Focus on becoming pathologizes black bodies as static liabilities that hamper posthuman movement.

A Spinozian concern (with or without the Deleuzian mediation) with the body as the ontological ground of Human encounters has become quite appealing to critical theory, especially in the footsteps of the “affective turn” and “nomadic” decenterings of the subject. Perceptions that precarity is ineliminable and persistent severely disrupted older signposts of progress—labor, gender, or national social inclusion—and revealed anxieties with recuperating precarity itself within a relational ontology. The mission seems to be the rescue of “living labor”32 (Virno 1999) as inherent to worker’s bodies belonging to the Human family, leaving to the Slave the permanent, thus deathly, separation of “labor power” from the flesh, and the ensuing impossibility of social inclusion and recognition.33 In Negri’s reflection, it is indeed the possibility of encounter and the promise of relationality that infuse work with a new ontological status, keeping it on the Human side of precarity and preventing it from falling into the abjection of enslavement. Negri’s redemption of work not as labor but as relation thus entails a revitalizing “ontology of work” centered on “immaterial” properties that are “intellectual, communicational, relational, affective, which are expressed by subjects and social movements, thereby leading to production.”34 Critical theory’s conceptual and ethical investment in the encounter as the force deemed to restore potential, becoming, and equlibrium to bodies—singular as well as social—otherwise constantly and vehemently stimulated to be “out of step with themselves,” to recall Simondon’s formulation,35 is thus overtly aimed at conjuring away slaveness as the haunting absence-presence of stasis and permanent disequilibrium without potential. The specter of slaveness is, on the other hand, as constantly and menacingly alluded to, like the abyss out of which Humanity must be kept, in the Spinozian fold of post-Marxist critical theory, as this allusion systematically disavows the structural isomorphism between Slaveness and Blackness. Thus, Frédéric Lordon’s image of neoliberal subjectivities turned into “willing slaves of capital,” self-entrepeneurial actors motivated to pursue their own exploitation, rests not on classical notions of ideology and hegemony, but, Spinozistically, on the hypothesis that the Human’s essential capacity to desire has been twisted toward a fleetingly joyful but ultimately oppressive encounter with capital and consumption.36 In a praising review of Lordon, Jason Read reminds the readers of what is the touchstone of coherence for this peculiar version of the Human “drama of value”: Spinoza considers the historical transformation of desire primarily in terms of the biography of an individual. The movement from bondage, from domination by the affects, to liberation, to the rational comprehension of the affects, is the trajectory of liberation that defines the Ethics. Hartman’s “Venus” provides, of course, a far more structurally accurate and ethically rigorous, because less generically “human,” characterization of the position of being “dominated by affect,” one in which White affect simultaneously determines antiblack violence, the terror of enslavement, and the possibility of desire and encounter for those whose freedom means staying clear of racial bondage. If the ominous evocation of slaveness—on condition that it completely disavows the violence defining racial blackness—is a somewhat unspoken asset in the critical vis of the Spinozian moment, its adamant opposition to the very notion of structural positionality, without which blackness becomes literally unthinkable at an ontological level, is a far more pronounced, perhaps even “programmatic,” aspect in contemporary theorizations of the encounter. For Brian Massumi, for example, the very existence of the social field as something distinct from a thingly “universe” of “death” rests on the “ontogenetic priority” of movement and becoming over stasis and position, a priority practically expressing itself through an expansive notion of affect and desire, not limited to emotions and feelings, but designating bodily intensive capacity for attractions that “affect” singularities in their collective assembling.38 Inspired by Massumi, Rosi Braidotti and Jasbir Puar directly target radical projects they regard as anachronistically wedded to, respectively, “negativity” and “identity” as impediments to an affect-driven post-modern and post-human reconstitution of the social.39 Patrice Douglass has convincingly shown how such critical turns—which I trace back to various influences of Deleuzian Spinozism—delineate their conceptual capaciousness through a deprecating allusion, which is often not even so implicit, to blackness (and, in political terms, Black radicalism and radical Black feminism) as a condition putatively obsessed with immobility, loss, and grief.40 In its very allusiveness and persistent refusal to engage questions of racialized violence and structural positionality raised by Black critique (rather than the more academically en vogue “people-of-color” critique), however, the Spinozian celebration of movement, affect, and becoming is self-fulfilling, since it fixes blackness as conceptually immobile, hence the constitutive outside for the flourishing horizon of Massumi’s, Puar’s, and Braidotti’s joyous and positive Human assemblages. The coerced conceptual immobility and policed practical objecthood of blackness, Douglass concludes, fuel the “theoretical mobility” of critical theory and its manifold desired subjectivities.