Shannon Sullivan

This chapter argues that black Americans’ hope that political struggle can achieve racial justice tends to be a harmful emotion they should avoid. It contends that rather than draw on Cornel West’s influential account of black hope, pragmatists concerned about racial injustice would do better to draw on Derrick Bell’s racial realism and Calvin Warren’s black nihilism. Complementing Bell and Warren with concrete evidence from the health sciences that black hope can be physically harmful to black people, the chapter argues for the advantages of reading Bell’s and Warren’s claims about the permanence of racism pragmatically, that is, by assessing the truth of their claims via their effects. The result is the working hypothesis that black people will have a much greater chance of developing new practices, habits, and strategies of flourishing in an antiblack world if they no longer hope that political struggle will eliminate racism.

Some embrace the idea of white privilege as an important concept that helps us to make sense of the connection between race and social and political disadvantages, while others are critical or even hostile. Regardless of personal views, it can be difficult to agree on what 'white privilege' even means. Philosopher Shannon Sullivan cuts through the confusion and cross-talk to challenge what ‘everybody knows’ about white privilege. Using real-life examples, she offers a candid assessment of the advantages and disadvantages of the term, to present a better understanding of how race functions in our societies. She argues that white privilege is about more than race, that not only white people can have white privilege, and that feeling guilty about privilege can have a negative effect on the very people you feel guilty towards. In the end, she offers practical solutions for eliminating white privilege and building a fairer society. Sullivan's forcefully argued book will inspire you to think again about white privilege and what it entails.

The articles in this special issue of the Journal of Speculative Philosophy were selected from revised versions of papers that were originally presented at the sixty-second annual meeting of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP) hosted by Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) in Rochester, New York, on September 26–28, 2024. The SPEP 2024 plenary addresses were delivered by Professor Hortense Spillers of Vanderbilt University and Professor Peter Szendy of Brown University. Spiller’s presentation, “Tales Told Out of School: Race and Public Relations,” used Franz Fanon’s concept of sociogeny to examine the role of publicity in the mythemic creation of racialize subjects in contemporary America. Szendy’s presentation, “Sympnea: Or, Breathing Together,” explored the ancient Stoic concept of sympnea to rethink and reanimate new ways of being together in public social and political spaces. We are delighted to publish Spiller’s paper in this volume; unfortunately, for various reasons, we are unable to include Szendy’s presentation.The twelve articles in this issue that follow Spiller’s plenary address have been organized according to three broad groupings. The first set of four papers addresses various social and political issues in continental philosophy: Brendan Brown’s “A Democracy (Never) to Come: Fugitivity and Metaphysics in Afropessimism,” María de los Ángeles Aldana Mendoza’s “The Speciesist Logic Behind Social Oppressions: A Decolonial and Intersectional Approach,” Anne van Leeuwen’s “‘Left-Wing’ Thought Today: Simone de Beauvoir on Fetishism and Belief,” and Isabelle Ensass’s “The Moment of Revolution: Blanchot’s Movement from Negation to Insurrection.”The second set of papers gathers five articles on materiality, affectivity, and perception: Sanjula Rajat’s “Lives in Limbo: Trans Temporalities and the Phenomenology of Waiting,” Miriam Ambrosino’s “Affective Agency and Axiological Harm: A Schelerian Approach to Affective Injustice,” Rachel Cicoria’s “Remembering Without Having Memorized: Technologies of Embodied Resistance,” Daniel Estrada’s “The Materiality of Affective Environments: From Emotional Responsivity to Metabolic Relationality,” and Emmanuel Cuisinier’s “Perception, Heroism, and the Problem of Expression.”Finally, the third set of three papers focuses on intersections between science and continental philosophy: Christian Roy’s “Validations of QBism from a Hidden Source of French Phenomenology: Arnaud Dandieu and Claude Chevalley on Measurements as Creative Acts,” Christopher R. Myers’s “Gadamer and Lebensphilosophie: Reconceptualizing Historical Science as Being with the Dead,” and Dustin M. Taylor’s “Heidegger and Cavaillès on Crisis and the Movement of Scientific Thought.”Abstracts of all articles are included at the beginning of each article that follows.On behalf of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy and the Journal of Speculative Philosophy, the editors would like to thank all of the authors for allowing us to include their papers in this special issue. We would also like to express our gratitude to John Stuhr, general editor of the Journal of Speculative Philosophy, and Astrid Meyer, Rachel Anderson, and the entire JSP production staff at the Penn State University Press for their invaluable assistance with the publication process. Final thanks go to all the participants at our sixty-second SPEP conference in Rochester. Their scholarly expertise, philosophical insight, and inspired discussions with each other made the event a resounding success.

_Leading scholars explore how different forms of ignorance are produced and sustained, and the role they play in knowledge practices._ Offering a wide variety of philosophical approaches to the neglected philosophical problem of ignorance, this groundbreaking collection builds on Charles Mills's claim that racism involves an inverted epistemology, an epistemology of ignorance. Contributors explore how different forms of ignorance linked to race are produced and sustained and what role they play in promoting racism and white privilege. They argue that the ignorance that underpins racism is not a simple gap in knowledge, the accidental result of an epistemological oversight. In the case of racial oppression, ignorance often is actively produced for purposes of domination and exploitation. But as these essays demonstrate, ignorance is not simply a tool of oppression wielded by the powerful. It can also be a strategy for survival, an important tool for people of color to wield against white privilege and white supremacy. The book concludes that understanding ignorance and the politics of such ignorance should be a key element of epistemological and social/political analyses, for it has the potential to reveal the role of power in the construction of what is known and provide a lens for the political values at work in knowledge practices.

Drawing on the recent recognition of Du Bois by contemporary anthropologists, this article highlights the anthropological work that Du Bois conducted on Black people and communities in Philadelphia and Atlanta. It also argues that when reading Du Bois with an eye for his anthropological pragmatism, contemporary scholars should not stop at reading Du Bois’ work on Black people. We also should read his analyses of whiteness and white people as components of a critical anthropology of race. Those components include participant observation of white people, interviews of white people, and historical research about white people. Finally, Du Bois’ anthropological pragmatism underscores the centrality of unconscious habits in the operation of racial prejudice, especially unconscious beliefs and practices that assume that whiteness is the rightful measure of humanity.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Editors’ IntroductionAlan D. Schrift and Shannon SullivanThe articles in this special issue of the Journal of Speculative Philosophy were selected from revised versions of papers that were originally presented at the sixty-first annual meeting of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP) hosted by Toronto Metropolitan University in Toronto, Ontario, Canada on October 12–14, 2023. The SPEP 2023 plenary addresses were delivered by Rahel Jaeggi of Humboldt University of Berlin and Olúfẹmi O. Táíwò of Georgetown University. Jaeggi’s presentation, “Progress and Regression,” defended Critical Theory’s traditional pairing of these two concepts as a necessary tool for diagnosing and analyzing the crises of our times. Táíwò’s presentation, “The Point Is to Change It,” expanded on the constructive approach to politics developed in his recent book Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else) (2022). Unfortunately, for various reasons, we are not able to include either of the plenary addresses in the present issue.The thirteen articles in this issue have been organized according to four broad groupings. The first set of papers, on “Varieties of French Philosophy,” address important themes in the work of three of the most influential and [End Page 209] important French philosophers of the past half-century: Gilles Deleuze, Alain Badiou, and Michel Serres. Eric Aldieri, in “Infinite Speed, or the Metaphysical Basis for Deleuzian Epistemology,” argues that the Deleuzian concept of infinite speed plays a role in Deleuze’s epistemology similar to the role played by the concept of eternity in Spinoza’s epistemology. By carefully reconstructing Spinoza’s appeal to eternity as the foundation of adequate knowledge, Aldieri shows that although Deleuze is critical of how the category of eternity functions in Spinoza’s philosophy, his idea that thought operates at infinite speed functions in the same way as the condition of possibility of knowledge in Deleuze’s later work.Through a close reading of the formal correspondences between the ontological and logical structures of Deleuze’s theory of sense-events, M. Curtis Allen, in “Singularities and Genetic Structure in Deleuze’s Logic of Sense,” seeks to clarify the role of singularities in Deleuze’s early major works. Are they, Allen asks, physical, metaphysical, or logical primitives, or are they relational, formal, or functional indices? Are they the building blocks out of which things and thought are made, or are they points of degeneration that cause systems to break down? Ultimately, what Allen concludes is that these questions presuppose an opposition that Deleuze will not recognize because they both mistake singularities as states of affairs while for Deleuze singularities are events.In “Sense and Circumstance: Michel Serres on the Transcendental,” Brent Adkins argues that Serres’s account of the transcendental differs in important ways from the post-Kantian consensus that by transcendental, we refer to the general conditions of possibility. Such a view depends on understanding the difference between the conditions and the conditioned as the difference between the general and the particular, and this is where Serres intervenes by suggesting instead that the transcendental has nothing to do with generality; rather, it concerns particular circumstances coming together as contingent stabilities. Adkins concludes by suggesting that here Serres and Deleuze share common ground.Joshua Avery Dawson, in “Power Failure: Appearance and Change in Badiou’s Logics of Worlds,” has a two-fold task. First, he wants to show how William Watkin, in his groundbreaking work on Badiou’s Being and Event trilogy, offers an account of power that Dawson calls the “power of appearance” but fails to account for another function of power that Dawson calls the “power of change.” Moreover, if Watkin’s account of power in Badiou is accurate, and Dawson thinks it is, then this raises a serious problem for [End Page 210] Badiou’s account of power insofar as these two modes of power are incommensurable, and this incommensurability may render Badiou’s notion of the event unviable.The topic of the second set of papers is “Varieties of Phenomenology,” which assesses anti-colonial phenomenology, early origins of French phenomenology, and cross-cultural phenomenology. In “Tran Duc Thao: The Foundations of Anti-Colonial Phenomenology,” Ernesto...

This chapter argues that given affect and emotion’s importance both to the operation of unconscious habit and to a non-reductive, psychologically complex account of human physiology, feminist philosophy and critical philosophy of race need an account of affect and emotion as thoroughly somatic, not something “mental” or extra-biological, layered on top of the body. They also need an account of human physiology that appreciates how emotion and affect are interpersonal, social, and can be transactionally transmitted between people. Developing that account, Chapter 1 takes the hips and pelvis as a case study, using an example of tight pelvic and hamstring muscles to argue for the transactional physiology of affect and emotion. Setting the stage for subsequent chapters, “The Hips” draws on William James to develop an account of the affective body as the psychosomatic substrate from which biologically unconscious habits develop.

This chapter examines the human enteric nervous system to discern some of the physiological effects of sexism, sexual abuse, and male privilege. It argues that to understand the gut, we must appreciate the affective relationship of the entire digestive tract with both itself and the pelvic floor. Examining the body’s digestive tube from the throat to the cloaca—the phylogenetic common origin of the pelvic floor’s separate urinary, genital, and anal tracts—Chapter 2 develops cloacal thinking, which treats the gut and pelvic floor as psychosomatically integrated. Cloacal thinking blurs without erasing boundaries between the function and substance of the digestive tract’s “parts,” refusing to consider them as isolated from either each other or from the “outside” world. It also can help us appreciate gut functioning as transgenerational. The gut’s particular relationship with the world can result in a person’s physiologically passing the harmful effects of sexism and sexual abuse to her offspring.

The concluding chapter explores how the unjust physiological effects of racism and sexism might be countered as part of feminist and critical race movements for social justice. Social-political change can result in physiological transformation, and this change can take place in a number of ways. Most important are institutional changes. In addition, however, physiological changes can take place on a personal, individual level, and those transformations can range from greater to lesser involvement of conscious awareness of physiological states. In particular, this chapter focuses on transformative methods on the individual level that work directly with biologically unconscious habits, rather than detouring through conscious thought. Developing the notion of a physiological therapy that does not prioritize bringing unconscious habits to conscious awareness, the book’s conclusion proposes a double-barreled approach of working for institutional change and transforming biologically unconscious habits as a response to the physiological effects of racism and sexism.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:On the Need for a New Ethos of White AntiracismShannon SullivanWhite people in this country will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this—which will not be tomorrow and may very well be never—the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed.—James Baldwin, The Fire Next TimeIn his classic manifesto on race, The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin passionately urges black people not to retaliate against white people by attempting to debase or dominate them in return. The reason is that doing so would harm black people most of all. As Baldwin (1963, 113) assures his readers,I am very much concerned that American Negroes achieve their freedom here in the United States. But I am also concerned for their dignity, for the health of their souls, and must oppose any attempt that Negroes may make to do to others what has been done to them. I think I know—we see it around us every day—the spiritual wasteland to which that road leads.... I would not like to see Negroes ever arrive at so wretched a condition.Likewise, when Martin Luther King Jr., urged his black church members to love their white enemies rather than return their racial hate, he did so because he believed that “hate distorts the personality of the hater. We usually think of what hate does for the individual hated or the individuals hated or the groups hated. But it is even more tragic, it is even more ruinous and injurious to the [End Page 21] individual who hates” (King 1957). While Baldwin was an avowed atheist and King a Christian minister, both warned of the devastating effects of white racism on “the souls of white folk,” and they pleaded and preached that black people should not stoop to white people’s debased level.1 Out of all the damage that white racism has done to African Americans and other people of color, the most damaging of all would be for it to turn them into the debilitated, deplorable people that white folk generally are.We might say that on Baldwin’s (and perhaps also King’s) view, white people are the truly “wretched of the earth” (Fanon 1965). It has been argued that white racism has cost white people their capability for intimacy, their affective lives, their authenticity, their sense of connection to other people, and their spiritual selves (Segrest 2001, 65). These claims are not an attempt to trump or erase the enormous physical, psychological, economic, spiritual, and other types of pain that white people have caused people of color around the world. They instead are a recognition that white people’s attempts to gain material riches and political power through the domination of people of color have impoverished and depleted their own souls. White people qua white are ill in that their racial habits largely have been built out of greed, hatred, jealousy, fear, and cruelty. Their psychosomatic health has suffered and continues to suffer because of their toxic racial identities.So much the worse for white people, we might think. But although understandable, this response would be misguided since white people’s psychosomatic depletion has implications for the well-being of others. Put succinctly, white people’s unhealthiness helps fuel their abuse and domination of people of color. It thus matters to struggles for racial justice whether white people are psychosomatically healthy and strong. It matters which affects, emotions, and passions fund white people’s actions in general, and their work for racial justice in particular. In this paper, I will draw from Friedrich Nietzsche, Teresa Brennan, and other scholars to explain the ontological and power-full aspects of affect, touching briefly on the toxicity of white guilt and shame and focusing especially on the healthiness of what Nietzsche calls a bestowing self-love. I will argue that in the context of white people’s contributions to racial justice movements, a positive effect of their bestowing self-love is that white people will be more likely and better able to clean up their own house...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Editors' IntroductionAlan D. Schrift and Shannon SullivanThe articles in this special issue of the Journal of Speculative Philosophy were selected from revised versions of papers that were originally presented at the sixtieth annual meeting of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP) at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas October 13–15, 2022.Michael Hardt of Duke University and Patricia Pisters of the University of Amsterdam gave the SPEP 2022 Plenary Addresses, and we are grateful to be able to include their plenary papers in this special issue. Hardt's paper, "The Politics of Articulation and Strategic Multiplicities," treated SPEP members to an early peek at his newest book, The Subversive 70s (Oxford University Press, 2023). In this work, Hardt digs into the powerful resources for social movements that activists and theorists from the 1970s developed. As he argues, in many ways those activists and thinkers were ahead of their times—and also ahead of ours—in understanding how to analyze interwoven multiplicities of power and how to articulate and organize liberation struggles based on those multiplicities. Hardt brilliantly demonstrates how analyzing the progressive and revolutionary social [End Page 237] movements of the '70s can help us not only understand the roots of contemporary social and political struggles but also reclaim critical resources for those struggles.Patricia Pisters's paper, "Thinking with Fire: Elemental Philosophy and Media Technology," draws upon Gaston Bachelard's "fire complexes" to address a variety of pyrotechnical images appearing in contemporary cinema. Noting that elemental philosophy is on the rise in media studies and elsewhere, not least because of current environmental crises, fire is particularly engaging for its metaphorical, "matterphorical," and technological associations. While acknowledging fire as a material medium—cooking, heating, burning, etc.—Pisters's primary focus in her paper is on fire as an immaterial medium, and it is here that she turns to Bachelard's constellation of fire complexes—the Empedocles, Prometheus, and Novalis Complexes—to which she adds her own fourth complex, the Sita Complex. With these complexes, she provides readings of four cinematic productions that elucidate the annihilating, transgressive, sexual, and purifying qualities of fire, and she suggests that these entangled fire complexes present different kinds of combustive knowledge in which the element of fire manifests itself as material phenomenon of nature, the engine for modern life, and immaterial affective reverie of destruction, transgression, and sexuality.The other articles in this special issue have been organized according to five broad groupings. The first grouping, "On Latin American Philosophy," brings together three papers that engage Latin American philosophy, particularly as found in Mexican, Columbian, and Venezuelan history and political movements. In "Radicalizing Localization: Notes on Santiago Castro-Gómez's Genealogies of Coloniality," Julian Rios Acuña argues that Columbian philosopher Santiago Castro-Gómez develops a radical method of localization. This method allows Castro-Gómez to transform Foucauldian genealogy into genealogies of coloniality that grapple with the complexities of extreme violence produced by colonialism. In "Stefan Gandler's Renewal of Critical Theory from Latin America," Jake M. Bartholomew argues for a version of Critical Theory that is not bound by Europe but also remains true to its first-generation Marxist roots. Relocating to Mexico and advocating for Mexican philosophers, German-born philosopher Stefan Gandler shows how Latin American philosophy can enrich Critical Theory, providing more than can the second and third generations of Critical Theory because of its ability to analyze capitalism from outside the economic perspectives of the Global North. In "Two Versions of the Mestizo [End Page 238] Model: Toward a Theory of Anti-Blackness in Latin American Thought," Miguel Gualdron Ramirez criticizes the anti-Blackness that he sees at the heart of mestizo models of latinidad, or lo latinoamericano. Focusing on the concepts of liberation offered by Venezuelan theorist and politician Simón Bolívar and Mexican philosopher José de Vasconcelos, Ramirez reveals the exclusion and erasure of Black bodies, lives, and histories that ground their versions of Latinx identity and Latin American history. Together these three articles showcase how Latin American philosophy can enrich and expand the scope of Continental philosophy.The second grouping, "Liberatory Limits and Misalignments," features three articles...

Focusing on The Second Sex, this chapter examines concerns about the divisions of gender and race in Beauvoir's work and provides an intersectional reading of the role of physical violence in the gendering and racing of young girls in “The Girl” chapter of the book. The chapter then highlights the role of biology in the existential infrastructure provided in the first three chapters of The Second Sex to argue that Beauvoir can be viewed as a forerunner of contemporary critical understandings of how race becomes biologically real.

Beginning with the experience of a white woman's stomach seizing up in fear of a black man, this essay examines some of the ethical and epistemological issues connected to white ignorance. In conversation with Charles Mills on the epistemology of ignorance, I argue that white ignorance primarily operates physiologically, not cognitively. Drawing critically from psychology, neurocardiology, and other medical sciences, I examine some of the biological effects of racism on white people's stomachs and hearts. I argue for a nonideal medical theory focused on improving wellness in a society that systematically has damaged the health of people of color. The essay concludes that to be fully successful, critical philosophy of race must examine not just the financial, legal, political, and other forms of racism, but also its biological and physiological operations

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Awakening to Race: Individualism and Social Consciousness in America by Jack TurnerShannon SullivanJack Turner Awakening to Race: Individualism and Social Consciousness in America Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2012. xv + 199pp, incl. index.Don’t let the size of this slim volume fool you: Awakening to Race is chock-full of fresh insights and original arguments regarding individualism and race in the American democratic tradition. Individualism in America often takes atomistic forms that are antithetical to a rich sense of the social constitution of the self. For that reason, individualism often is viewed as antithetical to a critical consciousness of how race and white racism operate. In Awakening to Race, Jack Turner boldly takes the bull of American individualism by its horns. He argues that the rhetoric of individualism can be used against, rather than in service of an allegedly colorblind society in which independent, post-racial individuals pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. The result of Turner’s skillful intervention into American political philosophy is to take back individualism from conservative forces and refashion it into a progressive tool for racial justice movements.Turner sets the stage for his intervention in chapter one, which provides an overview of the book. Beginning with Ralph Waldo Emerson, Awakening to Race proceeds to focus on Frederick Douglass and Ralph Ellison and concludes with James Baldwin. One of the primary tasks of chapter one is to outline the book’s major Emersonian theme, which is that an individualist notion of self-reliance should lead a person to become more, rather than less aware of structural and social injustices. Properly understood, individualism should lead to an awakening to race, as Turner’s book is aptly titled, not to ignoring or failing to see it. An individual who wishes to be self-reliant should be wary and watchful of the ways in which she depends on social structures, including those of social injustice. An atomistic notion of the individual is not adequate to this task; an Emersonian democratic individual is needed instead. As Turner explains with reference to adherents of atomistic individualism, “their failure to awaken to the socially indebted nature of the self desensitizes them to structural—and thus racial—injustice” (11).Chapter two turns to Tocqueville, Emerson, and (to a lesser extent) Thoreau to flesh out this idea. In this chapter, Turner develops [End Page 170] Emerson’s notion of self-reliance as “a politically dynamic ethical ideal, one that can motivate and energize democratic political action” rather than withdrawal from society (29). To do so, Turner references Tocqueville’s analysis of race in the United States, which reveals an affinity between white individualism and white supremacy. White individuals could contrast themselves with black slaves to reassure themselves that they were free while simultaneously ignoring their dependence on social and legal structures of white supremacy to ensure their psychological and personal sense of personhood. Individual self-sufficiency can operate as a racialized marker of freedom that is in bad faith because it evades its dependence on race and racism. With Emerson, Turner argues that genuine self-sufficiency requires reckoning with all sorts of ways that one is dependent on and complicit with societal structures, including those of white supremacy. Drawing on Emerson’s anti-slavery addresses, Turner develops a theory of democratic individual responsibility that requires of genuine self-reliance that it not interfere with the self-reliance of others. This requirement obligates the individual to take political and other forms of action to ensure that his or her free, self-reliant life is not dependent on the exploitation of others (45).In addition to its nonexploitation obligation, democratic individualist responsibility includes a democratic egalitarian obligation. Turner develops the latter idea in chapter three through the work of Frederick Douglas. While Douglas’s notion of self-help often is read as atomistically individualist, Turner shows how it is instead tied to social responsibility. In the case of Douglasian self-help, “ought implies can” and so requiring of people that they help themselves means ensuring that they have the resources available to do so (62). While dominant notions of self-help have been used in the United States...

This article introduces the concept of white priority and challenges the false universalism built into the concept of white privilege. Proceeding from the perspective of “trash crit,” the article analyzes white domination from the perspective of poor and working class white people. While racial advantages exist for poor and working class white people, the concept of white privilege does not capture them well. The concept of white priority—the sense of coming before another, of not being at “the bottom of the well” (Derrick Bell)—is needed to help America grapple with race and class in a post-Obama era.