ABSTRACT
This chapter brings key tenets of Afro-Pessimist thought into conversation with Foucault’s genealogy of sovereignty and right undertaken in “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976 (2003). Acknowledging that the material and ontological violence of antiblackness is a cornerstone of liberalism and its institutions suggests that recourse to rights via juridico-political mechanisms will encounter specific impossibilities in the project of freedom. The liberal regime of the Human as a rights-bearing subject remains invested with discursive truths that have long been used to justify the subjugation of black and brown life as object, as nonsovereign, as deathbound. Foucault repudiates a turn to the old right of sovereignty as a mechanism for justice, a negation this chapter considers aligned with Afro-Pessimism’s emancipatory poetics and politics. At these intersections, this chapter encounters the ghosts of unfreedom that linger in the juridico-political forms of right established by white, bourgeois, liberal valuations. Further, it suggests the possibility for solidarity between Foucauldian and Afro-Pessimist thought as modalities of thinking and pursuing transformative action, ethical relations, and freedom dreams.
