black mysticism: fred moten’s phenomenology of (black) spirit

Black Mysticism: Fred Moten’s Phenomenology of (Black) Spirit

Calvin L. WarrenGeorge Washington University

Assistant ProfessorAmerican Studies

E-mail: [email protected]

Please do not cite without the author’s permission. Draft under review 1

mailto:[email protected]

In any investigatory procedure concerning African-American culture, a given episteme fractures into negative and positive stresses that could be designated the crisis of inquiry that reveals where a kind of abandonment—we could call it a gap—has occurred…we are confronted, then, by divergent temporal frames, or beats, that pose the problem of adequacy—how to claim an abandoned site of inquiry in the

critical discourse when the very question that it articulates is carried along as part of the methodological structure as a feature of the paradigm itself under suspicion, while the question itself foregrounds a

thematic that cannot be approached in any other way.----Hortense Spillers 1

The fervent cry that “black lives matter” has compelled African American Criticism2 to

return to what Hortense Spillers would describe as a site of abandonment, a crisis of inquiry, that

fractures into negative and positive stresses. In fact, African American Criticism has often

returned to this site of abandonment, much like Nietzsche’s “eternal return,” in an effort to

provide philosophical suturing of this gap and a resolution of the problematic. We can describe

this gap as the “problem of ontology,” and its contemporary fracturing into “negative” and

“positive” stresses is the distinction between “Afro-pessimism” and “Black-optimism.” These

two fields of African American Criticism orbit around the gap of black ontology, each

attempting to understand black existence in an anti-black world. Afro-pessimists such as Frank

Wilderson and Jared Sexton would argue for the non-ontology of blackness—that Blackness is

excluded from the realm of humanity and this exclusion preconditions ontology itself. For Afro-

pessimists, the grammar of bio-futurity and political programs will do very little to bring blacks

into the fold of humanity; in fact, this grammar is the source of black suffering and dread. The

term “black optimist” describes a diverse group of scholars committed to humanism. Although

these scholars do not self identify as black optimists, the term dockets a humanist desire either to

fold blacks into humanity and resolve the ontological problem, or to move “beyond” race and

embrace an optimistic future of universal humanism. Scholars such as Paul Gilroy, Anthony

Appiah, and Daphne Brooks, among others, would argue for the inviolable humanity of blacks.


In this essay, I want to introduce a third term that complicates the fracturing between

Afro-pessimists and Black-optimists: Black mysticism. Black mysticism approaches the

problem of ontology, this gap, in an innovative way: instead of ascertaining the efficacy of

political action to resolve the problem of ontology and black humanity, it seeks to abandon

ontology. I will argue that the work of Fred Moten is exemplary of this strategy, and although his

work is often characterized as “black-optimism” I suggest that he departs from Black optimism

in his abandonment of both ontology and politics. If we can indeed imagine a suture of this gap

between Black optimism and Afro-pessimism, Black mysticism provides a guide or a

reorientation. Part of the difficulty, then, with the contemporary debate is that it suffers from

what I will call grammatical paucity—it relies on an anti-black grammar that does not easily fit

the black being under investigation. The semantic confusion and tension between the terms

“social life,” “political death,” and “social death” that obfuscate and organize the debate between

Afro-pessimists and Black optimists is a deep symptom of this grammatical paucity. What Black

mysticism offers is a lexical imagination that aims to take us outside of political ontology and

into the metaphysical (or the spiritual). Furthermore, I suggest that we lack a systematic theory

of “Black spirit” in the humanities because philosophical practices such as post-metaphysics,

post-structuralism, and strands of scientific reasoning have discredited the spiritual or

metaphysical. Black mysticism provides a needed philosophical supplement to these discourses.

In order to present the anatomy of Black mysticism, I will read the work of Fred Moten

for its philosophical interventions, tensions, and aspirations. Fred Moten’s work has become

central in discussions of blackness, aesthetics, and sociality, but very rarely do scholars engage

his work as philosophy. This essay provides such a reading not only to explicate the dimensions

of Black mysticism, but also to recognize Fred Moten as a unique philosopher with an approach


to Blackness and ontology that is ambitious, difficult, and provocative. What I am calling “Black

mysticism” is a philosophical orientation scattered across the arch of his writing; thus, I will

engage a series of his articles to construct this perspective. Ultimately, through a close reading

of his engagement and departure from Afro-pessimism, Black Optimism, and Continental

philosophy, I argue that the academy is in serious need of Black mysticism.

Metaphysics, Mysticism, and Divergence: Afro-pessimism and Black Mysticism

Afro-pessimism and Black Mysticism are inseparable compliments or mutually

constitutive when discussing, as Jared Sexton would call it following Jacques Derrida, the

“supplementary logic of the copula.”3 Before I delve into this “supplementary logic of the

copula” let me first say a word about metaphysics, since it is shares a philosophical affinity with

certain aspects of mysticism and it is the source of anti-black violence in modernity. The history

of metaphysics is complex, and it is often difficult to pin down the term within the philosophical

cannon. Although Kant, Hegel, and Marx would consider themselves “post-metaphysical,”

Heidegger read them in another way. In his Introduction to Metaphysics he describes

metaphysics as a particularly violent episteme, one that reduced the grandeur of Being into a

schematized, calculable, object of science—metaphysics is the objectification of Being.4 This

thread of metaphysics runs deep in the philosophical tradition and, in this sense, I think of Moten

as a “neo-Heideggerian” because he wants to abandon, if not destroy, traditional ontology and

metaphysics—since it is ontology that distorts blackness and limits it to nothing more than forms

of being.


Moten reads African American Criticism in much the same way Heidegger read

philosophy from Plato onward: He identifies the preoccupation of African American Criticism

with blackness as being (e.g. people, things, etc) instead of Blackness as transcendental horizon

(by this I mean that which escapes ontology, paraontology). African American Criticism has

forgotten Blackness because it is preoccupied with the critique of political ontology (blackness

as things). African American criticism, within this framework, is not really studying Blackness at

all, but Western Civilization and political ontology. African American Criticism and Black

Studies are not synonymous, for Moten, and his philosophical enterprise is situated within “the

break” between the two.

What Moten and Afro-pessimists share is a deep understanding of the relationship

between Blackness and ontology—a relation that Heidegger could not, or would not, envision

because of his Eurocentric perspective on being and Dasein. But unlike Heidegger, Moten does

not abandon the theological imagination or the mystical impulse. It is precisely this mysticism

that provides our fugitive escape from the confines of ontology. Thus, mysticism is not inimical

to freedom; it is the only aspect of existence that provides hope. Because of this, Moten often

appropriates seemingly mystical concepts in post-metaphysical writing: Heidegger’s “Thing,”

Kant’s “unruly imagination,” Agamben’s “form-of life,” Leibniz’s “timelessness,” among others,

all become mystical elements within his formulation of paraontology. Ironically, he reads

Heidegger against Heidegger to develop a more robust critique of metaphysical violence than

Heidegger himself. Moten is re-writing onto-theology in another register; he uses Eastern

philosophy (e.g. Buddhism) and “mystical post-metaphysics” to imagine a flight from ontology,

a place beyond the arid terrain of political ontology. His yearning to escape the brutal physicality

of ontology results in a form of “mysticism in the flesh.”5


Afro-pessimism

For Afro-pessimists, Blackness is the product and property of political ontology. It

emerges as the violent technology and discourse to pulverize, subject, and eviscerate African

being. Blackness is always already a political non-relationality, and it is pure instrumentality—or

a metaphysical body in the Heideggerian and Spillerian sense. As Bryan Wagner astutely puts it

in Disturbing the Peace, “Blackness does not come from Africa. Rather, Africa and its diaspora

become black at a particular stage in their history. It sounds a little strange to put it this way, but

the truth of this description is widely acknowledged. Blackness is an adjunct to racial slavery.”6

Blackness signals the reduction of African being to a schematized, scientific object of commerce

—African being becomes a play-thing for the New World. Hortense Spillers would describe this

vicious process as the theft of the flesh, that primary narrative, and the imposition of the

“body”—an anti-black invention, in which the body forcefully eclipses the flesh—rendering the

African a “being for the other.” The problem with humanism, according to Afro-pessimists, is

that it attempts to provide an inaccurate etiology of Blackness—Blackness emerges as an object

of commerce and science and not as a feature of human difference. Blackness, then, is not an

identity capable of infinite deconstructions or hasty universalizations, but is a specific technology

of modernity for certain beings. Within modernity, Blackness is functional and instrumental—it

provides the permanent violation of Kant’s categorical imperative; Blackness is pure means.

Afro-pessimists demystify ontology, striping it of its assumed “purity” in the Western

tradition, and exposes ontology as the product of political processes. Ontology does not precede

the Political, and this assumption is often the basis of flawed emancipatory logic. According to

Frank Wilderson, modernity has created a “new ontology”—an ontology that is non-ontological,

in the sense that it provides the necessary condition of negativity. Thus, Blackness is an instance


of “non-adequation”—blackness is not a being proper to itself, it is always fractured, doubled,

and rebounded. Afro-pessimists would argue that Dubois’s “Double Consciousness” is the

product of a foreclosure of “ontological narcissism,” as William Connerly and Elizabeth Anker

might call it.7 Blackness cannot lay claim to the capacities that constitute human subjectivity in

the world because Blackness is a commodity in fleshy form; it is the devastating inverse of

ontological narcissism—we might call Black being “ontological deprivation” in an anti-black

world. And because it does not participate in the narcissistic ontogenesis that founds human

subjectivity, Blackness poses problems for any copula formulation.

Black Mysticism

Fred Moten’s etiology of Blackness begins elsewhere—something we might call the

paraontological:

What emerges in the desire that constitutes a certain proximity to that thought is not

(just) that blackness is ontologically prior to the logistics and regulative power that is

supposed to have brought it into existence but that blackness is prior to ontology; or in a

slight variation of what Nahum Chandler would say, blackness is the anoriginal

displacement of ontology, that it is ontology’s anti- and ante foundation, ontology’s

underground, the irreparable disturbance of ontology’s time and space.

The etiology (origin) and nature of blackness are woven together tightly in his theory of

Blackness. Unlike Afro-pessimists, Moten believes that “blackness is ontologically prior to the

logistics and regulatory power” of anti-blackness. Blackness is not an adjunct to racial slavery,


but is violently appropriated during slavery. If Blackness is ontological, its ontological

constitution precedes its ontological captivity. What is the ontology of Blackness—the Blackness

that precedes anti-blackness? This is not a philosophical road that Moten explores much, given

that he ultimately wants to dispense of ontology. We might read this silence as a certain

concession to Afro-pessimists because Moten’s line of inquiry would lead us to an ontology

untainted by the Political. This would place Moten in the tradition of “pure ontologists” who

believe in being in-and-of-itself (e.g. the Platonic tradition). But how do we comprehend and

apprehend such a being without recourse to the tools of the Political (e.g. rationality, science,

schematization, instrumentalization, and probability)? This ontology becomes something like

Kant’s noumenon, but since Moten does not rely on phenomenal rationality (because this is the

realm of anti-black death), there is not much he can do with this ontology, other than to fervently

insist that it exists (which seems to be a strategy he employs with his “knowledge of freedom”

essay, and he, ironically, attempts to read Kant against Kant in an understanding of aesthetic

judgment8). The brilliance of Moten, however, is that is refuses this double-bind, and instead of

insisting on the “pure” ontology of blackness prior to anti-blackness, he dispenses with ontology

all together—thus shifting ground from ontological origins to blackness without ontology.

What, then, is “Blackness without ontology”? Answering this single question seems to be

his philosophical project. Moten wants to excavate the ancient etiology of that which precedes

ontology itself—that which is in excess to ontology and with this excess has the potential to

destroy it—what he would call blackness as “ paraontological pathogen.” Moten’s enterprise

desires to escape, or flee, ontology —understanding that ontology is an exceptionally hostile

place for Blackness and renders blacks homeless within such a structure. Ontology is the site of

pulverized being, abusive power, and systemized muteness. And given that we might not have


access to the “pure” ontology of blackness, if it does indeed exist, his enterprise turns away from

ontology toward the anoriginal site of blackness—paraontology:

blackness and ontology are unavailable for one another; on the other hand blackness must

free itself from ontological expectation, must refuse subjection to ontology’s sanction

against the very idea of black subjectivity. This imperative is not something up ahead, to

which blackness aspires; it is the labor, which must not be mistaken for Sisphean, that

blackness serially commits. The paraonotlogical distinction between blackness and

blacks allows us no longer to be enthralled by the notion that blackness is a property that

belongs to blacks (thereby replacing certain formulations regarding non-relationality and

non/communicability on a different footing and under a certain pressure) but also because

ultimately it allows us to detach blackness from the question of being. 9

Furthermore, “Blackness or the thinking of blackness, [must] be understood in what some not so

strange combination of Nahum Chandler and Martin Heidegger might call its paraontological

distinction from black people,”10 according to Moten. Maintaining the distinction between black

people and blackness entails the crucial metaphysical objective for Moten’s work. His critique of

Afro-pessimism is that it collapses this distinction, confusing blackness with black-things, and

once this distinction is collapsed, or obliterated, Blackness and black things are presented as

pathological, wanting, inadequate, and deathly. It is not surprising, then, that Moten relies on

Heidegger as a philosophical interlocutor, and exemplar, in this project; for Heidegger attempted

to do precisely the same thing with his distinction between Being and beings in Being and Time

and Introduction to Metaphysics. Moten is “interested in how the troubled, illicit commerce

between fact and lived experience is bound up with that between blackness and the black, a


difference that is often concealed, one that plays itself out not by way of the question of accuracy

or adequation but by way of the shadowed emergence of the ontological difference between

being and beings.”11 He wants to disentangle Blackness and blacks by positing his own

(para)ontological distinction, a distinction that serves as a mystical ground for the “escape” he

believes is possible (of course, Afro-pessimists would argue that there is nothing to escape from

since the distinction that Moten posits is itself the product of political ontology, and he is caught

in somewhat of a performative contradiction). Moten carries Heidegger’s ontological difference

between being/Being and ontic/Ontological into the distinction between blacks (ontic/political-

ontology) and Blackness (para-ontology). Blackness is being within Moten’s philosophical

enterprise. Perhaps, blackness is what Heidegger was after all along.

Heidegger offered the strategy of Destruktion to combat the obliteration of the

ontological distinction, which he considered the source of human misery and suffering. De-

struktion would involve the intense weakening of metaphysical being, a self-consumption of its

violent arrangements. One would turn metaphysics against metaphysics and expose the utter

irrationality and misery of its vacuous core. Moten, however, does not offer such a strategy, and

this makes his paraontology difficult to embrace—especially in the face of brutal anti-blackness.

Indeed, Moten’s philosophical translation and appropriation of Heidegger stops short of

Heidegger’s “solution” to the problem of metaphysics; Moten offers no solution to the problem

of anti-blackness other than the assertion that Blackness in an anti-black world functions as a

“pathogen” and it “bears or is the potential to end the world.”12 But how exactly does Blackness

destroy anti-blackness as pathogen? It is certainly the case that Moten is primarily concerned

with blackness and not anti-blackness; but given this, it becomes difficult for Moten to convince

African American Criticism of its need to shift emphasis when blacks are suffering daily from


anti-blackness. Afro-pessimists would argue that the idea of a solution to anti-blackness is a

myth, since the analytic tools used to eradicate anti-blackness are themselves infused with anti-

blackness. Moten might well agree with this double-bind, but he avoids this sense of pessimism

by not discussing anti-blackness explicitly. He is much more interested in the paraontology of

blackness than a phenomenology of anti-blackness. But to shift emphasis from the obsessional

object of political ontology to the wonder of blackness will require a strong philosophical

justification for paraontology over the phenomenology of anti-blackness—if not, paraontology

could very easily become an anti-black structure within discourses seeking to deny or avoid the

reality of black suffering.

But does Blackness have an obligation to black people? And if not, why not? What is the

relationship between anti-black suffering and Blackness? Is it possible to have Blackness without

black people? (This mirrors the provocative question asked at a conference on Black Studies:

Can we ethically “practice” black studies without black scholars and black students?) Moten

seems to suggest as such:

…blackness is present (as E.P. Thompason said of the English working class) at its own

making and that all the people who are called black are given in and to that presence,

which exceeds them (in an irrevocable, antenational combination of terror and

enjoyment, longing and rejection, that Hartman, in particular illuminates). Ultimately,

the paraontological force that is transmitted in the long chain of life and death

performances that are the concern of black studies is horribly misunderstood if it is

understood exclusive, which is to say everyone can claim blackness. That claim is neither

the last anticipatory reorientation but is, rather, an irreducible element of the differentially

repeating plane that intersects and animates the comparativist sphere.13


Black people are “touched by Blackness” (Blackness is presented to them much like

being is presented to Dasein for Heidegger), but Blackness is not the property of black people.

Blackness becomes what philosopher Mary Jane Rubenstein might call “strange wonder”—a

wonder that Heidegger described as the groundlessness of being.14 Because it is without ground,

this wonder cannot be objectified or owned as the property of this or that group of persons. The

relationship between black people and Blackness is not one that Moten explicitly articulates,

primarily because he is attempting to detach blackness from black people and conceptualize

Blackness as a mystical abstraction appearing to the world. Blackness, here, becomes the site of

a “looking away,” a desire to escape that for which we no longer will engage. (But if we close

our eyes to political ontology, do we risk additional injuries? Is there a certain value to our

obsession with the entity that has the potential to destroy us? Can we escape that which we do

not fully know?) This impasse is precisely the violence that Afro-pessimists see at the heart of

such enterprises of escape, fugitivity, freedom, and emancipation.

When Moten describes the paraontological as the “not so strange combination of Nahum

Chandler and Martin Heidegger,” we might suggest that the juxtaposition of Chandler and

Heidegger invokes Derrida’s critique of Heidegger, since Nahum Chandler is our finest

proponent of deconstruction in Black Studies. Derrida’s critique of Heidegger, of course, was

that he was entangled in the very metaphysical structure he sought to destroy. Destruktion

disclosed itself as reinscription and repetition.15 It is the re-inscription of ontology within the

para-ontological that haunts Moten’s philosophical enterprise, for indeed, can we ever truly wrest

“para ontology” from the “ontology” that distinguishes it? Does not the “trace” of the other

(ontology) inevitably infuse itself into the sphere that purportedly excludes it (paraontology)—as


its illegitimate foundation? Is the “para” here an actuality or a yearning for reprieve? In other

words: Does the pathogen need its host to survive? To put this somewhat differently, if the issue

with Black Studies is that it is preoccupied with ontology and formations of anti-blackness that

sustain it, according to Moten, then we might say that it is “ontological thinking” that is at the

root of this problem. We “forget” Blackness because we are unable to disentangle our

investigations from the thinking and procedure of Western ontology and metaphysics. To address

this, Moten wants to “think otherwise”(much like Heidegger attempted to do with his concept

An-denken). But herein lies the problem: Moten is still entangled in the very metaphysical-

ontological enterprise he wants to escape because his analytic depends on the distinction between

Blackness and blacks. The significance of this is two-fold, not only is this binary opposition

between Blackness and blacks a product of binary-metaphysical/ontological thinking—thus a

reproduction of the very thing he wants to flee—but he lacks an analytic framework and a

lexicon that can transcend the constraints of ontology. Moten still operates within ontology

through binary oppositions and terminology. The difficulty of such an enterprise is that we do

not have a grammar outside of ontology to describe the “paraontological,” which means that his

idea of paraontology is still tethered to that which it is designed to escape. Paraontology

becomes another version of ontology. Moten is as much obsessed with ontology as Afro-

pessimists. But this obsession is inescapable; there is no way out (which is what Afro-pessimists

have been emphasizing). We can become creative with prepositions and prefixes and say that

paraontology is not “outside” of ontology, but “through it” “within it,” “alongside” etc—but

these prepositional distinctions do not rectify the fundamental problem of repetition and re-

inscription. The same binary thinking that stains ontology (e.g. between subject/object,

free/slave, and white/black) lingers in the paraontological framework (e.g. between


Blackness/blacks, fugitivity/stagnation, pathological/pathogenic, etc.). If Blackness and

ontology are unavailable for one another, then Blackness and paraontology are just as

unavailable and incompatible. Since Blackness indexes an atavistic being—before the reign of

metaphysics and ontology, and any other organizing system for that matter—no-thing is

compatible with blackness. And because we can only approach Blackness with the instruments,

grammars, and analytics of ontology (“para” or otherwise), we will never really know Blackness

—only our metaphysical engagement with it. Our desire to move beyond “ontological

Blackness”—as Victor Anderson would describe it16—becomes something similar to the

psychoanalytic notion of objet(a). Blackness is the imaginary wholeness or origin that we are in

constant pursuit of, but never can quite approach—indeed, if we successfully capture it, we die.

There is, then, a certain majesty, terror, and mysticism about blackness. Moten’s brilliant work

re-members the majesty and mysticism of Blackness, even if it brackets the terror of Blackness

(and this, perhaps, is the job of the Afro-pessimists to describe this terror). His desire to escape

ontology—to flee it as an existential fugitive—expresses an impossibility that nonetheless

enlivens his texts.

In his early critique of Afro-pessimism, Moten describes it as the “fetishization” of bare-

life, a critical obsession with the bareness of it all. Afro-pessimism

[leaves something] unattended in [its] invocation of Fanon, in [its] move toward equating

objecthood with ‘the domain of non existence’ or the interstitial space between life and

death, something to be understood in its difference from and relation to what Giorgio

Agamben calls naked life, something they call raw life, that moves—or more precisely


cannot move—in its forgetful non-relation to that quickening, forgetive force that

Agamben calls the form of life.17

Read through Heidegger, we can suggest that, for Moten, Afro-pessimists forget the “form of

life” just like philosophers have forgotten Being. The fetishization of bare-life is an aspect of

our obsession with metaphysics (political ontology). Agamben’s bare life—that kernel of

exceptional state power found at the center of the modern citizen/subject—engenders a forgetting

of the very thing it would overcome. Agamben also prepares the way, philosophically, for

Moten in that he too develops the term “paraontology” in his own way, as a “messianic

subjectivity.” Robert Thomas reads Agamben in relation to the non-dialectical work of Deleuze

and suggests that Agamben’s paraontological paradigm attempts to describe “life beside itself”—

that “life that struggles with another kind of life,” according to Deleuze. Agamben’s

paraontology, unlike Moten’s, emerges from an imminent critique, not an escape from or

rejection of decreation, but an imminent emergence of “this other life form” within the very

decreative form itself. Thomas describes paraontology as life lived within the state of exception.

It is “the status of a life in the state of exception, and the exigency of what is unforgettable in that

experience and the ethical relation that calls to us from within that exigency: the possibility that

another life, and another time—not transcendent, but immanent within this one is possible.”18

The fine distinction between Moten’s paraontological Blackness and Agamben’s

parantological form-of-life resides in Moten’s conceptualization of Blackness as the epitome of

transcendence because it precedes ontology; it is found within the world but is outside of it.

Blackness becomes a form of life for Moten, but a life that is outside of life—or what we know

as life in our anti-black ontic reality. At times, Moten seems to oscillate between transcendence


and immanence; perhaps blackness is both transcendence and immanence, which makes it a

paradox that Agamben does not address. Delueze picks up where Agamben leaves off, as it were,

and Moten understands the paradox of transcendence and immanence as the “hold of the slave

ship,” read through Deleuze’s analysis of Foucault’s “ship of fools” as “the inside [functioning]

as an operation of the outside” or “life within the folds”.19 Blackness struggles against the life of

anti-blackness in a dialectical motion that synthesizes into something we can call “the mystical”

or transcendent for Moten. We can suggest that paraontology conceals a Hegelian motion of

sublation—Blackness as pure Spirit.

Social life and Political Death

The metaphysical distinction between Blackness and blacks and paraontology and

political ontology is also articulated through another binary distinction—social life and political

death. It is within this distinction that the tension between Afro-pessimism and Moten’s black

mysticism becomes most prominent. Most of this tension is semantic: the choice between “social

death” and “political death” or “social life” and “political life.” For Moten, this sematic tension

is a deep philosophical problematic because these signifiers carry philosophical baggage that is

not always unpacked. At base, the philosophical tension boils down to the difference between

“social death” and “political death”—what Moten calls “terminological dehiscence.” The terms

“Social” and “Political” are often used interchangeably to describe the condition of anti-

blackness and the particular enframing of this violence. It is the existential mapping of blackness

that concerns Moten, and how our notion of blackness shifts given where blackness is placed.

We can locate the origin of this tension in a foundational text of Afro-pessimism, Orlando


Patterson’s Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Analysis.20 In this text, Patterson describes

the condition of captivity as social death, which entails general dishonor, natal alienation, Civil

“excommunication,” and forms of what Frank Wilderson would describe as “gratuitous

violence.” Why does Patterson use the term “social” when what he seems to be describing is the

realm of the political? This is the question that frustrates and invigorates Moten. His answer to

this question adumbrates semantic confusion on Patterson’s part—he suggests that Patterson

(mis)translates or (mis)appropriates Hannah Arendt’s distinction between the “social” and the

“political”:

What I offer here as a clarification of Sexton’s understanding of my relation to Afro-

pessimism emerges from my sense of a kind of terminological dehiscence in Orlando

Patterson’s (1982) work that emerges in what I take to be his deep but unacknowledged

affinity with and indebtedness to the work of Hannah Arendt, namely, with a distinction

crucial to her work between the social and the political. The “secular excommunication”

that describes slavery for Patterson (1982:5) is more precisely understood as the radical

exclusion from a political order, which is tantamount, in Arendt’s formulation, with

something on the order of a radical relegation to the social. The problem with slavery,

for Patterson, is that it is political death, not social death; the problem is that slavery

confers the paradoxically stateless status of the merely, barely living; it delineates the

inhuman as unaccomodated bios.21

Captivity, then, is the forced relegation of Blackness to the social because the political is

foreclosed as a viable option (this existential mapping delimits the only options as the “political”


or the “social”). Anti-blackness works its violence through this foreclosure, and it is this

foreclosure that Patterson attempts to capture with his term “social death.” But “social death” is

an unfortunate misnomer or intellectual sloppiness, given the primary form of exclusion that

preoccupies Patterson’s work is the captive’s (non)relation to the political. Hannah Arendt relies

on a rigid distinction between the “social” and the “political” to ground her Aristotelian theory of

“action.”22 For her, the social constitutes the realm of necessity—those essential entities that

secure the promulgation of life and survival of the citizen. The political, on the other hand, is the

privileged space of unencumbered action and participation within the public sphere. It is the

realm of the citizen. Arendt’s theory of political action parasitically relies on the excluded social

—if the basic issues of living aren’t secure, it becomes difficult for the citizen to exercise

freedom in the public because his creative energy would be spent securing necessity. Thus, the

essentiality of slavery for Aristotle and Arendt: the slave, excluded from the political, is

relegated to the social to free up the citizen’s creative (political) energy. Historically, necessity

has been epidermalized in modernity, and Blackness has become the sign of such oppressive

necessity. Part of the problem with anti-blackness, then, is the conflation of Blackness with an

oppressive social, where the “social,” historically at least, is a synonym for slavery and

oppression. It is this theoretical lineage that Moten believes orients Patterson’s term “social

death.” Since the social is the realm of exclusion, rightlessness, and dispossession, then what the

black experiences in modernity is tantamount to “death,” following Patterson’s rationale—the

black becomes mere property in an anti-black social.

The Afro-pessimistic belief in the futility of the social/political distinction is what Moten

adamantly refuses. Thus, the tension does not reside in whether anti-blackness excludes blacks


from Civil society (which separates Moten from black optimists who believe in political

transformation), but in the utility of the social. What Moten wants to conceptualize

by way of this terminological slide in Patterson, is the consideration of a radical

disjunction between sociality and state sanctioned, state sponsored terror of power-laden

intersubjectivity, which is, or would be, the structural foundation of Patterson’s

epiphenomenology of spirit…this is to say that, yes, I am in total agreement with Afro-

pessimistic understanding of blackness as exterior to civil society and, moreover, as

unmappable within the cosmological grid of the transcendental subject. However, I

understand civil society and the coordinates of the transcendental aesthetic—cognate as

they are not with the failed but rather with the successful state and its abstract, equivalent

citizens—to be the fundamentally and essentially anti-social nursery for a necessarily

necropolitical imitation of life. So that if Afro-pessimists say that social [death] is not the

condition of black life but is, rather, the political field that would surround it, then that’s a

formulation with which I would agree. Social death is not imposed upon blackness by or

from the standpoint or postionality of the political; rather, it is the field of the political,

from which blackness is relegated to the supposedly undifferentiated mass or blob of the

social, which is, in any case, where and what blackness chooses to stay.23

Thus, the transcendental, abstract subject of political ontology and state sanctioned terror

comprise the “anti-social nursery” of the political. Social death is a particular synonym for the

political field in Moten’s analysis. In other words, what Patterson and Afro-pessimists consider

social death is not social at all, but the death-scape of the political. In Moten’s analysis, we have


so confused the social with the political that we lack a proper analysis of the social and its

potentiality. The relegation of Blackness to the social is not a death sentence at all for Moten,

rather, it the site of dynamic possibility, fugitivity, and a mystical transcendence (not the flawed

universalism of political ontology, but a transcendence that fractures, exceeds, and precedes

traditional transcendental subjectivity). The social becomes akin to a sacred space and it refuses

complete closure by the forces of anti-blackness. There is something about the social that is

indomitable, untranslatable, and mystical for Moten—we might call this “something” Spirit in

contradistinction to Orlando Patterson’s “epiphenomenology of spirit,” which privileges the

terrain of political ontology and keeps blackness embattled in a failed struggle for recognition.

Moten wants to redefine the terms of existence away from the pursuit of recognized ontology,

since ontology and Blackness are unavailable for each other. The social offers a mystical space

of existential reconfiguration.

In “The Social Life of Social Death: On Afro-pessimism and Black Optimism,” Jared

Sexton destabilizes this distinction by suggesting the mutual dependence or even indissociability

of social life and social death:

To speak of black social life and social death, black social life against black social death,

black social life as black social death, black social life in black social death—all of this is

to find oneself in the midst of an argument that is also a profound agreement, an

agreement that takes shape in (between) meconnaisance and (dis)belief. Black optimism

is not the negation of the negation that is afro-pessimism, just as black social life does not

negate black social death by inhabiting it and vitalizing it. A living death is as much a

death as it is a living. Nothing in afro-pessimism suggests that there is no black (social)


life, only that black life is not social life in the universe formed by the codes of state and

civil society, of citizen and subject, of nation and culture, of people and place, of history

and heritage, of all the things that colonial society has in common with the colonized, of

all hat capital has in common with labor—the modern world system.24

In Sexton’s brilliant analysis, when a “living death is as much a death as it is a living,” the terms

“death” and “life” must be reconfigured or rethought in relation to blacks in an anti-black world.

Thus, the distinction between “social life” and “political death” is really a philosophical inquiry

of what it means to “live” and to “die” in an anti-black world. The problem, then, is that we lack

a grammar outside ontology to describe “life” and “death.” Because the terms of life and death

are defined by an anti-black Order, the distinction between the two blurs into conceptual chaos:

this is the condition of black suffering in the New World. The social life and political death

distinction that Moten emphasizes seems to be a yearning for “life” within anti-blackness (i.e.

life within the hold of the slave ship). If this “life” is found in the “social,” then the “social” must

be protected at all cost from the destructive deconstruction of its boundaries (which, ultimately,

is the aim of an afro-pessimistic analysis—to deconstruct these boundaries and expose the

absurdity of the political architecture). Although Moten is most certainly correct that theorists

haven’t handled the distinctions between “political death,” “social death,” and “social life” with

care, once we sort through the sematic sloppiness of it all we must contend with the fundamental

issue at hand: what type of life is possible for blacks in an anti-black world? What does this life

entail? It becomes clear that Moten must reject “social death” because the social offers the only

possibility of life along the existential cartography of political death. The stakes are

exceptionally high here. If there is an irresolvable difference between Afro-pessimists and Black


Mystics, it is the “form” that life assumes in anti-blackness—since both agree that death is the

landscape of anti-blackness. If the social assumes synonymity or intimacy with what we call

“life,” then the social is sacred in as much as black-life (which is to say life) is sacred.

But we arrive at a sort of double-bind here: is there life outside ontology? Moten’s black

mysticism wants us to flee ontology, in a fugitive like movement, but where do we end up? We

flee ontology to arrive where? In a sense, Moten flees ontology only to return to ontology, yet

again, in his distinction between “life” and “death.” The distinction between social and political

—this sacred distinction becomes contaminated by its own graphematic deconstruction (e.g.

even the jazz music he proffers as examples of life affirming sociality is recorded within anti-

black musical institutions and by record labels who expropriate black genius for profit, and then

transcribed into sheet music using Eurocentric conceptions of rhythm and time—I am thinking of

Thelonious Monk’s brilliant work and life as a prime example). Which means the “trace” of

banished ontology and disowned political death is at the heart of social life. Moten would argue

against this assertion, I believe. He would assert that there is life outside political ontology, a life

that precedes it—but can we call this “life”? The terms “political,” “social,” “life,” and “death,”

are always already circumscribed by political ontology. Any notion of “life” (be it “political” or

“social”) always carries anti-black conceptions of vitalism and being within its structure.

Moten’s concept “social life” is overwhelmed with tension, paradox, and oxymoron—since the

term “social” is designed to index a reprieve from the political and the term “life” is the property

of political ontology, the term “social life” rebounds upon itself endlessly.

Perhaps this is why Moten turns to the grammar of mysticism in his essay “Blackness and

Nothingness (Mysticism in the Flesh)” to address this tension. Nishida Kitaro ̄’s philosophical

ruminations on the nature of “being” and “non-being” seduces with its potential to provide this


alternative grammar, but alas, we apprehend this Eastern philosophy with the metaphysics that

plagues both the East and the West. The problem is cyclical and dizzying. Both Moten and

Heidegger end up at the same place: how do you think otherwise when this “otherwise” is the

product of the thinking to overcome? Moten’s work seems to move toward a destruktion of

ontological blackness, but how exactly we accomplish this is unknown or unexplored. Ironically,

this is the same problem that Afro-pessimists have in describing that which is excluded from

ontology but provides the condition of its possibility. Thus, the sematic confusion between

“social life,” “political death,” and “social death” is a deep symptom of grammatical paucity.

We are using the grammar available to us to undo this very grammar, but we get stuck in the

deconstructionist turn because what is left after the deconstruction is still inadequate. It might

help if both afro-pessimists and black mystics write “social life,” “social death,” and ”political

death” under erasure to signal our dissatisfaction and uncertainty in relation to the terms “life”

and “death.” This will not solve the problem (there isn’t a solution), but it will remind us that

such a problem and crisis exists when we conduct our investigations of Blackness and anti-

blackness.

But if we must work within the constraints of ontological grammar, mysticism provides a

critical perspective on ontology, even if it cannot ultimately dispense of it. Within the mystical

grammar, “life” in the term “social life” seems to resemble more the term “spirit” (not the Geist

of political orders used to galvanize and unite nations, but an esoteric entity that reveals itself to

us and evades scientific and metaphysical captivity). It seems that Moten is after something we

can call “spirit,” and it is precisely this spirit that precedes and exceeds ontology. The spirit,

then, is not the property of blacks but it manifests through blacks—through the resilience found

in things like artistic endeavors (the beauty within conditions of extreme ugliness). Perhaps,


there is no “life” for blacks in the ontological sense, but there is spirit. We lack a systematic

theory of “black spirit” within the humanities, which means that we must bend toward black

theology (such as Howard Thurman’s mysticism) to illuminate the way.25 The critique of

metaphysics—the theodicy that dominates much of our epistemology—has discredited the

theological imagination. This has been to the detriment of black studies, I believe, because it

strips us of a necessary grammar to imagine an escape from anti-blackness (even if such an

escape is impossible). This is not to suggest that religious, mystical, and spiritual discourse is

not, at times, saturated with anti-black sentiment, but it is to suggest that we need additional

grammars and lexical imaginations to counter anti-blackness. Deconstruction alone won’t

eradicate anti-blackness. We have worked tirelessly to deconstruct race, blackness, gender,

class, etc, and anti-blackness simply winks at the irrationality that deconstruction exposes and

continues business as usual or finds sophisticated ways to neutralize the critique by incorporating

it. A return to “mysticism in the flesh,” as Moten would call it, might revitalize our strategies

and discourse. A “phenomenology of (Black) spirit” would help us to redefine the terms of

black existence in an anti-black world.

Read through the philosophical framework and aspirational grammar of Black mysticism,

the urgent cry that “black lives matters,” then, becomes a reorienting away from political

ontology (or ontology altogether) and toward something mystical (the paraontological). Black

lives “matter” (in both senses of the term as “important” and having a phenomenological “form”)

because black lives cannot be simply reduced to the terms of political ontology—an ontological

orientation that disregards and pulverizes black being. The living of Blackness is the property of

a mystical constitution, the “wonderful” aspect of blackness. Black lives matter because black

lives have been “touched” by Blackness, that aperture into the realm of ineffable empowerment


and joy. Fred Moten, as a black mystic, would urge us to rethink this phrase as not an appeal to

an ontological organization of society that debases blackness, but as a declaration that Blackness,

as mystical entity, matters through the living bodies of black beings. It is a declaration of joy, or

mystical ecstasy. “Black lives matter” reminds us that the phenomenology of black spirit that

animates us is truly indomitable.


1 Spillers, Hortense, Black, White, & in Color. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (2003), 406. 2 In this essay, the term “African American Criticism” dockets a field of inquiry that investigates issues of ontology, metaphysics, and blackness through diverse approaches. I use it only to signal the “critical” dimension of the field in distinction to the more social scientific orientation of other approaches to these issues. 3 Jared Sexton, “The Social Life of Social Death: On Afro-Pessimism and Black Optimism.” Intensions issue 5 (Fall/Winter 2011), 22. 4 Martin Heidegger, The Introduction to Metaphysics. Trans. Greogory Fried and Richard Polt. New Haven: Yale University Press. Second edition (2014). 5 I am grateful to Dr. Brandi Hughes for her insight into the theological dimension of Moten’s work. 6 Bryan Wagner, Disturbing the Peace: Black Culture and the Police Power after Slavery. Cambridge: Harvard University Press (2009), 1-2. 7 William Connolly, Identity Difference; Democratic Negotiations of Difference. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002; Elizabeth Anker, Orgies of Felling: Melodrama and the Politics of Freedom. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014. 8 Moten, “Knowledge of Freedom,” CR: The New Centennial Review. Vol. 4, number 2, (Fall 2004).9 Moten, “Blackness and Nothingness,” 749-750. 10 Moten, “Black Optimism/Black Operation,” unpublished paper. 11 Moten, “The Case of Blackness,” Criticism v.50. number 2 (Spring 2008), 180. 12 Moten, “Blackness and Nothingness,” 739. 13 Moten, “Black Op,” PLMA 123.5 (2008), 1746. 14 Mary Jane Rubenstein, Strange Wonder: The Closure of Metaphysics and the Opening of Awe. NY: Columbia University Press (2010). 15 See Jacques Derrida’s Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question. Trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (1991). 16 Victor Anderson, Beyond Ontological Blackness: An Essay on African American Religious and Cultural Criticism. NY: Continuum Intl Publ. Group (1995).17 Ibid. , 180. 18 Robert C. Thomas, Broken: Thought Images of Life in the State of Exception. Unpublished manuscript (2007), 155. 19 Moten, “Blackness and Nothingness,” 18; Gilles Deleuze, Foucault. Trans. Sean Hand. New York: Continuum (1998), 81. 20 Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study. Cambridge: Harvard University Press (1982). 21 Moten, “Blackness and Nothingness,” 739-740. 22 See Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, second edition (1998). 23 Moten, “Blackness and Nothingness,” 740 24 Sexton, “Social Life of Social Death” 28-29. 25 Howard Thurman, Howard Thurman, “Mysticism and the Experience of Love,” in For the Inward Journey, ed. Anne Spencer Thurman. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Publishers (1984).

black mysticism: fred moten’s phenomenology of (black) spirit

Documents