Unpayable debt: What lies beneath 1

It will take, I submit, no less than interrupting the very process of Thought, which means releasing thinking from the necessity and the onto-epistemological pillars and descriptors on which it rests, in order to maintain Man’s uniqueness.

Ferreira da Silva (2022)

In other words, blacklight does not illuminate: it makes things emanate or shine. Ferreira da Silva (2017)

In this volume, Cultural Dynamics breaks from its customary format of a short Book Forum to inaugurate an extended focus. Going forward, we will adopt this format for texts that we believe have considerable influence on interdisciplinary conversations across the board, particularly books and essays that we see as unsettling paradigms, theories, categories and offering innovative approaches and interventions for apprehending histories in relation to sociocultural and sociopolitical formations. For we believe like MLK, that the “fierce urgency of now” (MLK, 1963) demands that we attend to the business of unsettling the violence that underpins our human and more than human existence. Unpayable Debt, an exceptionally erudite text by Denise Ferreira da Silva, offers a provocative opening for exploring enduring and recurring ideas of raciality that manifestly or latently activate a Kantian and Hegelian understanding of the planet and its inhabitants. In this post/Enlightenment framing, Ferreira da Silva identifies subjects of transparency who, emboldened by their consciousness and the power of their reason, are contrasted with those others who are mere subjects of affectability and suffer from cultural or biologically derived mental disabilities.

Despite changing times, these dualisms continue to pervade thought in their account of raciality, e.g., notions of race relations, leading to circuitous explanations (often victim-blaming) that are still largely undergirded by these earlier post/Enlightenment arguments. For Ferreira da Silva, to be thoroughly understood, Blackness, raciality’s ground zero muse, requires an engagement with the continuously overlooked ‘wounded captive body in the scene of subjugation,’ that reveals the hidden codes within the myriad nodes of modernity and, not least, the workings of modernization, which is capital’s DNA. Perhaps paradoxically, it is this figure, reflected and refracted through Octavia Butler’s Dana, in Kindred, in her transtemporal travels, that opens out on a different imaginary from which we can draw upon 1) to dismantle the grammar and praxes of raciality 2) for the becoming of another worlding that departs from the violent one of our present. Unpayable Debt draws on Ferreira da Silva’s earlier published, essays—for instance, “On Difference without Separability” (2012), “Accumulation Dispossession and Debt,” 2016), and “Blacklight (2017)—but in this book, one is treated to more cellular detail through the shine of Blacklight that exposes “how the juridical and economic architectures of colonial/racial violence enter into the very construction of the analytical tools available to critiques of global capital” (2017, 245). CDY therefore invited several commentators to engage the book’s ambitious arguments.

We are fundamentally interested in ideas that can take us more deeply into assessing our inseparable present future pasts or past future presents. As well, we would like to promote discussions that speak from the relational global Souths. The global South we treat as a counter-cartographic expression, though it makes for a loose fit with the excolonized countries of the world. More specifically, it points to people who live generationally precarious lives and to those places that are more prone to the vulnerabilities that have emanated from colonialism and contend with ongoing colonial imaginaries, produced by biopolitical and sovereign governmentalities—those places and people seen by the West as historyless, wanting, less than human and equivalent to nature. Yet, as many agree, the global North too produces its own Souths of neighborhoods, states, and peoples.

Unpayable Debt, penned by one of the more formidable philosophers of our times, is one such text that calls for rethinking the systemic violence that has attended lives blackened in the universalizing of Western imaginaries. Unpayable Debt draws on quantum physics’ privileging of the idea that everything is in everything and therefore centers the need to think ‘deep implicancy,’ rejecting separability (of mind and body), in order to “rethink sociality without the modern text” (58). In a deft move, Ferreira da Silva draws on Octavia Butler’s Kindred (which the writer Junot Diaz calls a neo-slave narrative, while others refer to it as science fiction) in order to explore the symbolism of Dana’s time travel through what she calls a black feminist tool of ‘the wounded captive body in the scene of subjugation.’ Exploration with this poethical tool is also about attending to what it gifts to the modern world by way of innovative techniques for thinking up a new world without deploying the master’s tools, to adapt Audre Lorde’s powerful statement. In doing so, Ferreira da Silva calls attention to the entanglement of material and virtual or spectral presence that cuts through and challenges chronological and linear time and which sustains ‘a racial dialectic’ that misrecognizes the practice and endurance of raciality, as the ultimate means by which to “unleash an attack from its underside” ‘on the Kantian program’ (261) as she ‘re/de/composes’ the properties fixated in Western thought that still inflict violence onto the bodies of Black, Indigenous and nonwhite populations.

The idea of value runs through the text as raciality is indeed about valuation and its ‘Others.’ Thus, the category of capital comes in for special scrutiny given that it addresses the power of the economy, oftentimes without attention to the economy of power and its extraordinary impact on producing life and death. Though Marx remains a vital resource for thinking new economically free worlds. Ferreira da Silva sees her task here to “re/de/compose the original presentation of capital by identifying how labor and property function in its composition as a totality.” As she says, “All I am doing in short, is reading the statements that assemble capital as a (formal-historical) totality” (192). Thus, Dana’s travel from the present into the plantation past and back to 1970s Los Angeles (with her arm stuck in the wall as she attempts to free herself from the violence of her encounter with the past) accounts for the wounded present exploding the constitution of capital within Marx’s formulation of value in defining capital. Value so formulated within capital, as Ferreira da Silva sees it, obfuscates the labor time of the enslaved casting it only as a precondition for the emergence of capital. In this reckoning, Ferreira da Silva sees the pre-eminence of wage labor undervaluing or ignoring the active and durable life and afterlife of slave labor in the formation and reformation of capital accumulation.

If capital isn’t simply an economic category but a social and political relationship—though the former process has been the more popular focus—then, Ferreira da Silva asks, what are the social and political relationships needed to produce it? Wage labor or ‘free labor’ is the outcome of workers (formerly peasants or artisans) dispossessed of their means of production, equipped only with their capacity to labor–labor power in Marxian terms, (labor time for Ferreira da Silva) and unable to sustain themselves become the sole bearers of the means toward freedom. Despite Marx’s recognition of slavery and even its aftermath (such as Quashie’s resistance to capital in Jamaica), historical materialism, argues Ferreira da Silva, is unable to account for the labor of the slave in its rendering of political economy. In short, the representation of the labor theory of value–M-C-M–excises the role of slavery as part of the cellular structuration of capital accumulation. If apprehended only as a precondition—namely as primitive accumulation interpreted here as preceding capital formation—black bodies, and others, namely indigenous persons are subsumed within a past that no longer seems useful in the modern configuration of capital.

Throughout her expansive opus, Ferreira da Silva has been a tireless critic of post/Enlightenment thought for its paradigmatic orientation toward its onto-epistemological constructs of separability, determinacy, and sequentiality. These assumptions, which she sees as underpinning contemporary thought, get played out in the praxes of modernity and modernization. In her most cited text Toward a Global Idea of Race (2007), Ferreira da Silva is concerned with how ideas of raciality constitute such thought and shape and guide our present. For her, this racial dialectic can also be found in Marx’s historical materialism. Thus, for her despite Marx’s productive shifts and undercutting of elements of the interiority of being, his materialist conception of history still performs this excision of the Black enslaved body from any meaningful role in the production of value. Thus, this erasure continues the Kantian and Hegelian tradition of treating Black people and their labor as unessential, disposable, for the real emancipatory moment of capital, which in its destruction of feudal, ‘Asiatic’ and other pre-modern modes of production, will eventually subvert itself in emancipatory struggles led by wage laborers the successors to unfree forms of labor (that of the enslaved), in their dynamic and hegemonic economic conduct within the world market.

Ferreira da Silva’s argument that historical materialism’s fault lines—dependent as they are on (primarily) an incapacity to work with raciality—are captured by the blacklight of the wounded captive body in the scene of subjugation, first appears in her essay on the financial meltdown via the sub-prime mortgage crisis of 2007–2008. There, Ferreira da Silva takes issue with analyses that emphasize only the issue of social class rather than also its glaring racial dimension which targeted especially Brown and Black bodies. Co-authored with Paula Chakravartty, “Accumulation, Dispossession and Debt: The Racial Logic of Global Capitalism—An Introduction” (2012) highlights the mortgage crisis’s visible racial dynamic, framing it as the resurfacing of post-Enlightenment understanding of corporeal disposability that underpins the modern/colonial/power matrix. That mortgage crisis, also treated as an unpayable debt, proved profitable for those granting such credit. In fact, the authors and other analysts argue that it was an acknowledged fact that the inability of Black and Brown persons to repay would be the instrument for profit-making. In other words, the inability to pay was what the profiteers bet on. Katharyne Mitchell (2009) uses the term, “pre-black,” for those populations profiled “in advance—as risk failures” (243). What Mitchell has in mind is to capture the changed temporality within capital that sustains Blackness. I read her identification of the shift from “if/then,” to “when/then,” coinciding with the Kantian pre-known of consciousness, that Ferreira da Silva’s work highlights. Such new times, so to speak, register a deepening of fear of the ‘otherized,’ and the need for surveillance, by capital and States of those whose lives they persist in making precarious. Those ‘expulsed’ (Sassen, 2014) or, as Tanya Murray Li posits, become surplus labor “kept alive in prisons, refugee camps, and ghettos” (Murray Li, 2010; Estes, 2021) fall outside of risk and are seen to occupy a future already known. In other words, the when/then probability of already known displaces the traditional future unknown if/then supposition. Thus, populations can be and are criminalized before any crime is committed. Those are the kinds of outcomes of post/Enlightenment thought that Ferreira da Silva sees as inhabiting our present. ‘Unpayable Debt turns on the insides-outsides of universal determinations, undergirding Blacks’ marked non-humanness, and thus exposes a political economic architecture that continues to structure modern Black subjects as mentally deficient and eminently disposable. Not even the radical Marx and Marxists seem able to escape this structure, Ferreira da Silva argues.

For Ferreira da Silva, Marx mainly focuses on the social and economic relationships embedding a labor process; but one being shaped by other entangled social political relationships that produce an exorbitance in the nature of the political in form and capital. It’s that kind of excess that Marx does not theorize because, she argues, he looks only at the political within the framework of the market, given his singular focus on the commodification process as representing capital becoming hegemonic. While the concept of racial capitalism points to the different ways in which racialization operates within a sociocultural and socioeconomic hierarchy, it is not simply that all these racial differences get produced, as some have argued, through the notion that “everyone is being racialized.” There is something distinct about the commodified racial body, the wounded captive in the scene of subjugation, that calls forth a racial analytic like no other.

One cannot understand race simply in terms of the economic dimensions of the lived process, is Ferreira da Silva’s clear assertion; one needs to understand race within the sociopolitical processes which extend to the nature of sovereignty. And so, given political economy’s incapacity to do so, there is this need to think race outside of those constructs it affords—and this is what Marx fails to do. As her argument goes, Marx never calculates or theorizes outside of the category of economics, which is why Black bodies always act as an additional leverage for the White body’s fundamental historical task of emancipation. Black bodies, for Marx, have never been central to that project of capital relative to the European body. Ferreira da Silva’s point: In Marx, the wounded captive body in the scene of subjugation is the precursor grasped in the project of primitive accumulation but always merely as a pedestal for emergent capital and free labor, and therefore always a supplement. Ferreira Da Silva insists that the question does not even revolve around the issue of racial inclusion, nor can it be supplemental or additive to the project of emancipation. No, she argues, the issue concerns the racial being threaded through the very idea of what freedom and emancipation mean. As such, there exists a blind spot, or, put another way, Marx applies his conceptual categories’ indebtedness to earlier traditions and thought (say, Aristotelian and post-Enlightenment epistemologies), leaves him faithful to notions of separability, determinacy and sequentiality, in which one mode of production succeeds another (even as dialectically conceptualized) which leads to progress through which freedom can be realized. What seems particularly distinctive about Ferreira da Silva’s argument is that in Marx’s political economy one cannot merely graft the racial onto it: it is the unthought reality that escapes historical materialism’s formulations. Her argument, she states, is not simply about the different forms of racialization—Jews, Irish, Muslims, not even the slave per se—even as her argument certainly invokes the latter’s relation to raciality.

If, as Ferreira da Silva argues, the Marxian formulation treats the slave’s value only as the groundwork for the emergence of capital—primitive accumulation—how do present debates and revisions of the concept of primitive accumulation, especially in their rendition of it as an ongoing component and not only as a precondition for capital’s possibility, affect this argument? David Harvey (2009), with his concept of accumulation by dispossession, takes us into the myriad nontraditional areas of violent and predatory practices to resolve capital’s crisis of accumulation, including debt, and he argues that primitive accumulation did not end with the onset of industrialization. But does Harvey’s concept change anything concerning the formula M-C-M or merely extend it to other areas? In fact, this recognition permits, Ferreira da Silva would argue, the continuation of the practice of severing of forms from each other—that these new forms of accumulation are merely cumulative and do little to denounce post-Enlightenment rationales.

Dale Tomich (1990, 2003) formulates a more productive approach that reads capital as a dynamic relationship forged through a multiplicity of labor forms. For example, his argument that capital is realized at the world market/world economy scale, in the moment of exchange and not in production per se and the subsequent decentering of wage labor as the DNA of capitalism, creates a space for race to enter. Ferreira da Silva cites Tomich’s theorization of history (p.231n93) as empowering and innovative, lauding it for its revision of Marx’s undertheorized account of the world economy since it encompasses all forms of labor as value-creating and therefore includes slavery in the circuit of capital accumulation. But Tomich’s materialist revision works only with the economic, and, even as he incorporates slavery as producing value in his revised theorizing, one still must contend with the raciality that the wounded captive body in the scene of subjugation also reveals in the juridical and political spheres, which is another way of saying that one still needs to attend to the ‘economy of power’ or modern governmentality–its lived and systemic crises, “especially manifest in the (former) slaves’ experiences of the modern world in relation to the processes and politics of making place and presence” (Crichlow and Northover 2009, 44).

This volume carries several responses to Ferreira da Silva’s provocative argument. I need not repeat them here, as Tâmis Parron ably summarizes the orientation of these commentaries in his introduction. As he correctly states, most seem to draw deeply from the fount of Marx’s writings to engage Ferreira da Silva. Most seem to defend Marx’s formulations, observations, and theorizations as covering Black bodies, notably the enslaved, and therefore rupturing earlier European epistemic traditions of treating slavery en passant. The careful reader—of Unpayable Debt—can judge for herself whether these commentaries address, directly or indirectly, the fault lines that Ferreira da Silva sees in the shine of the blacklight produced by the wounded captive body in the scene of subjugation. She can assess whether the arguments of Unpayable Debt get us beyond what Ferreira da Silva refers to as the “racial dialectic” that at best misrecognizes, “rendering blackness (as racial difference) the cause and effect of racial subjugation” (106).

Ferreira da Silva’s insistence that the ‘ungendered’ wounded captive body in the scene of subjugation be brought into the calculative strategies of the living, the dead and the fodder (she never left); for they are the multiple one who can never not exist, aims to offer a different imperative to construct a world without violence. That is what is at stake in this book compelled by Butler’s Dana representing that invisibilized body in the scene of subjugation. That timeless figure, visibilized, also generously tenders the gift of sight and possibilities for other forms of life and living. Ferreira da Silva argues that, since one cannot add that figure back to recover or revise the Western thought that she critiques, these formulations must be unthought. As she put it:

There is no point in trying to reform the captive body and make her fit where she does not belong. Hers is a radical stance that is at once a demand for accountability or redress and a move to release existence from the grips of the transparent I, to bring its world of knowledge to an end and clear the grounds for thinking beyond its limits. Her stance, in sum, insofar as it is confrontational, is negativation, namely, an enactment of refusal–refusal to die, refusal to comply, refusal to give up and give in—to which the mere existence of black persons here/now testifies. (273)

This presentation of thinking beyond the modern text that, Ferreira da Silva deploys in order to map raciality’s persistence in the present, via the black feminist poethical tool of the wounded captive body in the scene of subjugation, also serves as a guarantee for the creation of a world without the sociocultural, political and economic violence (juridical and economic) that destructively inhabits our present. It is the imperative for the realization of a necessary pluriversal decolonized world. A world forged in our entangled and relational temporalities and as a condition of our existence– ‘deep implicancy,’ in Ferreira da Silva’s words.