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The death-drive theory has not found wide acceptance among Freud's followers. With significant exceptions like Melanie Klein, it has been explicitly denounced as misconceived biology, unsubstantiated speculation, logically incoherent and/or without evidence. It has also been attributed to Freud's own painful personal circumstances: the death of his daughter, the death of a grandson, his own illness (cancer), and his lifelong preoccupation with death. Of those who have been sympathetic to the idea, most have tended to tame it - as indeed did Freud himself. One move was to rewrite the instinct as largely an instinct of aggression. But for Freud the aggressive aspect of the death drive had been secondary; the instinct was primarily self-destructive. Sadism derives from a more primordial masochism, which means in effect that human aggression is, originally, self destructiveness. Of all subsequent theorists of psychoanalysis, Jacques Lacan takes the death drive most seriously, and most contemporary psychoanalytic attention to it comes via him. To his credit, Lacan does not underplay or tame the death drive, and he locates Freud firmly within the Western tradition when he remarks that Freud questioned life as to its meaning and his answer was not that it had none 'which is a convenient way of washing one's hands of the whole business' - but that life has 'only one meaning, that in which desire is borne by death' (Ecrits, p. 277). According to Lacan, the Freudian world is one not of things, nor even of being, but rather of desire. More so even than Freud, Lacan finds in desire 'the paradoxical, deviant, erratic, eccentric, even scandalous character by which it is distinguished from need'. Although this distinction has been 'always obvious to moralists worthy of the name', psychoanalysis nevertheless misses the point by pursuing an obscurantist reduction of desire to need (p. 286). And that, for Lacan, is a cardinal error. This distinction belween desire and need leads him to dwell on something else in both Freud and earlier writers, moralists and otherwise: the relation between desire and lack. In modern psychoanalysis we find a secularized, intensified version of an existential perception that goes back a long way, even though the immediate influences here are Heidegger and Kojeve: Desire is a relation of being to lack. This lack is the lack of being properly speaking. It isn't the lack of this or that, but lack of being whereby the being exists. (Lacan, Seminar, 11.222-3) For Lacan, death is the name for a primordial absence intrinsic to presence; as John Forrester puts it, 'presence includes as its very condition the limit beyond which is its absence' (p. 176).16 To bind desire so resolutely into lack and absence means that it inevitably becomes a kind of essential negativity (Lacan, Seminar, 1.146)*' - something premised on an initial failure of satisfaction and which, as such, comes to exist only by virtue of its own alienation; as Juliet Mitchell puts it, 'Desire persists as an effect of a primordial absence and it therefore indicates that, in this area, there is something fundamentally impossible about satisfaction itself (Lacan. Feminine Sexuality, p. 6). One consequence of this is a radical fragmentation of the human subject.18 In one respect Lacan recasts the familiar metaphysical idea that life is rooted in death: 'it is death that sustains existence' (Ecrits, p. 300). In his development of this idea he combines diverse elements of the Western tradition of desire's impossibility: a theology of desire as death, crossed with something more romantic if no less severe - desire as annihilating excess, a primordial discord. The two elements are fused in those places where, for example, he speaks of 'that desperate affirmation of life that is the purest form in which we recognize the death instinct' (p. 104). These ideas then get reworked according to structuralist and linguistic preoccupations, as when he speaks of the 'frenzy' of desire 'mocking Ihe abyss of Ihe infinite', and of how this amounts to 'no other derangement of instinct than that of being caught in the rails - eternally stretching forth towards the desire for something else - of metonymy. Hence its "perverse" fixation at the very suspension-point of the signifying chain where the memory-screen is immobilized and the fascinating image of the fetish is petrified' (p. 167). In the same vein Lacan suggests that it is from death that existence takes on all the meaning it has; the lack which is at the heart of desire is also the price that human beings pay for their admission to language and culture. Death makes life possible in that it makes meaning and representation possible; it is not only before speech but 'primordial to the birth of symbols' (pp. 104-5, 300). Hence Lacan's most well-known formulation, that the unconscious is structured like a language, and his claim to have demonstrated 'the profound relationship uniting the notion of the death instinct to the problems of speech' (Four Fundamental Concepts, p. 20; Merits, p. 101). Richard Boothby regards this as the most radical and innovative aspect of Lacan. I remain unconvinced.19 Lacan's invocations of death's centrality to life are more derivative than their complex, often obscure, formulations suggest.20 When he declares that All that life is concerned with is seeking repose as much as possible while awaiting death. This is what devours the time of the suckling baby at the beginning of its existence... Life is concerned solely with dying {Seminar. 11.233) we can hear Freud and Schopenhauer most closely, but also Montaigne (especially in that last assertion - 'Life is concerned solely with dying'), who also, incidentally, consolidated his own perception of this truth with extensive citation of classical sources. In the giving over of the newborn child to death we might hear too the early Christian Fathers. Lacan does not exactly disguise his precedents; the passage just cited continues with a reference to Hamlet's 'to die, to sleep, perchance to dream' and to the idea developed by philosophers in antiquity that it would have been better not to have been born. But (and this recalls Freud's own evasive acknowledgment of his influences) in Lacan these allusions to the past are fleeting, in passing, almost secretive; the implication is that these past writers anticipate something which can only properly, and only now, be understood through the lens of Lacanian psychoanalysis, whose complexity is, at the same time, almost guaranteed to defeat the attempt. Some at least of that complexity is obscurantist. In the wake of contemporary cultural developments, including the perceived failure of sexual radicalism and the trauma of AIDS, there are those who have turned to Lacan for a more honest view of desire, and, via him, are reconsidering a severe account of human desire. I should not speak for them; what I find in Lacan is an overtheorized expression of something more significantly and relevantly expressed elsewhere (in Freud and before). It this respect I believe he is symptomatic of a much wider tendency in (post-) modern theory. But in terms of his influence alone Lacan remains significant for this study. By crossing Freud's death drive with the philosophy of lack and nothingness derived from Kojeve's version of Hegel (itself influenced by Heidegger), he continues to drive death ever further into being; now, perhaps more inexorably than ever before, death is the lack which drives desire. In doing that he also exemplifies another significant tendency in modern thought which I have already remarked, namely the antihumanist wish to decentre 'man' in the name of a philosophy which is truly adequate to the complexity of being, yet which seeks to retain a residual human mastery in the very effort of articulating this complexity. As we have seen, the philosophical bid to comprehend the truth of being was always a form of intellectual empowerment - even, or rather especially, when issuing in the declaration that life, desire and the world have to be renounced. But modern theory, having lost faith in older philosophical notions of truth, now half-settles for the mastery of a new kind of complexity which it partly produces in order to enable this performance of mastery. Phoenix-like, the omniscient, masterful and above all complex analytic of the modern theorist rises above his sacrifice of 'man' to death.

In an era in which psychiatry is dominated by neuroscience-based models, psychological constructs tend to be neglected and may be taken seriously only when they have neural correlates.37 Some psychoanalysts have sought to link their model with neurobiological research and to claim that newer methods of studying the brain can validate their theories.5,6¶ Mark Solms, a South African neuropsychologist, is the founder of “neuropsychoanalysis.” This new field, with its own society and its own journal, proposes to use neuroimaging to confirm analytic theories. Its key idea is that subjective experience and the unconscious mind can be observed through neuroimaging.5 It is known that brain processes can be seen on brain imaging even before they have entered consciousness.38 However, claims that neuroimaging validate Freud’s model of the unconscious can be based only on “cherry-picking” the literature. The observed correspondences are superficial and hardly support the complex edifice of psychoanalytic theory.¶ Solms39 has also suggested that Freud’s ideas about dreams are consistent with neuroscience research based on rapid eye movement (REM) activity. This attempt to rescue a century-old theory met with opposition from dream researchers who consider Freud’s clinical speculations to be incompatible with empirical data.40,41¶ The proposal to establish a discipline of neuropsychoanalysis also met with a mixed reception from traditional psychoanalysts, who did not want to dilute Freud’s wine with neuroscientific water.42 Neuroscientists, who are more likely to see links to psychology as lying in cognitive science,43 have ignored this idea. In summary, neuropsychoanalysis is being used a way to justify long-standing models, without attempting to find something new or to develop an integration of perspectives on psychology.¶ However, Eric Kandel,44 influential in the light of his Nobel Prize for the study of the neurochemistry of memory, has taken a sympathetic view of the use of biological methods to study psychoanalytic theory. Kandel had wanted to be an analyst before becoming a neuroscientist.45 But Kandel, who does not actively practice psychiatry, may be caught in a time warp, unaware that psychoanalysis has been overtaken by competitors in the field of psychotherapy.¶ Another attempt to reconcile psychoanalysis with science has come from the literature on neuroplasticity.46 It is now known that neurogenesis occurs in some brain regions (particularly the hippocampus) during adulthood and that neural connections undergo modification in all parts of the brain. There is also evidence that CBT can produce brain changes that are visible using imaging.47 These findings have not been confirmed in psychoanalytic therapies. However, Norman Doidge, a Canadian psychoanalyst, has argued that psychoanalysis can change the brain.48 This may be the case for all psychotherapies. However, more recently, Doidge49 has claimed that mental exercises can reverse the course of severe neurological and psychiatric problems, including chronic pain, stroke, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s disease, and autism. While these books have been best-sellers, most of their ideas in the second volume,49 based on anecdotes rather than on clinical trials, have had little impact in medicine. This story underscores the difficulty of reconciling the perspectives and methods of psychoanalysis with scientific methods based on empirical testing.¶ Psychoanalysis and the Humanities¶ Psychoanalysis claimed to be a science but did not function like one. It failed to operationalize its hypotheses, to test them with empirical methods, or to remove constructs that failed to gain scientific support.1 In this way, the intellectual world of psychoanalysis more closely resembles the humanities. Today, with few psychiatrists or clinical psychologists entering psychoanalytic training, the door has been opened to practitioners with backgrounds in other disciplines, including the humanities.¶ This trend is related to a hermeneutic mode of thought,50 which focuses on meaningful interpretations of phenomena, rather than on empirical testing of hypotheses and observations. Since the time of Freud, the typical psychoanalytic paper has consisted of speculations backed up with illustrations, similar to the methods of literary theory and criticism.¶ One model currently popular in the humanities is “critical theory.”51 This postmodernist approach uses Marxist concepts to explain phenomena ranging from literature to politics. It proposes that truth is entirely relative and often governed by hidden social forces. In its most radical form, in the work of Michel Foucault,52 critical theory and postmodernism take an antiscience position, denying the existence of objective truth and viewing scientific findings as ways of defending the “hegemony” of those in power

Nothing could be further from the theoretical argument that Wilder- son presents. Emphasizing an insight central to Afropessimist thought as a whole, he declares, “Blacks are not Human subjects, but are structurally inert props, implements for the execution of White and non-Black fantasies and sado-masochistic pleasures.”11 By recognizing Blackness as external to the on- tological framework of the human, Wilderson, building on earlier work by theorists like Ronald Judy, can identify anti-Blackness as inherent in the con- stitution of (human) being. It follows from this that politics can never escape the anti-Blackness that structures the human in the first place. Both Seale and Kendi, like Angela Davis, push discussions of racism beyond the trap of intentionality and individual guilt, leading to difficult questions about structural determination that remind us, in Davis’s words, that “if we don’t take seriously the ways in which racism is embedded in structures of insti- tutions, if we assume that there must be an identifiable racist . . . who is the perpetrator, then we won’t ever succeed in eradicating racism.”12 But in doing so they also insist that those structures, because they manifest themselves in human institutions, are therefore subject to change by humans. For Wilderson and others constructing the intellectual framework of Afropessimism, that very embeddedness in the human makes structural change impossible. Thus, Wilderson rejects the prospect of “coherent liberation campaigns” for Black subjects; Afropessimism, he writes, “describe[s] a structural problem but of- fer[s] no structural solution.”13 From within the precepts of Afropessimism such a solution cannot exist. The meaning of structure has shifted here from the contingent power to shape and control particular institutions to an ontological imperative bound up with social organization as such. That imperative, as Bad Educa- tion maintains, grounds being in being meaningful, in conforming to the logic of thinkability that organizes human community. As the introduction argues by attending closely to a passage from L’Étourdit, the Symbolic’s on- tology arises, according to the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, through the exclusion of what he calls ab-sens, the nonrelation to meaning. Only this enabling subtraction of what, in itself, is subtracted from sense (even before there is a sense from which it could be subtracted), only this negation of a primal negativity, allows the ontology of the human through the language that differentiates culture from nature. To the extent that ab-sens, according to Lacan, is also what “designates . . . sex,” its ontology-producing exclusion makes sex external to meaning and being, simultaneously incomprehensible and ontologically impossible.14 Unlike the sex whose definition Justice Alito can blithely cite, sex for Lacan pertains to the Real, to the beyond of signification where definition does not obtain. As discussed in Bad Education, then, the sex that ab-sens would designate, a priori absented from being, gives way to sex as the difference that governs the Symbolic as sens-absexe, Lacan’s term for the ontological order linking sexual difference to meaning. Sens-absexe permits signification precisely by absenting sex as ab-sens. It creates, with that negative gesture, the world that swells into being through words. Because sex as ab-sens is exorbitant to the logic of difference and meaning, however, it can have no name of its own. Only through catachresis can it indicate the state of nondifferentiation made unthinkable by sens-absexe, which consigns it to the void of nonbeing that enables being to be. To that extent, the sex foreclosed with the subtraction of ab-sens coincides with incest in psychoanalysis, where incest is seen as impossible either to cognize or to enact, constituting as it does, in Lacanian terms, the impossible Real of sex. Inconceivable in its radical nondifferen- tiation, incest figures, like sex and ab-sens, the exclusion that structures the Symbolic (as the order of language, ontology, and the human) and permits it to function as the reality procured by sens-absexe. With this we may seem to have wandered far from the murder of George Floyd, but Bad Education argues, to the contrary, that this is the immutable structure to which “structural racism” finally refers. While acknowledging historical differences in lived experience, socioeconomic mobility, degree of precarity, access to power, and positioning in the cultural imaginary among those read as Black, queer, woman, trans*, or any other category of social (non)“being” collectively delegitimated as other than human,

In particular, I am interested in how this archive of African queer literature appeal to this time relation made possible by “queer” to reanimate debates that have been side-lined, if not displaced, by an overly pragmatic turn in queer theory, which ‘has dominated sexuality studies’ since ‘the post-civil rights era’ in the Global North (Puar xiv). There has been a trend in queer theory, initiated by Jasbir Puar’s work on homonationalism, critiquing this political turn in queer theory. Puar sums up this pragmatism as ‘a fatigued debate about the advances and merits of civil legitimation – legalization of sodomy, gay marriage, and gay adoption’ (Ibid xiv). In her critique, Puar argues that, in fact, ‘homosexual desires’ and their reorientation towards these forms of queerness that are acceptable to the nation – monogamous family units endorsed by marriage, for example – ‘are foundational to the project of nationalism, as is the strict policing of the homo-hetero binary’ (Ibid 49). Thus, she argues, ‘nations are heteronormative because of, rather than despite, homosexuality’ (Ibid). To put it succinctly, homonationalism, the folding into the nation of certain forms of queer identity, is therefore a normative project. Queerness, in this sense ‘operates as a regulatory script not only of normative gayness, queerness, or homosexuality, but also of the racial and national norms that reinforce these sexual subjects’ (Ibid 2). This folding-into-the nation of queer subjects, however, should be understood as ‘a biopolitical project’ and hence a normalising into nationhood that produces a set of discriminations (Ibid 22). For Puar, the ‘emergence and sanctioning of queer subjecthood is a historical shift condoned only through a parallel process of demarcation from populations targeted for segregation, disposal, or death, a reintensification of racialization through queerness’ (Ibid xii). Indeed, she argues that ‘[h]omonormativity can be read as a formation complicit with and invited into the biopolitical valorization of life in its inhabitation and reproduction of heteronormative norms’ (Ibid 9). This counterstrand of queer theory has led me to consider how these Moroccan and South African novels and their focus on the ethics of group sex, and the meaning of democratic sexual citizenship, can be productive WI SH WE WE RE QUE E R 10 for exactly the kinds of alternative projects proposed by theorists like Puar, which will move us beyond homonormative pragmatism. Muñoz suggests that one way to overcome the stifling pragmatism of contemporary queer politics, and perhaps we can add postcolonial politics too, is to take a ‘posterior glance at different moments, objects, and spaces [that] might offer us an anticipatory illumination of queerness’ (Ibid). In doing so, in stepping back to look forward, and in imagining future queer utopias, the texts I have chosen illuminate an alternative to the pragmatic preoccupation with the political present that dominates much contemporary African scholarship on sexuality as well. This search for queer utopias – each of which are individual rather than monolithic – also disorientates the impulse to calcify diverse African sexualities in historically contingent categories of identity, advocating instead for forms of being/becoming that resist neat categorisation. These particular African texts articulate the possibility of stepping outside of the normative, of bending and twisting time, in such ways as to produce entirely novel ways of conceiving of normative conventions and categories – of gender, sexuality and especially temporality – effectively queering the schemes of intelligibility that construct temporality while creating new spaces for queer existence, or queer utopias. In this way, queer figures in African literatures speak back to queer and postcolonial theory, developing and extending its theorising of time and politics. One of the ways that these texts formulate new ways to think about time is in their investment in moments of group and/or public sex, which I argue constitutes a mode of undercommons belonging. In The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (2013), Moten and Harney unravel the idea of the undercommons as an organic collectivity at the margins of academia, although it is a notion that can be extended and applied to all who occupy the margins of society more broadly. ‘Undercommons’ as a critical term describes the radical and utopian possibility of community formations outside of social norms; it is the potential for alliances amongst outsiders of various stripes. As Halberstam describes in the introduction to their book, the undercommons can be ‘black people, indigenous peoples, queers and poor people (“Wild Beyond” 6). It includes those who ‘cannot be satisfied with the recognition and acknowledgement generated by the very system that denies a) that anything was ever broken and b) that we deserved to be the broken part’ (Ibid). The undercommons is thus a ‘call to dis-order and this disorder or wildness shows up in many places’ (Ibid 7). Hence, the undercommons articulates a certain desire ‘to take apart, dismantle, tear down the structure that, right now, limits our ability to find each other, to see beyond it and to access the places that we know lie outside its walls’ (Ibid 6). Inherent in the desire to ‘rely on the undercommons for protection’, Moten and Harney argue, is a kind of ‘fugitive impulse’ (40). The undercommons itself can thus be thought of as a ‘fugitive community’ (Ibid) that for Halberstam is ‘mostly about reaching out to find connection; they are about making common cause with the brokenness of being’ (“Wild Beyond” 5). This notion of the undercommons aligns well with the intention of queer theory and activism, and certain forms of feminism, that attempt to ‘dismantle’ the binarisms of heteropatriarchy, to ‘take apart’ the ways that heteronormativity structure our lives and living. Thus, queer theory can be one of the “wild places” where the undercommons shows up. Moten and Harney are also insistent that, rather than define the undercommons as belonging to the university 11 INTRODUCTION alone, ‘the concepts are ways to develop a mode of living together, a mode of being together that cannot be shared as a model but as an instance’ (105). For Moten and Harney, therefore, it is more important that the concept be ‘put in play’ in different circumstances and for different ideas and outcomes (Ibid 106).

Sociologists of race have argued that the dominant “social contract” of society can be contextualized within the notion of a Black/white binary (). Their analysis of racism and racial oppression and inequality has largely examined Black people in relation to whites. This racial paradigm has been widely critiqued for how it invisiblizes other racial and ethnic groups, such as Latinos/Latinas and Asian Americans. For example, legal scholar Juan Perea () observes that binary thinking excludes the histories and experiences of Latinx peoples and works to sustain negative stereotypes. Perea points out that a focus on Black and white negates the ways that other groups have experienced racism in America. Further, he defines the Black/white binary as “the conception that race in America consists, either exclusively or primarily, of only two constituent racial groups, the Black and the White” (p. 1219). Additionally, education scholars have warned against binary thinking as it relates to schools. Howard () identifies problems with the Black/white binary, which has overtaken the analysis of various types of racism that impact school experiences. He explains that educational equity “cannot be fully understood in only Black and White terms.” Criticisms of the Black/white binary follow at least three themes. The first theme suggests that the binary is an overly simplistic, one-dimensional analysis of race. Second, scholars argue that the Black/white binary links racism exclusively to skin color and denies the structural aspects of racism. Finally, another set of criticisms recognize how binary thinking on race misrepresents history while also obscuring the experiences of non-Black people of color. Further the Black/white binary does not account for how Latinos/as, Mexicans, Chinese, Japanese, Native, and other racialized groups practice discrimination. It is the latter theme that has most utility for this article. Afro-Pessimism is less interested in the Black/white binary, per se, but rather a Black/non-Black divide. They suggest that all non-Blacks can have antagonisms against Black people. Instead of regarding race-based systems as primarily and solely an extension of white supremacy, Afro-Pessimism contends that anti-Blackness is upheld by its own set of logics that intersects with white supremacy, but is also operates separately in service to the dehumanization of Blacks. Lipsitz’s notions of the Black spatial imaginary and the white spatial imaginary does not fully account for the centrality and specificity of anti-Blackness. The white spatial imaginary does not explicitly explicate how non-Blacks and non-whites come to make sense of space and how those spatial logics work to subject and dehumanize Black people. The experience of slavery and its afterlives give Blacks a particular ontological position—that is, a grammar of suffering that has no analogy to any event endured by other racial groups. Thus, the plight of Black people cannot and should not be understood through a Black/white paradigm. (; ). Instead, what is needed is a specific spatial imaginary that centers on the specificity of anti-Blackness. Given the significance of anti-Blackness in the U.S., as a separate but related form of racism, attention to anti-Blackness is a critical component in unmasking how spatial imaginaries function as an unspoken grammar in society. Anti-Blackness is spatialized in bodies, buildings, memories, minds, and social ecologies that extirpate the potential of Black people to reach full humanity and thus be consigned to “a paradigmatic impossibility” (p. 9), as  posits. As a spatial imaginary, anti-Blackness is circulated through discourses, images, and texts that tell a story of Blackness as a problem, non-human, and placeless. Subsequently, the stories materialize into geographies and spatial practices that people act in relation to, and through, this spatial imaginary. These practices work to reify the imaginary. The anti-Black spatial imaginary promotes policies and practices that structure the social death of Black individuals and groups. It produces the destruction of social identity and social networks through modes of displacement, exclusion and estrangement. It endorses natal alienation—the disassociation of community, kinship, and familial bonds. The anti-Black spatial imaginary inflicts gratuitous and wanton spatial violence upon Black people’s flesh, spirit, and psyche. It attacks, wounds, and breaks the connections that bind Black populations together. Black communities witness their neighborhoods, schools, and classrooms dislodged from their places as anchors in Black communities. The anti-Black spatial imaginary marks Black bodies as undesirable and therefore extractable from spaces and places that have been envisioned for their exclusion. The careless removal, displacement, and dispossession of Black bodies is anchored in spatialized anti-Blackness; it is anchored by the assumption that Black populations are spatially illegitimate and, moreover, part of a larger anti-Black project to exterminate Afrocultural traditions, values, and ways of being and celebrating Blackness. The visible presence of Blackness and Black people is seen by non-Blacks as a credible threat poised to unsettle normative and “pure” white spaces (). As the dominant social warrant of society, the anti-Black spatial imaginary views Blacks as captives, unfree subjects lodged in the nowheres of Black life. Anti-Blackness remains a powerful way of reading and interpreting the painful relationship of the Black condition within a context of disregard, disdain, and dismissal of Black people, particularly within environments that champion colorblind and anti-racist discourses. The architecture of education policy has “spatialized Blackness” by restricting movement and constructing Black bodies as needing to be surveilled, monitored, and policed. The anti-Black spatial imaginary is riddled with fear and presupposes that Black people are aspatial. Spatial imaginaries are effective vehicles for the transmission of social anxieties and/or hopes about the future. In conceptualizing an anti-Black spatial imaginary, it is not my intention to provide an articulation that is inflexible or intractable. Spatial imaginaries are not secure or unwavering. We produce narratives and ideas about spaces, and we produce their embedded meanings. Instead, I consider the spatiality of anti-Blackness not as a clearly demarcated thing or a unified imaginary of causes and consequences, but as a pliable framework that explores the violent conditions that seek to debilitate the persistence of Black people.

It also throws us into a conceptual crisis because the violence directed against the “Gay Nigger #1” is inconceivable and inarticulate within Afro-pessimistic logics (although the violence against the “Nigger” at least has a gram-mar under the sign “antiblack”). Put differently, we lose something (whatever this something “is”) under the banner “fungibility” when the particular violence that Steen, and others structured similarly, experienced is broadly characterized as antiblackness. How do we then understand the “Gay Nigger #1” philosophically and theoretically within Afro- pessimistic discourse? Are antiblack violence and antiqueer violence indissociable? And if they are indissociable, why are some black commodities the targets of “anti- gay” violence and other black commodities are not? If antiblack violence serves as the unifying ground of fungible commodities, then differentiating violence might just fracture this commodity, such that it is interchangeable on one register (antiblackness) but not on another. The problem space that opens this article circulates around these inquiries as it concerns the “Gay Nigger #1.” In essence, this problem space is nothing more than the double bind of humanism that lingers despite our investment in invalidating and disarming it. To avoid the “structural adjustment” that many scholars rely on to incorporate blacks into the fold of humanism and its liberal narratives, Afro-pessimists have rejected, to the extent that we can reject, this humanism and its structural adjustment. In the vacuous space of undifferentiation, differences such as “gender,” “sexuality,” “ability,” and so forth are also rejected because they belong to the human and not the fungible commodity. But this rejection leaves us without a way to understand the particularities of violence and the way this particular violence constitutes ontology. Thus, the “black gay,” the black lesbian, and the “black heterosexual” object might bond over the pulverizing technologies of antiblack violence, but fracture around antiqueer violence. We lack a procedure to theorize this fracturing outside humanism. But, again, I am writing gay, lesbian, and heterosexual under erasure here to docket the double bind that this inquiry presents. Without the differentiating grammar of humanism, we are unable to talk about the fracturing between fungible commodities that renders some the targets of certain violence and others not. Afro-pessimism becomes uncomfortably silent when confronted with issues of sexism experienced by black women and antiqueer violence experienced by black gays or lesbians, for example, to avoid the performative contradiction. The assumption that antiblack violence will offer a theoretical/philosophical covering for these beings neglects the particularities of the violence experienced and the particularities of the fungible commodity that becomes the target of specific violence. If fungibility creates a blob of black commodities, certain sociopolitical violence cuts this blob into unthinkable parts—parts that we have yet to name or provide a sufficient grammar to describe. I would argue that this fracturing is significant if we take Wilderson’s (2010) argument seriously that “violence is a matrix of (im)possibility, a paradigm for ontology” because it speaks to the way that the fungible commodity is constituted through different procedures of violence, which cannot be easily subsumed under the banner “antiblackness.” But scholars have attempted to reconcile blackness with sexual difference and sexual identity through logics of equivalence. This scholarship operates under what I call “the intersectional approach.” Although this approach provides intellectual space for contemplating and representing sexual difference and sexual identity, it often does so precisely by way of a structural adjustment. Thus it enacts a performative contradiction (between blackness and humanism) that it either ignores or neglects.

6. Abstraction as a mode of resistance to visibility is not limited to queer perspectives. Intersectional accounts of abstraction and visibility are necessary and expansive. There have been artists working from many different marginalized positions who have used abstraction as a mode of resistance to visibility, scrutiny, and surveillance or who have utilized it as a means of worlding, of poiesis, or of futurity. These are articulated in response to the daily experience of others’ categorizing gazes and to the persistent cultural marking that any representation of the human form calls forth from viewers. Such employments of abstraction gain their political and affective resonances because they are drawn from the anger, exhaustion, and facility that come with navigating the ways in which “marked” positions of difference are opposed to (and defining of) a supposedly unmarked “neutral.” Of course, any unmarked position only gains its contours by policing boundaries of difference, and power is dispensed across these borders between the “normal” and the “other.” We know well these unmarked positions that attempt to mask themselves as somehow natural; among the most insidious are Whiteness, heteronormativity, ability, and the doctrine that genders are binary and static. Abstraction’s resistant capacity can be used against this hegemonic positing of the invisibility of normativity and the visibility of difference. In thinking about the wide range of deployments of non-representation and afiguration, it is the power-laden relationship to visibility that is the key variable. For instance, there are long and complex histories of Black artists who have used abstraction in relation to the virulent force of racism, whether to call out its workings or to circumvent the speed with which race becomes a primary factor in the visual categorization of persons.22 These and other invested ways of using abstraction should be understood in relation (and, at times, precedent) to those practices that seek to render or allegorize how queer persons suffer under and attempt escape from normative categorizations. Respect the different ways in which surveillance is endured. But of course, marked positions also imbricate and intersect, and many people live at the margins of multiple identities. Sometimes, this intersectionality is addressed head-on by artists or writers and, at other times, there is a usefulness in focusing on one aspect of identity or on only some of them. Many individuals pivot (sometimes hourly) between the positions they inhabit in a system of cultural marking and categorization. They deploy an array of survival tactics in order to navigate visual taxonomies, surveillance, and compulsory visibility.23 An understanding of the differences between these positionalities (and the categories they navigate) is a precursor to a more complex intersectional analysis of their connectedness. Abstraction as a visual strategy is particularly useful as a means of discussing questions of difference, intersectionality, and power because it asks the linked questions “What is visible?” and “What are you looking for?” These questions, simply put, mean differently when asked from or of positions of cultural difference 70 such as queerness, Blackness, gender non-conforming, differently abled, and intersections thereof. These questions generate multiple, interdependent answers that unfold into contention and connection.24 The conversation about how these questions are confronted across different positions, identities, and intersections can be the basis for alliances, for a productive skepticism about those alliances, for synergies, and for more wide-ranging critical resistance. Indeed, abstraction’s openness might be generative of surprising ways to visualizing such intersections, solidarities, and critiques.

We know that, just by existing, historically subordinated populations are deemed inconvenient to the privileged who made them so; the subordinated who are cast as a problem experience themselves as both necessary for and inconvenient to the general supremacist happiness. All politics involves at least one group becoming inconvenient to the reproduction of power; that power might be material or fantasmatic, in the convoluted paranoid way endemic to the intimacy of enemies. The biopolitical politics of inconvenience increases the ordinary pressure of getting in each other’s way, magnifying the shaping duration of social friction within the mind’s echo chambers and the structuring dynamics of the world. As an affect, inconvenience can thus encompass all kinds of intensity but still be cast as a mode of impersonal contact that has an impact, opening itself to becoming personal, creating images of what feels like a looming social totality, and making a countervailing social organization imaginable. Think about Cheryl Harris’s staging of Blackness as “trespassing” on white consciousness as it strolls and scrolls through the world expecting not to feel impeded; think of the pervasive sexual violence women imagine concretely when they’re walking somewhere alone.7 These sensations of threat are ordinary to the people moving through in the lifeworlds of a supremacist society and its entitlement hierarchies.8 They can confirm or disconfirm the erotophobia or specific mistrust we have been schooled to live with. The expectation of inconvenience can pull you into a zone where the impersonal opens to genres of viscerally strong yet abstract encounter. It can be an effect of speculation prior to movement that creates hypervigilance, tableaux Introduction 5 or scenarios in prefigurative response to potential encounters. It can get people talking to each other about how to change what’s deemed structural, even when the only evidence is a sense of things that permeates the social field and is central to the reproduction of its norms of concentrated value. But the threat posed by politicized inconvenience doesn’t have to be immediately theatrical or traumatic: a sense of apprehension can arise in any moment, seemingly happening and passing as an irritation. One never knows about effects until this kind of contact becomes materialized in a series. The inconveniences of managing one’s own putative inconvenience to the sense of freedom demanded by the structurally dominant is a completely predictable experience, both draining and animating, in intimate and political settings. It forces a constant reassessment of what kinds of impact constitute an event. In this book, “inconvenience” draws a membrane across radically private experiences of world-receptivity at the periphery of attention and anything people have to face every day—an ongoing labor situation, a family, a politicized infrastructure they may have been born into, the population they’ve been assigned to, or other people’s projected fantasies.9 When is a body an event because of the kind of thing it is deemed to be, as when they walk into a room or cross a state line? What price and what kinds of price are being paid in order to live a life as other people’s inconvenient object? These questions tap into the ordinary of biopower at the same time as they tap into the encounter with being as such. However dramatic the situation of power, it is at its most powerful when it is distributed across the structural, the casual, and the shadowy, as Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, Achille Mbembe, and Jasbir Puar have documented in their work on necropolitical protocols of the state and related apparatuses.10 As Puar argues, to maim rather than kill in order to maintain political power is to enjoy enforcing the ongoing theater of the inconvenience of certain other people. But it’s not just bullets that disable living. It’s inconvenient to bear the burden of a naming you didn’t ask for: there is no getting beyond it, only dealing with it as a form of life you live with. To a structurally and/or fantasmatically dominant class, though, the experience of inconvenience produces dramas of unfairness. Take, for example, the paranoid reversals of “incels” and other entitled persons who experience their vulnerability as an injury of unjustly denied deference.11 It is predictable that the structurally dominant feel vulnerable about their status and insist that if the historically subordinated deserve repair, so do the entitled. It is as though there is a democracy in vulnerability, as though the details do not matter. From both perspectives, the exhaustion from incessant abrasive contact can produce numbed or intense self-subtraction and the elaboration of massive rage. At whatever intensity or scale, then, in whatever scenario of power, the sense of the inconvenience of other people in general, and often some other particular kinds of people, is constantly being renewed and reevaluated. Mainly the hit of it surfaces and dives in the ordinary life of being in the world, shifting atmospheres and coordinating stresses without much being memorable. But the ordinary includes the casual reproduction of hatreds and aversions, creating subjectivities powerfully shaped by navigating its entailments, excitements, and tolls.

Wynter notes that Columbus is often positioned in terms of celebratory American “discovery” in ways that brush over the colonial, nationalistic, and imperialistic implications of his individual financial aspirations and the objectification of black bodies on which those aspirations depended. Walter Mignolo follows Wynter, providing some insight into the racial foundations of homo economicus, particularly connecting it to Western colonialism and imperialism, both of which are inseparable from the post-Columbian context.68 Mignolo argues that the self-interested optimization that fleshes out the figure of homo economicus assumes coloniality and imperialism.69 In effect, Western colonial enrichment—at the expense of indigenous racial others of Europe—is already inherent in the “economic rationality” of homo economicus, as it is seen as a financially rational tool of enrichment, rather than a moral wrong. Elsewhere Wynter claims that the proto-notion of homo economicus that circulated in the sixteenth century underwent important transformations by the nineteenth century. Further removed from Judeo-Christianity, conceptions of economic rationality in the nineteenth century functioned in raced form to articulate both black and indigenous populations in the “New World” as the epitome of economic irrationality. Wynter notes that by the nineteenth century, the black slave “would now be made into the physical referent of the ostensibly most racially inferior and non-evolved Other to Man, itself redefined as optimally homo economicus.”70 The black slave is in effect the defining opposite of homo economicus, that nonbeing who is less than human and/ or not human at all. Where homo economicus is self-interested and free to choose—the subject who can fulfill the ultimate human goal of surplus accumulation on his own—the slave is utterly removed from not only this goal but even the possibility of choosing or acting within the construct of the self. W. E. B. Du Bois suggested the white worker’s choice and the black slave’s absence of choice were important components of the capitalistic distinction between blackness and whiteness. Du Bois argued white workers always held out hope that “they themselves might also become planters by saving money, by investment, by the power of good luck.”71 Black slaves come into existence not as exploited, which is to say “free” to sell their labor (choice), but expropriated in ways that mirror the extraction of natural resources.72 Another way to say this is that the slave, much like the tree or cattle, for Frank Wilderson,73 is Financial Literacy and Black Economic Life | 981 the ground on which human capitalist exploitation stands. Julia Ott’s comprehensive review of research on slave capital bears this out: the transatlantic slave trade and slave-based Southern US commodity production created modern capitalism, financing transformations in technology, industry, and economy more thoroughly than any other capital input.74 Ian Baucom explains the connection between the objecthood of black slave bodies and the economic rationality of finance.75 According to Baucom, it was the transatlantic slave trade that birthed the modern financial calculation of value through insurance on slaves. The value of slave bodies as chattel, which could, if circumstances demanded, be cast overboard from a slave ship facing turbulent seas, was guaranteed in advance for the owners of slave ships by insurance policies. The calculation of the cost of that insurance was a foundational form of what Baucom variously terms “actuarial historicism” or “theoretical realism,” which are forms of rationality that “ground value in the loss of the singular and the invention of the average.”76 In other words, insurance on slave bodies evacuated their singularity more completely even than enslavement, rendering them placeholders of value, which could be converted into paper money either through exchange or through the exercise of an insurance contract once they were cast overboard. For Baucom, the modern credit economy and finance capitalism itself are founded on the reification of speculative values that the insured transatlantic trade in black slaves inaugurated. In his formulation, it is the white slave trader or actuary who can see through the “thingliness” of the objects of slavery to calculate their speculative value, embodying the “speculative culture of finance capital” that has much in common with the economic rationality invoked in the calculation of the abstract cost of “free” checking accounts, despite their very real lived costs for poor customers.77 These dynamics did not end with slavery. The twentieth century is rich with examples of outerdetermined black objecthood within capitalism.78 The 1939 Federal Housing Authority Underwriting Manual that served as both guide and tool for suburbanization in the US not only ratified the practice of “redlining” whereby neighborhoods of black families were drawn out of mortgage lending, but actually directed homeowners to use racial covenants to prevent black people from moving into their neighborhoods.79 Both redlining and racial covenants acted on black homeowners and potential buyers, making them objects to be circumscribed and excluded. They also prevented black people from becoming privileged subjects of the American mortgage boom, which was built and protected for those consumers who fit within the racialized subject position of homo economicus.

A drive, as described by Freud, ‘differs from a stimulus in that it originates from sources of stimulation within the body, acts as a constant force, and the individual can’t flee from it in the way that he can from an external stimulus’ (2003/1933, 88). For him, drives ‘represent the physical demands of the psyche’ (2003/1940, 178). Drives signify ‘need’ and thus crave satisfaction which leads Freud to formulate the pleasure-unpleasure principle (2005/1915, 15). The pleasure-ego strives for wish-fulfilment, ‘to pursue pleasure and avoid unpleasure’. The reality-ego, on the other hand, strives for what is ‘useful’ while protecting itself from harm. The reality-ego safeguards the individual from the overweening demands of the pleasure-ego but protects rather than opposes it, in a sense ‘safeguarding it, not deposing it’ (2005/1911, 6). In Beyond the Pleasure Principle however, Freud, a self-confessed rigorous revisionist, conceded that ‘the pleasure principle exists as a strong tendency within the psyche, but is opposed by certain other forces or circumstances, so that the final outcome cannot possibly always accord with the said tendency in favour of pleasure’ (2003/1920, 47). Through observing patients undergoing psychoanalysis, Freud noticed that people regularly return to unpleasurable experiences and memories, what he termed the ‘compulsion to repeat’, which ‘pays no heed to the pleasure principle’ (57, 61). Developing on from this compulsion to return again and again to what has gone before, Freud proposed the existence of what he termed ‘der Todestrieb’ – the death drive sometimes translated as the death instinct – to explain what he saw as ‘the drive to return to the inanimate’ because ‘the inanimate existed before the animate’ (78). Freud propounded the view that there were two drives – the death drive and Eros – the interaction of which produces the vibrancy of life, a constant struggle or working-through of resistance, each one to the other. In Jean Laplanche’s view, this ongoing struggle between the death and life drives manifests ‘not as a difference between sexuality and a non-sexual aggressivity, but in the heart of sexuality itself ’ (1999, 40). In his critique of No Future and as part of his intention to reframe the death drive for ‘a different – one might say queerer – vision of futurity’, Tim Hird, M. J. (2008). Queering the non/human. Taylor & Francis Group. Dean remarks that ‘Edelman advocates our embracing – even identifying with – something that is not of the order of representation, namely, the death drive’, to which Dean asserts he is ‘not convinced that it is possible, even were it deemed politically desirable, to embrace or identify with a drive’ (2008). This statement needs unpacking, namely Dean’s representation of Edelman’s remarks on the death drive, politics, possibility and queerness. This section introduces my interpretation of Edelman’s formulation of queerness as it relates to the death drive before I argue that No Future is not about considering possibilities but rather is a meditation on a range of impossibilities. First, the impossibility of exercising agency if one partakes of a system steeped in reproductive futurism which permeates all social, political and cultural structures. Secondly, the intolerable living conditions created for those figured as sinthomosexuals through heteronormativity’s employment of reproductive futurism as a fantasy/ phantasy (Segal 2000) against the death drive through the inauguration of a series of defence mechanisms, namely denial, splitting, idealisation and projective identification (Klein 1997/1946; 1997/1948; 1997/1955; 1997/1957). Third, the impossibility of launching a queer political resistance to heteronormativity without its being recuperated and neutralised by reproductive futurism in the process and put into the service of heteronormativity. Fourth, the Queer’s figuration as the death drive and how that both facilitates while ultimately preventing heteronormativity’s desired fulfilment of itself in the figure of the Child. Edelman’s ‘impossible project’, which he claims stakes ‘its fortunes on a truly hopeless wager’, presents us with an interpretation of queerness that promises ‘absolutely nothing’ (2004, 4, 5). It promises nothing, in my view, precisely because the death drive is already within us. To accept that – the what ‘is’ – is to accede to this book’s argument.5 The death drive is beyond linguistic expression, it is ‘the inarticulable surplus that dismantles the subject from within’ (9). Queerness, for Edelman, is inextricably linked to the death drive. Let me return to the epigraph that frames this chapter in which Edelman proclaims that ‘the death drive names what the queer, in the order of the social, is called forth to figure: the negativity opposed to every form of social viability’ (9). Although queerness is not reducible to homosexuality and in fact ‘could never constitute an authenticor substantive identity’ (24) because it ‘is never a matter of being or becoming’ (25), the 5 This puts me in mind of Eckhart Tolle’s promulgation of ‘the Now’ in which he urges readers to ‘End the delusion of time … To be identified with your mind is to be trapped in time: the compulsion to live almost exclusively through memory and anticipation … The compulsion arises because the past gives you an identity and the future holds the promise of salvation, fulfilment in whatever forms. Both are illusions’. Queer as a category configured by homophobic and heterosexist discourses is invariably aligned with same-sex desire (Bersani 1987; Dollimore 1995; Hanson 1991; Coviello 2000). While the Child is understood as the apotheosis of life, the Queer is set up as the epitome of death. Indeed, same-sex desire has become synonymous with death in the homophobic imagination: death understood as the foreclosure of reproduction in sexual acts performed by same-sex couples, the death of civilisation as a consequence of the ‘ills’ of ‘the homosexual lifestyle’, or same-sex desire leading to actual physical death with references to HIV/AIDS as ‘the gay plague’. So while heteronormativity is caught up in a continuous cycle of refusing to acknowledge its own internal lack by forever desiring the ‘realization of the subject’s authentic presence’ (Edelman 2004, 10) through the ‘sacralization of the Child’ (28), the Queer is feared as a threat to the completion of this compulsive practice. Thus, the death drive signifies both the position that is conferred on the Queer by the social as well as the trace of the anxious social’s projections of the death drive and everything it signifies onto the Queer, who becomes a repository of negativity. In a sense, queerness is a creation of the social, its abject Other, a constant reminder of the social’s incompleteness and vulnerability. Reproductive futurism imposes, according to Edelman, ‘an ideological limit on political discourse as such, preserving in the process the absolute privilege of heteronormativity by rendering unthinkable, by casting outside the political domain, the possibility of a queer resistance to this organizing principle of communal relations’ (2). Reproductive futurism absorbs all challenges and translates them into more of the same. It operates in a similar way to Monique Wittig’s concept of the straight mind in that ‘when thought of by the straight mind, homosexuality is nothing but heterosexuality’ (1992, 28). Reproductive futurism is a more specific term than heteronormativity in that it describes the process through which heterosexuality becomes heteronormative. Heteronormativity is thus a term to describe a conglomerate of effects while reproductive futurism signifies the process through which such effects are wrought. It is all-encompassing, operating at the level of ideology so that it sets limits on, not just what we think or do, but also on what and how we desire. Desire itself becomes reproductive futurism in its ‘translation into a narrative’, ‘its teleological determination’ through politics which ‘conforms to the temporality of desire’, ‘the inevitable historicity of desire’ (Edelman 2004, 9). Reproductive futurism is, what I call, ‘heterocycloptic’, bound up with the desiring gaze and the setting-out of a developmental trajectory of ‘progress’ moving endlessly towards a ‘better’ future, in the process imposing a panopticonlike self-surveillance: ‘It’s a machine in which everyone is caught, those who exercise power just as much as those over whom it is exercised’ (Foucault)

When the question of organization is brought up with respect to the revolution, Marxists often return to the idea of the party. The party is often approached as if the word itself has power, as if the term “party building” on its own implies all the structural and strategic information necessary for the conversation. This is a problem, because while the left does distinguish between a mass party and a Leninist party (though even this distinction is contested), there is quite a bit of diversity within these forms that are both shaped by the strategies of the trends they are born out of and the political terrain of countries they operate in. The Bolsheviks, the Communist Party of the Philippines, and the Socialist Workers Party (US) were all Leninist parties that operated on nominal democratic centralism, but the specific forms and ways they operate are all quite different. AROC in their original critique of Marxist Center gives a preliminary definition of what a party is, contending that “political parties are the institution of unitary political leadership for a class or fraction of a class.” This is still a broad enough definition that it could theoretically encompass any variety of organizational types. With all this lack of clarity over what a call to party build means, is party building desirable? In her contribution to the debate in the aftermath of Marxist Center’s founding, Alyson Escalante makes an argument for its benefit. She points out that, despite the Marxist Center’s commitment to mass work and institution building, it hasn’t committed to a strategy for revolution, and this is a major weakness. Party building provides a next step beyond building new working class institutions, and can provide a context for MC’s mass work and a basis for the development of a revolutionary strategy. While Marxist Center may fail to build the party as in past movements, this isn’t an argument against trying. Alyson’s argument isn’t completely disagreeable. In fact, this document agrees with her fundamental point: Marxist Center’s lack of a strategy for revolution is a major weakness. From here, she errs; by placing party building at the foundation of our strategy, we lose sight of the fact that the organizational forms are determined in large part by the strategy and struggles with which we engage. Elevating the ‘party’ form to the level of strategy presents the possibility of conflating utterly different visions which fall under the category of “party building”. A party that leads a guerilla war is different from a party that operates mostly in electoral politics. If we don’t have our strategy, we don’t know what type of party to build. Furthermore, by making party building a goal, we have to ask the question:at what point does a party building project become the party? A quote from the Union of French Communists Marxist-Leninists tries to answer this: …the party must be constructed in the fire of struggles, step by step, under the control of the mass political movement. In France today, this party does not exist. It is not a question of self proclaiming it. This is why we declare that we are not the Party. We are a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist political group FOR the foundation of a communist Union. This Union, having proven itself, and gathering a significant fraction of the vanguard workers, will itself have to determine the conditions and stages for the foundation of the Party. When has a party proven itself? What constitutes a significant fraction of vanguard workers? How do we distinguish between premature self-declarations and genuine foundations of the party? If a political organization has already clearly successfully accomplished all these things before founding the party, what benefit is there to founding a new organization? The pre-party formation has already accomplished the tasks that define a party in this sense. Just like the problems facing dual power theories where revolution becomes this far point in the future with no clear path from where we currently are, party building also provides little in the way of a clear path from the ‘pre-party’ to the party. If organizational forms are determined by strategy and the conditions under which we organize, then what are the organizational forms for revolutionaries that flow from the ruptural strategy for socialism? To start, one reality that needs to be confronted is that, despite the aspirations of vanguardist tendencies, the idea that we will have unitary leadership of the working class is unrealistic for the near term and might very well be completely impossible. Revolutions, while they might have a dominant organization, are often carried out by blocs of revolutionary political organizations and mass organizations (as seen in the Russian Revolution). This isn’t a weakness necessarily and, in fact, we can use this to our benefit even in the near term.

We know that, just by existing, historically subordinated populations are deemed inconvenient to the privileged who made them so; the subordinated who are cast as a problem experience themselves as both necessary for and inconvenient to the general supremacist happiness. All politics involves at least one group becoming inconvenient to the reproduction of power; that power might be material or fantasmatic, in the convoluted paranoid way endemic to the intimacy of enemies. The biopolitical politics of inconvenience increases the ordinary pressure of getting in each other’s way, magnifying the shaping duration of social friction within the mind’s echo chambers and the structuring dynamics of the world. As an affect, inconvenience can thus encompass all kinds of intensity but still be cast as a mode of impersonal contact that has an impact, opening itself to becoming personal, creating images of what feels like a looming social totality, and making a countervailing social organization imaginable. Think about Cheryl Harris’s staging of Blackness as “trespassing” on white consciousness as it strolls and scrolls through the world expecting not to feel impeded; think of the pervasive sexual violence women imagine concretely when they’re walking somewhere alone.7 These sensations of threat are ordinary to the people moving through in the lifeworlds of a supremacist society and its entitlement hierarchies.8 They can confirm or disconfirm the erotophobia or specific mistrust we have been schooled to live with. The expectation of inconvenience can pull you into a zone where the impersonal opens to genres of viscerally strong yet abstract encounter. It can be an effect of speculation prior to movement that creates hypervigilance, tableaux Introduction 5 or scenarios in prefigurative response to potential encounters. It can get people talking to each other about how to change what’s deemed structural, even when the only evidence is a sense of things that permeates the social field and is central to the reproduction of its norms of concentrated value. But the threat posed by politicized inconvenience doesn’t have to be immediately theatrical or traumatic: a sense of apprehension can arise in any moment, seemingly happening and passing as an irritation. One never knows about effects until this kind of contact becomes materialized in a series. The inconveniences of managing one’s own putative inconvenience to the sense of freedom demanded by the structurally dominant is a completely predictable experience, both draining and animating, in intimate and political settings. It forces a constant reassessment of what kinds of impact constitute an event. In this book, “inconvenience” draws a membrane across radically private experiences of world-receptivity at the periphery of attention and anything people have to face every day—an ongoing labor situation, a family, a politicized infrastructure they may have been born into, the population they’ve been assigned to, or other people’s projected fantasies.9 When is a body an event because of the kind of thing it is deemed to be, as when they walk into a room or cross a state line? What price and what kinds of price are being paid in order to live a life as other people’s inconvenient object? These questions tap into the ordinary of biopower at the same time as they tap into the encounter with being as such. However dramatic the situation of power, it is at its most powerful when it is distributed across the structural, the casual, and the shadowy, as Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, Achille Mbembe, and Jasbir Puar have documented in their work on necropolitical protocols of the state and related apparatuses.10 As Puar argues, to maim rather than kill in order to maintain political power is to enjoy enforcing the ongoing theater of the inconvenience of certain other people. But it’s not just bullets that disable living. It’s inconvenient to bear the burden of a naming you didn’t ask for: there is no getting beyond it, only dealing with it as a form of life you live with. To a structurally and/or fantasmatically dominant class, though, the experience of inconvenience produces dramas of unfairness. Take, for example, the paranoid reversals of “incels” and other entitled persons who experience their vulnerability as an injury of unjustly denied deference.11 It is predictable that the structurally dominant feel vulnerable about their status and insist that if the historically subordinated deserve repair, so do the entitled. It is as though there is a democracy in vulnerability, as though the details do not matter. From both perspectives, the exhaustion from incessant abrasive contact can produce numbed or intense self-subtraction and the elaboration of massive rage. At whatever intensity or scale, then, in whatever scenario of power, the sense of the inconvenience of other people in general, and often some other particular kinds of people, is constantly being renewed and reevaluated. Mainly the hit of it surfaces and dives in the ordinary life of being in the world, shifting atmospheres and coordinating stresses without much being memorable. But the ordinary includes the casual reproduction of hatreds and aversions, creating subjectivities powerfully shaped by navigating its entailments, excitements, and tolls.

Differing emphases upon racism’s moral valences and economic function have similarly shaped different strategic and political conceptions of “race” and “community” versus “labor” and “class” organization. Emigrating to the United States in the s, James agreed with those who thought Black self-organization was “backward,” even “reactionary,” in a context of industrial working-class struggle. The politics of the New Deal, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) labor upsurge, and communist party influence led a rising cohort of Black activists and intellectuals to reject middle-class presumptions of older race leadership. To them, Du Bois’s politics, even as he grew more radical during the s, continued to rest on an outmoded racial premise. Abram Harris summed up their views: “[Du Bois] is a racialist whose discovery of Marxism as a critical instrument has been too recent and sudden for it to discipline his mental processes or basically to change his social outlook” (quoted in Singh, Black Is a Country, ). E. Franklin Frazier argued “the status of the Negro is losing its purely racial character and becoming tied up with the struggle of white and Black workers against the white landlords and capitalists” (quoted in Black Is a Country, ). Black socialist George Streator was unsparing: defense of “Negro racialism” was “reactionary,” obscuring the fact that “the Negro is nine-tenths a laborer” (quoted in Black Is a Country, ). Du Bois was unyielding: “So long as we are fighting a color-line, we must strive by color organization.” “Science alone could not settle this matter;” nor would the “color bar ... be broken by a series of brilliant, immediate assaults.” Rather, a “long siege was indicated,” with “organization in boycott, propaganda and mob frenzy,” alongside “careful planning and subtle campaign with the education of coming generations” (quoted in Black Is a Country, ). Independent Black political activity, in this view, was intrinsically valuable and as important as labor organization. “[We] thought it was, the day of Internationalism, Humanity and the disappearance of ‘race’ from our vocabulary,” Du Bois admitted (quoted in Black Is a Country, ). But he was skeptical Black incorporation into workingclass politics would eliminate racial antagonism as a dimension of national life and international relations and saw movements of the racially excluded as the cutting edge of democratic politics: a means to reorganizing the state, through legal reform and normative influence. These debates at the onset of the long civil rights movement and the birth of the Keynesian welfare state seem distant, but they illuminate puzzles that have been central to the problematic of racial capitalism going forward. Robinson aligns with Du Bois, emphasizing the precedence of racial ordering as an inheritance of European feudalism presaging the rise of capitalism in the English countryside in the sixteenth century. “Capitalism was less a catastrophic revolution (negation) of feudalist social orders than the extension of these social relations into the larger tapestry of the modern world’s political and economic relationships,” Robinson writes. “[F]rom its very beginnings, European civilization ... was constructed on antagonistic differences.” The conquests and uneven development of European peoples, exemplified by the colonization of Ireland, seeded the “uneven development of national capitalisms” and secreted racialism as “an enduring principle of European social order” and its settler colonial offshoots (Black Marxism, ). “The universality of capitalism is less an historical reality, than the construct of this language of error,” Robinson concludes (). The “error” has led to consequential erasures, but also, it should be added, to stabilizing reforms, in which overcoming capitalism’s particularistic, violent precedents, and ascriptive hierarchies associated with them, became a means by which bourgeois discourse represented capitalism’s historical progress and purported moral development. Focusing on demystifying this ideological procedure, Western Marxists have tended to redouble the progressive error by emphasizing economically determined stages of history and derogating democratic rights and struggles. What Robinson calls Black Marxism, by contrast, pursues a recursive, iterative path, delineating persistent (racial/national) exclusions of Western emancipatory discourses, while at the same time laying claim to an insurgent universality deriving from a stubborn resistance and failure to incorporate Black life into legal and normative capitalist circuitries of wage and contract

For my dissertation, I intend to unearth a genealogy of white same-sex sexual violence against Black men, specifically focusing on queer men or those engaging in sex acts with other men, from the late eighteenth century to the present within literary, legal, and historical archives. Scholars such as Saidiya Hartman, Sharon Holland, and E. Patrick Johnson have written on how the racial quotidian, particularly within the study of sexuality, localizes expressions of racially charged modes of sexual abuse within an economy of enjoyment. However, disentangling the ways that queer sex acts have actively created paradigms that continue to develop Antebellum scripts generates insights into the evolution of such practices in ways that not only connect these to plantation life but that also track how they transformed to better serve white supremacist economies of enjoyment since slavery. I’m developing a theory to make legible the existence of Black enslaved people whose lives are obscured in an attempt to protect queer American life from knowledge of its genealogy in the practices of antebellum slavery. My methodology incorporates practices of close reading, contextual analysis, and cultural analysis informed by approaches found in texts such as Scenes of Subjection by Saidiya Hartman, Rethinking Rufus by Thomas A. Foster, and The Delectable Negro by Vincent Woodard. The materials obscured within archives of American chattel slavery highlight a gap in the humanities and social sciences that underscores the socio-political response to the sexual abuse of black queer men from the Antebellum period to the present. The proprietorial bindings of enslavement contribute to the petri dish of queer sexual discourse the necessary ideological fragments needed to buttress functioning economies that hold stock in clandestine racialized corporeal markets. I use “clandestine” to note the illegibility of existing archival materials holding these non-normative sexual economies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and to highlight ways in which failing to identify these moments plainly undermines efforts to fully understand the history of contemporary queer sexual discourses. Whether to maintain the sense of injury of white queerness or to securitize the perimeters of Queer Studies, debates on the “appropriate” use of the term queer in relation to the 19th-century contexts disavow this form of sexual abuse found in the archive and (despite evidence of its occurrence) renders it illegible. White queer forms of sexual abuse practiced by white slaveholding men instilled into queer sexual discourses a metric of pleasure that is directly linked to the economies of enjoyment within plantation life. These sexual gestures make up the enterprises within these economies of enjoyment that depend on the consumption and circulation of sexualized black bodies to be the lifeblood of, as Edward Baptist writes, “a complex of inseparable fetishes.” In an effort to build a scaffolding for my research, I have spent the last few years compiling primary sources with several faculty research mentors who specialize in physical and digital archives spanning from the early American period to the late twentieth century. In order to examine the racialized corporeal markets that are driving these white queer sexual economies, I have to contend with an Antebellum rubric of pleasure and enjoyment. This portion of the historical work of my project is informed by the theoretical guidance of Saidiya Hartman. In Scenes of Subjection (1997), Hartman writes: Antebellum formations of pleasure, even those of the North, need to be considered in relation to the affective dimensions of chattel slavery since enjoyment is virtually unimaginable without recourse to the black body and the subjection of the captive, the diversions engendered by the dispossession of the enslaved, or the fantasies launched by the myriad uses of the black body. (26) In my work, I understand the conditions of pleasure and enjoyment as multifaceted expressions of mastery that seek to recreate the homoerotic possibilities of slave performance (Hartman 43). The texts that I’ve compiled in the field of history explore the erotic life of white mastery. The African American historiographies that I’ve read examine how the forced display of sexual submission, the performative gestures of white sexual ownership, and the demand placed upon the enslaved for submission to forced sexual acts are established and built into the ontology of white homoerotic desire. The field of African American History allows me to ground this charge in archival texts and historiographies through which I analyze the social (and sexual) nuances of mastery. I ground the social and affective dynamics of sexual ownership in the historicization of mastery theorized in Walter Johnson’s Soul by Soul (1999). Johnson writes: These slaves, then, embodied a type of public recognition--a type of honor--that could be beaten out of their backs. In buying them, slave-holders boasted that their own mastery would inhabit their slaves’ every action. Their slaves would be extensions of themselves, the actions of the enslaved indistinguishable from the will of the enslavers. Slave breaking was a technology of the soul. Buying slaves to break them represented a fantasy of mastery embodied in the public subjugation of another or private omnipotence transmuted into public reputation. (107) The “technology” of slave-breaking as a method to underscore the extent of access to and ownership over the enslaved body not only emphasizes the present nature of the “fantasy of mastery” (Johnson 107) but is also inextricably linked to the sexual charge of racialized corporeal markets. In a psychoanalytic turn, a better understanding of the emphasis on the melding of these inner and outer worlds, or “private omnipotence transmuted into public reputation” (Johnson 107), allows for a deeper historical analysis of the sexually charged affective stakes of ownership. Stakes that, for the sake of both social and sexual economies, blur the delineations made between what it meant publicly to have complete bodily access to enslaved bodies of the same gender versus the opposite, suggesting that mastery is not devoid of homoeroticism. I invoke Vincent Woodard’s definition of homoerotic in The Delectable Negro--- “[implying] same-sex arousal and draw[ing] attention to those political, social and libidinal forces that shape desire ...” (14)---to specify and delineate a separate set of internal negotiations during the same-sex sexual abuse (or the erogenous mapping) of Black male bodies. Since enslaved Black bodies “embodied registers of the indomitability of [their owner’s] will” (Johnson 107), the sexual charge of the public displays of mastery (including ones of a homoerotic nature) is inevitably bound to the history of white queer sexual discourse. This will be the groundwork that informs my readings of the nineteenth and twentieth-century texts. Using my historical analysis as a foundation, I will be critically examining erotogenic spectacles of blackness that share aesthetic and affective components of the public displays of mastery under slavery. This section of my project looks at the social and literary evolution of homoerotic forms of white mastery through the late twentieth century. The growing presence of a more widely recognized queer literary canon and its production of affective language and sexual literacies still remain connected to an understanding of pleasure that cannot be severed from the ontological life of American chattel slavery. Thus, despite the emerging critiques of a strictly heteronormative regime within American literature, homoerotic renderings of blackness within the white literary imaginary are mined for an understanding of pleasure that is directly linked to Hartman’s notion of an economy of enjoyment (Hartman 26). In an effort to continue developing Hartman’s theory of the economies of pleasure and enjoyment, I will be interrogating these economies not as interchangeable affective establishments but as a single economy of enjoyment that, in an Althusserian sense, is deeply invested in the production of pleasure (Althusser 86). The investments that American literature makes in this economy of enjoyment allow it to monetize the pornotropic black spectacle yielding pleasurable dividends (Spillers 206). The literary investments of this economy of enjoyment and its reproduction of erotogenic black spectacles for pleasure leave a paper trail that is connected to American chattel slavery based on its defining proprietorial characteristics. Since the reproduction of erotogenic spectacles of blackness is needed to attain pleasure, this economic model can be examined over several literary periods. Additionally, tracking the queer appraisal of these erotogenic black spectacles allows me to make legible the Antebellum value attributed to pleasure within white queer sexual economies down to the present. My work seeks to make interventions in literary and cultural studies around blackness and sexuality. Additionally, the intention of this project is to also reconsider the colonial historicization of American queer life and pleasure within the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The second half of the twentieth century saw a major upsurge in radical and revolutionary organizing in oppressed communities in the United States and around the world. This powerful organizing posed a significant threat to the legitimacy of US power and capitalist empire more broadly, and therefore needed to be contained. These movements were undermined by two main strategies: First, the radical movements of the 1960s and ’70s were criminalized, with the US government using tactics of imprisonment, torture, sabotage, and assassination to target and destroy groups like the Black Panthers, American Indian Movement, and Young Lords, among others. Second, the growth of the nonprofit sector has seen social movements professionalizing, chasing philanthropic dollars, separating into “issue areas,” and moving toward social services and legal reform projects rather than radical projects aimed at the underlying causes of poverty and injustice.17 These developments left significant sections of the radical left traumatized and decimated, wiping out a generation of revolutionaries and shifting the terms of resistance from revolution and transformation to inclusion and reform, prioritizing state- and foundation-sanctioned legal reforms and social services over mass organizing and direct action.

EXAMPLE: The FBI’s Counter-Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) is a notorious example of the US government’s use of infiltration, surveillance, and violence to overtly target dissent and resistance. COINTELPRO was exposed when internal government documents were revealed that detailed the outrageous work undertaken by the federal government to dismantle resistance groups in the 1960s and ’70s. Although the program was dissolved under that name, the tactics continued and can be seen today in current controversies about wiretapping and torture as well as in the USA PATRIOT Act. Overt action to eliminate resistance and dissent here is as old as the European colonization of North America

[Lee Edelman, prof of english at tufts university, December 5, 2022, “Bad Education

Why Queer Theory Teaches Us Nothing”, Ch. 2, Duke University Press]//owen

This conclusion makes a certain sense if we understand character as a form of reification that forces us to mistake characters for real people with psychological interiority. If we take characters as real, we miss how they are effects of linguistic and narrative conventions. By extension, if we take queer characters as real, the argument goes, we overlook how queerness is an effect of cultural norms, discursive structures, and social power. Rather than a force of antinormative potential, queerness becomes an ahistorical core of the self, an identity to be represented like any other without threatening dominant structures of gender and sexuality. Queer characters seem to contain queerness by reifying sexuality as subjectivity. Hence queer theory treats character and other representational forms, such as narrative, with great skepticism.2 For example, Teresa de Lauretis (2011: 244) defines queer texts as those that “pointedly [disrupt] the referentiality of language and the referentiality of images.” To find queerness in a text, queer theory looks to the cracks in representation. This is why queer readings tend to privilege nonmimetic elements of style such as syntax, enjambment, and rhythm, which seem to elude representation, or rhetorical tropes such as irony, catachresis, and zeugma, which destabilize representation by proliferating meaning. These forms are “queer,” on this account, because they rupture the structures of signification that buttress the heteronormative symbolic order.

[Lee Edelman, prof of english at tufts university, December 5, 2022, “Bad Education

Why Queer Theory Teaches Us Nothing”, Ch. 2, Duke University Press]//owen **includes brief descriptions of sexual violence

--ideally, the 1AC would be defending some form of abstraction for this card to really apply, but that shouldn’t be an issue given how I understand the thesis of the AFF.

Getsy ‘19 [David J. Getsy, art historian, curator, and art writer focusing on modern and contemporary art; 2019; “TEN QUEER THESES ON ABSTRACTION”; in Jared Ledesma, ed., Queer Abstraction, Des Moines: Des Moines Art Center, 2019); online version available at: ; accessed 07-13-2024] dliang

A lot of oppressed people are hyper-sexualized in dominant culture as a way to create them as a threat, a fetish, or a caricature—transgender women, black men, Asian and Pacific Islander women, to name a few. Despite often good intentions to raise awareness about the treatment of transgender and gender-non-conforming people in prisons, we recognize that much of the “public education” work around these issues often relies on sexualization, voyeurism, sensationalism, and fetishization to get its point across. In general there is a focus on graphic descriptions of people’s bodies (specifically their genitals), sexual violence, and the humiliation they have faced. Imprisoned people (who are usually represented as black) and transgender people (who are usually represented as transgender women of color in this “have long been the target of voyeuristic representation —from porn movies that glorify rape in prison to fetishizing “human rights” research distributed to majority white, middle-class audiences. As transgender people who often have our bodies on display for non-transgender people who feel empowered to question, display, and discuss us, we know that this is a dangerous trend that seriously undercuts the integrity of our work and the types of relationships that can be formed. Unless we address these exploitative power dynamics in our work, even our most “well-intentioned” strategies and movements will reproduce the prison industrial complex’s norms of transphobic, misogynist, and racist sexualized violence. Research, media, cultural work, and activism on this issue needs to be accountable to and directed by low-income transgender people and transgender people of color and our organizations.