“O político” na teologia de Paul Tillich

A teologia de Paul Tillich apresenta a noção ampla de “o político”, que agora tem sido discutida por pensadores políticos dentro e fora da teologia. Ele pode estabelecer diálogo com pensadores tais como Giorgio Agamben, Chantal Mouffe, Clayton Crockett, Sylvia Wynter e Vincent Lloyd. Todo o corpus teológico de Tillich tem uma dimensão política recorrente, fundamental e vibrante. Isso não se deve apenas às questões políticas óbvias levantadas em seus primeiros escritos políticos alemães, como em seu livro de 1933, A decisão socialista (DS). Mais importante, suas palestras em Berlim de 1951, proferidas quando ele também publicou o primeiro volume de sua Teologia Sistemática (TS), mostram temas-chave que continuariam por toda a sua obra, até mesmo no volume 3 de sua TS. Consequentemente, a TS de Tillich pode ser lida como uma simbologia do político, uma “teopoética” da vida política - uma “teopoética” que faz parte de uma “política socialista” complexamente estruturada, uma postura que Tillich desenvolveu ao longo de anos de escrita até o fim de sua vida, bem como adaptou às mudanças políticas e aos conflitos culturais.

Conjuring Caliban's Woman: Moving beyond Cinema's Memory of Man in Praise House (1991)

Julie Dash's experimental short film, Praise House (1991), situates conjuring as both a narrative and formal device to invent new memories around Black womanhood that exceed our representation within the epistemes of Man. I view Praise House as an example of conjure-cinema with which we can evaluate how Black feminist filmmakers, primarily working in experimental film, manipulate the poetic structure and aesthetics of film to affect audiences rather than rely on representational narrative alone. Following the scholarship of Sylvia Wynter, I use Man to refer to the representational body of the Western episteme that defines value through mass accumulation. It is through Wynter's scholarship that we find the ontological emancipation from Man that is Caliban's woman, who represents discourse beyond our normative, colonial mode of feeling/knowing/being. Through an analysis of Praise House that foregrounds film's ability to generate affect via its aesthetics, this article argues that aesthetics can similarly enact the same power of conjure as found in Praise House's narrative, and as such conjures an epistemological rupture to our normative order that is Caliban's woman.

Abduction and the Grounds of Caribbean Reasoning

This review essay engages with Aaron Kamugisha’s 2019 Beyond Coloniality: Citizenship and Freedom in the Caribbean Intellectual Tradition by focusing on its methodological commitment to seeking Caribbean answers to Caribbean political and social problems. The author argues that Kamugisha powerfully offers something other than a methodology through which the circulation of Caribbean geographies, politics, epistemologies, and its people’s lived experiences moves outward to provide analytical and conceptual service for metropolitan centers, even if for ostensibly decolonial purposes. The essay demonstrates how by turning to two of the Caribbean’s major thinkers, C. L. R. James and Sylvia Wynter, and their far-less-studied Caribbean writings, Kamugisha takes seriously the centering of Caribbean thinkers in their own histories of political becoming. The essay ends with sustained focus on Kamugisha’s elaboration of two of Wynter’s conceptualizations: indigenization as an alternative to creolization and abduction as a kind of theorizing out from Caribbean reasonings.

Thinking Beyond Coloniality: Toward Radical Caribbean Futures

This essay reviews Aaron Kamugisha’s reading of the works of C. L. R. James and Sylvia Wynter in his 2019 book Beyond Coloniality: Citizenship and Freedom in the Caribbean Intellectual Tradition. Kamugisha issues a resounding call to reenergize the radical Caribbean intellectual tradition, saving us from our own alienation, colonization, and ambivalence. This essay takes inspiration from Beyond Coloniality to respond to the climate-political-social-cultural crisis in the Caribbean and to think through the possibilities for futurity in relation to reparative justice and ecological repair. It considers how the multiple devastations of recent “unnatural disasters” in the Caribbean are the outcome of the coloniality of climate, the deadly logics of racial capitalism, and the persistence of antiblack racism globally. The coloniality of climate calls for attention to repair, care, and reparations. We need to ask, Who is responsible, who is harmed, and who should be accountable?

The Housing Question, ground rent theory, and differentiation vs. homogenization

This essay takes Engels’ The Housing Question as a provocation to (1) apply ground rent theory to housing (something which Engels neglected to do) and (2) investigate Engels’ conflation of housing struggles with the concerns of a “backwards” peasantry. I show that applying Marx’s ground rent theory to housing illuminates aspects of the housing question heretofore unexamined—in particular, the significance of the relationship between landowner and capitalist in housing. I then show that Engels’ dismissal of housing struggles and land-based struggles more broadly is rooted in the specious belief that proletarianization homogenizes people. Engels’ spurious logic nonetheless sets in relief an important connection: I suggest that only through grasping what Cedric Robinson has called racialization or differentiation and what Sylvia Wynter has named nonhomogeneity can we recognize the theoretical and practical centrality of housing and other land-based struggles to revolution and abolition.

Sylvia Wynter and the Climate of Biocentric Man

Chapter 4 discusses the philosophy of climate change of Sylvia Wynter. Wynter’s work extends that of Fanon into a philosophy of genre. Wynter argues that the inspiration for the sciences of sex, madness, illness, indigence, and sexual classification of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries in Western Europe is the science of racial anatomy. And this science of racial anatomy is what creates the current genre of biocentrism that is also responsible for climate change. This chapter examines the gesture of hybridity in the work of both Bruno Latour and Sylvia Wynter.