Opacity, Narration, and “The Fathomless Word”

• Published in: Representations (Berkeley, Calif.) Vol. 158; no. 1; pp. 45 - 56
• Main Author: Tavia Nyong’o
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Berkeley University of California Press Books Division 01.05.2022
• Subjects: Black people; Butler, Judith; Human rights; Liberalism; Narratives; Phenomenology
• ISSN: 0734-6018; 1533-855X
• DOI: 10.1525/rep.2022.158.5.45

If we reflect on the violence of blackening as a quite literal denigration (blackening) of Black life, the right to opacity appears quite specifically as the right of the rightless—not simply the right to have rights, which are embedded (however problematically) within the procedures of civil order, but a right to remain outside of and opaque to the civil order that demands, as its price of entry, the presentation of a transparent subject. The right to opacity is a distortion and even an etiolation of the philosophy of rights, a wound that keeps reopening in the febrile heart of liberalism.27 The phenomenology of the nonsovereign self that Butler mounts in Giving an Account of Oneself is one that strives toward a common ground for ethics, indexed by the ‘‘we’’ in one of their most well-known maxims: ‘‘Let’s face it. We’re undone by each other. And if we’re not, we’re missing something.’’28 While it’s tempting to attend to the rhetoric of ‘‘undoing’’ here—insofar as it corroborates the rhetoric of forgiveness in Butler’s account of opacity—I want to instead focus on the ‘‘we.’’ The ‘‘we’’ who must ‘‘face it,’’ we who are drawninto this exercise of recognition, must already expect mutuality, if not universality. The thing we are missing, when we miss out on that mutuality, is the richness of a full, human life, no easy wealth to relinquish. But for this full human life to be possible, even conditionally, for the blackened, another opacity must enclose and bedevil it: a nonreflective opacity that is uchromatic, a blackness outside the dialectic of self and other. This blackness also forms the prehistory of the subject of which Butler must give an inevitably partial account. In suggesting this, my intention is neither to take Butler to task from the perspective of blackness, nor to reconcile the scandal of the speaking Black body with the fallibilistic account of the subject that Butler has so compellingly provided. Foregoing these two facile options, I suggest we instead pursue, like Ralph Kabnis, the via negativa of embracing the opacity that exceeds any account of the subject, including my own.