John E. Drabinski

The multi-century event of enslavement and colonialism changed the cultural and political imagination of the Atlantic world. We still live and work in the horizon of that event. It was an event that placed a violent Manichean structure of antiblackness at the foundation of our shared world. What kinds of life are possible in nihilistic, antiblack worlds of social death? Is it possible to imagine life outside the reach of those worlds? What decolonial methods help us understand that form of life in relation to expressive cultures of resistance and refusal? At the Margins of Nihilism develops a theoretical frame through a comparative reading of Jacques Derrida and Orlando Patterson. Reading between deconstruction and social death, Drabinski describes a notion of life as interstitial, situated outside the play of life and death in systems of antiblackness. This notion of life has broad epistemological, existential, and ontological implications. Drawing from a diverse set of sources including Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, Gloria Anzaldúa, and others, At the Margins of Nihilism shows how the nihilisms of Richard Wright, Frantz Fanon, James Baldwin, and contemporary afropessimism operate as a closed system. Each system is opened by vernacular forms of life and practices of refusal. Those forms and practices speak to the power and significance of life that persists across centuries of antiblack culture, social life, and political hegemony.

The multi-century event of enslavement and colonialism changed the cultural and political imagination of the Atlantic world. We still live and work in the horizon of that event. It was an event that placed a violent Manichean structure of antiblackness at the foundation of our shared world. What kinds of life are possible in nihilistic, antiblack worlds of social death? Is it possible to imagine life outside the reach of those worlds? What decolonial methods help us understand that form of life in relation to expressive cultures of resistance and refusal? At the Margins of Nihilism develops a theoretical frame through a comparative reading of Jacques Derrida and Orlando Patterson. Reading between deconstruction and social death, Drabinski describes a notion of life as interstitial, situated outside the play of life and death in systems of antiblackness. This notion of life has broad epistemological, existential, and ontological implications. Drawing from a diverse set of sources including Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, Gloria Anzaldúa, and others, At the Margins of Nihilism shows how the nihilisms of Richard Wright, Frantz Fanon, James Baldwin, and contemporary afropessimism operate as a closed system. Each system is opened by vernacular forms of life and practices of refusal. Those forms and practices speak to the power and significance of life that persists across centuries of antiblack culture, social life, and political hegemony.

Rereading Baldwin’s nonfiction in the context of midcentury Black Atlantic thought James Baldwin’s nonfiction offers some of the most important and challenging thinking on the experience of race, history, and memory in the Black Atlantic world. Yet much of the scholarly literature on Baldwin’s writing reads his work from inside the sociocultural context of the United States, alongside key interlocutors like Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and Lorraine Hansberry. So Unimaginable a Price: Baldwin and the Black Atlantic shifts the critical frame, examining Baldwin’s work as part of a midcentury moment across the wider Atlantic world and tying his reflections to those of thinkers in the Caribbean and Africa to underscore the widening sense, as well as the particularity, of his critical claims. Who is Baldwin to the Atlantic world? And who, then, is Baldwin to the United States? John E. Drabinski recasts Baldwin as a Black Atlantic writer whose unique qualities as a thinker are enhanced by their similarities and differences with fellow writers of liberation in the global Black world.

Rereading Baldwin’s nonfiction in the context of midcentury Black Atlantic thought James Baldwin’s nonfiction offers some of the most important and challenging thinking on the experience of race, history, and memory in the Black Atlantic world. Yet much of the scholarly literature on Baldwin’s writing reads his work from inside the sociocultural context of the United States, alongside key interlocutors like Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and Lorraine Hansberry. So Unimaginable a Price: Baldwin and the Black Atlantic shifts the critical frame, examining Baldwin’s work as part of a midcentury moment across the wider Atlantic world and tying his reflections to those of thinkers in the Caribbean and Africa to underscore the widening sense, as well as the particularity, of his critical claims. Who is Baldwin to the Atlantic world? And who, then, is Baldwin to the United States? John E. Drabinski recasts Baldwin as a Black Atlantic writer whose unique qualities as a thinker are enhanced by their similarities and differences with fellow writers of liberation in the global Black world.

This largely new collection of essays explores how the history of empire has impacted the intellectual life of the Atlantic world through treatments of key figures in Atlantic theory, including Emmanuel Levinas, Frantz Fanon, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Angela Davis, Leopold Senghor and douard Glissant. Out of these critical and comparative readings emerges a portrait of Atlantic theory as a distinct orientation toward complex relations of colonial power, memory of atrocity, negotiation of the aftermath of empire, and the creativity of the oppressed living under impossible conditions of violence.

Henri Bergson has been the subject of keen interest within French philosophy ever since being championed by Gilles Deleuze and others. Yet his influence extends well beyond European philosophy, especially within Africa and South Asia. Postcolonial Bergson traces the influence of Bergson's thought through the work of two major figures in the postcolonial struggle, Muhammad Iqbal and Léopold Sédar Senghor. Poets and statesmen as well as philosophers, both of these thinkers—the one Muslim and the other Catholic—played an essential political and intellectual role in the independence of their respective countries. Both found, in Bergson's work, important support for their philosophical, cultural, and political projects. For Iqbal, a founding father of independent Pakistan, Bergson's conceptions of time and creative evolution resonated with the need for the "reconstruction of religious thought in Islam," a religious thought newly able to incorporate innovation and change. For Senghor, Bergsonian ideas of perception, intuition, and élan vital—filtered in part through the work of the French philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin—proved crucial for thinking about African art, as well as foundational for his formulations of African socialism and his visions of an unalienated African future. At a moment of renewed interest in Bergson's philosophy, this book, by a major figure in both French and African philosophy, gives an expanded idea of the political ramifications of Bergson's thought in a postcolonial context.

Henri Bergson has been the subject of keen interest within French philosophy ever since being championed by Gilles Deleuze and others. Yet his influence extends well beyond European philosophy, especially within Africa and South Asia. Postcolonial Bergson traces the influence of Bergson's thought through the work of two major figures in the postcolonial struggle, Muhammad Iqbal and Léopold Sédar Senghor. Poets and statesmen as well as philosophers, both of these thinkers—the one Muslim and the other Catholic—played an essential political and intellectual role in the independence of their respective countries. Both found, in Bergson's work, important support for their philosophical, cultural, and political projects. For Iqbal, a founding father of independent Pakistan, Bergson's conceptions of time and creative evolution resonated with the need for the "reconstruction of religious thought in Islam," a religious thought newly able to incorporate innovation and change. For Senghor, Bergsonian ideas of perception, intuition, and élan vital—filtered in part through the work of the French philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin—proved crucial for thinking about African art, as well as foundational for his formulations of African socialism and his visions of an unalienated African future. At a moment of renewed interest in Bergson's philosophy, this book, by a major figure in both French and African philosophy, gives an expanded idea of the political ramifications of Bergson's thought in a postcolonial context.

A reevaluation of Édouard Glissant that centers on the catastrophe of the Middle Passage and creates deep, original theories of trauma and Caribbeanness While philosophy has undertaken the work of accounting for Europe’s traumatic history, the field has not shown the same attention to the catastrophe known as the Middle Passage. It is a history that requires its own ideas that emerge organically from the societies that experienced the Middle Passage and its consequences firsthand. Glissant and the Middle Passage offers a new, important approach to this neglected calamity by examining the thought of Édouard Glissant, particularly his development of Caribbeanness as a critical concept rooted in the experience of the slave trade and its aftermath in colonialism. In dialogue with key theorists of catastrophe and trauma-including AimÉ CÉsaire, Frantz Fanon, George Lamming, Gilles Deleuze, FÉlix Guattari, Derek Walcott, as well as key figures in Holocaust studies-Glissant and the Middle Passage hones a sharp sense of the specifically Caribbean varieties of loss, developing them into a transformative philosophical idea. Using the Plantation as a critical concept, John E. Drabinski creolizes notions of rhizome and nomad, examining what kinds of aesthetics grow from these roots and offering reconsiderations of what constitutes intellectual work and cultural production. Glissant and the Middle Passage establishes Glissant’s proper place as a key theorist of ruin, catastrophe, abyss, and memory. Identifying his insistence on memories and histories tied to place as the crucial geography at the heart of his work, this book imparts an innovative new response to the specific historical experiences of the Middle Passage.

A reevaluation of Édouard Glissant that centers on the catastrophe of the Middle Passage and creates deep, original theories of trauma and Caribbeanness While philosophy has undertaken the work of accounting for Europe’s traumatic history, the field has not shown the same attention to the catastrophe known as the Middle Passage. It is a history that requires its own ideas that emerge organically from the societies that experienced the Middle Passage and its consequences firsthand. Glissant and the Middle Passage offers a new, important approach to this neglected calamity by examining the thought of Édouard Glissant, particularly his development of Caribbeanness as a critical concept rooted in the experience of the slave trade and its aftermath in colonialism. In dialogue with key theorists of catastrophe and trauma-including AimÉ CÉsaire, Frantz Fanon, George Lamming, Gilles Deleuze, FÉlix Guattari, Derek Walcott, as well as key figures in Holocaust studies-Glissant and the Middle Passage hones a sharp sense of the specifically Caribbean varieties of loss, developing them into a transformative philosophical idea. Using the Plantation as a critical concept, John E. Drabinski creolizes notions of rhizome and nomad, examining what kinds of aesthetics grow from these roots and offering reconsiderations of what constitutes intellectual work and cultural production. Glissant and the Middle Passage establishes Glissant’s proper place as a key theorist of ruin, catastrophe, abyss, and memory. Identifying his insistence on memories and histories tied to place as the crucial geography at the heart of his work, this book imparts an innovative new response to the specific historical experiences of the Middle Passage.

This title relates Levinas' central concept of the Other to distinctly postcolonial conceptions of Otherness. The idea of the Other is central to both Levinas' philosophy and to postcolonialism, but they both apply the concept in different ways. Now, John E. Drabinski asks what we can learn from reading Levinas alongside postcolonial theories of difference. With that question in view, Drabinski undertakes readings of Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha, Edouard Glissant and Subcommandante Marcos in order to rethink ideas of difference, language, subjectivity, ethics and politics.

This book reads a series of Godard films as interventions in contemporary debate about the language of difference. Godard has something he wants both to preserve (singularity) and destroy (visual and aural totalitarianism). How is it possible to speak about the Other? How is it possible for the Other to speak? Does all speaking about or by the Other render that speaking common, thereby rendering what is different identical? These questions gather together a number of issues that cross and intersect disciplinary boundaries: signification, representation, ethics, politics, and so on. The problematics with which Drabinski is concerned begin in the debate between Levinas and Derrida, then later in dialogue with Blanchot and Irigaray. To this extent, Godard is particularly well-suited as an interlocutor. Godard's work, especially in the 1970s, is itself a self-conscious form of philosophy. His films theorize themselves, produce a reflexive sound-image language, and so in many ways match the very essence of philosophy: thought thinking thought. Still, the medium of sound and image complicates any rendering of Godard's work as philosophy. Godard produces a philosophically significant cinematic language, rather than simply narrating or representing philosophical ideas in the medium of film. And this language must be taken seriously in the context of the problem of difference. For, if difference is concerned with signification as such, then the visual and aural retain equal rights with writing (and all questions obtaining therein). Indeed, if part of the problem of speaking about or by the Other is how such speaking traffics in inscription, then cinematic language is certainly an important - and authentically complex - intervention in that problem. The nature of the debate in this project - how the language of alterity is possible or impossible - immediately breaks disciplinary borders between philosophy, literary theory, film studies, and cultural studies. What it means to engage with film in this context, however, is complicated. To wit, there are two standard treatments of film in philosophy. Film is typically either an example of a philosophical position or philosophy is used to interpret motifs, characters, plot lines, etc. In neither case is film engaged as a form of philosophizing itself, that is, as a language engaged with philosophical problematics. It is articulating exactly this engagement that this book takes as its primary task. The aim of the project is to read Godard's work as primary texts, with all the attention due the idiosyncratic language of those texts. Framed by the debate about difference and signification, these primary texts register and resonate as transformative interventions. The overarching argument of the book is that Godard's conception and practice of cinematic language opens new, important possibilities for thinking about radical alterity.

What can we learn from reading Levinas alongside postcolonial theories of difference? With that question in view, Drabinski undertakes readings of Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha, Edouard Glissant, and Subcommandante Marcos in order to rethink ideas of difference, language, subjectivity, ethics, and politics. Through these philosophical readings, he gives a new perspective on the work of these important postcolonial theorists and helps make Levinas relevant to other disciplines concerned with postcolonialism and ethics.

The overarching argument of the book is that Godard's conception and practice of cinematic language opens new, important possibilities for thinking about radical alterity. This book reads a series of Godard films as interventions in contemporary debate about the language of difference. Godard has something he wants both to preserve (singularity) and destroy (visual and aural totalitarianism). How is it possible to speak about the Other? How is it possible for the Other to speak? Does all speaking about or by the Other render that speaking common, thereby rendering what is different identical? These questions gather together a number of issues that cross and intersect disciplinary boundaries: signification, representation, ethics, politics. The problematics with which Drabinski is concerned begin in the debate between Levinas and Derrida, then later in dialogue with Blanchot and Irigaray. To this extent, Godard is particularly well-suited as an interlocutor. Godard's work, especially in the 1970s, is itself a self-conscious form of philosophy. His films theorize themselves, produce a reflexive sound-image language, and so in many ways match the very essence of philosophy: thought thinking thought. Still, the medium of sound and image complicates any rendering of Godard's work as philosophy. Godard produces a philosophically significant cinematic language rather than simply narrating or representing philosophical ideas in the medium of film. And this language must be taken seriously in the context of the problem of difference. For, if difference is concerned with signification as such, then the visual and aural retain equal rights with writing (and all questions obtaining therein). The nature of the debate in this project - how the language of alterity is possible or impossible - immediately breaks disciplinary borders between philosophy, literary theory, film studies and cultural studies. What it means to engage with film in this context, however, is complicated. To wit, there are two standard treatments of film in philosophy. Film is typically either an example of a philosophical position or philosophy is used to interpret motifs, characters, plot lines, etc. In neither case is film engaged as a form of philosophizing itself,that is, as a language engaged with philosophical problems. The aim of the project is to read Godard's work as primary texts, with all the attention due the idiosyncratic language of those texts. Framed by the debate about difference and signification, these primary texts register and resonate as transformative interventions.

Establishes the importance of Husserl's phenomenology for Levinas's ethics. Is Emmanuel Levinas a dismissive critic of Husserlian phenomenology, or an important member of its movement? The standard account of Levinas's work assumes his distance from Husserl. In opposition to this account, Sensibility and Singularity contends that Husserl was a vital, living resource for Levinas throughout his philosophical career. The singularity of the Other is the centerpiece of Levinas's thought. The philosophical significance of this singularity, however, cannot be fully appreciated without attending to Levinas's transformation of the Husserlian themes of time, materiality, intentionality, and sense. This book documents those transformations and establishes their centrality to Levinas's notion of ethics. What emerges from this reading is a thorough account of Levinas's constant and productive debate with the Husserlian tradition of phenomenology.