Word Made Flesh: Asma Abbas's Liberalism and Human Suffering and Alexander Weheliye's Habeas Viscus

In Parables of the Virtual, Brian Massumi diagnoses problems brought about by roughly two decades of deconstructive methodological hegemony in Cultural Studies—namely, the critical surrender by scholars and commentators of the inability to apprehend anything other than the world as an effect of representation. Baudrillard called this state of affairs second- and third-order simulacra and he abhorred its usage as an effect of media cultures. Within deconstruction, language becomes an all-consuming medium in which materialities swim with great difficulty and the viscus nature of this ephemeral relation proves more obscuring than apprehensive. Massumi particularly worries over the concealing facades in which language games are on display before the alternative workings of fleshy materiality; the ways in which bodies can only be read as imprinted by human-made meanings rather than productive—in their own right—of the environments they inhabit.

In this comment, I compare two recent books very much in the spirit of Massumi's critique of language's eclipsing capacities (although only the second mentions his research): Asma Abbas's Liberalism and Human Suffering and Alexander Weheliye's Habeas Viscus. Both works place the messiness of materialist analysis at the center of their explications of political potentiality for minority actors (particularly with regard to communities of color and queer subjectivities): in Abbas's case with relation to liberalism's restrictive definitions of who participates in the consenting, contractual relations of the Social Contract; and in Weheliye's case with respect to market priorities in neoliberalism that create hierarchies of humanity.

Each work endeavors to elucidate the sites of alternative sociologies of the human. Each seeks to foreground materiality as the locus of identifying pathways of non-normative existence (particularly racial and queer) that exist beyond the ken of white, western man's normative ascriptions of assimilation as virtue. In this sense, both works are about queer world-making wherein the word queer is deployed not to suggest choice of partner, but to delineate those whose lives are designated outside the fold of normative existence and are regulated as such by these alien criteria.

Queer imaginings for Abbas and Weheliye do not only signify the presence of taboo same-sex desire, practice, and identities. Instead, to use Weheliye's words, queer functions "as a shorthand for the interruptions of violence that attends to the enforcement of gender and sexual norms, especially as it pertains to blackness" (97). The queer and racialized body is a marker for the modern inscription of inhumanity—a location where those considered non-human or less human can be brought into a scopic visual conformity with their abjectness. Weheliye's phrase for this process is a "hieroglyphics of the flesh" (111).

Abbas's work offers extended analyses of literary and theatrical texts, such as Tony Kushner's Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, and Weheliye traces traditions of pornotropes in "the cinema of slavery," deepening a phrase originally coined by Hortense Spillers (99). Those works share a critique of liberalism's and neoliberalism's limited inclusionism that recognizes limited forms of suffering (namely, victimization but not alternative world-makings) as defining of minority humanities, while also excluding the voices/experiences of others who made up the diversity of a more limited multiculturalism. Liberalism's power for both writers exists in its ability to coerce assimilation toward the desirability of western man as a false universalizing category of identification.

In doing so, modern discourses of subjecthood submerge alternative humanities operating below the radar of liberal/neoliberal normativities. Both works critique the limiting ethos of a personhoodas-property approach awaiting acknowledgement by state institutions of legal and formal classification, the delay and deferral of alternative, non-normative lives that cannot or will not extrapolate themselves into a normal order of acceptable identities. The mutual goal of such criticism is to surface with racial/queer experiences that not only refuse, but thrive on their indescribability within the normative order of Man. They perform, in Abbas's words, alternative modes of historical telling that are "not exhausted by tragedy or...