Loving Sentient Flesh

I want to share that I love and admire this book, that I love it and that I have not been able to cease doing so, and that this never-ceasing, this excess in love over the thinking of being “as such” is what will have been at stake in my love of R. A. Judy’s Sentient Flesh: Thinking in Disorder, Poiēsis in Black. It is a book that extends from readings of Plato and Aristotle to W. E. B. Du Bois, al-Jāhiẓ, Ibn Khaldūn, Nabile Farès, and more, and I love it—and I can do nothing else—because it gives us to think “the basis for reimagining the order of human sociality, governance, and being,”1 because it patiently, and with philological care, recalls us to read the terms for life and death, and their racialized and philosophical articulation, in “Atlantic modernity” (197) and “the sociopolitical order of racialized capitalist slavery” (198), and because it does so through a reading of “ontology” in relation to “the Negro,” a term, Judy demonstrates, of juridical and lexical pertinence: “For him,” Judy writes of Heidegger, “the Negro denotes incomprehension. There is, indisputably, existence there, and it is equally indisputably human existence precisely in his sense of world constituting signification. It is just that ontology, that is to say, philosophy, cannot speak to it or even of it in any comprehensible way. It can only look on dumbfounded” (390). It is at this moment, and at the intersection of Judy’s thinking of “being in flight” (129), which promises and poetically gives a “being-in-common-with-one-another” (298), that I wish to ask about Sentient Flesh, about its love and the love that it shares, and about the relation between Sentient Flesh and Judy’s engagement with Fanon, and with the sentence in Black Skin, White Masks in relation to which Sentient Flesh may be said to be a kind of extended footnote, an extensive and detailed “paraphrasis,” to borrow a term of Judy’s: “Ontology,” as Judy translates this Fanonian sentence, “does not allow us to understand the being of black” (114).If all that I can do is love Sentient Flesh, I’ll want to do so in manner that is, following Judy, “improper,” a “love,” he writes, “that does not seek to comprehend the other; it does not bring the object of love into grasp, into the fold of its proper self, but encounters it and opens itself up to its incomprehensibility.” “We may think of it,” Judy also writes, “as the love of poiēsis in black” (416). And so in addition to thinking about Judy’s explication of “ontology” and his taking a distance from it—“poiēsis in black,” “is in dynamis, in active flight, moving according to an un-ontological para-semiosis” (393)—I want to linger with Judy’s love, not in order to advance a “comprehension” of “the other,” not in order to “bring the object of love into grasp,” and not in order to wonder about or inquire into its “proper self,” but only in order to ask about the “encounter” Judy stages and the manner in which this encounter gives “improper” love to “open itself up” to “its incomprehensibility.”Now, this incomprehensibility is not Heidegger’s. For Heidegger, Judy has explained in the passage I’ve cited above, “the Negro denotes incomprehension” (360), and, further in the “Introduction: Body and Flesh”: “This para-semiosis of poiēsis in black is not only incomprehensible to ontology; it also articulates a way of being human that is nonontological” (21). The incomprehensibility of “the Negro,” by which I mean, the incomprehensibility that “the Negro” is for Heidegger, does not only represent an instance of noncomprehension for ontology, because it also occasions the reiterated enactment of a linguistic and social relation where “the Negro” and whatever it does or says—for example, as Judy explicates it in meticulous detail, in Juba and the Buzzard Lope, and in John Jones’s utterance of a line of the Lohengrin bride-song in the eighth chapter of Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk, a story entitled “Of the Coming of John”—is coerced to appear as if it were “cacophonous noise” that is to be recognized and properly understood, which is also to say, “transformed into reasonable speech through the action of civil discourse” (17). It is an “action,” an imposition of civility and a pacification of the social, in relation to which we may read Sentient Flesh: if the privilege of the ontological is a privilege that installs a particular sense of being through the historical formation of trans-Atlantic chattel slavery, the institution of the juridical person as a subject of property and rights, and the generalization of capitalism as a social form, this privilege extends to the disciplines of reading, the practices of language and doing in the social, and their intersection with a racialized imposition of death and life. In this sense Sentient Flesh teaches us to attend to the manner in which ontology becomes legality, legality becomes personhood, and personhood becomes a particular allocation of beings as “things”—“The Negro, however, is construed as a different sort of being,” Judy writes (301)—as the social is installed through a desire to domesticate the “cacophonous noise” to which Judy calls our attention and in relation to which Sentient Flesh may be said to be an invitation to think the sensuous matter that language and life—and if also being—are otherwise.In reading “Of the Coming of John” Judy underlines, in relation to the lynching of John Jones, which is not related in the story, that “There is no Passion there, no scene of prolonged torture and violent death, in which the fleshly suffering of the victim expunges the flesh of its frailties and flaws redeeming it” (406). There is, then, in Du Bois, a non-redemptive, non-sacrificial thinking of the social; this non-redemptive and non-sacrificial thinking of sociality is contrasted to that of The Gospel of John—“As the Father knoweth me, even so know I the Father; and I lay down my life for the sheep” (414)—as well as Paul. Judy annotates Paul’s love through his reading of the Greek of the Septuagint, where “love,” as “agapē,” displaces the Roman understanding of “fides,” “the reciprocal trust between two parties,” in “the Pauline virtue of faith”: “In its displacing fides with pity and phronesis with glad tidings, Paul’s doctrine of love changed the purpose of action from working to constitute the world to working for its end, ἔσχατον (eschaton)” (309). Judy’s interest is to think this “action” in its disarticulation from ends, from a certain teliocentrism, and his gloss on “the Pauline virtue of faith,” where “faith” is “belief in the truth of the promised kingdom to come beyond this world that can be known only after death, and access to which is contingent upon obedience to the church” (308), points to the frame through which he wishes to elaborate this disarticulation in Du Bois in relation to a thinking of sociality, and, in particular, in relation to “the constitutive role of dynamic human intelligence in the formation and sustainability of a universal ethical community not grounded in a transcendental principle, whether theistic or metaphysical” (259). The thinking of the social, in Sentient Flesh, is to be disallocated from the “transcendental,” the “theistic,” and the “metaphysical”—as it is in Du Bois and in the statement of Thomas Windham, which forms a “point of departure” for the book taken as a whole: “Lacking as he does even a residual trace of the transcendental postulate, Windham’s ‘us is human flesh’ moves us away from the theological, as well as the metaphysical tendency of thought, the tendency to think the ‘I’ that falls into the world of things having its reality beyond them” (178). And so if “love,” as “agapē,” in Paul, is on the side of a redemptive and sacrificial understanding of the social and language, and if this is aligned, in its modern transmutations, with the “comprehension,” “grasping,” and privilege of the “proper self,” against which Judy warns us in his reading of “improper love,” there is still the matter of that love’s “incomprehensibility,” not the “incomprehensibility” of “the Negro” as “cacophony” (163) before the white subject—the subject, one might say, in a manner that Judy does not, that is of and for ontology, that is ontology and that is all for it, as it is all for person and property in a reiterated social devotion—but the “incomprehensibility” of “improper love.”But what is ontology? Is it? And how does it relate to property, the law, “the Negro,” the poetic, and, finally, to love?Judy is clear that what he means by “ontology” is “the Western philosophical ontological tradition” (378), and in Judy’s reading this tradition extends itself as a particular understanding of what a person, in its relation to property, is. Judy outlines this in relation to the juridical and lexical institution of “the Negro,” through a reading of the 1661 laws of the Barbados House of Assembly and of the General Assembly of Virginia in 1662, as well as in relation to “the 1669 Fundamental Constitution of the Carolinas, clause 110 of which states: ‘Every Freedman of the Carolinas has absolute power and authority over his negro slaves, of what opinion or religion whatsoever,’” and which John Locke “had a substantial hand in drafting” (171). This allocation of form is a denegation of right: “As far as this type of hominid is concerned, personhood is diminished or otherwise alienated in relation to the body, and the body has no rights” (171). That denegation of right is related through the coercive privilege of the person as a social form, which becomes—in a textual field and social and juridical logic Judy so carefully explicates—materially manifest in “the body”: “In that sense, the person is attached to a body or stands in a principal proprietary relation to the flesh, disciplining it to embody a specific consciousness” (170).The privilege of “a specific consciousness” is contrasted to that which is given in “poiēsis in black”—“Consciousness,” in Du Bois, “is primarily a function of milieu” (47), a matter of and in sociality—and the sense of consciousness Judy wishes to localize and place in question is, at this point in Sentient Flesh, that of Locke. In Judy’s reading, “Locke’s liberalism is problematized around the question of slavery” (170), and, in particular, the “negro slave,” in its having been “purchased as property,” “is made an exception to natural rights” (171) as those rights are explicated Locke’s Second Treatise of Government. Judy glosses Locke as follows: “According to his epistemology, anthropologically, an individual human cannot be alienated from himself in body but is consistently and continually himself throughout the material existence, the life span of the body” (170). And yet this Lockean moment, in its relation to the forms of social and juridical life it installs—and, in particular, what Judy calls “the Enlightenment ideal of reciprocal recognition of each and every individual as the ethical foundation of a viable social contract” (50)—is already a response: it is a form of sociality and a coercive allocation of violence. What is at stake, then, is not a thinking of the social life of an “ideal”—and Judy underlines that in the postbellum United States the “Negro masses” were “denied normative membership in American society through the juridically enforced (Jim Crow) sociopolitical betrayal of civic republicanism’s ethical ideals” (148)—but a reflection on the social form that the Lockean institution of person and property occasions hemispherically and globally. The “society” to which Judy calls attention, and the “ideals” said to have been made manifest through its proclamations and institutions, is, to use a language that Judy does not, an attack against Black and Indigenous life—it is a response to and attack upon the insurgence of modes of life and ways of being, and if also ongoing acts of rebellion against and flight from what Judy calls “the systems of colonial imperiality and New World slavery” (199). Judy’s term “betrayal” jars, and this is not solely because in Jim Crow there is no “betrayal” of “civic republicanism’s ethical ideals” but only their extension and transmutation. It is only from the point of view of the legitimacy of those “ideals”—including the “ideal” of the “reciprocal recognition of each and every individual as the ethical foundation of a viable social contract”—that one can speak of their “betrayal” at all. And so Judy’s explication of the juridical installation of “the Negro” in its distinction from the “person” and in its coerced social institution as “property”—even as Judy underlines “slavery’s legacy of blurring the differentiation between thing and person” (404)—can obscure the constitutive relation between those terms—“person,” “property,” and “Negro”—and the modern forms of racialized life.In this frame: “The Lockean principle of natural moral personhood” is not a “negation” of the American settler state’s “Constitution” (404) but the mode of juridical and social understanding through which the racialization of sociality in it is installed; and it is not that the understanding of “the slave” as “a laboring thing without the full moral standing as a person” is a “disruption” of the “the republic’s life-world,” in Judy’s terms, “at its innermost core” (404), but is, as it were, its affirmation.This is a first moment, I wish to share, of my improper love for Sentient Flesh; the words “ideal” and “betrayal” undo the social understanding Sentient Flesh also gives to us. I want to linger with another: “Locke expressly presumes the Negro’s status as fungible property in 1669, based on eight years of legal precedence” (127), Judy notes. Judy clearly delimits Locke’s presumptions, and I want to notice what Locke, in Judy’s reading, does not presume: in Judy’s reading Locke does not presume any sovereign entity, or any history of settler political or social activity or military or linguistic action, which will have granted juridical sanction or interpretive authority to “the 1669 Fundamental Constitution of the Carolinas”; and Locke does not presume—in Judy’s reading—the transmutation of land into an alienable object in modern capitalism, the translation of earth into property. Paradoxical as this must seem: there is no place in Sentient Flesh for a reflection on settler colonization in the Americas, or for a reflection on the American state as a settler colony. It is as if the matter of settler sovereignty—a matter which, in 1669, and if also today, is itself hardly settled, a matter to be left in the past—were irrelevant to a thinking of “the Negro,” “ontology,” “poiēsis,” “community,” and “the modern capitalist semiological order” (6).Judy draws attention, in a single paragraph, to Bartolomé de las Casas, but he diminishes the relevancy of settler colonization and reads it only in relation to its pertinence for thinking “the Negro”: “By implication, the indigenous population of the Americas, like the African subjects of the Dum Diversas [a papal bull of 1452 which established the “Doctrine of Discovery”—JS], possessed valued souls that are to be ‘gained for Christ,’” while, “In contrast, the index Negro, as has already been noted in some detail, connotes the embodiment of capital—animate sentient instrumentalities of production” (386). The passage refers to Judy’s earlier discussion of “Negro thingness”—“Remember, in the New World, since the colonial seventeenth-century juridical reforms, Negro conversion to Christianity did not suspend Negro thingness; in the Code Noir, just as in the 1667 and 1682 laws of the Virginia Assembly, the converted Negro is a Negro, a it underlines a distinction in the juridical and lexical institution and status of “the Negro” in relation to “the I wish to that the manner of Judy’s to the to what sort of being is the and terms of the sociality in settler colonization and that it in place the form of the settler state and the capitalist understanding of land as property. a discussion of the settler state and its relation to Judy of of what he calls “the of our modernity” and “the of “The of the of against the Negro body a of the of which on the basis of its to all existence, to its I do not wish to this I wish to ask how it to settler the transmutation of land into property, and Indigenous itself ongoing and in each of a thinking of “the Negro” in relation to “poiēsis in black,” as well as in relation to language, sociality, and love a of a reflection on the social and terms for settler is not about or even the It is about being and so the away from of a on “ontology” to a question of Sentient Flesh, then, gives one to to think of its to the to think social of its to to think language, and the poetic, of its to the subject of to think relation of a to and to And finally, how to think being is being in without any redemptive or wish to share the following thought, without any and because all I can do is love Sentient Flesh: since there is, of no in Paul, and since the reading of as the of the Pauline of terms for reading in modern and philosophical and in particular, in the privilege of in language and and is what Sentient Flesh is all I want to the following no to Juba or Buzzard his ‘us is human flesh’ with the sense of the of the connotes the of human flesh thinking in the world and that thinking in a of of the The of the is in Judy’s all is to have been and if also because this is what in Judy, is. The doing of language, I wish to is to a privilege that presumes a form of sociality in the of that is to have been given through its and social What Judy wishes to is “the of a human that is and so not but also not but the reading of language in Sentient Flesh language into a instance of social that gives and I want to be what Judy is is that in the understanding of the he “the is is in relation with and and in in is to be in and through “the activity of I want to a in without its an of that may or may I be to a sense of the Judy in al-Jāhiẓ, the is “a the activity of in the Judy to I this because each of and a of or in relation to the of language upon which it as an interpretive of this a subject of language in the social, a being in sociality that is the to which language and relation are to be there is then, in al-Jāhiẓ, a if also an “open as this is what language is coerced to have Judy wishes to what he glosses as from this ontology without is just “ontology” in it all for me, a of constituting as in the “incomprehensibility” of Judy’s love, a of sociality as that the social logic of person and property against which Sentient Flesh must by an of para-semiosis” but what if the the of every and allocation of sense, what if it is to every and and what if it does nothing but the terms for social and linguistic which What if the is, a doing in sociality without a to its in a being or to think the and its sociality without its into a field of given sense or a field for the of to think a of improper poiēsis and improper love, a that is a of a that gives itself that be all love, without or that will have itself on an “incomprehensibility” of the “encounter” that “improper love,” in Judy’s explication of it, There will have then, no of “the “as but only an to whatever as itself to Sentient Flesh gives this to this love without or subject, and it gives us to think it, a of “love,” which, like “the in the story of Judy reads in the of Sentient Flesh, into the order of does language, which be properly or and this in each and every and each and every sentence, in Paul, in Du Bois, in al-Jāhiẓ, and right and right

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