Alexander G. Weheliye - Habeas Viscus

On the one hand, Habeas Viscus is concerned with rectifying the shortcomings of bare life and biopolitics discourse, and on the other hand, it suggestsfrom the vantage point of black studiesalternate ways of conceptualizing the place of race, or racializing assemblages, within the dominion of modern politics. Focusing on the layered interconnectedness of political violence, racialization, and the human, I contend that the concepts of bare life and biopolitics, which have come to dominate contemporary scholarly considerations of these questions, are in dire need of recalibration if we want to understand the workings of and abolish our extremely uneven global power structures defined by the intersections of neoliberal capitalism, racism, settler colonialism, immigration, and imperialism, which interact in the creation and maintenance of systems of domination; and dispossession, criminalization, expropriation, exploitation, and violence that are predicated upon hierarchies of racialized, gendered, sexualized, economized, and nationalized social existence.the violence, subjection, exploitation, and racialization that define the modern human.

Building on Hortense Spillers's distinction between body and flesh and the writ of habeas corpus, I use the phrase habeas viscusYou shall have the fleshon the one hand, to signal how violent political domination activates a fleshly surplus that simultaneously sustains and disfigures said brutality, and, on the other hand, to reclaim the atrocity of flesh as a pivotal arena for the politics emanating from different traditions of the oppressed. The flesh, rather than displacing bare life or civil death, excavates the social (after)life of these categories: it represents racializing assemblages of subjection that can never annihilate the lines of flight, freedom dreams, practices of liberation, and possibilities of other worlds. Nonetheless, genres of the human I discuss in Habeas Viscus ought not to be understood within the lexicons of resistance and agency, because, as explanatory tools, these concepts have a tendency to blind us, whether through strenuous denials or exalted celebrations of their existence, to the manifold occurrences of freedom in zones of indistinction. As modes of analyzing and imagining the practices of the oppressed in the face of extreme violencealthough this is also applicable more broadlyresistance and agency assume full, self-present, and coherent subjects working against something or someone. Which is not to say that agency and resistance are completely irrelevant in this context, just that we might come to a more layered and improvisatory understanding of extreme subjection if we do not decide in advance what forms its disfigurations should take on.

When I initially began thinking about this book I wondered about the very basic possibility of agency and/or resistance in extreme circumstances such as slave plantations or concentration camps. The initial inquiry, then, led me to broader methodological questions facing minority discourse: Why are formations of the oppressed deemed liberatory only if they resist hegemony and/or exhibit the full agency of the oppressed? What deformations of freedom become possible in the absence of resistance and agency? I don't intend for Habeas Viscus