Blackness Before Race and Race as Reoccupation

Reading Sylvia Wynter with Hans Blumenberg

Bibliographic Data

ID6445332
AuthorsTapji Garba (Film Independent, corresponding author), Tapji Paul Garba (independent scholar), Sara-Maria Sorentino (University of Alabama), Sara‐maria Sorentino (University of Alabama)
Year2022
Volume26
Issue3
Pages227-248
Publication date2022-05-24
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenuePolitical Theology (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1462-317X • E-ISSN: 1743-1719
PublisherRoutledge (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/1462317x.2022.2079216
OpenAlexW4281388442
LanguageEN
Citations received3
References cited18

This essay explores Sylvia Wynter’s appropriation of German philosopher Hans Blumenberg’s “reoccupation thesis” to clarify a number of key metaphysical moves in Wynter’s oeuvre with respect to her sociogenic method. We are motivated by the sense that attending to Wynter’s reading of Blumenberg will afford appreciation of her return to Scholastic questions, including 1) how this return activates the problem of race in the longue durée and 2) what this means for her excavation of cautionary parallels for our present predicament. The diffusion of Blumenberg’s concept-metaphor “reoccupation” into Wynter’s linguistic tool-kit responds to political-theological questions, we argue, by configuring race as the reoccupation of long-standing metaphysical problems. After first providing an overview of Blumenberg’s reoccupation thesis, we navigate how Blumenberg and Wynter address transformations to our social field through their differently configured analytics—counter-exertion and sociogeny. Following Wynter’s articulation of sociogeny as the generative principle of our mode of existence, we access the payoff in Wynter’s retrieval of reoccupation’s rejection of historical substantialism, particularly in the ways her theory of blackness becomes the firmament for her reworking of theology and materialism.Taking race as the grounding of being, our heretical approach to the political theology of race reads Wynter’s sociogenic principle in order to rethink the centrality of race to philosophies of history that undergird secularization stories. As an apparently natural (“extra-human”) form of social objectivity, race succeeds, at great cost, in stabilizing tensions emergent from the reoccupation of persisting theological questions. In part, Wynter’s social history of the Latin-Christian order works as a necessary historiographical description of what comes before race, with divisions between the spirit and the flesh manifesting new forms of hierarchy with every iteration. While this orientation, which we call “blackness-before-race,” seems to butt up against our other proposition—“race-as-reoccupation”—we activate this tension to elaborate the differentia specifica of modernity and index its aporetic foundations. The precedence of blackness-before-race elaborates race’s emergence and intractability, the way race-as-reoccupation exceeds empirical decipherability, for it is the substrate through which the world is rendered intelligible. Wynter’s elliptical approach to these questions eclipses those criticisms that take her to be a secret historical substantialist by providing an explanatory field for the past that is attentive to its fraught political purchase in the present

Epistemology · Metaphysics · Politics · Race (biology · Sociology · Theology · Gender Studies · Humanities and Social Sciences · Law · Philosophy · Posthumanist Ethics and Activism · Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, and Politics · Religious studies

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