By LAZAR VASCONCELOS OLIVEIRA*
The piece Othello, by Shakespeare, is a great illustration that can be used to understand the suppression of the black body in a libidinal economy
1.
Calvin L. Warren is a contemporary philosopher working in the field of critical race theory. In his book Ontological Terror: blackness, nihilism and emancipation (2018), he develops a current called black nihilism (Black nihilism). For him, black humanism “merely provides temporary relief from the fact that black people are not safe in an anti-black world” (Warren, 2018, p. 6).
It was Cornel West, in his book Race Matters 1993, which coined the term black nihilism to designate the lack of political power as a result of a spiritual and cultural crisis in the black community. In Black Nihilism and the Politics of Hope (2015), Calvin L. Warren revisits the category of black nihilism as a critical response to the crisis of humanist existentialism in the face of incessant violence against black communities.
in the context of black studies In the North American context, the category of anti-blackness appears in the midst of this debate as an attempt to construct a grammar through which one can speak about the suffering of the existence of the black body.
A problem is brought into play, because if the category of “racism” alone is not enough to understand the relations of racial violence, or at least, it is delimited by its social construction in the 2020th century (Vargas, 85, p. XNUMX), the social death assumed by the black body in modernity required from theorists like Orlando Patterson an even deeper archaeology of what he called the internal relations of slavery. In this way, we can understand the roots of what Afropessimists have called “social death” or, as Calvin L. Warren’s black nihilism points out, an “ontological terror.”
2.
The piece Othello, by Shakespeare, is a great illustration that can be used to understand the suppression of the black body in a libidinal economy, or as Wilderson's (2021, p. 26) Afropessimism suggests: “a genome of renewal of humanity”. The characters are often interpreted by a Christian moral dichotomy, embodying in Othello, for example, a passive representation of goodness while in Iago, his antagonist, an active representation of evil.
However, the inquiry into Iago's motivations leads to a generic interpretative flaw, where the character's own motivations are often subterfuges or reinforced, convincing himself of the jealousy, disgust and repulsion directed at the Moor. This is not a dispute between Freudian egos, but a nuclear staging of the onto-epistemology of modernity. Therein lies the central drama of Othello in relation to Shakespeare's other tragedies: around him and plotting against his health were not his enemies, but the entire human community.
The black penis as an “anatomized nothing” is the result of a body devoid of meaning or power. Anti-black rituals such as lynching and castration physically enact this abstraction, producing a brutal result where black anatomy is stripped of its significance: black sexuality without the figure of the human.
The character is swallowed up by a reduction to subhumanity in animalistic comparisons, narrative instruments typical of the hierarchy created by the Other of Europe, added to this, the “civilizing” rites that concentrate in his condition, black, the reason for misfortune and catastrophe, a dermal curse without an explicit divine cause, or even without any cause at all, constituting in him an internal enemy that is apprehended solely by extratextual elements contingent on the time.
Othello’s black penis is suppressed by all possible arrows, by all the characters in the plot, unconsciously by its author and most of the readers. This product of Shakespearean literary genius is only understandable in an order that presupposes otherness in the black body. Othello, therefore, can be interpreted as a meta-commentary that performs the same denial of the “analogy” of black suffering in Afropessimists: in relation to the suppression of the black body, no other body is ended in a metaphysical holocaust (Warren, 2021).
We are led to not perceive what is hidden behind the characters' motivations, in a reading that privileges the reason of Kantian transcendental realism, the result of the emergency need that the rising bourgeoisie needed to elaborate a space-time notion for the universalist structuring of modernity, of the modern subject, which in contemporary times is camouflaged by transparency, but operationalizes the slave as a necessity specific to modernity.
It is explicit in how the bourgeois ideologies of Enlightenment liberalism and their subversions in revolutionary but still Eurocentric theories in which “time is the field of human development” (Marx, 1953, p. 26), did not overcome this universalist figure of the “human” that still remains as a repository of violent practices and technologies that have crystallized over time.
*Lazaro Vasconcelos Oliveira é undergraduate in social sciences from the State University of Santa Cruz (UESC), Bahia.
MARX, Carl. Salary, price and profit. Available in: https://www.unirio.br/cchs/ess/Members/renata.gomes/2020.1/servico-social-e-processos-de-trabalho/Bibliografia/basica/Marx-%20Karl.%20Salario-%20preco%20e%20lucro.pdf.
VARGAS, João H. Costa. Racism is not enough: anti-blackness, the ontological and social dynamics that define modernity. Journal On the Agenda: social theory and contemporary reality, [S. l.], v. 18, n. 45, 2020. DOI: 10.12957/rep.2020.47201. Available at: https://www.e-publicacoes.uerj.br/revistaempauta/article/view/47201
WARREN, Calvin. Onticide: Afropessimism, Queer Theory, and Ethics. Periodicus Magazine, [S. l.], v. 2, no. 16, p. 172-191, 2021. DOI: 10.9771/peri.v2i16.42790.
WAREN, Calvin. Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation. Durham: Duke University Press.
WILDERSON III, Frank. Afropessimism. São Paulo: However, 2021.
the earth is round there is thanks to our readers and supporters.
Help us keep this idea going.
CONTRIBUTE
