Inventions: Black Philosophy, Politics, Aesthetics

DAVID MARRIOTT, SERIES EDITOR
ERICA WETTER, SUP EDITOR

Le véritable saut consiste à introduire l’invention dans l’existence – the real leap consists in introducing invention into existence. Among this and other demands for a thought, a blackness of thought that is itself an act of liberation, for Frantz Fanon, the critical task of any aspirational black philosophy is its ability to tell apart blackness from its mirages and impossibilities in science, art, and European history and philosophy. Is it still possible to pursue this goal today, within the ongoing reaches of anti-blackness? And what could this “leap” be given the undecidability of blackness as a concept, feeling, or figure? The premise of the series is that blackness cannot be subsumed under the prevailing forms of philosophy, politics, or aesthetics without putting into question what this leap could be, or mistaking invention for their presuppositions, and so losing sight of what this invention could be in its very difference. To that end, Inventions seeks to publish works that set the agenda for what this leap would look like or be.