Tony Baugh

This paper examines death as an ethical category within theological and philosophical discourse. Drawing on John 12:25, where Jesus asserts that “he that loveth his life shall lose it,” I argue that life is framed as negation rather than affirmation. Jesus critiques attachment to worldly pleasures as illusory, a view echoed in Plato’s Phædo, where Socrates advocates detachment from bodily desires and lifelong preparation for death. Both figures employ “death talk” not as morbidity but as an ethical orientation: to be fully human is to recognize mortality and live accordingly. I term this orientation funereal ethics, an imperative that redirects action away from solipsistic self-preservation toward communal responsibility. To make this claim, I analyze Umberto Eco, Huey P. Newton, Victor Anderson, and Frank B. Wilderson III, tracing how their work conceptualizes fascism, both political and existential, as a site for rethinking death and ethics.

The following essay engages with the assimilationist proto-theodicy articulated by Magdalena Beulah Brockden, an enslaved African woman in the eighteenth century, as recounted in Seth Moglen’s article, “Enslaved in the City on a Hill: The Archive of Moravian Slavery and the Practical Past.” While Moglen’s analysis foregrounds narrative as a genre within the corpus of slave literature, my inquiry centers on interpreting Brockden’s Lebenslauf, her memoir of Christian conversion, as a theodicy, a complex philosophical meditation on religion and politics. In addition, this essay undertakes a critical exegesis of C. L. R. James’s State Capitalism and World Revolution, focusing particularly on the concluding chapter, “Philosophy and State Capitalism.” In this section, James identifies rationalism and idealism as paradigmatic philosophies of subordination and managerial control, precisely because they misconstrue materialism, a similar pitfall of Brockden’s ontologically assimilationist theodicy.

The following paper moves on two fronts: the first movement is an examination of three important texts by W.E.B. Du Bois, Karl Marx, and Cedric Robinson, where I perform an exegesis to explore the ways in which the desiderata and destruction of the Black body, at the center of the practice of white supremacy/whiteness, is also at the center of capitalism. After this foundational work is completed, the second movement of the paper is toward revealing a throughline from the commoditization of the Black body as site of desiderata and destruction under chattel slavery towards rampant modes of appropriation of Black American cultural products. I argue that this process is a cornerstone of late capitalistic consumption, socioeconomic domination, and biopolitical control.