Introduction: What’s love got to do with it
“Philosophy doesn’t love me, just the idea of me,”
This was the opening line to a presentation I gave for a MAP panel at the APA this past year.
In a bid to be pithy, the line was inspired by the direct etymology of the word “philosophy,” from the Greek philo (“to love”) and sophia (“wisdom”). What I sought to articulate then, as well as in the present essay, is the issue of philosophical discussions lacking the right kind of love to orient us toward knowledge and wisdom.
What is it for philosophers to have the right kind of love in the pursuit of knowledge and wisdom? And what was I trying to incite by announcing that Philosophy as a discipline loved only the idea of me?
Here, establishing how I am positioned in the world will help to get at an answer, because—as will become clear—my experience of the discipline’s ways of relating to me are evidence of the broader phenomenon at hand. A descendant of those who survived chattel slavery in the Americas and of white western settlers, I am a femme Black/multi-racial individual. As such, I am the kind of person Philosophy loves to boast about bringing in to “diversify” the field. Non-man, non-white, and—better still—Black. My Blackness makes me stand out in philosophical spaces. And it is in my Blackness that I find exclusion masked as an invitation to be a “present” silent, oddity in academic Philosophy.
In what follows, I will attempt to articulate why it is that to be Black in Philosophy very often means having yourself and your work made into mere aesthetic objects. Such aesthetic objects, though situated within a field characterized by knowledge production, are nonetheless often expected by hegemonic representatives to serve only a passive function in the production of knowledge, a passive function that works through modes of “love” that, I will argue, are ultimately pornographic. It is this pornographic love, this “bad loving,” that renders the value of Black thinkers and Black thought as mere entertainment (minstrelsy) or as a means to alleviate the guilt and intellectual sins of others (martyrdom).
Philosophy and the “Bad Loving” of the Beautiful Black Intellect(ual)
As some white philosophers attempt to “know” who Black thinkers are as people and weigh the value of their intellectual contributions, they struggles to contravene certain traditions of “bad loving.” What emerges is not a love of wisdom that functions through engagement with Black intellects, but rather the reduction or partial interpretation of Black intellects. Thus, the outcome is a corrupted imitation of love (of wisdom) rather than love (of wisdom) itself. The commonplace spaces of academic philosophy, then, can be diagnosed with desiring—the appearance of including Black thinkers and Black thought, despite in actuality only allowing the entry of hollow vestiges of either.
My interest in articulating this issue in relation to the language of love and beauty was prompted by a talk given by Nick Riggle. I found in Riggle’s description of the connection between a well-trained aesthetic judge and the ability to find the (objective) truth of the beauty in objects given their love of them, was a set of seemingly irresolvable tensions. For one, how could we identify reliable judges who were sufficiently immune to white supremacist and colonial ideals of what constitutes a definitively beautiful aesthetic object? Still more pressing, how could we account for cases of love that go awry and distort the true value of the “beautiful”?
My engagement with Riggle’s thoughts brought me to another surprisingly relevant non-Black philosopher, Bernard Williams. Williams’s approaches to the virtues of accuracy and sincerity in the pursuit of truthfulness in understanding the world opened up a means by which to track where the orientation to the truth in the love of beauty could sour.
An inaccurate love, I concluded, can thus be characterized as fetishistic. An insincere love, likewise, is lustful. Both are improper orientations toward the truth of what is claimed to be loved and valued.
As I went about life in the academy, I consistently confronted how Black academic philosophers (and Black people more broadly) were made into objects of fetishistic or lustful intrigue. The thingification of Black intellectuals and Black intellectual productions diluted their value. Racial exoticization regards Black thought and Black thinkers as beautiful in some sense, but they have to be first stripped of their genuine content in order to then be taken up. They were “loved” but only as mere gorgeous ideas. The truth of Black intellect(uals) and the value held therein are forfeited to the fetishistic and lustful inaccurate and insincere orientations academic philosophy held toward them.
Negrophilia as Pornographic Valuation
The terminology of fetish and lust led me in turn to an engagement with the concept of pornography as I processed how my selected discipline viewed me and other Black philosophers. It seemed in academic philosophy there lay a consumptive urge to take from Black philosophers and Black Philosophy a simulacrum of their being, of their meaning. Here, relevant are the efforts of C. Thi Nguyen & Bekka Williams, who theorize it as a matter of failing to make an authentic connection (lacking a true relationship and understanding) with that which is being represented.
This generalized account of pornography grows stronger still in its application to theories of valuation, such as what Carlos Santana develops. The “shadow of understanding” to which many Black philosophers and Black intellectual production are subjected allows for a “hollowing out” of their contents. This in turn manifests in a corrupted valuation of the truths they hold and represent. Fetishistic and lustful orientations toward Black intellectuals and their productions simultaneously doom them to thingification while deploying pornographic valuations that void them of their independent truths and value.
In this way, the framing of pornographic valuation develops the inner workings of what takes place in this form of academic negrophilia. Here we can invoke Arthur Jafa’s account of negrophilia, which in turn draws heavily on Saidiya Hartman’s reflections on fungibility. Negrophilia calls for a thingification of Black academic work and Black people, loving not such works and peoples themselves but rather those gratifying, fungible things to which such works and people can be reduced by their “lover.” This cannot in principle be analyzed strictly as an aesthetic phenomenon. Its political and epistemic dimensions come to the fore as this “loving” is read as a method by which (further) to place Black intellectuals in a place of servitude within the academy.
Such white academic philosophers’ predisposition to partake in a kind of “voyeurism” in their engagements with Black philosophers and Black philosophy involves an appropriative spirit such that this negrophilic desire engages only the “shadows of understanding” mentioned earlier; thus, it distorts academic Philosophy as a site of knowledge production. But perhaps more importantly, the Black philosopher still faces the vexed question of how to relate and resist the attrition from such “bad loving.” The Black intellectual faces the anxiety, first, of whether to be concerned with seeking such “love” in the context of a human endeavor where the absence of such recognition may portend both material and existential starvation. But then, even if the Black intellectual rejects the pursuit of negrophilic representation, there remains the anxiety of finding oneself receiving it nonetheless. To notice such philosophers’ bad loving toward Black philosophers and their intellectual contributions prompts a reconsideration of where if we fall into these accusations of voyeurism and impositions of servitude. Indeed, could we ourselves be guilty of emptying out of Black philosophers and Philosophy of their truthful content? Are we callous “pornographers” when it comes to our interpretations and invocation of figures such as Charles Mills, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Sylvia Wynter (the list continues)? Who might we have caught up in the lie of love and boiled down to a beautiful thing worthy only of being studied, and not capable of rigorous study themselves?
Minstrels and Martyrs, Who are Black folks made by How their Work is Received?
“It seems like Lorde’s concept of the erotic is vacuous.”
This assessment of one of Audre Lorde’s seminal works, “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” was casually uttered by a fellow philosophy graduate student in one of our seminars.
This statement was greeted by eager nods of agreement. All the other philosophers seemed to be in general concord: Lorde was saying something, but that something failed to meet their analytic standards of “rigor.” Her work on the erotic was an eye-pleasing piece of prose, but nothing more. While exalting her use of language, they found no content, no truth, in what she was saying; they instead found value only in the way she was saying it. Lorde and her work were to them hollow, beautiful Black things. They were pretty, but not substantive. In the classroom they felt an unstated pressure to praise Lorde so as not to appear racist, but that praise was not extended to her theorizing as such.
Appalled by their dismissal of Lorde as a theorist, I gestured toward the value and truth of Lorde’s contentions. I suggested that the realization of such truth would require readers to take the time to feel and interpret Lorde’s text through their own bodies. My invoking feelings, bodies, and the need for active interpretation brought on puzzled sneers. One of those in agreement with the initial utterer resented that I questioned their capacities to interpret accurately the intricate theoretical backing of Lorde’s text.
After all, they “read and loved literature.”
This story highlights the dissonance between the supposed inclusion of Lorde and other Black intellectuals in typical spaces of academic philosophy and the overtly negrophilic nature of many philosophers’ engagement with Lorde. Contained in it is the refusal to take seriously the need to interpret dynamically and feel with and through the theorizing at hand, while still attempting to claim some sort of “love” of those intellectual efforts beyond a merely aesthetic appreciation. The dangerous lie contained in the reading of Lorde only as literature, or as merely aesthetically pleasing prose, is that she has been adequately understood and valued.
What we should take from the dissection of this dissonant reception of Lorde as Black woman theorist and her theory is that from the internal churning of those philosophers’ “bad loving” comes a place to categorize the different archetypes transposed onto the faces of Black thinkers and Black thought. These categorizations arrive from the manner in which a Black thinker is “captured” (to use the language of Fred Moten) between the two poles of untruth in pornographic valuation: fetish and lust. From fetish, an inaccurate orientation toward the truth, we can derive the category of martyrdom, where Black thinkers and thought become bare symbols. Such symbols are gestured toward in order to indicate one’s own good moral standing, but beyond their utility for such gestures they are hollowed out. From lust, an insincere orientation toward the truth, we can derive the category of minstrel, where Black thinkers and thought are rendered mere entertainment.
By being made martyrs, Black thinkers and thought are reduced to beautiful oddities that make the field of philosophy defer halfheartedly without fully processing the profound demands that such work demands in order to be accurately interpreted. By being made minstrels, Black thinkers and thought are reduced to sources of amusement, of distraction, something to cast a look over without truly seeking to integrate such people and such work meaningfully across the discipline instead of relegating them to secondary spaces. Loved merely for the beauty—but not the truth—of their ideas, the pornographic gaze of Philosophy as an academic field makes the discipline a torrid zone for Black thinkers and their thought.
To distinguish between these two archetypes, though, is not to imply the impossibility of their co-presence within frameworks of bad loving. In my graduate seminar, Lorde was submitted to both martyr and minstrel status. Her work is condemned to minstrelsy insofar as those critics regarded it as a source of entertaining poetics, stripped of inherent truths and value. In turn, Lorde as a thinker can then placed into martyrdom, where invoking her legacy without seriously contending with her work grants a person varieties of moral and/or social capital.
Concluding Thoughts: Can Academic Philosophy be a Better Lover to Black Thinkers and Thought
I am dissatisfied with the pessimistic outlook on the inescapability of “bad loving” in philosophical spaces. Are Black thinkers and thought then doomed to be in an abusive, pornographic relationship with hegemonic academic Philosophy?
I find myself awash in non-answers. There is a gnawing, fruitless irritation in the pursuit of an idealistic elegant solution where Black thinkers and Black thought arrive to a discipline ready to embrace them. So I will indulge myself in a partially satisfactory non-conclusion that offers up only some cursory advice.
This advice is simply to push oneself to reflect on how one is reading and engaging with Black thinkers and Black thought. Straightforward, really. When you read a Black thinker’s work, or are interacting with the thinker directly, consider for a moment who they are and what they represent in of themselves. We are humans, and bound to coming to know the world through the limitations of our lenses of interpretation. But to recognize this limitation does not impede the need to reflect on our relationality and the power imbalances that can undergird it.
What is needed in philosophy as a discipline to become a better lover of Black thinkers and Black thought is the willingness to admit to a propensity the field holds to reduce and thingify non-western, non-anglophone contributors and contributions. To admit the problem, and to look around at its aftermath of inclusion in name only, will bring the discipline closer to confronting fully where its clandestine (though, perhaps I would also call it overt) intellectual negrophilia has strained academic philosophic spaces for Black folks and their work.
You do not need to pretend to love Lorde to appease the pornographic powers that be.
And indeed, you would be all the better lover for it.
The author wishes to thank James Haile III and Dana Francisco Miranda for their help in the development of this essay.
Gwendalynn Roebke
Gwendalynn Roebke is a multiracial/multiethnic (Black descendant of chattel slavery, Mississippi Choctaw Freedmen, and 4th generation Anglo settler Coloradan) Philosophy PhD student at UPenn. Their interests include social psychology/affect, neuroscience, agency, identity formation and coloniality. In one of Gwendalynn's current projects, they look at the centrality of coherence, as composed of mindedness, agency, identity, and narrativity, to the survival of colonial ruptures brought on by dispossession.
