt, The Human Condition, 176.

12 Lawtoo, Homo Mimeticus, 37.

13 On il sapore, see Paul A. Kottman’s Translator’s Introduction to Cavarero’s Relating Narratives, xxviii, note 39.

14 Lawtoo, Homo Mimeticus, 12.

15 Judith Butler, Frames of War, 4–5.

16 Huzar, “Apprehending Care in the Flesh,” 2021.

17 Cavarero, Inclinations, 105.

18 Sharpe, In the Wake, 104.

19 Ibid.

20 Ibid., 9.

21 Ibid. 10–11.

22 Ibid. 11.

23 On consent, agency, will, and their limits, see Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 79–112.

24 Odysseos, “Stolen Life’s Poetic Revolt.”

25 Cavarero, Inclinations, 105.

26 Cavarero, Horrorism, 20, 30.

27 Ibid., 30.

28 Cavarero, Inclinations, 105, 106.

29 Cavarero, Horrorism, 30.

30 Ibid., 21.

31 Ibid. 16.

32 The painting is Thomas Satterwhite Noble’s Margaret Garner, 1867. Oil on canvas, 50.8×40.6 cm (20×16 in.). Proctor and Gamble Company, Cincinnati, Ohio. See Furth’s “The Modern Medea.” Throughout her article Furth draws attention to what Cavarero might describe as horrorist tropes present in the painting, its reception and comparison to the myth of Medea, and broader mid-nineteenth century United States culture as it responded to the formal abolition of slavery. For Furth, “the painting seems to oscillate between two discourses, one exposing the horrors of slavery and the other heightening the spectacular horror of Garner’s act itself.” Ibid., 37.

33 Cavarero, Horrorism, 26.

34 As Furth argues, “to a post-Civil War audience, Garner, as an icon of her race in the white imagination, eerily echoed Medea as a frightening specter of primitivism. […] Garner’s association with Medea ultimately brings the examination of the painting [Noble’s Margaret Garner] back to its tacit and probably unintended subtext — an evocation of the black female as the barbarian other and a graphic rehearsal of her perversity in the face of black autonomy.” “The Modern Medea,” 54.

35 Cavarero, Horrorism, 27, 26.

36 Ibid., 27.

37 Ibid., 28.

38 Cavarero, Inclinations, 103.

39 Ibid., 106.

40 Morrison, Beloved, 294–5.

41 Hartman, “The Belly of the World,” 171. Emphasis original.

42 In one sense this gestures towards the entanglement of Beloved and Sethe themselves. The wound that Sethe delivers to Beloved is also a wounding of herself, even if these two woundings, while coincidental, are not identical. Following Spillers, if the mother leaves her mark on the infant, if the infant carries the touch of the mother within them, then the mother also carries the infant, is touched by the infant in return. As Judith Butler notes, the loss of another is also to lose that part of them that we hold within us; that when we lose another, we also lose something of ourselves. Butler, Precarious Life, 22.

43 Cavarero, Inclinations, 172.

44 Sharpe, In the Wake, 88.

45 Ibid., 15, 78.

46 Söderbäck, “Natality or Birth?” 279; Cavarero, Inclinations, 158–61.

47 Cavarero, Inclinations, 162.

48 Ibid.

49 Cavarero, Horrorism, 27.

50 Morrison, Beloved, 61.

51 Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” 80. Emphasis original.

52 For more on partus sequitur ventrem, see, for example, Morgan, “Partus sequitur ventrem.”

53 Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” 67.

54 Ibid.

55 Hartman, “The Belly of the World,” 168.

56 Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” 80.

57 Nancy, “Introduction.” Cf. Cavarero, “Who Engenders Politics?”

58 Cf. Sethe’s refusal to let her children be dirtied by the violences of white people (Morrison, Beloved, 295–6).

59 Moten, Stolen Life, 258–9.

60 Morrison, Beloved, 212.

61 Morrison, Beloved, 174–80; 103–4, 208; 115,116; 302–9; 292–5; 130; 99. On Baby Suggs’ Call, cf. Moten, Stolen Life, 177–82. On the community’s support for Denver, cf. Jean Wyatt, “Giving Body,” 483. On Hi Man’s call, cf. Sharpe, In the Wake, 132–3. On Denver’s birth, cf. Wyatt, “Giving Body,” 476.

62 Paraphrasing Sora Han, does Sethe’s non-act present a territory of ethics where distinctions between care and wound appear as effects of a care that is in ethics but not of ethics, and thus obscene? Han, in Moten, Stolen Life, 252.

63 Hartman, “The Terrible Beauty.” da Silva, “On Difference Without Separability.”

64 For Christina Sharpe, this notion of care can be approached if one tarries with the polyphony of being beheld, simultaneously signifying being seen; as well as being held, perhaps in another’s outstretched hands; being beholden, owing another something; but also being held by the hold of the slave ship, and its afterlife in the present. Sharpe says, “[a]cross time and space the languages and apparatuses of the hold and its violences multiply; so, too, the languages of beholding. In what ways might we enact a beholdenness to each other, laterally?” In the Wake, 100. This lateral beholdenness can be understood as another way inclination may signify.

65 Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” 11.

66 Sharpe, In the Wake, 14.

67 Morrison, Beloved, 36–7.

68 Quoted in Sharpe, In the Wake, 103.

69 Morrison, Beloved, 37. Cf. Sharpe, In the Wake, 103.

70 Cavarero and Lawtoo, “Mimetic Inclinations.”

71 Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” 67.

72 Sharpe, In the Wake, 106.

73 Morrison, Beloved, 248–52. Sharpe, In the Wake, 68–81.

74 Cavarero, Inclinations, 9.

75 Ibid., 129. On the problems of understanding inclination as a “correct” posture, see Paul A. Kottman’s forward to Inclinations (vii).

76 Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Mabe,” 67.

77 Cf. Tina Campt’s understanding of stasis and tenseness in her chapter “Striking Poses in a Tense Grammar: Stasis and the Frequencies of Black Refusal,” in Listening to Images (2017, 47–67).

78 Cavarero, Inclinations, 13. See also Cavarero’s reading of Italo Calvino’s novel If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, where for Cavarero the character Irina is a “weaving serpent-like figure” who reflects the thread of Calvino’s story, which “emphasises the contrast between the moving tangle of shapes representing the female figure and the rigidity of the straight line attributable to the male characters” (“Scenes of Inclination” ).

79 Cavarero, Inclinations, 105.

80 Hartman, “The Belly of the World,” 171.

81 Ineluctable comes from the Latin inēlūctābilis, which, from lūctor, signifies to struggle or wrestle one's way out of something. Lūctor has its roots in the Proto-Indo-European lewg, signifying to bend or twist. To escape as one struggles out is to bend and twist, a variant of an inclined posture. Cf. the Latin luxus (dislocated) and the Ancient Greek loxós (slanting, crosswise), both also derived from lewg.

82 Morrison, Beloved, 37. On the relation of logos to phone, see Cavarero’s chapter “The Devocalization of Logos,” in her For More Than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression (2005, 33–41). On the relation of both logos and phone to noise, see Fred Moten’s chapter “The Resistance of the Object: Aunt Hester’s Scream,” in his In the Break, 1–24. On breath, see Crawley’s Blackpentacostal Breath.

83 Sharpe, In the Wake, 132.