Methaphysics of Race

Abstract

The present research begins with the discomfort with the way Western philosophy has sought to think about its others. That is, how metaphysics was constituted as a discourse related to what Vladimir Safatle called “white identity”, relegating the idea of ​​Relation (used here in the sense of Édouard Glissant) to a minor category in relation to the ways in which the thought of the other and otherness were constituted in the West. Thus, the metaphysics of race is one of the possibilities for us to see the reifying ways that identities – in their essentialist uses – limited us as Others of the Same; but mainly, how catastrophic events such as the colonization of America and the tragedy of the “Middle Passage” gave rise to what Aníbal Quijano calls “coloniality”, and which I summarize here as a world whose difference presents itself as the great irreducible. Denise Ferreira da Silva will call this the three modern onto-epistemological pillars, namely, the Kantian categories of understanding, separability and determinability, as well as the category of Hegelian sequentiality, gestated from an emerging scientific practice, whose universal subject was the craftsman, and from where the categories of matter were defined as finite, final, and fixed. Therefore, I make use of both authors, Glissant and Da Silva, to imagine what an opaque metaphysics, in opposition to a transparent methaphysics, would be like, one that begins with Glissant's claim for the right to opacity. A demand that may seem rather timid in the face of capitalist-colonial extractability, which established a becoming-black of the world (Mbembe, 2018), positioning us all (the cultural (non-white/non-European) and (more-than-human) “Others” (da Silva, 2016, p. 59)) within a scale of Being by inscribing a “difference with separability”, in Da Silva words, but whose existence continues to extract value from difference. The right to opacity, as we see it, corresponds in the work of Denise Ferreira da Silva to her cry for the “end of this world”. The end of this world is nothing more than the end of the racial arsenal generated by the modern onto-episteme and its variants in racial, cultural, colonial difference, but also of the very “racial analytics” that informs it. And how to do it if not through a poetics? Accordingly to Da Silva, an ethical doing that ends with separability, determinability and sequentiality is the prerogative of a poetics of blackness, a black feminist poetics (Da Silva, 2019).