Hieroglyphics of the Flesh

Abstract

Alexander G. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics and Black Feminist Theories of the Human, Durham and London, Duke University Press, 2014, 224ppAlexander Weheliye's Habeas Viscus is the latest iteration in the current reinvigoration of black diasporic thought. Perhaps best read in tandem with this year's publication of Nahum Chandler's X: The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Thought, Weheliye can also be situated alongside Denise Ferreira da Silva, Jared Sexton, Fred Moten and Saidiya Hartman in terms of understanding the activity taking place within black diasporic thought as an ensemble project.1Habeas Viscus feeds into this furiously complex joy fill noise in two ways. One is the tacit deracination of critical theory that seems to have become a dominant trend in Euro-American thought for a number of years. This was a process undertaken in the name of political generalities over the apparent limitations of racial, sexual and gendered particularities. The other position Weheliye occupies is that of a black studies theorist addressing his own field. Over the course of its breakdown into various delineations of area studies, he argues, black studies has become far too comfortable as a mode of scholarship orientated towards targets and calculability. The result for Weheliye is a waning of the intensely poetic - and no less empirical - experimentation that was the engine of the project. The same could be said of black diasporic thought in the UK, which after the demise of Cultural Studies (the only place it found a home) has been repurposed as a policy device within the field of sociology.What ties Weheliye's book to the work of the black diasporic thinkers named above is that he deploys these two threads as part of a fundamental commitment to the truth that abolition remains incomplete. Whilst some identify property or the administered world as the focal point for ongoing abolitionism, in Weheliye's case the target is Man.Thus Habeas Viscus instrumentalises Hortense Spulers and Sylvia Wynter in order to disestablish two dominant features of deracinated critical theory - biopolitics and bare life. The means for this reordering lie in taking seriously the proposition that the enfleshments of Atlantic slavery and colonisation are not solely racialised renderings of duress, but have also always carried the capacities to generate further genres of the human through the actions of the populations who were the objects of those systems. Such a claim sounds bold when made in isolation, but what Weheliye is able to do is make it, much like Chandler, a constitutive function of the architectures of his book. The danger in trying to desediment the overbearing presence of Giorgio Agamben and Michel Foucault in a work of this type, is that an author may commit too much space to these monoliths, thereby dulling the edge of the promised counter-argument. Weheliye avoids these pitfalls by leading with Wynter and Spulers in the opening two chapters ('Blackness: The Human' and 'Bare Life: The Flesh'). He makes the case for the strategic foregrounding of these two as nothing other than thinkers whose reach is without limits precisely because of their attentiveness to the massive and world forming dislocations of slavery and colonialism. Even when Weheliye does set aside the majority of chapters four and five ('Racism: Biopolitics', 'Law: Property') to bare-life and biopolitics, the neat theoretical concentrations which close each section remind the reader of how these close readings function as part of the text's overall line of argument.As a result the foundational arguments of Habeas Viscus are given room to breathe. Agamben and Foucault, with bare life as an essential biological substance and biopower as a fundamentally new form of European racial organisation, arrived at schematics of violence and power that were built upon the logic of exceptionalism and were a historical. Their major theoretical formulations were developed often in distinction or without recourse to the long histories of globalised racial power. …