a place of deep silence and brooding shadows, and the gods who lived here had no names.
GRRM
The shuttling between grief and grievance has been lost in pursuit of what is possible within a liberal legal conception of law and property. What is sacrificed in this approach, what cannot be heard, is the black noise that animated Cugoano’s earlier polemic. It is to this sound that the remaining essays in this volume are attuned. Black noise represents the kinds of political aspirations that are inaudible and illegible within the prevailing formulas of political rationality; these yearnings are illegible because they are so wildly utopian and derelict to capitalism (for example, ‘‘forty acres and a mule,’’ the end of commodity production and restoration of the commons, the realization of ‘‘the sublime ideal of freedom,’’ the resuscitation of the socially dead).20 Black noise is always already barred from the court.21
—
Fugitive Justice, STEPHEN BEST, SAIDIYA HARTMAN, Representations (2005) 92 (1): 1–15.
20. Seyla Benhabib and Paul Gilroy would term this noise ‘‘the politics of transfiguration,’’
by which they mean a notion of utopian politics that exceeds the frame of prevailing
conceptions of political rationality. See Gilroy, The Black Atlantic (Cambridge,1993), 37;
and Seyla Benhabib, Critique, Norm, and Utopia (New York, 1986), 13, 41. On ‘‘black
mo’nin’,’’ see Fred Moten, In the Break (Minneapolis, 2003), 192–211.
21. What we call ‘‘black noise’’ Robin Kelley would describe as a ‘‘freedom dream,’’ or
Fred Moten would describe as ‘‘the surreal utopian ‘nonsense’ of a utopian vision, the
freedom we know outside of the opposition of sense and intellection’’; see Robin D. G.
Kelley, Freedom Dreams, and Fred Moten, ‘‘Uplift and Criminality,’’ unpublished manu-
script, 23.
