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INTRODUCTION
THE BECOMING BLACK
OF THE WORLD
These heads of men, these collections of ears, these burned h ouses, these Gothic inva-
sions, this steaming blood, these cities that evaporate at the edge of the sword, are not to
be so easily disposed of.
—aimé césaire, Discourse on Colonialism
I envision this book as a river with many tributaries, since history and all
things flow toward us now. Europe is no longer the center of gravity of the
world. This is the significant event, the fundamental experience, of our era.
And we are only just now beginning the work of measuring its implications
and weighing its consequences.1 W hether such a revelation is an occasion
for joy or cause for surprise or worry, one t hing remains certain: the demo-
tion of Europe opens up possibilities—and presents dangers—for critical
thought. That is, in part, what this essay seeks to examine.
To capture the precise contours of t hese dangers and possibilities,
we need first to remember that, throughout its history, European thought
has tended to conceive of identity less in terms of mutual belonging
(cobelonging) to a common world than in terms of a relation between
similar beings—of being itself emerging and manifesting itself in its own
state, or its own mirror.2 But it is also crucial for us to understand that
as the direct consequence of the logic of self-fictionalization and self-
contemplation, indeed of closure, Blackness and race have played multiple
roles in the imaginaries of European societies.3 Primary, loaded, burden-
some, and unhinged, symbols of raw intensity and repulsion, the two have
always occupied a central place—simultaneously, or at least in parallel—
within modern knowledge and discourse about man (and therefore about
h umanism and humanity). Since the beginning of the eighteenth century,
Blackness and race have constituted the (unacknowledged and often de-
nied) foundation, what we might call the nuclear power plant, from which
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the modern project of knowledge—and of governance—has been de-
ployed.4 Blackness and race, the one and the other, represent twin figures
of the delirium produced by modernity (chapters 1 and 2).
What are the reasons for the delirium, and what are its most basic mani-
festations? It results, first, from the fact that the Black Man is the one (or the
thing) that one sees when one sees nothing, when one understands noth-
ing, and, above all, when one wishes to understand nothing. Everywhere
he appears, the Black Man unleashes impassioned dynamics and provokes
an irrational exuberance that always tests the limits of the very system of
reason. But delirium is also caused by the fact that no one—not those who
invented him, not those who named him thus—would want to be a Black
Man or to be treated as one. As Gilles Deleuze observed, “there is always
a Black person, a Jew, a Chinese, a G rand Mogol, an Aryan in the midst
of delirium,” since what drives delirium is, among other t hings, race.5 By
reducing the body and the living being to matters of appearance, skin, and
color, by granting skin and color the status of fiction based on biology, the
Euro-American world in particul ar has made Blackness and race two sides
of a single coin, two sides of a codified madness.6 Race, operating over
the past centuries as a foundational category that is at once material and
phantasmic, has been at the root of catastrophe, the cause of extraordinary
psychic devastation and of innumerable crimes and massacres.7
Vertiginous Assemblage
ere are three critical moments in the biography of the vertiginous as-
Th
semblage that is Blackness and race. The first arrived with the organized
despoliation of the Atlantic slave trade (from the fifteenth through the
nineteenth century), through which men and women from Africa were
transformed into human-objects, human-commodities, human-money.8
Imprisoned in the dungeon of appearance, they came to belong to o thers
who hated them. They were deprived of their own names and their own
languages. Their lives and their work w
ere from then on controlled by the
others with whom they were condemned to live, and who denied them
recognition as cohumans. And yet they nevertheless remained active sub-
2 Introduction
jects.9 The second moment corresponded with the birth of writing near
the end of the eighteenth c entury, when Blacks, as beings-taken-by-others,
began leaving traces in a language all of their own and at the same time
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demanded the status of full subjects in the world of the living.10 The mo-
ment was punctuated by innumerable slave revolts and the independence
of Haiti in 1804, by the b attle for the abolition of the slave trade, by African
decolonization, and by the struggle for civil rights in the United States.
The second era culminated in the dismantling of apartheid during the last
decades of the twentieth century. The third moment—the early twenty-
first century—is one marked by the globalization of markets, the priva-
tization of the world under the aegis of neoliberalism, and the increasing
imbrication of the financial markets, the postimperial military complex,
and electronic and digital technologies.
By “neoliberalism” I mean a phase in the history of humanity domi-
nated by the industries of the Silicon Valley and digital technology. In the
era of neoliberalism, time passes quickly and is converted into the produc-
tion of the money-form. Capital, having reached its maximal capability for
flight, sets off a process of escalation. The vision that defines the neoliberal
moment is one according to which “all events and situations in the world
of life can be assigned a market value.”11 The process is also characterized
by the production of indifference; the frenzied codification of social life
according to norms, categories, and numbers; and various operations of
abstraction that claim to rationalize the world on the basis of corporate
logic.12 Capital, notably finance capital, is haunted by a baneful double and
defines itself as unlimited in terms of both ends and means. It does more
than just dictate its own temporal regime. Having taken as its responsibil-
ity the “fabrication of all relations of filiation,” it seeks to reproduce itself
“on its own” in an infinite series of structurally insolvent debts.13
There are no more workers as such. There are only laboring nomads. If
yesterday’s drama of the subject was exploitation by capital, the tragedy
of the multitude today is that they are unable to be exploited at all. They
are abandoned subjects, relegated to the role of a “superfluous humanity.”
Capital hardly needs them anymore to function. A new form of psychic
life is emerging, one based on artificial and digital memory and on cog-
nitive models drawn from the neurosciences and neuroeconomics. With
little distinction remaining between psychic reflexes and technological re-
flexes, the human subject becomes fictionalized as “an entrepreneur of the
Introduction 3
self.” This subject is plastic and perpetually called on to reconfigure itself
in relation to the artifacts of the age.14
This new man, subject to the market and to debt, views himself as the
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simple product of natural luck. He is a kind of “ready-made abstract form,”
characteristic of the civilization of the image and of the new relationships
that it establishes between fact and fiction, and capable of absorbing any
content.15 He is now just one animal among o thers, lacking an essence of
his own to protect or safeguard. Th ere are no longer any limits placed on
the modification of his genetic, biological structure.16 The new subject differs
in many ways from the tragic and alienated figure of early industrialization.
First and foremost, he is a prisoner of desire. His pleasure depends almost
entirely on his capacity to reconstruct his private life publicly, to turn it
into v iable merchandise and put it up for sale. He is a neuroeconomic
subject absorbed by a double concern stemming from his animal nature
(as subject to the biological reproduction of life) and his thingness (as sub-
ject to o thers’ enjoyment of the t hings of this world). As a human-thing,
human-machine, human-code, and human-in-flux, he seeks above all to regulate
his behavior according to the norms of the market. He eagerly instru-
mentalizes himself and others to optimize his own pleasure. Condemned
to lifelong apprenticeship, to flexibility, to the reign of the short term, he
must embrace his condition as a soluble, fungible subject to be able to re-
spond to what is constantly demanded of him: to become another.
Moreover, in the era of neoliberalism, capitalism and animism—long
and painstakingly kept apart from each other—have finally tended to merge.
The cycle of capital moves from image to image, with the image now serv-
ing as an accelerant, creating energy and drive. The potential fusion of cap-
italism and animism carries with it a number of implications for our f uture
understanding of race and racism. First, the systematic risks experienced
specifically by Black slaves during early capitalism have now become the
norm for, or at least the lot of, all of subaltern humanity. The emergence
of new imperial practices is then tied to the tendency to universalize the
Black condition. Such practices borrow as much from the slaving logic of
capture and predation as from the colonial logic of occupation and extrac-
tion, as well as from the civil wars and raiding of earlier epochs.17 Wars of
occupation and counterinsurgency aim not only to track and eliminate the
enemy but also to create a partition in time and an atomization of space. In
the future, part of the task of empire will consist in transforming the real
4 Introduction
into fiction, and fiction into the real. The mobilization of airpower and the
destruction of infrastructure, the strikes and wounds caused by military
action, are now combined with the mass mobilization of images, a key part
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of the deployment of a violence that seeks purity.18
Capture, predation, extraction, and asymmetrical warfare converge
with the rebalkanization of the world and intensifying practices of zoning,
all of which point to a new collusion between the economic and the bio-
logical. Such collusion translates in concrete terms into the militarization
of borders, the fragmentation and partitioning of territories, and the cre-
ation of more or less autonomous spaces within the borders of existing
states. In some cases such spaces are subtracted from all forms of national
sovereignty, operating instead under the informal laws of a multitude of
fragmented authorities and private armed forces. In other cases they re-
main under the control of foreign armies or of international organizations
operating under the pretext of, or on behalf of, humanitarianism.19 Zon-
ing practices are linked in general to transnational networks of repression
whose tools and methods include the imposition of ideological grids on pop-
ulations, the hiring of mercenaries to fight local guerrillas, the formation of
“hunt commandos,” and the systematic use of mass imprisonment, torture,
and extrajudicial execution.20 This “imperialism of disorganization,” which
feeds on anarchy, leverages practices of zoning to manufacture disasters and
multiply states of exception nearly everywhere.
Foreign corporations, powerful nations, and local dominant classes all
in turn present themselves as helping with reconstruction or use the pre-
text of fighting insecurity and disorder in order to help themselves to the
riches and raw materials of countries thrown into chaos through zoning
practices. The age has seen the massive transfer of wealth to private in-
terests, increasing dispossession of the riches wrested from capital during
previous struggles, and indefinite payments of massive debt. Even Europe,
struck by the violence of capital, has witnessed the emergence of a new
class of structurally indebted people.21
The potential fusion of capitalism and animism presents a further impli-
cation: the very distinct possibility that human beings will be transformed
into animate things made up of coded digital data. Across early capital-
ism, the term “Black” referred only to the condition imposed on peoples of
African origin (different forms of depredation, dispossession of all power
of self-determination, and, most of all, dispossession of the future and of
Introduction 5
time, the two matrices of the possible). Now, for the first time in human
history, the term “Black” has been generalized. This new fungibility, this
solubility, institutionalized as a new norm of existence and expanded to
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the entire planet, is what I call the Becoming Black of the world.
Race in the Future Tense
Although this fact has always been denied, Euro-American discourse on
man depends on the two central figures of Blackness and race. Does the
demotion of Europe to the rank of a mere world province signal the ex-
tinction of racism? Or must we instead understand that as humanity be-
comes fungible, racism will simply reconstitute itself in the interstices of
a new language on “species,” inserting itself as a kind of sand, molecular
and in fragments? In posing the question in these terms, we uphold the
idea that neither Blackness nor race has ever been fixed (chapter 1). They
have, on the contrary, always belonged to a chain of open-ended signifiers.
The fundamental meanings of Blackness and race have always been ex-
istential. For ages, the term “Black” in particular flowed with incredible
energy, at times connoting inferior instincts and chaotic powers, at o thers
serving as the luminous sign of the possibility that the world might be re-
deemed and transfigured (chapters 2 and 5). In addition to designating a
heterogeneous, multiple, and fragmented world—ever new fragments of
fragments—the term “Black” signaled a series of devastating historical ex-
periences, the reality of a vacant life, the fear felt by the millions trapped in
the ruts of racial domination, the anguish at seeing their bodies and minds
controlled from the outside, at being transformed into spectators watch-
ing something that was, but also was not, their true existence.22
This is not all. The term “Black” was the product of a social and tech-
nological machine tightly linked to the emergence and globalization of
capitalism. It was invented to signify exclusion, brutalization, and degra-
dation, to point to a limit constantly conjured and abhorred. The Black
Man, despised and profoundly dishonored, is the only h uman in the
modern order whose skin has been transformed into the form and spirit
of merchandise—the living crypt of capital. But there is also a manifest
dualism to Blackness. In a spectacular reversal, it becomes the symbol of a
conscious desire for life, a force springing forth, buoyant and plastic, fully
engaged in the act of creation and capable of living in the midst of several
6 Introduction
times and several histories at once. Its capacity for sorcery, and its ability
to incite hallucination, multiplies tenfold. Some saw in the Black Man the
salt of the earth, the vein of life through which the dream of a humanity rec-
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onciled with nature, and even with the totality of existence, would find its
new face, voice, and movement.23
Europe’s twilight has arrived, and the Euro-American world has not
yet figured out what it wants to know about, or do with, the Black Man.
“Racism without races” is now surfacing in many countries.24 To practice
racism today even as it is rendered conceptually unthinkable, “culture” and
“religion” have replaced “biology.” Republican universalism is presented as
blind to race, even as non-W hites are locked in their supposed origins. Ra-
cialized categories abound, most of them feeding into everyday practices of
Islamophobia. But who among us can doubt that the moment has finally ar-
rived for us to begin-from-ourselves? While Europe goes astray, overtaken
by the malaise of not knowing where it is within and with the world, is it not
time to lay the foundation for something absolutely new? To do so, will we
have to forget Blackness? Or perhaps, on the contrary, must we hold on to
its false power, its luminous, fluid, and crystalline character—that strange
subject, slippery, serial, and plastic, always masked, firmly camped on both
sides of the mirror, constantly skirting the edge of the frame? And if, by
chance, in the midst of this torment, Blackness survives t hose who inven
ted it, and if all of subaltern humanity becomes Black in a reversal to which
only history knows the secret, what risks would a Becoming-Black-of-the-
World pose to the promise of liberty and universal equality for which the
term “Black” has stood throughout the modern period (chapter 6)?
The fierce colonial desire to divide and classify, to create hierarchies
and produce difference, leaves b ehind wounds and scars. Worse, it created
a fault line that lives on. Is it possible today to craft a relationship with
the Black Man that is something other than that between a master and his
valet? Does the Black Man not insist, still, on seeing himself through and
within difference? Is he not convinced that he is inhabited by a double, a
foreign entity that prevents him from knowing himself? Does he not live
in a world shaped by loss and separation, cultivating a dream of return-
ing to an identity founded on pure essentialism and therefore, often, on
alterity? At what point does the project of a radical uprising in search of
autonomy in the name of difference turn into a simple mimetic inversion
of what was previously showered with malediction?
Introduction 7
These are some of the questions I ask in this book. It is neither a history of
ideas nor an exercise in sociologic al history, but it uses history to propose
a style of critical reflection on our contemporary world. By privileging a
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sort of reminiscence, half solar and half lunar, half day and half night, I
have in mind a single question: how can we think through difference and
life, the similar and the dissimilar, the surplus and the in-common? This
kind of questioning is familiar to the Black experience, which knows so
well how to occupy the place of a fleeing limit within contemporary con-
sciousness, serving as a kind of mirror in perpetual motion. But we must
wonder why the mirror never stops turning. What prevents it from stop-
ping? What explains the infinite refraction of divisions, each more sterile
than the last?
—Johannesburg, 2 August 2013
This essay was written during my long stay at the Witwatersrand Institute
for Social and Economic Research at the University of Witwatersrand (in
Johannesburg, South Africa). It is part of a cycle of reflections first opened
up in On the Postcolony (2000), then pursued in Sortir de la grande nuit
(2010), and concluded by my teaching in a course on Afropolitanism.
During this cycle we sought to inhabit several worlds at the same time,
not in an easy gesture of fragmentation, but in one of coming and g oing,
able to authorize the articulation, from Africa, of a thinking of circulation
and crossings. Along this path it was not useful to seek to “provincialize”
European traditions of thought. They are, of course, not at all foreign to
us. When it comes to speaking the world in a language for everyone, how-
ever, there exist relations of power at the heart of t hese traditions, and part
of the work consisted in weighing in on these internal frictions, inviting
them to a decentering, not in order to deepen the distance between Africa
and the world, but rather to make possible the emergence, relatively lucidly,
of the new demands of a possible universalism.
Throughout my time at the institute I benefited from the support of
my colleagues Deborah Posel, Sarah Nutall, John Hyslop, Ashlee Neeser,
Pamila Gupta, and, recently, Cathy Burns and Keith Breckenridge. The
pages that follow owe a great deal to the friendship of David Theo Gold-
berg, Arjun Appadurai, Ackbar Abbas, Françoise Vergès, Pascal Blanchard,
Laurent Dubois, Eric Fassin, Ian Baucom, Srinivas Aravamudan, Charlie
8 Introduction
Piot, and Jean-Pierre Chrétien. Paul Gilroy, Jean Comaroff, John Comaroff,
and the much-missed Carol Breckenridge w ere enormous sources of
inspiration. I also thank my colleagues Kelly Gillespie, Julia Hornberger,
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Leigh-Ann Naidoo, and Zen Marie of the Johannesburg Workshop in
Theory and Criticism of the University of Witwatersrand.
My editor, François Gèze, and his team (Pascale Iltis and Thomas
Deltombe in particular) were, as always, a steady source of support.
I thank the journals Le Débat, Politique Africaine, Cahiers d’Études Af-
ricaines, Research in African Literat ures, Africulture, and Le Monde Diplo-
matique, which welcomed the exploratory texts that form the basis for this
essay.
For reasons t here is no reason to repeat h ere, this book is dedicated to
Sarah, Léa, and Aniel, as well as Jolyon and Jean.
Introduction 9
