After Over-Representation, Care

[C]are. It's all we have.¹

To end with care, to end with a point of departure, is to not end at all. It is instead to call, to seek, to journey, to request, to manifest desire for relationality—for sociality—and thus to resist the imposition of modern Western thought that would have us severed one from another. To end with care, as Christina Sharpe does in In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, is to open rather than close—to think directionally and, possibility, otherwise. To care about that which is considered impossible to care for, to offer care—as concern, as tending to, as love, as abiding with—is to disrupt the time and space of Western logics: its history, its present, its futures.

The philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel is infamous for having said that Africa does not belong to history. And though lots of philosophers have attempted to explain away such racism—though it was precisely anti-Black racism that allowed such an assertion—I want to attend to the complexity that emerges when one considers history as something that is not axiomatic, that is not self-evident, as something that can be categorically refused to a people, as a mode of thinking relation that can function by exclusion. I want to consider those excluded from history philosophically because to belong to, to be captured by, to be engulfed in the history-philosophical is to be placed within the strictures and constraints of the normative world and, following the line and root of Sylvia Wynter's poetics, its overrepresentation.²

We might say that overrepresentation itself is a problem, if not the problem, of the mood and movement against the flourishing of Black life, against the flourishing of Black flesh. In other words, what if the perennial problem of our current political moment—its crisis of meaning, its ongoing reproductions of settler colonialism and anti-Black racism as dual nodal forces of its globality and violence—is rooted at least in part by desiring a history, at least in part by desiring a Being that belongs to history?

What if the history Hegel marks, and thus then perhaps the history of Western thought, and thus also thought-Western itself—that big and wide and capacious category that seeks to claim everything within its reach, that attempts to leave nothing unfurled in its wake—is created through an aversion to difference, an aversion to the disruptive capacity of Black life and flesh and Black language, the desire to create smooth, linear, progressive, and forward-moving time? To produce history by averting Blackness is to produce through exclusion and violence, such that to want to belong to it, to desire it, would be something that must be refused. How to attend to the fact that what befalls Blackness, what befalls Black flesh, is what is produced by the exclusion of and aversion to Blackness, that which remains after overrepresentation of Man?

Sharpe's In the Wake points us there, in that direction, to that restive questioning, that restive calling that is also a solicitation for response. She calls us to think about the necessity, the urgency, the practice of care. And if care—of braided hair before ecological crises that have the fingerprints of Man on them; of delicate and gentle and intentional placements in boats—is that which cannot be liquidated or quelled, then how does one practice care when a neoliberal logic of inclusion and exclusion, of monetization and financialization, can utilize the concept of care itself as a means to further exploit, exclude, and produce violence against Black flesh? That is, how can we practice care as reflex and gift and outpouring against the imposition of having to care, of being forced to care, of being made to care as a juridical practice of anti-Black violence? Can we practice care against the logics of violence and exclusion that mark care as all that we "have"? What is care to overrepresentation?

To ask about care is to consider how to be together, how to forge a way otherwise, how to imagine life...