l ee e delman Queerness, Afro-Pessimism, and the Return of the Aesthetic When Schiller sets out to celebrate the exemplary freedom of the aesthetic, he finds himself snared in the contradictions produced by such exemplarity� Conscripted to a pedagogical function that connects “the whole fabric of aesthetic art” to “the still more difficult art of living,” Schiller’s description of Beauty as “released … from the fetters of every aim” (a condition he sees expressed in the sculpted faces of Greek gods), paradoxically imposes on the aesthetic the aim of exemplifying this aimlessness, this absolute of freedom, “in order to incite [the human being] into the ideal world” (80, 140)� Schiller may acknowledge as “self-contradictory … the notion of a fine instructive (didactic) or improving (moral) art,” adding that “nothing is more at variance with the concept of Beauty than that it should have a tendentitious effect upon the character,” but he bases his argument for aesthetic education on “the cultivation of Beauty” understood precisely as the “instrument” whereby our “character become[s] enobled” (107, 55, 50)� Though humanity, as he sees it, may be “chained … to the material,” the aesthetic lifts it to the realm of abstraction and allows it to reflect on the material world with which it no longer identifies (132). Hence “[c]ontemplation (reflection) is Man’s first free relation to the universe” (120)� As Walter Benjamin would argue, however, such a notion of freedom comes at the cost of collectivity and political engagement� Carolin Duttlinger, tracking Benjamin’s ideas about attention, contemplation, and distraction, sums up his views on aesthetics and autonomy during the period when he was writing “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”: “In modern secularized society, … contemplation not only loses its liberating potential but is in fact exemplary of a pervasive trend towards social fragmentation and isolation� As a result, he argues, the residues of religious practice in bourgeois art reception do not lead to greater (self-) awareness but are more akin to the secular state of absorption, which Benjamin criticizes in ‘Über das Grauen.’ Unlike in his earlier text, however, Benjamin’s critique is not primarily psychological in focus, but concerns the social and political consequences of such contemplative reception” (Duttlinger 41)� Schillerian aesthetic autonomy, as evinced by the self-enclosure that the aesthetic object and the contemplative subject share, carries with it, according to Benjamin, 12 l ee e delman a threat of political quietism� By contrast, the modes of distracted reception excited by encounters with urban architecture or by cinematic spectatorship enact a heteronomous subordination to forms of collective experience. 1 In “A ‘Hive of Subtlety’: Aesthetics and the End(s) of Cultural Studies,” their jointly written introduction to a special issue of American Literature, Christopher Castiglia and Russ Castronovo explore one consequence of this antagonism at the very core of the aesthetic between autonomy and heteronomy, withdrawal and engagement, the individual and the collective, and freedom and limitation. Though grounding their remarks in the specific context of cultural studies in America, they identify a more general tension in the politics of the aesthetic: “Cultural Studies, with its attention to the social conditions and settings that make aesthetic contemplation a privilege available to relatively few, keeps us alert to the dangers of making aesthetics inherently progressive� In a corollary and countervailing gesture, however, cultural studies, with its attention to the unpredictable nature of these social conditions and settings, keeps us alert to the parallel fallacy of discarding aesthetic process as inherently conservative” (424)� Taking issue with critics like Fredric Jameson, who described what he called the “aesthetic revival” in the final decade of the twentieth century as a repression of real social engagement, Castiglia and Castronovo insist that the aesthetic “can, in fact, facilitate collective becoming, and, with it, collective social interests” (427)� In doing so they make clear that the “return” of the aesthetic more properly names its rehabilitation by critics intent on (re)claiming its utility for politically progressive ends� Conservatives, after all, have never renounced the aesthetic’s importance in consolidating communities of taste, even if that taste can swing wildly between ethno-nationalist assertions of cultural supremacy and populist opposition to whatever smacks of cultural pretension� The post-civil rights era in the United States has nourished conservative aesthetic ideologies that simultaneously denounce high culture for its association with elitism and academic privilege and decry the loss of that culture, often blamed on resentment of its domination by European-descended white males� In either case, the aesthetic collectivizes “the people” in the conservative imaginary� That this “people” generally possesses a racial and ethnic specificity, despite its invocation as universal (or, at the very least, as national), inflects this populist notion with exclusionary force. Taking seriously the normative implications of such a conservative aesthetic, Fred Moten characterizes the racial logic of Western subjectivity as the invention of a “transcendental aesthetic,” an aesthetic of “abstract, equivalent citizens” conjoined in the political community he describes (with some irony) as “civil society” (740)� Similarly, Sylvia Wynter attributes the origins of racial subjectivity to a “bio-aesthetic system of figuration” that “sets limits to [the] Subject’s mode of imagining … and, therefore, to the knowledge it can have of its world” (36, 44)� This aesthetic 1 Such distracted spectatorship allows the subject to master the violent shock of the urban encounter with modernity—a violence that threatens the contemplative subject of aesthetic education as fully as do the home invaders in Haneke’s Funny Games. Queerness, Afro-Pessimism, and the Return of the Aesthetic 13 shapes the normative framework within which subjects make sense of social existence; conservative defences of the aesthetic, therefore, coincide with defenses of that framework and that normativity both� Simon Gikandi puts it bluntly: “we cannot understand the idea of autonomy and transcendentalism in the ideology of the aesthetic outside of its economy of exclusion” (333). Proponents of the aesthetic’s contemporary “return” aspire, by contrast, to affirm the aesthetic’s potential to produce an inclusive community, one that Castiglia and Castronovo invoke as “an alternative, post-identity collectivism” (433)� This (re)turn to the aesthetic also reflects an impatience with what Rita Felski calls “the limits of critique�” It can signal, in such cases, an attempt to escape a pervasive hermeneutics of suspicion as expressed in paranoid, symptomatic, deconstructive, and ideological methods of analysis, all of which stand accused of performing a constraining and predictable set of moves that subordinate aesthetic objects to determination by history, context, rhetoric, or politics narrowly construed� Drawing on the currency of affect theory in its numerous iterations, Felski observes that reading “is not just a cognitive activity but an embodied mode of attention that involves us in acts of sensing, perceiving, feeling, registering, and engaging�” It is on this that she stakes her claim for the transformative power of the aesthetic: “To speak of a stylistics of existence is to acknowledge that our being in the world is formed and patterned along certain lines and that aesthetic experience can modify or redraw such patterns… . We give form to our existence through the diverse ways in which we inhabit, inflect, and appropriate the artistic forms we encounter” (175)� The aesthetic, so framed, is said to afford what critique alone cannot: a change in our being, and not just our thought; a freedom from the hold of the patterns to which we had previously been bound; a freedom, that is, from what Wynter sees as the limits on our “mode of imagining” that follow, as Wynters recognizes, from the dominant aesthetic itself� More than a decade after collaborating with Castronovo, Castiglia, hailing the “post-critique” moment to which Felski’s work responds, refers to it as potentially “the most significant dispositional shift [in literary criticism] since the advent of the New Historicism” (397)� He quotes Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus to explain his own enthusiasm for this renewed engagement with the aesthetic: “I believe that, as Best and Marcus assert, ‘immersion in texts (without paranoia or suspicion about their merit or value)’ can result in an ‘attentiveness to the artwork as itself a kind of freedom’” (415)� Let us bracket just what this attentiveness means (a return to Schillerian contemplation? ); let us bracket, as well, what immersion means and how it can evade the metaphorics of depth associated with paranoia and suspicion� Let us focus exclusively on the freedom claim being made on behalf of the aesthetic, a claim deeply rooted in the transformative potential that Castiglia links with “speculation, idealism, hopefulness, and their combination in what I’ve been calling imagination” (415)� Turning to the writings of Ernst Bloch, and following, by so doing, in the intellectual footsteps of José Esteban Muñoz, Castiglia views hope, understood as bound to aesthetic imagination, as the 14 l ee e delman engine that frees us from “the tyranny of unchallengeable facts” and the “inevitability … of the purported real”; only this imaginative freedom from fact permits us, Castiglia argues, to envision “counterworlds” (403, 405)� Like his view of the aesthetic as the gateway to freedom, Castiglia’s preference for hope over fact echoes Schiller’s association of the aesthetic with the imaginative liberty the latter associates with “seeing” as opposed to perception� “What we see through the eye,” writes Schiller, “is different from what we perceive …� As soon as seeing acquires an absolute value for [Man], he is already aesthetically free also” (126)� Such seeing, like the liberating immersion in art that Castiglia endorses via Best and Marcus, corresponds to the subordination of fact to the autonomy of aesthetic imagination, understood by Schiller as delight in what he identifies as “mere appearance” or form (127). Through the exercise of this function, Schiller argues, humans discover their sovereignty: “Since all actual existence derives its origin from Nature, as an extraneous power, but all appearance comes originally from Man, as percipient subject, he is only availing himself of his absolute proprietary right when he separates the appearance from the essence and arranges it according to his own laws� With unrestrained freedom he can join together what Nature has sundered, as soon as he can think of it together, and separate what Nature has combined, as soon as he can separate it in his intellect” (127)� Castiglia, however, parts company with Schiller when it comes to the imagination’s intervention in the world� With regard to aesthetic autonomy, Schiller insists that the human “possesses this sovereign right positively only in the world of appearance,” only “in the unsubstantial kingdom of the imagination” (128)� The aesthetic, in other words, frees us precisely by freeing us from the actual and it loses, for Schiller, its aesthetic status once harnessed in the service of reality, even if that instrumentalization intends to alter the reality we know� Schiller makes this point clearly: “Only insofar as it is candid (expressly renouncing all claim to reality), and only insofar as it is self-dependent (dispensing with all assistance from reality), is appearance aesthetic� As soon as it is deceitful and simulates reality, as soon as it is impure and requires reality for its operation, it is nothing but a base tool for material ends and can prove nothing for the freedom of the spirit” (128)� Displaying here what Paul de Man called “idealism as an ideology,” Schiller, as de Man goes on to observe, “posits the possibility of a pure intellect entirely separated from the material world, entirely separated from sensory experience” (146). This is not to say that Schiller denies the aesthetic any social consequence; to the contrary, he sees the aesthetic as the necessary condition for social relation� “Beauty alone,” he famously observes, “can confer on [Man] a social character� Taste alone brings harmony into society, because it establishes harmony in the individual� All other forms of perception divide a man, because they are exclusively based either on the sensuous or on the intellectual part of his being; only the perception of the Beautiful makes something whole of him, … only the communication of the Beautiful unites society, because it relates to what is common to all of them” (138)� The commonality to which Schiller refers, however, is the common pursuit of an aesthetic state that Queerness, Afro-Pessimism, and the Return of the Aesthetic 15 severs our thralldom to the actual, not a common investment in actualizing an imagined aesthetic state� That commonality, moreover, as Moten suggests, presupposes a universal aesthetic, which is also an aesthetic of universality attached, as Schiller makes clear by referring to the indifference of the gods in Greek sculpture, to a particular ethno-cultural history despite remaining at odds with any political commitment to reality and directing us, instead, toward the disengaged abstraction of an ideal� 2 These differing interpretations of aesthetic freedom in the work of Castiglia and Schiller correspond, if inexactly, to what Jacques Rancière calls an originary and persistent tension between the two great politics of aesthetics: the politics of the becoming-life of art and the politics of the resistant form� The first identifies the forms of aesthetic experience with the forms of an other life. The finality it ascribes to art is to construct new forms of life in common, and hence to eliminate itself as a separate reality� The second, by contrast, encloses the political promise of aesthetic experience in art’s very separation, in the resistance of its form to every transformation of form into life� 3 (43-44) The return of the aesthetic as endorsed by Castiglia, who stands in for a host of others here—including Felski, Marcus, and Best—partakes of the hope, essential to progressive appropriations of aesthetic discourse, invested in what Rancière describes as the “becoming-life of art.” From this perspective, the aesthetic evinces the creativity of life itself and allow us, as Rancière puts it, “to construct new forms of life in common�” This is what Castigilia and Castronovo suggest when they declare that “illusion, masquerade, deception, artifice, and any other terms that connote the ultimate ideological bankruptcy of aesthetic practice can, in fact, facilitate collective becoming, and, with it, collective social interests” (427)� So conceived, the virtue of the aesthetic lies in its capacity to envision the possibility of a world beyond the reality of this one, though the ultimate goal is to reconceive this one, through the liberty of the imagination, precisely in terms of the oneness of a collectivity modelled on the aesthetic union of the ”sensuous” and “the intellectual�” By this logic, moreover, the freedom, which is also the autonomy, of the aesthetic (as invoked by Castiglia’s emphasis on its “turning away from facts”) paradoxically reinforces its submission to the heteronomy of social reality (403)� Elizabeth Dillon recognizes as much when, echoing Castiglia and Castronovo’s implication of the aesthetic in “collective becoming,” she writes, “it seems important to view aesthetic judgment in its connection with community function and thus with heteronomy” (518). To this extent, the return of the aesthetic among thinkers on the left is largely the return of the 2 As in the case of social politics as described above, that ideal might well be one, like “the people,” that finds its embodiment in the most mundane or even vulgar forms of expression; but that very vulgarity thus becomes the element that raises it above its mere materiality to figure an abstract idea. 3 Although Castiglia clearly endorses the becoming-life of art and Schiller is closer to the politics of resistant form, it is important to note, as Ranciere will do, that Schiller’s attention to the inaccessibility, the “celestial self-sufficiency” of a work like the Juno Ludovici (Schiller 81), indicates, nonetheless, the aesthetic opening of a space of human freedom and, to that extent, enters, despite itself, into the “becoming-life” of art. 16 l ee e delman politics it purports to supersede� But rather than leading to more critique or to largely routinized gestures of ideological unmasking, the return of the aesthetic “discovers” something just as predictable and predetermined: the imaginative elaboration of counterworlds meant to counter precisely the presupposed force of ideologically determined fact� Castiglia puts it as follows: “Facticity, in Bloch’s account, serves the interests of the privileged, but anticipatory illuminations turn the real into a fantastic—and vigilant—hope” (403)� Though what he refers to as aesthetic “illuminations” here both escape and transform “the real,” Castiglia’s reference to Bloch seems to challenge his privileging of aesthetic hope over critique in its negativity� How do we know that facticity “serves the interests of the privileged” except by performing the sort of critique—whether paranoid, suspicious, or symptomatic—against which the aesthetic is posed? And what props up the vigilance of hope but Castiglia’s a priori assumption of the imagination’s dispositive relation to the self-same factual world from which, in his argument, it turns? On the basis of such a presumed relation Paul Gilmore affirms a similarly political vision of aesthetic hope: “aesthetic experience could become a precondition to greater political and social freedom and equality by imagining a universally shared terrain in place of the delimited ground of identity politics” (472)� One needn’t be enamoured of “identity politics” to hesitate before Gilmore’s predication of freedom on a “universally shared terrain,” which is to say, on the sort of “transcendental aesthetic” discussed by Moten� The desire for universality speaks to an investment in the aesthetic as, in Rancière’s words, “a living tissue of experiences and common beliefs in which both the elite and the people share”—an investment, therefore, in producing, as Rancière goes on to observe, “a ‘consensual’ community, not a community in which everyone is in agreement, but one that is realized as a community of feeling” (37). Such a community, however, as Rancière acknowledges, comes at the cost of the aesthetic autonomy from which it purports to spring� The valuation of the aesthetic for its independence from the world of “unchallengeable fact” turns out to have been the projection of a political vision all along—a vision wholly determined by the “facticity” it claims to escape� As if speaking directly to Castiglia, for whom the return of the aesthetic explicitly hinges on the imaginative “suspension of reality”—that is, on the suspension of the political, social, and cultural reality of the world as given—Rancière writes: “aesthetic metapolitics cannot fulfill the promise of living truth that it finds in aesthetic suspension except at the price of revoking this suspension, that is of transforming the form into a form of life” (Castiglia 402; Rancière 39)� The “suspension of reality,” to put this otherwise, responds to the imperative to transform reality by means of this very suspension, which, in consequence, is never really a suspension of reality at all� Castiglia and Castronovo affirm this transformation of “form into a form of life” when they characterize the aesthetic as a mode of “collective becoming�” With this they partake of a Deleuzian tradition that aspires, in the words of Levi Bryant, “to formulate an ontology… that locates intelligibility at the level of the aesthetic or the sensible itself,” thus making the aesthetic a resource for the apprehension Queerness, Afro-Pessimism, and the Return of the Aesthetic 17 of new ways of being (12)� 4 Insofar as this politics of the aesthetic is determined by the reality it purports to suspend, it engages a process of “becoming-life” that coincides with “becoming-intelligible�” As Kant points out in the Critique of Judgment, “it is necessary that the imagination in its freedom be commensurate with the lawfulness of the understanding” (188)� Indeed, the very point of this (re)turn to the aesthetic for progressive political ends lies in the intelligibilization, the critical translation into new forms of life, of what the imagination conjures beyond the constraints of the actual world� So conceived, the aesthetic would offer us more than a merely affective access to what a given world forecloses; it would offer us cognitive access as well, allowing us to grasp what a given reality casts outside of sense� The aesthetic politics of “becoming-life” thus must posit the aesthetic as, simultaneously, sufficiently other than factual reality to be free of its conceptual limitations and sufficiently intimate with factual reality to yield new forms of collective experience. In consequence, the politics of becoming-life constrains the imagination to serve the ends of intelligibility� For all that this version of the aesthetic may insist on affect and embodiment, its social and political mobilization rests, as Felski puts it clearly, on our “inhabit[ing], inflect[ing], and appropriat[ing] the artistic forms we encounter” (176)� The pedagogical corollary of her project, as she implicitly acknowledges, is wholly cognitive: teaching her students “to think carefully about their attachments” (emphasis mine) will allow them to “move beyond the stultifying division between naïve, emotional reading and rigorous, critical reading” (180)� But the ostensible movement “beyond … division” wherein students “think carefully about their attachments” maintains the obvious privileging of careful thought over “naive” reading� Like the aesthetic, “attachments” must submit to the language of critical intelligibility even in the effort to overcome the “limits of critique�” Whatever remains outside the framework of a community’s intelligibility, whatever that community doesn’t possess a critical language to “think,” will therefore elude recognition by the aesthetic imagination as well� If the foremost stake in the return of the aesthetic for progressive political ends is its ability to offer, through imagination, a mode of thought free from the conceptual restrictions imposed by the world as it is, then we must ask what happens when the aesthetic itself “sets limits to [the] Subject’s mode of imagining,” as Sylvia Wynter asserts (44)� Or, alternatively, what happens if we take the notion of aesthetic autonomy seriously, recognizing the aesthetic as separate from and ex-centric to the concerns of actuality and, therefore, as incommensurate with the assumption of its intelligibility? 4 Bryant goes on to discuss Deleuze’s concept of the encounter “in a twofold way� On the one hand, … it suspends our habitual relations of recognition with being and allows us to call these structures into question… � On the other hand, the encounter functions as a sign of the transcendental, announcing an internal difference within intuition whose structure and essence must be unfolded” (13)� 18 l ee e delman This prospect shapes the second of Rancière’s “two great politics of aesthetics,” the “politics of the resistant form,” which entails the “radical separation of the sensorium of art from that of everyday aestheticized life” such that the aesthetic “retains its purity, avoiding all forms of political intervention” (Rancière 43-44, 40). This position conceives the aesthetic as so fully self-enclosed that it winds up eluding human thought, “refusing every form of reconciliation,” and “maintaining the gap between the dissensual form of the work and the forms of ordinary experience” (41). Like the becominglife of art, however, it still holds out, as Rancière explains it, a metapolitical promise for the organization of the world� On the one hand, that promise inheres in art’s very separation from the world, suggesting the possibility of a radical freedom from reality and its hierarchies of value; on the other, and to me the more interesting, hand, it inheres for Rancière in the aesthetic’s “testimony to the power of the Other” (43)� The politics of the resistant form insists on “the shock of the aistheton, attesting to the mind’s alienation from the power of an irremediable alterity� The work’s sensible heterogeneity no longer vouches for the promise of emancipation� On the contrary, it comes to invalidate every such promise by testifying to the mind’s irremediable dependency with regard to the Other inhabiting it” (42)� Referring to the work of Jean-Francois Lyotard to conceptualize this aesthetic of Otherness, Rancière describes it, using Lyotard’s term, as a relation of “pure difference,” a relation that names the non-relation between the mind’s “conceptual determinations” and the “sensuous matter” that the mind is incapable of grasping or presenting, although it consists of such matter itself (90). But Rancière touches, however briefly, on another way to broach the alterity at issue in the politics of the resistant form when he describes it as “grounded in a notion of art as that which testifies to the immemorial dependency of the human mind on the unmasterable presence that, following Lacan, [Lyotard] calls the ‘Thing’” (94)� As tantalizing as this suggestion is, Rancière does little to expand on the connection between the Lacanian “Thing” and the aesthetic� I choose, nonetheless, to press on it here for the challenge it poses to the return of the aesthetic as a mode of “collective becoming”—a challenge that centers on the insistent ab-sens by which queerness and Afro-pessimism both would fracture the ontological ground supporting the aesthetics of collectivity� 5 The Lacanian Thing designates the “beyond-of-the-signified,” the ab-sens foundationally excluded from Symbolic signification (Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 54, 139)� Inhabiting the Symbolic as an impossibility produced by the Symbolic itself, it testifies to the persistence of the null set in every account of the world as it “is” and to the presence of something uncountable in every enumeration of collectivity� Each attempt to name it misnames it by turning its nothing into something, producing a catachrestic form to make 5 See, for example, Jared Sexton, who writes: “coalitions require a logic of identity and difference, of collective selves modeled on the construct of the modern individual, an entity whose coherence is purchased at the expense of whatever is cast off by definition” (“Afro-Pessimism” 3)� Queerness, Afro-Pessimism, and the Return of the Aesthetic 19 present what language excludes. Incapable of positivization, the Thing never attains the intelligibility its catachreses intend� Refusing the logic of sense (both as sensory experience and intellectual apprehension), the Thing, instead, partakes of ab-sens, insisting on what never is presented in or counted as part of a world� Where Schiller understood the aesthetic as surmounting the division between “the sensuous and the intellectual,” the Thing, as ab-sens, instantiates the radical priority of division as such, a division that is not a division of something but an originary division� Only through the prior subtraction of ab-sens as meaningless division or subtraction does the thought of being become possible—but that subtraction, by contrast, makes impossible the thought of ab-sens as such. In this way ab-sens interrupts both the oneness of being and the oneness of any being by incising in every entity the subtraction that incompletes it and confounding the aesthetic hope of “imagining a universally shared terrain,” a “unite[d] society,” or a “collective becoming�” 6 The subtraction that constitutes ab-sens for Lacan is central to his theoretization of sex, which remains, as he frames it, unknowable: a cut or division irreducible to the traditional binarization of sexual difference and as such inaccessible to logic or sense� For this reason, as we have seen, Lacan maintains that “there is no sexual relation” and man and woman, the so-called halves pretending to totalize the subject positions available to the speaking animal, are merely linguistic positings that serve to dissimulate ab-sens� Queerness, as I have argued, rather than naming non-normative sexual practices by way of a vague umbrella identity, catachrestically figures the ab-sens that designates sex in psychoanalysis, the ab-sens that the fantasy of sexual relation, of complementarity between man and woman, masks� Such queerness has no mooring in particular characteristics in themselves� It refers, instead, to whatever figures, in a given social order, a disruption in the economy of meaning, even if such figures of disruption are required for that economy to survive. It stands in for the Thing that no framework of intelligibility can accommodate and so appears, from the dominant perspective of the becoming-life of art, as the anti-aesthetic, the aesthetic’s inverse: in other words, the obscene� If the politics of the becoming-life of art and the politics of the resistant form both share, as Rancière maintains, “a common core linking the autonomy of art to the anticipation of a community to come” (128), then the queerness excluded from community, the queerness that figurally embodies the void inherent in the formation of every community, manifests itself as the obscenity that the aesthetic calls into being as its other� Major theorists of Afro-pessimism have framed blackness in tellingly similar terms� Noting that “it [is] impossible to divide slaveness from Blackness,” Frank Wilderson III proposes that since “the structure by which human beings are recognized and incorporated into a community of human beings is anti-slave,” the Black remains “a sentient being for whom recognition and 6 The universality of ab-sens in the structural production of speaking subjects does not produce a universal aesthetic of subjectivity, only the universality of aesthetic recuperations of subjectivity� 20 l ee e delman incorporation is impossible” (57, 57, 54)� Fred Moten, who places himself “in apposition” to the discourse of Afro-pessimism, declares nonetheless, “I am in total agreement with the Afro-pessimistic understanding of blackness as exterior to civil society” and he concurs that from within “the coordinates of the transcendental aesthetic,” “blackness is nothing, that is, the relative nothingness of the impossible, pathological subject” (739-41)� He then asks a series of questions: “What’s the relationship between blackness, thingliness, nothingness, and the (de/ re)generative operations of what Deleuze might call a life in common? … Can there be an aesthetic sociology or a social poetics of nothingness? ” (742). Although he answers in the affirmative (“[i]n the end,” he writes, “…life and optimism are the terms under which I speak” [742]), Afro-pessimists like Jared Sexton offer a very different perspective: “The question that remains,” writes Sexton in his respectful response to Moten, “is whether a politics, which is also to say an aesthetics, that affirms (social) life can avoid the thanatological dead end if it does not will its own (social) death” (“The Social Life of Social Death” 16)� The contemporary return of the aesthetic, of course, is far from willing its own social death, making it less a return than the continuation of a pervasive aesthetic politics whose dual aspects, as Rancière defines them, find “their common core” in a commitment to “a community to come�” With its promise of a redemptive collectivism, this aesthetics that returns without having left can realize such a community only by perpetuating the exclusion of whatever cannot be accommodated to being, whatever, as a consequence, finds itself figured by a catachrestic identity (like the queer, the black, the woman) constructed to be abjected by a particular socio-cultural regime� These catachreses of impossibility function as the aesthetic’s obscene remainders; they are positivized versions of the Thing, of ab-sens, of the pure negativity of division, as created by an aesthetic community to enclose and secure its notion of sense� The element of irredeemability inseparable from the category of obscenity— which never generates an aesthetic since any ascription of aesthetic value automatically disqualifies it as obscene—aligns it with the social death imposed on those made to figure the nothingness of ontological negation that inheres in queerness, blackness, ab-sens, or any of the myriad names for the void that disturbs the ethics, which is always also an aesthetics, of collectivity� The aesthetic, in fact, is bound to an ethics, specifically to an ethics of desire, even when that desire is the desire to escape our enslavement to desire as such� But this should hardly surprise us since our earliest seizure by the aesthetic coincides with our very precipitation as subjects through identification with the image of the other in which we first perceive an integral self. The ethical relation of the self to the other takes shape in the human from the outset by this internalization of an aesthetic image, of a totalized form, as the self—an aesthetic form whose intuited totality gives birth to our paradigm of being� That totality, however, can offer no image of queerness, or blackness, or sex, though the catachreses, the positivizations, that each of these precipitate may be mirrored back in a later moment under certain regimes of visibility. Queerness, blackness, sex, and ab-sens, as names for the primal Queerness, Afro-Pessimism, and the Return of the Aesthetic 21 subtraction that renders totality not-all, oppose to the aesthetic’s ethics of desire (which is the desire for aesthetic unity) the anti-aesthetic expressed by the drive, which, as the primal instantiation of the aesthetic’s obscene remainder, admits no incorporation into a subject without division� What drives this incessant return of the aesthetic, which keeps coming back, to great acclaim, to where it has been all along? Rooted as it is in an ethics of desire, why should the aesthetic be constrained to enact the repetition compulsion’s negativity when its goal is precisely to surmount negativity by insisting on totalization? Perhaps, as I have suggested, the answer has to do with the aesthetic’s involvement in the misrecognition that structures the mirror stage, engendering the subject through anticipation of the unity of the “I�” The image in the mirror is never whole; it both marks and is marked by its division from the proto-subject it elicits (who discovers not only itself but also its rival in the mirror) as well as from everything else that the mirror’s image can never show nor representation ever include� In mobilizing the logic of division and initiating the movement of desire, the mirror invokes, if only by negation, what never appears in the form of an object: the negativity of division as such� Out of that division, the source of the drive in the order of signification, the other of the aesthetic emerges, too: the Real that dissolves our reality, the obscenity wherein we never are but without which we could not be� That radical division with no name of its own, though the names it assumes are legion (including queerness, blackness, woman, and trans* in their non-positivizable senses), is the site of the subject’s unfreedom where all claims of aesthetic liberation, self-possession, and autonomy founder� But it is also, as Alenka Zupančič maintains, the singular condition of our freedom: the place of the subject’s self-constitution insofar as “there is no Other of the Other, no cause behind the cause” (40)� Determined by nothing beyond that division as it expresses itself in the drive, the subject is not subjected to the drive as a constraint or a form of unfreedom but, instead, is subjectified by it� In her juxtaposition of Kant and Lacan, Zupančič reminds us that, according to each, “man is not only much more unfree than he believes, but also much freer than he knows” (39)� Freedom, in fact, is something the subject is incapable of “knowing” since it is realized only at the level of the drives and not at the level of desire. It expresses itself in the jouissance that cares nothing for the subject’s self-interest (which is always the interest of its aesthetic self-image); instead, it consists of the drive’s negativity that refuses every object� Rather than pertaining to the self engendered through an aesthetic ideal of unity appropriated from without (the coherence of the image in the mirror), freedom inhabits the gap or division internal to the aesthetic and resistant to its totalizations� The subject of desire’s continuous pursuit of satisfaction in a cathected object yields to the drive’s attachment to jouissance through fixation, instead, on the object a with which nothing in reality coincides� Lacan observes in Seminar XX that “[o]bject a is no being� Object a is the void presupposed by a demand” (On Feminine Sexuality 126). This aspect of the void finds its corollary, he tells us, in the metonymy that propels us through a sentence from its beginning to 22 l ee e delman its end, instantiating, in his account of it, “a desire that is based on no being” (126)� In this radical of desire uncoupled from any objectal realization we encounter the negativity of the void that Lacan evokes in the phrase, “ce n’est pas ça”: “‘That’s not it’ means that, in the desire of every demand, there is but the request for object a” (126)� That “request,” in its negativity, constitutes the drive as the radical of desire: in other words, as the subtraction of desire from any positivization in an object� This “ce n’est pas ça” thus closely corresponds with the de-ontologizing force of Frantz Fanon’s “n’est pas” (“Le nègre n’est pas� Pas plus que le Blanc�”) as incisively glossed by David Marriott: “Too many readings of Fanon want to say what this ‘n’est pas’ is, to explain it away as mere negation in the manner, say, of Freud or Hegel� It seems necessary to be able to locate blackness in terms of what negates it, or, more precisely, to be able to attach predicates to it to make it recognizable (it seems to be characteristic of these readings to assume at least the possibility that blackness can be incorporated as a thing, or else as an identity or subject whose demands can be met and its referent duly agreed on)” (Marriott 8)� With this refusal of positivization and this distancing of blackness from the “predicates” intended to bind it to an ontological referent, we see the commonality of blackness and queerness as designations for what escapes incorporation in the catachreses that generate (id)entities� In this context we might return to Paul Gilmore’s previously cited words: “aesthetic experience could become a precondition to greater political and social freedom and equality by imagining a universally shared terrain in place of the delimited ground of identity politics” (472)� The aesthetic—itself an “identity politics” inseparable from the subject’s constitutive self-identification as a subject—cannot procure the subject’s “freedom,” from a psychoanalytic point of view, any more than universality can avoid its condition as not-all� The only universality a psychoanalytic concept of freedom can acknowledge is the drive’s attachment to a jouissance at odds with the (aesthetic) identities through which we imag(in)e ourselves and the world� Such a freedom, because inaccessible to the subject’s conscious desires, can serve as the ground for no political program or collective social engagement� In her subtle analysis of the historical logic by which Hegel justifies the enslavement of Africans as “an essentially emancipatory project,” Andrea Long Chu asks a series of questions raised by the drive as well: “Can we think freedom without the future? What would a radically presentist notion of freedom look like? Would we even recognize it as freedom? ” (417)� Sade himself, in his most orgiastic scenes, filters his evocations of the drive through the lens of the libertine’s “liberty,” making it, at worst, a wearisome task to which the libertine accedes and not what it is for psychoanalysis: an imperative that sidesteps the will� Slavoj Žižek gives us a better image of the drive’s relation to freedom when he discusses the fate of Karen in Hans Christian Anderson’s, “The Red Shoes” (81)� While the woman by whom she was raised lies dying, Karen, eager to attend a great ball being thrown that night in town, turns her thoughts to the shiny red shoes in which she has long taken pride� Thinking it can do Queerness, Afro-Pessimism, and the Return of the Aesthetic 23 no harm to look at, to handle, or even to wear them, she decides to put them on� No sooner has she done so, however, than they prompt her to abandon her guardian’s deathbed and make her way to the ball� Once there, they take control of her movements, merging with her feet and forcing her to dance continuously, night and day� Far from gaining the pleasure she imagined or the freedom of action she desired, she experiences herself as coerced by the shoes in which she now feels imprisoned. They exert, like the drive, as Žižek puts it, “a kind of impersonal willing” that “exacts satisfaction at any price, irrespective of the subject’s well-being�” But Karen, who perceives this willing as something alien to her desire, determines to escape it, which she does by persuading an executioner to cut her feet off with his axe. Still ensconced in the shoes, her feet dance away while Karen, now crippled, devotes herself to a life of penitence and devotion, “free” of the enjoyment to which she had found herself driven by the shoes. But as Žižek rightly reminds us, while no subject can ever “subjectivize” the drive and “assume it as ‘her own,’” it “operates in her very kernel,” expressing “that which is ‘in the subject more than herself’”; indeed, to the extent that “desire is the desire of the Other, while drive is never the drive of the Other,” only the latter can express the subject’s freedom from external determination (81). Only it reveals, in the words of Zupančiç, “no Other of the Other, no cause behind the cause,” thus escaping heteronomy� Unlike what Rancière discusses as the aesthetic politics of the resistant form—where the work “no longer vouches for the promise of emancipation� On the contrary, it comes to invalidate every such promise by testifying to the mind’s irremediable dependency with regard to the Other inhabiting it”—the drive’s insistence, as “The Red Shoes” depicts it, implicates enslavement and emancipation in each other. It testifies not to what is Other than the subject but to the division of which the subject consists, its negative ontology� Intolerable to our cathected self-image, the negativity that emerges from within the aesthetic (not for nothing do the red shoes begin as the beautiful objects of Karen’s desire) occasions not only the disavowal of the obscene compulsion such negativity exerts (as when Karen asks that her feet be cut off), but also its sublimation, its rerouting toward socially sanctioned ends, like the piety that demands, as the red shoes did, submission to a will not one’s “own�” If the compulsion of the drive gets negated here as the antithesis of aesthetic freedom only to be refigured as Karen’s subservience to the mandate of celestial law, then we can recognize the underlying affinity between religion and the obscenity it demonizes, an affinity that shows how the drive’s sublimation, aesthetic education’s goal, preserves, in its own negativity, the obscenity it would subl(im)ate� The constant return of the aesthetic corresponds to the constant pressure of the drive, but in seeking to counter the drive’s enjoyment, aesthetic sublimation reinforces it� In the same way, the freedom the aesthetic proposes finds its predicate in constraint: not just the constraint that lets the subject escape its enchainment to materiality only by chaining the devalued material to the abstraction said to transcend it, but also the literal enchainment of those it excludes from rational thought. Like 24 l ee e delman philosophy in Badiou’s account of it, the aesthetic, as a form of education, “wants to know nothing about jouissance” and for just that reason remains bound to it, like Hegel’s lord to his bondsman (Badiou 66)� That latter relation models, in Lacan’s analysis, philosophy’s theft of the slave’s jouissance, but it also describes the structure supporting Schillerian aesthetic freedom, with its privileging of “idleness and indifference�” Exploring the central position of race in the formation of such an aesthetic, Gikandi observes that “[p]roponents of the aesthetic sought to use blackness as the counterpoint to beauty and enlightenment and then to relegate it to the margins of their discourse” (331)� In response to Elaine Scarry’s defense of beauty as a spur “to repair existing injustices,” he observes: “[i]t is perhaps true that concerns with beauty do indeed make us hanker for justice and just solutions to our social problems, but still, if this claim is to be taken seriously, if we are to associate beauty with an immanent idea of justice, then we need to consider its counterpoint: the injuries done to the bodies of those considered to be outside the domain of the beautiful and the injustice committed on these bodies in the name of beauty” (Scarry 57, Gikandi 327)� But we needn’t stop there� We should also consider the injustice done to those excluded from the realm of being, those figured as its negation in order to shelter the concept of aesthetic totality from its inherent antagonism� These are the queer, the monstrous, the alien, the irrational, and the nonhuman who embody that antagonism (to which the drive returns us); these are all who figurally embody the other of the aesthetic, the obscenity of ab-sens, and thereby refute the Schillerian hope of a purely aesthetic liberation, as well as the progressive political fantasy of an aesthetic of collective becoming, by insisting on the injury and exclusion that follow inevitably from this irreducible fact: aesthetic totality is always not-all� Works Cited Badiou, Alain� Images du temps present, 2001-2004. 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Aesthetics and Its Discontents� Malden: Polity, 2009� Scarry, Elaine� On Beauty and Being Just� Princeton: Princeton UP, 1999� Schiller, Friedrich� On the Aesthetic Education of Man� Trans� Reginald Snell� Mineola: Dover, 2004� Sexton, Jared. “Afro-Pessimism: The Unclear Word.” Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledges 29 (2016)� ---� “The Social Life of Social Death: On Afro-Pessimism and Black Optimism�” InTensions Journal 5 (2011)� Wilderson, Frank B�, III� Interview by Jared Ball, Todd Steven Burroughs and Dr� Hate� “‘We’re trying to destroy the world’: Anti-Blackness and Police Violence after Ferguson�” Ill Will Editions, Nov 2014� Wynter, Sylvia� “The Ceremony Must Be Found: After Humanism�” boundary 2 12�3 (1984): 19-70� Žižek, Slavoj. The Abyss of Freedom. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1997� Zupančič, Alenka. Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan� New York: Verso, 2000�