UCI Fred Moten Lecture 11 6 23

okay I think the hush coming over the room is my cue to uh to get us started um it's a little bit like a Taylor Swift concert or something I think it's registering on the seismic register of the school of humanities well I am delighted and honored toome welcome uh Professor Fred by the way I'm Tyrus Miller I'm dean of school of humanities and I'm delighted as I said to welcome Professor Fred to UCI to deliver the 2023 24 well family lecture Professor M has been widely read celebrated and debated in several areas of scholarship as a poet um theorist a performance and art scholar and a historian and critic of Black Arts and Aesthetics among probably many other areas that I haven't mentioned Professor Kyle Grady from the Department of English will be introducing him today and speaking a bit more about his work so I'm going to confine my brief remarks to the Bellic lecture occasion and it's worth noting um this as an occasion because it really has a very distinguished uh background in history at UCI as our annual signature event in critical theory the have taken place nearly every year since 1981 um back in the previous Millennium and they represent pathbreaking directions in critical theory annually we host a series of three lectures by a critical theorist that relate to current directions and debates in critical theory they're named in honor of Renee Valic a renowned comparative literature scholar who immigrated with the background of what was going on in the 1930s in Europe um from Czechoslovakia first to London and then to the United States um he was really one of the founding figures of comparative literature in the United States primarily at Yale University I didn't know he taught at University of Iowa before that if you can imagine Rene V and Iowa City um he authored a myriad of Works including the well-known theory of literature with Austin Lauren and an eight volume history of literary criticism his library of works of critical theory is now housed in Langston Library special collections at the University of California Irvine where we have a number of both papers and other sorts of artifacts of various sorts of critical theory at at UCI and um we'll have a recession after the uh lecture today where uh there's a small selection of those that you can take a look at over the years the Bellic lectures have included Harry Anderson Frank Cod ja John Fran leot L Moran Jean bodri diatri Hy Baba Paul Gilroy andela Davis David Harvey Frederick Jameson etan balibar Helen suu Judith Butler Edward S A MIM Donna herway Wendy Brown mmud Mami and last year R sha uh that's not the full list it's just a a really spectacular sample of the list of speakers that we've had in this lecture series and for those who are interested the critical theory website includes the full list and further information related to the Past lectures I should also mention that these lectures have have been the basis of an extensive set of book Publications by the Columbia University press the Bic lectures have been generative not only of ongoing discussion and debate in critical theory at UCI but also literally internationally through the book Publications that have come out of the annual lectures I think it's safe to say that my first encounter with UC Irvine was through the the Bellic lecture book series that was as a student back in the previous Millennium uh decades before I had any idea that I might be a faculty member or a Dean here I'll also say that a look at the history of the speakers in theic lecture series gives an index of the evolution of critical theory at UCI and Beyond the early years bear a a strong stamp of literary criticism and French deconstructive philosophy with speakers such as Jo d da Harold Bloom and Jay Hillis meller with a strong hint uh tilt towards comparative literature as the naming after Renee bellik might also suggest the '90s and the 2000s brought greater diversity both of approaches and disciplines and with more Global Perspective including lectures representing feminist and gender studies postc Colonial studies art historical and visual culture and science studies approaches our most recent Bellic lectures have continued to represent the shifts and diversification of critical theory encompassing new environmental technology studies memory studies approaches and more we honor our distinguished critical theory past but critical theory at UCI is a living and evolving space of discussion and argument helping us to frame new problems uncover new Bodies of Evidence and Aton rate new modalities of application and practical intervention in the world it is in that spirit and in that context i r only welcome professor molon as our 2023 24 Bic lecturer and um I don't want to get involved in an infinite regress of introductions but I will uh say a word about Professor p Grady who is going to make the uh full introduction to Professor moton he's an assistant professor of English um he's recently a recipient of the institute for Citizens and Scholars career enhancement Fellowship in 2022 his work engages early modern literature and culture from a black study's perspective focusing primarily on Elizabeth and and jaab and drama including the works of Shakespeare and his work has appeared in several distinguished journals including Shakespeare quarterly Shakespeare studies early modern culture and new literary history his book project tracks the development of dominant approaches to black and white mixedness in early modern English literature and culture so thank you Kyle for introducing and please come [Applause] up thanks dyrus hi everyone um I want to start uh by thanking and acknowledging the work of Amanda Swain uh and the rest of the humanity Center staff uh for all their work supporting the Bellic lectures just a round of applause I also want to acknowledge the work of the faculty uh uh the critical theory advisory committee for their planning as well as uh our Gene of humanities Tyrus Miller whose office funds these lectures so thank [Applause] you it's a real honor to introduce our speaker for this year's velic lecture series although he in many ways needs no introduction Dr Fred moton is Professor of comparative literature and professor of performance studies at New York University he's incredibly influential and Innovative work in fields such as critical theory Aesthetics studies visual culture literary studies music and Poetics continue to bring into Focus conceptual spaces that accommodate black art and cultural expression is skewing those modes of analysis grounded in West Western philosophical traditions that fail to speak to the black experience I first encountered the work of professor moton as a graduate student when I was introduced to the undercommons Fugitive planning and black study co-written by Stefano Harney a text that brought into Stark relief the disjuncture many of us feel between the institution and the modes of inquiry that draw their Insight from the world I would later discover Mod's remarkable Trilogy of books black and blur stolen Life and the universal machine collected under the title consent not to be a single being which powerfully demonstrate how Blackness black art and black inquiry are modes that resist the schematic and the formulaic modes that profoundly exceed the confines so often placed on them Professor mton has also published numerous and award-winning books of poetry including Houston's Tavern me Jenkins the little edges the service porch all that beauty and the field Trio which won the LA Times book prize for poetry and was a finalist for the national book award goes about saying that Professor moton's areas of focus are incredibly and impressively wide ranging and in fact the last time I had the pleasure of hearing Dr Moen speak it was earlier this year at the race before race conference on Poetics where he and fellow poet Jericho Brown discussed their engagement with premodern literature as part of a dialogue with medievalists and early modernists Professor moton's work has been the recipient of numerous Awards including a gugenheim fellowship The Truman capot award for literary criticism the Steven E Henderson award for outstanding achievement in poetry from the African-American literature and culture society and MacArthur Fellowship I know I speak for everyone in saying how excited and how grateful we all are to have Professor mton here with us this week at UCI please join me in welcoming Professor Fred m [Applause] thank you so much Professor Brady Miller all my friends and colleagues um here today I really um honored to be here um already had a good time talking with students this afternoon so I'm feeling very very happy appreciative I um I wanted also to to thank Amanda to thank Su and um other folks who've you know made it made my being here so easy and smooth it's been uh it's just been nothing but a pleasure um I you know I used to teach here and um during the time that I was here I was um lucky enough to have an opportunity to introduce um Angela Davis and she delivered one of her well nowhere near as gracefully and as generously as you just did pray so thank you again um I guess I I wanted to say a couple other things too um I find myself getting in this mode where the preface gets to to whatever I'm supposed to do just gets longer and longer Prett soon um the preface will whatever it was supposed to um introduce but um maybe not today but but um but I wanted to you know obviously Renee wellick is a renowned name and renowned figure in the history of the development of literary criticism and literary Theory um I believe B was a student of Edmund huro I think he was very interested in trying to establish for literary criticism some of the modes of scientific rigor that that hust wanted to bring to to philosophy um and I think that it was important um it's very important for me it means a little something to me on a personal level to give these lectures just because I was introduced to his work by a wonderful person who was my dissertation director named Julian Boyd who actually was a a dissertation student of Austin Warren who is the co-author of theory of literature and um and I think that Julian would find it really funny and I'm standing up here so I hope he's enjoying it wherever he is um uh I also wanted to say that maybe I need to give a little sense of kind of what my my general attitude is um these days um or at least over the last few months um I might have something maybe on Thursday or Wednesday rather to say about um my attitude with regard to these more recent days but but probably over the last year or so I've begun to think that um you know like like we were just talking professor and I I shouldn't tell on you we were we were mentioning you know the prospect of retirement and uh and I have a date okay so um so I'm I'm ready you know and um and I think that that there's a moment in which one begins to kind of feel to think a little bit more retrospectively about things um not in a sense of trying to wrap anything up or even trying to explain but rather you know you come more and more to grips with this sort of fact you know that just as Fuko said we've just been writing the same book over and over you and and and it becomes so much more immediate you know um and in a way I think part of what I would like to try to do uh over the next three days is say specifically uh kind of think through U some things that maybe I didn't quite think through as well as I might have um in in in the previous book um the called the universal machine and I won't say that much more about that because I address it in the the talk but um but this thing where you're sort of Looking Backward while moving forward is um the most that I kind of feel pretty committed to at this point and um and so um and one can't help but think you know critically this it would hopefully one can't help but think critically about what one has done you know before and um and so that that's kind of the attitude that I sort of bring to the place you know today um trying to still trying to figure something out um okay and what it also means though is if the M of that thinking comes into a little bit sharper relief and so I find myself harboring this I don't know if it's a delusion it's probably is but I hope it's not but I'm kind of feeling like what I would like to be able to to say what I hope will turn out to have been true is that these are the last three lectures that I do because uh there's just something that feels almost unsupportable you know about standing in front of a bunch of people by yourself reading something as if it were finished um when you know that it's not and um the worst part of it is the by yourself part so I gotta say that um I crave you know Interruption it helps me to figure out what's not clear it doesn't even mean that I'll be able sufficiently to clarify but at least it'll give me another chance so if I say something that just seems completely ridiculously unle or or just wrong or crazy don't don't wait till the Q&A you know just give me a chance to get at it when I'm fresh you know what I'm saying so um you wait till then it might be too late um it it's helpful it's not I don't think of it as a bad thing or you know and and it won't it won't won't stop me it'll it'll help me and it'll and what it'll really help me to do you see is to properly kind of calibrate the the repetition because because it's going to be repetitive and the repetition is in part a function of attempting to address maybe a certain lack of clarity and then there's another way in which the repetition is a kind of revelent you see in the lack of clarity and I want to be I want to feel good about reing in it but the only way I can feel good about reing in it is to is to is to have you make me make me make me say it again um so uh I didn't know I was going to say that um The Eyes Of Brothers um okay so this um the last thing I'll say before I begin is this is a this kind of happened last time I was well not the last time I was here but but one of the last times I was here years ago to give three lectures and it and it was really one piece and so I'm not exactly sure if these things stand alone I'll try to some indication of what's going to happen next at you know what's going to happen tomorrow um I I I would like for them to have been able to stand alone in a way that you know would would make it so that if you can't come to all three you don't get penalized and something but but but I don't think I've being able quite to do that I'm going to interrupt you right away and turn up the mic volume so everyone in the back can hear you say something something that's better in the back say a sentence sorry to put you on the SP something comes from something speak again okay that's as high as it goes so has a gentle voice and uh if if it suddenly sounds too loud um let me know and I'll sneak up and put it back down a little bit well that's a good way to start I don't really want to say [Music] something kind of want to say nothing um as emphatically as possible and and and a lot [Music] of a lot of this hopefully that that will that little bit of cryptography will get some kind of cryptological you know relief in a little while but as I was going to say this is there's sort of three parts to this um and and I hope I can make this part as self-contained as possible um the the the general theme is is Black Performance um violence and um and performance is spelled p r e f o r m a n c e and I'll try to say something about why that is so this has three parts and the first part is zero and the reason I'm starting at zero is because I have another preface to get when I get finished with this and that preface is meant to kind of help set the tone for all three of the lectures um and there's a middle section of this first part that sort of veers off into a certain set of formulations about art in black art and then there's a third section that's sort of really the part of part one it's when I attempt to say a little something about Leos but I will tell you that I'm not NE necessarily finished saying something about levos it's just that levos introduces a a way of thinking about reading that I want to be sort of a kind of guideline for what then happens on tomorrow wed zero I'm shying away from the lecture with some combination of antipathy [Music] actually this makes me think the last time I was here and gave gave a lecture I I played music and I I thought I was I was trying to well anyway I played I played this song I played this great version of a old standard show tune called Just Friends it was by uh you know Coleman Hawkins and sunny Rollins and uh I thought about playing some music this time too but then I kind of thought better of it but that all that feedback makes me think maybe I should have played some music and so I I won't play it but I'll tell you what I would have played would play this great live version of Lou Nelson [Music] Angel and maybe that'll come up to I'm shying away from the lecture with some combination of antipathy and inability to say that you can't finish anything is also to say that you can't you can't We Can't Stop Singing what happens is a kind of sustenance that can be taken for Ascension a Decay it can be mistaken for Disappearance fallenness in flying in grounding is what it really hopes it is it kind of wants to be anural or anti-philosophical Veer away from dialects and dialogues dialectical capture which philosophy becomes when it comes to itself or comes into its own like when Socrates resolves to turn gorus as nothings into something okay now I have to interrupt myself since y'all probably ain't GNA do it I just gave a talk a couple like Friday Friday yeah at this kind of really weird cool kind of place called St John's College in New Mexico anybody know this but they uh they really heavy duty into you know the classics and Western C like that's all they read you know it's Plato Aristotle or city and so it was kind of a cool experience to give a talk to a bunch of undergraduates who probably knew more about what I was talking about than I did and they I was giving a talk on um on well it was called the gorgeous nothings and I realized that I was probably well according to the people who say they know mispronouncing gorgus you know who's a a sophist who uh Socrates was in the middle of a certain pitched battle with over the distinctions between you know rhetoric near rhetoric and real philosophy and there's a text that gorgius reportedly wrote it's very difficult it's lost and every once in a while certain folks try to take pains to try to reconstruct it but it's called um on nature or the non-existent and um and and so this sense of nothing or the non-existent um that is not you know if you will is is an interesting topic to me and and it just happens to be the case that there's this really really beautiful collection of what most dickon critics called the scraps of her literature that um that was collected by a sort of curator critic named I think Jan bvin called the gorgeous nothings so see I'm totally susceptible to being l by Sonic accidents and a lot of what I'm getting ready to say is of connected to that one of them you'll see with regard to this term performance the other you'll see with regard to a term that starts to come up pretty soon called the anthological and I'll tell a little story about that but but in the back of my mind still I'm still basking in the glow of this great visit to Santa Fe New Mexico so I'm thinking about gorgeous here too and of course the analex is obviously a extraordinary collection of philosophical says um confucious now the question is is there a relationship between philosophy and what we might refer to as merely philosophical sayings that's that's one of the questions that you all will have to decide it doesn't matter to me if you think that what I'm doing is not philosoph it only matters to me that you know that if I'm not being philosophical at least I know that I'm not and that I don't want to be even though um sometimes it might accidentally seem like I am the anural wants to keep trying to make nothing out of something after all so hopefully without any will to Nar I want to tell y'all some stories that beg to be interrupted misleadingly I promised R to um to offer a reading of Hana AR France Fon and Emanuel levas on violence what I have for you hopefully violently lovingly preforms re hand on Trans on and Eman Le offence pre forms Bears a little unbearably all but unable dialect dialectal Buzz I have to read that again okay see I'm telling myself to say preforms just so y'all will know that that's what I'm saying because every once in a while I'll say performs and it's meant to be peer it's just that when I say preforms it really is supposed to be pronounced performs but but I'll try to say something something about what that means so you have to bear with this next sent performs see how how can I say it right perform can you hear that can you just hear that little bit of push like if y'all ever notice how y'all like this a stupid question y'all like y'all like artha Franklin right you know how I think artha Franklin's s's very very often turn to the sh I think it's because her voice was so powerful right that that kind of pressure right that you would need to when you when tongue is pressed upon the glus she would unleash a kind of wind that made it difficult for that s for that for the tong to stay up there and so that sh would would happen right but but that could be wrong I'm I'm I'm I'm appealing I'm I'm I'm imagining I want to almost say that like what George Lewis says about aacm and even sometimes the readr was sort of you know infused with a power that was stronger than herself but but but I'm also interested in the way that those those those sounds those those what I want to call roughnesses of sound are really really powerful and intense and deep and I also think significant let's say in in in in Black Culture you know I think pretty much on kind of global scale so that's why I'm belaboring this point I want you to hear that when I say the p and point is not quite the same as the he in this performed right just I don't want to overdo it but I just want you to hear this thing okay and so this is how I would perform Bears a little unbearably all but unable dialectal buz and I wrote unhearable and it's a typo but I kept it it could be unbearable and it could be unhearable like some all but withdrawn ionic B plus h always on the way to R but ain't going to get there always holding finishing and never come to pass PR deferral of Pur is improvs ongoing oncoming retr projection Looking Backward and moving forward is criticism but damn I said that tomorrow one way to think of it is how did I let certain brutalities in work of fen and AR and Le get me off the track of violence and these lectures then are the remains of one last book called the universal machine the lens and the general question of attitude through which some dispersed Focus will have been achieved are provided by Walter benin's critique de deal critique of violence and a repr pronounced echo of Vera haker indispens criticism of Ben's indispensible text in an essay called a formative strike the lens itself comes most clearly out of focus when it's framed by WB vo's anticipation in text like John Brown accompaniment in another text Dark Water and overdubbing in Black reconstruction in America of benin's text from and within the apposition of a kind of quantum soci ology that he offers in 1905 in a ridiculously amazing text called sociology hesitant as far as I'm concerned 1905 is is in general the year of Miracles so stop for a second what do I mean by that um first of all I don't know why I'm I don't know I'm I'm nervous like I just want to make sure that is anybody here young enough to remember when or old enough I mean to say to remember like when P Funk albums would actually come out like One Nation Under a group um even later George Clinton albums like uh computer games the guy who did the album cover work for Clinton was um and for p was this guy named Pedro B he had a kind of Studio that he called splank works and it was amazing to read to get the album covered it take you like a year just to look at it because there's so much weird little detail and I always wanted to have a chance to fill stuff up with detail like that so y'all ever read uh Hopscotch by Julio remember that scene I said saxophone player is playing a solo and he says damn I played that tomorrow that formulation is something like I'm what I'm trying to get to in this notion of an ongoing oncoming retr projection this thing again where you're moving forward but you're looking back moving forward while you're Looking Backward one way to describe that is criticism the other way to describe that is improvisation freak out improvisations like to move as it were with a lack of foresight well the reason that there's no foresight is improvisation is because you're looking back because improvisation is criticism let me what did I miles right play so what what 300 times a year between 1959 and 1968 and the version that he played in Chicago the 1967 was a was a criticism not necessarily A critique it was criticism of the version that he played you know I don't know some other club in 1961 do you understand right let me keep working on this let me keep working on this for a while um so part of what I'm trying to suggest is that this this this problematic of looking back while you're moving forward let's call it it's a problematic of an angle and it's also one might call it the Angel's problem I.E the angel of History's problem blown into the future right win from Paradise um I think it's also something like what one might call a Quantum so in sociology hesitant she written in 1905 the reason why I say it's like another Mo moment in in a year of Miracles is because there's a couple other writers who are doing some interesting stuff at that historical moment I mean many people but the ones I have in mind first is Ros of Luxenberg on the man strike and the second is Einstein who if you'll recall revolutionizes physics in 1905 with four famous papers one on electromagnetism one on the special Theory relativity and that year is often called his honest morous right is a year of Miracles well the fifth great paper is the year of Miracles the fifth great intellectual intervention into a sort of what one might call a critique critique of positivism okay the fifth grade paper is Duo's sociology hes [Music] um and so I'm trying to read all these texts together and trying to think about them together this palum sestic approach will require some consideration of angles and Angels we'll attempt to keep the devian of topographical Faith within these texts reading closely and slowly in concerted digressions so we can see if the performative force of black study makes precise descriptions of violence a bit more possible some questions about at proximity might emerge from the ruins of our intellectual credit economy some people speak of debt when they mean credit some people don't speak of credit when they mean kinship the patriarchy that subtains this accounting overshadows the more complex matrices of study where in what it is the philosophy and its avatars and representatives its methods and protocols it subjects and objects owes to Black thinking namely an incalculably way more and way less than theoretical mechanics of selflessness that will have also and of necessity obliterated the very idea of repair might come into relief so I got these weird notes in diagrams here and I'm trying to again sort of set a kind of I don't know right I guess I almost want to feel like I'm trying to almost like give you a picture of a of a pallet you know um something Robert dunan talks about um you know like there's these moments in in bending the bow one of Robert Johnson's Robert Duncan's early of poems in which he he he he takes like a list of words and puts him in a kind of square like grid as if he's saying these are the words I'm going to use right to make this poem so um in a way that kind of would correspond to how we might look at a painter's palette before you before they actually start painting so so there's certain folks that are in play here um and for some reason it seemed to me important that they're dates be given the dates of their birth on syia winter 1926 horts and Spillers 1942 s Harman 1961 Denise ferera the Sila 1963 what I want to say is they anticipate Lev 1906 arent 1906 truct 1917 and fom 1925 in an incalculable rhythm Boyce describes in 1905 and that activity this incalculable Rhythm to which he refers he's referring to it as a kind of as something unavailable to a certain kind of positivist sociology that concerns itself primarily with what he calls the evident Rhythm of Life which for him manifests itself most clearly in relation to the birth rate and the death rate he he he opposes if you will that evident Rhythm what he calls the incalculable Rhythm Of Human Action which he Associates with the activity of A Woman's Club so we're working with the Woman's Club for the next three days right and and I mentioned the women you know it's it's a cool Club um okay but there's also these other two texts that I need to mention so that I can tell this other story that I need to and it's partly going to help to finish the story of the the BS and it's also partly going to help to set the set the terms and conditions for this other part of the story that's given in the term anthological so let's see how how how how should I go so when I was in college the only actual good thing about Cambridge Massachusetts is [Music] called everything else was was bad and uh it's a book shop is strictly devoted to poetry it's like you can fit a 100 grollers in this room little place but it was a cool place and it was a kind of Haven you know she hated everything else and um and I used to go there all the time and I remember going in there one day and seeing this book that seemed strange because it was bigger than most poetry books and it had like a green cover and when I picked it up I was even more intrigued because it was heavy right like it was substantial it it you know you could feel it if you were carrying it around and part of it was because the paper was so thick and part of the reason the paper was so thick is because it was glossy because most of the book were images right and what I mean to suggest is that they weren't printed it wasn't a text that had been printed on paper it was images of text that had been you understand what I'm trying to say it was a when you read the the text you were seeing an image you had to look at it before you read it and not only that you had to feel it before you read it you kind of felt it before you looked at it because of its weight and because of its heavy and the book was called the making of the prey there translation by his great translator named Lee fonto was University of Missouri press okay and it was a translation of a book by great French poet Francis PA called excuse my horrible fren I think thank you okay see thank you I need help right I need friends I'm like Richard second at pfor Castle you know and it doesn't bother me to need friends he freaked him out but but I'm okay with it um he so if I bre through prayer it's like so help me more feel free please if you will pray pray it can be translated as meta right in most most of the translations of the poem is called the meadow it's a it's a book about the making of a poem called the meadow it's important that it's very specifically about the making of the pray it's not the writing of the in that respect I immediately was drawn to that title because it was an echo of this thing that I used to listen to William Carlos Williams on tapes say at the only other decent place to be in Cambridge which is place called The Poetry room in Lamont Library where they had all these tapes of poems poets reading poems and and and Williams would say he said a poem is not written it's made and obviously he's invested in drawing to our attention the more literal translation of poesis as making so this book I was like I just got to get this book I didn't know who this guy was I never heard of Francis pawns I got the book on F I bought the book on weight I don't I I didn't read French any better then than I do now okay but it has been like my constant companion for 40 years this book and one way to think about it is that it is a kind of old to unfinishedness an old to previously an olded to the eternally prefatory which is something that we might associate with a meadow or with spring and that sense of it being an OE to previous is something that makes the book for me a preview to the work of another poet who's been also my constant companion in my head and sometimes in real life life for almost 40 years Nathaniel Macky who at a certain moment in a great book called the betterin horn book talks about something that he calls the sexual cut and the way he refers to that the way he defines it the way the character at least in this epistolary novel defines it is an insistent previous evading each and every natal occasion I remember I went to a conference the first conference I went to after I got my first job at Miami of Ohio in 1993 and I asked him man did you actually mean that he looked at me like I was stupid you know and said yeah and that's right what is it what is the impact what is the importance of this General sense of previous and it's in this relay between PA and Mackie that I'm that I guess I've always been situating myself right with with some with you know gradually well it's unclear how much success that relay which is a kind of horizontal oscillation right I'm imagining also that there could be a way which you could turn your attitude change your attitude so that it become something like vertical too but this sense of the prefatory of the meadow then shifts in this slight we to another book that I remember hearing about in graduate school and someh finally found a copy of long after my dissertation director Julian Boyd told me about it and it's a book a translation about give the title in English by great Swiss sort of linguist and and philologist Jean stabinsky called words upon words so it's that image of words upon words right which is palum and and what it makes me think think of is the notion of a field okay but as it were the horizontal field of a meadow and when you say grass right when you say grass when you hear the word grass what do you actually hear are you is grass a singular term or P term or does it requ or it or does it leave was free of the requirement to make that choice Leaves of Grass kind of puts a certain amount of responsibility on our backs right just grassp it's like that old kind of joke that that my wife used to tell our kids cuz I guess her mother used to tell it to her you say kid say well I need a haircut which one you understand what if it turns out that the word the grass kind of like haircutting is a suspension of the imperative to make a metaphysical decision so I think of the prey grass Meadow as just such a suspension it's like a a little a moment of deferral the deferral of the imposition of choice it's a resit it's a pause it's a bit of a recess right it's a break even and if you take advantage of that break if you linger in it a while as Allison teaches us to do you might commit an action and if you wait a little bit longer than that you might even get involved in a practice so all right um but that the metals like this right one thinks of it long to but imagine a shift in attitude so that all of a sudden what seem to be side by side is now layered you've all done that thing with paper right where you got a stack of it coming out of the copy and you go or you're trying to put it in the the fax machine so it'll go through you have to what you have to do you have to aate it right you you have to you have to you have to help the differentiation out with your breath right you have to infuse a little soul into the paper so it'll work right and it produces that fan right you know what I'm talking so the palum sest is it's an air that can merge and and and I believe that this is part of what it is that Sarah binsky is saying in words upon words words are not upon each other in a crushing kind of way they're upon each other in a cessive erated kind of way and what happens is is that you begin to see that this in that this differentiation between words is also a kind of IND a kind of kind of differentiation within the word and that differentiation within the word is sort of what happens when we begin to recognize the presence of something like what we might call a translational effect D our famously echoing higer says there is no unique word for being for anything else every word that you choose is accompanied by the words that you don't which is what gives us the Glorious opportunity to constantly repat ourselves right in the wake of the essential and fundamental and irreducible un Clarity that occurs with having said this word as opposed to that so consider that to be something on the order of what we might call a translational feeli the word is not the word it's a translational field which we cognize which we approach right not only with our eyes not only with you know our minds but also as it were with our hands you approach the transitional field the translational field is something like what we might call a translational Feld this interplay between field and feel is part of what I'm interested in trying to say something about and it's got really important implications some of which could even be conceived of as as as as as apocalyptic because it's interplay between translational field and translational field one of the words that I want to talk that I want to give it one of the names that I would want to attach to it is violence so I'm asking you to go along with me in the next couple of days as I try to make as I try to offer a different understanding of the normal one that we have with regard to violence and in order to do that what I also have to do and I'll try to begin to do that especially tomorrow is to offer a distinction between violence and to so there's something going on between the making of the pray and words upon words and I'm still there I'm never going to get out of that I'm still Waring around there and so what I'm asking you to do is is come there with me for a while and I promise I don't think anything bad is going to happen um so now I tell you the second story I don't even know if this is the right time to tell it but I guess but I better tell it cuz it's already 7 I don't change my it's 459 okay so I got this friend right who um she's like a really good friend a great scholar great scholar and practitioner of theater her name is Mariel piser and uh she's from Mars um and she came to NYU to be a visiting scholar the same year that I started working there so we just became good friends you know and um she uh I really I'm convinced that she really likes me you know because because unlike a lot of French people I know she's very indulgent with my pronunciation and at first I thought maybe she's just generally indulging but I realized not because at one point I was teaching a class on Opera and we were listening to this amazing version of kmen conducted by Herbert van caran starring Leon team price and leontin price is and Mario's like that's not French I don't know what I was like you really like me because because I know I'm not speaking French when either um it got to the point where I would feel bad about the way I pronounced her name I could see you know I understand it bothered her but every once in a while she would betray a certain disc when I would call her name and so I got to the cor was like I'm really going to try you so I was like oh yeah you know I was that weird way in which French seems to be like this it's actually cool right it's like you say something and in about 82% of the way through saying it you start taking it back so and I would but I I I would mess it up you know and I couldn't do smoothly so I would start taking it back about 70% of the way through and then I would bump up against something like oh yeah and she finally just said just it's okay just Mariel so so we you know we were friends and one day we were in class and she was talking about something and she kept saying an ontology she keep saying ontology but it didn't make sense in the sentence every time she say on to like what what are you talking about what and finally I realized in like one of the greatest moments of my life at least over the last five or six years she was saying Anthology she was saying Anthology okay so there's another part to this story which is maybe not quite so pleasant but I guess but I sort of have to tell it um I was kind of secretly wishing that I would see my uh old friend who with whom I have not been friendly for many years now for too many years name name Chand here but he's not here or at least I don't think he's here but if y'all see him you should tell him that I said Lord and I asked n was the first person I ever heard use the word par onology I didn't knew I had no idea as far as I was concerned he made it up and when he said par onology it immediately connected for me to this other use of the word par that I was in love with namely the par literary which came from like one of the great writers in the world still Liv living Samuel AR Delany and his constant use of the term the paral literary specifically with regard to speculative fiction and I knew from a long time ago we were talking about this today with in the in the the black studies group at the level of language at the level of everyday language at least in the places where I grew up to be around the workingclass black folks that I grew up with meant that even at the level of language you were already constantly being taught at the level of usage that there was something a little bit occult about the relationship between black people and what black people do and to be lots of people do stuff and then every once in a while you want to into a bunch of people who be doing stuff do you understand this Ault relation to the verb to be it's part of where I'm going and you see what I'm trying to get at right that this weird little phonic anomaly between ontology and ontology or ontology and Anthology it it it perked me up you see it connected up to something that I had grown up with and that I had been thinking about for 25 years okay by way of Baraka by way of fenom by way of certain readers of fenom so so when I heard Nam say par onology like literally one time we had like I picked him up one time at the airport and we pulled up into my driveway on Hill Crest Avenue in Los Angeles and we stayed in the car for three hours yall like we couldn't get out of the car was like when when when Neil's boore picked up Einstein okay at the ship at the dock okay in Copenhagen and they started talking about physics and they drove rode past the institute for physics right and then all the way to the end of the line and they roll back all the way to the dock you understand I I I kind of want to say it was something like that okay so and I began to use this term because it was because he used it but I also knew pretty early on that the way I used it was de from the way used and I always wanted to mark that I would say there's this term par onology that Nam Chandler uses and I know that what I'm saying is a little bit different than what is but but I still wanted to give him credit for the term and then our mutual friend ra Judy told me well it turns out man that this really problematic somebody even say evil German philosopher named OS Oscar Becker who was hiding was col and who was also H's student right he coined the phrase paron the word Becker is interesting right the being in time was published in the 1927 I believe or edition of the yearbook for phenomenological research journals were different back then they were just published 500 page books and the other thing that was published in that issue right was Becker's dissertation on mathematical reality so Becker was maybe a little bit closer in some ways to to to H's own training as a mathematician the point I'm trying to get at is this is what I was trying to intimate before with regard to this question of let's say the patriarchy right that subtends okay um a certain notion of of of of intellectual relationships what I'm trying to get at is why it is it maybe the question of debt or credit is not quite where it's at it's more it's more up than that it's one thing to owe somebody something it's one thing to be indebted to somebody it's another thing to find out that they're your cousin you understand right again I'll talk more about this on Wednesday but the thing about it is is that what I wanted to do at a certain point it became clear to me that name didn't particularly like the way I was using par onology or even maybe the idea that maybe it somehow become more associated with me than with him even though I was always quoting him when I said it I can see why he would be pissed because he like why do you keep saying it if you ain't going to say what I'm actually saying right so I said I got to stop using it and then of course you know uh there's a scholar named AEL Carrera who decided that she was going to do a little bit of forensic intellectual accounting you know to to make sure that that the world knew that you know there was some debt that I owe you know that I didn't necessarily want to owe to Oscar Becker um and again this this problematic of intellectual accounting is something that we can get into as well but the point is when Mariel said ontological even though what she was saying was anthological it was as if I had become like Clarence Thomas the loone had been forgiven and I could drive around in my RV and I have and say everybody sleeping whatever Walmart parking lot I wanted to sleep in so so I see now I got to have a different plan cuz because I just finished page one I was like do I have enough do I have enough so I always getting this you know I I guess I got enough so I'm going to see how much right this is 810 right so I'm going try to find a good place to stop in like 10 minutes is that okay it up I didn't get to this problem of the description slame of violence in the Universal machine like I it didn't show up for me it didn't occur to me like that book emerged from me being mad at Hana in she pissed me off and levos too actually I was mad at all of them okay I was mad at levos because of a lot of racist he said in these late interviews which y'all know about I was mad at Han because of really crop racist she says all throughout but especially in this book called on violence and I was mad at Fen long because I think that fenon was saying cuz why was I mad that's different that's more complicated cuz I didn't love the other two at that point but I love F it's harder to figure out how come you mad if somebody get you I think most I think the reason why I was mad at him is the reason most people get mad at people who they love it's because you don't think they really love you that's why I was why did I think he didn't love me the C just mean say sometime like in richet of the earth he talks about the you know the Obscure hiccup the Obscure growl the Obscure Jazz hiccup of the poor misfortunate negro like I think you talking about I think you think you're talking about LS Armstrong at which point no but who I think you also might be talking about and you don't know it is Miles DAV at which other point we know do you understand okay like like like what did it mean that you could find what you were looking for in a certain kind of way in the desert of Algeria but you couldn't find it in Martin what's that about you know if you couldn't find it in Martin N I bet you then you wouldn't have been able to find it in arkans you see what I'm saying so look that you know I I just wanted to ask him you know but of course black people die young right they're cut off right from a future that seemed to me to be deeply and powerfully emerging right a future sort of embeddedness in a kind of thought of the non-normative right that would move against the vein of a residual humanism and even a residual liberalism that manifests itself all throughout black skinn white mask this other was going on in the WR of the earth cut him off and you'll never convince me to they didn't kill him just like people don't just die people get killed black people don't anyway right we we we my children will die of antiblackness I already know that you understand right it's genocidal my mom they told me she died of heart failure no she died in antiblackness on her 66th birth yall understand okay so something was cut off a set of chances right and the question is what modalities of reading might reactivate those chances what modalities of deviant reading I'm sorry I'm trying to keep myself from saying something mean I'm going to succeed I just need to take some water y'all ever see this film called shoes of the fisherman it's like my favorite movie y look it up it's Anthony Quinn plays a pope a Russian Pope you know who two weeks before he was elected Pope was in a goog in Siberia it's like magic realism name right before they right before the Russian Premiere releases him Russian Premiere played by Lawrence Olivier what did you learn in your confinement say learn that that without some kind of loving a man will wither like a great B of kind right how might we lovingly carefully violently re so so it doesn't Wither on a grape like a nine so okay it means attending to this thing that links them see my thing was like I couldn't take the wellc turn I did not want to apply phenomenological method and research to literature and especially to the reading and the thinking of black literature culture right that the mode with which phenomenology thinks itself finally to have resolved the interplay between subject and object could never apply it wasn't applicable to this thing that to this stuff that I was deing the way that phenomenology is always held within a metaphysics that requires it to make a set of ontological choices that wasn't going to work for what I was interested trying to think about which was not in the first instance antiblackness but was actually in the first instance Blackness so but I missed the discourse on violence because I was mad you understand and my way of reading lavas and in F off emerged from a kind of brutality that wasn't sufficiently attuned to the difference between brutality and violence and so I had to check myself I had to try at least to do that and so that's what these lectures are meant to do let me go back let me look again let me see how violence Works in these three so in some say Dar in 1962 had already begun to do this with regard to levos in great essay called violence in metaphysics um you know I wanted to try to do something similar and at the same time extended also towards living other and also towards towards every so that's what I'm in the middle that's what this is a preface and for me that moment in which Mariel began to open up a space through mispronunciation opened up a space in the translational field between ontology and Anthology displacing ontology with Anthology in the same way that I want to figure out how to displace performance with performance that's the work that I'm trying to get to that's what I'm trying to approach in in these in these lectures um and just I guess in general you know in life um so I don't know I kind of feel like I think probably I go on enough um and I'm at the top of page two and um I'll pick up next time and I'll and I'll next time what I'm going to do is say a little more about lvos and then try to connect it up with the I'm going to try to say something about this relay between seeing naming and describing I'm interested in trying to see if I can say something about description spelled D C R Y and um and I'm going to try to see if I can um connect this up with again connect all this up with this sort of relay between the anthological and and the pray um so but I'm happy to to just hang out and answer lots of questions if you you have any um but I think I'll maybe is it okay is it better to I think I should try so we have um plenty of time for some questions I will ask you to take the mic this mic that I have in my hand uh when you ask your question and you could also identify yourself and um to you know kind of moderate but if you want to just take questions yourself I'm sure I'm just going to get this chair all right thank you for your Lear from [Music] years listen to you want to a little bit first question has to do with would you make a distinction between previous and givenness and which one of them has an authority to influence the history of the Pres in being attentive to either one is our modality passive or active that's away the second has to do with a test I have a story here of street addresses in Chennai and India I've written about that this is mading you'll have an address that will say FR where you want to go the address is old number 22 new number 42 eras Co there's no eraser like Sy one on top of the other insisting on a double recognition so in that context how you pick a trace in AIS ground is comping inventory in your reading from the point of view of black experience you think of a Paris as an archive or as an anti- archive the last [Music] question I youing between in the context of the phonic defamiliarizing the semantic okay are you would you say that there is no meaning or meaning is not semantic okay I'm done thank you again hear you um do I need a mic I guess um see this is what I mean when I say that it's so much better to be interrupted you know because everybody would have been saved so much trouble if you just because I don't well okay all right so first um um and this is how come I know it's time for me to retire because um I hate to be one of these kind of people who's like I'm not saying that I said something already because you should know it or I feel like people should just know it I'm just saying it because I'm scared that maybe somebody does know it and I'm embarrassed about saying the same that I said you know a whole long time ago when I probably should have had something better to say by now okay but like in in the break I was pretty interested in you know what I wanted to do was to go against the grain of a kind of semiotic order you know um a law that had maybe already been laid down you know in certain ways by by S but then got you know reinforced you know by his you know by his by his secret police namely Lon you know which is like I I did not wantan to I could not bear I could not believe in the necessity of the reduction of the phonic substance as a precursor to the development of a let's say a science or Universal science of language the the reduction of the phonic substance or what what JL Austin calls you know the the the reduction of mere accompaniments of the utterance it was mere accompan to the utterance was all I was interested in and what it required it wasn't I didn't necessarily feel like I wanted to have some full out assault on meaning but what I wanted to do was to be able to sit and although maybe now I would be more more comfortable with with making such a full-on assault particularly in the light of of a better understanding of the intensity of the relation between meaning and value and so but what I wouldn't want to say is that but I was interested in content so it wasn't like a pure formalism I was interested in the distinction between meaning and content because I felt like if I'm listening to James Brown screaming it like for instance at the end of Cold Sweat and it's and it's deep right because he starts screaming at the end of the song and then all and you feel like is he in some he's in some like he has he's lost it he's gone he's gone you know and then he says hold it right there to the band still giving directions to the band so evidently he still got something some kind of rational capacity there and then he just start screaming again at which point then you think well he's saying something here about love he's not particularly saying anything meaningful even in the lyrics of closer I don't care about your about your faults I just want to tell you about your dos and don'ts that's a line like any language poet would be happy to have written such a line right what's what's the Godfather doing in 1966 and the point would be that I think he's invested in what it is that the music that Words and Music can convey at the level of content that can't be held within a kind logic of of meaning right so so that's the so so there's something going on there is what I would say and it's not meant at all to to dispense with meaning there's a there's a field of linguistic activity in which meaning makes sense and it's useful in our study and understanding of it but there's something else too and I was interested in that something else okay so that's the third question the first question was um had to do with uh okay okay so look man I mean I remember when I was here teaching you know and I used to hang out all the time with with our mutual friend akir you know and like I only met you know dared I once twice you know um cuz he wouldn't I I was telling the St today he he wouldn't come to Berkeley during the week he would only come on Saturday right because he was in his fight with s you know and so he wouldn't come during the week but I remember but I was very deeply influenced and still am by his work and deeply influenced by these things that would happen in his work that really that see as much as I was interested in sound I was also interested in certain things in there I was work that couldn't be sounded the most famous of which of course is differents right there's no Sonic difference that allows you so you know this that obviously that's within a language but but across languages this can happen too and that's the attraction of the double ontology so to speak that I'm interested in another version of this would be this other word is like a big word for me maybe more so in poetry than in stuffff and it's just the word forgiven it's just it's got another e in it and and I sort of touch on it a little bit in the Universal machine because I'm interested in a kind of in what is previous to the given something that is before the given but but not but not by way of some strict ontological determination but rather a kind of logical disruption that says that as it were there will have always been something before that and this forgiveness right which is to say before the given as the determination of a thing right that can be given that in that forgiveness right the condition of that forgiveness is nothingness or another way to put it would be and this is what makes the pun really bad okay because then you get caught up in some that you don't want to get caught up in because people see hear me here say he you say forgiven and they think forgiven and within the context of black studies it it it opens up a range of formulations that end up claiming that you're you know soft on antiblackness or you don't pay sufficient attention to Black suffering I like no I'm not talking about forgiving anybody or forgiving them or whatever what I'm interested in is this thing that is before the giving and again and that's something that for me one gets from from Mackie but it's also just part and parcel of a general critique of the idea of origin that folks our age were kind of raised up in you know as in our studies and and that and so the weird pun that that kind of causes trouble is the relationship between this forgiveness and a certain notion of absolution where um because AB is a cool prefix and it sort of means kind of like before you know and it's and and what it get it doesn't this this forgiveness or this forgiveness which you know you put another end in there this forgiveness that I'm interested in is is one that operates outside of what one might call an ethics of normative metaphysically determined relation um so and then the second part of the first question had to do with what does this forgiveness have to do with able to I don't want to say the wrong word but but but but let's say with present practices or acting in the present I mean I would want to say practicing in the present or even practicing the present but and I think that it absolutely has something to do with that for me it's not a a mere abstraction because at that point then the question of our ethical in Social formations have to operate outside of the normative metaphysical foundations of political action because because the terms of order of those foundations have been Disturbed in and by this forgiveness right and that's a Cedric Robinson and then the second one I I just totally forgot the being yeah well see that's cool too right because here's because I'm not even trying to act like what I'm talking talking about eting messy it's a mess it's a mess it's disordered right in that kind of RA Judy sense of the world right and in the same way that I would imagine and and you can get annoyed trying to just you just trying to get home from the airport right or whatever you know in you know and and it's that because it is as if where you're trying to get to is neither here nor there it is as if the Lo it it is as if somehow you've been operating in a in a in a perfectly reasonable ukian SL neonian world and all of a sudden on the way to your on the way home you've been thrust into a regime of non-locality okay and and yes that that can't help but be a pain in ass it it radically you all where do you go how do you locate yourself in a different kind of sense than he means it it's sort of kind of like what Frank would say you don't have a place in time in the universe but what I guess I'm trying to suggest is is that the present we need to practice is precisely given made possible for us in that displacement and displacement is another word that will come up maybe tomorrow or Thursday but it's a weird word and it's spelled dis space p a CE slme n t and it's norbie Philip on the one hand and Amir Baraka on the other right and and I'll try to say something more about that too because the question is how do we well this is what I think what I think is is that black people other people poor people in the world they know something about how to live this displacement um and they understand that this displacement is something which can be brutally imposed by power but it does not originate in that brutal imposition so that the normative subject reaction would be to say I want a place in time and and and this activity in the present of which I that I'm imagining would be let me defer that Choice let me defer that moment of saying that in order to be I have to be like at at at this basic content level right in which the subject has to have a place in time so that's that's thank you [Music] um I wanted to ask you I remember reading in I he was in Black Op um there was a part that always stuck with me it's been kind of the guiding principle for me a little bit um you took a moment to describe I don't know was in a foot but you're describing your decision to stick with a particular translation of even though you said it was a bad translation and you said that was power or utility or something to have in that bad translation it remind me of what you're saying abouts today um and I wanted to ask you about deviant because it reminds me of it Tres to boord with a lot of different Scholars that have also been died for me as as a black scholar are talking about UND disciplining the work um the idea of play as it's been reated cated and on stages and in different other ways that black people create and um I gu my question is very broad even if it sounds simple um but as a practice and also as a predisposition preempting that practice you know how do you imagine maybe amplifying this the deviance as a a thing that we do an internalize um as black schols who come to the work deviantly almost by by nature but also you know as an active attentive intentional disposition um I imagine this is an eological question but it's also think a question about what we feel and how we think when we approach a text a song or each other in these spaces so I don't know if we need to give share tra Secrets I guess um about black studies but I always wanted to you know ask you about that um because the fun and the play and OB and disciplinary disposition seem very crucial to just be active black stud gentl oh yeah this thank you for question it's like uh but just Friday night I was sort of talking about this because I realized that uh in thinking about Emily Dickinson and um goria estate you know um because when I read I read like black black black study or whatever that's that's how to read so everything I read is black studies play I don't so um so I was thinking about how there is this kind of almost spy like thing going on you know in Dickinson's work you know the way it's an open obscurity right and and one way one word to use would be wouldn't be Trade Secrets it be tradecraft in that way the spies use that word like the Johan lare uses the term you know fascist on MI5 or something you know you know how to how to how to how to keep secrets out in the open so and obviously you know the way Harman would put it you know is you know the right to obscurity must be respected um but really on the other hand it's not necessarily a matter of Rights what if it ends up having to do with the very the very anthological condition not only of language um but but but the general anthological condition and here's what I mean you know um so yeah like I don't know if it was Black Op but or the case of Blackness but because man when I was in grad school okay um I'm so I was in English Department at Birth and C lit was in this building called Dell kind of down the hill and it was different you know it was like going across you know you know a frontier to go from one of these places to the other and one way you knew you were in the wrong plac is being a comp L class talking about flud and if somebody said Instinct it would pop off it would be like like a high school football like comp like like like like uh like cring allw versus dorsy or something you know drive jeep drive it's not Instinct you know and and I felt something similar was happening in Black studies around the distinction between the fact of Blackness and the lived experience of black exper you know like okay okay okay right and and it felt to me that but then I was also having to deal with the fact that sometimes I just like the Fairington better than the Phil Cox sometimes the M okay like a good example ronier right uh what is it excuse my horrible French the partage the S right the who translated it as distribution of the sensor there's a big ass difference between sharing and distrib distribution right distribution already exceeds to a metaphysical order that sharing does not necessarily sharing hasn't made that choice yet I mean this is something I'll try to talk about next time it's great physicist at princeon named John Wheeler who used to do these things called the delayed Choice experiment like he was basically he couldn't he was trying to figure out a better way of understanding entanglement a better way of understanding non-locality a better way understanding it's double slit experiment he like it's as if a particle waits to decide right which way to go and then he's like it's even weirder than that it's as if matter waits to decide if it's going to be a particle or a we and Lou de broley said well it's turns out that the the mode of existence of the particle is wav like you know it's like it's as if somebody's saying you don't have to it's as if nature is as it were saying you don't have to make that choice okay so what if it turns out that yeah I believe that it's necessary actively as it were to practice this deviance but you but the devience is going to exist where you don't have a choice where see the the choice comes in the repression of deviant the deviance the difference comes first okay regulation we're talking talking about this this morning with the just something I heard Michael Hart say and it opened my eyes up deep you know he was talking about Del and Fuko and the way that they would kind of read marks it's like resistance is prior to power devian is prior to regulation work work discipline in the workplace responds to worker Insurgency right we make little kids sit down in class because they're getting up moving around right and and and and and and and the impulse to to to suppress that kind of movement is Regulatory and it's bad okay so so here's the great dilemma that black studies is in Black radical thought one of the great dilemmas that it has always had to deal with which is how do we come to name and describe what it is that we want and how do we deal with the fact that the history of the name of what it is that we say that we want is a really bad history right you see what I'm trying to say like like it's we know it's horrible and difficult and all but unlivable and unbearable not to have a place and time in the universe but it is the desire for a place and time in the Universe not the reality of that delusion but the desire to fulfill that delusion which has caused us so much damn trouble so how do we learn to describe what it is we want without exceeding to that formulation and the into the various metaphysical and ontological commitments that go with that formulation so it's not a matter of figuring out how actively to practice deviant as maybe it's more of a matter of figuring out something like how actively to accept and to claim as it were and so so so and you know and Christina Sharp's a great example you know it's like you know we but we could say talk about this on a real simple kind of historical level and we we live in this moment of the pseudo valorization of of whatever multi you know what do you call it um multi-disciplinarity or anti-disciplinary but then it's like all the people that we all the great people even in the history of disciplinarity that we read and that we're supposed to valorize they never they didn't have any discipline what discipline is Shakespeare have you just te everyone to do you know it's like my son my son called me last night mad I why you you man I can't stand Victor can't stand it I said I said I said why you might as well get used to it because it's what six games into the season then we see we see what's gonna happen and it's probably gonna happen by the end of the year right I it he might end up being the best player in the world by by March we see it okay I said get used to it man get used to yeah but he said yeah but he can do whatever you want to do he just he pulls up and shoots threes from Deep he's pissed off at he at the fact that he can do all that he's mad at Victor when byana like the way that like people were mad at baby sus for cooking all that food he's mad at the at the at the abundance okay but but it's an abundance of of differences you know that's what where where have we ever seen a gathering of differences like right you see what I'm trying to say like a so that's how is so to speak with is in ER right that's the condition okay you can either be mad at it or you can commit yourself ethically to the flourishing of okay and um so for me that's what's cool about I mean it was great to read sharp writing about the an grammatical because it's like that's what made me go back and find my stabinsky book because stabinsky is is writing a book about these unpublished lectures that s was giving at the end of his life on anagrams and and that palum cystic translational feel I mean I think that that's what they're both trying to talk about and and the point is that's the condition that's the anthological condition violence isn't something that happens to to to a isn't something that happens to some other thing that undermines or disrupts the Integrity of that thing violence is the forgiven condition of differentiation brutality is the reduction of differentiation um it's just like schinger says in that book what is life it's it's the imposition of equilibrium does that that was kind of ramp you know but that's so I don't know if it's a trade secret or a trade it's just like look it's also annoyingly close to certain kinds of that heider might say which is you know a kind of occupational hazard right CU you know goosin height release you know let beings be you know like but but um anyway at least that's what I think so I again you know to deviantly Echo you know Frank wierson was like it has to do with the recalibration of our black capacity to desire or like speac used to say you know education is the non-coercive rearrangement of Desire so how do you learn how to not want home how do you learn how to not want well this is what I'll talk about one of these two days and it's a horrible thing to say I don't like saying it my mom would be mad at me I understand how come everybody's mad at me okay or why people might be everybody nobody gives a but I understand why a couple people might be mad at me how do you learn to not want freedom um which is chained to slavery so hi my question is an interruption to your discussion about forgiveness which I find very interesting so my question are questions are like where does that f r given us come from uh is it a social construction tool is it Collective or is it individual of the individual level um and is it open for everyone of the present to get access to or to be aware of or does it belong to a specific group um or I would is there a specific black forgiveness or is there a general forgiveness well I I would say you know and I'm not trying to be cute you know but um okay this will seem horrible and I apologize for saying it but see this is the trouble usually if you can make a simple sentence nobody really wants that it's too simple right it's too quick it's too messy is better you know right I think especially anyway I was going to make a bad joke but um now I forget the simp sentence that I was going to say the specificity of black forgiveness is General forgiveness I mean I I would say that and um look I mean I guess I have always been very interested in in in these sort of forms of cosmic you know unfairness that accre to certain people in the world um and I do think that you know um for a very specific set of historical reasons um that are not mysterious um and in a way that is specific but nonexclusive and also I think non exclusionary Blackness black people have been given as it were the completely unfair historical task of protecting right certain kinds of thinking certain practices of thinking um precisely because those practices of thinking and those practices of life and I'm very much channeling Judy here those practices of thinking and those practices of Life were at a certain point subject to epidermalization in fal's use of the word I mean the example I like to give it's it might be a I don't know I haven't given it in a while so I'm gonna give it now but it might I'll stop if it if it starts to seem bad to me let's say but you know how people say you know all black people can dance right um and there's a kind of reaction like Stephano will call it the subject reaction so you put yourself in this position where you say that's not true not all black people can dance that's an anti-black formulation and you totally perfectly understand why people say that right but all black people can dance okay why because everybody can dance question why would you give up why would you why would you relinquish right the the the claim your claim on the capacity to dance right just just to stop somebody from being anti-black and can you stop them right the reputation of that claim has never stopped about something you understand what joh say Okay so so so my whole thing is like what does it mean that over the course of time this capacity to dance was epidermalization what who were these people and what and to what were they committed when they decided to say that it will be better for us if we are known as the people who can't dance how much money do you want to make how much of the Earth do you want to conquer that's bad right why would you give dance up what do you think you're giving up when you give up dance what do you mean to denigrate when you give up things what do you mean to regulate when you give up things and if we organize our sense of what we are or should be in response to that formulation it feels problematic to me okay so so I guess part of what I'm saying is is that it's interesting how on a historical level level there are certain examples like this where a universal capacity has been relegated to the zone of Blackness why in the interest of of of of of brutal regulation and it and then and what it ends up producing for some black thinkers is a double bond or a double kind of operation in which you reject both the specificity of the claim and the generality and the implicit generality of the claim you say no it's not true that all black people can dance a and then you say be um you know um and and and and and and and and it's horrible that that that Blackness will have been you know constrained to Bear right this universe and and I just want to like I understand the justifiable reaction that produces these positions but just because these positions are justifiable doesn't mean that they're like actually true and my sense of it is that the the justifi leness of these reactions does not actually speak to whether or not they're affected which is to say it does not speak to the question of whether or not they are effective in the battle against antiblack so so I guess the best way to put it just I feel like this problem atic has to be re rethought in a sort of General way and we have um one hand which I've acknowledged and another no sorry um we need these to be um cly formulated um and I'll go ahead and take questions and that you can respond as you will thank you so much this might be an un question question because [Music] it's I been wrestling few years talkinging [Music] in histic sound I think probably that and at that point I went back to univers machine and I asked myself particularly um dealing with um the section on where you talk about the confr racism is a necessary first step to begin to think about important Insight work I realized that I wasn't convinced that you at that point that you saw radically important Insight work in the same way that when I listen to you talk about Elliot I felt convinced by that double tension but now I'm curious how that you're about to to talk about living us were you yourself convinced at that moment waiting when you were mad that there were radically important Ty which you needed to like need to deal with all this other stuff before you could approach that do you believe that so while um while we're moving towards the the back of room I want to remind people that we have a reception across the Bree way um and we also have the display of the critical theory materials so I really invite everyone to join you join us and we also have two more lectures coming up where there may be the opportunity to ask more questions to you that us thank you um it's a great talk um and a very exciting book uh I usually don't be very excited about things um so my question would be you started to talk speaking about SES and rhetorical opponents and Socrates was he was murdered right like executed essentially right um in so far as he was judged to have been going against democracy and in that way he wasn't a very good uh rer right um and so when you talk about uh levinas and European men and and unintended racism you situate leas as saying essentially there's only the Greek and the Bible and so but you start your talk with the Greek um and I wanted you to maybe is that a sort of meta sort of thing going on where you counterposed it to someone who was I guess arguing about non being so is that where the black should enter um but differently on the first page of the uh Universal machine uh the great quote of letting us yes of course so far I am still a philosopher but it supplies us the expression of a dancing civilization they weep differently um and this idea of a dancing civilization something you just brought up is that where we're supposed to enter And in regards to the epidermal ation of uh I guess certain attributes being one of them what about the terminalization of other attributes like you know food safety security moral perfection is that where we can do we disel that or how do we navigate that I guess finally in so far as um leas you know was studied under under a very important conent scholar and uh sort of was at the dav's debate between higer and casier go to help me my French as you know um this debate between finite ontology and then this sort of Ideal thing in itself and after the debate I guess um levas was a part of this staging this mock this sort of redoing of what happened in the debate which both haiger and the other guy attended and uh levas he played the role of casier who had a wig and powdered white and basically kept repeating I'm a pacifist I'm a pacifist he was more on the hiar side at that point it's and I'm just going to finish and um four years later Hitler came H joined the party P year he had to leave 40 years later I guess when leev finally made it to America he found D's wife and wanted to apologize for moning him that way and I'm wondering with your encounter with leas at the level of Greek Socrates at the level of dance dance are you promoting any type of passivism that you might regret not not not that you might regret but are you promoting a passivism that might play into this sixth grade mass mass extinction called the anthropos um well I don't know you know I don't think I would ever characterize myself as a pacifist so um and again part of the reason why I want to make an argument for another a different understanding of violence is precisely to to be able to you know refuse the necessary imposition of pacifism it is constantly um visited upon upon oppressed people because in general it is only oppressed peoples who have to declare their nonviolence beforehand and so in fact what I'm interested in I am interested in making a distinction between violence and War but it's only in so far as it seems necessary to me given the fact that that what we are in is a state of war and have long been in this state of War which I tend to think of is a war you know maybe in Ivan illich's terms war against subsistence and it's important to make a distinction between subsistence and existence I think um um so that's one thing I would say I'm not trying to make any kind of argument for pacifism um I'm not trying to make an argument for the idea that we should begin with Plato either or Socrates um it's just that where I was priday that's what they talk about so so I was happy to go there and talk about that with them okay and it see the real question and and the reason I was is because having to read Plato and Socrates in order to prepare for that talk let me further understand how embedded I was in talking as if I were Plato and Socrates even though I didn't necessarily always know that I was so you know I think it's always important for all of us to see just how much PL and Socrates is embedded in the very the grammar of the simplest we say like hello or how are you or or I am deonal for instance um there might be some platonic up in there you know at which point one would need you know uh to call the doodoo Chasers as George Clinton would put it with the implicit formulation being that one of the best ways to deal with do do right um with with mental diarrhea is to is to is to dance um and obviously levos is interested in the refusal of a civilization that dances specifically a civilization that dances When They Mourn he's specifically talking about ferial practices that that freedom fighters in South Africa were engaged in you know thec but he could just as easily be talking about funerary practices in New Orleans the second line and I guess my formulation is more like at that point you know it's like I don't give a what you say not like I'm not interested in your good opinion you know and you know and what does he say just so and and I remain a philosopher well I'm not a philosopher and and I'm happy to kind of say you know I don't want to be a philosopher if that's what being a philosopher takes I never called myself one I never will call myself one I don't necessarily get mad if people call me that but I'm not that I'm not interested in that I'm not even a theorist okay but at the same time there's some stuff going on in levos it strikes me as extraordinarily important and here I'm kind of shifting a little bit to your question I had inklings about it and I tried to touch on it in that chapter and it really had to do with this notion of Escape that levos begins to work through it might have taken him 40 years to get to get around to to apologizing to cir's Widow I never heard that story but by 1935 he had already written an essay called the philosophy of hitlerism which I do try to talk about in that chapter of the book so he knew some was going on pretty early on and I think he had made a kind of shift now what's interesting is for us to consider what the limitations of that shift was and what does it mean for this man who has lived through what he lived to say at the end of his life that the world is the Bible in the Greeks that's a statement that I'm interested in not only because it reveals some of his limitations but also because what if it turns out that the is true this would be a reason not just to call for the end of the world it would be the reason to eliminate the concept of world my sense of it is that the concept of world can probably be reduced to the Bible in the Greeks which is how come I don't want any other right so even you know sometimes people say bad things things and you still have to read it because sometimes the bad things they say reveal something about the way that they think and the assumptions that are given in what they think and why it is that we can't think that way right so so so so I don't know I don't I don't have any big you know and this talk again I guess I tried to say this beginning this nothing nothing began here it it might seem like I began with the Greeks but I didn't I I can tell you I don't I would like to be able to tell you where it began you know um and and if I did you know it might might allow you to think a little bit more kindly of me you know I had to do today in the meeting you know I was asked you know to to give a kindly of you oh yeah no I I don't no I said more kindly I didn't I don't think that you don't think I just want more you know what I'm saying but but but I but I but I would you know I I would so where where where where did it begin inal biography and I said well I was born you know but it didn't begin with that again like Mackie says there's an insistent previous evading each and every natal occasion it's no beginning um I don't know what the beginning would be my tendency would be to that rather than to try to offer a specific critique of this or that notion of the beginning that it's probably better to go along with my training at least in this regard and to and to engage in a general critique of beginning as well as a general critique of ends right so it's a preface to some that I can't finish okay but um so there's so that that's that's that's part of it it's there's a lot more to say I mean that's the thing is I I really want to make a good argument for for the Plato and and for that that thing man it's deep it's interesting because yeah the the state did Kill Socrates and what's interesting is that Socrates in this particular dialogue called gorgius is trying his best to make an argument for why it is that philosophy is superior to rhetoric precisely because philosophy can lend itself to a more efficient and a more honorable use by the state we don't ordinarily want to think of Socrates as a state philosopher but in gorgius he's making that argument right and it's interesting to then think about it in relation to what we'll see in the apology you know and all of that you know that's a that's a that's a you know if if if if if you know I could see teaching a class on that and the name of the class would be black studies you know Playdoh and um now you know what is there in Ling us I believe that this notion of Escape see I started working on that chapter in like 20 six or something you know and um and the stuff on like page at the end of it that stuff goes back to like 907 I mean I was just still working on it but what I was trying to I I I was interested in the notion of a escape and I it it struck me that it was important and and even potentially deep and useful from that levos talks about a kind of a es from being you know but then part of what I end up doing in the argument in the in the article is I'm wary of this notion and this desire of escape and at that point I feel like what I was already getting out of it was that it was forcing me to to try to think better about this notion of fugitivity that I had picked up from Mackie and from and from Baraka and from you know every place throughout you know sort afro dipor you know literary tradition but but I was wary of it and I was probably wary of it in a way that was kind of similar to the way that naam would have been wary of it because naam is like can't just opt out of of onology and I think maybe that's at the heart of some of his impatient with me and certainly some of his impatience with with a certain set of thinkers that get yolked under the maybe voluntarily under the rubric of Afro pessimism and um now what I would think now there two things one that I think it's really important that I wanted to I I I was wary of the way he used Escape but I didn't want to dispense with the of escape and it required me to realize again and it made me go back and read Nate macki more carefully that first of all fugitivity is it it it implies Escape or flight but it also implies Pursuit on the part both of the fugitive so-called and the one who is after him and this Pursuit implies is also interesting especially we begin to think of it in relation to this notion of of the eternally prefatory of the unfinished Escape is not an achievement it's a practice my sense of it is that in some ways Leos seemed to believe that the way he was trying to think about ethics will'll have accomplished do an actual escape from ontology and I don't think that's the case but but what I also think is that that was a relatively early essay and by the time so the the stuff I kind of want to try to talk about tomorrow is levos is the nine talmudic lectures and a kind of ethics of reading a wild kind of messy violent ethics of reading that I think levos is invested in that I think corresponds in all these really cool ways with the PA and with stabinsky but which also corresponds in I think brilliant ways with an whole array of black cultural practices that I've been interested in so um in another way to put it would be that there's a way in which what levinos is doing in especially in this essay called the temptation of Temptation that there's a way that what he's doing is is creating this really really interesting alignment between what we might between talmudic study and black study um and I've been interested in thinking about this stuff also actually in all these kind of really generative ways with with Ethan kleinberg with the boyarin brothers you know and all these very cool very friendly very really beautiful conversations that that I've been able to have with them and and that my friend Jay Carter who will be here soon has been happen so um so that's kind of what I wanted to try to talk about tomorrow and then to be to just wrap it up and what I was going to try to talk about Thursday gets back to these questions about the present about the war against subsistence and why it is that this interesting entanglement of black study into mudic study manifests itself for me in like the most Absol absolutely emphatic um what's the word I'm saying the most absolutely emphatic imperative not just to be solidarity with anti-colonial struggle to actually engage in anticolonial strug in relation to specific that's happening in the world right now um so but but I'll we'll see if I can get to all that seems like a very good point to interrupt with this uh this unfinish in and I want to really um also thank Ed Bon for this amazing leure and [Applause] conversation reception please please join us carry on the conversation