John E. Drabinski

"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..."

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

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.

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.

In Levinas’ hands, the problematic of transcendence challenges phenomenological description by positing, as primary, that which is outside intentionality. How, then, to think about this transcendence outside intentionality? This essay explores the possibilities of a description of transcendence through Levinas’ and Marion’s readings of the Cartesian idea of the Infinite. What emerges from these readings of Descartes’ idea of the Infinite is a sense of indication that is fundamentally elliptical, pointing beyond what it can render to presence, but pointing nonetheless. Thinking through this problem of elliptical indication, I argue, is central to generating a phenomenological account of transcendence.

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, 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, which gives an interesting and important twist to Martin Heidegger's famous phrase that “language is the house of Being.”