Afro-Pessimism and Non-Philosophy at the Zero Point of Subjectivity, History, and Aesthetics

Culp, Andrew

doi:10.5749/j.ctv270kv8d.10

Cited by 4 publications

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“…Because, on any given day, we might imagine, the captive personality did not know where s/he was, we could say they were culturally ‘unmade,’ … We might say that the slave ship, its crew, and its human‐as‐cargo stand for a wild and unclaimed richness of possibility , that is not interrupted, not counted/accounted, or differentiated, until its movement gains the land thousands of miles away from the point of departure.Rather than provide us with a productive alternative to the subject as posited by modern world‐making, the subject of the abyss is figured as lacking an ontological grounding; ‘suspended’ in ‘non‐differentiation’ (see also Ibrahim, 2021: 15), with no possibility of going back to ‘irretrievable selves’ after passing through ‘The Door of No Return’ (Brand, 2002: 224). This is ‘the absence of Black subjectivity (and homeland, and political sovereignty) that can never be fully realized’ (Culp, 2021: 11). Thrown into a world in which it is never ‘at home’, the abyssal subject is unable to ontologically project itself upon the world.…”

Section: The World As Abyss Forged Through the Middle Passagementioning

confidence: 99%

Abyssal geography^†

Chandler

Pugh

2023

Singap J Trop Geogr

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Today, we are held to live in the Anthropocene, bringing to an end modern binary imaginaries, such as the separation between Human and Nature, and with them Western assumptions of progress, linear causality and human exceptionalism. Much Western critical theory, from new or vital materialism to post‐ and more‐than‐human thinking, unsurprisingly reflects this internal crisis of faith in Eurocentric or Enlightenment reasoning. At the same time, a radically different critique of modernity has gained prominence in recent years, emerging from critical Black studies, which places the Caribbean at the centre of the development of a new and distinct mode of critical thought. In attempting to grasp the ways in which Caribbean thought and practice have been seen to enable a distinctive alternative non‐Eurocentric imaginary, this paper heuristically sets out a paradigmatic framing of ‘abyssal geography’. We emphasize two key points. The first is that abyssal thought is not grounded in abstract and timeless philosophical assumptions but figuratively draws upon aspects of Caribbean practices of resistance and survival, for example, from the Middle Passage, Plantation, carnival, creolization, dance forms and speculative fiction. The second is that abyssal work engages the legacies of modernity and coloniality by explicitly seeking to question the lure of ontology: seeking to disrupt, suspend and to problematize the modern project of the human and the world.

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Section: The World As Abyss Forged Through the Middle Passagementioning

confidence: 99%

Abyssal geography^†

Chandler

Pugh

2023

Singap J Trop Geogr

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“…85 Building on this concept of the politics of withdrawal, Culp reinforces the Laruellian idea of non-participation in relations as an active form of participating in the political space. 86 Unexpectedly, the retreat from the political turns out to be unambiguously politicising: Culp suggests that 'the way through is not to pity the nihilism of nonbeing in a move to redeem them; rather, the non-of the nonbeing and its survival is an ultimatum that invited an insurrection against the world' . 87 In Anthropocene terminology, these insights insist against saving the world and instead suggest ways to end it, as Culp notes.…”

Section: From Entanglement Fetishism To the Possibility Of Being With...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Problematising entanglement fetishism in IR: On the possibility of being without being in relation

Torrent

2023

Rev. Int. Stud.

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The following article seeks to question the deterministic tinge behind entanglement fetishism, namely the celebratory, uninhibited, and totalising projection of the world as a relational wholeness. Alongside the rise of Anthropocene debates and the claimed incapacity of post-positivism to account for contemporary socio-natural transformations, the text embarks on two main goals. On the one hand, the article sketches a brief genealogy of processual and relational thinking, with a focus on International Relations (IR) literature. On the other hand, the text seeks to move forward critical engagements with the entangled grand narrative. To this end, the article exposes a problematic ontological assumption often overlooked by both entanglement fetishists and their critics: entanglements are infallibly generative, that is to say, they deterministically precipitate further beings and events. In doing so, the text invites IR scholarship to explore non-generative encounters and hence to address the question of the possibility of being without being in relation. Drawing from an unorthodox line of research, the article unearths non-relational, or beyond-the-relational, instances, whose engagement with an entangled world can only be materialised through the logics of subjugation. For this mode of being, the texts hints, non-engagement, refusal, and withdrawal become a form of political resistance and survival, thus distorting the controversial association between political subjectivity and emancipation.

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“…As Dekeyser and Jellis (Dekeyser & Jellis, 2021, p. 318) argue, much research in human geography still remains ‘affirmational’, ‘the inclination to embrace—ontologically, politically, and/or ethically—the productive forces of inciting, sustaining, and cultivating existence’ (see also Chandler & Pugh, 2022; Noys, 2010; Pugh, 2022). Yet, there is also today certainly a broader backlash against affirmational approaches, through the rise of such tropes as ‘worldlessness’ (Dekeyser, 2022), ‘world‐destructive theory’ (Colebrook, 2021) and ‘nothingness’ (Moten, 2016; Oliver & Dekeyser, 2022), the ‘nonrelational’ (Harrison, 2007; Rose et al, 2021), ‘Afropessimism’ (Culp, 2021; Wilderson III, 2020), the ‘abyssal’ (Chandler & Pugh, 2022; Pugh, 2022; Pugh & Chandler, 2023), the ‘ante‐ontological’ (Harney & Moten, 2013, 2021; Ife, 2021; Ruiz & Vourloumis, 2021) and ‘paraontological’ (Bey, 2020; Chandler, 2014; da Silva, 2022). In various ways, the unobtainable, that which cannot be reduced to the cuts and distinctions of ontological world‐making, or the ontic realm, is rising to the surface of debate as a focus for research.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The lure of an unavailable world: The shifting stakes of contemporary critique

Pugh

2023

Area

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The lure of an unavailable world is becoming increasingly prominent in Geography and related disciplines. The concern is that much research today remains affirmational-still grasping and instrumentalising being and relation-and that, whilst no doubt modified in such developments as the relational and ontological turns, this nevertheless continues the legacies of the modern episteme in new ways. Indeed, there is a marked momentum, across the social sciences and humanities, from cultural geography to computer and Black studies, to read the reduction of the world to available ontic and ontological cuts and distinctions as a form of violence. In response, tropes of the non-relational, non-ontological, the negative, nothingness, the void, absence and the abyss, for examples-what could be called 'unavailable geographies'-are of growing appeal and interest. This paper, foregrounding the importance of tracking how the material forces of history are read as enabling for the emergence of any new problem space, provides a distinctive pathway into this sense of a critical shift in Western critique. By way of an illustrative example, it focuses upon how the proliferation of logistics (broadly framed here as the logic of obtaining the world by way of cuts and distinctions, from metric culture, to identity politics, to the grasping of ontology and relation) is increasingly understood to open up the power of an undifferentiating reality; one which expands and deepens the unavailable world as a problem space for critique. Thus, whilst geographers, like many others, are currently critiquing dominant approaches for being too affirmational, the key argument of this paper is that we should also be taking one step back, asking why now, and through what broader forces of history, the lure of an unavailable world today?

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Afro-Pessimism and Non-Philosophy at the Zero Point of Subjectivity, History, and Aesthetics

Cited by 4 publications

References 0 publications

Abyssal geography^†

Abyssal geography^†

Problematising entanglement fetishism in IR: On the possibility of being without being in relation

The lure of an unavailable world: The shifting stakes of contemporary critique

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Afro-Pessimism and Non-Philosophy at the Zero Point of Subjectivity, History, and Aesthetics

Cited by 4 publications

References 0 publications

Abyssal geography†

Abyssal geography†

Problematising entanglement fetishism in IR: On the possibility of being without being in relation

The lure of an unavailable world: The shifting stakes of contemporary critique

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About

Abyssal geography^†

Abyssal geography^†