We (Don’t) Want the End of the World
Blackness in the Scene of Psychoanalysis
Patricia Ekpo and Denise Ferreira da Silva
Whether as a core antagonism or as a pervasive elemental fractal, the problem of blackness subtends and interrupts any desire for psychic, subjective, social, or structural repair in the modern world. Histories of enslavement, colonialism, and genocide resolutely configure the modern world's social, subjective, psychic, philosophical, scientific, ethical, economic, and political architectures—thoroughly inflecting all modes of experience and understanding, all modes of conflict and suffering. This foundation, and blackness’s foundational place within it, makes clear that an originary scene of total violence constitutes what might be called the modern body and its material, national, and universal forms. This body is the often-unacknowledged inheritance of psychoanalytic renderings of the modern subject and psyche, which carry the antiblack underpinnings of Enlightenment thought. This can be found in the relations of power, imputed desire and will, and modes of suffering that psychoanalysis delineates—a delineation that provides tools toward the potential destruction of the world's antiblack architecture.
Denise Ferreira da Silva, in her scholarly and artistic production, has constructed her own body of work that approaches this modern body and considerably illuminates the place of the racial, most typified by blackness, in the architecture of our global present. Her work provides essential tools to understand and, in her phrasing, re/de/compose the continuing and lively inheritances of Enlightenment thought, moving us toward the potential dissolution of its forms. In her significant oeuvre, Ferreira da Silva has presented a critique of modern thought that illuminates how racial knowledge and power produce global space (Toward a Global Idea of Race, 2007), analyzed the role of the racial as a signifier for the subprime and global economic logic (Race, Empire, and the Crisis of the Subprime, co-edited with Paula Chakravartty, 2013), and has constructed critical Black feminist tools toward theorizing global justice (“Toward a Black Feminist Poethics: The Quest(ion) of Blackness Toward the End of the World,” 2014, and “Hacking the Subject: Black Feminism and Refusal beyond the Limits of Critique,” 2018). The shape, tenor, and theoretical depth of her work all reflect the scale of the global ordering that is the object of her comprehensive critique as she guides us through its most obdurate ideas forged through intractable racial violence: reason, universality, self-determination, self-consciousness, and subjectivity.
In this interview, we focus our discussion on Ferreira da Silva’s most recent work, Unpayable Debt (Strenberg Press, 2022), which takes up economic and ethical value as the continually structuring products of coloniality and raciality. The work argues expansively that our understandings of ethical value and capitalist accumulation cannot be disentangled from the expropriation of labor and value via enslavement on expropriated indigenous lands. In our interview, Ferreira da Silva walks through her theoretical explication of the debt that blackness holds that it can never pay back—one that structures current understandings of value, labor, and capital and which was forged in a scene of Black captive wounding whose repair is impossible within and because of our current ordering. She also interrogates the role of Black feminine gender in this structuring dynamic, the racialized grounds of the assumed subject of psychoanalysis in Freudian and Lacanian thought, and the vicious racial logic of criminality and police brutality. We conclude with a discussion of Ferreira da Silva’s potentializing theory of the image and her expansive creative practices that search for a way out of modernity’s seemingly inescapable formal and subjective confines.
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Ferreira da Silva walks through her theoretical explication of the debt that blackness holds that it can never pay back
Patricia Ekpo: Your book Unpayable Debt is inspired by Octavia Butler’s 1979 novel, Kindred, in which Dana, a Black woman living in 1976 Los Angeles, is pulled repeatedly in time and space to 1815 Maryland. Each time she is pulled, she is conscripted to save the life of her white slave-owning ancestor, Rufus, in order to make possible her own life. Dana is pulled instantaneously from her existence as a “free” Black woman in the present day of the novel to one of an assumed slave in the antebellum South, and the novel illuminates the indistinction between these two positionalities: a modern structural ordering in which the Black is positioned always already as slave. You delineate this in Unpayable Debt and argue that “Dana’s blackness signals both slavery and her lack of equity.” So to start off, I am wondering why “unpayable debt” was the formulation that came to you to figure this ongoing condition?
Denise Ferreira da Silva: That’s a great question to get us started. The phrase first came to mind to me when Paula Chakravartty and I were drafting what became the introduction to the American Quarterly special issue “Race, Empire, and the Crisis of the Subprime.” On the one hand, the problem to which it refers is about that. What was happening is that those who had nothing became profitable for those who had everything, and they were also the ones blamed for the global economic crisis of 2007–2008. So the idea of unpayable debt as a debt that one carries but is not one’s to pay was just immediately there. On the other hand, the plan for the special issue was to connect that global economic crisis to previous ones that primarily impacted the Global South—that is, the plan was to produce a critical racial and postcolonial or anticolonial analysis of the 2007–2008 global economic crisis.
The phrase has a longer history. “This is an unpayable debt” is a slogan we used to shout in Brazil back in the eighties, when the country was pretty much dying due to having to pay the service of its foreign debt. Back then, not only Brazil but other countries in Latin America were going through the same process. So much so that the 1980s is known as the lost decade for Latin America in the literature. But anyway, as we are fighting, protesting in the streets against the IMF-imposed structural adjustment policies, we’re just shouting “Esta dívida é impagável.” This other aspect of our initial idea for the special issue did not really concretize as much as we wanted.
I can add a third aspect: How is it that Black and Latinx persons and families are the ones to blame for the fact that people lost because they bet on these populations’ lack of equity? And also—speaking primarily about Black persons and families—how is it that people continue to profit off blackness and yet that profit is not acknowledged as an element of racial subjugation? That question takes us straight back to consider slavery and identify a similar pattern and to ask the question, not in a historical way, but actually look at the connections beyond history.
PE: Okay, yes! I will want to go back to a lot of what you’re bringing up, but another figure that comes up in Unpayable Debt is the “wounded captive body in the scene of subjugation.” At the beginning of Kindred, while she is traveling through time and space, Dana’s arm is severed after she kills her owner/ancestor Rufus when he attempts to rape her. And so, inspired by this image of her wounded body, you draw on Hortense Spillers’ theorization of black flesh and the captive body as well as Saidiya Hartman’s figuration of the repeating scenes of terror and subjection in enslavement, and you construct a kind of portmanteau of these concepts to create this guiding figure of the book: the wounded captive body in the scene of subjugation. You utilize this figure to various ends but particularly “to track, explicate, and annihilate the workings of the social-scientific category of blackness.” Can you say a bit about the construction of this figure for thought and the work that it is able to do for you in the text, and perhaps for a larger politics?
DFS: In the text, this figure allows me to revisit themes and questions that have been explored in Black studies, critical ethnic studies, critical legal theory, and critical race theory—without dragging along the meanings the category of blackness cannot but impose. These are the meanings generated by what I call the racial dialectic, which is the explanation that attributes racial subjugation to the “fact” that racial difference occasions improper beliefs and practices among white people. How to curb that effect of blackness, as a racial category, was always in my mind while I worked on the manuscript. You’ve already described how I go about it: I draw from Hortense Spillers’s distinction between skin color, captive body, and the flesh in order to create another image, another composition that would refer to all aspects of the political without relying on the category of blackness, or any other category that is associated with our understanding of the political, while at the same time signaling it. I assembled her, the wounded captive body in the scene of subjugation, as a reading tool: a tool not in the sense of it being an instrument to be used, not just as a mediator for my desire, but actually a tool that, when it’s applied, does things beyond even what I am asking it to do. I don’t recall if I say it that explicitly in the book. But I’m okay with the fact that some of the moves I make may go to places where I wasn’t intending to go, because I know it doesn’t go to places where I wouldn’t go [laughs].
So the assembling of the wounded captive body in the scene of subjugation gives me, on the one hand, a way of presenting, of referring to total violence as it operated in slavery and continues to operate in Black existence but in a way that does not explain total violence as an effect of blackness. The wounded captive body refers to that scene of power in which we find all of the relevant political positions, namely, owner/slave, white/Black, overseer/slave. On the other hand, precisely because captivity recalls that it is a juridic scene, it becomes the privileged instantiation of the political, which goes everywhere that figure goes in the analysis. So she exposes everything that allows us to read colonial and racial subjugation as properly modern political circumstances. Unlike skin color, which hides everything because of how it has been theorized in the nineteenth-century science of man, through the twentieth-century sociology of race relations, to today’s studies on racial subjugation that focus on antiblackness.
PE: You mentioned that this figure, the wounded captive body in the scene of subjugation, took you places that you did not expect it to. I’m wondering about the places you went that you were not planning?
DFS: No, it’s not so much that it’s taken me to places but that I anticipated that it could. As I was writing, I was always testing in a way to try to see where it could go, what kinds of meanings it could bring into the text. For instance, the phrase “the wounded captive body in the scene of subjugation” could be read as a version of the scene of suffering. That is, it could be read through the usual rendering of blackness in terms of suffering and not in “properly” political terms. I had to ask myself if I was restating a distinction between what is personal (affective) and what is “properly” political. To deal with this, all I could do was to think through if that possibility was there as I was deploying the tool in different moments. As I did, I realized that it was not the case, that she, the wounded body in the scene of subjugation, she’s a badass. She’s not crying [laughs]. Something that is also important in Kindred is that Dana lost her arm because she was fighting for her life. And she killed him! The loss of the arm was the cost. To me, it meant the figure inspired by Dana, the wounded captive body in the scene of subjugation, is a not figure of suffering, one completely determined by her conditions. To the extent that the wounded captive body is determined and delimited by the scene of subjugation, she is fighting!
PE: Okay, yes, that’s really helpful and takes me to another question. In the book, you cite a conception from Frank B. Wilderson III of the Black subject’s position as structurally impossible, an a-positionality that threatens the coherence of “the whole of modern grammar,” and then you extend this to say that only if they (the modern grammar and maybe also the Black subject?) were inward looking, they would be incomprehensible. And what you just said about the fighting, related somehow to will, made me think of this. This incomprehensibility refers to “the metaphysical relay…that blackness activates” because, impossibly and confoundingly, it points to blackness’s status as both the thing (as property) and the human.
So I wonder if this is linked to your invocation of Saidiya Hartman’s analysis of the scene of subjection, which you write shows that “attempts at capturing a Black interiority in (reenactments of) the scene of total violence fail precisely because the very aspects of the scene that attain Humanity and Subjectivity—that is leisure, desire, and sentiment—are juridically performed.” Hartman includes will in this list of violently imputed aspects of humanity and subjectivity. You make clear that you’re not interested in providing an account of Black being without objectification, or rehumanizing a Black subjectivity. But throughout the text, there’s an undercurrent relating to will that implies something about that subject. And I’m not sure that you say explicitly what it is, but it made me think about questions of interiority, desire, will, the grammar of modernity, and incomprehensibility as they relate to blackness, subjectivity, and humanity.
DFS: Okay, there are different ways of framing my reply to that question. I’m going to do one that connects with psychoanalysis more quickly than not [laughs]. The best way to respond to this question now is through the distinction between two versions of the modern subject. The first is—if you follow Foucault, you’d call it the classic version of man, or, if you follow Sylvia Wynter, you’d call it Man1. However you name it, or however you construct it, that is the figure that would prevail through the eighteenth century and probably also through the nineteenth century, during which it was reconfigured. This is the thing of the will, the one with free will, which is the one informing the modern juridic text and the one that, in a way, also commands the modern scientific text. This is the one Immanuel Kant elaborates in his Critique of Pure Reason, the one presupposed in notions such as judgment and determination: the one that does, that says, that decides. It is also the one to which the concept of freedom is initially attached. This is also the figure that reigns in the slavery juridic system. Now the question is not about whether or not somebody, a person, any existing person, has will. It’s not about that. It’s about the figuring of the subject that is supposed to be described in the very structures, in the juridic economic structures. So any description of the scene of subjugation in the juridical context of slavery, to me, reads as a description of subjects of the will. The subject who can actualize his will, the owner and overseer, and the slave, the subject whose will cannot be actualized, the one that must be curbed through the deployment of total violence. My point is there was the assumption that the slaved—I understand the preference for “enslaved” but I literally don’t take the juridical category of slave personally. I am using it, instead of “enslaved,” because I am referring to the juridic figure and not to a particular person. Anyway, the presumption was that the slave had a will; had it not been the case, total violence wouldn’t be thought as necessary. It wouldn’t have to be authorized and it wouldn’t be employed.
So, now, our problem, as interpretive thinkers, is that we begin with the subject as a thing of desire. This is the version of the subject that was manufactured or elaborated throughout the nineteenth and the twentieth century. The subject of desire comes back to itself. The subject of desire is the one that recognizes itself, or not, in the object or the other, but which always comes back to itself, because it emerges in relation to/with itself. With the images included in chapter 1 or chapter 2 of Unpayable Debt, I’m trying to break this latter version, the thing of desire, because that’s also the entity that is constitutive of racial categories and obviously of all social categories. It is the one that, if there is any operation of power—so here Foucault again comes to mind—it is an operation of power that mediates between the subject and itself and hence precludes its exercise, its actualizing of its freedom. In short, the subject of the will is a subject that exercises its freedom, its free will, through action, outwardly. The subject of desire is a subject that supposedly actualizes its freedom by claiming, recognizing, and resolving that which is outside of itself, in itself, that is, through reflection, inwardly.
Now the slaved in the nineteenth century is a little bit of a problem when we think of it now, right? Why? From our point of view, the interpretive point of view, we come to her with the assumption that all that is there—when you take an existence that looks like a human—is a thing of desire. We make demands on her as the ground for Black subjectivity, which is an entity that definitely only shows up in the twentieth century [laughs]. We demand her to be so, while she can’t possibly be that, because in her constitution, as a juridical entity, which is the one through which she grounds us, she’s a thing of the will. And then also she is a thing and, as such, she is a juridical object; even as a person, she only comes to us as property. (We are not as lucky as Dana, who travels back in time and encounters the slave as persons.) Even if you think of her as a juridic-ethic entity, as a person, she is still ruled by a conception of the subject as a thing of the will. And that, I find, kind of releases her desire. But I’m not gonna go there now [laughs]. It’s something else that we can speculate on.
PE: Speculate on the release of her desire?
DFS: No, I was going to say something about being thought through the concept of will and also freedom. I mean, it releases her, it liberates her from having to actualize it in the ways in which the conception of freedom as desire kind of imposes on us. It is a slight distinction, which gets too complex. Let’s not go there.
I believe that neither figure—the Freudian ego or the Lacanian subject—would survive a confrontation with the wounded captive body in the scene of subjugation.
PE: [Laughs] Okay, I am interested in going there. I can sense the implications that this may have for thinking psychoanalytically and seemingly the impossibilities in some ways because of this divide between the subject of will and the subject of desire.
DFS: Well, let me just maybe mention one thing that we could think about through this distinction. Let me place the distinction between will and desire at the core of psychoanalysis, recalling Freud and Lacan, and then see where it goes. I’m just thinking aloud. Let’s assume that Freud marks the passage. He contributes to a certain refiguring of interiority, in which the subject becomes a thing of affect as well as of intellect. Now, the contribution is still informed by the thing of the will. The key moment in the formation of the subject of the psyche and the ego, in Freud’s rendering, is precisely that of encountering prohibition, or the Law of the Father as Lacan later phrases it, right? This construction marks an interiorizing of the law in a new way. Let me try and locate it. With Locke, the rational subject of will, he says, has the idea of the law, but this is due to the knowing of the divine mandate for self-preservation, which is also in the register of natural law. With Kant, we find the crucial moment of interiorizing, but it’s one in which the idea of something like law exists a priori in the rational (human) mind, whose products occupy everything else to which they are applied (nature). In this construct, the law still operates exteriorly, which carries the threat that if its tools were to apply to the human, it would do so also exteriorly. With Hegel, a solution to this last problem conflates reason (law) and freedom, which he describes as operating in/as the actualizing movement of the subject. When doing so, he refigures the subject as a thing of desire. With Freud, that law, that interdiction—the prohibited access to the mother—forms a core in the constitution of the person, as the account of pain and suffering refers to the mind, now conceived as through both freedom (as a thing of will) and nature (or law of nature, as a thing of instinct).
With Lacan, the figuring is not the subject of will (ruled by nature, divine or scientific) but it is a subject of desire, even if it is positioned in the symbolic and affected by its rules. In Freud’s rendering, the image is that of authority. Verticality marks this situation: the law is up there, and then you have everybody/everything else below. The dispute is for the position of authority, the Law of the Father. The image here is that of the One and the manifold, in which the One is on top. In Lacan, the position is given by a structure with its own laws, even though the “I” marks the position of expression of desire. It is not the One alone on top. Horizontality marks this situation: it’s a position in a line or a plane. Precisely that horizontality allows acknowledgment that the subject is constituted by the Other in a relation (or condition) that precedes both. This subject (the thing of desire) is fundamentally split; the subject is fundamentally unstable, is constituted by that which it is not and knows not. Here, there is no presentation of the subject without the Other and at the same time there is the impossibility of resolving the distance between itself and the other/Other.
But that relationship between the “I” and the Other doesn’t happen in the abstract, it happens in the context of a symbolic structure itself. If you consider the slave in this rendering of the subject, they would figure in that Freudian situation. That is, if the slave is to be the “object” of our reflection on subjectivity, then it would make sense to stay there in that moment. But what would happen then if we were to take, as I think we do, the Lacanian figuring and position the Black subject in there, where the subject of desire emerges in a structure? Now remember that blackness is a category, it carries historical, anthropological, and sociological meanings, and with them the understanding that the Black person’s physical features cause white persons to entertain (discriminatory, stereotypical) unbecoming ideas and actions. In Toward a Global Idea of Race, I did quite a bit of the work of mapping how racial categories—like blackness—play in the modern symbolic regime. Much more work needs to be done, in particular, in the case of psychoanalysis, the study of what happens as a figure of the will (the slave) grounds considerations of the subject as a figure of desire. Until we do this work, to use “enslaved” instead of “slave” to mark some kind of recognition of the person under this juridical condition may make us (as writers) feel better but does not change any of the work the figure of the will continues to do to undermine our highest emancipatory or abolitionist endeavors.
PE: Yes! This is perhaps the question regarding blackness and psychoanalysis: the outcome of placing the Black/the slave in that Lacanian figuring.
DFS: Both if you ignore the social historical reference of blackness and then if you do not ignore. That is the work that should be done, isn’t it? Historically, that subject is informed juridically (the colonial figure of the slave) and scientifically (the category of blackness), that is, that “I”—just like any other colonial and racial figuring of the subject—emerges before something like an Other or an object as already constituted, that is, they are affectable subjects.
Let me continue with the dichotomic pair I chose to answer to guide our conversation: the subject of will and the subject of desire. Neither can deal with the racial subject. The subject of will, the one with sole authority, exists in the Lockean image of the state of nature or in the Cartesian image of a formal “I.” The Lacanian subject works for the Hegelian transparent subject, it is framed against it, but not for the racial subject (both the transparent “I” and its affectable others). Why? For one thing, if you approach the subject historically, it is not a mere abstract subject of law or science, but it is already enmeshed in what I will call an authority matrix (a web of positions): it is father, husband, and settler, a slave owner and merchant [laughs]. When figured racially, the subject of psychoanalysis (Freudian, Lacanian, or others) is always already mediated juridically (historical and actual relations) and scientifically. It doesn’t stand alone as a figure of authority, nor does it enter naked in the symbolic positions of authority. For this reason, I believe that neither figure—the Freudian ego or the Lacanian subject—would survive a confrontation with the wounded captive body in the scene of subjugation.
As a product of scientific signification, the transparent “I,” like the other racial subjects, is an effect of the tools of necessity. First, let’s assume that the transparent “I,” presumed in the Freudian ego and the Lacanian subject, is solely the philosophical figure of will and desire. Now let’s place a subject under any of the BIPOC categories in that position. Neither will nor desire would hold because the BIPOC categories yield social subjects that are unable to even conceive of those laws of necessity and to actualize a free will, as they have been constructed in a subaltern position vis-à-vis the white European. But, as I said before, if you place the white European, as a racial subject, there, where it supposedly belongs—that is, in the position of the transparent “I”—its own claims to transparency would not hold because it is determined by racial signification and also by the historical juridical relation of conquest, settlement, enslavement in regards to BIPOCs, the acknowledgment of which racial categories obviate.
PE: Okay, yes, absolutely! You lay that out in such a clarifying way.
To pivot a little bit, I’m curious about the place of gender in your figuration of the wounded captive body in the scene of subjugation. You distinguish it from Joy James’s captive maternal, a figure based on the enslaved Black woman, who is “disproportionately disciplined, denigrated, and consumed by the greater democracy” and illuminates gaps in theory about the consumption of the maternal. But in Unpayable Debt, you make clear that the wounded captive body in the scene of subjugation is not a woman, though she is a female: “She is nobody’s mother and no one’s wife or lover.” What aspect of the female—you cite Spillers’s female flesh ungendered—signifies for this figure?
DFS: This question takes us back in time, to about twelve years ago and to the subject of desire again. How to begin? One thing that is consistent in gender critiques or analyses of slavery or the female slave is the registering and the recalling of rape. (Let me just note that I am not ignoring that male slaves were also raped.) In any event, it is important to remember that the rape of the female slave was also extracting total value, through the appropriation of her reproductive labor (the producing of a person to be enslaved). That element is crucial and we forget about it.
Along with that, because of the pervasiveness of rape—and the juridic point about whether a piece of property can consent—there is also this impossibility of describing her as a figure of desire. She probably did not, but yet, one can’t for sure say that she never wanted to have sex with her owner, or the overseer, or even another male or female slave. It is difficult, almost impossible to describe her as a subject of desire because she’s a slave (juridically null subject of the will) and a woman (psychoanalytically void subject of desire). Another way of saying this is that the subject of desire—the crucial concept in psychoanalysis from Hegel through Freud, Lacan, what have you—is a figure for which the female (in general and the Black female much less) doesn’t stand as an acceptable referent or signifier.
When I started speculating about this twelve years ago, my initial question was: If the phallic reference will never work for the female or much less for the Black female or for the Black male, what’s happening there? How to consider desire from the position of the female slave? We know that there was something that is captured by the concept of desire that was part of these women’s existence, as it is part of our existence. How do we capture it? How do we describe that desire? In “To Be Announced: Radical Praxis or Knowing (at) the Limits of Justice,” I pursue this question by starting with sexual desire (with Bataille and Irigaray). Instead of gender, I pursued the question privileging the sexual. To make it work, I coined the phrase “the sexual in the female body” regarding the Black female body, precisely to avoid placing it immediately in the scene of desire. The phrase “the sexual in the female body” allowed me to speculate about what would become thinkable if thinking starts with the fact of the Black female body, not the name for it, not the concept, but the fact. Or what could be disturbed if we begin by saying the Black female body is sexual. Well, it allowed me to do several things, but primarily to speak of total violence and total value. To think about the ethical and the economic scenes of value, through the sexual and the Black female body and as a figuring of violence that does not return to the phallic as a symbol of the will (power) and a symbol of desire.
That text had the beginning of a critique of the juridic but without its main referent. In “Hacking the Subject,” I decided to explore it. In short, I take the hacked X (\X), the “sexual in the black female body,” into two equations: the equation of sexual reproduction and the equation of sexual desire, to see what she does to patriarchy when she is activated. What she does expectedly—as Hortense Spillers had already guided us to see in “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe”—is to absolutely completely unsettle the patriarchal equations because she’s not a mother, not a proper mother. She doesn’t figure gender in the ways in which the ones who are defined by the phallic do. My thinking here begins with Spillers’s female flesh ungendered, with that position where the usual deployments of patriarchy do not occur because slavery is the juridic condition that defines her position. Remember that patriarchy is a juridic position, so in the encounter of those two juridic forms, slavery and patriarchy, situated at that encounter, the Black female becomes incomprehensible by gender. But then, at the same time, she becomes very dangerous for the whole gender formation because she’s still a woman. In the same way that she’s both a thing and a human, she’s a woman. In my equations, from that position, which is given by the category of gender, she unravels everything. In a way, gender is central. Not as an explanatory concept but as the category that allows me to focus on this moment where two juridic forms actually open up the possibility for unraveling the whole system. Instead of just staying within the system—in this case the text of cisheteropatriarchy—and trying to explain it using its own terms.
How to consider desire from the position of the female slave? We know that there was something that is captured by the concept of desire that was part of these women’s existence, as it is part of our existence.
PE: That’s very beautifully explained. I want to pivot a bit but stay with the Black woman. During recent election cycles, Black women have been figured as saviors of democracy of some kind for voting Democratically more consistently than other demographics, especially in the 2016 presidential election, which you reference elsewhere as the most important racial event of the century up to that point. There’s this refrain that Black women carry the country on their backs and are owed everything and the attendant refrain that Black women do not owe “us” anything. What do you make of this desire to figure the Black woman as a liberal democratic subject par excellence and then also the repudiation of our debt? What do you think drives that?
DFS: This is such a beautiful question. It just makes me want to write another book. No, it’s not easy. Also, because we are having this conversation as it happens. It’s happening right now. It’s happening in the larger international context of Mia Mottley, the prime minister of Barbados, who is raising the bar for issues on climate change but also on reparations. It’s happening when you have the U.S. vice president, Kamala Harris, who is Black, South Asian, and Caribbean. It’s happening in Brazil: this January a Black woman took the position of minister for racial equality and an Indigenous woman took the position as a minister for Indigenous Peoples. Their inauguration ceremony was a joint one. Both at the same time, blackness and indigeneity, because that’s how Brazil has to do it. There is Francia Márquez, Colombia’s vice president, who is now receiving death threats and assassination attempts. It is telling that these happen in the wake of the #MeToo Movement and Black Lives Matter.
I don’t have anything else intelligent to say than that. That is the level at which it’s happening, right? We have this configuration but the question is whether—and that’s why I’m mentioning Francia in Colombia and the two new ministers in Brazil—this will be and remain mere symbolic recognition or there will be changes that will impact the conditions of existence of most Black women, everywhere, in fundamental ways? I don’t know. But thinking of Mia Mottley in Barbados, I remember these are Black women in positions of authority—limited, true, but still—in their countries. We have the possibility of hijacking that symbolism toward advancing political programs that have real impact in people’s daily existence. But it will require moving in directions that we usually don’t. I think one of them is to look at this whole process globally, and not only at what is happening in each separate country. The second one is to also look at the context, not exclusively in terms of blackness or only in identity and visibility (gender and racial) terms—by counting or naming women and BIPOCs. We need to take these into consideration but in terms of “What for? Why? Under which conditions? Toward which goals?” I’m saying that because then we can acknowledge that it is symbolism and at the same time think, “Well, so what do we do? How can we take advantage of those symbols or of this opening? Toward what?”
PE: Yes, absolutely. And even you saying that we have to think about Black women globally toward particular and singular ends, I’m struck by how unusual that is. It’s done infrequently on a theoretical level and not really done on a widespread political level with those questions you list in mind. We don’t really know because that position has not been thought from in a widespread way.
So far, we’ve touched on some aspects of this issue’s themes of repair and irreparability, and your work is highly relevant to thinking through the movement for reparations for descendants of chattel slavery. It’s important on two levels. A contemporary program of reparations would link slavery to “emancipatory” concepts like equality, liberty, and identity, which, as you describe in the book, would more clearly expose the modern world as foundationally and continually a site of total violence. So that’s one level of the threat reparations might pose. And then, on the other level, is your very important reworking of Marx’s equation of value. You recompose the equation of value by returning labor to its raw definition as material capacity, which can include the value created by enslaved workers on plantations and on conquered native lands. As you work through this inclusion in Unpayable Debt, you demonstrate that slaves had negative accumulation and their descendants have negative productive capacity and are left economically dispossessed, structurally and ontologically. But importantly, you assert that everything that was created and all that exists today carry the elemental components of their laboring bodies. So this makes for, potentially, a very confounding question of what reparations could possibly be!
DFS: I know. Every time I’m reminded of the question of reparations—and I’m reminded not because I forget about it but just because we can think on different levels. So, every time I’m reminded of the question of reparations and the questionings of reparations, I am like, this is so complicated! How am I going to explain? But actually, it is complicated but it’s possible to explain if you’re a bit obsessive. We just must think at two or more levels of abstraction simultaneously, right? To me, the argument in Unpayable Debt, as it is presented, is more generative if addressed at the level at which it’s made, which is the philosophical one. At that level of abstraction, it’s doing two things: on the one hand, just saying that the philosophical concepts that ground our demands for justice—liberty and equality—can’t deliver reparations. We know that, right? And yet the demands are reasonable, urgent, and necessary, to use that language.
So what do we need? We need a different point of departure for making the demands. We need a different context for situating the demands. And to me, the context is given precisely by what you said. The second level is the theoretical. It is about how, while that which is produced by slave labor is not recognized as part of accumulation of capital, it remains operative in the accumulation of capital. This basically means that reparations is a demand for the return of everything. You cannot return everything. It is a deadly contradiction. To return everything is the end of the world as we may know it. However, it can also operate as a principle, as a basis for demands and decisions, and as the reason, the grounds, for meeting them: that everything must be returned, even though the idea itself is incomprehensible because everything cannot possibly be returned. Any decision made toward meeting the demand for reparations will carry that impossibility and its intrinsic failure, which basically means that it will also demand that more is done. In short, I am thinking about reparations from these two levels of abstraction: the philosophical and the theoretical one, because I am convinced that we need a better basis for this demand. The liberal framework is weak and the historical-materialist one is useless, to say the least, as ethical grounds for demanding reparations.
PE: So then that demand for more to be returned, as you’re saying, is always a demand for the end of the world.
Any decision made toward meeting the demand for reparations will carry that impossibility and its intrinsic failure, which basically means that it will also demand that more is done.
DFS: Yes. It will always be postponed because basically we don’t want the end of the world. The only way is to try to return more and more, as close as possible to what is impossible. The point, which is philosophical, is to eliminate the dichotomy between what’s possible and what’s impossible. Let’s eliminate that because basically it’s everything. And if you think about it, it’s us, it’s our bodies, but beyond that, it’s the being of those descendants of enslaved persons or of First Nations persons for that matter.
PE: Yes. And that takes me to your turn to the cosmic or the quantic, which you say attends to the elemental in lieu of the metaphysical. You state that this turn enables us to consider the body in its singularity, in a quote I really like, “at the level at which it is also not the same as, not identical with, but equally composed of that which makes up everything else that has, does, and will exist.” Could you say more about the elemental and the collapsing of normative conceptions of time and space?
DFS: This is about the ethical moment of the demand. Here the issue is not only ontological, epistemological, but refers to what precedes and also informs considerations of existence. Still, the level is a philosophical one, about how humans make sense of existence, but beyond that which is thinkable and that which is knowable, with the tools of philosophy and science. The term that helps me to convey it is image. It’s an image of existence. An image of everything that exists and everything that happens that is as expansive as the cosmic and minute and quantic. Which means that it cannot be mediated by space-time because it is as expansive as space-time and assumes that space-time is nothing but everything that exists. Because that’s what general relativity exposes or is all about, the whole thing and how we think of it.
This is the domain of speculation. It is about thinking guided by an “as if,” as if the image captures existence—not proving that it’s true. Nor is it about a principle from which to only determine, delimit, consider something. The image I have been speculating with is corpus infinitum. With this construct, I’m playing with the way in which the concept of the body has occupied every existing thing that is approached in space and time. The phrase, again, conveys a contradiction. You can’t have an infinite body, because the body gives you an idea of shape, separation, solidity, extension. So, the phrase is also an invitation to the imagination, as it conveys both at the same time, infinity and body. Well, maybe I should say I am becoming more and more convinced that a thing that humans do that is interesting is the image. They entertain these images that have this amazing quality of being nowhere and everywhere, of being actual and not, but once you have an image in your head—it’s like the dream, once you have a dream, it is as if it did happen—it is part of your daily existence.
PE: Yes, that was my association as well, to dreams. Of course, I thought of the unconscious and I know it can’t map on very directly to your formulation in its traditional psychoanalytic sense, but has some of those same components of the fluidity of space-time and disembodiment.
DFS: The unconscious, but not as a structure or as part of a system, as image or as the unconscious that is in everything you think, see, touch, smell, imagine, dream. But you can think that’s where everything is housed before it’s filtered by the symbolic (mathematical, conceptual, aesthetical) mediators. Not as a structure, I repeat, but a complete mess. Totally messy, good for nothing in itself, but which carries everything, which is absolutely completely im/possible. But it also demands a certain way of dealing with complexity because it’s there, undeterminable but there at the same time.
PE: It seems like a part of your larger project is the deconstructing and dismantling of the structures that form and shape the way that those images and those experiences are filtered and constructed by/into power in the world.
DFS: Another way of saying that is that my larger project is the complete, complete destruction of the Kantian program and everything that lives of it because all that it authorizes is violence, including the destruction of the planet. It’s time for that, the transparent thing, to go.
PE: Yes! I love that framing, and much of my work, inspired by yours, carries that goal.
To pivot again a little bit more, we’re speaking on MLK Jr. Day on January 16 in 2023, and a Black man, Keenan Anderson, was murdered by the police on January 3. He was a thirty-one-year-old teacher and was tasered by LAPD officers six times, while being physically restrained by several other officers. And body camera footage shows Anderson begging for his life, saying, “they’re trying to George Floyd me.” And this was after a traffic collision that police said was caused by Anderson in a felony hit-and-run, and the police also reported his cause of death as cardiac arrest. Then the LAPD conducted its own toxicology tests and reported preemptively that Anderson had cocaine metabolite and cannabinoids in his system, while noting that the coroner’s office had not determined the cause of death and an autopsy hadn’t been released. So this is a commonly deployed tactic to establish Black people’s blameworthiness for their own deaths. And you describe this as emerging from the racial dialectic, a vicious circular logic that produces blackness as both the cause and the effect of racial subjugation, so that a Black person is solely responsible for the violence enacted upon them. And I think we can really see it here in this instance and in so many instances of police brutality. I am wondering if you could say a bit more about that.
DFS: Yes, it’s horrible, unacceptable, isn’t it? This is always the beginning of my thinking. Let’s talk about the image, those are the images. Of young Black persons, most of them young Black man who had been my classmates in elementary school and had been killed by the police by the time we were fourteen, fifteen. I remember at some point thinking, “I’m just like them, so I am going after you. But it’s going to be in a different way.” And I have this feeling—it’s my generation, it wasn’t the first one, but I think, actually both in Brazil and the United States, the late seventies, when cocaine and guns arrived in the neighborhoods—it was at the same time it happened in Brazil as it happened in the U.S. I don’t see how we can find a way to stop that unless we completely, completely, completely reshape the very basis of how we think about things, both immediately but also our critical tools and our creative tools.
To be sure, trying to figure out police brutality and criminalization in general is what called my attention to the operations of the racial dialectic. An effect of the racial dialectic that creates the figure of the Black person as a criminal on the one hand, but also, on the other hand, it places everything in the legal judicial system, where the rules for evidence, all the damn rules for evidence that create the space and create the proper objects, already militate against the claims that we make. Here I’m thinking about Mike Brown in Ferguson and the sense that Mike Brown’s neighbors’ accounts of what happened weren’t objective [laughs]. Why? The explanation was basically, because they don’t like the cops! Of course, they could never, never be objective according to the rules for findings around civil rights. Never because, if you’re Black and you grew up in some places, like I did, where the police were always harassing everyone and where they enter already shooting to kill, you just can’t trust them! But that is what militates against attempts to have justice done and what is used to justify police brutality. That is also why those killings of unarmed persons happen over and over again. It will continue to happen.
Either we face criminalization—criminality as a political dimension, as an aspect of racial subjugation—that is, make the argument that criminalization is the political operator that facilitates these moments. I mean, the argument here is that criminality—the construction of the Black, Latinx, brown body and territories as criminal—is to be dealt with outside the criminal justice system, in the political stage. This is a tough call because this sets up the political confrontation as one with the repressive forces of the state, as it is a challenge to it. Doing so is to move the consideration of the political to the scene of total violence. That is where the liberal political architecture does not want to encounter itself. That is where it places its Others; “oh, the violent ones, that was back in the past, the fascists, the white supremacists, the Nazis, and so on.” Police brutality, as we know, is not exceptional; it is systemic. The judicial system itself is the locus of it. You have to stage a confrontation with the system. Because criminalization does it every time.
PE: That is a very important reorientation. I want to conclude with some discussion of your artistic and creative endeavors. A couple of years ago, I was grateful to receive a screener of your film Serpent Rain (2016) from your collaborator, Arjuna Neuman, to screen for the first session of my undergraduate course, Wilderness in the North American Imagination. We viewed it during our first class and it really impacted students, they referenced it throughout the rest of the semester. And upon reading Unpayable Debt, I realized that you lay the groundwork for parts of your argument in the film. The film consists of lush and varied shots of oil refineries, fires, the sea, forests, glaciers, scenes of police brutality, Black hands, and other images that are intercut with text and your voice-over speaking about primitive accumulation, the relegation of slave labor outside of the life of capitalism, the elemental and continuing life of the products of slave labor, among much else. So you were working through these arguments and theories about six years before publishing your recent book. And you also collaborated with Neuman to make 4 Waters: Deep Implicancy (2018), which also contains concepts that show up in the book. And so, I’m curious about the role of this kind of artistic production in your theorization?
DFS: I have been thinking about those things for a long time. I have been thinking about those things, actually, since I finished the first full draft of Toward a Global Idea of Race, which was twenty years ago, in 2002. When I finished, I found a problem, which was the problem of space and time, which I experienced as a paralyzing crisis. Because if space-time is the core of how we think, there is no way out. Since then, I have been trying to figure out a way out for thinking. Arjuna and I collaborated on Serpent Rain in 2015, that’s when we were talking and filming. The idea for the film actually came from Stefano Harney, who commissioned from us a film that was supposed to be based on my ideas. But I couldn’t do what I’m doing with you now, the talking head on camera. So we ended up collaborating. That was a long story. Because I couldn’t be the talking head, it became evident that it would only make sense if the film itself kind of materialized the ideas, and so, in addition to conveying them, it should materialize them. Then, to do so, it had to become a collaboration. It did. Arjuna and I make decisions about everything. So the films, in a way, convey things that I’ve been thinking about and also things that Arjuna is thinking about. In them, you see things that I’m thinking about, things that he’s thinking about, and then how they come together. However, the ideas, as they come through the films, can’t be produced or reproduced in writing. It’s something else. It’s a whole different rendering. When I realized that, I decided that I want to do more films [laughs]! These are also conversations with Arjuna, each one of them. We are conversing with each other through our collaboration. The films stand alone, they do their thing.
PE: It seems like it’s getting toward something you were describing about images, the place of images. Obviously, films and images, as we have them in the world, are mediated by specific and constraining forms but I think it is outside of one type of language and maybe getting you closer to what you described about the place of images and the elemental or expansive.
DFS: Even if the images are not there, how the images that are there do what they do and they do it immediately. I could write a thousand pages about it and fail to convey what the images and the sounds do in the films, in the way they do it. There is no way of explaining it. There is something that the film does, the film that we put together [laughs].
PE: Yes, there is something! As a final question, I think it might be appropriate to talk about your collaboration with Valentina Desideri, which involves experimentation with the healing arts within a studio practice you call the Sensing Salon, which includes tarot, astrology, Reiki, as well as Political Therapy. We have discussed psychoanalysis as one modality of what one might call reading, thinking, or healing [laughs]. But this I imagine to be radically different. Could you say more about this conception of political therapy?
DFS: The political nature of the Sensing Salon has to do with the question that started it and which is explicit and implicit in what we do, both with the poethical readings and the Sensing Salon, which is the question of how to image ethics with/out the subject. All we do in the practice is attempting that. Displace, disorganize, disavow every time it tries to show up and take over. Then, in doing so, we do the readings with the tarot and astrology. The natural elements are crucial in those reading practices; they inform the ways in which we go about re/de/composing political questions. Which are any questions anyone brings to us [laughs]!
PE: [Laughs] Oh, that’s amazing, and I could ask so much more! As an approach—displacing, disorganizing, disavowing every time the subject shows up—this is something that motivates my approach to psychoanalysis and my question of what end/s it could be used toward. Ends that are different from what psychoanalysis wants but can orient toward something else. And it seems like you are trying to think similarly.
DFS: Yeah, we’re doing this kind of work. But it’s a practice, right? It’s not a theorizing of it, it’s a practicing of it.