Thursday, December 28, 2006
(10:53 PM) | Amish Lovelock:
Discrepant experiences
Some (incoherent) thoughts and nothing more.K-punk, in his posts on hauntology, often evokes a book called Kindred by the science fiction writer, Octavia Butler. In that book the main character, Dana, is brought back in time repeatedly by her slave-owning grandfather, Rufus, at times when his life is in danger. Each time, Dana chooses to save Rufus because she knows that if she doesn’t a free-born black woman will not be raped by him and become her maternal grandmother. Later in the book she even attempts to personally persuade her grandmother to be raped by Rufus to ensure her birth. K-punk comments,
"The 'founding trauma' of the Black Atlantic involved the shattering of linear time: Apocalypse now (and forever). X marks the spot where identity was permanently erased; what is left is the absence, the memory loss, that is constitutive of Black Atlantean subjectivity as such. (Butler's Kindred remains one of the most powerful explorations of the bind whereby, for the modern Black Atlantean, wishing away slavery means wishing away oneself.)"
The discussion concerning Levinas’ racism in the comments to my post/link below reminded me of this post (and this too). It made me wonder whether or not he might be located on the reverse side of this existential bind: What if wishing away Levinas' racism means a wishing away of Levinas himself? Or, is the opposite to “Have I a right to be and at the cost of whom?,” “Do you exist and if so what proof do you have?” (see here).
In response to this fact there should be no demands for retrospective righting of the philosophical archive. Shouldn't we be having an “explicitly political” engagement with racism beyond reducing it to the level of personal prejudice?
