Paraontology: Interruption, Inheritance, or a Debt One Often Regrets

Autor: Axelle Karera
Rok vydání: 2022
Předmět:
Zdroj: Critical Philosophy of Race. 10:158-197
ISSN: 2165-8692
2165-8684
DOI: 10.5325/critphilrace.10.2.0158
Popis: Once referring to the debt he owed to Martin Heidegger for his research on the question of death, Emmanuel Levinas explained that, though he distinguished his work from Heidegger’s thought, he did so in spite of “whatever” the debt “every contemporary thinker” owed to Heidegger—a debt that, Levinas then quipped, one “often owes to his regrets.” Contemporary thinkers working in the field of Black Studies have acknowledged their own “debt” to the black philosopher Nahum Chandler for the concept of paraontology. Fred Moten, most notably, credits Chandler for providing a conceptual opening for a renewed thinking of blackness’ modes of resisting ongoing regimes of racial predation. Typifying disturbance, therefore, paraontology offers us the possibility of considering blackness beyond (though always with and against) the violence of its constitution. To heed the ramifications of transformative events, I attempt to measure those hermeneutical passages often compressed by the force of such groundbreaking discursive moments. Thus, responding to Chandler’s wish for his concerns to remain “perennial” rather than “fashionable,” I trace the history of the concept of paraontology back to its first use by Heidegger’s student Oskar Becker, whose main concern uncannily echoes the concept’s seemingly axiomatic use in Black Studies: namely, a radical disruption in the hegemonic and purist logic of ontology.
Databáze: OpenAIRE