Speaking the Hieroglyph

Black women, while equally subject to regimes of violence against Black men, find differing articulations within these schemas. I contend that the mourning we refuse for Black women, cis and trans, rests upon differentially affected responses to anti-black violence, not upon a gender differential in its structure and practice. Analyzing the psychoanalytic work of Hortense Spillers and David Marriott, I argue that a bifurcation between these two theorists reflects both a political and ontological impasse: a political disagreement about the promise of Black life and the aporetics of Black psychoanalytic discourse on the psychic purchase of Black absence and loss.