Modernity is built upon an Enlightenment archē – The Subject constitutes itself through a revelation by occlusion that foregrounds the belonging hu/Man against the nontransparent black “thing”.

Far too unknown in black studies, ethnic studies, and critical theory and continental philosophy, Long rigorously argued that a “new archē” of being and knowing, of ontology and epistemology—indeed, a unique mythos and cosmology— had come to structure or organize the present.10 This new archē emerged with and through the contacts, commerce, and exchanges that took place in the Atlantic World from the mid-fifteenth century forward in what is often called the Age of Discovery and Conquest. Differently put, a new archē of (human) being and knowing emerged with and through the simultaneous appearance of a people who would be called black and something that would be called black religion in the Atlantic World. Modernity is of this natal occasion. It was the occasion of the imposition of a racial capitalist cosmology upon the earth. Long contended that animating that natal occasion is a colonial archē that, through the emergence in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries of a series of “sciences” intent on understanding Man, or “the human,” extended or mutated into a system of knowledge about what counts as real, about “the world as such.”11 We’ve been subjected to the colonial idea(l) of “the world,” made its conscripts, its uncomfortable denizens, undergone its process of “genesis.” Sylvia Wynter names what I am talking about “the coloniality of being and knowing.”12 Founded in a colonial archē, or a principle of being, to use the language afforded us by Long, who is of Wynter’s generation, modernity would in due course come to articulate a philosophical or “Enlightenment archē,” a knowledge of the human being as a certain kind of Subject in a certain kind of world. What I am trying to communicate here is that these terms—the human, the Subject, and world (or as we often so easily and casually say, the world)—and the practices that carry them are neither self-evidently given nor innocent.

This invites a question: What manner of Subject, what manner of Man, or rather human, or rather hu/Man, is this? This is a Subject who in being, supposedly, self-determined, self-possessed, and of autonomous mind claims rationality for itself. As such, this Subject (rendered with a capital S to signal its imagined, which is also a brutal, magnanimity), can subject other things to itself. It can rule. It can own things, beginning with itself, though this properly self-possessed and self-determining Subject cannot be subjected to another. In rationally owning itself as the basis of owning things, including the capacity to lay claim to the earth itself, it declares itself to be the veritable embodiment of “freedom.” And yet, it is also the case that within this cosmology, within this imagination of “the world,” Man’s freedom expresses a capacity of self-rule for the sake of ruling over other things. Within the world, or more precisely within such a cosmology, this is what freedom means. Freedom is a function of sovereignty and sovereignty is a function, an expression, of freedom. This is, to introduce another term, sovereignty.

This account of the Subject, of freedom, and of ownership is a fused adumbration of both Saidiya Hartman’s and Denise Ferreira da Silva’s accounts of the racial dialectic that constitutes modernity as a “scene of subjection” and a “scene of obliteration.”13 Such a dialectic, premised on settler logics of property, propriety, and properness, constitutes a world that is Man’s “home” even as those blackened or rendered thingly or thinglike and even animallike and monstrous with respect to that world (I explore this in chapter 1) both are not at home in that world and host a kind of utopian potential to unhome or undo the world owing to an insistent refusal of the very world that has been imposed on them and extracts from them, even as that world also refuses them standing.14 Borrowing from Sigmund Freud, we might call the animacy of such things precisely in their thingliness, in their opacity, in their nontransparency, which is to say, as black(ened) and dark(ened) things, “uncanny (umheimlich).”15 They are uncanny things. Strange and estranged, strained, stranded and unhomely, the opacity of dark(ened), black(ened) things is the seized-on backdrop against