Jasmine Wallace

ABSTRACT This article concerns the ways in which Afropessimist Calvin Warren misuses and overextends both Wynter’s historiography of the Human and Hartman’s concept “fungible commodity.” First, Calvin Warren flattens the ontology of the political subject described in Wynter’s concept “genres of Man” to argue that the contemporary Black US person exists as “being,” that is, non-being. Second, Warren misaligns with Wynter’s account of the period of historical rupture between the Human and nonhuman. Whereas, for Wynter, this rupture was constituted by the colonial encounter in the Americas, Warren cites chattel slavery as the event wherein the Human and Other, specifically the Black Other, were torn apart. Third, Warren’s use of “fungible commodity” when referencing the contemporary Black lacks a historiographical framework that would account for the continued non-being of Black existence as commodity post-emancipation.

Responding to the long-standing debate concerning whether Michel Foucault is a philosopher or a historian, Amy Allen questions the incompatibility that this opposition suggests. Foucault can be considered neither a historian nor a philosopher in isolation. Rather, given his own account of history and critique in his early text, The Order of Things, we should understand Foucault as a philosopher whose critical interventions are historically contingent. This commentary asks about the role of linguistics in critical theory, as it is the third counterscience listed alongside ethnology and psychoanalysis. Does a Foucault-inspired critical theory privilege the linguistic turn, even above and beyond the critical potential of either psychoanalysis or ethnology? Secondly, this commentary questions the truly critical power of Foucauldian critique in light of a defanged postcolonial theory, which is partially rooted in Foucauldian thought. Specifically, this commentary asks whether Edward Said, a postcolonial theorist explicitly influenced by Foucault, should be considered emblematic of this Foucauldian critique despite Said's complete assimilation into the status quo.

Recordar: To remember; from the Latin re-cordis, to pass back through the heart.Forgetting is not secondary; it is not an improvised failing of what has first been constituted as memory. Forgetfulness is a practice.In his search for a community that does not rely upon the false unities of subjectivity or identity, Maurice Blanchot looks to literature and writing. To achieve the common in community, Blanchot argues for the development of unworking writing practices aimed at the silence anterior to language—a silence that constitutes authentic communication. Instead of abiding by the rules of grammar, Blanchot encourages writers to produce fragments, which constitutes one method of unworking writing. This...