Abstract:

If every concept, like any other modern tool for thinking, cannot but presuppose interiority as its domain of operation, how can the latter be brought under interrogation - how can interiority itself become available to its own (our mental) tools? In this talk I speculate on what happens when blackness – as a  tool of raciality (that is, racial difference and cultural difference), which is the symbolic arsenal that plays in both the ethic-economic and an ethic-juridic corner of the liberal political architecture –  guides an analysis of interiority able to expose how it has operated in the accumulation of capital in the past two hundred years or so. The key formulation of interiority engaged here is the one presented in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and Critique of Practical Reason, namely the formal thing or “unity of apperception.”  Both books will be read with theoretical contributions that frame raciality as a political concept, such as Gayatri C. Spivak’s, David C. Lloyd’s, Sylvia Wynter’s, Judith Butler’s, Frantz Fanon’s, C.L.R James’s, Édouard Glissant’s, among others.

Bio:

The artist and philosopher Denise Ferreira da Silva is the Samuel Rudin Professor in the Humanities and Co-Director of the Critical Racial & Anti-Colonial Study Co-Laboratory at New York University and adjunct professor at the Monash University School of Art, Architecture, and Design (Australia). Her  artistic and academic work reflect and speculate on themes and questions crucial to contemporary philosophy, aesthetics, political theory, black thought, feminist thought, and historical materialism. 

She is the author of Toward a Global Idea of Race (University of Minnesota Press, 2007), The Impagavel Divide (Workshop of Political Imagination and Living Commons, 2019), Unpayable Debt (Stenberg / MIT Press, 2022) and co-editor (with Paula Chakravartty) of Race, Empire, and the Crisis of the Subprime (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013)  

Her artwork includes the films Serpent Rain (2016), 4Waters-Deep Implicancy (2018), Soot Breath / Corpus Infinitum (2020) and Ancestral Claims/Ancestral Clouds (2023) in collaboration with Arjuna Neuman; and the relational artistic practices Poethical Readings and Sensing Salon, in collaboration with Valentina Desideri. She has performed shows and lectures in important artistic spaces, such as the Pompidou Centre (Paris), Whitechapel Gallery (London), MASP (São Paulo), Guggenheim (New York) and MoMa (New York). She also wrote and created for publications for major art events (Liverpool Biennale, 2017; São Paulo Biennale, 2016; 2023 Venice Biennale, 2017 and Documenta 14, São Paulo Biennale, 2023) and published in art spaces such as Canadian Art, Texte Zur Kunst and E-Flux.