White Amerikkkaners
As I conversed and corresponded with my readers, I noticed that many of them were de-contextualizing and de-historicizing my work, willfully ignoring the apocalyptic events that have shaped our world and, in turn, informed my work.
Unsurprisingly, most of the readers who maintained such willful ignorance to context and history happened to be white Americans.
Investigations into the Modern University: An Introduction
The modern university is not, and has never been, a noble institution. Much to the contrary, it has historically been and remains to this day a racist, sexist, and classist institution devoted to the reproduction of ruling class elites and the reproduction of knowledge as the preserve of ruling class elites.
(Self-)Possession, (Anti-)Blackness, and Abolition
Inspired by my encounters with the glyphs BLM and ACAB graffitied on the streets of Rome, this dispatch seeks to articulate how it is that chattel-slavery, wage-slavery, mass incarceration in the United States, anti-migrant policies in the Global North, and anti-blackness are intimately related to one another in today’s world.
Burning Out
I need to admit something — to myself most of all but to my readers as well — and it is this: I am burning out.
It is important that I admit this to myself and to my readers because, if I am to live by what I write, it is imperative that I do not divorce what I produce from the conditions and relations of its production.
TEK & the Technosphere
The fabrication of “unscientific and superstitious primitives” was obviously at the cost of immense expenditures of psychic and intellectual energies in the Euro-Atlantic West. The exercise was obligatory. It was an effort commensurate with the importance that the repression and ruination of Traditional Ecological Knowledges (TEK) possessed for the maintenance and advancement of Western(ized) “human, all too human” social arrangements.
A Note on Bantu Philosophy
Few of my readers, however, are likely to recognize my touchpoints from the African philosophical tradition.
This is my fault: I have oriented my works towards Western readers who have no interest in African philosophy, and I have not thought to cite African philosophers and acknowledge their deep influences on my work.
With this dispatch, I hope to begin to do some reparative work in this regard by talking about the influence of Alexis Kagame on my own theoretical framework.
Anti-Blackness and the Prevalence of Afropessimism
I have written that the power formation that prevails over our world today is a white-supremacist, capitalist, and patriarchal power formation, citing the work of bell hooks. I would like to qualify my previous writings by marking the difference between white supremacy and anti-blackness.
The Ruling Class & the Radical Resistance
A radical resistance seeks to abolish the need for a ruling class, not to reform a ruling class.
For the Witches
The witch hunts were an assault on indigeneity within Europe that complemented European’s assaults on indigeneity without. These twin assaults on indigeneity prepared the way for humanism to prevail by enabling European Man to make the “enlightened” claim that his local peculiarities were universalities that peoples all across the globe must be made to aspire to.
For the Ancestors
The progressive capitalist says it is imperative that we reduce the dead to the eliminated in order to accelerate and innovate, but the fact is this: all liberating social transformations involve taking time to commune with the dead.
A revolution that does not liberate the dead from oppressive forces cannot liberate the living from oppressive forces.
The Horror and the Splendor
Considering the origins of the (De-/Re-)Constructing Worlds project and the outcomes of its first phase in order to better envision its next phase.
Putting the Pandemic in Context
In the midst of a planetary ecocide, the most outrageously brutal historical tragedy is beginning to replay itself as the most outrageously brutal historical farce.
The War on Terra
Thus far, I have only been articulating theories and describing my approach to the (de-/re-)construction of our deathly world of suffering.
Beginning with this dispatch, I would like to begin telling my story and narrating my approach to the (de-/re-)construction of our deathly world of suffering.
Another Black Man in America
My own lived experience has revealed to me how the workings of optimizing powers are meant to be experienced as being taught lessons and having to teach lessons, as needing protection from oneself and needing to protect others from themselves.
A Case in Point
I happened to write my previous two dispatches, “Entrapment” and “Ethnocide and Ecocide”, while re-reading the preface from Mike Davis’s Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World. As I re-read Mike Davis’s text, it struck me that I might use the events he describes as a case study, qualifying my propositions regarding power formations generally and regarding the specific power formation that is imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy.
Ethnocide and Ecocide
So as not to forget what is at stake in the (De-/Re-)Constructing Worlds project, this dispatch seeks to boldly articulate what it is that concerns me whenever I write any dispatch — halting the advance of ethnocidal and ecocidal power formations.
Entrapment
A brief dispatch on the ways in which my readings of detective stories have inspired me to think of statements, implements, and environments as furnishing motives, means, and opportunities.
Blackness and Primitiveness
The black radical tradition is not the tradition of a crisply defined set of peoples that can be said to fall under the designation “Black”. Rather, the black radical tradition is the tradition of a blur of peoples, a fuzzy and indeterminate set, perpetually engaged in the process of troubling the designation “Black” that has been imposed upon them and staying with the trouble. This is to say, in other words, that the black radical tradition is a counter-cultural tradition: it is a tradition dedicated to countering the imposing power formations of dominant cultures.
Countering Power
The “living worlds“ that I have envisioned must not to be made by seeking power but, rather, they must be made by countering power.
But what is power and how is it countered? And how do those processes “pivotal” to the making of living worlds contribute to countering power?
Beyond Disciplines
Many, if not most, inter-disciplinary and trans-disciplinary projects take the existence of so many organs without bodies for granted and try to construct “complex systems” from these various separate organs. These projects do not recognize that the organs they take for granted were parted from bodies that preceded and exceeded them. These projects do not recognize that these bodies may survive and suffer the organs that have been parted from them. Ay, and these projects do not recognize that these surviving and suffering bodies deserve far greater attention than the organs that have been parted from them.