Epilogue

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It is customary for a book like this to end with
a prescriptive gesture, at least the germ of a new be­
ginning if not a new world, a seed to be nurtured and
cultivated by Vladimir Lenin’s question, What is to be
done? Even when such seeds were not sown through­
out the book, an author might be tempted to harvest
a yield, however meager, in the conclusion. Not only
have such seeds not been sown in this book, but I have
argued that anti-Blackness is the genome of this horti­
cultural template for Human renewal. Given the struc­
tural violence that it takes to produce and reproduce a
Slave—violence as the structure of Black life, as opposed
to violence as one of many lived Black experiences—
a concluding consideration of Lenin’s question would
ring hollow.
Frantz Fanon came closest to the only image of
sowing and harvesting that befits this book. Quoting
Aimé Césaire, he urged his readers to start “the end of
the world,” the “only thing . . . worth the effort of starting,”
a shift from horticulture to pyrotechnics.1 Rather than
mime the restoration and reorganization dreams which
conclusions often fall prey to, however unwittingly,
338 Epilogue

Fanon dreams of an undoing, however implausible, for its own sake. Still,
there are moments when Fanon finds his own flames too incendiary. So
much so that he momentarily backs away from the comprehensive eman­
cipation he calls for. Which is why one can find the Fanon of the Slave on
the same page as the Fanon of the postcolonial subject. Nonetheless, I am
humbled by his efforts, and though I am freighted with enough hubris to

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extend his ensemble of questions beyond his unintentional containment
strategies, I know better than to underrate their gravitas by offering—or
even hinting at—a roadmap to freedom so extensive it would free us from
the epistemic air we breathe. To say we must be free of air, while admit­
ting to knowing no other source of breath, is what I have tried to do
here.
In the preceding chapters I have critiqued Marxism, White feminism,
and Indigenism by arguing that their approach to the question What
is to be thought? and to its doppelgänger What is to be done? advances
through misrecognition of the Slave, a sentient being that cannot be. The
way Marxism, White feminism, and Indigenism approach the problem
of the paradigm, in other words, their account of unethical power rela­
tions, emerges as a constituent element of those relations. Through their
indisputably robust interventions, the world they seek to clarify and de­
construct is the world they ultimately mystify and renew.
Furthermore, I have argued that the same codes and conventions that
reify the horticultural labor mobilized by Antonio Negri’s restoration of
the commons, by Indigenism’s restoration of Turtle Island, and by White
feminism’s search for an alternative or “negative” Oedipus (an Oedipus
complex “which is culturally disavowed and organizes subjectivity in fun­
damentally ‘perverse: and homosexual ways,’ ” in short, an Oedipus com­
plex endowed with the capacity to be claimed for a revolutionary feminist
agenda)2 are codes and conventions shared by the narrative strategies of
some of the most politically motivated films.
In the spirit of the metacommentaries on political ontology I have re­
viewed in this book, films like Bush Mama and Skins attempt to raise the
bar of political aesthetics by deploying discursive strategies allied more
to analysis than to empathy. As an antidote to empathetic mystification,
politically motivated films such as Bush Mama and Skins subordinate
biographical time to historical time—“the [dramatic] unfolding of events
[staged as] the product of collective humanity.” In their repudiation of
Epilogue 339
the unified self and the self-made (or self-unmade) individual, such films
interpellate spectators through codes and conventions properly suited
to the dramatization of “sociohistorical heterogeneity.”3 Which is to say,
they heighten social and political contradictions, rather than smooth
them over or crowd them out.
In contrast, empathetic aesthetics, which films like Antwone Fisher

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and Monster’s Ball are underwritten by, dissipate cinema’s critical poten­
tial by hailing the spectator to an impoverished ensemble of questions,
such as Isn’t it sad? Isn’t it tragic? Why do some people behave badly and
others don’t? These are moral assessments made at the expense of in­
stitutional analysis. Analytic film aesthetics, however, strive to repudi­
ate moral assessments by privileging effect over cause,4 thereby locating
causal agency (the “because” principle of the drama) within institutional
relations of power as opposed to interpersonal acts of behavior.
Throughout this book, I have rejected, a priori, Hollywood’s embrace
of the Aristotelian promise of empathy, while remaining skeptical of
independent (analytically motivated) cinema’s implicit and explicit po­
litical promise. This is because, disparate as these aesthetic orientations
appear, their ontological suppositions assume relational capacity for all
sentient beings. In other words, films underwritten by both of these aes­
thetic orientations are rarely narrated through the voice of someone for
whom relationality is a condition of irrevocable rupture—whether filial
and interpersonal, in the case of empathy, or affilial and institutional, in
the case of analysis. The dispute between an empathetic aesthetic orien­
tation and an analytic one is not over whether relationality itself is pos­
sible or impossible, but over the proper scale at which existing, though
frayed, relations should be dramatized, and whether the drama should be
set in biographical time or in historical time.
Historical time is the time of the worker, the time of the Indian, and
the time of the woman—the time of analysis. But whereas historical time
marks stasis and change within a paradigm, it does not mark the time
of the paradigm, the time of time itself, the time by which the Slave’s
dramatic clock is set. For the Slave, historical time is no more viable a
temporality of emancipation than biographical time—the time of empa­
thy. Thus, neither the analytic aesthetic nor the empathetic aesthetic can
accompany a theory of change that restores Black people to relationality.
The social and political time of emancipation proclamations should not
340 Epilogue

be confused with the ontological and epistemological time of modernity

itself, in which Blackness and Slaveness are imbricated ab initio. Socially
engaged cinema and politically inspired meditations on ontology are
hobbled by their misrecognition of the former for the latter.
In films like Antwone Fisher and Monster’s Ball, this displacement is
often sentimentalized. In such films, an acknowledgment of structural

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violence as the condition of Black possibility is rendered visually. Here,
that acknowledgment is a dreadful, omnipresent knowledge of the vio­
lence that separates ontological time (the time of the paradigm) from
historical time (the time in the paradigm). In other words, it is knowl­
edge of the violence that secures the essential stasis of Black “life” and in
turn makes legible the essential capacity for transformation and mobility
that characterizes Human life: in the images, editing, and camera work of
even the most sentimental socially engaged films one finds confirmation
of structural violence.
I have endeavored to illustrate the ways a film’s narrative strategies te­
naciously disavow this knowledge of the chasm between Human life and
Black death, only to be disturbed and sometimes disrupted by equally
tenacious cinematic strategies that insist on patrolling this divide. The
narrative strategies labor like responsible citizens, razing social barriers
of the “past” and democratizing the personal pronoun we. The cinematic
strategies labor like watch commanders, sending the spectator out on
patrol.
We are not living in the nineteenth century, when Humans were not
ashamed to embrace their embodied capacity out in the open and, if need
be, close their fists and forge their weapons to hold the line between the
living and the dead themselves, rather than by proxy, the police. Given
civil society’s twentieth- and twenty-first-century libidinal investments
in a presumed distance between its “democratic” present and its despotic
past, civic “evolution” as an article of faith, film narratives are charged
with the task of imposing an illusion of unity on repressed affirmations
of relational logic that the images, editing, and camera work threaten to
unleash.
Antwone Fisher begins the film as a genealogical isolate, someone
who is known to and positioned by others as a thing with no relations.
He ends the film at a feast, with those lost relations he dreamed of when
the film began. We are asked to believe that his isolation from kinship,
Epilogue 341
the effect of a violent extraction at the highest scale imaginable, has been
overcome through inner fortitude catalyzed by three or four sessions of
therapy, interventions at the lowest scale imaginable. Similarly, as Hank
spoon-feeds Leticia chocolate ice cream, the narrative of Monster’s Ball
reminds us that love conquers all, and facilitates our forgetting of a vio­
lence that has always already conquered love.

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In the face of an extensive corpus of sentimental apologies for struc­
tural violence, exemplified here by Antwone Fisher and Monster’s Ball,
films such as Bush Mama and Skins are oases of critical thinking. For in
their effort to perform paradigmatic analyses, they attempt to reassert
relational logic on the illusion of unity. But, as I have argued throughout
this book, their efforts to reassert relational logic on the illusion of unity
fail to reassert relational logic on relationality itself.
How does one deconstruct life? Who would benefit from such an
under­taking? The coffle approaches with its answers in tow.