Abstract
My study explores the question of “Black desire” (Frank Wilderson’s phrase in Afropessimism) as it pertains to Lacanian ethics (as conveyed in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Seminar VII). Like Antigone, Afropessimism is “a turning point” in the field of ethics. Lacan poses the same question about Antigone that Wilderson poses regarding the Black: “What does it mean . . . [to] go beyond the limits of the human?” After elaborating on Fanon’s notion that “the black . . . is not,” Marriott’s conception of ab-sens as blackness, and Wilderson’s idea of the Black as Slave, I use and then reverse Žižek’s notion of parallax to suggest that the shift (which these theorists call for) in the (Black) phobogenic nightmare/object (petrified by the “white gaze”), can effect not only collapse of the (white) subject (as it pulls the black rug out from under it) but also a dissolution of the subject-object (racist) structure. As the object refuses to accept its reification (parallax), resisting its relegation to social death, through confrontation with and ownership of the Real hell that especially Wilderson’s Fanonian/Lacanian work insists on, the entire edifice will undergo a sea change as the eye that now looks at the Human sees it as what it is: nothing (reverse parallax). Herein lies the revolutionary desire—which can only arise through an “absolute condition”—that Afropessimism, in the spirit of Antigone, aims to ignite. “Social death can be destroyed,” writes Wilderson, once the ship is burned “from the inside out.”
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
2024 Special Focus—Traveling Concepts: The Transfer and Translation of Ideas in the Humanities
KEYWORDS
Afropessimism, Black Social Death, Lacanian Ethics/Antigone, Parallax, Revolutionary Desire
