Articles by Denise Ferreira da Silva
E-Flux, 2019
Because how refers to what has and has not already been done, to what takes place at this exact m... more Because how refers to what has and has not already been done, to what takes place at this exact moment and in that other unimagined place, because how recalls infinity, all I do here is share with you another possible how, another black feminist doing, inspired by the kind of sensibility announced when one attends to doings that are always and simultaneously feats, deeds, burdens, artifacts. When contemplating such sensibility, I have in mind the works of many black female thinkers and artists, but it has been inspired particularly by the speculative/science-fiction writer Octavia E. Butler, the poet Ai Ogawa, and the artists Otobong Nkanga and Simone Leigh. More particularly, I am moved by the many presentations of matter that I find in their work. All of them are highly sophisticated and carefully composed texts or objects, whose raw materials (what is used as material content in their composition) refer to the past and present configurations of the global (juridic, economic, and symbolic) context, which they make available to the critical gaze through beautiful visual or written compositions
Searching for Contemporary Legal Thought Edited by Justin Desautels-Stein & Christopher Tomlins, University of California, Berkeley School of Law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, , 2017
This is a book chapter. Analysis of policy brutality, in particular a reading of the opening sta... more This is a book chapter. Analysis of policy brutality, in particular a reading of the opening statements in the court case on the killing of Amadou Diallo
E-Flux, 2018
What is it that a black feminist poethics makes available? What can it offer to the task of unthi... more What is it that a black feminist poethics makes available? What can it offer to the task of unthinking the world, of releasing it from the grips of the abstract forms of modern representation and the violent juridic and economic architectures they support? If it is a practice of imaging and thinking (with/in/for) the world, without separability, determinacy, and sequentiality, then it approaches reflection as a kind of study, or as the play of the imagination without the constraints of the understanding. And, if the task is unthinking this world with a view to its end—that is, decolonization, or the return of the total value expropriated from conquered lands and enslaved bodies—the practice would not aim at providing answers but, instead, would involve raising questions that both expose and undermine the Kantian forms of the subject, that is, the implicit and explicit positions of enunciation—in particular, the loci of decision or judgement or determination—this subject occupies.
PhiloSOPHIA, 2018
“Take our differences and make them our strengths”—the poet’s inten- tion recalls the black femin... more “Take our differences and make them our strengths”—the poet’s inten- tion recalls the black feminist position as trouble. For it refuses to disappear into the general categories of otherness or objecthood, that is, blackness and womanhood, and refuses to comply with the formulations of racial and gender- sexual emancipatory projects these categories guide.1 At once an experiment and performance, this essay takes up Sojourner Truth’s question(ing) as an invitation to rebel. Heeding a long line of the “unacceptable women,” I stage a confrontation between the female figuring of blackness and the very notions of the subject, “object,” and the “other” that organize feminist and black and other critical discourses on difference. With this return to the problem of difference, I tackle the current circumstance; that is, how, as deconstruction becomes part of the common vocabulary, there seems to be a return to the “good” old themes of modern philosophy, in reaffirmations both of the subject and its ability to produce “objective descriptions” and of its “mathematical” access to “truth,” which explicitly and implicitly disavow critical affirmations of social (race, gender, sexual) difference as grounds for challenging modern architectures, practices, and texts.2 Returning to the theme of difference, I experiment with a black radical procedure designed to counter recent reactionary moves by European philosophers and theorists. More explicitly, I propose that the object (as figured in modern political philosophy and the arsenal of racial knowledge and the practices and discourses these sustained) emerging as subject of a critical address interrupts such refashionings of modern themes disguised as critical departures from deconstruction (as Bruno Latour argues) or from postmodern deviations of proper philosophy (as Alain Badiou argues); for many reasons, but most importantly, because of how such easy returns to “objectivity” (Latour) and “truth” (Badiou) do not even pretend to contemplate the instances in which the human itself emerges as an “object,” as registered by raciality, sexuality, and other modern concepts.
Link to the article: http://www.e-flux.com/journal/79/94686/1-life-0-blackness-or-on-matter-beyon... more Link to the article: http://www.e-flux.com/journal/79/94686/1-life-0-blackness-or-on-matter-beyond-the-equation-of-value/
"What if blackness referred to rare and obsolete definitions of matter: respectively, “substance … of which something consists” and “substance without form”? How would this affect the question of value? What would become of the economic value of things if they were read as expressions of our modern grammar and its defining logic of obliteration? Would this expose how the object (of exchange, appreciation, and knowledge)—that is, the economic, the artistic, and the scientific thing—cannot be imagined without presupposing an ethical (self-determining) thing, which is its very condition of existence and the determination of value in general?2 Black Lives Matter, as both a movement and a call to respond to everyday events of racial violence (the killing of unarmed black persons by police) that rehearse the ethical syntax that works through/as the liberal democratic state,3 signals a political subject emerging in the scene of obliteration through a sentence without a (self-determined) subject."
Returning to Wendy Brown’s The Time of the Political reminded me of Hannah Arendt’s comments on E... more Returning to Wendy Brown’s The Time of the Political reminded me of Hannah Arendt’s comments on Eichmann’s affect, in the postscript of her report: “Eichmann was not Iago and not Macbeth … he had no motive at all (…) He merely, to put the matter colloquially, never realized what he was doing. (…) He was not stupid. It was sheer thoughtlessness -- … -- that predisposed him to become of the greatest criminals of that period.” More precisely, I find their seemingly different takes on the banal refers to the workings on separability, as both rest on double distinction, which places racial subjugation outside of the ‘proper’ domain of political theory. Explicitly, this distinction appears as racial matters are place in a moral (social or cultural) terrain, where affectability (emotions and attachments) rules; implicitly, however, it refers to a deep layer of modern thought, in which raciality functions among the conditions of possibility for articulating the proper subject of the Political as a self-determined (self-regulated or self-transparent) existent while affectability is attributed to everything (bodies, minds, places, and more-than-humans) that is not white/European. When considering the distinctions organizing Brown’s 1997 piece, with an attention to the deeper layers, it becomes evident why she lists the beating of Rodney King, the OJ Simpson trial and the Hill-Thomas hearings among the ‘banal events’ that do concern ‘proper’ political theorizing
Everyone knows, whether or not they have actually danced to Donna Summer’s Love to Love You Baby,... more Everyone knows, whether or not they have actually danced to Donna Summer’s Love to Love You Baby, on dance floors too small for disco’s most expansive moves, that without blacklight the scene would lose eighty percent of its glamour. Though invisible to the human eye, ultraviolet radiation turns opaque things into luminous ones. In other words, blacklight does not illuminate: it makes things emanate or shine. For this reason, it is perfect for the task of imaging a reading procedure which, instead of relying on transparency, moves to dissolve it: a compositional practice designed to decompose the abstract forms (the concept and categories) of the understanding and reflection which both presuppose and rehearse the occlusion of colonial violence and indifference to racial violence. Here I activate blacklight as a poethical tool, a black feminist device for tracing correspondences that can expose how the juridical and economic architectures of colonial/racial violence enter into the very construction of the analytical tools available to critiques of global capital. Focusing blacklight on the already known, I hope to clear the grounds for a recomposition of the ethical scene of value, thereby opening the way for a thinking that exposes the deeper implication of the “spaces of shine” and “places of obscurity” which Otobong Nkanga exposes in her work. In this experiment, instead of offering an alternative descriptor of the scene of value, blacklight transudes historical materialist concepts and categories and reaches the depths of Marx’s account of value. In doing so, it allows me to dive in, as it makes shine the obscurations that maintain transparency as the proper descriptor of modern onto-epistemological devices (concepts and categories), ethical grammar (principles and procedures), and juridic-economic architectures (practices and methods).
Feminist Legal Studies, 2011
The comments of the roundtable presenters are reproduced here (with minor revisions), along with ... more The comments of the roundtable presenters are reproduced here (with minor revisions), along with a response from Eve Darian-Smith.
Ethnicities, Sep 1, 2005
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Resumo: Quando é que se tornou uma trivialidade -mais do que uma evidência, mas ainda não uma "ve... more Resumo: Quando é que se tornou uma trivialidade -mais do que uma evidência, mas ainda não uma "verdade" óbvia -o fato de que um número considerável (cuja dimensão talvez nunca seja conhecida) de jovens do sexo masculino e do sexo feminino sucumbe como sujeitos da violência infringida para preservação da lei? Neste artigo, esse questionamento guia uma reflexão acerca de uma dimensão da existência global contemporânea que deveria se tornar tema da teoria política. Descreve-se, aqui, um cenário político no qual os braços do Estado -a polícia e o Exército -empregam total violência como tática de regulação. Mais especificamente, faz-se uma leitura das ocupações empreendidas pelo Estado nas regiões economicamente desfavorecidas -onde os traficantes de drogas competem para instituir a "lei do lugar" -como representações de um tipo diferente de contrato de fundação, significantes da violência racial. Nessa abordagem do cenário político (ético-jurídico), os corpos mortos dos adolescentes negros e mulatos contam não como baixas de guerras urbanas, mas como significantes do horizonte da morte, pois a existência . "Meus agradecimentos a Joseph Pugliese, Maria Giannacopoulos, Mark A. Harris e a meus alunos de pós-graduação Maile Arvin, Rashné Limki, Kit Myers e Angela (Angie) Morrill, pelos comentários, questionamentos e inspirações. Todos contribuíram enormemente para o que há de bom neste trabalho e não têm responsabilidade alguma pelo que não estiver bom".
Truth' and ideology (as error or falsity), like any other oppositional terms, take up the same pr... more Truth' and ideology (as error or falsity), like any other oppositional terms, take up the same productive powers and necessarily track each other very closely. Not much is necessary for any statement to move from the former into the latter field. My review of the main twentieth-century lines of Brazilian racial studies, in this introduction, traces how they have moved miscegenation and racial democracy back and forth across the border between social scientific 'truth' and racial ideology. Because the papers included in this issue, rather than repeating this move, address how these socio-historical signifiers inform the contemporary Brazilian social configuration, they move beyond the predicament shared by both narratives of the nation and social scientific accounts of racial subjection in Brazil.
This article revisits the theme of representation by examining the relationship between differenc... more This article revisits the theme of representation by examining the relationship between difference and transparency. I argue that the current purchase of multiculturalism and diversity marks the 'officialization' of the 1980s politics of difference, which refashioned previous formulations of racial and cultural difference without challenging their ontological premises. Through a reading of the Bloco Olodum's 1988s carnival lyrics, I chart the articulation of signifiers of Africanity, as a marker of cultural difference, which writes the black Brazilian as subaltern subject without producing a particular version of a (self-)transparent (interior/temporal) African subject. Instead, in this emancipatory text, Africanity delimits a region of subalternity, one inhabited by Africans and economically dispossessed blacks in the diaspora, which is defined in terms of a political struggle that marks their existence in post-Enlightenment social configurations. Not only does the interpretive strategy I deploy show how an attention to social scientific knowledge's role in production of modern (post-Enlightenment) subject is crucial for a critique of the notion of difference informing the global principles of multiculturalism and diversity. More importantly, it also indicates why the logic of exclusion, the prevailing account of social subjection has been now added to the arsenal of racial subjection.
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Articles by Denise Ferreira da Silva
"What if blackness referred to rare and obsolete definitions of matter: respectively, “substance … of which something consists” and “substance without form”? How would this affect the question of value? What would become of the economic value of things if they were read as expressions of our modern grammar and its defining logic of obliteration? Would this expose how the object (of exchange, appreciation, and knowledge)—that is, the economic, the artistic, and the scientific thing—cannot be imagined without presupposing an ethical (self-determining) thing, which is its very condition of existence and the determination of value in general?2 Black Lives Matter, as both a movement and a call to respond to everyday events of racial violence (the killing of unarmed black persons by police) that rehearse the ethical syntax that works through/as the liberal democratic state,3 signals a political subject emerging in the scene of obliteration through a sentence without a (self-determined) subject."
"What if blackness referred to rare and obsolete definitions of matter: respectively, “substance … of which something consists” and “substance without form”? How would this affect the question of value? What would become of the economic value of things if they were read as expressions of our modern grammar and its defining logic of obliteration? Would this expose how the object (of exchange, appreciation, and knowledge)—that is, the economic, the artistic, and the scientific thing—cannot be imagined without presupposing an ethical (self-determining) thing, which is its very condition of existence and the determination of value in general?2 Black Lives Matter, as both a movement and a call to respond to everyday events of racial violence (the killing of unarmed black persons by police) that rehearse the ethical syntax that works through/as the liberal democratic state,3 signals a political subject emerging in the scene of obliteration through a sentence without a (self-determined) subject."
https://www.theshowroom.org/exhibitions/denise-ferreira-da-silva-and-arjuna-neuman-4-waters-deep-implicancy
The collaboration began with the discovery of a sunken slave ship, and an artist asking a philosopher – how do we get to the post-human without technology? And the philosopher replying – maybe we can make a film without time.
The result is a video that speaks from inside the cut between slavery and resource extraction, between black lives matter and the matter of life, between the state changes of elements, timelessness and tarot.
Together we ask: what becomes of the human if expressed by the elements?
Serpent Rain is a collaboration with Denise Ferreira Da Silva and commissioned by Stefano Harney for The Bergen Assemb
How might we map the complex meanings evoked by the political questions that concern us in all of our different groupings? If institutional forms of care, with their objective, distanced reason, are intimately linked with oppressive forms of contemporary life, what tools could we use instead? Maybe un-reasonable, intuitive, ethical, non-colonial, anti-therapeutic, open, complicating ways of ‘reading’ the situation would be more productive
For two weeks they will set up a Sensing Salon, a studio for the practice of healing arts. The studio is designed to open a conversation about expanding existing ideas of art, to include the healing arts. It also creates a space where they can work together with London’s migrant communities, and include neglected traditional healing practices as well as rehearsing new ones.
Healing, as much as art, is a praxis. It is something to do. Even when you ask a physician about what’s really happening they can never answer, because they don’t know exactly, but there are thing that can be done - treatments, which in the case of modern medicine is very invasive – through which the body comes back to some kind of integration.
Part of the Hotbed Festival
In his famous essay ‘Discourse on Colonialism’ poet Aimé Césaire* argued that what in Europe is called ‘fascism’ is just colonial violence finding its way back home**. The carceral state, ethnonationalisms and imperial warfare are, one could argue, different facets of what Nikhil Pal Singh termed ‘the afterlife of fascism but the relation of settler colonialism to Fascism and National Socialism remains under-theorized and poorly understood.
The aim of the present series of events is to challenge the Eurocentrism that undergirds the current concept of Fascism, and to tackle the under-theorized relation between settler colonialism and national socialism via the ‘proto-totalitarian’ scene of colonial expansion and its racialized concept of personhood, in order to address, and by extension counter, the antipolitical nature of a concept such as the West, and the resurgence of fascist doctrines this notion engenders.
Le Master de Recherche CCC RP [les pratiques de recherche critiques, curatoriales, cybernétiques, conceptuelles, contemporaines, communales] du département Arts Visuels de la HEAD Genève est un programme pluridisciplinaire, transdisciplinaire, transnational et multilingue qui s'attache à exprimer le spécifique dans la condition mondiale contemporaine. Le programme forme les étudiant•e•x•s (venant de formations artistiques ou non) au développement d'une méthodologie située pour matérialiser, par les moyens de l'artexpérimentation, un projet de recherche. Les champs d'application futurs des étudiant•e•x•s sont l'art contemporain, les projets curatoriaux, les organismes extra-gouvernementaux, les collaborations avec la recherche scientifique, les musées, l'activisme, les plateformes communautaires, les plateformes auto-gérées, les droits humains ou les doctorats centrés sur la pratique. Les langues du séminaire sont l'anglais et le français. L'année académique 2021/22 circule autour des questions de transmission d'un processus de recherche, vers une émergence publique, aux côtés des processus de "décolonisation, qui est le seul nom propre de la justice." (Denise Ferreira da Silva, 2018).
Seminar languages are English and French.