THE TOURING MACHINE (FLESH THOUGHT INSIDE OUT )

In his review of evolutionary psychologist Robert Kurzbans book, Why Everyone (Else) is
a Hypocrite: Evolution and the Modular Mind, philosopher and linguist Jerry Fodor takes
sharp exception to Kurzbans assertion that our brains, insofar as they are nothing more
than a bundle of heuristics capable of performing discrete sets of computational
operations, neither imply nor require the organizing principle/principal that we
ordinarily call a self. Since Kurzban says repeatedly that he knows of no reason why the
science of psychology should acknowledgeselves, Fodor is happy to provide one:
selves are the agents of inference and of behavior; you need executives to account for
the rationality of our inferences; you need the rationality of our inferences to account for
the coherence of our behavior; and you need the coherence of our behavior to explain the
successes of our actions.1 When Fodor asserts the necessity of the executive a relation
between the knowledge and the care of the self is implied, though what Michel Foucault
claims to be the priority of care to knowledge is inverted. In the intensity of his normative
philosophical self-regard, Fodors executive is proximate to what Foucault, in a brief
reading of Senecas De Ira, calls the administrator. For Foucault, the administrative
knowledge that Fodor sees as necessary prepares the way for renunciation, which, in the
end, cannot abide with care. But insofar as Fodors critique of Kurzban seems to leave
renunciation by the wayside, to consider the representative generality that emerges when
Fodors self, which seeks to explain the success of [his] actions, and Foucaults self,
which prepares for a certain complete achievement of life, are posed together seems

nothing less than an imperative.2 At stake in such a pose, in the assumption of the
possibility of position, is not only how, but also that, one looks at oneself; how and that
one gives, in Judith Butlers words, an account of oneself in the end, as an end, in a
discourse of ends above means. In the mean time, in a temporality of means that might
not even be discernible as a moments absence, the relay between abjuration and esteem
that derives from philosophical self-absorption is endlessly refused in an ongoing flash of
exhaustion and consent. Our flesh of flames burns bright in its submergence.3 Its (neo-)
plastic flash still folds beneath the water. I want to study the poetic registration of this
immeasurable apposition to the world.
In sketching an outline of the technologies of the self, which permit individuals to
effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on
their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform
themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection or
immortality, Foucault presumes a clear difference between them and those technologies
of production, which permit us to produce, transform or manipulate things. This is to
say that while these technologies hardly ever function separately, they do operate
against the backdrop of a sharp distinction between things and selves, which move within
two different technological hemispheresthe technological manipulation of things and
signs, which are used in the study of science and linguistics and the technologies of
domination and the self that Foucault concerned himself with in the development of his
history of the organization of knowledge, his historiography of the present.4

Black Studies, which does or should consider what Nahum Chandler calls the
problem of the negro as a problem for thought within and by way of imperatives that are
beyond category, is constrained to investigate the integration of these hemispheres and is
particularly responsible for forging an understanding regarding the relationship between
(the manipulation of) things and (the care of) selves.5 This is to say that insofar as the
ungovernability of things and signs within and outside or underneath the field that is
delineated and enclosed by the manipulative efforts of selves caught up in the exertions of
governmentality is, or should be, our constant study, we must be comported in and
toward the juncture of technological breakthrough and technological breakdown. Black
study moves at the horizon of an event where certain instruments, insofar as they can no
longer either calculate or be calculated, are bent towards the incalculable. That juncture,
that event, doesnt just imply and assume and consider movement; it is, itself, on the
move, as a kind of fugitive coalescence of and against more than agential force, more than
agential voluntarity; as a kind of choir, a kind of commercium, whose general refrain
like a buzz or hum underneath self-concerns melodic lineis that its not your thing, you
cant just do what you want to do. Such clamor might best be understood, in its constant
improvisational assault on the understanding that was sent to regulate it, as antiadministrative, ante-executive action.
Fodor believes that evolutionary psychologists like Kurzban have taken the notion
of the modularity of mindan idea derived in part from the Chomskyan idea of innate
and specific mental device, which states that such a device is evolutionarily developed to
have a specific functiontoo far. Though Fodor is a major contributor to that notion, he

believes that too much liberty is taken with and derived from cognitive impenetrability,
the condition in which mental mechanisms are understood not only to be distinct but
also independent, encapsulated from beliefs and from one another.6 And so he takes
Kurzban severely to task for attempting to show that such encapsulation predicts the
absence of the executive. For Kurzban, the fact that we can believe two contradictory
beliefs is explained by the fact that the brain contains distinct, discrete modulesbundles
of software, as it werethat are devoted to separate operations. Its not the mind or the
self that believes contradictory things; its just two different packages within the brain
that do. Contradictory views correspond to different functions, different uses to which
the brain is put that correspond, in turn, to different packages of mental processes. An
important consequence of this view, Kurzban adds, is that it makes us think about the
self in a way that is very different from how people usually understand it. In particular, it
makes the very notion of a self something of a problem, and perhaps quite a bit less
useful than one might think.7 Fodors concern and his critique are derived from his sense
that Kurzbans psychological Darwinismthe theory thatthe traits that constitute our
psychological phenotype are adaptations to problems posed by the environments in
which the mind evolvedcan explain negation (the relation or co-presence of P and notP) but not addition (the relation of P and Q).8 He argues that Kurzban can explain how
there can be impenetrability, but not how there can be interpenetrability, without an
executive.
What Ive been wondering, thoughby way of the specificity of Fodors critique of
Kurzban but against the grain of what Fodor understands to constitute the ground of that

critique; from the perspective of someone who is also interested in certain operations that
have been done on bodies and souls, as well as on Body and Soul; in the light and sound,
therefore, of a mode of social aesthesis whose predicate is that impenetrability and
interpenetrability are one anothers animationis whether the self is better understood
as something akin to what David Kazanjian calls a flashpoint marking a socially
generated rebellion against the executive that is manifest in the form of the soloist who
can now be thought as socialitys non-full, non-simple, anarchic, anarchaic avatar?9 The
executive function is an exclusionary, hierarchical function that governs the space and
adjudicates the relation between what negates and what carries and is derived from P. In
this regard, Fodor writes that it is not an accident that the belief P is a constituent of the
belief P&Q; and it is not an accident that the sentence John prefers coffee is a
constituent of the sentence John prefers coffee in the morning. If you have an executive,
you can (maybe) make sense of all that. If not, thenso far as anyone knowsyou cant.
Intellectualism suggests the possibility of a unified treatment of logic, language and
thought.10 I want to suggest that it is something other than anti-intellectualism to think
that what the executive excludes is a vast range of extra-rational relations for which we
cannot, strictly speaking, account; relations, which is to say things, that cannot be
accounted for because they cut and augment inference; things like whatever occurs when
believing P and believing Q is more or less and/or more and less than P and Q. All the
things we are are more and less than selves. In general, the general is more and less, given
in new sentences that some might see as unworthy constituents for which we cannot

account, but which others might see more clearly as instantiations of the incalculable.
Worked minds work wonders with 6.2 words, making do with less and more. 11
Before a submarine poetics of plain, sous leau danse lavenir dans le pre. Were
something like, but both a little bit and a whole lot less and more than, the machine Alan
Turing imagined and described: an infinite memory capacity, with an infinite amount of
time, whose computational force allows us to chart the limits of what can be computed.
This other thinga somethings else or extragoes over the edge of that limit. It is as if it
has been thrown over the side of the vessel, the state-sanctioned ship or self that
navigates that limit. The selfs or the subjects transcendence has usually been associated
with what it is to stand on the edge of the abyss to which it is and has been committed.
Transcendence matters to the one who stands there only if it is given in her immanence,
her thingliness, her fallenness, her homelessness, her sounding, her submarine
movement, her endless tour. Study of the socio-aesthetic substance of black insurgency is
inseparable from attending to the history of the interplay of calculation and
displacement. This conjuncture manifests itself in frenzied, troubled, muffled speech over
the edge of whatever is supposed to divide sacrament from profanation. Foucault, by way
of Philo of Alexandria, recalls an austere community, devoted to reading, to healing
meditation, to individual and collective prayer and to meeting for a spiritual banquet
(agape, feast). These common practices, he argues, stemmed from concern for oneself.
Foucault then shows how the movement from self-care to self-knowledge is finally and
fully instantiated in techniques of verbalization that are first deployed in the service of
ascetic self-renunciation and then, with the advent of the human sciences, are given over

to a mode of self-representation that is the necessary accompaniment to what Angela

Mitropoulos calls the proliferation and democratization of sovereignty. 12 The
undercommon articulation I want to study, the symposium I want to join, marks the
violent festivity of the knowledge and care of fleshin the flesh and not in sovereigntys
divided bodyarrayed against the terror and privation that attend the long career of selfconcerns attempt to regulate that for which it cannot account, either through
renunciation or assertion. When drowned speech becomes fire music, embalming burned
flesh with a runaway sermons fragrant sound, an alternative is announced.
By way of the din of generative multiplicity, which sounds like an itinerant quartets
rhizomatic excess of itself, or like what kids anarchic sounding does to speech, or like the
evolutionary step of loved, invaluable fleshs instantiating interplay of artifice and
intelligence, its blessedness inseparable from its woundedness, both new, interinanimate in
beatitude, in povertys radical theoretical attitude, M. NourbeSe Philips Zong! documents
descent and dissent, experiments in ascension and consent, as an emergence in anticipation
but after the fact of the ongoing imposition of a submarine state of emergency that the
dispersed sovereign (the executive whose sentences are constrained to administer the
brutalities of broken felicity, fractured enjoyment), having commenced merchant, is serially
enjoined to declare.

Theres an unruly interplay of silence and chatter that Ian Baucoms assemblage and
idiosyncretic archive, Spectres of the Atlantic, replays. There, the Zongs exhausted,
inspiriting cargo132 or 143 or 150 persons (documentation of the number always changes

as if marking an insistent incalculability) thrown into the sea whose trace was buried in the
hold of the official language and documents of the governmental and financial entities that
authored their disappearanceenacts its emergence and meta-emergence again. Thinking,
but also living, between silence and chatter persists on other registers, in all languages: not
only the silencing of things, the silence of an unheard case, of a muffled appeal consigned to
lower frequencies, of disruptive wave and terminally colliding particle where no one can
observe; and not only that other effect that constantly nascent and dying capitalism and
colonialism produces, the ceaseless chatter of administration, regulation and what Baucom
calls phenomenal busy-ness: but also the silence and chatter of song, which thinkers have
been known to misrecognize as an unbearable lightness; but also the hard, sweet life of
language on the spectrum, where I am an initiate under the protection of my son. He
moves between silence and chatter, where the set pieces that adults usually reserve for the
forced participation of kids break down in the face of a constant contact improvisation that
you have to be ready for, as Al Green or Danielle Goldman would say. The brilliant surprise
of the silly abcs (ba, dc, fe, h sung to the rhythm and melody of the old tune) or the belated
christening of a dinosaur (the protocerealbox, his bones discovered in illicit breakfast
reading) must be heard to be believed. But those impositions (How old are you? Are you
ready for Santa Claus? Are you strong? Show me your muscles! Do you like school?) arent
the only scripts, all of which arent so easily done without. Every returned I love you is
treasure when every incalculable gift was occasioned by an unimaginable loss and when the
gift is often harder to accept, or would be, if it werent for what you had already been given
by poems, which Charles Bernstein, thinking about Robin Blaser, calls the flowers of

associational thinking. Lorenzo gives me a fresh bouquet every day as I learn to stop
mourning for something I never had.

One of the hard parts of caring for a child with an Autism Spectrum Disorder is the
problem of where he should go to school. And if youre picky about school to the point of not
believing in it even though you love it so much you never want to leave it, if youre so
committed to the conservation of the strange and beautiful that your mistrust of the
normal is redoubled to a level of intensity that can actually keep up with your desire for
your child to have a normal life, then the general necessity of the alternative (school), which
may have been a principle youve been trying to live by, now becomes concrete and absolute.
It requires you to go back to kindergarten, at least every Tuesday morning, in order to play
and get dirty and paint and make birdbaths and talk about princesses. Lorenzo and I
facilitate communication with the other kids for one another out in the woods, where all the
flowers grow. On Tuesday afternoon I go to school with the big kids, whose interest in
flowers often goes against the grain of their schooling, where critical and creative
attendance upon both silence and chatter is frowned upon in the interest of a whole other
kind of preparation. In the afternoon we try to read Zong! This means we get together to
decide how to get together to decide how to read it. The implication of a collective enterprise
is now explicitI dont think anybody can do it by themselves. Philips memorial bouquet
faded, fading, murmured, submerged, displaced, misspaced, overlaid, is an effect of a range
of (a)voided superimposition exposed as beauty, the amplification of an associational field

that evokes the mutual aid that it also requires, the terrible intimacy of the irreparable
where everything is less and more than itself.

The logic of reparation is grounded on notions of originary wholeness, on the one hand, and
abstract / general equivalence, on the other. Baucom thinks this in relation to credit and
imagination but I wonder if its not really bound up with a strange kind of empiricism.
Whats the relation between the logic of reparation and the logic of representation? And
what does that relation have to do with telling the truth, or the story, or the whole truth, or
the whole story, with truth telling as a way of making whole? The normative arc of
becoming (a subject, a citizen) is part of this logic. What if there were a radical politics of
innovation whose condition of possibility is memory, which remains untranslated, whose
resistance, in turn, makes innovation possible? Not to resuscitate! No resurrection. Make it
new, like they used to say, so that indexicality is an effect, a technique, so that the recording
is part of an experimental impulse. The archive is an assemblage. The assemblage is an
image of disaster. But I just want you to enjoy yourself and I want you to believe that. This
is an enthusiasm. This is the new thing and a lot of what its about is just trying to figure
out how to say something. How to read. Not (or not only) how to offer a reading, or even an
interpretation, but a performance of a text, in the face of its unintelligibility, as if one were
forced/privileged to access some other other world where representation and
unrepresentability were beside the point, so that the response to the terrors and chances of
history were not about calculation, not bound to replicate, even in a blunted and ethically

10

responsible way, the horrors of speculation, where new materialities of imagination were
already on the other side of the logic of equivalence.

In a long set of unmade circles, the conditions and effects of miscommunication are brutal
and glorious. They keep going till you stopto revel in something that breaks you up; to
rebel in dread of reverse and whatever brings it because if there were nothing it would be
impossible and easier. Im trying to talk about zones of miscommunication + areas of
disaster + their affective ground and atmosphere and terrible beauty. Theyre the same but
really close to one another but unbridgeably far from one another, connected by some inside
stories we keep running from, the way people flee a broken park when the island is a
shipwreck. The crumbled refuge is a hold and a language lab. Half the school falls away
from the other half that escapes. Help in the form of a madmans persistent gunship. The
settlers exceptional and invasive mobile fortress. Aggressive, hovering neglect of the
instructor. He says the constant variety of distraction makes collaborating impossible and
the other storys been buried again, concrete taken for water. The serially disrupted plan
should have been disrupted but the disruption is serialthe same, enlarged catastrophe
whose sociomusical, sociopoetic anticipation will peek through every once in a while as
suppressed reports of suppression. Somebody has to imagine that, and how we keep dying
for the shit we live for. The slave trades death toll takes another shock today and still we
cannot quite engage, always a little turned away and elsewhere, a little alone. At 1:15 we
have to see if we want to figure out a way to work through this, which is to say in this. To

11

move in, which is to say through, the obscenity of poetry. This, too, is what Zong! is about,
having claimed the catastrophe.

Poetry is rhythm breaking something to say that broke rhythm, an afterlife installation
where knowledge takes the form of pauses, a soundscape made of risen questions, a
machine made out of what happened when we were together in the open in secret. It
miscommunicates catastrophe with unseemly festivity, in an obscenity of objection; it
knows not seems, it doesnt know like that, its Julianic showings go past meaning, in social
encryption, presuming the form of life whose submergence it represents. But it doesnt
represent. It more and less than represents. Theres a rough, unsutured transaction that
moves against repair to make a scar. The new thing is a scar. Its hard to look at something
when you cant look away. In Scenes of Subjection, Saidiya Hartman says re-dress is "a remembering of the social body that occurs through the recognition and articulation of
devastation, captivity and enslavement..." I dont know if redress is obscene; I just know that
its cognate with administration. The social life of poetry strains against a grammar that
seeks to defy both decay and generativity in the name of a self-possessed equivalence that,
in any case, you know you cant have because you know you cant have a case. Some folks
strive for that impossibility, rather than claim the exhaustion they are and have, as if this
were either the only world or the real one. Encrypted celebration of the ongoing encryption
is an analytic of the surreal world in and out of this one. Its not about cultural identity and
its not about origin; its the disruptive innovation of one and the voluntary evasion of the
other.

12

Catastrophe is the absence of the realistic account. Unflinching realism cannot account for
such exhaustion. Attempts at such accounting are brazen in their hubris unless whatever
such account moves up and down an incalculable scale. The assignment of a specific value
to the incalculable is a kind of terror. At the same time, the incalculable is the very
instantiation of value. The incalculable is what I think I mean by innovation. You could
think about it in relation to Hannah Arendts understanding of natality, but only by way of
a suspension of her stringent exclusions. This is Hartmans encryption. The logic of
reparation is vulgar. Its inseparable from representation understood as the thingwhich is
presumed to have a hole in it, whose fantasy in the hold is serially deniedmade whole. To
make whole, as if one could ever find completion, as if completion werent an absolute
brutality, as if the whole were static, as if it were the original, as if it were ever anything
other than more and less than itself, as if the simple logic of the synechdoche could ever
have been adequate to the mobile assemblage (the Benjaminian constellation where what
has been comes together with the now), is an act of violence. The thing made whole is a
heuristic device for attorneys and their post-literary critical clerks, who have no sense of
time. Meanwhile, Jetztsein is the supplement like Selassie is the chapel.

The commitment to repair is how a refusal to represent terror redoubles the logic of
representation. The refusal of our ongoing afterlife can only ever replicate a worn-out
grammar. The event remains, in the depths. The event-remains are deep and we stand
before them, to express them, as their expression. These bits are a mystery, a new machine

13

for the incalculable, which is next, having defied its starting place. I almost remembered this
in a dream, where we were just talking, and nothing happened, and then it was over, until
just now, with your hands, and light on the breezes edge. I just cant help feeling that this is
what were supposed to doto conserve what we are and what we can do by expansion,
whose prompt, more often than not, shows up as loss (which shows up, more often than
not, as a prompt). More shows up more often than nought if you can stand it.

Theres a mutual transformation that occurs when the thing is engaged, a mutual
supplement that serrates fantasmatic scenes of repair, that is always manifest as getting
through or past or behind it to its essence or its message. What if the message were
displaced by the ongoing production of code, which is our social life and what our social life
is meant to conserve? What if what we talked about under the rubric of silence were
discussed under the rubric of space? Or, in a different register, air? Or water? What is it like
to be in the world with some other thing? What does it mean to consider that the relation
between the reader, the poem, and history is spatial, a special relation, a north Atlantic
entreaty, a plea, an exhortation in the form of a world embrace in resistance to enclosure?
To speak the space-time of articulation as futurity, as projection? Theres a mutual
transportation that occurs when the poem is engaged, a mutual indirection that turns the
way back round, this beckoning descent onto the gallery floor or fire or flor or banquet or
bouquet.

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Fragmentation is also about more, an initiation of the works interior social life, a rending of
that interiority by the outside that materializes it. The logic of the supplement is
instantiated with every blur, every gliss, every melismatic torque, every twist of the drone,
every turn of held syllable. I want to attend to the necessary polyphony. I dont want to
represent anything and I dont want to repair anything but I do want to be here more, in
another way. I think, in the end, Zong! works this way but even if it doesnt work this way I
want it to work this way. I want to work it this way, in coded memory, as the history of no
repair, as the ongoing event of more and less than representing. Zong! is about what hasnt
happened yet. It is a bridge, which is to say a witness, to the ecstatic and general before. It
moves in the irreducible, multiply lined relation between document and speculation, where
the laws of time and history, of physics and biochemistry, are suspended, remade, in
transubstantiation. The ones who have been rendered speechless are given to and by a
speaker, in code, whose message, finally, is that there is speech, that there will have been
speech, that radical enunciation (announcement, prophecy, preface, introduction) is being
offered in its irreducible animateriality. No mercantile citizenship, no transcendental
subject, no neuro-typical self matters as much as this: the refusal of administration by those
who are destined for a life of being thrown, thrown out, thrown over, overlooked for their
enthusiasms, which they keep having to learn to look for and honor in having been thrown,
which keep coming to them, which they keep on coming upon, always up ahead, again and
again from way back, as out recording, submerged encoding, faded script that cant be
faded, joining the sound of the ones who have (been) sounded, under an absolute duress of

15

water, flesh that keeps speaking to us here and now, in contratechnical, counterstrophic,
macrophonic amplification of the incalculable.

At circle time on Thursday, Lorenzo declared that when he makes smores for Julian (which I
wasnt aware that hed ever done, because I think hes never done it) he makes them with
bricks, sticks and snow. He has become an anoriginal king of comedy. When everybody
stopped laughing all the other jokes started flying around. Have you ever seen a Bethany eat
another Bethany? Have you ever seen a Christopher eat a dishtopher? The circle broke up
into a whole bunch of fiery, delectable shapes driven further out by chocolate milk. Orchard
Hill School became the river of rivers in North Carolina (centrifugal curriculum, vigor, local
abstraction). Then it was time for me to go to real school and time for them to go to the
sleds. I wish my class were at the surreal school. Thats what Im trying for. But I have been
lecturing my ass off, driven by the Holy Ghost that Philip is giving away. The only way Im
gonna be able to shut up is to go to Chicago. But I hadnt gone yet last week so my poor
students had to bear with me, sitting around the table, while I repeated myself again, hoping
that it was in a different way and hoping that the difference mattered. Then I said, in
desparation, that the thing about this class is that I just want to be in a band, preferably
this band, pointing to the speakers, listening to that first modification of the one/s that
cause/s Baraka to use atom bomb and switchblade in the same phrase, Miles and them in
60, in Stockholm, with Wynton instead of Red, Jimmy instead of Philly Joe. Theres a spedup deepening of All Blues that was only gonna get faster and more lowdown over the next
handful of years as the universal machines kept blowing things up. From there we went back

16

to The Buzzard Song, a Gil Evans installation, arranged horns chasing measure into the
room with the moving walls. Abram said, Well, hes just so cool that he can play his way
out of any situation.

When we immerse ourselves in Zong!, throw ourselves into its terrible analytic of flesh, its
beautiful analyric of being-thrown, we are the touring machine, dedicated to the thinking of
the incalculable, suspended in the break of computation, held on the other side in always
being sent, saturated in what Edouard Glissantspeaking of the middle passage as an
insistent and ongoing worrying of inaugurationcalls the consent not to be a single
being, still in movement, in the quartets sober enthusiasm, from which the soloist flashes,
as striated glide, to introduce us, once again, to our multiplicity. Which reminds me of a
little girl named Mykah, noted for her refusal of administration, her resistance to
calculation, her tendency to get in over her head. She keeps caringly, carefully, not taking
care of herself with others all the time, is so exorbitantly common that she keeps folks
worried about her executive and her administrator, who seem too often to go on tour. One
day, standing in front of a hollow place in a tree almost big enough for them to enter,
Mykah said to my boy: Come on, Lorenzo, lets take a walk into the future.

In Will Sovereignty Ever Be Deconstructed, Catherine Malabou impatiently notes that

political philosophy is still organized by the problem of sovereignty. This might appear to
be a problem that political theory needs to overcome; on the other hand, perhaps the
problem is with politics. In other words, what if the theory of politics understands and

17

properly calculates its object? What if political philosophy is, and can be, nothing other
than the theory of sovereignty? What if the biopolitical deconstruction of sovereignty
(which Angela Mitropoulos describes as sovereigntys democratization and which we
might think of as the condition in which every properly self-possessed, property-owning
person is the king of his castle) marks the modern convergence of politics and its theory?
What if that convergence is the very constitution of our contemporaneity precisely
insofar as it keeps the strange untimeliness that demarcates what it is to be a
contemporary (to be an other for another as Frantz Fanon once said, in a kind of militant
despair)? What if our contemporaneity is the emergence of the citizen as general
equivalent (the abstract and empty signifier that Malabou aligns with the symbolic life of
those who are constrained to stand in for one another)? What if the citizen, serially
remade, as it were, by his right to life, which is given in the regulation of her life, is
nothing other than an executive function that turns out to be the form that sovereignty
takes, the way that it shows up, the airy structure of its phenomenality? Such appearance,
or manifestation, marks a movement that Malabou traces from natural history to
biologyfrom the political subject to the living subject. And the living subject, the
biologized subject, is not just vulnerable to but instantiated by a kind of
instrumentalization of the one who bears and is the regulated right to regulated life that
operates in and by way of something like a loss of enchantment, a purposive deficit that is
given in the turn from natural history to biology, predicated on the absence of a
teleological principle. When Immanuel Kant attempts to supply that principle is he
already engaged in something like the deconstruction of biopolitical deconstruction,

18

allowing the biological and the political to touch? This is, I think, an interesting and
nagging question, given the particular tools that he invents and deploys in the interest of
that deconstruction. Whats at stake is that resistance to instrumentalization is driven by
a kind of panic in the face of generativity and destruction, of a certain unregulated
interplay of fecundity and finitude that might be something like what Malabou has been
elaborating under the rubric of plasticity. The transcendental subject, the sovereign,
dispersed in and as the new citizen with a right to life, returns in the interest of a certain
security, in a way that recognizes what I think it is that animates Malabous essay, the
notion that there is nothing other than biological resistance to bio-power. She allows and
requires us to ask what if the bios is nothing other than mutual instrumentalization and,
even, indebtedness within a massive field of means without end/s? Then, biological
determination is what we would conceptualize, constantly and paradoxically, as a
necessary and unavoidable indeterminacy within the general structure of the interplay of
fecundity and finitude. This is what the re-introduction of plasticity allows us to
approach.
More pointedly, Malabous work requires consideration of the relationships
between law and the sovereign, the sovereign and the state? If its possible to detach law
from the state, as Robert Cover suggests, then it might also be possible to detach law from
the sovereign. Kant joins those philosophers who see the biological as an instrument of
power. He fears the play of life and death, which is characterized as the state of nature,
which Hobbes famously describes as the time men live without a common power to keep
them all in awe, [when] they are in that condition which is called war; and such a war as

19

is of every man against every man," delimiting life as "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and
short. Whats just as crucial as the assumption of the need for a common power to keep
men in awe is the simple fact that the anarchic in/determinations of the biological are
submitted to statist terminology, a kind of transcendental clue that seduces us to
consider its mirror image, that nature is nothing other than resistance to the
state/sovereign. Unseduced, Kant lays down a certain pathway, which more recently
Arendt follows and maps, that traces the interplay between teleological principle and the
state (a universal history whose cosmopolitan intent is carried out by sovereignty-indispersion). Along that line we would speak of the administration of/in natural history, as
opposed to biology, which has no executive. Insofar as Kant appeals to natural history he
tries to deconstruct biopolitical deconstruction; insofar as he remains committed to
sovereignty in the form of a kind of world citizenship, he remains committed to the
biopolitical deconstruction. Natural (or universal) history reifies and recollects the
dispersed sovereign. After all, even the critique or deconstruction of sovereignty is
structured as the very entity it tends to critique or deconstruct, says Malabou, such that
contemporary philosophers reaffirm the theory of sovereignty, that is the split between
the symbolic and the biological.13
By way of Foucault, and also by way of Eric Santners updating of Ernst
Kantorowicz, Malabou implies that the distinction between the symbolic and the
biological (given first in the medieval notion of the kings two bodies and then dispersed
throughout the citizenry) corresponds to the distinction between the body and (divested,
devalued [insofar as they have been assigned and reduced to an exchange value],

20

supposedly deanimated) flesh. She accesses Giorgio Agambens assertion that the bare life
of divested flesh is somehow incorporated into every body, as a kind of essence, that
dwells in the biological. Mere flesh is within, as well as outside, the symbolic economy, as
the thing itself of incorporative exclusion. Necessarily degraded essence, flesh is within, at
the core of, the body, as its reduction to the deathliness of merely living though the
merely living, homeless and adrift, are incapable, precisely in their unlocatability, of being
or having a body. The merely living fall short of the basic spatio-temporal requirements of
self-hood which is, in turn, the basic requirement of sovereignty. Flesh is
unaccommodated, which further implies the impossibility of something like an analytic
of flesh that might pierce the distinction between the biological and the symbolic by
thinking the flesh as invaluable, as the continual disruption of the very idea of (symbolic)
value, which moves by way of the reduction of substance. This is to say that the reduction
to substance (body to flesh) is inseparable from the reduction of substance. Saussure
speaks, for instance, of the reduction of phonic substance as a fundamental maneuver for
the formation of a universal science of language that is given in the terms of a theory of
value; some thinkers (Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan) endorse this reduction in their
different ways; others (such as Flix Guattari) assert that this materiality is irreducible;
Malabou refines and extends that assertion, challenging the ascription of non-value to the
one whose value is only in the arbitrariness of exchange or signification.
Malabous challenge echoes without fully acknowledging a recent history of the
theory of flesh that moves from detached analysis to immanent critique to ritual

21

celebration. Before Malabou, before Agamben, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Fanon, move
in a kind of mutual orbit.

And then we were given the occasion to confront the white gaze. An
unusual weight descended on us. The real world robbed us of our share. In the
white world, the man of color encounters difficulties in elaborating his body
schema. The image of ones body is solely negating. Its an image in the third
person. All around the body reigns an atmosphere of certain uncertainty. I know
that if I want to smoke, I shall have to stretch out my right arm and grab the pack
of cigarettes lying at the other end of the table. As for the matches, they are in the
left drawer, and I shall have to move back a little. And I make all these moves, not
out of habit, but by implicit knowledge. A slow construction of my self as a body in
a spatial and temporal worldsuch seems to be the schema. It is not imposed on
me; it is rather a definitive structuring of my self and the worlddefinitive
because it creates a genuine dialectic between my body and the world.
For some years now, certain laboratories have been searching for a
denegrification serum. In all seriousness they have been rinsing out their test
tubes and adjusting their scales and have begun research on how the wretched
black man could whiten himself and this rid himself of the burden of this bodily
curse. Beneath the bodily schema I had created a historical-racial schema. The
data I used were provided not by remnant of feelings and notions of the tactile,
vestibular, kinesthetic, or visual nature but by the Other, the white man, who had

22

woven me out of a thousand details, anecdotes, and stories. I thought I was being
asked to construct a psychological self, to balance space and localize sensations,
when all the time they were clamoring for more.14

my body is made of the same flesh as the world (it is perceived), and
moreover that this flesh of my body is shared by the world, the world reflects it,
encroaches upon it and it encroaches upon the world (the felt [senti] at the same
time the culmination of subjectivity and the culmination of materiality), they are
in a relation of transgression or of overlapping.
The touching itself, seeing itself of the body is itself to be understood in
terms of what we said of the seeing and the visible, the touching and the
touchable. I.e., it is not an act, it is a being at (tre ). To touch oneself, to see
oneself, accordingly, is not to apprehend oneself as an ob-ject, it is to be open to
oneself, destined to oneself (narcissism)Nor, therefore, is it to reach oneself, it is
on the contrary to escape oneself, to be ignorant of oneself, the self in question is
by divergence (dcart), is Unverborgenheit of the Verborgen as such, which
consequently does not cease to be hidden or latent
It is by the flesh of the world that in the last analysis once can understand
the lived body (corps proper)the flesh of the world is of the Being-seen, i.e., is a
Being that is eminently percipi, and it is by it that we can understand the percipere:
this perceived that we call my body applying itself to the rest of the perceived, i.e.,
treating itself as a perceived by itself and hence as a perceiving15

23

Merleau-Ponty discovers territory that Fanon had already begun to explore in MerleauPontys wake, namely the difference and relation between flesh and body and the theory
that emerges from bodily position and fleshly apposition (in and against and before
imposition). In Fanon, the reduction to flesh that is implied in the loss of bodily schema
is a reduction to the bare materiality of the thing whose very existence is ontologically
and epistemologically dark to itself. Flesh, in its unlocatable immanence, because it is
nowhere in being everywhere, nothing in being everything, is reduced to what it is made
to signify. The immaterial is not given in flesh as the very animation of the invaluable but
ascribed to or inscribed upon the flesh as mark/sign/value. Fanon is forced to inhabit the
double edge of this experiment; a dehiscence is imposed upon him, his torn flesh opened
to the experiments irruptive possibilities. Who could fathom such enjoyment? Is it to his
credit that Merleau-Ponty can want to approach it, that scandalous commitment to
phenomenological exploration of which Husserl speaks, revealing the close proximity of
coloniality to philosophy that Fanon had not only to interpret but also negotiate? In their
mutual orbit, where philosophical conquest is unsettled by a constant anti-colonial
insurgency, Merleau-Ponty and Fanon theorize the experimental inhabitation of flesh, in
and as the naked declivity of being-perceived, pierces objecthood, making possible body
and all the acts of consciousness that body, in turn, makes possible even unto the
establishment of a real presence, a full inhabitation of and with rather than a kind of
standing against or observinggiven in and as an openness to things.

24

After Fanon and Merleau-Ponty, but in a way that is before them, in anticipation
of them, Philip considers flesh that is mortified beyond the constraints of the symbolic
(within which the keeping/writing of books instantiates the self as a financial instrument)
in a violent hapticality while, for Toni Morrison, that hapticality brings us back to the
revelation that Merleau-Ponty imagines, which is only materialized after the fact of a
profound history of denial and deprivation that neither he nor Fanon hadnt fully taken
into accountthe impossibilities that follow from not having easy access to the lived
body due to the very possibility of bodys already having been overwhelmed by a
negative signification that takes the form of an imposition of race and a denial of gender.
Together, this quartet of the flesh of the world, exploring a general and generative
resistance to what ontology can think and narrative can tell, protect Malabous approach
to the investigation of what is it to achieve fleshliness and what is it to be relegated to it.
Her investment in flesh would, in turn, result in a kind of analytic, a complete lysis of
this morbid body that is the kings two bodies. What emerges in Philip and, here, in
Morrison, on the other hand, is a ceremonial poetics:

It started that way: laughing children, dancing men, crying women and
then it got mixed up. Women stopped crying and danced; men sat down and cried;
children danced, women laughed, children cried until, exhausted and riven, all and
each lay about the Clearing damp and gasping for breath. In the silence that
followed, Baby Suggs, holy, offered up to them her great big heart.

25

She did not tell them to clean up their lives or to go and sin no more. She
did not tell them they the blessed of the earth, its inheriting meek or its
glorybound pure.
She told them that the only grace they could have was the grace they could
imagine. That if they could not see it, they would not have it.
Here, she said, in this here place, we flesh: flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh
that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard. Yonder they do not love
your flesh. They despise it. They dont love your eyes; theyd just as soon pick em
out. No more do they love the skin on your back. Yonder they flay it. And O my
people they do not love your hands. Those they only use, tie, bind chop off and
leave empty. Love your hands! Love them. Raise them up and kiss them. Touch
others with them, pat them together, stroke them on your face cause they dont
love that either. You got to love it, you! And no, they aint in love with your mouth.
Yonder, out there, they will see it broken and break it again. What you say out of it
they will not heed. What you scream from it they do not hear. What you put into it
to nourish your body they will snatch away and give you leavins instead. No, they
dont love your mouth. You got to love it. This is flesh Im talking about here. Flesh
that needs to be loved.16

Is Baby Suggss fugitive sermon to the fugitives who embody the disruption of the
distinction between things and persons, her injunction to them to love the flesh that they
are, the flesh that has been unloved and devalued in an ongoing, violent valuation, an

26

attempt at reinvestment or does she preach the impossibility of fleshs divestment,

therein further implying something like a radical displacement of the symbolic and its
supposed force? This touches on a certain problematic of resurrection and
transubstantiation that comes into quite specific analytic relief in experience of, which is
always also to say over, the edge where being valued in exchange and having no value
outside of exchange converge. In the age of the biopolitical deconstruction of sovereignty,
such experience is racialized and gendered so that Malabous resounding of Derridas
insight that the dignity of life can only subsist beyond the present living being comes
fully into its own by way of the analytic of invaluable flesh that is given in that exhaustive
consent not to be a single being that Glissant locates in middle passages brutal
emergency. This is something Hortense Spillers elaborates in her grammar, which must
also be understood as a poetics, of (being-held in the terrible) interval.

First of all, their New-World, diasporic plight marked a theft of the body
a willful and violent (and unimaginable from this distance) severing of the captive
body from its motive will, its active desire. Under these conditions, we lose at least
gender difference in the outcome, and the female body and the male body become
a territory of cultural and political maneuver, not at all gender-related, genderspecific. But this body, at least from the point of view of the captive community,
focuses a private and particular space, at which point of convergence biological,
sexual, social, cultural, linguistic, ritualistic and psychological features join. This
profound intimacy of interlocking detail is disrupted, however, by externally

27

imposed meanings and uses: 1) the captive body becomes the source of an
irresistible, destructive sensuality; 2) at the same timein stunning
contradictionthe captive body reduces to a thing, becoming being for the captor;
3) in this absence from a subject position, the captured sexualities provide a
physical and biological expression of otherness; 4) as a category of otherness,
the captive body translates into a potential for pornotroping and embodies sheer
physical powerlessness that slides into a more general powerlessness, resonating
through various centers of human and social meaning.
But I would make a distinction in this case between body and flesh and
impose that distinction as the central one between captive and liberated subjectpositions. In that sense, before the body there is the flesh, that zero degree of
social conceptualization that does not escape concealment under the brush of
discourse, or the reflexes of iconography. Even though the European hegemonies
stole bodiessome of them femaleout of West African communities in concert
with the African middleman, we regard this human and social irreparability as
high crimes against the flesh, as the person of the African females and African
males registered the wounding. If we think of the flesh as a primary narrative,
then we mean its seared, divided, ripped-apartness, riveted to the ships hole,
fallen, or escaped overboard.17

Against and through every erasure, every legal record, every historiographic forgetting,
every patrimonial repression, Spillers argues, this materialized scene of unprotected

28

female fleshof female flesh ungenderedoffers a praxis and a theory, a text for living
and for dying, and a method for reading both through their diverse mediations.18 Bare
life is supposed to be (degraded) essence, sacred and sacrificable. But flesh and bare life
are not the same. If, as Malabou suggests, the space which separates bare life from the
biological body can only be the space of the symbolic, then flesh is the biological that, in
its finitude and fecundity, is before the body. The biological is the essence of the symbolic
(its impetus, its initiation) just as flesh is the essence of the body. Essence is, here, as
Malabou suggests, neither and both inside and outside. It has no place, it is insofar as it is
displacement. Flesh might then also be thought as the irreducible materiality of
Derridean differance, the non-full, non-simple structured and differentiating origin of
differences.19
Perhaps Malabou would say, by way of Levi-Strauss, that flesh, as Spillers theorizes
it, as Morrison recites it, is a floating signifier, possessing a value zero that it is the very
engine of the symbolic, the very instantiation of valuation. And they would agree except
for the fact that it also constitutes the most radical endangerment of the system of value,
of the symbolic, of the discursive. What happens, then, if the traditional placement of
flesh within the outer depths of the kings twosymbolic and biologicalbodies is
refused by the Africanist presences fleshly, thingly displacement of American grammar?
What happens, then, if we follow Mamas Baby Suggs in claiming the monstrosity of
mere flesh? This is another way of thinking about Malabous assertion of the brains
plasticity, its explosive capacity to give and take form, which emerges for her most
recently and most emphatically, in the impossible experience of the those with severe

29

brain injury or impairment, the ones she calls the new wounded, la nouvelle blesse. It
allows us to imagine Malabou desire to put an end to the split between the two bodies,
the symbolic and the biological, being performed in lingering for a while in/with the
unclaimed experience of fleshthe merely biological, the mottled biothanatical, which is,
itself, supposed to make no claims, which cannot, itself, be claimed though it can be
bought and sold. Or to imagine, more broadly, that the discourse of cognitive science
would take the deviant, non-neurotypical imagination of the Lorenzo bird, the lover and
the poet as its new, constantly self-disruptive standard. What they know of their blessing
is given in what they know of their woundedness, by way of the analytic that flesh makes
possible, as if there were something already there, in the persistence of its difference
from, rather than in its reintegration with, the discursive body, in and as its very
exhaustion and exhaustibility. This is what is given in and as Baby Suggss festival of
things.
There is something in the flesh, in its disintegration from and of the body, its
personality, and its place. There is something to be thought from the fleshs givenness in
displacement, the violence it does to positionality that instantiates positional violence.
Sovereignty may very well be located or instantiated in the split between the kings two
bodies but this still requires us to consider that sovereignty, which can never be separated
from the (symbolic) body, is detachable from the (biological) flesh, which would justify
some interest in the fleshliness, the thingliness, of the ones whose sovereignty,
subjectivity, citizenship and selfhood are placed in question, in a question they consent to
inhabit. It is this inalienable heritability of owned, disowned, unowned flesh and not my

30

body that makes such questioning resound while rendering the difference and distance
between the kings two bodies inoperative and inarticulate. The merger and dispersion of
those bodies is biopolitics. In this sense, the merger of bios and ta politika is inseparable
from and is manifest as the political rejection of the biological, which is given in the
regulative conferral of the right to life. This is why, as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has
suggested, the first right must be the right to refuse, and not to have, rights, even if it is
exercised as the refusal of what has been refused which is, in the end, the monstrous
emergence that occurs where right, power, life and death converge.
In her desire for a rehabilitation of the biological that will have been accomplished
by way of a liberation of continental philosophy from the rigid separation it has always
maintained between the biological, hence the material, and the symbolic, that is the nonmaterial, or the transcendental, Malabou might be said to cause the brain to appear as
re-invested, symbolical, transcendental, flesh.20 But, in this regard, isnt the
deconstruction of biopolitical deconstruction still a sovereign operation? Not only in
Malabous work but also in a great deal of philosophical reflection and cultural criticism,
isnt the brain, in a way that flesh precisely exhausts, where the sovereign (the executive;
the administrator) is said now to reside? Maybe the trouble we have with the kings head,
its indefatigable resistance to all our would-be decapitative weaponry, is that it has a
brain in it. Maybe we can appose the transcendental brain, and its scientistic
underwriting of self-concern, to the fleshs dislocative immanence. Malabou says, We are
the authors of our own brains.21 But who are we? How can we resist a tendency to
isolate the brain from the rest of our (phenotypical/genotypical) flesh so that

31

authorship doesnt reify an old administrative or executive function that is nothing other
than a new version of sovereignty? How can we prevent the bodys inspirited materiality
(the brain) leaving the flesh behind? Or a plasticization of sovereignty, which is also a
placement of sovereignty, a reconfiguration or opening of sovereigntys place, leaving
behind what flesh-in-displacement allows us to think, a new analytic of sociality, a new
analytic of thingliness-in-festivity?
In the end, Id like you to consider that the transition from a philosophy, or a
natural history, to a biology of race accompanies and informs the pseudoscientific
emergence of what we now recognize as the science of the brain; and that the Kantian
revolution in moral, aesthetic and political theory, and the theory of mind, are fatefully
and fatally coupled with and enabled by the invention of the philosophical concept of
race that submits difference to a sovereign power that will have been both refined (in the
recovery of a single originary purpose, a monogenetic impetus) and dispersed (wherein
that purpose is, as it were, replicated and reproduced as human mental endowment). Do
so while keeping in mind that the revolution in theories and techniques of computation
(especially the computation of risk and maritime positioning that helped significantly to
fuel the transition from mercantilism to [the interplay of the dispersion of sovereignty
and the refinement of private accumulation and the conceptualization and regulative
exclusion of externalities that we call] capitalism) that began to emerge in the midnineteenth century with the work of Charles Babbage and which took more immediately
practical and efficient shape in the mid twentieth century by way of the contributions of
Alan Turing, Norbert Wiener and others coincide roughly with the inception and return

32

of Afro-diasporic revolutionary social movement and the new modes of consciousness

(and their globalized dispersal) such movement reflected and helped to shape. The desire
to study the black insurgency whose traces remain in and as the dissemination of phonic
substance in literature and music is now inseparable from attending to the history of the
interplay of calculation, displacement and abolition. Baby Suggss musicin the noise it
brings to the opposition of score and performance, writing and reading; in its insistent
worrying of the executive linepreserves what Foucault once called the thought of the
outside so that the potential solipsism that autonomy and autopoiesis might be said to
carry is given over to a desire for the informal, which will have been given, or will have
been seen to have been instantiated, in every held, unheld, ruptured, ruptural social
generativity that goes over the edge. Over the edge of the ship. Overboard. Thrown.
Fallen. Inescaped. The touring machine is a diving bell, an instrument for sounding that
becomes, at the end of exhaustion, ascent, accent, a certain song like, sing song quality, a
sing sing sing kinda quality, a fugitive sing sing kinda thing, an instrument whose forced
movement in thinking the unregulated, the un-self-possessed, the un-self-concerned, its
rubbed, performed, informal interiority, its flash, is flesh thought inside out.
1

Jerry Fodor, Fire the Press Secretary, London Review of Books 28 (April 2011): 24.

Fodor, Fire the Press Secretary, 25; Michel Foucault, Technologies of the Self, Luther

H. Martin, Huck Gutman & Patrick H. Hutton, ed. Technologies of the Self: A Seminar
with Michel Foucault (Amherst: The University Press of Massachusetts, 1988) 31.
3

See Theodore A. Harris & Amiri Baraka, Our Flesh of Flames (Philadelphia: Anvil Arts

Press, 2008).
33

Foucault, Technologies of the Self, 18.

See Nahum Chandler, Of Exorbitance: The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for

Thought, Criticism 50:3 (Summer 2008): 345-410.

6

Fodor, Fire the Press Secretary, 24.

Robert Kurzban, Why Everyone (Else) Is a Hypocrite: Evolution and the Modular Mind

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011) 22.

8

Fodor, Fire the Press Secretary, 24.

See David Kazanjian, The Colonizing Trick: National Culture and Imperial Citizenship in

Early America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004) 27. There, Kazanjian
writes that in the strictest sense the term refers to the process of igniting a liquid, of
turning a liquid into flame. Here, I interpret such a process less as a breaking out of chaos
than as a material transformation with powerful effects. Flashpoint in this sense refers to
the process by which someone or something emerges or bursts into action or being, not
out of nothing but transformed from one form to another; and, it refers to the powerful
effects of that emergence or transformation. In his concern with the conjunction of form
and explosiveness, Kazanjian takes a theoretical path that can be said to parallel that of
Catharine Malabou. In his concern with the irreducible sociality of the flash, Kazanjian
can be said to diverge from or overrun Malabou, about whom more later.
10

Fodor, Fire the Press Secretary, 25.

11

Im thinking a very specific interpenetration, which is, I think, only disguised as an

impenetrability. The first permutation/permeation emerges in part of an epigraph for

Polly Greenberg, The Devil Has Slippery Shoes: A Biased Biography of the Child
34

Development Group of Mississippi (London: The Macmillan Company, 1969) xv: Course
CDGMs good, said a large lady from Lauderdale County. Cept the things about it thats
bad. Theres a lotta good folks come here to help us. Course, theres a lot just come to
cause a fuss too. And the federal governments finally recognized us down herecourse
sometimes that aint so good, cause for every smile it gives us, it gives us a kick too. Well,
at least its got us colored peoples workin for oursels. Cept the ones that wont. One
thing, though, its great for the kids. Ony thing, its kinda hard on em when they get to
real school and it aint like our school. Gods helpin us, aint no doubt. Its just that the
Devil keeps skippin in and outa things sos we wont get spoilt. He really keeps you
guessin! Each thing, you gotta study it to see if its God in the disguise of difficulty, or the
Devil in the disguise of somebody good. This whole thing really keep us workin our
mind. The second comes into relief in Noam Chomsky, What We Know: On the
Universals of Language and Rights, Boston Review (Summer 2005). A significant insight
of the first cognitive revolution was that properties of the world that are informally called
mental may involve unbounded capacities of a finite organ, the infinite use of finite
means, in Wilhelm von Humboldts phrase. In a rather similar vein, Hume had
recognized that our moral judgments are unbounded in scope, and must be founded on
general principles that are part of our nature though they are beyond our original
instincts. That observation poses Huartes problem in a different domain, where we
might find part of the thin thread that links the search for cognitive and moral universals.
By mid-20th century, it had become possible to face such problems in more substantive
ways than before. By then, there was a clear understanding, from the study of recursive
35

functions, of finite generative systems with unbounded scopewhich could be readily

adapted to the reframing and investigation of some of the traditional questions that had
necessarily been left obscurethough only some, it is important to stress. Humboldt
referred to the infinite use of language, quite a different matter from the unbounded
scope of the finite means that characterizes language, where a finite set of elements yields
a potentially infinite array of discrete expressions: discrete, because there are six-word
sentences and seven-word sentences, but no 6.2 word sentences; infinite because there is
no longest sentence (append I think that to the start of any sentence). Another
influential factor in the renewal of the cognitive revolution was the work of ethologists,
then just coming to be more widely known, with their concern for the innate working
hypotheses present in subhuman organisms (Nikolaas Tinbergen) and the human a
priori (Konrad Lorenz), which should have much the same character. That framework
too could be adapted to the study of human cognitive organs (for example, the language
faculty) and their genetically determined nature, which constructs experience and guides
the general path of development, as in other aspects of growth of organisms, including
the human visual, circulatory, and digestive systems, among others.
12

Angela Mitropoulos, Oikopolitics, and Storms, The Global South 3:1 (Spring 2009): 68.

13

Catherine Malabou, Will Sovereignty Ever Be Deconstructed? pagination unkn (Im

assuming youll want to refer to the pagination in the book).

14

Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, Richard Philcox, trans. (New York: Grove Press,

2008) 90-91.

36

15

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible (Followed by Working Notes).

Claude Lefort, ed. Alphonso Lingis, trans. (Evanston: Northwestern University Press,
1968) 248-50.
16

17

Toni Morrison, Beloved. (New York: Plume, 1988) 88.

Hortense J. Spillers, Mamas Baby, Papas Maybe: An American Grammar Book,

Diacritics 17:2 (Summer, 1987): 67.

18

Spillers, Mamas Baby, 68.

19

Jacques Derrida, Diffrance, Alan Bass, trans. Margins of Philosophy (Chicago: The

University of Chicago Press, 1985) 11.

20

Malabou, Will Sovereignty Ever be Deconstructed? page unkn.

21

Malabou, Will Sovereignty Ever be Deconstructed? page unkn.

37