John E. Drabinski

Édouard Glissant passed away on 4 February 2011 at the age of 82. A few words of memory. As a person and thinker, Glissant lived through, then reflected with meditative patience and profundity upon some of the most critical years in the black Atlantic: the aesthetics and politics of anti-colonial struggle, the civil rights movement in the United States, postcolonial cultural anxiety and explosion, the vicissitudes of an emerging cultural globalism, and all of the accompanying intellectual movements from surrealism to negritude to existentialism to those varieties of high modernism and postmodernism for which Glissant himself is such a generative, founding resource. His life bears witness to those years, events, and movements with a poet’s word and a philosopher’s eye. And so Glissant, like all important thinkers, leaves for us an enormous gift – in his case, a new, enigmatic vocabulary of and for the Americas.&nbsp.

This essay examines the possibility of developing an ethical politics out of the work of Emmanuel Levinas. Levinas' own work does not accomplish this kind of politics. He opts instead for a politics of peace, which, as this essay argues, falls short of the demands of the ethical. Thus, this essay both provides an account of Levinas' own politics and develops resources from within Levinas' own work for thinking beyond that politics. An alternative, liturgical politics is sketched out. In a liturgical politics, law must be thought on a redistributive model. Redistribution, it is argued, responds more adequately to the extravagant generosity of ethics than the neutral 'droits de l'homme' developed in Levinas' political philosophy. Key Words: ethics • law • Levinas • liturgy • peace • politics • redistribution.

This essay examines James Baldwin's conception of what he calls “black English” and its link to historical and cultural identity. I link Baldwin's defense of black English to his reflections on the sorrow songs and sound, which draws on long-standing accounts of musicality as the foundation of the African-American tradition. In order to demonstrate this relation to the tradition, the essay puts Baldwin's remarks in relation to Frederick Douglass's and W. E. B. Du Bois's description of the sorrow songs. I also underscore how that relation to the African-American tradition marks an important set of tensions with mid-twentieth century black Atlantic theory (Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon), tensions which make sense of the Americanness of Baldwin's work. Across the essay, I claim that Baldwin's account of language has epistemological and ontological significance (and so is not just aesthetic or political), which gives an interesting and important twist to Martin Heidegger's famous phrase that “language is the house of Being.”

Much of the work on Levinas and political philosophy is content to note two things: the resistance of the ethical to politics and the messianic dimension of Levinas’s thought. The task, then, has largely been to identify (usually formal) points of resistance and/or to trace out the figures of messianism in the various functions of the prophetic word. Themes of singularity and eschatology therefore dominate the discussion. While both of these aspects of his work are important and can pay interesting dividends, one cannot but note another result: a lack of materiality in developing a Levinasian politics. This need not be the case. Indeed, much of my concern in what follows is to open up the possibility of thinking about Levinas and politics in a manner that reintroduces an element of concreteness.

"Jean-Luc Godard is nothing if not an enigma. His image has a life of its own, especially in its younger form: cigarette, sunglasses, smirk, rambling revolutionary slogans, and important books. It wasn’t just an image, we all know, for it reflected perfectly in iconic image the more substantial revolutionary recklessness with the camera we see from Breathless forward. Filmmaking is never the same after Godard. Images and their sequencing – Godard cloaked them in sunglasses and made them smirk. He made them revolutionary. That’s his thing. And even the older Godard makes for an iconic photograph: rough facial hair, the artist’s glasses, smirk, and important books. His films continue to be unpredictable, compelling, and revolutionary..."

The point of this collection of essays on James Baldwin is, as it were, to not take the word on James Baldwin at its word. This collection does not seek to iterate, once again, the divisions—separating Baldwin's work into distinct, discrete articulations such as those that have so marked critiques on Baldwin. James Baldwin, culminating in The Fire Next Time (this is always where the dividing line is drawn, The Fire Next Time), darling of the white liberal establishment with his essays in Partisan Review and Commentary—this Baldwin is the author who struggled with that metaphoric father, Richard Wright, the Marxist “naturalist” (and confrère of Sartre, de Beauvoir) and creator of the tragic Bigger Thomas, who had to be “slain” in order that “art” (for “arts sake,” of course) might triumph over the “protest novel.” The Baldwin, who, try as he might, could never quite bridge the gap with “Alas, Poor Richard,” the essay he penned after Wright's death. That Baldwin is undone by the violent homophobia of Eldridge Cleaver's Soul on Ice, in which Baldwin is attacked relentlessly, for his homosexuality, for being, among other things, the “black boy, with a white mind”; the effect of Cleaver's attacks, the logic goes, is that it “reduced” Baldwin to giving up his liberalist tendencies, his commitment to “art” for its own sake. As a consequence, Baldwin “apologized” to Cleaver, in part by revising, radically, his position on the Black Panthers by underwriting Cleaver's and Huey Newton's project. In this schema, everything that Baldwin writes after The Fire Next Time is either “bad literature” or outright pamphleteering—black nationalist “propaganda.”There is a place in Baldwin scholarship for critiques and assessments of this kind, but that is not the thinking on Baldwin that this collection undertakes. The ambition here is, rather, to see where Baldwin's Logos, his word, his word on race and racism, his word on film, his word on violence against African-Americans across the decades (indeed, the centuries), his word on love and religion, takes us. This collection engages Baldwin as a philosopher, as a thinker who raises fundamental questions, questions that go to the core of what it means to be in the world.In a certain sense, this should not be a surprising turn in scholarship, considering his moment as a writer. Born in 1924, Baldwin belongs to a generation of black Atlantic thinkers who infused nonfiction, fiction, poetry, and theater with philosophical language and massive theoretical aspiration. Baldwin's birth-moment puts him alongside that great anticolonial cluster of West Indian writers, including Frantz Fanon, Kamau Brathwaite, Édouard Glissant, George Lamming, and Derek Walcott, inheritors, all of them, of that just-prior wave of anticolonial writing and struggle in the works of Aimé Césaire, Leopold Senghor, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and C. L. R. James. These are legendary, world-historical thinkers, renowned for the challenge they put to European imperial power and the logic of colonialism as much as they anticipated the problems and, indeed, the disappointments that sovereignty would bring to fledgling Third World nations—and the sovereign nations to come. This is a cadre of thinkers to which Baldwin, in his own complicated way, belonged.The birth-moment is also an intellectual event, an occasion in which an honest reckoning with the past seemed possible, one that might reject and surpass the abjection of the Africana past in the name of something simultaneously more syncretic, creolized, and more messianic. This is, as C. L. R. James might have insisted, a world-historical moment. For all of these thinkers, this moment was: revolutionary. Transformative. It was full of potentiality but already haunted by the specter of a failed to-come. Another future becomes possible in Baldwin's work, just as it had become possible in the essays, poems, novels, and theoretical works of his black Atlantic contemporaries, drawing, always, on the complex richness of the painful, yet something more than just pain, history, and the memory of black people. Such a moment and its work entrenches Baldwin deeply in his generation and its philosophical moment. In such an entrenchment, set in that context and thought in its moment, the nuance and complexity of Baldwin's work becomes visible. It becomes material for treatment, not simply restatement or historical framing—to not take the word on Baldwin at its word, but to treat the word and draw out its theoretical sense and sensibilities. To not take Baldwin at his word demands thinking the philosophical difficulties that Baldwin's work grapples with in so many registers, that he raises insistently.It is this insistence on a philosophical treatment of Baldwin's work that marks the importance of this collection. This collection, in its own somewhat oblique way, situates the work of Baldwin in the context of an emerging specialty in philosophy and one to which this journal is dedicated: philosophy of race. What that specialty, still so new, will come to mean is of course not yet set (and we are immensely grateful for this indeterminacy), and is perhaps held open as a matter of principle, but for that very reason Baldwin's work warrants serious attention from philosophers theorizing about race. If by philosophy of race we mean a scientific interrogation into the meaning of the term race, whether historical or contemporary, then Baldwin's contribution is thin, if even of any real significance. He does not examine the history of the idea, nor does he try to give a clear definition of it; for Baldwin, the pathologies of American life so deeply disturb our thinking and speaking about race that clarity about the concept seems a dream that is its own kind of pathology. (That may be one of the projects Baldwin charges us to undertake, in part that we may better situate his work philosophically.)Nonetheless, the concept of race is absolutely the center of Baldwin's thinking, the question that will not let go of him, the question that is always determinedly present. Always, of course, cast in discourses such as language, embodiment, politics, memory, identity—these are all Baldwin's questions, the impossibly freighted and difficult questions of his moment and generation. He does not begin with the history of a concept, nor does he begin with the project of re- or de-definition of race. Rather, Baldwin begins with what the early Fanon called l'expérience vécue du Noir—the existential sense of blackness, the lived-experience of a racialized body and all of those meanings, contingent and otherwise, that attend to it, that pressed so sharply on his thinking, that so animated and troubled his thinking.In all, then, at work in the essays that follow is a thinking Baldwin: Baldwin as thinker, thinking through Baldwin's work. Love, language, cinema, ethnicity, race, and violence—these are the critical issues for any thinking, and Baldwin's exploration of them across three decades of writing, all of which are represented here, is both adventurous and rigorous. To draw out both of these senses of his work requires a new horizon of Baldwin scholarship, one that steps out of the literary historical approach to him and his moment and toward the conceptual stakes in that moment, his response to it, and the difficult matter of formulating a way of thinking through Baldwin's own questions. In this way, to take Baldwin at his word by working from his word—as if it were the first word for our thinking of race, love, language …We are taking Baldwin seriously, and so are taking seriously what he calls in “Many Thousands Gone” the myriad forces “which reduce the person to anonymity and which make themselves manifest daily all over the darkening world.”1 Against this, Baldwin demands, we must struggle in every possible way—politically and, of course, philosophically, we must think again/st those forces that would reduce anyone to “anonymity.” The determination not be anonymous is, of course, the philosophical (existential) force that motivates the writing of Nobody Knows My Name—few works could be so overburdened, simply the act of their naming, as an existential consequence of how and what they are named. Baldwin asks us to be philosophical readers: read the text, his text, the text of anti-black racism, attend to the manifestations, register their violence and pain, take seriously the history and memory borne by and in that world, and theorize another possible future. That is, think philosophically about the black experience. To think philosophically about Baldwin's work, the primary task of the essays that follow, is to deploy philosophy, not simply or solely as the internal character of a text (though that is certainly part of Baldwin's nonfiction), but also as the interpretative frame through which that text is read. Take Baldwin seriously, read the text of racism, read his work as such. The essays that follow do not indulge such frames in order to enhance the texts themselves, but instead draw out what otherwise might lay hidden, and thereby draw out the philosophical register in Baldwin's essayist and literary voice.Not, then, we could say, Baldwin as philosophy or Baldwin in the terms of philosophy, but rather Baldwin and philosophy, that peculiar, textured conjunction that marks the specificity of each, yet mixes, contaminates, and reformulates. Baldwin here emerges from that conjunction in a philosophical register we do not yet find, in any systematic sense, in commentary on his work. Therein lies this contribution to a scholarly field. In this admixture there are also consequences for philosophy and how we think philosophically about racialized experience. Baldwin's experimentation with the time of love and the (temporal) force of language draws us into the unthinkability of the future and the sublimity of the suffering and suffered past. We can only, as Walter Benjamin's work reminds us, apprehend the relationship of the extant present to the future through our grappling with the always historic past. In that philosophy of race, that racialization of philosophical thinking, the Logos of Baldwin's work says its piece in no small measure because Baldwin's oeuvre will not admit of any peace on the critical philosophical issues of our conjuncture. Baldwin's work makes us take up all the resonant questions, from race to love, from culture to sexual identity, from literature to the law. Wherever we turn, there is Baldwin, confronting us, asking us how we are taking up these questions, “baby.”

This essay explores a philosophical encounter between Frantz Fanon and James Baldwin framed by the problem of the affect of shame. In particular, this essay asks how the affect of shame functions simultaneously as the accomplishment of regimes of anti-black racism and the site of transformative, revolutionary consciousness. Shame threatens the formation of subjectivity, as well as, and as an extension of, senses of home and belonging. How are we to imagine another subjectivity, another relation to home, and so another kind of social and political order? For both Fanon and Baldwin, imagining the future requires an engagement with memory and history that purges black subjects of shame. The two thinkers part ways at that moment, however, with Fanon advocating a forgetting of abject history and Baldwin arguing for a retrieval of meaning and place won through pain and suffering. At the heart of this parting of ways, then, lies a conflict over the meaning of history across the black diaspora and its relation to cultural production, which, in turn, reflects important, differing conceptions of home.