Land, Wilderson, and the Structure of Alterity

“[W]e have always already torn out the tongue
of alterity before entering into relation with it.”
–Land¹⁾Nick Land, “Kant, Capital, and the Prohibition of Incest: A Polemical Introduction to the Configuration of Philosophy of Modernity,” in Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987–2007, ed. Robin Mackay and Ray Brassier (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2017), 55-80: 64.

In “Gramsci’s Black Marx: Wither the Slave in Civil Society?” Frank B. Wilderson III, expanding upon the positionality of the black body in civil society, takes a slight detour in an attempt to answer the question ‘why is the black body so radically Other, and thus a “sacrificial lamb”?’²⁾Frank B. Wilderson III, “Gramsci’s Black Marx: Whither the Slave in Civil Society?” Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture 9, No. 2 (2003), 225-240: 234. Following up by extending J.M. Coetzee’s work on the black-white discourse of the Cape of Africa, Wilderson notes that engagement with the Other – what we can call ‘alterior engagement’ – is not uniform. Where Europeans engaging with other Europeans, even in times of conflict and strife, could recognize a (minimal) shared bond – humanness –, Africans were not so lucky. For Wilderson, a minimum level of sameness was required for ‘productive’³⁾I use this term very loosely and with little to no positive connotations. engagement. Indeed, contrasting the KhoiSan and Xhosa peoples, Wilderson notes that while the Xhosa were “agriculturists” and thus provided European colonizers with a certain level of sameness insofar as they could recognize instantiations of labor and thus at least affirm an “historical play of difference,” the KhoiSan represented an “Anthropological scandal.”⁴⁾Wilderson, “Gramsci’s Black Marx,” 235, 234. Indeed, the KhoiSan peoples were

being[s] without (recognisable) customs, religion, medicine, dietary patterns, culinary habits, sexual mores, means of agriculture, and most significantly, without character.⁵⁾Ibid., 234.

Such a lack supposedly produced the conditions for abject violence as the Other was not only foreign, but wholly inhuman. Wilderson’s contention is, ultimately, that the incommensurability between the existence of the colonizers and the “condition” of the KhoiSan inevitably led to one end: “annihilation.”⁶⁾Ibid.

Is it correct to say that unknowability is the harbinger of violence, however? Does violence occur when we cannot understand the Other, or might it occur as we try to know the Other? Perhaps the imperative to synthesize the Other for the Self – that is to say, the imperative to (re)produce discourses – is an intrinsically violent action.

In Nick Land’s reading of Kant and Lévi-Strauss in “Kant, Capital, and the Prohibition of Incest,” the structuring relationship of alterior engagement is an attempt at synthesis. Drawing upon Kantian transcendental understandings whereby our relationship to the Outside is always mediated by structuring categories – “the unchanging manner in which things must be if they are to be for us” –, a desire for understanding and absolute knowability underpins what Land sees as the paradox of understanding Otherness through Sameness.⁷⁾Land, “Kant, Capital, and the Prohibition of Incest,” 67. Land traces this paradox back to the Enlightenment (while arguably the same issue arises in the Meno) and the tension between growth and homogeneity. For Land, the dream of the Enlightenment was “to grow whilst remaining identical to what it was, to touch the other without vulnerability.”⁸⁾Ibid., 64-65. Such a dream thus structured Enlightenment thought by attempting to know the Other through already existent (safe) conditions and therefore not engage with the Other on its own terms, but rather already bring it into relationship with the Self before learning about it. The Other is thus stripped of their Otherness as the Self presupposes, and indeed prescribes, Sameness in Otherness – the synthetic a priori becomes the Procustean bed of the Enlightenment.

Returning to tangible engagement with the Other, perhaps a new way of making sense of seemingly ‘irrational’ violence against the Other is not to appeal to the Other’s utter incommensurability – an odd form of victim blaming? – but to appeal to the Self’s fetish for control from a safe distance. Thus, violence against the Other can be understood not as being catalyzed by complete unknowability, but rather by a desire for total prior knowability and assimilation into existent régimes of knowledge. While it’s true that the tongue of alterity is always already torn out before engagement, the limbs of alterity are thus chopped and stretched after we’re confronted with the Other.