Andrew Santana Kaplan

Anne Margaret Castro’s The Sacred Act of Reading: Spirituality, Performance, and Power in Afro-Diasporic Literature (2020) makes significant contributions to the fields of religious, literary, performance, Africana, and Caribbean studies. These contributions revolve around reading, capaciously conceived. While working primarily with “literary” texts, many of the written texts encompass multi-modal/multi-sensory dimensions. This multi-modal composition proves essential to Castro’s method of “performative textual hermeneutics,” which theorizes how reading always already entails interpretation, which is itself always already “performative” in the sense that interpretation is actualized through perception.

In this chapter, I chart a philosophical path through Martin Heidegger, Giorgio Agamben, and Bernard Stiegler as a means of preparing readiness to inhabit the crack in Black Mirror (and the World). However, the questioning-concerning-modern-technology must attend to the-position-of-the-unthought if it wants to truly understand what Black Mirror reveals. The “black” in Black Mirror—as the season 4 finale written by Charlie Brooker, “Black Museum,” paradigmatically shows—also signifies the blackness of racial-chattel-slavery that is the foundation of the modern world’s fundamental fantasy. “Black Museum” presents an allegorical meta-commentary on both Black Mirror and our world by re-iterating “black” in a way that reflexively gestures to the series and its paradigm in the museum’s archae-teleological culminating exhibit: a digitally incarcerated black man whom patron’s get to electrocute for their pleasure. The black man, Clayton Leigh, is paradigmatic of black being’s availability-as-onto-libidinal-equipment. However, Clayton’s daughter, Nish, whose seemingly accidental presence at the museum is the condition of possibility for the viewer’s witness, renders the apparatuses inoperative so as to end her father’s suffering and burn the museum to the ground.

In this chapter, I chart a philosophical path through Martin Heidegger, Giorgio Agamben, and Bernard Stiegler as a means of preparing readiness to inhabit the crack in Black Mirror (and the World). However, the questioning-concerning-modern-technology must attend to the-position-of-the-unthought if it wants to truly understand what Black Mirror reveals. The “black” in Black Mirror—as the season 4 finale written by Charlie Brooker, “Black Museum,” paradigmatically shows—also signifies the blackness of racial-chattel-slavery that is the foundation of the modern world’s fundamental fantasy. “Black Museum” presents an allegorical meta-commentary on both Black Mirror and our world by re-iterating “black” in a way that reflexively gestures to the series and its paradigm in the museum’s archae-teleological culminating exhibit: a digitally incarcerated black man whom patron’s get to electrocute for their pleasure. The black man, Clayton Leigh, is paradigmatic of black being’s availability-as-onto-libidinal-equipment. However, Clayton’s daughter, Nish, whose seemingly accidental presence at the museum is the condition of possibility for the viewer’s witness, renders the apparatuses inoperative so as to end her father’s suffering and burn the museum to the ground.

Modernity is structured around a prior decision to which it is constitutively blind: the World’s perverse invention and simultaneous foreclosure of blackness. This is Afro-pessimism’s non-philosophical insight—informing its oraxiomatic demand for the end of the World. But Afro-pessimism’s apocalyptics should be understood etymologically as well as connotatively: its apo-kalupsis is a radically immanent un-covering of the World’s anti-black grammar that constitutes Society’s katechontic restraint of gratuitous freedom. Before Laurelle demanded we “make a tabula rasa out of the future,” Fanon gestured toward gratuitous freedom’s radical break in describing the “tabula rasa which from the outset defines any decolonization.” Fanon models as much in observing that, as an incarnation of blackness, “I am endlessly creating myself” in accordance with his oraxiom of “introducing invention into existence.” In these ways, I suggest Fanon is practicing a black-christo-fiction. Accordingly, I non-philosophically take up James H. Cone black theology of liberation: if modernity’s cross is the lynching tree, then Afro-pessimism’s apocalyptic thought is immanently messianic. As such, the black is paradigmatic of the (Christ-)Victim-in-person. Therefore, the invention of generic justice is necessarily immanent in the abolition of anti-blackness, making the paradigmatic affirmation of blackness the World’s fundamental heresy.

This essay aspires to put in contact two contemporary movements in radical political thought. The first is Afro-pessimism, coined by political theorist Frank B. Wilderson III, to name a set of thinkers who theorize racial slavery as modernity’s singular constitution, which invented anti-/Black positionality as the World’s fundamental structure of antagonism. The second is the contemporary turn to Paul by continental philosophers who attempt a modern reinterpretation of the Apostle’s apocalyptic announcement of the messianic event as a paradigm for radical politics. This essay will argue that, on the one hand, Paul’s apocalyptic-messianic framework can both elucidate and situate how Afro-pessimism uncompromisingly inhabits its antagonistic non-relation to the World as such. On the other hand, Afro-pessimism can show how Blackness is “the position of the unthought” that contemporary Paulinism is unconsciously parasitic upon—circumscribing its theorists’ attempt to radically formulate apocalyptic-messianic fidelity in the modern World. The motivation for staging this encounter lies in their shared conviction that true justice demands the end of the World. My essay aspires to dialogically elucidate this shared conviction by constellating their homologous theses, which reveals what I call "the Black messianic." I argue that if it is still possible, in the wake of racial slavery, to hear the Apostle’s summons to messianic existence and outlaw justice, then, in modernity, Afro-pessimism is its paradigmatic mode of fidelity.

This essay—together with the larger project that it is a synecdoche of—is an attempt to take up Afropessimism’s delineation of “the Negro’s” invitation to the dance of social death. What I am speculatively contemplating here as the apocalyptic hauntology of Black messianicity is a deconstructive experiment in theorizing the conditions of possibility—amid the Worldly conditions of impossibility—for “the Human” (i.e. non-Black people) to accept “the Black’s” invitation. I propose that Afropessimism’s singularly transformed question of Blackness can be read back into a recurrent gesture made by the Christian theologian of Black liberation, James Cone. When considering the conditions of possibility for his White readership to engage in an authentic (rather than merely intellectual) reading of his texts, Cone contended that this could only occur once such readers “begin to hate their whiteness, asking from the depths of their being: ‘How can we become black?’.” In Red, White & Black, Frank Wilderson makes a gesture that could potentially be read as a tacit answer to Cone’s question. There, when considering how Humans could begin think of freedom as gratuitous (i.e. freedom from the World) rather than contingent (i.e. freedom within the World), Wilderson contends that “one would have to lose one’s Human coordinates and become Black”—which is to say, “one would have to die.” This is what I theorize as the gift of social death.

This essay advances my project on “the Black messianic” in Afropessimism’s apocalyptic thought through a meta-commentary on Agamben’s The Mystery of Evil ([2013] 2017) and The Kingdom and the Garden ([2019] 2020). The first study interrogates the history of (mis)reading 2 Thessalonians 2 where the Apostle Paul announces the messianic “mystery of lawlessness” that is being concealed and delayed by the katechōn. This argument anticipates Agamben’s later study, which argues that the legacy of Augustinian original sin as the irremediable alienation of humanity falsely conceals and thus restrains messianic access to the Garden. However, in the wake of racial slavery, annotating Agamben’s thought with Afropessimism reveals that access to the Garden has in fact become foreclosed. And yet, when modernity's anti-Black original sin is understood as the katechōn, Agamben’s reading of the messianic mystery of lawlessness can help us contemplate Afropessimism’s invitation to the dance of social death.

This essay speculatively proposes to think of John Brown as W.E. B. Du Bois's "ideal" White reader. Beginning with the "Forethought" to The Souls of Black Folk (1903), Du Bois attempts to interpellate his "Gentle Reader" with tropes of revelation. While Du Bois initially deploys a more accommodating rhetoric, his tone decidedly shifts in "The Souls of White Folk" (1920). Between these moments, Du Bois wrote John Brown (1909), which offers a model for how White people can receive the gift of second-sight. Concurrent with its writing, Du Bois gave a hagiographical commencement speech on St. Francis (1906) who serves as a model for praxis. By constellating Francis with Brown, I argue that DuBois's writing cultivates what I call a form-of-life-toward-social-death. I then demonstrate how Brown's eschatological comportment intensifies Du Bois's apocalyptic tropes in his speculative fiction "The Comet" (1920), which cultivates a revolutionary desire for the end of the World.