And the Flesh Shall Set You Free: Weheliye’s Habeas Viscus

Alexander Weheliye’s Habeas Viscus is, in many ways, like a brilliant mixtape, dazzlingly sampling, juxtaposing, and elaborating key theorizations of “humanity otherwise”¹: stubbornly persistent forms of life whose abjection subtends the master categories of legitimate and legible humanity (white supremacist, propertied, heteropatriarchal)—but which constitute, through that very abjection, fugitive practices of alternative human being. Readers familiar with Weheliye’s previous work—for example, Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity²—will not be surprised at the mixological aspect of the text, which takes the reader through a series of thoroughly multi-genre and –media encounters. He lays out his keynote interpretations of the work of US black feminist literary and cultural critic Hortense Spillers and Jamaican-US literary critic, novelist, and playwright Sylvia Wynter alongside the scenes and sounds of artists from Sun Ra to MIA, as well as Haile Gerima’s film Sankofa and the Blaxploitation movie Mandingo. But he here extends his emphasis on the sensory to the fleshly—whence the titular viscus—ambit of taste, touch, and smell as a locus of complex political responsiveness not fully describable in terms of agency or resistance, and which prevailing analytical frames systematically deny or neglect. For example, as suggested by the more familiar sense of viscus as guts, hungering for, dreaming of, and rejecting food appear as irrepressible and creative assertions of human being in even the most extreme sites of racialized violence. All these layers together richly evoke the living vibrations, attunements, and as-yet-unknown potentials of what, employing Wynter’s terminology, he calls “genres of humanity” other than Euro-supremacist capital-M “Man.”

Weheliye pursues two interconnected aims, one critical, one constructive. His critical aim is to demonstrate the limitations of what he calls “bare life and biopolitics discourse”—Giorgio Agamben’s theorizations in particular, Michel Foucault’s secondarily—as the dominant frame for understanding modern racism. “Bare life and biopolitics” approaches rightly foreground, for Weheliye, the death-dealing violence inherent in modern states’ management of life for those whose lives are deemed unworthy of the designation. At the same time, these approaches underestimate the constitutive role of racialization in the modern ontology of the human. Building on now-familiar postcolonial critiques, Weheliye highlights the Eurocentrism of Foucault’s notion of state racism and both Foucault and Agamben’s positing of the Nazi holocaust as the unassailable apex and culmination of state racism/bare life production, as well as their neglect of colonial genocide and racial slavery (even if, in Foucault’s case, the former is briefly mentioned) as key sites of biopolitical violence that still ground contemporary global regimes of life and death.³ Even more serious than this narrowness of vision, however, is these approaches’ replication in theory of the very object of their critique, namely, the annihilation of radical alterity: they “neglect and /or actively dispute the existence of alternative forms of life alongside the violence, subjection, exploitation, and racialization that define the modern human.”⁴

The recovery of the r/evolutionary potential of these alternative modes of life comprises Weheliye’s constructive undertaking. This requires an account of race and racialization complex and capacious enough to countenance not only the global present as an ongoing political history of atrocity but also, coeval with that history, the lifeways of the subjugated as grounding a politics of being and relating, sounding and imagining, enacting other humanities in/and a parallel present. To this end, Weheliye follows the Deleuzian appropriations of Jasbir Puar, Kara Keeling, and others to develop a notion of racializing assemblages, which “constru[e] race not as a biological or cultural classification but as a set of sociopolitical processes that discipline humanity into full humans, not quite humans, and nonhumans.”⁵ Given provisional structure by historically sedimented relations of dominance, these processes also generate fugitive effects, “produc[ing] a surplus…that evades capture.”⁶

For the coordinates by which to track the simultaneous production, deformation, and...