For Moten, Heidegger’s distinction between “thing” (das Ding) and object offers a way to imagine a form of experience and an understanding of blackness that exceeds categories of ontology. Wynter turns to Heidegger’s critique of the metaphysics of humanism as a model for mapping the manner in which colonialism uses race as a ground (Grund) for erecting its system determining the human from the non-human. In her conceptualization of “perishment,” Holland invokes Heidegger’s distinction between the human and the animal to think with specificity about black death. And Farred offers an account of his relation to Heidegger’s thought with the startling title Martin Heidegger Saved My Life, which charts a language of thinking beyond the determinations of the racist encounter.
This engagement with Heidegger in Black Studies constitutes what we are calling “Black thinking.” These scholars all express a drive to engage with the question of race as the problem of “the unthought,” as Heidegger names this in his 1951-52 lecture course What is Called Thinking? According to him, the unthought is that which remains masked under dominant modes of thought, but is that which makes such modes possible in the first place. In What is Called Thinking?, a prime example Heidegger gives is the ways technological rationality obscures the appropriating event of Being (Ereignis)—the relation between Being and human being—that grounds thinking. For Heidegger, then, the age of modern technology results in a situation in which there is a mode of thought that is not yet thinking. For scholars in contemporary Black Studies, we are living in an epoch that uses race as a ground for thought, yet has not yet begun to think race and thus engage in a thinking that moves “in the break” and “in the wake” of racial thought. This thinking deserves sustained scholarly attention, which “Heidegger and the Human After Race” will begin.
Our proposed panel aims to analyze, contribute to, and expand this compelling development in Black Studies in which scholars turn to Heidegger’s work to think about black sociality and its relationship to the category of the human. Aligned with the scholars’ work we analyze, we submit that no thought of the relation between Being and human being is possible without posing the question of race, and together we argue that to pose this question through Heidegger’s category of the “unthought” will yield productive results for thinking the human. We do not treat Black Studies as a monolithic field. Rather, we explore how Heidegger’s work can reveal productive tensions within it--opening nuanced spaces between Afro-Pessimism and Black Ops, for example—and thereby demonstrate the multiple ways Black Studies grapples with the question of the human. Furthermore, as the descriptions below attest, our panel begins to inflect the unthought of race with questions of gender and sexuality.
The panel will begin with Michael Eng’s paper, which examines Moten’s engagement with Heidegger’s distinction between “thing” (das Ding) and object. Eng demonstrates that for Moten, this distinction offers a way to examine a form of experience that exceeds the categories of ontology--that of black sociality. Eng follows Moten’s argument that “das Ding” opens the possibility of hearing black sociality beyond the visual architecture of the subject-object relation and demonstrates that this argument leads to a reconfiguration of the Heideggerian voice. We will then turn to J. Kameron Carter’s essay, which also utilizes Heidegger’s notion of das Ding and puts it into dialogue with the Heideggerian category of the unthought and brings both to bear on Denise Ferreira da Silva’s concept of “black feminist poethics.” For Carter, da Silva’s “black feminist poethics” is an uncharted, unrepresentable excess that challenges the ontotheological text and its categories of Being. Carter explores the fact that da Silva names this excess “the Thing” and argues that it “unthinks” the subject and explodes phallic sovereignty and therefore suggests that perhaps gender is the unthought of black thinking. The next paper by Kimberly Lamm continues this line of inquiry by examining the artwork of Lorna Simpson through Heidegger’s “Origin of the Work of Art” essay and its category of “the Thing.” Looking closely at Simpson’s Landscape/Body Parts III (1992), a conceptual photo text triptych that portrays the bodies of African-American women holding up women’s shoes to their abdomens, Lamm demonstrates how Simpson’s artwork suggests that because the history of making African-American women’s reproductive capacities an exploitable ground remains muted and repressed, black women’s bodies fall between what Heidegger identifies as the “thingly character of the thing” and the “workly character of the artwork.” Calvin Warren’s essay concludes the panel and reasserts that race is the unthought of the human. Warren engages with Heidegger’s claims that Dasein is sexually neutral and that every proper body is sexed to argue that the relations between self-possession, embodiment, and sex seems to provide a “proper” precondition of neutrality. Meditating on the ontological problem of black corporeality and the unending violence and vulnerability of black bodies, Warren asks whether improper bodies throw the enterprise of ontology into crisis.
We plan to allot each of our presenters 15 minutes for their presentations, which will leave 15 minutes for unstructured discussion with the audience.