Lewis Gordon

Presented in Baroda, Gujarat, India, at the Balvant Parekh Centre for General Semantics and Other Human Sciences as the 2025 Balvant Parekh Memorial Lecture, this paper first articulates the author’s phenomenological philosophy of human science, which addresses human reality as lived meaning and its symbiotic relationship with technology. The second part examines unique challenges posed to human science and phenomenological science by learning machines and eventual (if achieved) artificial intelligence.

This afterword to the symposium, Concepts of the Human from the Global South, offers a reflection on the context of the July 2022 workshop in Berlin, Germany, organized by Mahmoud Al-Zayed followed by the inclusion of an interview Al-Zayed conducted with Lewis R. Gordon on both the June 2022 conference on Hijacking Holocaust memory, organized by Susan Neiman on behalf of the Einstein Forum, and the July 2022 workshop at the Freie Universität Berlin, entitled: What Is It to Be Human? Engaging the Possibilities of Living together.

Lewis Gordon presents the first detailed existential phenomenological investigation of antiblack racism as a form of Sartrean bad faith. Bad faith, the attitude in which human beings attempt to evade freedom and responsibility, is treated as a constant possibility of human existence. Antiblack racism, the attitude and practice that involve the construction of black people as fundamentally inferior and subhuman, is examined as an effort to evade the responsibilities of a human and humane world. Gordon argues that the concept of bad faith militates against any human science that is built upon a theory of human nature and as such offers an analysis of antiblack racism that stands as a challenge to our ordinary assumptions of what it means to be human.

The social sciences were founded at the height of the Euromodern era when the belief in infinite expansion coexisted with the willingness to enclose, categorize, and lock up a large part of humanity. The invention of the social sciences was closely linked to this enterprise of disciplinarization of spaces and of populations which accompanied the expansion of capitalism and colonial conquest. Stigmatized, dominated, and colonized groups were constituted as objects by social scientists who considered themselves as pure subjects, and concealed the conditions under which they undertook their research and prohibited the colonized from expressing their own subjectivity. Colonization also imposed a binary cartography of the world and a geography of reason with obligatory references and strict disciplinary divisions. There are many ways to decolonize knowledge, but they remain marginal in a world where white male supremacy is also epistemological. The rejection of disciplinary decadence implies not only a critical but a metacritical gesture, and the refusal of the imperative of objectivation and non-engagement.

This review essay explores Josiah Young's project of developing a liberatory Pan‐Africanism that is attuned to cultural diversity and Victor Anderson's advocacy of postmodern cultural criticism in African‐American religious thought. After situating African‐American religious thought as a branch of Africana thought, the author examines these two religious thinkers' work as an effort to forge a position on African‐American religious thought—including its relation to theology—in an age where even theory is treated as a god that is about to die. At the conclusion, secularism emerges as a religious project that normatively undergirds the methodological dimensions of these works.

The authors summarize their theory of disaster as a sign continuum through which monsters—mythic agents of divine warning—raise questions of the meaning of political speech in the wake of colonialism. Unlike prior ages, where monsters had the social function of specialized speech, their warnings are ignored in the age of modern colonialism. Thus, instead of focusing on whether subalterns can speak, the authors ask, Can they be heard? This question is examined through explorations of the challenges racism poses for distinctions between moral and political speech.

In this contemporary classic, Lewis Gordon presents his iconic, detailed existential phenomenological investigation of antiblack racism as a form of Sartrean bad faith. Bad faith, the attitude in which human beings attempt to evade freedom and responsibility, is treated as a constant possibility of human existence. Antiblack racism, the attitude and practice that involve the construction of black people as fundamentally inferior and subhuman, is examined as an effort to evade the responsibilities of a human and humane world. Gordon argues that the concept of bad faith militates against any human science that is built upon a theory of human nature and as such offers an analysis of antiblack racism that stands as a challenge to our ordinary assumptions of what it means to be human. A foundational text in black existentialism, this 30th anniversary edition includes a substantial introduction by Mabogo P. More and afterword essays by Jacqueline M. Martinez and Paget Henry to address the ongoing importance of Gordon's thought in critiquing and resisting racist bad faith in our contemporary moment.

Lewis Gordon presents the first detailed existential phenomenological investigation of antiblack racism as a form of Sartrean bad faith. Bad faith, the attitude in which human beings attempt to evade freedom and responsibility, is treated as a constant possibility of human existence. Antiblack racism, the attitude and practice that involve the construction of black people as fundamentally inferior and subhuman, is examined as an effort to evade the responsibilities of a human and humane world. Gordon argues that the concept of bad faith militates against any human science that is built upon a theory of human nature and as such offers an analysis of antiblack racism that stands as a challenge to our ordinary assumptions of what it means to be human.

En abril de 1961, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir y Frantz Fanon se reunieron en un café de Roma. La reunión, por lo menos tal como la registró Beauvoir, duró horas, hasta las dos de la mañana, hasta el momento en que el cuerpo de Sartre, de 56 años, sufrió fatiga. Sartre necesitaba descansar, instó Beauvoir. Fanon, con su cuerpo de 36 años muriendo de leucemia, se resintió de su insistencia: “No me gustan los hombres que acumulan sus recursos”. Él quería aprovechar esa oportunidad de oro de hablar con Sartre durante semanas sin descanso si era necesario. Sin embargo, el agotamiento prevaleció, aunque la reunión legendaria consistió en una conversación sin parar durante casi tres días. Sartre, impresionado por el joven revolucionario, había acordado escribir el prefacio de Los condenados de la tierra, una obra que se supone compuesta durante diez semanas agotadoras, y él y el colectivo editorial también acordaron publicar el primer capítulo en la edición de junio de Les Temps Modernes. La salud de Fanon empeoró a medida que pasaba el año. Eventualmente fue a Bethesda, Maryland, para tratamiento a finales de noviembre, donde fue detenido por la CIA y se le negó el tratamiento. Murió el 6 de diciembre de neumonía.

This essay is based on a portion of the author’s Spinoza Lecture, which was presented in Amsterdam on 24 May 2022. Although Spinoza is not the main subject of the lecture, his anxieties and fears about his Sephardic Jewishness and its links to Africa and by extension racialized blackness offer an opportunity to outline Euromodern hegemonic geography of reason as a misrepresentation from which a shift in point of view can offer a set of important challenges to the portrait of philosophy it promotes. These challenges are elaborated through the author’s summary of Africana and Black philosophy and the questions that philosophy, understood in intellectual, historical, and political terms, generates. Among these are the meanings of humanity, freedom, justification, redemption, reality, political transformation, and love.