The Creature as a Figure of Unrestitutability, or Monsters in Paradise not Allowed: Benevolence and Restitution in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

This chapter brings Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in conversation with two moral sentiment philosophers of the 18th century, Joseph Butler and David Hume. It focuses on the connection between the modern restitutive trope and reparation as premised on shared humanity. The ‘problem’ that the Creature from Frankenstein illuminates is the conditional logic of restitution, which is open only to those who are already included in human society; animals, monsters, and other non-humans do not partake in restitution. By showing that the concept of benevolence has a central place in the construction of prelapsarian desires in Shelley’s novel, the chapter argues that the Creature represents for the other protagonists the humanity’s ‘radical outside’; he is both excluded from the benevolent society and divested of restitutive possibilities. The Creature is a figure of ‘unrestitutability’ because the possibilities of return, undoing and repair are barred from him by the virtue of his constitutive exclusion from humanity.

From Locke to Slots: Money and the Politics of Indigeneity

With ongoing consequences for American Indians, the New World Indian has been a pervasive figure of constitutive exclusion in modern theories of money, property, and government. This paradoxical exclusion of indigenous peoples from the money/property/government complex is intrinsic to, and constitutive of, modern theories of money. What is more, it haunts the cultural politics of indigenous peoples’ economic actions. In Part I, I establish that, and how, indigeneity has been constitutively present at the foundation of modern theories of money, as Europeans and settlers defined indigenous peoples in part by the absence of money and property (of which money is a special form). In turn, and more to the point here, they defined money and property in part as that which modern non-indigenous people have and use. These are not solely economic matters: the conceptual exclusions from money/property were coproduced with juridical ones insofar as liberal political theory grounded the authority of modern government in private property (and, in turn, in money). To show how this formation of money and indigeneity has mattered both for disciplinary anthropology and for American public culture at several historical moments, Part II traces how the dilemmas expressed by these texts haunt subsequent debates about the function of wampum, the logic of potlatch, and the impact of tribal gaming. Such debates inform scholarship beyond the boundaries of anthropology and, as each case shows in brief, they create harms and benefits for peoples in ways that perpetuate the (il)logics and everyday practices of settler colonialism.

Multiplicity and Collective Contestation in the 1992 Los Angeles Riots/Rebellion

Chapter 7 takes up the political unintelligibility of the 1992 Los Angeles (LA) Riot/Rebellion to understand—if not why the riots remain unintelligible to us as political contestation of political conditions—how this unintelligibility is produced and what significance it bears for us now. While riots (and race riots in particular) might be politically intelligible under certain conditions, the consolidation of anti-Black racism with riots throughout the latter twentieth century rendered “America’s first multiracial riot” particularly unintelligible as a political contestation of constitutive exclusion. I discuss the interrelation of gender, class, and sexuality in the Rodney King beating, the murder of Latasha Harlins, and the multiracial geography of the riots to articulate how the continued unintelligibility of the 1992 Los Angeles Riot/Rebellion, as well as contemporary riots, constitute political agency now.

Materialist History and Method

Chapter 5 argues that due to its retroactive character, any critique of constitutive exclusion must be retrospective: both materialist and historical. First, this critical method must be material as a means of releasing the possibilities sedimented in a political agency we often presume to be fixed, natural, and unified. It must also be material in order to orient our listening toward concrete conditions without reducing them to brute facticity and without romanticizing or fetishizing those constitutively excluded. Second, this critical method must also be retrospective or historical, because the retroactive temporality of constitutive exclusion leaves the current terrain of politics and intelligible political agency sedimented with multiple exclusions. By unearthing how things may have been otherwise, we release those sparks of resistance that they can still be otherwise.

Postscript

In Chapter 8, I discuss how I came to the question of constitutive exclusion in the aftermath of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. Drawing on both Afro-pessimist and Latina feminist thought, I outline a pluralist political ontology as a response to the political ontologies presumed by and reinscribed through constitutive exclusion. Reconstitution, rather than mere inclusion, would be necessary to respond adequately to constitutive exclusion. And I argue for a recognition of our selves as multiple and constituted by each other—a possibility implicit in the critical account of the book, and explicitly developed in practice by #BlackLivesMatter and allied activist organizations.

Adorno’s Negative Dialectics as Critical Method

Chapter 4 turns to the method of critique, for the sake of the political epistemology of constitutive exclusion. If constitutive exclusion produces the terms of intelligible political agency, then those cast in the space of exclusion will still be within, but will be politically unintelligible. How do we listen for what we cannot hear? This chapter takes up Adorno’s negative dialectics as a model for method, through an analysis of “nonidentity” as quasi-transcendent. Like the constitutively excluded element, nonidentity can only be found within what has excluded it rather than absolutely beyond it. Two requirements thus emerge: first, our method must be dialectical, because dialectics respects that what exceeds the delimited terms of politics emerges from within those terms but is not captured by them. Second, our method must be negative, because this keeps us from determining the meaning of contestations of constitutive exclusion in advance.

On the Quasi-Transcendental: Temporality and Political Epistemology in Derrida’s Glas

Chapter 3 articulates how constitutive exclusion both grounds and troubles borders and foundations, acting as the simultaneous condition of possibility and impossibility for the body whose border it draws. I investigate this quasi-transcendental character through an analysis of Derrida’s reading of Hegel in Glas, and in his 1971–1972 course, “La famille de Hegel.” Derrida argues that the speculative dialectic of the Logic is distinguished from the empirical differences of nature through an account of gender produced as “natural” but which secures the gender of language and power. Relying on Derrida’s analysis of Antigone/Antigone, I flesh out the economy and retroactive temporality of constitutive exclusion. I give an account of transcendental as a performative role, and argue that retroactive temporality, in combination with the multiplicity diagnosed in Chapter 2, indicates that political bodies and agency are secured through a sedimented history of multiple constitutive exclusions.

Multiple Negativity: Negativity and Difference in Hegel’s Science of Logic

Chapter 2 diagnoses the operation of constitutive exclusion in hegemonic or closed systems, using Hegel’s philosophical system as a model. I argue that Hegel’s totalized philosophical system relies on a more radical, heterogeneous negativity and difference that it constitutively excludes. The Science of Logic—and by extension the whole of the Hegelian system—relies on the constitutive exclusion of a multiple negativity that exceeds the logic of determinate negation and contradiction that organizes the Hegelian system. However, while this multiple negativity is necessary to the system, because it cannot be recognized by the system it operates in an epistemological “blind spot.” I show that the ontological account of the Logic is arrived at by means of the disavowal of a multiple negativity with its roots in contingent empirical differences, and that this is an ultimately political operation. This irruption of politics into ontology is the hallmark of constitutive exclusion.

Critical Models: Antigone, Rosa Parks and Claudette Colvin

Chapter 6 treats the figures of Antigone, Rosa Parks, and Claudette Colvin as models for the contestation of constitutive exclusion. First, Antigone’s constitutive exclusion from Thebes excludes her from the terms of intelligible political agency. When she challenges that exclusion, her contestation is politically unintelligible. While the radical alternative Antigone represents leads to her death in the play, that challenge survives in the multiple performances and adaptations of the play. Second, the choice to organize the Montgomery bus boycott around Parks rather than Colvin reveals the multiplicity of constitutive exclusion, since Parks could play some axes of her identity off others in her contestation in ways Colvin could not. The effect of this choice reinscribes the political unintelligibility of Colvin and reifies Parks as apolitical. While the terms of political agency are defined through the exclusion of Colvin, the radical potential she represents remains buried within those terms.

Constitutive Exclusion

This chapter introduces “constitutive exclusion” and makes the case for it as a framework for understanding why some claims are unintelligible as political claims, and some actors unintelligible as political agents. While many theoretical frameworks—political theory, critical theory, feminist theory, queer theory, and Afro-pessimism—rely on constitutive exclusion, none take it up explicitly. I do so around three claims: First, political borders are drawn through the internal exclusion of radical political actors, whose claims are then rendered unintelligible. Second, a politics of recognition is insufficient as a response to these exclusions, as recognition is often consistent with domination and disavowal. Third, the radical potential buried within internal exclusions is accessible by means of a method attentive to the temporality and materiality of these exclusions. The critical work of the book is in service of a future in which we no longer define ourselves through such exclusions within.