Some critics will take it upon themselves to remind us that the proposition has a converse. I say that this is false.
The
black man has no ontological resistance in the eyes of the white man.
1
This passage
, and the ontological (absence of)
drama it represents,
leads us to
a set of fundamental
questions. How do we think the possibility and the law of outlawed,
impossible things?
And if, as Frantz Fanon suggests,
the black cannot be an other for another black, if the black can
only be an other for a white, then is there ever anything called black social life?
Is the designation of this or that thing as
lawless, and the assertion that such lawlessness is a function of an already extant flaw, something more than that trying, even neurotic, oscillation between the
exposure and the replication of a regulatory maneuver whose force is held precisely in the assumption that it comes before what it would contain? What's the relation
between explanation and resistance?
Who bears the responsibility of discovering an ontology of, or of
discovering
for
ontology, the ensemble of political, aesthetic,
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]
and philosophical derangements
that comprise the being that is neither for itself nor for the other?
What form of life makes such discovery
possible as well as necessary?
Would we know it by its flaws, its impurities? What might an impurity in a worldview actually be? Impurity implies a
kind of non-completeness, if not absence, of a worldview.
Perhaps that non-completeness signals an originarily criminal refusal
of the interplay of framing and grasping, taking and keeping—a certain reticence at the ongoing advent of
the age of the world picture. Perhaps it is the reticence of the grasped, the enframed, the taken, the kept—
or, more precisely, the reluctance that disrupts grasping and framing, taking and keeping—as
epistemological stance as well as accumulative activity. Perhaps this is the flaw that attends essential,
anoriginal impurity—the flaw that accompanies impossible origins and deviant translations.
2
What's at
stake is fugitive movement
in and out of the frame, bar, or whatever externally imposed social logic—
a movement of escape, the
stealth of the stolen that can be said, since it inheres in every closed circle, to break every enclosure.
This
fugitive movement
is stolen life, and its relation to law is reducible neither to simple interdiction nor bare
transgression.
Part of what can be attained in this zone of unattainability, to which the eminently attainable ones have been relegated, which they occupy but
cannot (and refuse to) own, is some sense of the fugitive law of movement that makes black social life ungovernable, that demands a para-ontological disruption of the
supposed connection between explanation and resistance.
