Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Notes on Sentient Flesh

2023; Penn State University Press; Volume: 60; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/complitstudies.60.1.0002

1528-4212

Fred Moten,

Race, History, and American Society

It should be clear from the very beginning that this is not a review but an appreciation. R. A. Judy is my friend and mentor. His contribution to my intellectual life and to intellectual life in general over the past thirty-five years is incalculable. His concern with the elemental entanglement of sentience, flesh, and semiosis—which Black thought, Black life, and Black art express and demonstrate in and against the grain of their suppression, incarceration, and regulation, in the interest of a constant and irreducible disturbance of what Cedric Robinson calls “the terms of order” that structure (the) world as politico-philosophical containment of earth—is of the utmost importance. Judy’s philosophical, literary critical, pedagogical, and editorial work uniquely and emphatically announces what the essential strain of and in Black studies has long been—the irruptive, disruptive turning and overturning of the ontological, metaphysical, and epistemological foundations of modernity. Work that extends and renews that project in the current moment cannot be otherwise than challenging to and demanding of its readers. It must be work of great learning, of deep erudition. The erudition must, in turn, be on display and not merely for display. Such work must be read and reread because of its density, beauty, and the pleasures these afford. Those pleasures are given in the deep attention such work pays, in turn, to dense, beautiful things. Those pleasures are given in how they take away certainties and clear away certain illusions of simplicity or conclusion, certain dogmas that tend toward the status of mantras, certain oft repeated but seldom sounded formulations. Because he does this work, and because he does it so well, Judy allows us to begin to read and think again.Like Thomas Windham, my fellow Arkansan and our now deeply considered forbear and anticipatory witness thanks to Judy’s engagement with him in Sentient Flesh: Thinking in Disorder, Poiēsis in Black, Judy is concerned with revealing and thinking “the processual nature of the entire order of things,” when density’s breathy dispersion moves, finally, against the grain of thingly, orderly apparition.1 Indeed, Judy and Windham work the field where things aren’t just put on the move but are rendered indeterminate, thereby challenging the standard epistemic drive to separate with a preference for the experimental exercise of common difference. Judy’s assertion of Black intellect-in-action—which is renewed in Sentient Flesh but which carries all the way through his work from Dis-Forming the American Canon: African-Arabic Slave Narratives and the Vernacular to an extraordinary series of essays, prefaces, special editions, and, just as importantly, to the many intellectual gatherings he has regularly offered and provided over the past three decades—resists law, custom, and what has been allowed to pass for science and philosophy, in order to say that Windham has something to say and something to do. Moreover, Judy shows that what Windham, and the polyglottal, polymathic, polygeneric ensemble from which he emanates, in a kind of radical and particular nonbeing for which no ontology could be adequate, say and do—what they do with words, and to words—is not merely self-evident. When all is said and done, their practiced incompleteness is only heard when thought, where thinking is also feeling, materialized in phono-philological digging, held in studious handing, touching the open history of being touched, which demands not only great erudition but also great empathy. The feeling of Sentient Flesh, which does not grasp but rather releases, is given in digressive reach and absorptive vulnerability. This is all hard to read, and it’s supposed to be hard, but in a way that is somehow compatible with its difficulty, this is all also easy to read, and easy to love, as well. We are drawn into what sweeps us away, propelling toward what Sun Ra calls “other planes of there.” Our guide, Ra Judy, says we’ve been here all along.It turns out that such precise disorientation is the characteristic mode of the comparativist. Sentient Flesh is a book of comparative analysis of the very idea of the human. It sounds this interrogative ensemble: Who can speak for the human? Who defines the human? Who guards the human? Who asks after the human? It does so without either making a claim upon the human or disavowing the human differential, thereby continually both approaching and inhabiting the paradisal abyss at the intersection of (the unimportance of) identity and the concept. Having had no plot, in the outskirts of the outskirts of no country, crumpling an unbroken circle, the animaterial gathering of nonlocal practice is what I’ve learned while reading Sentient Flesh and being talked through it by its author. Some simple problematics of shape, contour, and outline are exceeded in its more than simply (Euclidean) literary collation, which initiates topological investigations of so-called national literatures, languages, attitudes, and modes of inquiry. If Judy suspends certain time-worn wars of position and romances of juxtaposition, it’s neither in the interest of an already given peace nor against the interest of some natural attraction. The peace his thinking will have induced won’t be ge(n)ocidally perpetual but will bear, instead, juba’s violently auto-disruptive intermittence; the attraction his thinking bears out is improper, promiscuous, and strange. Comparativism such as this is the métier of the socio-intellectual calling of Black study, though sometimes the academic (inter)disciplinary profession of Black studies remains demure before its imperatives. What happens when philological attention is paid to the tuned drumming of thinking matter as it blurs the boundary between flesh and body? A new kind of critical discourse is born, which Judy delivers. Its beauty is unique. Serrated arabesque is the term that comes to mind. The book’s turns are complex, multiple, and sharp. This is, again, a necessity for which we must be prepared. A significant readership has begun that preparation by reading deeply in the social-intellectual field of which Judy is a particularly important instance of articulation. Readers of W. E. B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, Hortense Spillers, Sylvia Wynter, Édouard Glissant, Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, AbdouMaliq Simone, Nahum Chandler, Saidiya Hartman, David Marriott, Katherine McKittrick, Jared Sexton, Frank Wilderson, Brent Edwards, Achille Mbembe, and Denise Ferreira da Silva, are already alert to this tradition’s interinanimation of field and work/er, which always also, and most fundamentally requires that analysis of the long and profound arc of insurgent social poiēsis be attuned to the anonymous edges of First World cities and the unnamable centers of Third World villages.Perhaps, the most disturbing and rewarding lesson that Judy opens is this: that if the brutal trick of the interpersonal is that it’s always interracial, then, paradoxically, anti-Blackness is not, in the first instance, either most clearly or most viciously manifest in Black–white relations. It’s foregiven, rather, in the terrible honor of the human game. Nevertheless, there’s an intramural eccentricity where homelessly pantonal imprevision is all but always busting out. Such rupture is the general housequake, the generative dislodging, the open field holler, and/or kitchen table expression that Judy calls para-semiosis, where what Blackness does shows concern for what Blackness does. In this regard, neither Blackness nor its ethics are particular, which becomes really clear, as Judy shows, in the distance between empathy and identity, where empathy, either in terms of its racist refusal or its racist violation, is not best understood, within the frame of Black–white relations, as a (false) problematic of absorption predicated on prior separation and on separation as the modality in which difference is operative. Judy’s terms of disorder joust a logic and its attendant metaphysics with a startling concern that moves neither for nor against but through the desire for the redemption or recovery of Black interiority in the soulful figure of a Black and human body. Neither sentient flesh nor Sentient Flesh accedes to the simply drawn geometry of putatively normative personhood, which is a miracle given that they are constrained to what passes for life within it. Para-semiosis does not seek and is not comfortable with such stringent (in)security. Rather, and corrosively, it asks: What is interiority? What is the relation between territory and interiority? What if the problem is this interplay of identity, interiority, and individuation? What if it’s deeper than what’s supposed to be inside, indicating the semiotic paradox of the displaced and disrespected and disembodied experiences of Black persons? What if it’s really about the serially murderous imposition of (the very idea of) embodied experience? What if torture is a machine for producing interiority? What if selves have neither experience of themselves nor experience of things because selves (insofar as they are things) are indeterminate? What if the experience of indeterminacy is shared? What if para-semiotic indeterminacy is not the collapse but the enlargement of difference, which had heretofore been confined to particular selves “in” particular bodies? What if neither Erfahrung nor Erlebnis is the right word for the ingenious and congenial phenomenon of “us is human flesh.” Was that what Janie heard when “stretched on her back beneath the pear tree soaking in the alto chant of the visiting bees, the gold of the sun and the panting breath of the breeze . . .”—the “inaudible voice of it all,” all too human and more?