Chair en miettes: Pessimisme, optimisme et tradition radicale noire

In 1983, Cedric J. Robinson introduced, under the title of a “black radical tradition”, the idea of a specifically African genealogy of the struggle against slavery, capitalism and imperialism, distinct from European Marxism. “Afropessimist” thought draws on Hortense Spillers to measure the consequences of the subtraction of Blacks from the orders of humanity and political subjectivity, in a violence that converts African lives into flesh. The African American poet and theorist Fred Moten revisits these thoughts today by inventing a “black optimism,” which asserts the ambivalence and ambiguity of blackness, emphasizing its particular potentialities and designating in “the flesh” a possibility of formulating new forms of life.