According to Georges Bataille, religion at its most basic is “the search for lost intimacy.”[1]This lost intimacy is the result of the human’s capacity to treat itself and other beings as tools, as instruments to satisfy some end, and as objects that are separable and discontinuous from an elevated subject. Consequently, endeavors to recapture this immanent intimacy with the world (such as rituals of sacrifice) entail taking an object “out of the world of utility and restoring it to that of unintelligible caprice.”[2] For Bataille, sacred intimacy is a kind of break from the logic of utility, meaning-making, and transparency, all qualities that involve a vertical distance between self and other. Intimacy, which is a violent rupture of the individuated self, brings about a “beclouded consciousness,” an opacity that is more like an instance of “dazzlement” within darkness. Intimacy, exemplified in some aesthetic, religious, and erotic experiences, destroys thinghood or the fantasy of a discrete and separable self.
At its peak, this destruction opens upon the heterogenous and foments a coherence-shattering exuberance. And yet the desire for intimacy is complicated by the fact that human subjects will always have one foot in what Bataille calls the profane realm, the realm governed by instrumentality and preservation of the self or collective. One danger here is that the pursuit of connection, when combined with a refusal to disinvest from self-aggrandizing projects, can become what Christina Sharpe calls a “monstrous intimacy” in her analysis of sexual violence directed toward black people.[3] In other words, a touch, especially under conditions of subjugation, can always be expressed as a grasp and a will to possess; and this will to possession tends to disavow, or fear, the reversibility of touching and being touched.[4]
Frantz Fanon understood something about the significance of the touch. At the conclusion of Black Skin, White Masks, as Fanon gestures toward the possibility of creating the conditions for a decolonized world, he poses this question: “Why not the quite simple attempt to touch the other, to feel the other, to explain the other to myself?”[5] Here the notion of an explanation, a process that usually foregrounds reasons, logical discourse, and translation, is associated with feeling and being felt by the other. In fact, intrinsic to the infinitive “to feel” is a simultaneously active and receptive disposition; to feel the other to oneself is also to be touched by the other within oneself, the alterity that is constitutive of the self. When Fanon ends BSWM with a prayer to his body, a petition to always remain a questioning subject, he is not reducing himself to a body but accentuating permeability and a fundamental exposure to the material world. And yet this material relationship among bodies, between human flesh and the flesh of the world, is never easily disconnected from linguistic and symbolic regimes that contribute to the governing and structuring of affect, desire, and relationality. Words strike us; utterances can hurt; grammar disciplines; colonial discourses pre-condition how the blackened person appears, gets heard, and (mis-)recognized as a sentient, vulnerable being. We might even say that colonial grammars and arrangements disproportionately expose the black, or the damned, to violence, while diminishing the severity of this terror through commitments to civilizing projects and concomitant assumptions about black animality (and tolerance for pain).
This relationship between grammar, touch, and vulnerability is insinuated in Fanon’s oft-cited description of being hailed by a white child. When the child gesticulates to his mother, “Look, a Negro,” Fanon is seized and “fixed” by the utterance and gaze.[6] Afraid that the Negro is going to eat him, the child trembles and shudders; he is repelled by Fanon’s appearance, an appearance that is anticipated by a general perception of the black as “bad, mean, and ugly.”[7] While the white child’s speech act captures Fanon, it also twists, deforms, and tears Fanon into pieces. Or as Fanon puts it, “My body was given back to me, sprawled out, distorted, recolored, clad in mourning in that white winter day.”[8] The relationship between the white mother and child, and the subject formation of the child, relies on the figurative cutting of black flesh. Moreover, the child’s entry into the sphere of the human necessitates a separation from the black figure of monstrosity—and yet this drive to separate accompanies a trembling or an indication of proximity, affectability, and a strange intimacy.
Hortense Spillers might read this interaction between the white child and the blackened other, and the piercing look that positions the white subject-in-formation against the black, as a distinction between the body and flesh. In her well-known essay “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” Spillers writes: “Before the body, there is the flesh, that zero degree of social conceptualization… If we think of the flesh as a primary narrative, then we mean its seared, divided, ripped apartness, riveted to the ship’s hole, fallen, or escaped overboard.”[9] As “primary” and as the most basic form of existence, flesh is defined by its capacity to be torn and divided, whereas the body’s coherence is carved out of the flesh. The body, in other words, is outlined from and out of fleshly matter. The body, which for Spillers is correlated with the liberated subject, is formed over and against the flesh of the enslaved; the Master on the plantation actualizes his freedom in a field of violence that positions the enslaved as fungible, permeable, and “reducible to a thing…, a being for the captor.”[10] For Spillers, the language of flesh underscores everyday scenes of dismemberment on the plantation such as “eyes beaten out, arms, backs, skulls branded, a left jaw, a right ankle punctured; teeth missing, as the calculated work of iron, whips, chains, knives, the canine patrol, the bullet.”[11] As Spillers puts it, “such a body cannot prevent or ward off another’s touch.”[12] Black flesh magnetizes violent contact and mutilating forms of touch. And yet there is something else about flesh that signifies fallenness and escape, even if that escape is a flight toward death, or home.
It is important that the subtitle of Spillers’s 1987 essay is “An American Grammar Book.” Grammar, as intimated above, includes the structures and rules that regulate how we speak, write, think, and imagine. American lexicons harbor racial and gendered imaginaries that are necessary for the functioning and coherence of the national body. As Spillers begins her essay “Let’s face it. I am a marked woman, but not everybody knows my name. ‘Peaches,’ ‘Brown Sugar,’ ‘Sapphire’…: I describe a locus of confounded identities, a meeting ground of investments and privations in the national treasury of rhetorical wealth. My country needs me, and if I were not here, I would have to be invented.”[13] Here I draw attention to the image of being “marked” by language, or selected, targeted, and smeared by various identifications. Names designated for black women stage a gathering of “investments and privations” or desires to be fulfilled (through black women) and desires that take away and impoverish. In the same way that the petrified white child requires the black for self-formation, American needs to mark and pilfer value from black women for its collective self-definition. (Violence is not simply a legitimated attribute of nations and nation-states; violence is what makes national projects possible in the first place.)
For Spillers, the aftermath of slavery persists in (American) grammar, in the words and utterances that constitute ordinary language. According to Spillers, “Even though the captive body/flesh has been “liberated,” and no one need pretend that even the quotation marks do not matter, dominant symbolic activity, the ruling episteme that releases the dynamics of naming and valuation, remains grounded in the originating metaphors of captivity and mutilation…”[14] Here Spillers does not deny that emancipation meant something significant; she is not so simply claiming that prevailing epistemes and modes of valuation continue to hold, contain, and cut in a manner that repeats a foundational violence, even if the appearance of this violence is sometimes less salient, less brutal, and hidden in plain sight. The black male subject hunted, tracked down, and killed by an appendage of the state because he is up to no good; because he fits the suspicious description of the “thug,” the “punk,” the one who always gets away. The utility of the image of the “Welfare Queen” and the myth of indolent black (female) subjects as a way for politicians to muster support for economic policies that devastate working class and impoverished peoples. These pernicious ways of naming and framing black flesh remind us that “sticks and stones might break our bones but words will most certainly kill us.”[15]
In the same way that Fanon and Spillers draw attention to the relationship between word and touch, language and mutilation, Queen Latifah renders this interplay audible in her 1993 track “U.N.I.T.Y.” In this song, Latifah responds to the normalization of terms “bitch” and “ho,” terms that hail black women as invadable objects, as objects that are expected to accept and submit to the hurtful touch of another. While she acknowledges that the b-word can be used playfully, her first verse recounts a situation in which the word is used by a black male (in the video played by Vincent Brown, of Naughty by Nature) after he touches her backside without permission or consent. Latifah tells us that she is wearing cutoff shorts due to the “crazy heat,” as if to remind the listener that her sartorial choice is not designed for the male gaze but for her own comfort (or perhaps she is anticipating the familiar explanation that blames a woman’s appearance for attracting negative attention). It is important that in between the invasive grab and the hurling of the b-word, Latifah turns around, and gives the male assailant a look of wrath. Her disapproval, or mad response, is what precipitates the b-word and yet Latifah’s body has already been placed within a ruling episteme and mode of evaluation that makes the uninvited touch seem acceptable. As Latifah raps in this first verse, being called out of one’s name, or being called by person inhabiting a position in a grammatical world that refuses to know a black woman’s name, facilitates disrespect and domination (“making a sista feel low,” subordinate, etc). However, before one can fall into a perspective that renders Latifah a passive object, she ends the verse striking her adversary “dead in the eye.”
Latifah claps back and responds to the b-word call with a question: “Who you callin a b**?” In this rejoinder, Latifah not only opens up a gap between the Who being addressed as an available object and the Who refusing the hailing of the addresser. She also points the attention back to the You, the one who has been disciplined into an American grammar that needs black women to be positioned and signified in a certain manner. What is fascinating to me is the refrain throughout the song—“Love a black man, Love a black woman from infinity to infinity.” Something like limitless, or impossible, love appears to be the cure for the kinds of violence directed at black women in the song, including a predicament of partner abuse that is painfully articulated in the second verse. Something like mutual love and care is an alternative to black men redirecting the terror that has shaped and formed them, that has been internalized while enduring poverty, state surveillance, and rituals of survival. And of course the title of the song indicates an appeal to unity, to overcoming divisions within blackness. But things are a bit more complicated when one attends to the punctuation marks between the letters, almost as if the word “unity” becomes an acronym, as if it stands for something else and more. By spelling out the letters, by making audible the gaps between the letters, the very idea of unity becomes fissured and wounded. The notion of togetherness, and relationality, is cut and traversed by the violence that most pleas for unity deny and replicate. Unity is touched by the black woman and reconfigured in light of the racial and gendered anguish that haunts American grammars.