Table of Contents for Anteaesthetics
Introduction
The reader is introduced to the theoretical project Anteaesthetics opens. Beginning from the aesthesis of a black existence, I propose anteaesthetics as a method for recursively disclosing black anteriority to the modern aesthetic regime and its order of forms. Black aesthesis is before the metaphysics of the antiblack world. My conception of before—signaled in the title of the book by the prefix ante-—assumes a dual spatiotemporal valence. Black aesthesis is at once vestibular to the antiblack world—its metaphysical threshold and abyssal limit—and always already subject to the violence of that world, even if not reducible to or completely subsumed by it. The introduction proposes an anteaesthetic hermeneutic as a mode of attunement to and defense of what is indefensible in black art—of a tradition of artistry that serially and diffusively constitutes a problem of and for metaphysics.
1.Toward a Theory of Anteaesthetics
This chapter elaborates the theoretical architecture for Anteaesthetics. A reading of Arthur Jafa's 2013 experimental film Dreams are Colder than Death interrogates (film) phenomenology and contends that blackness is no more available to phenomenology than to ontology. Every appearance of blackness is necessarily a dissimulation—a violent phenomenological feint with which every instantiation of black art must contend. The chapter turns to black feminist theories of reproduction in order to argue that the bearings of black femininity subtend not only modernity and its aesthetic regime but also social and artistic traditions of black radicalism. This chapter argues that the anteriority of racially gendered reproductivity is central to the body within modernity. The chapter closes with an interrogation of the discourse on technics and proposes a theory of black mediality, which dissents from the discourses of mediation that have generally informed various theoretical approaches to new media studies.
2.The Corporeal Division of the World, or Aesthetic Ruination
This chapter investigates what I term the corporeal division of the world in its gendered dispensations across artistic forms. The historical cartography of the modern world and the aesthetic form that is 'the body' turn upon a racial division of corporeality for which blackness is the absent center. Proceeding through an iterative reading of Théodore Géricault's The Raft of the Medusa (1819) and the Study for the Signaling Black (1819), particularly by way of a critique of Thomas Crow's analogical turn to the Belvedere Torso (mid-first century BCE) in his reading of Géricault, the chapter introduces a theory of the black bodily fragment as a metonymic rend(er)ing of flesh. Finally, it undertakes a comparative reading of Raft and Louis François Charon's caricature of Saartjie Baartman to accentuate the disjunctive economies of touch as demarcations of the corporeal division of the world and the gendering of black mediality.
3.Before the Nude, or Exorbitant Figuration
This chapter is bookended by a reading of Mickalene Thomas's 2016 multimedia installation Me As Muse that emphasizes the work's recursive deconstruction of the corporeal division of the world, its aesthetic permutations, and the work's foregrounding of black feminine vestibularity in the making of artistic form, particularly with respect to the female nude. Tracing this reading through the figure of Saartjie Baartman (c. mid-1770s-1789 to 1815), Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres's La Grande Odalisque (1814), and the complicated nineteenth-century histories with which blackness and the aesthetic form of the nude are entwined, it proposes that the interdicted history of the brutalized flesh and dissimulated 'body' of Baartman was made the medium for an interwoven series of aesthetic, epistemic, and biopolitical transformations during the nineteenth century.
4.The Black Residuum, or That Which Remains
This chapter turns to the artist Glenn Ligon in order to excavate the concealments and failures of the racial metaphysics undergirding modern aesthetic formalisms, particularly as they pertain to medium-specificity and genealogy. The first half of the chapter reads Ligon's painterly interventions into language-based conceptualism as the divulgence of an irreducibly material opacity—the black residuum—that precedes the racial hyper(in)visibility which subtends the ocularcentric field of representation. The black residuum marks and is marked by the failures of an ocularcentric logic, which tends toward the excision of materiality from the visual field. The second half of the chapter turns to Ligon's 2008 video installation The Death of Tom, tracing the work's recursive deconstruction of the black mediality at the heart of the cinematic medium's emergence.
5.Unworlding, or the Involution of Value
The book's final chapter reads Sondra Perry's recent work to develop an anteaesthetic critique of the metaphysical architecture of worlding, the phenomenological body-subject of worldly inhabitation, and their aesthetic reproduction in and through the logic of value. The chapter argues for the importance of attending to the ulterior force of unworlding as a racially gendered emergence or submergence that is anterior and antithetical to worlding. The first part of the chapter argues that Perry's Typhoon coming on (2018) deconstructs the metrics and imperatives of value through a recursive descent into the enfleshed existence which is value's anoriginary condition of (im)possibility. The second part argues that Perry's Flesh Wall (2016–20) traces the antephenomenal existence of blackness and stages the unworlding that is vestibular to Maurice Merleau-Ponty's "the flesh of the world."